Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/360

330 charge; that the present demands of £160,000 were outrageous and insupportable, and prayed that the prelates and lords would treat by themselves, and set forth the ways by which a reasonable sum, at less distress to the people, might be levied and collected. After considerable discussion and mutual conference, the commons proposed that if the clergy, who occupied one-third of the kingdom, would support one-third of the charge, they would grant £100,000, so that the laity should be rated at 100,000 marks and the clergy at 50,000. Upon this the clergy replied, with less liberality than adherence to legal precedent, that their grant was never made in parliament, neither ought to be; that the laity neither ought nor had the power to bind the clergy, nor the clergy the laity, but that if any ought to be free, it was themselves; praying moreover, that the liberty of Holy Church might be saved to them entirely, and that what the commons deemed fit to perform, they would certainly do the like themselves. The commons then imposed a capitation tax on all the laity, male and female, above fifteen years old, of three groats, very beggars only excepted, which, with the sudden emancipation of the serfs in the following parliament, was the occasion of the insurrection under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw the next year. The same kind of revolt had, from a similar enlargement of their liberties, broken out amongst the French peasantry some time previously.