The Rise of the Democracy

The Great Churchmen

We are far from any thoughts of democracy in the early struggles against the absolutism of the Crown. The old love of personal liberty that is said to have characterised the Anglo-Saxon had no political outlet under Norman feudalism. What we note is that three Archbishops of Canterbury were strong enough and brave enough to stand up against the unchecked rule of kings, and the names of these great Archbishops-Anselm, Thomas à Becket, and Stephen Langton-are to be honoured for all time for the services they rendered in the making of English liberties. Not one of the three was in any sense a democrat. It is not till the latter part of the fourteenth century that we find John Ball, a wandering, revolutionary priest, uttering for the first time in England a democratic doctrine. Anselm, Becket, and Langton did their work, as Simon of Montfort, and as Eliot and Hampden worked later, not for the sake of a democracy, but for the restriction of an intolerable autocracy. All along in English history liberties have been gained and enlarged by this process of restriction, and it was only when the powers of the Crown had been made subject to Parliament that it was possible, at the close of the nineteenth century, for Parliament itself to become converted from an assembly of aristocrats to a governing body that really represented the nation.

But in considering the rise of democracy we can no more omit the early struggles against the absolutism of the Crown than we can pass over Simon of Montfort's Parliament, or the unsuccessful popular revolts, or the war with Charles I., or the Whig revolution of 1688. They are all incidents of pre-democratic days, but they are all events of significance. Democracy is no new order of society, conceived in the fertile mind of man; it has been slowly evolved and brought to birth after centuries of struggle, to be tried as a form of government only when other forms are outgrown, and cease to be acceptable.

All the great men-heroic and faulty-who withstood the tyranny of their day, not only wrested charters from kings, they left a tradition of resistance; and this tradition has been of incalculable service to a nation seeking self-government. It is easy to dismiss the work of Anselm and Becket as mere disputes between monarch and Churchman, to treat lightly the battle for the Great Charter as a strife between king and barons. Just as easy is it to regard the Peasant Revolt of the fourteenth century and Jack Cade's rebellion in the fifteenth century as the tumults of a riotous mob. The great point is to see clearly in all these contests, successful and unsuccessful, the movement for liberty, for greater security and expansion of life in England, and to note that only by a stern endurance and a willingness not to bear an irksome oppression have our liberties been won. In the winning of these liberties we have proved our fitness for democracy, for a government that will allow the fullest measure of self-development.

Now, what was it that Anselm contended for, first with William II. and then with Henry I.?

Archbishop Anselm and Norman Autocracy

Anselm was sixty when, in 1093, William II. named him for the Archbishopric of Canterbury. In vain Anselm, who was Abbot of the famous monastery of Bec, in Normandy, protested that he was too old, and that his business was not with high place and power in this world. The King seemed to be dying, and the bishops gathered round the sick bed would not hear of any refusal on Anselm's part. They pushed the pastoral staff into his hands, and carried him off to a neighbouring church, while the people shouted "Long live the bishop!"

What everybody felt was that with Anselm as Archbishop things might be better in England, for Anselm's reputation stood very high. He had been the friend of Lanfranc, the late Archbishop; he had been an honoured guest at the Court of William the Conqueror; and he was known for his deep learning, his sanctity of life, and simple, disinterested devotion to duty. It was hoped that with a man of such holiness at Canterbury some restraint might be placed on the lawless tyranny of the Red King. Lanfranc had been the trusted counsellor and right hand of the Red King's father: why should not Anselm bring back the son to the paths of decency-at least? The Archbishop of Canterbury was the chief man in the realm next to the king, and for three years since Lanfranc's death the see had been kept vacant that William Rufus might enjoy its revenues for his own pleasure. It was not unreasonable that men should look to the appointment of Anselm as the beginning of an amendment in Church and State. The trouble was that William stuck to his evil courses.

The rule of William the Conqueror had been stern and harsh, and his hand had been heavy on the English people. But there had been law and justice in the rule; religion and morality had been respected, and peace and security obtained.

The rule of the Red King was not only grievous, it was arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and without semblance of law. The austerity of the Conqueror had been conspicuous; equally conspicuous was the debauchery of his son. The Conqueror had been faithful and conscientious in seeing that vacancies in the Church were filled up quickly and wisely. The Red King preferred to leave bishoprics and churches empty so that he might annex the profits. Lanfranc, a wise and just man, had been the Minister of the Conqueror; the Red King made Ranulf (nicknamed the Torch or Firebrand)-a clever, unprincipled clerk-Bishop of Durham and Justiciar. It was Ranulf who did the King's business in keeping churches and bishoprics vacant, in violation of law and custom; it was Ranulf who plundered the King's vassals and the people at large by every kind of extortion, thwarted the protests of Anselm, and encouraged William in his savage profligacies.

Meek and gentle as Anselm was, he had all the courage that comes of a lofty sense of responsibility to God, and he stood before kings as the Hebrew prophets of old had stood, calm and fearless. At Christmas, 1092, three months before his nomination to the See of Canterbury, Anselm was in England over the affairs of his monastery, and William invited him to Court and treated him with great display of honour. Then some private talk took place between the two, and Anselm said plainly that "Things were spoken daily of the King, openly or secretly, by nearly all the men of his realm, which were not seemly for the King's dignity." From that time Anselm stayed in England, for William refused to give him leave to return to Normandy.

Then in March, 1093 came the King's sickness, which most men expected to be mortal. Anselm was summoned, and on his arrival bade the King "make a clean confession of all that he knows that he has done against God, and promise that, should he recover, he will without pretence amend in all things. The King at once agreed to this, and with sorrow of heart engaged to do all that Anselm required and to keep justice and mercy all his life long. To this he pledged his faith, and made his bishops witness between himself and God, sending persons in his stead to promise his word to God on the altar. An edict was written and sealed with the King's seal that all prisoners should be set free in all his dominions, all debts forgiven, all offences heretofore committed pardoned and forgotten for ever. Further, good and holy laws were promised to the whole people, and the sacred upholding of right and such solemn inquest into wrongdoing as may deter others."[3]

William did not die, and his repentance was short-lived; but the one act of grace he did before leaving his sick bed was to fill up the empty throne at Canterbury by the appointment of Anselm-Anselm's protests of unfitness notwithstanding. Then, on the King's recovery, as though to make up for the penitence displayed, all the royal promises of amendment were broken without shame, and "all the evil which the King had wrought before he was sick seemed good by the side of the wrong which he did when he was returned to health." The prisoners who had been pardoned were sent back to prison, the debts which had been cancelled were re-claimed, and all legal actions which had been dropped were resumed. Anselm was now enthroned at Canterbury, and his appointment could not be revoked; but the King was quick to show his displeasure at the new Archbishop.

The first point raised by William was that those lands belonging to the See of Canterbury, which had been made over to military vassals of the Crown while the archbishopric was vacant, should remain with their holders. Anselm said at once that this was impossible. He was responsible for the administration of all the estates of Canterbury, and to allow these lands to be alienated to the Crown was to rob the poor and needy who, it was held, had a just claim on the property of the Church. Besides, Anselm saw that the lands would never be restored once an Archbishop confirmed their appropriation by the King's military tenants. There was no one in all England save Anselm who dared withstand the Crown, and had he yielded on this matter resistance to the tyranny of the Red King would only have been harder on the next occasion.

Then came the question of a present of money to the King, the customary offering. Anselm brought five hundred marks (￡333), a very considerable sum in those days, and William, persuaded by some of his courtiers that twice the amount ought to have been given, curtly declined the present. Anselm, who disliked the whole business of these gifts to the Crown, for he knew that many a Churchman bought his office by promising a "free" gift after institution, solemnly warned William that money given freely as his was given was better than a forced tribute, and to this William answered that he wanted neither the Archbishop's money nor his preaching or company.

Thereupon Anselm retired and gave the money to the poor, determined that he, for his part, would make no attempt to purchase William's goodwill. Henceforth William was equally determined that Anselm should have no peace in England. It was hateful to the King that there should be anyone in the realm who acknowledged a higher authority than the Crown, and Anselm made it too plain that the Archbishop rested his authority not on the favour of the Crown, but on the discipline of the Christian religion. William was King of England indisputably, but there was a higher power than the King, and that was the Pope. William himself never dreamed of denying the divine authority of the Pope in spiritual matters; no one in all Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries questioned that at Rome was a court of appeal higher than the courts of kings. Strong rulers like William the Conqueror might decline to submit to Rome on a personal question of marriage, but Rome was the recognised centre of religion, the headquarters of the Christian Church, and the supreme court of appeal. Apart from Rome there was no power that could curb the fierce unbridled tyranny of the kings of the earth, and the power of Rome was a spiritual weapon, for the Pope had no army to enforce his decisions. So Anselm, conscious of this spiritual authority, refused to bow to the lawless rule of the Red King; and his very attitude, while it encouraged men to lift up their hearts who erstwhile had felt that it was hopeless and useless to strive against William,[4] enraged the Red King to fury.

The things he wanted to forget were that the chief representative of the Christian religion was a greater person than the King of England, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury could be a Christian minister rather than a King's man.[5] And Anselm was the constant witness to the Christian religion, and, by his very presence, a rebuke to the crimes and cruelties of the Court of the Red King. William actually wrote to the Pope, naturally without any success, praying him to depose Anselm, and promising a large annual tribute to Rome if the request was granted.

For years the uneven contest was waged. The bishops generally avoided Anselm, and were only anxious to be accepted by the King as good servants of the Crown, with the result that William despised them for their servility. But the barons began to declare their respect for the brave old man at Canterbury.

At last, when Anselm was summoned to appear before the King's Court, to "do the King right," on a trumped-up charge of having failed to send an adequate supply of troops for the King's service, he felt the position was hopeless. Anselm's longing had been to labour with the King, as Lanfranc had laboured, to promote religion in the country, and he had been frustrated at every turn. The summons to the King's Court was the last straw, for the defendant in this Court was entirely at the mercy of the Crown. "When, in Anglo-Norman times you speak of the King's Court, it is only a phrase for the King's despotism."[6] Anselm took no notice of the King's summons, and decided to appeal to Rome. For a time William refused permission for any departure from England, but he yielded in 1097, and Anselm set out for Rome.

He stayed at Rome and at Lyons till William was dead, for the Pope would not let him resign Canterbury, and could do nothing to bring the King to a better mind. Then, on the urgent request of Henry I., he returned to England, and for a time all went well. Henry was in earnest for the restoration of law and religion in England, and his declaration, at the very beginning of his reign-the oft-quoted "charter" of Henry I.-to stop the old scandals of selling and farming out Church lands, and to put down all unrighteousness that had been in his brother's time, was hailed with rejoicing.

Anselm stood loyally by Henry over the question of his marriage with Edith (who claimed release from vows taken under compulsion in a convent at Romsey), and his fidelity at the critical time when Robert of Normandy and the discontented nobles threatened the safety of the Crown was invaluable. But Henry was an absolutist, anxious for all the threads of power to be in his own hands; and just when a great Church Council at the Lateran had decided that bishops must not be invested by kings with the ring and staff of their office, because by such investiture they were the king's vassals, Henry decided to invite Anselm to receive the archbishopric afresh from the King's hands by a new act of investiture. To Anselm the abject submission of the bishops to the Red King had been a painful spectacle; and now Henry was making a demand that would emphasise the royal supremacy, and the demand was intolerable and impossible. Again Anselm stood practically alone in his resistance to the royal will, and again the question in dispute was whether there was any power in England higher than the Crown. The papal supremacy was no more under discussion than it had been under William. All that Henry wanted was that the archbishops and bishops should acknowledge that their authority came from the Crown; and at Henry's request Anselm, then 70 years old, again journeyed to Rome to lay the matter before the Pope.

Pope Paschal was fully alive to the mischief of making the bishops and clergy mere officers of kings, and it was soon seen there could be no dispensations from Rome even for Henry. All that the Pope would allow was that bishops might do homage to the Crown for their temporal rights, and with this Henry had to be content.

It was three years later before Anselm returned, and his course was now nearly run. He died at peace on April 21st, 1109, having wrought to no small purpose for religious liberty and the independence of the clergy. (The demand for political and social independence always follows the struggle for independence in religion.) Anselm spent the greater part of his life after his enthronement at Canterbury in battling for independence of the Crown; a century later Archbishop Stephen was to carry the battle still further, and win wider liberties for England from the Crown.

Of Anselm's general love of liberty and hatred of all tyranny many stories are told. One fact may be recalled. The Church Synod, which met at Westminster in 1102, at Anselm's request, attacked the slave trade as a "wicked trade used hitherto in England, by which men are sold like brute animals," and framed a Church rule against its continuance.

In spite of this decree, serfdom lingered in England for centuries, but hiring superseded open buying and selling of men. (The African slave trade was the work of the Elizabethan seamen, and was excused, as slavery in the United States was excused, by the Protestant Churches on the ground of the racial inferiority of the negro.)

Thomas à Becket and Henry II.

Resistance to autocracy is often more needed against a strong and just king than it is against an unprincipled profligate. Henry II.'s love of order and peace, the strength and energy he spent in curtailing the power of the barons, and in making firm the foundations of our national system of petty sessions and assize courts have made for him an enduring fame. Henry II. was a great lawyer; he was "the flower of the princes of his world," in contemporary eyes; but it was as an autocrat he would rule. Against this autocracy Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, protested, and the protest cost him five years of exile, and finally his life. The manner of his death earned for the Archbishop the title of martyr, and popular acclamation required him to be canonised as a saint,[7] and his name to be long cherished with deep devotion by the English people. Both Henry and Thomas stand out honourably, but the former would have brought all England under one great centralised authority, with the Crown not only predominant but absolute in its supremacy, and the Archbishop contended for the great mass of poor and needy people to mitigate the harshness of the law, and to maintain the liberties of the Church against the encroachments of sovereignty. "Nothing is more certain," as the old writer put it, "than that both strove earnestly to do the will of God, one for the sake of his realm, the other on behalf of his Church. But whether of the two was zealous in wisdom is not plain to man, who is so easily mistaken, but to the Lord, Who will judge between them at the last day."

Becket was the first English-born Archbishop of Canterbury since the Norman Conquest. Henry, on his accession, clove to him in friendship, made him Lord Chancellor in 1155, and on Archbishop Theobald's death, the monks of Canterbury at once accepted Henry's advice and elected him to the vacant see. Becket himself knew the King too well to desire the appointment, and warned Henry not to press the matter, and prophesied that their friendship would be turned to bitter enmity. But Henry's mind was made up. As Chancellor, Becket had shown no ecclesiastical bias. He had taxed clergy and laity with due impartiality, and his legal decisions had been given without fear or favour. Henry counted on Becket to act with the same indifference as Archbishop, to be the King's vicegerent during the royal absence in France. And here Henry, wise as he was in many things, mistook his man. As Chancellor of England Becket conceived his business to be the administration of the laws: as Archbishop he was first and foremost the champion of the Christian religion, the protector of the poor, and the defender of the liberties of the Church. All unwilling, like his great predecessor, St. Anselm, to become archbishop, from the hour of his consecration to the See of Canterbury, in 1162, Becket was as firm as Anselm had been in resisting the absolutism of the King. To the King's extreme annoyance the Chancellorship was at once given up-the only instance known of the voluntary resignation of the Chancellorship by layman or ecclesiastic,[8] and all the amusements of the Court and the business of the world were laid aside by the new archbishop. The care of his diocese, the relief of the poor and the sick, and attendance at the sacred offices of the Church were henceforth the work of the man who had been Henry's best-loved companion, and within a year of his enthronement friendship with the King was broken.

The first point at issue was whether there should be one common jurisdiction in all the land, or whether the Church courts should still exist. These Church courts had been set up by William the Conqueror and Lanfranc, in order that the clergy should not be mixed up in ordinary law matters, and should be excluded strictly from the common courts. No penalty involving bloodshed could be inflicted in the Church courts, and all the savage barbarities of mutilation, common enough as punishments in the King's court, were forbidden. Henry II., apart from his strong desire for centralisation in government, wanted these Church courts abolished, because every clerk who offended against the law escaped ordinary punishment, no matter what the charge might be. Archbishop Thomas saw that in the Church courts there was some protection, not only for the clergy, but for all minor ecclesiastics, and for widows and orphans, against the horrible legal cruelties of the age. "It must be held in mind that the Archbishop had on his side the Church or Canon Law, which he had sworn to obey, and certainly the law courts erred as much on the side of harshness and cruelty as those of the Church on that of foolish pity towards evil doers."[9]

Before this dispute had reached its climax Thomas had boldly taken measures against some of the King's courtiers who were defrauding the See of Canterbury; and he had successfully withstood Henry's plan for turning the old Dane-geld shire tax, which was paid to the sheriff for the defence of the country and the up-keep of roads, into a tax to be collected by the Crown as part of the royal revenue. Thomas told the King plainly that this tax was a voluntary offering to be paid to the sheriffs only "so long as they shall serve as fitly and maintain and defend our defendants," and said point blank that he would not suffer a penny to be taken off his lands for the King's purposes. Henry was obliged to yield, and this is the first case known of resistance to the royal will in the matter of taxation.

The case of clerical offenders, and the jurisdiction of the courts came before a great council at Westminster in 1163. Henry declared that criminous clerks should be deprived of their office in the Church courts, and then handed over to the King's courts for punishment. Thomas replied that the proposal was contrary to the religious liberties of the land, but he met with little support from the rest of the bishops. "Better the liberties of the Church perish than that we perish ourselves," they cried in fear of the King. Henry followed up his proposal by calling on the bishops to abide by the old customs of the realm, as settled by his grandfather, Henry I., and to this they all agreed, adding "saving the rights of our order."

A list of the old customs was drawn up, and sixteen Constitutions, or articles, were presented to the bishops at the Great Council of Clarendon, in January, 1164. To many of these Constitutions Thomas objected; notably (1) That clerks were to be tried in the King's courts for offences of common law. (2) That neither archbishops, bishops, nor beneficed clerks were to leave the kingdom without royal permission. (This would not only stop appeals to Rome, it would make pilgrimages or attendance at General Councils impossible without the King's consent.) (3) That no member of the King's household was to be excommunicated without the King's permission. (4) That no appeals should be taken beyond the Archbishop's court, except to be brought before the King. (This definite prohibition of appeals to Rome left the King absolute master in England.) The last article declared that neither serfs nor the sons of villeins were to be ordained without the consent of the lord on whose land they were born. Against his own judgment Thomas yielded to the entreaties of the bishops, and agreed to accept the Constitutions of Clarendon, but no sooner had he done so than he bitterly repented, and wrote off to the Pope acknowledging his mistake. Pope Alexander III. was mainly anxious to prevent open hostilities between Henry and the Archbishop, and wrote calmly that he was absolved, without suggesting any blame to the King.

Henry now saw that the Archbishop, and only the Archbishop, stood in the way of the royal will, and when another Council met at Northampton, in October, 1164, the King was ready to drive Thomas out of office. Before this Council Thomas was charged with having refused justice to John, the Treasury-Marshall, and with contempt of the King's court, and was heavily fined. It was difficult to get sentence pronounced, for the barons declined to sit as judges on an archbishop; but at length, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, on the King's order, declared the sentence. Henry followed up the attack next day by calling upon Thomas to account for 30,000 marks spent by him while Chancellor. In vain he proved that the Justiciar had declared him free of all claims when he laid down the Chancellorship, that the charge was totally unexpected; the King refused to stay the proceedings unless Thomas would sign the Constitutions of Clarendon.

Consultation with the bishops brought no help. "The King has declared, so it is said, that he and you cannot both remain in England as king and archbishop. It would be much safer to resign everything and submit to his mercy"; thus spake Hilary, of Chichester, and his fellow-bishops all urged resignation or submission.

Two days later the Archbishop came into the Council in full robes with the Cross in his hand. Earl Robert, of Leicester, rose to pass sentence upon him and at once the Archbishop refused to hear him. "Neither law nor reason permit children to pass sentence on their father," he declared. "I will not hear this sentence of the King, or any judgment of yours. For, under God, I will be judged by the Pope alone, to whom before you all here I appeal, placing the Church of Canterbury under God's protection and the protection of the Pope."

There were shouts of anger at these words, and some tore rushes from the floor and flung at him, but no one dared to stop the Archbishop's passage as he passed from the hall. It was useless to look for help or justice in England, and that very night Thomas left England for Flanders to appeal to Rome.

But Pope Alexander could do no more for Thomas than his predecessor had done for Anselm; only he would not allow any resignation from Canterbury. Henry himself appealed to the Pope in 1166, fearing excommunication by the Archbishop; "thus by a strange fate it happened that the King, while striving for those 'ancient customs' by which he endeavoured to prevent any right of appeal (to the Pope), was doomed to confirm the right of appeal for his own safety." The Pope did what he could to arrange a reconciliation, but it was not till 1170 that the King, seriously alarmed that Thomas would place England under an interdict, agreed to a reconciliation.

On December 1st the exile was over, and Thomas landed at Sandwich, and went at once to Canterbury. There were many who doubted whether there could be lasting peace between the King and the Archbishop, and while the bishops generally hated the Primate's return, the nobles spoke openly of him as a traitor to the King.

The end was near. Thomas, asked to withdraw the sentence of excommunication he had passed against the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London and Salisbury for violating the privileges of Canterbury, answered that the matter must go before the Pope. The bishops, instead of going to Rome, hastened to Henry, who was keeping his Court at Bur, in France.

Henry, at the complaint of the bishops, broke out into one of those terrible fits of anger which overcame him from time to time, and four knights left the Court saying, "All this trouble will be at an end when Thomas is dead, and not before." On December 29th these knights were at Canterbury, and at nightfall, just when vespers had begun, they slew Archbishop Thomas by the great pillar in the Cathedral. So died this great Archbishop for the liberties of the Church, and, as it seemed to him, for the welfare of the people.

Henry was horrified at the news of the Archbishop's death, and hastened to beg absolution from Rome for the rash words that had provoked the murder. In the presence of the Papal legate he promised to give up the Constitutions of Clarendon, nor in the remaining eighteen years of his reign did Henry make any fresh attempt to bring the Church under the subjection of the Crown.

To the great bulk of English people Thomas was a saint and martyr, and numerous churches were dedicated in his name. More than three hundred years later Henry VIII. decided that St. Thomas was an enemy of princes, that his shrine at Canterbury must be destroyed, and his festival unhallowed. But the fame of Thomas à Becket has survived the censure of Henry VIII., and his name shines clearly across the centuries. Democracy has been made possible by the willingness of brave men in earlier centuries to resist, to the death, an absolutism that would have left England bound and chained to the king's throne.

Stephen Langton and John

Stephen Langton was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in June, 1207, on the nomination of Pope Innocent III.; the monks of Canterbury, who had proposed their own superior, consenting to the appointment, for Langton had a high reputation for learning and was known to be of exalted character. But King John, who had wanted a man of his own heart for the archbishopric-John of Gray, Bishop of Norwich, commonly spoken of as "a servant of Mammon, and an evil shepherd that devoured his own sheep"-was enraged, and refusing to acknowledge Langton, defied the Pope, drove the monks out of the country, and declared that anyone who acknowledged Stephen Langton as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy. So it came about that the great English statesman who broke down the foulest and worst tyranny the land had known, and won for England the Great Charter of its liberties, was a nominee of the Pope, and was to find himself under the displeasure of the Papal legate when the Charter had been signed! For six years John kept Stephen out of Canterbury, while England lay under an interdict, with its King excommunicate and outside the pale of the Church. Most of the bishops fled abroad, "fearing the King, but afraid to obey him for dread of the Pope," and John laid hands on Church property and filled the royal treasury with the spoils of churchmen and Jews. But in 1213 John's position had become precarious, for the northern barons were plotting his overthrow, and the Pope had absolved all his subjects from allegiance, and given sentence that "John should be thrust from his throne and another worthier than he should reign in his stead," naming Philip of France as his successor. John was aware that he could not count on the support of the barons in a war with France, and a prophecy of Peter, the Wakefield Hermit, that the crown would be lost before Ascension Day, made him afraid of dying excommunicate. Accordingly John decided to get the Pope on his side. He agreed to receive Pandulf, the Papal legate; to acknowledge Stephen; make good the damage done to the Church, and, in addition, voluntarily ("of our own good free will and by the common counsel of our barons") surrendered "to God and to the Holy Mother Church of Rome, and to Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors," the whole realm of England and Ireland, "with all rights thereunto appertaining, to receive them back and hold them thenceforth as a feudatory of God and the Roman Church." He swore fealty to the Pope for both realms, and promised a yearly tribute of 1,000 marks.

This abject submission to the Pope was a matter of policy. John cared nothing for any appearance of personal or national humiliation, and as he had broken faith with all in England, so, if it should suit his purpose, would he as readily break faith with Rome. But the immediate advantage of having the Pope for his protector seemed considerable. "For when once he had put himself under apostolical protection and made his realms a part of the patrimony of St. Peter, there was not in the Roman world a sovereign who durst attack him or would invade his lands, in such awe was Pope Innocent held above all his predecessors for many years past."[10]

Stephen landed in June, 1213, and at Winchester John was formally absolved and the coronation oaths were renewed. It was very soon seen what manner of man the Archbishop was. In August a great gathering of the barons took place in St. Paul's, and there Langton recited the coronation charter of Henry I., and told all those assembled that these rights and liberties were to be recovered; and "the barons swore they would fight for these liberties, even unto death if it were needful, and the Archbishop promised that he would help with all his might." The weakness of the barons hitherto had been their want of cohesion, their endless personal feuds, and the lack of any feeling of national responsibility. Langton laboured to create a national party and to win recognition of law and justice for all in England; and the Great Charter was the issue of his work.

The state of things was intolerable. The whole administration of justice was corrupt. The decisions of the King's courts were as arbitrary as the methods employed to enforce sentence. Free men were arrested, evicted, exiled, and outlawed without even legal warrant or the semblance of a fair trial. All the machinery of government set up by the Norman kings, and developed under Henry II., had, in John's hands, become a mere instrument of despotic extortion, to be used against anybody and everybody, from earl to villein, who could be fleeced by the King's servants.

John saw the tide rising against him, and endeavoured to divide barons from Churchmen by proclaiming that the latter should have free and undisturbed right of election when bishoprics and other ecclesiastical offices were vacant. But the attempt failed. Langton was too resolute a statesman, and his conception of the primacy of Canterbury was too high for any turning back from the work he had set himself to accomplish. The rights of election in the Church were important, but the restoration of justice and order and the ending of tyranny were, in his eyes, hardly less important. John, who had been at war in France, returned defeated from his last attempt to recover for the Crown the lost Angevin provinces, to face a discontent that was both wide and general. The people, and in especial the barons and knights whom for fourteen years John had robbed, insulted, and spurned, and whose liberties he had trampled upon, were ready at last under wise leadership to end the oppression.

In November, 1214, the Archbishop saw that the time was come for action, and again the barons met in council. Before the high altar in the Abbey Church of St. Edmundsbury they swore that if the King sought to evade their demand for the laws and liberties of Henry I.'s charter, they would make war upon him until he pledged himself to confirm their rights in a charter under royal seal. "They also agreed that after Christmas they would go all together to the King and ask him for a confirmation of these liberties, and that meanwhile they would so provide themselves with horses and arms that if the King should seek to break his oath, they might, by seizing his castles, compel him to make satisfaction. And when these things were done every man returned to his own home."[11]

John now asked for time to consider these requests, and for the next six months worked hard to break up the barons' confederacy, to gain friends and supporters, and to get mercenaries from Poitou. It was all to no purpose. As a last resource he took the Cross, expecting to be saved as a crusader from attack, and at the same time he wrote to the Pope to help his faithful vassal. The Pope's letters rebuking the barons for conspiracy against the King were unheeded, and the mercenaries were inadequate when John was confronted by the whole baronage in arms.

The Great Charter

In May a list of articles to be signed was sent to John; and on his refusal the barons formally renounced their homage and fealty and flew to arms. John was forced to surrender before this host. On June 15th he met the barons at Runnymede, between Staines and Windsor, and there, in the presence of Archbishop Stephen and "a multitude of most illustrious knights," sealed the Great Charter of the Liberties of England.

This Great Charter was in the main a renewal of the old rights and liberties promised by Henry I. It set up no new rights, conferred no new privileges, and sanctioned no changes in the Constitution. Its real and lasting importance is due to its being a written document-for the first time in England it was down in black and white, for all to read, what the several rights and duties of King and people were, and in what the chief points of the Constitution consisted.

MAGNA CHARTA

A facsimile of the Original in the British Museum.

The Great Charter is a great table of laws. It marks the beginning of written legislation, and anticipates Acts of Parliament. Unwritten laws and traditions were not abolished: they remain with us to this day; but the written law had become a necessity when "the bonds of unwritten custom" failed to restrain kings and barons. The Great Charter also took into account the rights of free men, and of the tenants of the King's vassals. If the barons and knights had their grievances to be redressed, the commons and the freeholding peasants needed protection against the lawless exactions of their overlords.[12]

Sixty-three clauses make up Magna Charta, and we may summarise them as follows:-

(1) The full rights and liberties of the Church are acknowledged; bishops shall be freely elected, so that the Church of England shall be free.[13]

(2-8) The King's tenants are to have their feudal rights secured against abuse. Widows-in the wardship of the Crown-are to be protected against robbery and against compulsion to a second marriage.

(9-11) The harsh rules for securing the payment of debts to the Crown and to the Jews (in whose debts the Crown had an interest) are to be relaxed.

(12-14) No scutage or aid (save for the three regular feudal aids-the ransom of the King, the knighting of his eldest son, and the marriage of his eldest daughter) is to be imposed except by the Common Council of the nation; and to this Council archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons are to be called by special writ, while all who held their land directly from the King, and were of lesser rank, were to be summoned by a general writ addressed to the sheriff of the county. Forty days' notice of the meeting was to be given, and also the cause of the assembly. The action of those who obeyed the summons was to be taken to represent the action of all.[14] (This last clause is never repeated in later confirmations of the Great Charter.)

(15-16) The powers of lords over their tenants are limited and defined.

(17-19) A Court of Common Pleas is to be held in some fixed place so that suitors are not obliged to follow the King's Curia. Cases touching the ownership of land are to be tried in the counties by visiting justices, and by four knights chosen by the county.

(20-23) No freeman is to be fined beyond his offence, and the penalty is to be fixed by a local jury. Earls and barons to be fined by their peers; and clerks only according to the amount of their lay property.

(24-33) The powers of sheriffs, constables, coroners, and bailiffs of the King are strictly defined. No sheriff is to be a justice in his own county. Royal officers are to pay for all the goods taken by requisition; money is not to be taken in lieu of service from those who are willing to perform the service. The horses and carts of freemen are not to be seized for royal work without consent. The weirs in the Thames, Medway, and other rivers in England are to be removed.

(34-38) Uniformity of weights and measures is directed. Inquests are to be granted freely. The sole wardship of minors who have other lords will not be claimed by the King, except in special cases. No bailiff may force a man to ordeal without witnesses.

(39-40) No free man is to be taken, imprisoned, ousted of his land, outlawed, banished, or hurt in any way save by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land. The King is not to sell, delay, or deny right or justice to anyone.

(41-42) Merchants may go out or come in without paying exorbitant customs. All "lawful" men are to have a free right to pass in and out of England in time of peace.

(44-47) An inquiry into the Forest Laws and a reform of the forest abuses are promised. All forests made in present reign to be disforested, and all fences in rivers thrown down.

(49-60) The foreign mercenaries of the King, all the detested gang that came with horses and arms to the hurt of the realm, are to be sent out of the country. The Welsh princes and the King of Scots (who had sided with the barons) are to have justice done. A general amnesty for all political offences arising from the struggle is made.

The last three articles appointed twenty-five barons, chosen out of the whole baronage, to watch over the keeping of the Charter. They were empowered to demand that any breach of the articles should at once be put right, and, in default to make war on the King till the matter was settled to their satisfaction. Finally there was the oath to be taken on the part of the King, and on the part of the barons that the articles of the Charter should be observed in good faith according to their plain meaning.

The Great Charter was signed, and then in a wild burst of rage John shouted to his foreign supporters, "They have given me five-and-twenty over-kings!"

Within a week of Runnymede the Great Charter was published throughout England, but neither King nor barons looked for peace. John was ready to break all oaths, and while he set about increasing his army of mercenaries, he also appealed to the Pope, as his overlord, protesting that the Charter had been wrested from him by force.

Langton and the bishops left for Rome to attend a general council. Pope Innocent declared the Charter annulled on the ground that both King and barons had made the Pope overlord of England, and that consequently nothing in the government could be changed without his consent. But with Langton, the bishops, and the Papal legate all away at Rome, there was no one to publish the Papal repudiation of the Charter, and the King and barons were already at civil war. Pope Innocent III. was dead in the spring of 1216, and John's wretched reign was over when the King lay dying at Newark in October.

Stephen Langton was back again at Canterbury in 1217, and for eleven more years worked with William the Marshall and Hubert of Burgh to maintain public peace and order during Henry III.'s boyhood. At Oxford, in 1223, the Charter was confirmed afresh, and two years later it was solemnly proclaimed again when the King wanted a new subsidy. As long as the great statesmen were in office Henry III. was saved from the weakness that cursed his rule in England for nearly forty years. But William the Marshall died in 1219, Archbishop Stephen in 1228, and Hubert was dismissed from the justiciarship in 1234. A horde of greedy aliens from Poitou fed at the Court of Henry and devoured the substance of England, until men arose, as Langton had arisen, to demand the enforcement of charters and a just administration of the laws.

Again a national party arises under the leadership of Simon of Montfort, and in their victory over the King we get the beginnings of Parliamentary government and popular representation. Every step forward is followed by reaction, but the ground lost is recovered, and the next step taken marks always a steady advance. Over and over again it has seemed that all the liberties won in the past were lost, but looking back we can see that there has been no lasting defeat of liberty. Only for a time have the forces of oppression triumphed; it is soon found impossible in England to rest under tyranny, or to govern without the consent of the governed. And every fresh campaign for the restriction of kingly power brings us nearer the day of democratic government.

* * *

Democracy and Representative Government

To-day democracy takes the form of representative government in civilised countries; and for representative government contend the nations and peoples seeking democracy.

The weak spots in all popular electoral systems are obvious, and the election of representatives is always a subject for jokes and satire. It could hardly be otherwise. For the best machinery in the world needs some sort of sympathetic intelligence in the person who manipulates it, and the machinery of popular elections can only be worked successfully with a large measure of sincerity and good will. In the hands of the ambitious, the self-seeking, and the unscrupulous, democratic politics are a machine for frustrating popular representation, and as this state of things is always prevalent somewhere, the humorist and the satirist naturally treat politics without respect.

But in spite of all its faults and failings-glaring as these are-mankind can at present devise nothing better than representative government, and the abuse of power, the cunning, roguery, and corruption that too often accompany popular elections and democratic administration, rather stir honest men to action than make them incline to dictatorship and absolutism.

The present notion about representative government is that it makes possible the expression of popular will, and can ensure the fulfilment of that will. In the thirteenth century, when we get the beginnings of representative government, there is no question of the people making positive proposals in legislation, but there is a distinct belief that the consent of the governed ought to be obtained by the ruling power. The mere legal maxim from the Code of Justinian, that "that which touches all shall be approved by all,"[15] "becomes transmuted by Edward I. into a great political and constitutional principle."[16]

Representative Theory First Found in Ecclesiastical Assemblies

More than a century earlier the first recorded appearances of town representatives are found in the Spanish Cortes of Aragon and Castile.[17] St. Dominic makes a representative form of government the rule in his Order of Preaching Friars, each priory sending two representatives to its provincial chapter, and each province sending two representatives to the general chapter of the Order.

In England, Simon of Montfort, the son of Simon, the great warrior of the Albigensian wars and the warm friend of Dominic, was in close association with the friars. Hence there was nothing so very remarkable in Earl Simon issuing writs for the Full Parliament of 1265 for the return of two burgesses from each city and borough. He had seen representative government at work among the friars in their chapters. Why should the plan be not equally useful in the government of the country?[18] There is no evidence that the summons to the burgesses was regarded as a revolutionary proposal-so lightly comes political change in England.

The name of Simon of Montfort, Earl of Leicester, must always be associated with the beginning of representative government in England. Let us recall how it was the great Earl came to be in power in 1265.

The Misrule of Henry III.

Henry III. was always in want of money, and his crew of royal parasites from Poitou drained the exchequer. Over and over again the barons called on the King to get rid of his favourites, and to end the misrule that afflicted the country; and the King from time to time gave promises of amendment. But the promises were always broken. As long as Henry could get money he was averse from all constitutional reform. In 1258 the barons were determined that a change must be made. "If the King can't do without us in war, he must listen to us in peace," they declared. "And what sort of peace is this when the King is led astray by bad counsellors, and the land is filled with foreign tyrants who grind down native-born Englishmen?"

William of Rishanger, a contemporary writer, expressed the popular feeling in well-known verses:

"The King that tries without advice to seek his country's weal

Must often fail; he cannot know the wants and woes they feel.

The Parliament must tell the King how he may serve them best,

And he must see their wants fulfilled and injuries redressed.

A King should seek his people's good and not his own sweet will.

Nor think himself a slave because men hold him back from ill."

"The King's mistakes call for special treatment," said Richard, Earl of Gloucester.

Simon of Montfort, Leader of the National Party

So that year a Parliament met in Oxford, in the Dominican Priory. It was called the "Mad Parliament," because the barons all came to it fully armed, and civil war seemed imminent. But Earl Simon and Richard of Gloucester carried the barons with them in demanding reform. Henry was left without supporters, and civil war was put off for five years.

The work done at this Parliament of Oxford was an attempt to make the King abide loyally by the Great Charter; and the Provisions of Oxford, as they were called, set up a standing council of fifteen, by whom the King was to be guided, and ordered that Parliament was to meet three times a year: at Candlemas (February 2nd), on June 1st, and at Michaelmas. Four knights were to be chosen by the King's lesser freeholders in each county to attend this Parliament, and the baronage was to be represented by twelve commissioners.

It was an oligarchy that the Provisions of Oxford established, "intended rather to fetter the King than to extend or develop the action of the community at large. The baronial council clearly regards itself as competent to act on behalf of all the estates of the realm, and the expedient of reducing the national deliberations to three sessions of select committees betrays a desire to abridge the frequent and somewhat irksome duty of attendance in Parliament rather than to share the central legislative and deliberative power with the whole body of the people. It must, however, be remembered that the scheme makes a very indistinct claim to the character of a final arrangement."[19]

For a time things went better in England. The aliens at Henry's Court fled over-seas, and their posts were filled by Englishmen. Parliament also promised that the vassals of the nobles should have better treatment, and that the sheriffs should be chosen by the shire-moots, the county freeholders.

But Henry's promises were quickly broken, and war broke out on the Welsh borders between Simon of Montfort's friend Llewellyn and Mortimer and the Marchers. Edward, Prince of Wales, stood by the Provisions of Oxford for a few years, but supported his father when the latter refused to re-confirm the Provisions in 1263. As a last resource to prevent civil war, Simon and Henry agreed to appeal to King Louis of France to arbitrate on the fulfilment of the Provisions. The Pope had already absolved Henry from obedience to the Provisions, and the Award of Louis, given at Amiens and called the Mise of Amiens, was entirely in Henry's favour. It annulled the Provisions of Oxford, left the King free to appoint his own ministers, council, and sheriffs, to employ aliens, and to enjoy power uncontrolled. But the former charters of the realm were declared inviolate, and no reprisals were to take place.

To Simon and most of the barons the Award was intolerable, and when Henry returned from France with a large force ready to take the vengeance which the Award had forbidden, civil war could not be prevented. London rallied to Simon, and Oxford, the Cinque Ports, and the friars were all on the side of the barons against the King.

On May 14th, 1264, a pitched battle at Lewes ended in complete victory for Simon, and found the King, Prince Edward, and the kinsmen and chief supporters of the Crown prisoners in his hands.

Peace was made, and a treaty-the Mise of Lewes-drawn up and signed. Once more the King promised to keep the Provisions and Charters, and to dismiss the aliens. He also agreed to live thriftily till his debts were paid, and to leave his sons as hostages with Earl Simon.

Simon at once set about the work of reform. The King's Standing, or Privy, Council was reconstituted, and the Parliamentary Commissioners were abolished, "for Simon held it as much a man's duty to think and work for his country as to fight for it." A marked difference is seen between Simon's policy at Oxford and the policy after Lewes. The Provisions of 1258 were restrictive. The Constitution of 1264 deliberately extended the limits of Parliament. "Either Simon's views of a Constitution had rapidly developed, or the influences which had checked them in 1258 were removed. Anyhow, he had genius to interpret the mind of the nation, and to anticipate the line which was taken by later progress."[20] What Simon wanted was the approval of all classes of the community for his plans, and to that end he issued writs for the Parliament-the Full Parliament-of 1265.

The great feature of this Parliament was that for the first time the burgesses of each city and borough were summoned to send two representatives. In addition, two knights were to come from each shire, and clergy and barons as usual-though in the case of the earls and barons only twenty-three were invited, for Simon had no desire for the presence of those who were his enemies. The Full Parliament sat till March, and then two months later war had once more blazed out. Earl Gilbert of Gloucester broke away from Simon, Prince Edward escaped from custody, and these two joined Lord Mortimer and the Welsh Marchers.

On August 4th Edward surprised and routed the army of the younger Simon near Kenilworth, and then advanced to crush the great Earl, who was encamped at Evesham, waiting to join forces with his son. All hope of escape for Earl Simon was lost, and he was outnumbered by seven to two. But fly he would not. One by one the barons who stood by Simon were cut down, but though wounded and dismounted, the great Earl "fought on to the last like a giant for the freedom of England, till a foot soldier stabbed him in the back under the mail, and he was borne down and slain." For three hours the unequal fight lasted in the midst of storm and darkness, and when it was over the Grey Friars carried the mangled body of the dead Earl into the priory at Evesham, and laid it before the high altar, for the poorer clergy and the common people all counted Simon of Montfort for a saint.

"Those who knew Simon praise his piety, admire his learning, and extol his prowess as a knight and skill as a general. They tell of his simple fare and plain russet dress, bear witness to his kindly speech and firm friendship to all good men, describe his angry scorn for liars and unjust men, and marvel at his zeal for truth and right, which was such that neither pleasure nor threats nor promises could turn him aside from keeping the oath he swore at Oxford; for he held up the good cause 'like a pillar that cannot be moved, and, like a second Josiah, esteemed righteousness the very healing of his soul.' As a statesman he wished to bind the King to rule according to law, and to make the King's Ministers responsible to a Full Parliament; and though he did not live to see the success of his policy, he had pointed out the way by which future statesmen might bring it about."[21]

In the hour of Simon's death it might seem that the cause of good government was utterly lost, and for a time Henry triumphed with a fierce reaction. But the very barons who had turned against Simon were quite determined that the Charters should be observed, and Edward was to show, on his coming to the throne, that he had grasped even more fully than Simon the notion of a national representative assembly, and that he accepted the principle, "that which touches all shall be approved by all."

Henry III. died in 1272, and it was not till two years later that Edward I. was back in England from the crusades to take up the crown. It was an age of great lawgivers; an age that saw St. Louis ruling in France, Alfonso the Wise in Castile, the Emperor Frederick II.-the Wonder of the World-in Sicily. In England Edward shaped the Constitution and settled for future times the lines of Parliamentary representative government.

Edward I.'s Model Parliament, 1295

For the first twenty years Edward's Parliaments were great assemblies of barons and knights, and it was not till 1295 that the famous Model Parliament was summoned. "It is very evident that common dangers must be met by measures concerted in common," ran the writ to the bishops. Every sheriff was to cause two knights to be elected from each shire, two citizens from each city, two burgesses from each borough. The clergy were to be fully represented from each cathedral and each diocese.

Hitherto Parliament, save in 1265, had been little else than a feudal court, a council of the King's tenants; it became, after 1295, a national assembly. Edward's plan was that the three estates-clergy, barons, and commons: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work-should be represented. But the clergy always stood aloof, preferring to meet in their own houses of convocation; and the archbishops, bishops, and greater abbots only attended because they were great holders of land and important feudal lords.

Although the knights of the shire were of much the same class as the barons, the latter received personal summons to attend, and the knights joined with the representatives of the cities and boroughs. So the two Houses of Parliament consisted of barons and bishops-lords spiritual and lords temporal-and knights and commons; and we have to-day the House of Lords and the House of Commons; the former, as in the thirteenth century, lords spiritual and temporal, the latter, representatives from counties and boroughs.

The admission of elected representatives was to move, in course of time, the centre of government from the Crown to the House of Commons; but in Edward I.'s reign Parliament was just a larger growth of the King's Council-the Council that Norman and Plantagenet kings relied on for assistance in the administration of justice and the collection of revenue. The judges of the supreme court were always summoned to Parliament, as the law lords sit in the Upper House to-day.

Money, or rather the raising of money, was the main cause for calling a Parliament. The clergy at first voted their own grants to the Crown in convocation, but came to agree to pay the taxes voted by Lords and Commons, And Lords and Commons, instead of making separate grants, joined in a common grant.

"And, as the bulk of the burden fell upon the Commons, they adopted a formula which placed the Commons in the foreground. The grant was made by the Commons, with the assent of the Lords spiritual and temporal. This formula appeared in 1395, and became the rule. In 1407, eight years after Henry IV. came to the throne, he assented to the important principle that money grants were to be initiated by the House of Commons, were not to be reported to the King until both Houses were agreed, and were to be reported by the Speaker of the Commons' House. This rule is strictly observed at the present day. When a money bill, such as the Finance bill for the year or the Appropriation bill, has been passed by the House of Commons and agreed to by the House of Lords, it is, unlike all other bills, returned to the House of Commons."[22] The Speaker, with his own hand, delivers all money bills to the Clerk of Parliaments, the officer whose business it is to signify the royal assent.

In addition to voting money, the Commons, on the assembly of Parliament, would petition for the redress of grievances. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were not legislators, but petitioners for legislation; and as it often happened that their petitions were not granted in the form they asked, it became a matter of bitter complaint that the laws did not correspond with the petitions. Henry V. in 1414 granted the request that "nothing should be enacted to the petition of the Commons contrary to their asking, whereby they should be bound without their assent"; and from that time it became customary for bills to be sent up to the Crown instead of petitions, leaving the King the alternative of assent or reaction.

The Nobility Predominant in Parliament

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the power of Parliament was strong enough to force the abdication of two kings-Edward II. and Richard II.-but not strong enough to free the land of the turbulent authority of the nobles. This authority went down in the struggles of the Lancastrians and Yorkists.

"The bloody faction fights known as the Wars of the Roses brought the Plantagenet dynasty to a close, weeded out the older nobility, and cleared the way for a new form of monarchy."[23]

"The high nobility killed itself out. The great barons who adhered to the 'Red Rose' or the 'White Rose,' or who fluctuated from one to the other, became poorer, fewer, and less potent every year. When the great struggle ended at Bosworth, a large part of the greatest combatants were gone. The restless, aspiring, rich barons, who made the civil war, were broken by it. Henry VII. attained a kingdom in which there was a Parliament to advise, but scarcely a Parliament to control."[24]

It is important to note the ascendancy of the barons in the medieval Parliaments, and their self-destruction in the Wars of the Roses. Unless we realise how very largely the barons were the Parliament, it is difficult to understand how it came about that Parliament was so utterly impotent under the Tudors. The Wars of the Roses killed off the mighty parliamentarians, and it took a hundred years to raise the country landowners into a party which, under Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, was to make the House of Commons supreme.

"The civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if I might so say): that is, destroyed three parts of the greater nobility, who were its most potent members, tired the small nobility and gentry, and overthrew the aristocratic organisation on which all previous effectual resistance to the sovereign had been based."[25]

To get an idea of the weakness of Parliament when the Tudors ruled, we have but to suppose at the present day a Parliament deprived of all front-bench men on both sides of the House, and of the leaders of the Irish and Labour parties, and a House of Lords deprived of all Ministers and ex-Ministers.

The Medieval National Assemblies

Before passing to the Parliamentary revival of the seventeenth century, there still remain one or two points to be considered relating to the early national assemblies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

(1) Who were the electors in the Middle Ages?-In the counties, all who were entitled to attend and take part in the proceedings of the county court had the right of electing the knight of the shire; and "it is most probable, on the evidence of records, on the analogies of representative usage, and on the testimony of later facts, that the knights of the shire were elected by the full county court."[26]

The county court or shire-moot not only elected knights for Parliament; it often enough elected them for local purposes as well. The county coroner was elected in similar fashion by the county. All the chief tenants and small freeholders were therefore the county electors; but the tenants-in-chief (who held their lands from the Crown) and the knights of the county had naturally considerably more influence than the smaller men. "The chief lord of a great manor would have authority with his tenants, freeholders as they might be, which would make their theoretical equality a mere shadow, and would, moreover, be exercised all the more easily because the right which it usurped was one which the tenant neither understood nor cared for."[27]

It is difficult to decide to what extent the smaller freeholders could take an active interest in the affairs of the county. As for the office of knight of the shire, there was no competition in the thirteenth or fourteenth century for the honour of going to Parliament, and it is likely enough that the sheriff, upon whom rested the responsibility for the elections, would in some counties be obliged to nominate and compel the attendance of an unwilling candidate.

(2) Payment of Parliamentary Representatives.-The fact that Members of Parliament were paid by their constituents in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries[28] made certain small freeholders as anxious not to be included in the electorate as others were anxious not to be elected to Parliament. It was recognised as "fair that those persons who were excluded from the election should be exempt from contribution to the wages. And to many of the smaller freeholders the exemption from payment would be far more valuable than the privilege of voting."[29] But the Commons generally petitioned for payment to be made by all classes of freeholders, and when all allowance has been made for varying customs and for local diversities and territorial influence, it is safe to take it that the freeholders were the body of electors.

In 1430, the eighth year of Henry VI., an Act was passed ordering that electors must be resident in the country, and must have free land or tenement to the value of 40s. a year at least; and this Act was in operation till 1831.

The county franchise was a simple and straightforward matter compared with the methods of electing representatives from the boroughs. All that the sheriff was ordered to do by writ was to provide for the return of two members for each city or borough in his county; the places that were to be considered as boroughs were not named. In the Middle Ages a town might have no wish to be taxed for the wages of its Parliamentary representative, and in that case would do its best to come to an arrangement with the sheriff. (It was not till the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that a considerable increase of boroughs took place. The Tudors created "pocket" and "rotten" boroughs in order to have the nominees of the Crown in Parliament.) The size of the borough bore no relation to its membership till the Reform Act of the nineteenth century, and as the selection of towns to be represented was arbitrary, so the franchise in the towns was equally unsettled. One or two places had a wide franchise, others confined the vote to freemen and corporation members. But in spite of the extraordinary vagaries of the borough franchise, and the arbitrary selection of towns to be represented, these early medieval Parliaments really did in an imperfect way represent the nation-all but the peasants and artisans.

"Our English Parliaments were unsymmetrical realities. They were elected anyhow. The sheriff had a considerable licence in sending writs to boroughs, that is, he could in part pick its constituencies; and in each borough there was a rush and scramble for the franchise, so that the strongest local party got it whether few or many. But in England at that time there was a great and distinct desire to know the opinion of the nation, because there was a real and close necessity. The nation was wanted to do something-to assist the sovereign in some war, to pay some old debt, to contribute its force and aid in the critical juncture of the time. It would not have suited the ante-Tudor kings to have had a fictitious assembly; they would have lost their sole feeler, their only instrument for discovering national opinion. Nor could they have manufactured such an assembly if they wished. Looking at the mode of election, a theorist would say that these Parliaments were but 'chance' collections of influential Englishmen. There would be many corrections and limitations to add to that statement if it were wanted to make it accurate, but the statement itself hits exactly the principal excellence of these Parliaments. If not 'chance' collections of Englishmen, they were 'undesigned' collections; no administrations made them, or could make them. They were bona fide counsellors, whose opinion might be wise or unwise, but was anyhow of paramount importance, because their co-operation was wanted for what was in hand."[30]

(3) The political position of women in the Middle Ages.-Abbesses were summoned to the convocations of clergy in Edward I.'s reign. Peeresses were permitted to be represented by proxy in Parliament. The offices of sheriff, high constable, governor of a royal castle, and justice of the peace have all been held by women. In fact, the lady of the manor had the same rights as the lord of the manor, and joined with men who were freeholders in electing knights of the shire without question of sex disability.[31] (A survival of the medieval rights of women may be seen in the power of women to present clergy to benefices in the Church of England.)

In the towns women were members of various guilds and companies equally with men, and were burgesses and freewomen. Not till 1832 was the word "male" inserted before "persons" in the charters of boroughs. "Never before has the phrase 'male persons' appeared in any statute of the realm. By this Act (the Reform Bill), therefore, women were technically disfranchised for the first time in the history of the English Constitution. The privilege of abstention was converted into the penalty of exclusion."

No Theory of Democracy in the Middle Ages

The years of Simon of Montfort and Edward I., which saw the beginnings of a representative national assembly, were not a time of theoretical discussion on political rights. The English nation, indeed, has ever been averse from political theories. The notion of a carefully balanced constitution was outside the calculations of medieval statesmen, and the idea of political democracy was not included among their visions.

"Even the scholastic writers, amid their calculations of all possible combinations of principles in theology and morals, well aware of the difference between the 'rex politicus' who rules according to law, and the tyrant who rules without it, and of the characteristics of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, with their respective corruptions, contented themselves for the most part with balancing the spiritual and secular powers, and never broached the idea of a growth into political enfranchisement. Yet, in the long run, this has been the ideal towards which the healthy development of national life in Europe has constantly tended, only the steps towards it have not been taken to suit a preconceived theory."[32]

Each step towards democracy has been taken "to suit the convenience of party or the necessities of kings, to induce the newly admitted classes to give their money, to produce political contentment."

The only two principles that are apparent in the age-long struggles for political freedom in England, that are recognised and acknowledged, are: (1) That that which touches all shall be approved by all; (2) that government rests on the consent of the governed. Over and over again these two principles may be seen at work.

* * *

General Results of Popular Risings

Popular insurrection has never been successful in England; a violent death and a traitor's doom have been the lot of every leader of the common people who took up arms against the Government. The Civil War that brought Charles I. to the scaffold, and the Revolution that deposed James II. and set William of Orange on the throne, were the work of country gentlemen and Whig statesmen, not of the labouring people.

But if England has never seen popular revolution triumphant and democracy set up by force of arms, the earlier centuries witnessed more than one effort to gain by open insurrection some measure of freedom for the working people of the land.

No other way than violent resistance seemed possible to peasants and artisans in the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, if their wrongs were to be mitigated and their rulers to be called to account.

Langton and Simon of Montfort had placed some check on the power of the Crown, had laid the foundations of political liberty, and marked the road to be travelled; but the lot of the labouring people remained unheeded and voiceless in the councils of the nation. What could they do but take up arms to end an intolerable oppression?

William FitzOsbert, called Longbeard, 1196

The first serious protest came from the London workmen in the reign of Richard I.; and FitzOsbert, known as Longbeard, was the spokesman of the popular discontent.

The King wanted money, chiefly for his crusades in Palestine. He had no inclination to personal government, and the business of ruling England was in the hands of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, the justiciar or King's lieutenant. Richard left England for Normandy in 1194, and returned no more. England to him was a country where money could be raised, a subject-province to be bled by taxation. Archbishop Hubert did his best to satisfy the royal demands; and though by his inquisitions "England was reduced to poverty from one sea to the other"-it is estimated that more than ￡1,000,000 was sent to Richard in two years-the King was left unsatisfied. The nation generally came to hate the Archbishop's taxation, the Church suffered by his neglect, and he was finally compelled to resign the justiciarship.

It was the London rising, under FitzOsbert's leadership, that directly caused Archbishop Hubert's retirement, and FitzOsbert is notable as the first of the long line of agitators.

The political importance of the capital was seen in the reigns of Cnut and William the Conqueror. It was conspicuous on the arrival of Stephen in 1135, and its influence on national politics lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century.[33]

By its charter London had the right of raising taxes for the Crown in its own way, and in 1196 the method proposed by the Corporation provoked the outbreak. "When the aldermen assembled according to usage in full hustings for the purpose of assessing the taxes, the rulers endeavoured to spare their own purses and to levy the whole from the poor" (Hoveden).

The poorer citizens were voteless, and the plan of the aldermen was to levy the tallages per head, and not in proportion to the property of the inhabitants. This meant, practically, that the whole, except a very small fraction of the sum to be raised, must be paid by the working people.

Thereupon FitzOsbert protested, and the people rose in arms against the demand.

FitzOsbert was an old crusader, and he was something of a lawyer and a powerful speaker. Not a rich man by any means, FitzOsbert was yet a member of the city council when, "burning with zeal for justice and fair play, he made himself the champion of the poor." To his enemies he was a demagogue and disreputable-so Ralph de Diceto, Dean of St. Paul's at that time, described him. To others of more popular sympathies he was heroic and died a martyr's death. Across the centuries he is seen as "an agitator"-the first English agitator, the first man to stand up boldly against the oppression of the common people. This palpably unjust taxation of the poor was intolerable to FitzOsbert.

Fifteen thousand men banded themselves together in London under an oath that they would stand by each other and by their leader; and FitzOsbert, after a vain journey to Normandy to arouse Richard's attention to the wrongs of his subjects, bade open defiance to the justiciar and his tax-gatherers.

For a time the Archbishop's men were powerless, but weakness crept in amongst the citizens, and the aldermen were naturally on the side of constituted authority. FitzOsbert's success meant a readjustment of taxation quite unpalatable to the City Fathers.

In the end FitzOsbert was deserted by all but a handful of his followers and fled with them for sanctuary to the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. Pursued by the officers of the law, FitzOsbert climbed up into the tower of the church, and to fetch him down orders were given to set the church on fire. This was done, and the only chance of life that now remained for the rebels was to get out of the church and cut their way through the ranks of their enemies.

At the church door FitzOsbert was struck down, and his little company quickly overpowered.

Heavily chained, and badly wounded, FitzOsbert was carried off to the Tower, to be tried and sentenced to a traitor's death without delay.

A few days later-it was just before Easter-FitzOsbert was stripped naked, and dragged at the tail of a horse over the rough streets of London to Tyburn. He was dead before the place of execution was reached, but the body, broken and mangled, was hung up in chains under the gallows elm all the same; and nine of his companions were hanged with him.

The very people who had fallen away from their leader in the day of his need now counted FitzOsbert for a saint, and pieces of his gibbet and of the bloodstained earth underneath the tree were carried away and treasured as sacred relics. It was alleged that miracles were performed when these relics were touched-so wide was now the popular reverence for the dead champion of the poor.

Archbishop Hubert put a stop to this devotion by ordering sermons to be preached on FitzOsbert's iniquities; and an alleged death-bed confession, containing an account of many evil deeds, was published. It is likely enough that an old crusader had plenty of sins to answer for, but FitzOsbert's one crime before the law was that he had taught the people of London to stand up and resist by force of arms the payment of taxes-taxes levied with gross unfairness in popular judgment.

The monks of Canterbury, to whom the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside belonged, had long had their own quarrels with Archbishop Hubert, and on this firing of their church, and the violation of sanctuary, they appealed to the King and the Pope-Innocent III.-that Hubert should give up his political work and attend exclusively to his duties as Archbishop. Both the Pope and the great barons were against him, and in 1198 Archbishop Hubert was compelled to resign the judiciarship.

The Peasant Revolt and its Leaders, 1381

The great uprising of the peasants in 1381 was a very different matter from the local insurrection made by FitzOsbert. Two centuries had passed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been admitted in the Great Charter.

The Peasant Revolt was national. It was carefully prepared and skilfully organised, and its leaders were men of power and ability-men of character. It was not only a definite protest against positive evils, but a vigorous attempt to create a new social order-to substitute a social democracy for feudal government.[34]

The old feudal order had been widely upset by the Black Death in 1349, and the further ravages of pestilence in 1361 and 1369. The heavy mortality left many country districts bereft of labour, and landowners were compelled to offer higher wages if agriculture was to go on. In vain Parliament passed Statutes of Labourers to prevent the peasant from securing an advance. These Acts of Parliament expressly forbade a rise in wages; the landless man or woman was "to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood two years before the pestilence." The scarcity of labour drove landowners to compete for the services of the labourer, in spite of Parliament.

Discontent was rife in those years of social change. The Statutes of Labourers were ineffectual; but they galled the labourers and kept serfdom alive. The tenants had their grievance because they were obliged to give labour-service to their lords. Freehold yeomen, town workmen, and shopkeepers were irritated by heavy taxation, and vexed by excessive market tolls. All the materials were at hand for open rebellion, and leaders were found as the days went by to kindle and direct the revolt.

John Ball, an itinerant priest, who came from St. Mary's, at York, and then made Colchester the centre of his wanderings, spent twenty years organising the revolt, and three times was excommunicated and imprisoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury for teaching social "errors, schisms, and scandals," but was in no wise contrite or cast down.

Chief of Ball's fellow-agitators were John Wraw, in Suffolk, Jack Straw, in Essex-both priests these-William Grindcobbe, in Hertford, and Geoffrey Litster, in Norfolk. In Kent lived Wat Tyler, of whom nothing is told till the revolt was actually afire, but who at once was acknowledged leader and captain by the rebel hosts.

From village to village went John Ball in the years that preceded the rising, organising the peasants into clubs, and stirring the people with revolutionary talk. It was the way of this vagrant priest to preach to the people on village greens, and his discourses were all on the same text-"In the beginning of the world there were no bondmen, all men were created equal."[35] Inequalities of wealth and social position were to be ended:

"Good people, things will never go well in England, so long as goods be not kept in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom men call lords greater folk than we? If all come from the same father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride?

"They are clothed in velvet, and are warm in their furs and ermines, while we are covered in rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the wind and rain in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state.

"We are called slaves; and if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice."

The poet, William Langland, in "Piers Plowman," dwelt on the social wrongs of the time; Ball was fond of quoting from Langland, and of harping on a familiar couplet:

"When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?"

Besides the sermons, some of the rhymed letters that John Ball sent about the country have been preserved:

"John Ball, Priest of St. Mary's, greets well all manner of men, and bids them in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to stand together manfully in truth. Help truth and truth shall help you.

"John Ball greeteth you all,

And doth to understand he hath rung your bell.

Now with right and might, will and skill,

God speed every dell.

John the Miller asketh help to turn his mill right:

He hath ground small, small:

The King's Son of Heaven will pay for it all.

Look thy mill go right, with its four sails dight.

With right and with might, with skill and with will,

And let the post stand in steadfastness.

Let right help might, and skill go before will,

Then shall our mill go aright;

But if might go before right, and will go before skill,

Then is our mill mis-a-dight."

Sometimes it is under the signature of John Trueman that John Ball writes:

"Beware ere ye be woe;

Know your friend from your foe;

Take enough and cry "Ho!"

And do well and better and flee from sin,

And seek out peace and dwell therein-

So biddeth John Trueman and all his fellows."

A more definite note was struck when it seemed to Ball and his colleagues that the time was ripe for revolution, and the word was given that appeal must be made to the boy-king-Richard was only eleven years old when he came to the throne in 1377.

"Let us go to the King, and remonstrate with him, telling him we must have it otherwise, or we ourselves shall find the remedy. He is young. If we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the name of serf, or are held in bondage, will follow us in the hope of being free. When the King shall see us we shall obtain a favourable answer, or we must then ourselves seek to amend our condition."

In another letter John Ball greets John Nameless, John the Miller, and John Carter, and bids them stand together in God's name, and beware of guile: he bids Piers Plowman "go to his work and chastise well Hob the Robber (Sir Robert Hales, the King's Treasurer); and take with you John Trueman and all his fellows, and look that you choose one head and no more."

These letters and the preaching were accepted by willing minds. John Ball was in prison-in the jail of Archbishop Sudbury at Maidstone-in the spring of 1381, but the peasants were organised and ready to revolt. If Wat Tyler is the recognised leader of the rebel forces-"the one head"-John Ball's was the work of preparing the uprising. The vagrant priest had rung his bell to some purpose. In every county, from Somerset to York, the peasants flocked together, "some armed with clubs, rusty swords, axes, with old bows reddened by the smoke of the chimney corner, and odd arrows with only one feather."

At Whitsuntide, early in June, 1381, the great uprising began-the Hurling time of the peasants-long to be remembered with horror by the governing classes. A badly ordered poll-tax was the match that kindled the fire.

The poll-tax was first levied, in 1377, on all over fourteen years of age. Two years later it was graduated, every man and woman of the working class being rated at 4d., and dukes and archbishops at ￡6 13s. 4d. More money was still wanted by the Government, and early in 1381, John of Gaunt, the chief man in the realm, called Parliament together at Northampton, and demanded ￡160,000. Parliament agreed that ￡100,000 should be raised, and the clergy-owning a third of the land-promised ￡60,000. But the only way of raising the ￡100,000 that the Government could think of was by another poll-tax, and this time everybody over fifteen was required to pay 1s. Of course, the thing was impossible. In many parishes the mere returns of population were not filled in; numbers evaded payment-which spelt ruin-by leaving their homes. ￡22,000 was all that came to hand.

Then a man named John Legge came to the assistance of the Government, and was appointed chief commissioner, and empowered to collect the tax.

The methods of Legge and his assistants provoked hostility, and when the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham, and Stanford-le-Hope, in Essex, were summoned to meet the commissioner at Brentwood, their reply was to kill the collectors.

The Government answered this by sending down Chief Justice Belknap to punish the offenders, but the people drove the chief justice out of the place, and Belknap was glad to escape with his life.

This was on Whit-Sunday, June 2nd, and two days later the revolt had spread to Kent; Gravesend and Dartford were in tumult. In one place Sir Simon Burley, a friend of Richard II., seized a workman, claiming him as a bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of ￡300; while at Dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife and daughter of one John Tyler.[36]

Thereupon this John Tyler, "being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand, and ran reaking home; where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words, and strake at the tyler; whereupon the tyler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with his lathing staff, so that the brains flew out of his head. Wherethrough great noise arose in the streets, and the poor people being glad, everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler."

Now, with the fire of revolt in swift blaze, it was for the men of Kent to see that it burned under some direction. Authority and discipline were essential if the rising was not to become mob rule or mere anarchy, and if positive and intolerable wrongs were to find remedies.

At Maidstone, on June 7th-after Rochester Castle had been stormed, its prisoners set free and Sir John Newton its governor placed in safe custody-Wat Tyler was chosen captain of the rebel hosts.

History tells us nothing of the antecedents of this remarkable man. For eight days, and eight days only, he plays his part on the stage of national events: commands with authority a vast concourse of men; meets the King face to face, and wrests from sovereignty great promises of reform; orders the execution of the chief ministers of the Crown, and then, in what seems to be the hour of triumph, is struck to the ground, and goes to his death.

Under the accredited leadership of Wat Tyler the revolt at once took form. Five days were spent in Kent before the peasant army marched on London. The manor houses were attacked, and all rent rolls, legal documents, lists of tenants and serfs destroyed. The rising was not a ferocious massacre like the rising of the Jacquerie in France; there was no general massacre of landlords, or reign of terror. The lawyers who managed the landowners' estates were the enemy, and against them-against the instruments of landlord tyranny-was the anger of the peasants directed. In the same way John of Gaunt, and not the youthful King, was recognised as the evil influence in government; and while a vow was taken by the men of Kent that no man named "John" should be King of England, the popular cry was "King Richard and the Commons," and all who joined in this were accounted friends of the insurgent populace.

Blackheath was reached on the evening of June 12th, and early the following morning, which was Corpus Christi Day, John Ball-released by a thousand hands from his prison at Maidstone-preached to the multitude on the work before them:

"Now is the opportunity given to Englishmen, if they do but choose to take it, of casting off the yoke they have borne so long, of winning the freedom they have always desired. Wherefore, let us take good courage and behave like the wise husbandman of scripture, who gathered the wheat into his barn, but uprooted and burned the tares that had half-choked the good grain. The tares of England are her oppressive rulers, and the time of harvest has come. Ours it is to pluck up these tares and make away with them all-the wicked lords, the unjust judges, the lawyers-every man, indeed, who is dangerous to the common good. Then shall we all have peace in our time and security for the future. For when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will enjoy equal freedom and nobility, rank and power shall we have in common."

Thirty-thousand men-yeomen, craftsmen, villeins, and peasants, were at Blackheath, and these were soon joined by thousands more from Surrey.

John Wraw and Grindcobbe came to consult with Wat Tyler, and then returned to Suffolk and Hertford to announce that the hour had come to strike.

The Marshalsea and King's Bench prisons, and the houses of ill-fame that clustered round London Bridge, were destroyed before Wat Tyler led his army into the city. An attempt to meet the King in conference was frustrated by the royal counsellors. Richard came down in the royal barge as far as Rotherhithe, but was dissuaded by Sir Robert Hales, and the Earls of Suffolk, Salisbury, and Warwick, from "holding speech with the shoeless ruffians."

Richard rowed back swiftly to the Tower, and Tyler and his army swept into London. The city was in the hands of the rebel captain, but the citizens welcomed the invaders, and offered bread and ale when Tyler proclaimed that death would be the instant punishment for theft.

John of Gaunt's palace at the Savoy, on the river strand, was the first place to be burnt; but Henry, Earl of Derby, John of Gaunt's son (eighteen years later to reign as Henry IV., in place of Richard), was allowed to pass out uninjured, and a wretched man caught in the act of stealing off with a silver cup was promptly executed.

The Savoy destroyed, the Temple-a hive of lawyers-was the next to be burnt, and before nightfall the Fleet Prison and Newgate had been demolished.

Again Tyler demanded conference with the King, and Richard, lying in the Tower with his counsellors, unable to prevent the work of conference, boldly decided to come out and meet the rebels. Mile End was appointed for the conference, and to Mile End Richard came with a very modest retinue. The King was only fifteen, but he was the son of the Black Prince, and he had both courage and cunning. He was fully aware that the people did not lay on him responsibility for the sins of the Government. "If we measure intellectual power by the greatest exertion it ever displays, rather than by its average results, Richard II. was a man of considerable talents. He possessed along with much dissimulation a decisive promptitude in seizing the critical moment for action."[37]

At Mile End Tyler stated the grievances of the people. But first he asked that all traitors should be put to death, and to this the King agreed.

Four positive articles of reform were put forward, and were at once assented to by the King:-

1. A free and general pardon to all concerned in the rising.

2. The total abolition of all villeinage (forced labour) and serfdom.

3. An end to all tolls and market dues-"freedom to buy and sell in all cities, burghs, mercantile towns, and other places within our kingdom of England."

4. All customary tenants to become leaseholders at a fixed rental of fourpence an acre for ever.

That all doubts might be removed, thirty clerks were set to work on the spot to draw up charters of manumission, and banners were presented to each county. At nightfall thousands returned home convinced that the old order was ended, and that the Royal charters were genuine assurances of freedom.

But Tyler and the bulk of the men of Kent and Surrey remained in the city. It seemed to Wat Tyler that better terms still were to be wrung from the King. It looked that night as though the insurrection had triumphed completely. Not only were the charters signed and the royal promises given, but several in high office, whom Tyler held to be "traitors," had gone to their doom. Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, Archbishop Sudbury, the Chancellor-a gentle and kindly old man, "lenient to heretics"-John Legge, the hated poll-tax commissioner, with Appleton, John of Gaunt's chaplain, and Richard Lyons, a thoroughly corrupt contractor of Edward III.'s reign, were all dragged out of the Tower and beheaded on Tower Hill on Friday, June 15th.

On Tyler's request for another conference with Richard on the following day, the King saw he had no choice but to yield. For the second time Wat Tyler and Richard met face to face. The conference was held at Smithfield, in the square outside St. Bartholomew's Priory. The King and two hundred retainers, with Walworth the mayor, were on the east side of the square. Tyler and his army were on the west side, opposite the Priory.

In the open space Tyler, mounted on a little horse, presented his demands; more sweeping were the reforms now asked for than those of the previous day.

"Let no law but the law of Winchester[38] prevail throughout the land, and let no man be made an outlaw by the decree of judges and lawyers. Grant also that no lord shall henceforth exercise lordship over the commons; and since we are oppressed by so vast a horde of bishops and clerks, let there be but one bishop in England; and let the property and goods of Holy Church be divided fairly according to the needs of the people in each parish, after in justice making suitable provision for the present clergy and monks. Finally, let there be no more villeins in England, but grant us all to be free and of one condition."

Richard answered that he promised readily all that was asked, "if only it be consistent with the regality of my Crown." He then bade the commons return home, since their requests had been granted.

Nobles and counsellors stood in sullen and silent anger at the King's words, but were powerless to act. Tyler, conscious of victory, called for a draught, and when his attendant brought him a mighty tankard of ale, the rebel leader drank good-humouredly to "King Richard and the Commons." A knight in the royal service, a "valet of Kent," was heard to mutter that Wat Tyler was the greatest thief and robber in all the county, and Tyler caught the abusive words, drew his dagger, and made for the man.

Mayor Walworth, as angry as the nobles at the King's surrender, shouted that he would arrest all who drew weapons in the King's presence; and on Tyler striking at him impatiently, the Mayor drew a cutlass and slashed back, wounding Tyler in the neck so that he fell from his horse. Before he could recover a footing, two knights plunged their swords into him, and Tyler, mortally wounded, could only scramble on to his little horse, ride a yard or two, call on the commons to avenge him, and then drop-a dead man.[39]

And with Wat Tyler's death the whole rebellion collapsed. Confusion fell upon the people at Smithfield. Some were for immediate attack, but when Richard, riding out into the middle of the square, claimed that he and not Tyler was their King, and bade them follow him into the fields towards Islington, the great mass, convinced that Richard was honestly their friend, obeyed. At nightfall they were scattered.

Wat Tyler's body was taken into the Priory, and his head placed on London Bridge.

Walworth hastily gathered troops together, and the leader of the rebels being dead, the nobles recovered their courage.

The rising was over; the people without leaders were as sheep for the slaughter. Jack Straw was taken in London and hanged without the formality of a trial; and on June 22nd Tresilian, the new chief justice, went on a special assize to try the rebels, and "showed mercy to none and made great havock." The King's charters and promises were declared null and void when Parliament met, and some hundreds of peasants were hanged in various parts of the country.

John Ball and Grindcobbe were hanged at St. Albans on July 15th, John Wraw and Geoffrey Litster suffered the same fate.

All that Wat Tyler and the peasants had striven for was lost; but the rising was not quite in vain. For one thing, the poll-tax was stopped, and the end of villeinage was hastened.

The great uprising was the first serious demonstration of the English people for personal liberty. "It taught the King's officers and gentle folks that they must treat the peasants like men if they wished them to behave quietly, and it led most landlords to set free their bondsmen, and to take fixed money payments instead of uncertain services from their customary tenants, so that in a hundred years' time there were very few bondsmen left in England."[40]

Jack Cade, Captain of Kent, 1450

To understand the character and importance of the rising of the men of Kent under Jack Cade in 1450, the first thing to be done is to clear the mind of Shakespeare's travesty in King Henry VI., Part 2. In the play the name of Cade has been handed down in obloquy, and all that he and his followers aimed at caricatured out of recognition. The part that Jack Cade really played in national affairs has no likeness to the low comedy performance imagined by Shakespeare.

It was a popular rising in 1450, but it was not a peasant revolt. Men of substance in the county rallied to Cade's banner, and in many parishes in Kent the village constable was employed to enrol willing recruits in the army of disaffection.[41]

The peasant revolt was at bottom a social movement, fostered and fashioned by preachers of a social democracy. Cade's rising was provoked by misgovernment and directed at political reform. It was far less revolutionary in purpose than the revolt that preceded it, or the rising under Ket a hundred years later.

The discontent was general when Cade encamped on Blackheath with the commons of Kent at the end of May, 1450. Suffolk, the best hated of Henry VI.'s ministers, had already been put to death by the sailors of Dover, and Lord Say-and-Sele, the Treasurer, was in the Tower under impeachment. Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, another Minister, was hanged by his infuriated flock in Wiltshire, and Bishop Moleyns, of Chichester, Keeper of the Privy Seal, was executed in Portsmouth by a mob of sailors. Piracy prevailed unchecked in the English Channel, and the highways inland were haunted by robbers-soldiers back from France and broken in the wars.

The ablest statesman of the day, the Duke of York, was banished from the royal council, and there was a wide feeling that an improvement in government was impossible until York was recalled.

Whether Cade, who was known popularly as "Mortimer," was related to the Duke of York, or was merely a country landowner, can never be decided. The charges made against him after his death were not supported by a shred of evidence, but it was necessary then for the Government to blacken the character of the Captain of Kent for the utter discouragement of his followers. All we know of Cade is that by the Act of Attainder he must have been a man of some property in Surrey-probably a squire or yeoman.

The army that encamped on Blackheath numbered over 40,000, and included squires, yeomen, county gentlemen, and at least two notable ecclesiastics from Sussex, the Abbot of Battle and the Prior of Lewes. The testimony to Cade's character is that he was the unquestioned and warmly respected leader of the host. The Cade depicted by his enemies-a dissolute, disreputable ruffian-was not the kind of man to have had authority as a chosen captain over country gentlemen and clerical landowners in the fifteenth century.

The "Complaints" of the commons of Kent, drawn up at Blackheath and forwarded to the King and his Parliament, then sitting at Westminster, called attention in fifteen articles to the evils that afflicted the land. These articles dealt with a royal threat to lay waste Kent in revenge for the death of the Duke of Suffolk; the wasting of the royal revenue raised by heavy taxation; the banishment of the Duke of York-"to make room for unworthy ministers who would not do justice by law, but demanded bribes and gifts"; purveyance of goods for the royal household without payment; arrest and imprisonment on false charges of treason by persons whose goods and lands were subsequently seized by the King's servants, who then "either compassed their deaths or kept them in prison while they got possession of their property by royal grant"; interference by "the great rulers of the land" with the old right of free election of knights of the shire; the mismanagement of the war in France. A certain number of purely local grievances, chiefly concerned with the maladministration of justice, were also included in the "Complaints," and five "Requests"-including the abolition of the Statutes of Labourers-were added.

Henry and his counsellors dismissed these "Complaints" with contempt. "Such proud rebels," it was said, "should rather be suppressed and tamed with violence and force than with fair words or amicable answer." But when the royal troops moved into Kent to disperse the rising, Cade's army cut them to pieces at Sevenoaks. Henry returned to London; his nobles rode away to their country houses; and after a fruitless attempt at negotiations by the Duke of Buckingham and the Archbishop of Canterbury,[42] the King himself fled to Kenilworth-leaving London at the mercy of the Captain of Kent.

On July 2nd Cade crossed London Bridge on horseback, followed by all his army. The Corporation had already decided to offer no opposition to his entry, and one of its members, Thomas Cocke, of the Drapers' Company-later sheriff and M.P.-had gone freely between the camp at Blackheath and the city, acting as mutual friend to the rebels and the citizens. All that Cade required was that the foreign merchants in London should furnish him with a certain number of arms and horses, "and 1,000 marks of ready money"; and this was done. "So that it was found that the Captain and Kentishmen at their being in the city did no hurt to any stranger."[43]

On the old London stone, in Cannon Street, Cade laid his sword, in the presence of the Mayor and a great multitude of people, and declared proudly: "Now is Mortimer lord of this city." Then at nightfall he went back to his headquarters at the White Hart Inn in Southwark.

The following day Lord Say-and-Sele, and his son-in-law, Crowmer, Sheriff of Kent, were removed by Cade's orders from the Tower to the Guildhall, tried for "divers treasons" and "certain extortions," and quickly beheaded. Popular hatred, not content with this, placed the heads of the fallen minister and his son-in-law on poles, made them kiss in horrible embrace, and then bore them off in triumph to London Bridge.

A third man, one John Bailey, was also hanged for being a necromancer; and as Cade had promised death to all in his army convicted of theft, it fell out that certain "lawless men" paid the penalty for disobedience, and were hanged in Southwark-where the main body of the army lay.

Cade's difficulties began directly after Lord Say-and-Sele's execution. London assented willingly to the death of an unpopular statesman, but had no mind to provision an army of 50,000 men, and, indeed, had no liking for the proximity of such a host. Plunder being forbidden, and strict discipline the rule, the urgent question for the Captain of Kent was how the army was to be maintained.

Getting no voluntary help from the city. Cade decided that he must help himself. He supped with a worthy citizen named Curtis in Tower Street on July 4th, and insisted before he left that Curtis must contribute money for the support of the Kentish men. Curtis complied-how much he gave we know not-but he resented bitterly the demand, and he told the tale of his wrongs to his fellow-merchants.[44] The result was that while Cade slept in peace as usual at the White Hart, the Mayor and Corporation took counsel with Lord Scales, the Governor of the Tower, and resolved that at all costs the Captain of Kent and his forces must be kept out of the city. After the treatment of Curtis the fear was that disorder and pillage might become common.

On the evening of Sunday, July 5th, and all through the night battle waged hotly on London Bridge, which had been seized and fortified before Cade was awake, and by the morning the rebels, unsuccessful in their attack, were glad to agree to a hasty truce.

The truce gave opportunity to Cardinal Kemp, Archbishop of York, the King's Chancellor, to suggest a lasting peace to Cade. Messengers were sent speedily from the Tower, where Kemp, with Archbishop Stafford, of Canterbury, had stayed in safety, to the White Hart, urging a conference "to the end that the civil commotions and disturbances might cease and tranquillity be restored."

Cade consented, and when the two Archbishops, with William Waynfleet, Bishop of Winchester, met the Captain of Kent in the Church of St. Margaret, Southwark, and promised that Parliament should give consideration to the "Complaints" and "Requests" of the commons, and that a full pardon should be given to all who would straightway return home, the rising was at an end.

Cade hesitated, and asked for the endorsement of the pardons by Parliament; but this was plainly impossible because Parliament was not sitting. The bulk of the commons were satisfied with their pardons, and with the promise that Parliament would attend to their grievances. There was nothing to be gained, it seemed, by remaining in arms. On July 8th, the rebel army had broken up, taking the road back to the towns and villages, farms and cottages in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. Cade, with a small band of followers, retreated to Rochester, and attempted without success, the capture of Queenborough Castle. On the news that the commons had dispersed from Southwark, the Government at once took the offensive. Alexander Iden was appointed Sheriff of Kent, and, marrying Crowmer's widow, subsequently gained considerable profit. Within a week John Cade was proclaimed by the King's writ a false traitor throughout the countryside, and Sheriff Iden was in eager pursuit-for a reward of 1,000 marks awaited the person who should take Cade, alive or dead.

Near Heathfield, in Sussex, Cade, broken and famished, was found by Iden, and fought his last fight on July 13th, preferring to die sword in hand than to perish by the hangman. He fell before the overwhelming odds of the sheriff and his troops, and the body was immediately sent off to London for identification.

The landlady of the White Hart proved the identity of the dead captain, and all that remained was to stick the head on London Bridge, and dispatch the quartered body to Blackheath, Norwich, Salisbury and Gloucester for public exhibition.

Iden got the 1,000 marks reward and, in addition, the governorship of Rochester Castle at a salary of ￡36 a year.

By special Act of Attainder all Cade's goods, lands and tenements were made forfeit to the Crown, and statements were published for the discrediting of Cade's life.

No allusion was made in Parliament to the "Complaints" and "Requests," and, in spite of Cardinal Kemp's pardons, a number of men were hanged at Canterbury and Rochester for their share in the rising, when Henry VI. and his justices visited Kent in January, 1451.

The revolt failed to amend the wretched misrule. It remained for civil war to drive Henry VI. from the throne, and make Edward IV. of York his successor.

The Norfolk Rising under Robert Ket, 1549

A century after the rising of the commons of Kent came the last great popular rebellion-the Norfolk Rising, led by Ket. This insurrection was agrarian and social, concerned neither with the fierce theological differences of the time, nor with the political rivalries of Protector Somerset and his enemies in Edward VI.'s Council.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century England was in the main a nation of small farmers, but radical changes were taking place, and these changes meant ruin to thousands of yeomen and peasants.

The enclosure, by many large landowners, of the fields which for ages past had been cultivated by the country people, the turning of arable land into pasture, were the main causes of the distress.[45] Whole parishes were evicted in some places and dwelling houses destroyed, and contemporary writers are full of the miseries caused by these clearances.

Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515, prohibiting the "pulling down of towns," and ordering the reversion of pasture lands to tillage, but the legislation was ignored. Sir Thomas More, in his "Utopia" (1516), described very vividly what the enclosures were doing to rural England; and a royal commission, appointed by Cardinal Wolsey, reported in the following year that more than 36,000 acres had been enclosed in seven Midland counties. In some cases, waste lands only were enclosed, but landowners were ordered to make restitution within forty days where small occupiers had been dispossessed. Royal commissions and royal proclamations were no more effective than Acts of Parliament. Bad harvests drove the Norfolk peasantry to riot for food in 1527 and 1529. The dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 and 1539 abolished a great source of charity for the needy, and increased the social disorder. Finally, in 1547, came the confiscation by the Crown of the property of the guilds and brotherhoods, and the result of this enactment can only be realised by supposing the funds of friendly societies, trade unions, and co-operative societies taken by Government to-day without compensation.

All that Parliament would do in the face of the starvation and unemployment that brooded over many parts of England, was to pass penal legislation for the homeless and workless-so that it seemed to many that Government had got rid of Papal authority only to bring back slavery. The agrarian misery, the violent changes in the order of church services and social customs, the confiscation of the funds of the guilds, and the wanton spoiling of the parish churches[46]-all these things drove the people to revolt.

Early in 1549 the men of Devon and Cornwall took up arms for "the old religion," and were hanged by scores. In Norfolk that same year the rising under Ket was social, and unconcerned with religion. Lesser agrarian disturbances took place in Somerset, Lincoln, Essex, Kent, Oxford, Wilts, and Buckingham. But there was no cohesion amongst the insurgents, and no organisation of the peasants such as England had seen under John Ball and his companion in 1381.

In 1548 Somerset, the Lord Protector, made an honest attempt to check the rapacity of the landowners, but his proclamation and royal commission were no more successful than Wolsey's had been, and only earned for the Protector the hatred of the landowners.

The Norfolk Rising was the one strong movement to turn the current that was sweeping the peasants into destitution. It failed, as all popular insurrection in England has failed, and it brought its leaders to the gallows; but for six weeks hope lifted its head in the rebel camp outside Norwich, and many believed that oppression and misery were to end.

The rising began at Attleborough, on June 20th, when the people pulled down the fences and hedges set up round the common fields. On July 7th, at the annual feast in honour of St. Thomas of Canterbury, at Wymondham, a mighty concourse of people broke down the fences at Hetherset, and then appealed to Robert Ket and his brother to help them.

Both the Kets were well-known locally. They were men of old family, craftsmen, and landowners. Robert was a tanner by trade, William a butcher. Three manors-valued at 1,000 marks, with a yearly income of ￡50-belonged to Robert Ket: church lands mostly, leased from the Earl of Warwick.

Ket saw that only under leadership and guidance could the revolt become a revolution, and he threw himself into the cause of his poorer neighbours with whole-hearted fervour. "I am ready," he said, "and will be ready at all times to do whatever, not only to repress, but to subdue the power of great men. Whatsoever lands I have enclosed shall again be made common unto ye and all men, and my own hands shall first perform it. You shall have me, if you will, not only as a companion, but as a captain; and in the doing of the so great a work before us, not only as a fellow, but for a leader, author, and principal."

Ket's leadership was at once acclaimed with enthusiasm by the thousand men who formed the rebel band at the beginning of the rising. The news spread quickly that Ket was leading an army to Norwich, and on July 10th, when a camp was made at Eaton Wood, every hour brought fresh recruits. It is clear from Ket's speeches, and from "The Rebels' Complaint," issued by him at this time, that the aim of the leaders of the Norfolk Rising was not merely to stop the enclosures, but to end the ascendancy of the landlord class for all time, and to set up a social democracy.

Ket's address at Eaton Wood was revolutionary:

"Now are ye overtopped and trodden down by gentlemen, and put out of possibility ever to recover foot. Rivers of riches run into the coffers of your landlords, while you are par'd to the quick, and fed upon pease and oats like beasts. You are fleeced by these landlords for their private benefit, and as well kept under by the public burdens of State, wherein while the richer sort favour themselves, ye are gnawn to the very bones. Your tyrannous masters often implead, arrest, and cast you into prison, so that they may the more terrify and torture you in your minds, and wind your necks more surely under their arms.... Harmless counsels are fit for tame fools; for you who have already stirred, there is no hope but in adventuring boldly."

"The Rebels' Complaint" is equally definite and outspoken. It rehearsed the wrongs of a landless peasantry, and called on the people to end these wrongs by open rebellion. The note of social equality is struck by Ket throughout the rising.

"The present condition of possessing land seemeth miserable and slavish-holding it all at the pleasure of great men; not freely, but by prescription, and, as it were, at the will and pleasure of the lord. For as soon as any man offend any of these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust from all his goods.

"The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and our children are taken away.

"The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common, those are ditched and hedged in and made several; the pastures are enclosed, and we shut out.

"We can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury; neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness, excess, and pride of the nobility. We will rather take arms, and mix Heaven and earth together, than endure so great cruelty.

"Nature hath provided for us, as well as for them; hath given us a body and a soul, and hath not envied us other things. While we have the same form, and the same condition of birth together with them, why should they have a life so unlike unto ours, and differ so far from us in calling?

"We see that things have now come to extremities, and we will prove the extremity. We will rend down hedges, fill up ditches, and make a way for every man into the common pasture. Finally, we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed.

"We desire liberty and an indifferent (or equal) use of all things. This will we have. Otherwise these tumults and our lives shall only be ended together."

But though the method was revolution and the goal social democracy, Ket was no anarchist. He proved himself a strong, capable leader, able to enforce discipline and maintain law and order in the rebel camp. And with all his passionate hatred against the rule of the landlord, Ket would allow neither massacre nor murder. There is no evidence that the life of a single landowner was taken while the rising lasted, though many were brought captive to Ket's judgment seat.

Ket was equally averse from civil war between the citizens of Norwich and the peasants. When the Mayor of Norwich, Thomas Cod, refused to allow Ket's army to cross the city on its way to Mousehold Heath, where the permanent camp was to be made, Ket simply led his forces round by Hailsdon and Drayton, and so reached Mousehold on July 12th without bloodshed. A week later, and 20,000 was the number enrolled under the banner of revolt-for the publication of "The Rebels' Complaint" and the ringing of bells and firing of beacons roused all the countryside to action.

On Mousehold Heath, Robert Ket, with his brother William, gave directions and administered justice under a great tree, called the Oak of Reformation. Mayor Cod, and two other respected Norwich citizens, Aldrich, an alderman, and Watson, a preacher, joined Ket's council, thinking their influence might restrain the rebels from worse doings.

Twenty-nine "Requests and Demands," signed by Ket, Cod, and Aldrich, were dispatched to the King from Mousehold, and this document gave in full the grievances of the rebels. The chief demands were the cessation of enclosures, the enactment of fair rents, the restoration of common fishing rights, the appointment of resident clergymen to preach and instruct the children, and the free election or appointment of local "commissioners" for the enforcement of the laws. There was also a request "that all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with His precious bloodshedding."

The only answer to the "Requests and Demands" was the arrival of a herald with a promise that Parliament would meet in October to consider the grievances, if the people would in the meantime quietly return to their homes.

But this Ket would by no means agree to, and for the next few weeks his authority was supreme in that part of the country. He established a rough constitution for the prevention of mere disorder, two men being chosen by their fellows from the various hundreds of the eastern half of the county. A royal messenger, bearing commissions of the peace to certain country gentlemen, falling into the hands of Ket, was relieved of his documents and dismissed. Ket then put in these commissions the names of men who had joined the rising, and declared them magistrates with authority to check all disobedience to orders.

To feed the army at Mousehold, men were sent out with a warrant from Ket for obtaining cattle and corn from the country houses, and "to beware of robbing, spoiling, and other evil demeanours." No violence or injury was to be done to "any honest or poor man." Contributions came in from the smaller yeomen "with much private good-will," but the landowners generally were stricken with panic, and let the rebels do what they liked. Those who could not escape by flight were, for the most part, brought captive to the Oak of Reformation, and thence sent to the prisons in Norwich and St. Leonard's Hill.

Relations between Ket and the Norwich authorities soon became strained to breaking point. Mayor Cod was shocked at the imprisonment of county gentlemen, and refused permission for Ket's troops to pass through the city on their foraging expeditions. Citizens and rebels were in conflict on July 21st, but "for lack of powder and want of skill in the gunners" few lives were lost, and Norwich was in the hands of Ket the following day. No reprisals followed; but a week later came William Parr, Marquis of Northampton-Henry VIII.'s brother-in-law-with 1,500 Italian mercenaries and a body of country squires, to destroy the rebels. Northampton's forces were routed utterly, and Lord Sheffield was slain, and many houses and gates were burnt in the city.

Then for three weeks longer Robert Ket remained in power, still hoping against hope that some attention would be given by the Government to his "Requests and Demands." Protector Somerset, beset by his own difficulties, could do nothing for rebellious peasants, could not countenance in any way an armed revolt, however great the miseries that provoked insurrection. The Earl of Warwick was dispatched with 14,000 troops to end the rebellion, and arrived on August 24th. For two days the issue seemed uncertain-half the city only was in Warwick's hands. The arrival of 1,400 mercenaries-"lanzknechts," Germans mostly-and a fatal decision of the rebels to leave their vantage ground at Mousehold Heath and do battle in the open valley that stretched towards the city, gave complete victory to Warwick.

The peasants poured into the meadows beyond Magdalen and Pockthorpe gates, and were cut to pieces by the professional soldiers.

When all seemed over Ket galloped away to the north, but was taken, worn out, at the village of Swannington, eight miles from Norwich.

More than 400 peasants were hanged by Warwick's orders, and their bodies left to swing on Mousehold and in the city. Robert Ket and William Ket were sent to London, and after being tried and condemned for high treason, were returned to Norwich in December for execution. Robert Ket was hanged in chains from Norwich Castle, and William suffered in similar fashion from the parish church at Wymondham-to remind all people of the fate that befall those who venture, unsuccessfully, to take up arms against the government in power.

So the Norfolk Rising ended, and with it ended all serious popular insurrection in England. Riots and mob violence have been seen even to our own time, but no great, well-organised movement to overthrow authority and establish a social democracy by force of arms has been attempted since 1549.

The characters of Robert Ket and his brother have been vindicated by time, and the rebel leader is now recognised as a disinterested, capable, high-minded man. Ket took what seemed to him the only possible course to avert the doom of a ruined peasantry, and failed. But his courage and humaneness are beyond question.[47]

The enclosures did not end with the sixteenth century, and for another one hundred years complaints are heard of the steady depopulation of rural England. In the eighteenth century came the second great series of enclosures-the enclosing of the commons and waste spaces, by Acts of Parliament. Between 1710 and 1867 no less than 7,660,439 acres were thus enclosed.

To-day the questions of land tenure and land ownership are conspicuous items in the discussion of the whole social question, for the relations of a people to its land are of very first importance in a democratic state.

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