Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/345

Rh ECCLESIASTICAL A^D SOCIAL QUESTIONS.] Ili N (j Ij A .N D 325 ick ath; social cts. i: re- ,of vil- .s. dual lag of I lardy persecuted himself. His doctrines led directly to the unlawfulness of the whole ecclesiastical system, and specially to the unlawfulness of ecclesiastical property. Those doctrines he sent forth his poor priests to teach ; but he himself lived and died in quiet possession of the rectory of Lutterworth. A reformer, theological, moral, and political, he allied himself with John of Gaunt, as the Puritans did in after times with Robert Dudley, though the duke s schemes of reform were certainly of a more earthly kind than those of the doctor. But this union came to an end when another side of Wickliffe s teaching, one which was doubtless not designed by Wickliffe himself, came into notice. This age was beyond all others the age of social change, or at least of events which led to the greatest social change. Causes which had doubtless been working long before came to a head under the joint influence of a fearful physical stroke and of the new religious teaching. We may safely set down the great plague of 1349, known as the Black Death, as the greatest of all social landmarks in English history. While th? chivalrous king was keeping the feast of the foundation of the Order of the Garter, half the inhabitants of his kingdom were swept siway by the pestilence. The natural results followed. We have seen that one of the gradual results of the Norman Conquest was to fuse together the churls, the lowest class of freemen, along with the slaves in the intermediate class uf villains. By this time personal slavery had pretty well died out ; but villainage was still in full force. But various causes among them the frequent emancipation of the villains had called into being a class of free labourers alongside of the villains. When the plague cut off so large a proportion of the whole people, labour became scarcer, and higher wages were naturally demanded. Parliament after parliament, beginning in the very year of the Black Death, tried, in the interests of the employers of labour, to keep wages at their old rate. The Good Parliament itself did not shrink from this selfish and impossible attempt. The discontent caused by these statutes, the general stirring of men s minds of which Wickliffe and the Vision of the Ploughman are alike witnesses, led, under the preaching of some of Wickliffe s wilder and fiercer disciples, tu the great peasant outbreak of 1381, the insurrection which has chiefly become fairums through the story of Wat Tyler. The young king, undoubtedly outstripping his legal powers, promised freedom to all the villains. This promise the next parliament not unnaturally refused to confirm. Two results followed. Though the villains were not at once emancipated, yet from this time villainage gradually died out, as slavery had already died out. Neither institution was ever abolished by law ; but all the slaves gradually became villains, all the villains gradually became freemen. By the end of the fifteenth century, villainage was hardly known, except here and there on ecclesiastical estates. The clergy had always preached the emancipation of the villains as a good work. Yet they were the slowest of all landowners to emancipate their own villains. In this there is no real inconsistency. The layman might do what he would with his own ; he might dispense with services owing to himself. Those who were at any moment the members of an ecclesiastical corporation might be held not to have the same right to emancipate their villains, that is, to make away with the rights of the corporation itself. The other great result of the peasant uprising was to associate in men s minds the two ideas of religious reforma tion and political, or rather social, revolution. AVickliffe was himself as guiltless of the revolt of the villains as Luther was of the Peasants War or of the reign of the Anabaptists. But in both cases the teaching of the more moderate reformer had a real connexion with the doings of the reformers who outstripped him. From this time Lollardy, as the teaching of Wickliffe was called, was under a cloud. It was held to be all one, not only with heresy, but with revolution. Wickliffe himself died in peace ; but for the few years that he outlived the revolt, he lost all political influence and political support. The reign of Richard was hostile to the ecclesiastical order at home and abroad. Yet it produced in 1382 the first statute against Statutes heresy, the penalties of which did not go beyond imprison- against ment. It was regularly passed ; yet the Commons in the lieres J - next parliament expressly demanded that it should be declared null. The first statute for the burning of heretics dates from the reign of Henry IV., from which time the stake was their legal doom. But the number of heretics to burn was not great. The most famous victim was Sii John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, who was hanged and burned. under Henry V. on a combined charge of treason anJ heresy. Thus far the political character of Lollardy shows itself. But through the rest of the fifteenth century, though we ever and anon hear of a martyrdom, religious dissent was so thoroughly discredited as to be of no poli tical importance. Wickliffe was thus the direct author of a religious change. Language He was indirectly, if not the author, at least the uninten- aild liter &quot; tional abettor, of a social and political change. His place in ^j^pi, the history of English literature is at least equal to his O f English place in religious and political history. He was the father over of later English prose writing. Since the sudden close Frencli - of the Peterborough Chronicle, English prose writing had never quite died out, but it had remained something quite secondary by the side of English verse. But in the fourteenth century the English language again won back its own place. Now that the English nation had been formed again in its new shape, it was needful to pro claim the fact to the world by some unmistakable outward sign. That sign was found in the restoration of the national language to its rights as the acknowledged speech of the land, and that restoration was brought about by the same cause which first showed the regenerate English nation in the character of a great European power. It was the French war which completed the triumph of the English tongue. The men who had overcome the French enemy on his own soil could not endure that the French tongue should remain in use on the soil of England even as the speech of fashion. In the course of Edward III. s reign English displacedFrench as the speech of education and as the speech of the courts of law. Statutes are still drawn up in French, but speeches in parliament are now in English. The ministers of the crown address the houses, and Henry of Lancaster claims the crown, in the native speech of the land. At last, under Henry V., negotiations were carried on with France by ambassadors who knew not the French tongue. From this time the use of French in public documents, an use which still lingered till the end of the fifteenth century, was as mere a survival as the two or three formulae which are couched in French still. Thus after the ups and downs of three hundred years, Changes English was now again the acknowledged speech of Eng- in the land, the one common speech of Englishmen of all ranks. . ng ls But the ancient tongue, in winning back its ancient place, had greatly changed its ancient character. The two great changes in language which the effects of the Norman Con quest had rather strengthened than begun, the loss of inflexions and the constant introduction of foreign words, had had more and more effect as the speakers of the two tongues grew closer together, as the use of one or the other marked no longer a national but merely a social distinction. The English tongue which thus, in the course of the fourteenth century, won back its place from French, was a form of English which had lost or corrupted most of the