PEASANT REVOLTS 137 



possess them legally, yet, as we have seen in previous 

 chapters, he could so increase these exactions as to 

 squeeze them off their holdings and reduce them 

 to mere tenants, and finally, by the consolidation of 

 farms, to put them out of the occupation of land 

 altosrether. 



From this time the condition of rural life generally 

 began to change, the boundaries of peasant existence 

 became enlarged, and the personal character of the 

 people was raised. Numbers of villeins and other 

 bondmen, as they became free, went into the towns, 

 where, by their industry and enterprise, they laid 

 the foundation of the great middle class, from whose 

 ranks came the lords of industry who were destined 

 ultimately to leave in the background the lords of the 

 soil. 



We have dwelt at some length on Wat Tyler's 

 rebellion, because it was an epoch in the rural life 

 in England. It gave a fresh start, if not the first real 

 start, in the creation — as a body with a distinct social 

 and political power — of that great free peasantry and 

 yeomanry of which England has had such good reason 

 to be proud. The results of the rebellion fully justify 

 the notable statement of one of the most able and 

 judicious of our constitutional writers, that "this rising 

 of the Commons is one of the most portentous phen- 

 omena to be found in the whole of our history."^ 



The peasant revolts which took place after Wat 

 Tyler's time were of a different kind, and had different 

 aims. The main object of Wat Tyler's rising had 

 been achieved, and after that rising slavery in Eng- 

 land soon died out. Thenceforth the struggle of 

 the cultivating classes was for the retention of their 



^ Stubbs' "Constitutional History," Vol. II, p. 489. 



