

THE POPULAli EDUUATOl;. 



people of the county, which, not only caused them to make 

 ju cause at oneo with tho men of the Eastern Comities, 

 jw to the front men of a certain kind of ability such as 

 I'yler and the priest John Ball who marshalled the mal- 

 contents into something like order, and put them under 

 leadership. 



This second cause of offence is well known by tradition to 

 almost every one. A poll-tax, that is to say, a tax of so much 

 a head in this case it was fourpence -"had been ordered to be 

 levied on all persons above the age of fifteen. The tax was 

 very unpopular in itself, but the manner in which it was raised 

 rendered it almost unbearable. To begin with, it was not 

 committed to the royal officers to collect the money, but men of 

 influence about the Court gave the king a certain sum in lieu of 

 the tax, and then were permitted to make as much profit as they 

 could out jf the tax-gathering itself. Under these circum- 

 stances it is no wonder the tax was hated ; the farmers of it 

 naturally strove to make the yield as large as possible, and 

 they instructed their agents to see that no one who was liable 

 to the tax every man and woman above fifteen years of age 

 was liable escaped payment. 



One of these agents came to Dartford, in Kent, and began to 

 pursue his business. The household of John of Dartford, a 

 hellier or tiler, consisted of himself, his wife, his daughter, and 

 two other person's. John himself was from home, at his work 

 roofing a house, when the tax-gatherer came and demanded the 

 dues. John's wife paid for herself, her husband, and the 

 two servants or apprentices, but claimed exemption for her 

 daughter, as being under the taxable age. The man disputed 

 the woman's statement about her daughter, who, he .averred, 

 must be quite fifteen, and to this he held, demanding the tax 

 for her, in spite of her mother's statement, which was sup- 

 ported by the witness of all her neighbours. High words 

 followed, the tiler's wife refusing to. submit to an injustice, 

 and the collector, presuming on his position and his authority, 

 speaking in most 'unseemly way about the maiden. A friend 

 ran off to where John was working, and told him what was 

 going on at home, and probably magnified the true state of 

 the case, after the manner of rumour-bearers. Anyhow, John 

 no sooner heard his neighbour's words than ho jumped down from 

 the work he was engaged upon, and snatching up his heavy 

 helving hammer, ran away home. Arrived at his own door, he 

 found a crowd assembled, the tax-man still insisting on the poll- 

 tax for the maiden, and in the very act of taking an indecent 

 liberty, for the purpose, as he said, of ascertaining whether she 

 was of full age or not. 



The same practice, it seems, had been pursued in other places, 

 where the people had not had the strength or the spirit to resist 

 it; but Dartford was not the place in which to try such a 

 thing, and John the Tiler was the last man in Dartford to put 

 up with it. The scoundrel collector had barely time to draw 

 his sword, which was all too useless as a guard, when the 

 enraged father attacked him. No fence, however well sustained, 

 could ward off the tiler's blow. Quickly the hammer rose in 

 the air, swung by sinewy arms ; more quickly still it descended, 

 cleaved a way through the idle guard, which it shivered and 

 broke, and falling with tremendous force on the skull of the 

 collector, Sashed out his brains on to the adjacent wall. With- 

 out a struggle or a groan the man fell dead, and the people stood 

 around wondering at what was done. Yet no man laid hands on 

 the tiler, no man regarded him as a murderer; and when 

 he broke the silence, and told them in a few short words how 

 that his cause was theirs, that this act for which the collector 

 had died was of a piece with the rest of the treatment the 

 people received from those above them, they rent the air with 

 shouts of approval, and proposed to march at once to Canter- 

 bury and join their brethren who were already under arms. 



John the Tiler was a working man, and the people he ad- 

 dressed were of the same class* To that class also belonged 

 " the brethren," who were in rebellion all over the Eastern 

 Counties ; agricultural labourers, fishermen, and some artisans 

 employed in towns, composed the army if it could be so called 

 which Wat Tyler of Maidstone, Jack Straw, Hob the Miller, 

 John Ball, and others, led to Rochester, Canterbury, and Black- 

 heath, and bearded the king even in the Tower of London. 

 Working men alone were concerned in the affair ; none of the 

 knights, clergy, lawyers, or landowners taking any part in it, 

 except for its suppression. Had some such men put themselves 



at the head of the movement, they might have succeeded in 

 restraining the fury of the mv.i. ing- its 



energy into a channel where it would have borno ;;ood fruit. 

 But there was no Stephen de Langton no prophet,, 'iho people 

 merely knew they were oppressed both by the lords and by the 

 law which the lords had made ; they knew nut how to provide a 

 remedy. Goaded to desperation, they turned and kicked, as a 

 worm will twist when trampled on, and they became drunk in 

 their fury, and turned away even such sympathy as otherwise 

 there might have been in the breasts of their rulers. With 

 blind guides, demagogues, and men whose heads were turned by 

 the possession of power, " the Commons of England " went from 

 place to place, committing all sorts of excesses, cutting off the 

 heads of all lawyers they could lay hands on, burning books and 

 records, houses and colleges, opening the prisons, getting very 

 drunk on the wine for which they ransacked the cellars of castles 

 and mansions, and, for the purpose of enjoying the contrast, 

 making earls, barons, and knights attend upon them in the 

 capacity of servants and stable-men. To women, however, it 

 is not reported that they did any harm, though they sadly 

 frightened the Princess Dowager of Wales, widow of the Black 

 Prince, and mother of King Eichard, by detaining her on her 

 journey from Canterbury to London, and declining to let her 

 proceed until she had kissed some of them, which she did, the 

 old chroniclers report, with a very ill grace, though glad to get 

 away at such a price. 



But what was the cause of this rising of the Commons ? The end 

 of it we know. The rebels marched from all the homo counties 

 to London, sacked the Temple, the Duke of Lancaster's Palace 

 of the Savoy, and burnt many other houses ; they broke into the 

 Tower, cut off the head of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with 

 that of the Prior of St. John's, and some other noblemen ; and 

 proposed to do the like to all the knights and lords in the 

 country, though' they still professed affection for the king, and 

 rallied to the cry of " King Eichard and the true Commons." 

 Then came the end of all. Many of the insurgents had left 

 London with charters of liberties which they obtained from the 

 king, but Wat Tyler, at the head of several thousands, chiefly 

 Kentish men, remained, and venturing to be insolent to the king 

 himself at an interview which took place in Smithfield, was 

 slain in view of his host by Sir William Walworth, the Lord 

 Mayor of London. The men, disconcerted by the fall of their 

 leader, were partly cajoled, partly driven from the metropolis, 

 and when they were dispersed, commissions were issued for the 

 trial and punishment of the leaders, the charters already granted 

 were taken away, and the people were reduced to a- state of 

 bondage worse than before. The commissions to punish were 

 carried out with so much excessive zeal, that eren in those days, 

 when might was not over squeamish about the way in which it, 

 kicked right against the pricks, an Act of Indemnity was 

 thought necessary to hide the acts of the officers of the Crown. 



But what was the cause of the rebellion ? We Have seen a 

 part of it in the odious claim made by Sir' Simon Burley at 

 Gravesend, and in the outrageous conduct of the tax-gatherer 

 at Dartford. These, however, were only the outward, visible 

 signs of a very oppressive state of things winch had their 

 foundation in the laws and institutions of the country. 



In King John's time (1199 1215), when the population of 

 England was under two millions^ there were upwards of one 

 million villeins, that is to say, half the population were in a state 

 of bondage. A villein was one, man or woman, who was sold as 

 a separate chattel, or with the stock on the land one who, in 

 the terse language of the chronicler, " knew not in the evening 

 what he was to do in the morning, but ho was bound to do 

 whatever he was commanded." His children were slaves like 

 himself hence Sir Simon Burley 's claim to the Gravesend man 

 he might be 'beaten, chained, ill-fed, over- worked : his master 

 might do anything to him short of lulling him. The whole of 

 the agricultural labourers were of this condition. In towns 

 there were free workmen and free labourers, but their number 

 was not large, and their influence was a creature of slow 

 growth. Their wages were, moreover, fixed, not by the means 

 of competition in an open market, but by regulations made by 

 those who employed them. Thus, in the reign of Edward I. 

 (A..D. 1272), the wages of carpenters, tilers, masons, and 

 plasterers, in London, where the terms were probably more 

 liberal than in the provinces, were fixed at fourpence a day. As 

 time went on, the number of free men increased, both m town 



