Le THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT OF 1381. 
were pleaded in the manor-court itself, and judgment was given 
by the very officer whose interest it was to decide in favour of the 
lord. There is no doubt that the landowners were in great diffi- 
culties at the time, for on the one hand there were fewer farmers 
wanting farms, hence rents fell, and on the other hand, wages and 
the price of everything which depended on labour rose enor- 
mously. The difficulties of the situation drove the governing 
classes to adopt a most unwise policy, one which was calculated 
to cause the utmost friction, and which from its very nature was 
doomed to fail. In the panic caused by the Plague it was con- 
sidered necessary to dissolve Parliament, and the date of its 
reassembling was postponed from time to time. The king, 
meanwhile, issued a proclamation that no higher than the 
customary wages should be paid, and when Parliament at last 
met this Proclamation was embodied in a statute known as the, 
Statute of Labourers. Its chief enactments were :— 
1. No person under sixty, whether serf or free, should decline 
to undertake farm labour at the wages which had been 
customary in the twentieth year of the king’s reign (that is, 
the year before the appearance of the Black Death) unless 
he lived by merchandise, was regularly employed in some 
mechanical craft, was possessed of private means, or was 
an occupier of land. 
2. All persons quitting their employment before the time fixed 
in the agreement should be liable to imprisonment. 
3. No other than the old wages should be given, and remedy 
against those seeking more was to be sought in the lord’s 
court. 
4. Lords of manors paying more than the customary amount 
were to be liable to treble damages. 
This statute was no doubt often, if not generally, evaded. 
We will turn now to trace another cause of the rising of the 
Commons under Richard II., a rising which we must remember was 
partly a religious one. There were no more grasping and oppressive 
landlords in England in the middle of the fourteenth century than 
the monks, who are said to have held no less than one-third of the 
ee 
Ay vii 
