CHAPTER XX

THE POOR

"Misuse not thy bondman, the better mayst thou speed; Though he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven That he win a worthier seat, and with more bliss; For in charnel at the church churls be evil to know, Or a knight from a knave there; know this in thine heart." "Piers Plowman," B., vi., 46

It has sometimes been contended in recent years that the Middle Ages lacked only our smug middle-class comfort; and that, as the upper classes were nobler, so the poor were healthier and happier then. It is probable that the latter part of this theory is at least as mistaken as the first: but the question is in itself more complicated, and we have naturally less detailed evidence in the poor man's case than in the rich man's. Among the great, we find many virtues and many vices common to both ages; but a careful comparison reveals certain grave faults which put the earlier state of society, as we might expect, at a definite and serious disadvantage. No gentleman of the present day would dream of striking his wife and daughters, of talking to them like the Knight of La Tour Landry, or like the Merchant in the presence of the Nuns, or of selling marriages and wardships in the open market. All the redeeming virtues in the world, we should feel, could not put the man who saw no harm in these things in the front rank of real gentility. Such plain and decisive methods of differentiation, however, begin to disappear as we descend the social scale; until, at the very bottom, we find little or no difference in coarseness of moral fibre between our own contemporaries and Chaucer's. For it stands to reason that the development of the poor cannot be so rapid as that of the upper classes. In all human affairs, to him that hath shall be given; the superior energy and abilities of one family will differentiate it more and more, as life becomes more complicated, from other families which still vegetate among the mass; and in proportion as the wealth of the world increases, the gap must necessarily widen between the man who has most and the man who has least; since there have always been a certain number who possess, and are capable of possessing or keeping, virtually nothing. In that sense, the terrible contrast between wealth and poverty is undoubtedly worse in our days; but this fact in itself is as insignificant as it is unavoidable. The tramp on the highroad is not appreciably unhappier for knowing that his nothingness is contrasted nowadays with Mr. Carnegie's millions instead of de la Pole's thousands; and again, until we can find some means of distributing the accumulations of the rich among the poor without doing far more harm than good, the community loses no more by allowing a selfish man to lock up his millions, than formerly when they were only hundreds or thousands. The securities afforded by modern society for possession and accumulation of wealth do indeed often permit the capitalist to sweat his workmen deplorably; but these are the same securities which allow the workman to sleep in certain possession of his own little savings. While the capitalist is accumulating money, the foresight and self-restraint of the workmen enables them to accumulate votes, which in the long run are worth even more. Much may no doubt be done in detail by keeping in eye the simpler methods of our ancestors; but no sound principle can be modelled on an age when nothing prevented capitalists from hoarding but lack of decent security, when strikes were rare only because of penal laws against all combinations of workmen, and when the peasant was partly kept from starving by his recognized market value as the domestic animal of his master. We could easily remedy many desperate social difficulties--for the moment at least--if we might reduce half the population of England again to the status of serfs.

"The social questions of the period cannot be understood, unless we remember that in 1381 more than half the people of England did not possess the privileges which Magna Charta secured to every 'freeman.'"[240] The English serf was indeed some degrees better off than his French brother, to whose lord the legist Pierre de Fontaines could write in the 13th century "by our custom there is between thee and thy villein no judge but only God."[241] The English serf could not be evicted, but neither could he leave his holding; he was transferred with the estate from master to master as a portion of the live stock. By custom, as the master had rights to definite services or money dues from him, so he had definite rights as against his master; but though in cases of manslaughter or maiming the serf could appeal to the king's courts, all other cases must be heard in the manor court, where the lord was judge in his own cause. Let us hear Chaucer himself on this subject, in his Parson's Tale: "Through this cursed sin of avarice and covetise come these hard lordships, through which men be distrained by tallages, customs, and carriages more than their duty or reason is: and eke take they of their bondmen amercements which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements. Of which amercements, or ransoming of bondmen, some lords' stewards say that it is rightful, forasmuch as a churl hath no temporal thing that is not his lord's, as they say. But certes these lordships do wrong that bereave their bondmen [of] things that they never gave them." In theory, the Reeve was indeed a sort of foreman, elected by the workers to represent their interests before their master; but it will be noticed how Chaucer looks upon him as the lord's servant; and in "Piers Plowman" he is even more definitely put among the enemies of the people, with beadles, sheriffs, and "sisours," or jurors.[242] It must be remembered, too, that the general reliance everywhere on custom rather than on written law, the difference of customs on various manors, and the petty vexations constantly entailed even by those which were most certainly recognized, bred constant discontent and disputes. The heavy fine which the serf owed for sending his son to school fell, of course, only in very exceptional cases, and may be set off against the few who were enfranchized in order to enable them to take holy orders. But the _merchet_, or fine paid for marriage, must have been a bitter burden, while the _heriot_, or _mortuary_, is to modern ideas an exaction of unredeemed iniquity. In most manors, though apparently not in all, the lord claimed by this custom the best possession left by his dead tenant; and (so long as he had left not less than three head of live stock) the parish clergyman claimed the second best. The case of a widow and orphans in a struggling household is one in which no charity can ever be misplaced; yet here their natural protectors were precisely those who joined hands to plunder them; and every parish had its two licensed wreckers, who picked their perquisites from the deathbeds of the poor.[243] No doubt here, as elsewhere, the strict law was not always enforced, even though its enforcement was so definitely to the interest of the stronger party; self-interest, apart from a fellow-feeling which seldom dies out altogether, prevents a man from taxing even his horse beyond its powers; but there is definite evidence that merchets and heriots were no mere theoretical grievance. Moreover, these were only the worst of a hundred ways in which law and custom gave the lord a galling, and apparently unreasonable, hold upon the peasants; and they must needs have chafed against such a yoke as this even if their position as domestic animals had been more comfortable than it was. Let us suppose--though this needs better proof than has yet been advanced--that the serf was as well fed and housed as the modern English labourer;[244] suppose that he was far more of a real man than his legal status gave him a right to be; then he must only have smarted all the more, we may safely say, under his beastlike disabilities. "We are men formed in Christ's likeness, and we are kept like beasts"; such are the words which Froissart puts into the serfs' mouths. "To the sentiment" (comments a modern writer) "there is all the difference between economic compulsion, apparently the outcome of inevitable conditions, and a legal dependence upon personal caprice. Even comfortable circumstances, which he apparently enjoyed, created in the Malmesbury bondman no satisfaction with his lot. There is a pathetic ring in the words which, in his old age, he is recorded to have used, that 'if he might bring that [his freedom] aboute, it wold be more joifull to him than any worlie goode.'" Nor was this the cry of a single voice only, but also of the whole peasantry of England at that moment of the Middle Ages when they most definitely formulated their aims. "The rising of 1381 sets it beyond doubt that the peasant had grasped the conception of complete personal liberty, that he held it degrading to perform forced labour, and that he considered freedom to be his right."[245]

Moreover, the general voice of medieval moralists is here on the peasants' side. It is true that (in spite of the frequent reminders of our common parentage in Adam and Eve) few men of Chaucer's day would have agreed with Wycliffe in objecting on principle to hereditary bondage; but still fewer doubted that the landlords, as a class, did in fact use their power unmercifully. "How mad" (writes Cardinal Jacques de Vitry), "how mad are those men who rejoice when sons are born to their lords!" Many knights (he says) force their serfs to labour, and give them not even bread to eat. When the knight does call his men together, as if for war, it is too often only to prey on the peasant. "Many say nowadays, when they are rebuked for having taken a cow from a poor peasant: 'Let it suffice the boor that I have left him the calf and his own life. I might do him far more harm if I would; I have taken his goose, but left him the feathers.'"

Here, again, is a still more living picture from "Piers Plowman"--

"Then Peace came to Parliament and put up a bill, How that Wrong against his will his wife had y-taken And how he ravished Rose, Reginald's leman, And Margaret of her maidenhood, maugre her cheeks. 'Both my geese and my griskins his gadlings fetchen, I dare not for dread of him fight nor chide. He borrowed my bay steed, and brought him never again, Nor no farthing him-for, for nought I can plead. He maintaineth his men to murder mine own, Forestalleth my fair, fighteth in my cheapings, [markets Breaketh up my barn-door and beareth away my wheat; And taketh me but a tally for ten quarter oaten; And yet he beat me thereto, and lieth by my maiden, I am not so hardy for him up for to look.' The King knew he said sooth, for Conscience him told."

That this kind of thing was far less common in England than elsewhere, we have Froissart's and other evidence; but that it was far too common even in Chaucer's England there is no room whatever to doubt. As M. Jusserand has truly said, a dozen Parliamentary documents justify the poet's complaints; and he quotes an extraordinarily interesting case from the actual petition of the victims.[246]

The time, however, was yet unripe for such far-reaching changes as the peasants demanded. The circumstances and incidents of their revolt have been admirably described by Mr. Trevelyan, and lately in more detail by Prof. Oman; and its main events are prominent in all our histories; probably no rebellion of such magnitude was ever so sudden in its origin or its end; all was practically over in a single month. Discontent had, of course, been seething for years; yet even so definite a grievance as the Poll Tax of 1381 could not have raised half England in revolt within a few days, but for a sense of power and a rough discipline among the working-classes. For more than a century the men who were now so wronged had been compelled to keep arms, to learn their use, and to muster periodically under captains of twenties and captains of hundreds. For a whole generation Edward III. had proclaimed, at frequent intervals, that he could not meet his enemies without a fresh levy from town and country; and, under a system which allowed the purchase of substitutes, such levies fell heaviest on the lower classes. What was more natural than that these same lower classes should muster now to free the King from his other enemies--and theirs too, as they thought--incapable, bloodsucking ministers and unjust landlords? They had only to turn out as on a muster and march straight upon London, each village contingent picking up others on the way; and this is exactly what they did.[247] The chroniclers definitely record their order even in disorder; it was removed by a whole horizon from the contemporary Jacquerie in France, in which the peasants rose like wild beasts, with no ideas but plunder, lust, and revenge. These English rebels resisted manfully at first all temptation to plunder among the rich houses of London. "If they caught any man thieving, they cut off his head, as men who hated thieves above all things"--such is the testimony of their bitter enemy Walsingham. When they gutted John of Gaunt's palace, nothing was kept of the vast wealth which it contained; all things were treated as accursed, like the spoils of Jericho. The rioters were loyal to the King, had a definite policy, and aimed at making treaties in due form with their enemies. They "had among themselves a watchword in English, 'With whome haldes you?' and the answer was, 'With Kinge Richarde and the true comons.'" "They took [Chief Justice Belknap] and made him swear on the Bible." At Canterbury "they summoned the Mayor, the bailiffs and the commons of the said town, and examined them whether they would with good will swear to be faithful and loyal to King Richard and to the true commons of England or no." "The commons, out of good feeling to [the King], sent back word by his messengers that they wished to see him and speak with him at Blackheath." At Mile End they were arrayed under "two banners, and many pennons," drew out willingly into two lines at Richard's bidding, and made an orderly bargain with him. In the final meeting at Smithfield, "the king and his train ... turned into the eastern meadow in front of St. Bartholomew's ... and the commons arrayed themselves on the west side in great battles." After Tyler's death, again, they followed at Richard's command into Clerkenwell fields, where they were presently surrounded partly by the mercenary troopers of Sir Robert Knolles, but mainly by the citizen levies, "the wards arrayed in bands, a fine company of well-armed folks in great strength." The very suddenness of their collapse is not only perfectly explicable under these circumstances, but it is just what we might expect in a case where the conflicting parties have learnt, under some sort of common discipline, the priceless lesson of give and take, and can see some reason in each other's claims; the Cronstadt Mutiny is the latest example of this, and perhaps not the least instructive.[248] Their main claims had been granted by the King, and, in proportion as the rioters were loyal and orderly at heart, in the same proportion they must have seen clearly that Wat Tyler's fate had been thoroughly deserved. No wonder that they cowered now before the King and his troops, and dispersed peaceably to their homes. Even Walsingham's satirical account of their arms, with due allowance for literary exaggeration, is exactly what the most formal documents would lead us to expect. "The vilest of commons and peasants," he says; "some of whom had only cudgels, some rusty swords, some only axes, some bows that had hung so long in the smoke as to be browner than ancient ivory, with one arrow apiece, many whereof had but one wing.... Among a thousand such, you would scarce have found one man that wore armour."[249] Compare this with the actual muster-roll of a Norwich leet, a far richer community than these villages from which most of the rebels came (Conesford, A.D. 1355). Out of the 192 mustered, 33 wear defensive armour; 7 only are archers (an unusually small proportion, of course); 44 turn out with knife, sword, and bill or hatchet; 108 have only two weapons, which in nine out of ten cases consist of knife and cudgel. The rioters, of course, would in most cases have come from this lowest class; and in reading through the Norwich lists one seems to see the very men who followed after John Ball. "Thomas Pottage, with knife and cudgel"; "William Mouse, with knife and cudgel"; "Long John, with knife and cudgel"; "Adam Piper and Robert Skut, with knife and bill"; "John Cosy, Hamo Garlicman, Robert Rubbleyard, John Stutter, Roger Dauber, William Boardcleaver, William Merrygo, Nicholas Skip, Alice Brokedish's Servant,"--all with knife and cudgel again. Gower's mock-heroic catalogue of the rioters' names in the first book of his "Vox Clamantis" is not so picturesque as these actual muster-rolls.

These, then, were the men before whose face Gower describes his fellow-landlords as lurking like wild beasts in the woods, feeding on grass and acorns, and wishing that they could shrink within the very rind of the trees; the men who a day or two later surged like a sea round Chaucer's tower of Aldgate, until some accomplice unbarred the gate. Chroniclers note with astonishment the paralysis of the upper classes all through this revolt, or at least until Wat Tyler's death; and though Richard revoked his Royal promise of freedom, and bloody assizes were held from county to county until the country was sick of slaughter, and Parliament re-enacted all the old oppressive statutes, yet the landlords can never entirely have forgotten this lesson. Professor Oman, in his anxiety to kill the already slain theory that the Revolt virtually put an end to serfdom, seems hardly to allow enough for human nature; but Mr. Trevelyan sums the matter up in words as just as they are eloquent: "[The Revolt] was a sign of national energy, it was a sign of independence and self-respect in the medieval peasants, from whom three-quarters of our race, of all classes and in every continent, are descended. This independent spirit was not lacking in France in the 14th century, but it died out by the end of the Hundred Years' War; stupid resignation then took hold of burghers and peasantry alike, from the days when Machiavelli observed their torpor, down to the eve of the Revolution. The _ancien régime_ was permitted to grow up. But in England there has been a continuous spirit of resistance and independence, so that wherever our countrymen or our kinsmen have gone, they have taken with them the undying tradition of the best and surest freedom, which 'slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.'"[250]

This chapter could not be complete without at least a passing allusion to the general uncleanliness of medieval life, even in a city like London, where there was some real attempt at organized scavenging of the streets, and where the laws commanded strictly "he that will keep a pig, let him keep it in his own house."[251] Four great visitations of the bubonic plague occurred in Chaucer's lifetime; the least of them would have been enough to mark an epoch in modern England. The sixty years of his life are exceptional, on the other hand, in their comparative freedom from severe famine; but there hung always over men's lives the shadow of God's hand--or rather, as they too often felt, of Satan's. During the great storm of 1362 "beasts, trees and housen were all to-smit with violent lightning, and suddenly perished; and the Devil in man's likeness spake to men going by the way"; and a good herald who watched the march past of the rioters in 1381 "saw several Devils among them; he fell sick and died within a brief while afterwards."[252]

It has often been noted how little Chaucer refers either to this Revolt or the Great Pestilence; but the multitude interested him comparatively little. He felt with the pleasures and pains of the individual poor man; but with regard to the poor in bulk, he would only have shrugged his shoulders and said "they are always with us." His Griselda is own sister to King Cophetua's beggar-maid in the Burne-Jones picture. For all the real pathos of the story, her rags are draped with every refinement of consummate art. We believe in them conventionally, but know on reflection that they are there only to point an artistic contrast. Again, in the "Nuns' Priest's Tale" the "poure wydwe, somdel stope in age," with her smoky cottage and the humble stock of her yard, are just the subdued and tender background which the poet needs for the mock-chivalric glories of his Chanticleer and Partlet. For glimpses of the real poor, the poor poor, we must go to "Piers Plowman." Here we find them of all sorts, and at the top of the scale the Plowman, the skilled agricultural labourer or almost peasant-farmer--

"I have no penny, quoth Piers, pullets for to buy, Neither goose nor griskin; but two green cheeses [new A few curds and cream, and a cake of oats, And bread for my bairns of beans and of peases. And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon; Not a cockney, by Christ, collops to make, [egg: eggs and bacon But I have leek-plants, parsley and shallots, Chiboles and chervils and cherries, half-red ... [onions By this livelihood we must live till Lammas-time, And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft, Then may I dight my dinner as me dearly liketh."

Piers speaks here of a bad year; but even his modest comfort required hard work of all kinds and in all weathers. As the Ploughman says in another place--

"I have been Truth's servant all this fifty winter, Both y-sowen his seed and sued his beasts, Within and withouten waited his profits. I dike and I delve, I do what Truth biddeth; Some time I sow and some time I thresh, In tailor's craft and tinker's craft, what Truth can devise, I weave and I wind, and do what Truth biddeth."[253]

In contrast with Piers stands the great crowd of beggars--soldiers discharged from the wars, and sturdy vagrants who fear nothing but labour--"beggars with bags, which brewhouses be their churches," as the poet writes in the racy style affected in modern times by Mrs. Gamp. The roads were crowded with wandering minstrels "that will neither swink nor sweat, but swear great oaths, and find up foul fantasies, and fools them maken; and yet have wit at will to work, if they would." Lowest of all (except the outlaws and felons who haunt the thickets and forests) come the professional tramps--

"For they live in no love, nor no law they holden, They wed no woman wherewith they dealen, Bring forth bastards, beggars of kind. Or the back or some bone they breaken of their children, And go feigning with their infants for evermore after. There are more misshapen men among such beggars Than of many other men that on this mould walken."

But the Great Pestilence had bred yet another class odious to Piers Plowman--strikers, as they would be called in modern English--the men who thought their labour was worth more than the miserable price at which Parliament was constantly trying to fix it under the heaviest penalties. These were they of whom the Commons complained in 1376 that "they contrive by great malice prepense to evade the penalty of the aforesaid Ordinances and Statutes; for so soon as their masters chide them for evil service, or would fain pay them for their aforesaid service according to the form of the said Statutes, suddenly they flee and disperse away from their service and from their own district, from county to county, from hundred to hundred, from town to town, into strange places unknown to their said masters, who know not where to find them.... And the greater part of such runaway labourers become commonly stout thieves, wherefrom robberies and felonies increase everywhere from day to day, to the destruction of the aforesaid realm."[254] The worst effect of a law which attempted to fix wages everywhere and chain the labourer to one master or one parish, was to drive into rebellion indiscriminately the honest man who wanted to sell his work in an open market, and the idler who was glad to escape in company with his betters. No doubt there was a half-truth in the satire on the pretensions of these labourers for whom the old wages no longer sufficed, and who, in spite of the law, often managed to enforce their claim--

"Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands, Deigned not to dine to-day on last night's cabbage; May no penny-ale please them, nor a piece of bacon, But it be fresh flesh or fish, fried or y-baken, And that _chaud_ and _plus chaud_ for the chill of their maw."[255]

But sometimes the law too had its way; and for years before the Great Revolt the countryside swarmed with such Statute-made malefactors, together with those other outcasts so graphically described in Jusserand's "Vie Nomade" (Pt. II., c. 2).

Meanwhile there lived and died, in the background, the thousands who, for all their honest toil, struggled on daily from hand to mouth, knowing no Bible truth more true than this, that God had cursed the ground for Adam's sake. These are the true poor--"God's minstrels," as they are called in "Piers Plowman"; those upon whom our alms cannot possibly be ill-spent--

"The most needy are our neighbours, an we take good heed, As prisoners in pits and poor folk in cotes Charged with children and chief lordës rent; That they with spinning may spare, spend they it in house-hire, Both in milk and in meal to make therewith papelots To glut therewith their children that cry after food. Also themselves suffer much hunger, And woe in wintertime, with waking a-nights To rise to the ruel to rock the cradle ... Both to card and to comb, to clout and to wash To rub and to reel, and rushes to peel, That ruth is to read, or in rime to show The woe of these women that woneth in cotes; And many other men that much woe suffren, Both a-hungered and athirst, to turn the fair side outward, And be abashëd for to beg, and will not be a-known What them needeth to their neighbours at noon and at even. This I wot witterly, as the world teacheth, What other men behoveth that have many children And have no chattels but their craft to clothe them and to feed And fele to fong thereto, and few pence taken. There is payn and penny-ale as for a pittance y-taken, Cold flesh and cold fish for venison y-baken; Fridays and fasting-days, a farthing's worth of mussels Were a feast for such folk, or so many cockles."[256]

How many such cottages did Chaucer, like ourselves, pass on his ride to Canterbury? In all ages the sufferings of the very poor have been limited only by the bounds of that which flesh and blood can endure.