138 LAND REFORM 



rights in the soil. Wool rose in price, and sheep- 

 farming- became profitable. Land consequently be- 

 came more and more valuable, and the manorial 

 lords pursued a steady policy of getting it into their 

 hands as private property. The struggle between 

 the two classes was a bitter one, and was carried on 

 almost without ceasing till the eighteenth century and 

 the first half of the nineteenth, when, by the aid of a 

 landlord parliament, the objects of the landed aristo- 

 cracy were attained. "The manor won, the peasant 

 lost." 



A short review of the chief of these outbreaks will 

 show, better than anything else, the difficulties the 

 peasantry had to contend with, and the forces arrayed 

 against them. About seventy years after Wat Tyler's 

 revolt the great rebellion under Jack Cade broke out.^ 

 Perhaps no man, in all history, has been more ridicu- 

 lously caricatured than this remarkable peasant leader. 

 The plaster of calumny was, by his enemies, laid so 

 thickly over his reputation and has become so time- 

 hardened that it is difficult to break it off. His 

 character, as portrayed by Shakespeare ("Henry 

 the Sixth," Part H), has been generally accepted 

 as true. He is there represented as a vagabond, 

 plunderer, and a boasting clodpoll, a sort of slip- 

 gibbet, who, at the head of an army of " rebellious 

 hinds, the filth and scum of Kent," had, for his main 

 object, to obtain such reforms as should secure that 

 there "shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves 

 sold for a penny," that the "three-hooped pot shall 



' The object of Cade's rebellion was to secure political and economic 

 as well as agrarian reforms, and on that account classes, other than the 

 peasantry, joined the movement. Nevertheless, redress of land grievances 

 was most prominent among the demands made by the insurgents. 



