22 THE GREEN RISING 



struggling against the attempt to exact work from 

 him at low wages. The wandering workman was 

 being seized and branded as a vagrant." 



The results were inevitable. Finally in 1381 the 

 great revolt came. The immediate cause of the 

 peasant rising was the imposition by Parliament of 

 a poll tax, but this single act of injustice would not 

 have produced the revolt. "The peasantry were not 

 so much discontented," says Gamier, "with the hard- 

 ships of our national fiscal system as with the slav- 

 ery of our manorial rental system. The recent 

 labour laws had tied a man down to starve on a 

 particular spot at a day's wage fixed lower than the 

 current price of his day's bread. It was this circum- 

 stance which, from the coast of Kent to that of York- 

 shire, fomented the labour element into open 

 rebellion; which caused the sack of Norwich by a 

 host of peasants, under John the Litster; which 

 drove to arms the rustics of counties as wide asunder 

 as Devonshire and Lancashire ; which sent a flood of 

 insurgent yokels, under Tyler, up one bank of 

 the Thames towards London, while a second flood, 

 under Hales, went pari passu up the other bank; 

 and which prompted the intrusion by another wave 

 of serfs, under Grindecobbe, on the sanctified cloister 

 of St. Albans. The fact that the head of the rebel- 

 lion centered in Kent, where slavery was practically 

 unknown, cannot weigh against the evidence af- 

 forded by the demands of the peasants during the 

 first blush of a temporary success, and before men's 



