By C. E. BISHOP.

VII.—THE JOHN BROWN OF THE ENGLISH SLAVES.

Macaulay has remarked as singular the fact that two great relics of barbarism in England were never abolished by law: disappeared, melted away before the advance of civilization. These were feudalism and human slavery.

It is also a remarkable fact that there never was in England an insurrection of the laboring classes, save one, that in the reign of Richard II., of sad fortune. The same can not be said of any other nation. This favorable contrast for England is due to several causes which we need not recount. But England’s one servile rising came very near putting an abrupt end to serfdom by violence; emancipation was sanctioned and pardoned by royal writs, and would have been confirmed by act of Parliament had that body contained fewer slaveholders at the time; i. e., had it been more truly a representative body of the English people.

Wat Tyler was the John Brown of that movement, and Richard of Bordeaux came near being its Abraham Lincoln. Death in the guise of the Black Plague had struck a fierce blow at English slavery about the middle of the fourteenth century. [See last Chautauquan.] It made labor so scarce that the old laws binding the laborer to the soil and compelling him to work without hire, proved abortive; insomuch that we find Parliament soon at work passing the new “Statute of Laborers.” It was made to reach as well freedmen as serfs, for it said any man who was out of work “must serve the first employer who shall require him to do so,” and must not accept higher wages than obtained before the plague; and it forbade him going beyond his parish to hire out, under pain of arrest as a vagabond, branding on the forehead with a hot iron being one of the penalties. But this statute did not work, either; for succeeding Parliaments adopted it over and over again. That was the way they made laws more binding. King Edward I. reaffirmed to respect the Great Charter some thirty times. And yet, farmers and lords whose lands were lying waste, or whose herds were running wild for want of help, would offer large pay to get it and men were reckless enough to hire out to those who would pay the most, the much-enacted Statute of Laborers to the contrary, notwithstanding.

Then a crazy step was taken. An effort was made to supply landlords with unrequited help by remanding freed serfs to slavery on frivolous pretexts and legal technicalities, the ex-master usually controlling the decision of the manorial court before which these questions were tried. Of course the accused freedman had there little chance for right. The consequence was that the woods and wastes Boon became filled with bands of men who had been slaves, had tasted the sweets of freedom, and had turned outlaws and chronic vagabonds sooner than come within the reach of such “justice.”

While this was going on, during twenty years, other things helped to create the spirit of insubordination. John Wickliffe had begun to thunder against the tyranny of Rome and the corruptions of the clergy, and to preach individual liberty of conscience. The sect of Lollards, of which he was the head, had offshoots of ruder tenets and practices. A preacher named John Ball had for many years itinerated, with all England for his circuit and the fields, market-places and church-yards for his chapels. He “preached politics” with an unction and genuine eloquence, as this condensed report of one of his sermons will show:

And John Ball, like all men who move the masses, boiled his whole political and religious platform down into a motto with a rhyme to it, so that the most stolid ignorance could learn and remember it—for, mark you, poetry is the aspiration of the ignorant as well as the inspiration of the gifted:

Immortal old epigrammatist and poet of democracy! His lines are heard to-day wherever manhood rebels against the pride and tyranny of property. It was in every poor man’s mouth in England for a quarter of a century, and it did a wonderful work, that little couplet. Such is the power of a thought!

There were other street orators and other poets. An Oxford student wrote “The Plaints of Piers, the Ploughman,” the saddest, fiercest protest against caste that England ever heard.

While all this work was going on in the huts and fields of England, her proud nobles were squabbling over the dotage and around the dying bed of Edward III., and for the control of his grandson, Richard II.; and while they were thus dissipating government, her enemies were assailing her on all sides. Armies and fleets were raised, and campaigns and expeditions fooled away, while the treasure was squandered in both military failures and court prodigality and corruption. Taxes were laid, on the heels of defeats which made the old archers of Cressy, Nevill’s Cross, and Poictiers mad with shame and rage.

The crowning act of folly and injustice came when Parliament laid a poll-tax on every person in the kingdom over fifteen years of age. This made the poor man pay as much as the rich; and more, if the poorer the man the larger his family, which was probably the case then as now. There were no census statistics, and the tax-gatherers had to make a domiciliary visit in every case, an inquisition Englishmen especially resent; for the feeling that every man’s house is his castle dates back to the life of family segregation for which they were remarked in old Roman times. The tax, payable in money, came hard on poor people, who generally worked for their food and clothing, paid in kind. With an exaggerated idea of the population of England, Parliament had not levied a large enough unit per head. The rich, instead of helping the poor heads of families to pay the tax, as directed in the writs, shirked their own share. Thus the returns were insufficient to meet government needs, and the tax-gatherers were sent out again, with sheriffs’ posses, to glean more thoroughly.

With all these exactions when the times were ripe for an outbreak, you may be sure England was soon in a fever of excitement. Collectors’ processes began to be resisted, and they and their posses driven away by force. One day a rough collector went into the house of a man in Dartford, Kent, named Walter, a tyler by trade. Demanding his tax the collector insisted, in spite of the mother’s denial, that the eldest daughter was over fifteen years of age, and at last, to settle the dispute, he made an insulting proposition and laid hands on the girl. The screams of the mother and children brought the father running from his shop, hammer in hand, and seeing his daughter struggling in the arms of the man, he smashed his brains out with the hammer, regardless of the royal coat-of-arms. Walter himself had worn that uniform, for he had been a brave campaigner in France. The deed was done, and his life was forfeit. Instead of shrinking from the consequences, he placed himself at the head of his neighbors, who now gathered around him. His hammer had struck the percussion cap to the mine long prepared.

In another part of Kent there was another outbreak. A noble claimed a runaway bondsman and shut him up in Rochester Castle. The people stormed the castle and delivered the prisoner-slave to a double freedom. Couriers now went through all England bearing calls to rise, couched in rude rhymes which tell at once of the lowly state of the masses and of the art of those who called to arms. One ran thus:

There were several other leaders, and some of the proclamations were issued anonymously. They ran thus:

These unmistakable references to preparations already made, help us to understand how it was that almost in a day Wat Tyler found himself at the head of a hundred thousand men marching on London. One force under a leader named Jack Straw, came by Canterbury, which threw open its gates, as “the whole town was of their sort,” and they gutted the palace of the archbishop, who had ground the face of the poor by assuming a monopoly of all the grinding of grain in his district, on which he had placed excessive toll.

There is something very pathetic in this movement on London. They would appeal to the young king himself, and not to the selfish dukes, his uncles, who guarded him and misgoverned the realm. The son of the Black Prince, the defender of England, and, so long as he lived, the protector of the people against the cruelty of the nobles, should hear their appeal and do them right. It was said the boy king was no better than a prisoner in his uncles’ hands; peradventure they might deliver him and themselves by the same blow. All the way to London they made everybody they took swear allegiance to Richard. But all the lawyers they captured they hung, as the instruments of oppression, the contrivers of technicalities by which freedmen had been re-enslaved.

And thus they settled down on Blackheath, before London, June 12, 1381. Panic had gone before them. John, the Duke of Lancaster, fled to Scotland, deserting the young king he had overruled with no gentle hand. All the knights and nobles about the king threw themselves into the tower. The king’s mother, the widow of the Black Prince, hearing of the disturbance in her country home, made brave by a mother’s fear, hastened to London, passing through the camp of the insurgents unhurt and with honor; she kissed Walter Tyler and Jack Straw and took their devotion to her son.

In the general panic Richard was the only man in England equal to the emergency. Man! He was only sixteen, but at about that age his father had won his spurs at Cressy. He took boat on the Thames and rowed down to the insurgents’ camp. The Archbishop of Canterbury and some ministers were with him, and when Tyler asked the king to land and talk with them, promising respect and loyalty, this prelate prevented him, thus confirming the stories of the king’s duress. The rescue of their sovereign became their first object. They marched on the city, and the sympathizing citizens threw open the gates.

Lancaster’s stately Savoy Palace was soon in flames; also the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench Temple, the dwellings and offices of the hated lawyers. But one of their number who undertook to carry off a silver tankard from the destruction was immediately drowned in the Thames. “We are no thieves and robbers; we are not nobles and bishops; we are honest workingmen, come to deliver the king and ourselves,” said Tyler. The next day they captured the tower, took the archbishop, the royal treasurer, and the commissioner of the poll-tax, and cut off their heads as traitors on Tower Hill.

The king, now delivered from his court, sent word to Tyler that he would meet them at Mile-End, just out of London, to hear their grievances. The knights of the Tower and the guards wanted to gather a force and attack the mob, but the king rode out unarmed, with a few companions, to this historic appointment.

It was a memorable scene, and a poetic coincidence. The day was the anniversary of that other demand for rights from King John. Just one hundred and sixty-six years before Magna Charta has been wrung from a king at Runnymede. Now the boy king and the peasant leader meet to treat on equal terms. Justice levels all distinctions. The graceful, delicate and beautiful descendant of the Plantagenets and the rough, unkempt, Celto-Saxon artisan—the personification of the two armies at Hastings—the types of the extremes of English civilization; extremes destined to draw nearer together through centuries of civil war, of martyrdoms for free thought and speech, of sufferings and defeats, ever bravely and persistently renewed by generation after generation of laborers on the one side: through discrownings, beheadings and gradual curtailment of royal power on the other. Two chief agencies were to draw these extremes together—gunpowder and printer’s ink. The one to blow feudalism off the earth and put an end to baronial domination—the other to unlock the storehouses of thought and introduce the rule of mind, to the permanent limitation of those other two classes of tyrants: priests and kings. The despised class, represented by the ruder of these two “high contracting parties,” is to rise by slow and stormful evolution: the slave to become freeman—the freeman, yeoman—the yeoman, citizen—the citizen, an elector of rulers; out of all to be evolved that splendid, conservative, expansive power of England, the Middle Class. Happy England! that the two extremes stood that day and thereafter not as antagonists but as treaty-makers.

Richard found the Toussaint l’Overteur of that day prepared with very distinct and well-grounded grievances, though not numerous or unreasonable. He asked—

First—The abolition of slavery.

Second—Limitation of rent of land to fourpence an acre.

Third—Liberty to buy and sell in all markets and fairs, without favoritism or toll.

Fourth—Pardon for what they had done in order to obtain this interview.

The young king, more just than well-informed, more generous than politic, promised it all, and said he would immediately cause franchises and letters of pardon and emancipation to be drawn up under the royal seal. Great shouts of joy went up—premature shouts indeed!

During all that day and succeeding night thirty clerks were busy drawing up the charter of freedom and amnesty for every parish and township; and the next day the great body of the insurgents marched home, the king’s proclamation in their hands, the king’s banners over their heads, and in their hearts such joy as the children of Israel felt when Miriam’s timbrel rang out its triumph over the Red Sea.

Well if this had been the end of it; but there was to be a dark and bloody finale for Richard and Walter. Walter Tyler and many of the Kentish men remained behind, dissatisfied with the terms of the writs. We do not know the causes of Tyler’s refusal to accept the charters. Perhaps he foresaw what must and did come: that as soon as this pressure was removed from the young king, and his evil counselors again got control, all that had been given to the people would be withdrawn, and he wanted guaranties of fulfillment, just as the barons had done with John. However it was, we only know that the King and his attendants riding through Smith Fields the next day, chanced upon Tyler and his followers. Tyler rode out alone to speak with the king, and the mayor of London reproached him for approaching the king uninvited. Hot words followed, and the mayor stabbed Tyler dead, in sight of all his men.

Instantly thousands of arrows were drawn to let fly on the king and his party. Well for him had they sped and ended his unhappy career there, with the crown of emancipator upon it, instead of the failure, disgrace, and violent death that were to terminate it. Putting spurs to his horse he rode directly into the midst of the angry mob. “I will be your captain! Follow me!” he cried. This seemed to their simple-minded loyalty the obtaining of the end for which they had come out, and they followed the boy with docility to the fields at Islington, where a considerable force of royal troops was met. The king restrained the courage which now returned redundantly to the nobles and forbade the slaughter they were anxious to begin, dismissing the peasants to their homes.

And now the nobility began their revenge everywhere, and the embers of resistance were again blown into flames here and there. Green sketches the stamping-out of the fire:

For many years there were camps of refuge of these outlawed peasants in forests and upon lonely islands—Englishmen exiles in their own country for the cause of human rights.

The prelates and lawyers gathered around Richard with their sophisms and technicalities, to show him he had done an unlawful thing with his proclamations of emancipation and clemency; the barons backed the constitutional arguments up with fierce threats about this “royal usurpation,” insomuch that Richard within two weeks recalled and canceled all his charters, and let loose the unrestrained arrogance of the nobles on the people. So many and such unwarranted executions took place that Parliament subsequently granted an act of indemnity to the savage perpetrators, who, it says, “made divers punishments upon the said villeins and other traitors without due process of law, but only to appease and cease the apparent mischief.” All manumissions were declared void. But Richard submitted to the Parliament the proposition to abolish slavery if Parliament would lend its sanction. The lords and gentlemen replied, “The serfs are our chattels, and the king can not take our property from us without our consent. And this consent we have never given, and never will give were we all to die in one day.” Had Richard insisted on keeping faith with the lower classes of his subjects, had he placed his crown and life in the scale against human slavery, he would have gone into history as the Great Emancipator of Englishmen, or as Freedom’s Greatest Martyr. Either destiny was preferable to the ignominious end he did meet. He was a man for an emergency, but not a statesman for one of the world’s great crises. But in a boy of sixteen were not his conduct and his attempt at a great deed wonderful?

It is a curious thing to reflect on that Abraham Lincoln, in a government of constitutional law and in a position of very limited powers, could with a stroke of the pen decree emancipation, while Richard, a ruler of almost absolute powers in an age of ill-defined authority and much lawless administration, could not take the chains off one of his subjects.

At this distance it is difficult to determine just how much influence the only servile uprising of England had upon the emancipation of her serfs. It at least stamped a wholesome dread of the laboring classes into the selfish souls of the nobles, a dread that had much influence on the contentions of succeeding reigns, and raised the common people in importance. Slavery did not disappear for over two centuries; “Good Queen Bess” got her much gain by selling her subjects for slaves in the West Indies. But if “they never die who perish in a good cause,” the blood of Walter the Tyler aided the cause of human liberty, and he ought to be canonized as one of her martyrs, instead of being treated as the violent and bloody rioter that most historians make him.

[To be continued.]