94 



Tyler, according to Walsingham, was a man of ready ability 

 and good sense. Save in some excesses which perhaps were 

 politic, possibly unavoidable, and certainly exaggerated, the 

 rebels under him are admitted to have kept good order, and 

 to have readily submitted to discipline. It is said, on the 

 confession of some of his companions, that his purpose was 

 to secure the king's person, and having thus got a semblance 

 of authority, to overthrow the system of feudal dependence, 

 and to establish in its' room a government of counties or 

 districts by men of the same principles as himself. Wild and 

 impossible as these schemes may seem, and premature as they 

 certainly were, they were realized by Cromwell, and at any rate 

 shew that the purposes of the leaders in this insurrection were 

 more extensive than the mere remedy of personal wrongs. The 

 confessions of criminals are always suspicious, but there is an 

 antecedent probability in these admissions, due to the singular 

 foresight of the plan of political operations. In any case, the 

 villenage of England differed radically from the Jacquerie of 

 the Isle of France. 



Several questions naturally arise out of the peculiar facts 

 of this outbreak, and the organization which preceded it. 

 Who could have been the agents for the people? Who were 

 the persons through whose instrumentality the funds were 

 collected, as we read they were, for the purpose of legal 

 defence, and communications made between regions so remote 

 as Yorkshire and Kent, Hampshire and Norfolk? It is easy 

 to say that the discontent of the peasantry had been long 

 fermenting, and to point to the facts, as Lingard and Hallam 

 have, of general dissatisfaction in England, and occasional 

 outbreaks among the poorer classes in Paris, in Noftnandy, 

 and in Flanders before and about this time. But unless we 

 assume that there is some mysterious sympathy pervading 

 many communities, in the same way that epidemics do, and 

 stimulating them, though they have no immediate communi- 

 cation, to simultaneous action, we should demur to the con- 

 clusion that the English and continental insurrections were 



