112 LAND REFORM 



self? Why do you wait here? Unless you have 

 money to give to everybody in this Court you labour 

 in vain. Why then, wretch, do you remain ? If you 

 have brought nothing you will stand altogether out of 

 doors.' ... If these (bribes) are not sent privately 

 then they (Sheriffs) proceed as follows ; whatever 

 cattle they find are driven off to their own manors, 

 and the owners themselves are put in confinement 

 until they make satisfaction, so that they give double ; 

 then at length they are liberated." 



The scenes of these cruelties and persecutions were 

 neither in Eastern lands, nor among savage tribes, 

 but in the fair villages, hamlets, and market towns of 

 England. The victims — tracked and hunted from 

 place to place like wild beasts ; fastened in the stocks 

 for days and nights, exposed to hunger and cold ; kept 

 in filthy prisons till they were subdued ; their faces 

 branded with hot irons ; their peaceful homes and 

 little homesteads broken up, and their wives and 

 children subjected to untold misery ; — were not the 

 savages that some chroniclers have represented them 

 to be, but frugal, hardworking English peasants, who 

 only asked for some small degree of natural justice at 

 the hands of the rapacious class who ruled them. 



Courtly and monastic chroniclers of the time, while 

 keenly alive to the discomforts of the aristocratic 

 classes, had not a grain of sympathy — nothing but 

 condemnation — for the peasants and their cause. 

 Modern historians, for the most part, pass over these 

 doings with a few platitudes of sympathy, or with a 

 bare reference to the iniquitous statutes named, which 

 few persons take the trouble to consult. Modern 

 readers, however, must realize the state of things thus 

 pictured before they can judge of the great revolt 



