THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT OF 1381. II 
making labour scarce was the dreadful scourge known as the 
Black Death, which carried off more than half the population of 
the country. This terrible plague, the most desolating ever 
known in Europe, is said to have originated in the far East. It 
seems to have made its first appearance in China in 1333, and 
after travelling along the northern shores of the Black Sea and 
Mediterranean, spread through France and Germany early in 1348, 
entered England in August of the same year, and three months 
afterwards reached London. ‘The terrible havoc caused by this 
plague, and the effect it must have had in throwing the whole 
social fabric into confusion, can be imagined when we find that it 
is said to have claimed no less than 100,000 victims in London 
alone, and about half that number in Norwich, then the second 
city in the kingdom. These numbers appear the greater when we 
remember that the population of the whole country at the time 
was between three and four millions only. The immediate conse- 
quence of such a catastrophe as this was that, for some years after, 
there was a great dearth of labour and a consequent excessive 
enhancement of wages. There was serious difficulty in gathering 
in the harvests in the case of those landowners who depended upon 
hired labour. Crops were suffered to rot in the fields, cattle and 
sheep roamed over the country from lack of herdsmen, land went 
out of cultivation, and there was, eventually, a general impoverish- 
ment of the upper classes. To make matters worse, riot and 
disorder followed the plague, chiefly on the part of the “landless 
men,” the labourer and artisan wandering in search of employ- 
ment. And now arose for the first time in the history of this 
country a conflict between capital and labour. The progress of 
the emancipation of the serfs was suddenly checked, and all 
possible ingenuity on the part of the lawyers, who were also the 
stewards of the manors, was exercised, without any thought of the 
consequences, to find plausible excuses for cancelling manu- 
missions and exemptions, which had been unquestioned for years, 
on the ground of informality. Peasants were forced again into a 
bondage to which they had grown unaccustomed. The discon- 
tent of the poor was naturally increased by the fact that all causes 
