Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/13

 great insurrections of the Jacquerie in France, and of the serfs in Germany, were the attempts of the proletariat of the middle-ages to obtain some improvement in their lot apart from the traders, whose position was of course very different. The serf of the middle-ages shows but as a sorry figure, indeed, in all countries, as compared with that splendid chivalry, whose resplendent armour and noble individual prowess have been the theme of so much glorification. Yet, for centuries, these despised churls provided in the form of food and wares, furnished by the number of days' work due to their lord for nothing, the means of providing all the magnificence which decked out the baron, the abbot, and the fair ladies of the court. Everywhere, however, at the height of the feudal domination, the handicraftsman, more especially at the later period which preceded its disruption, was a free man. The contrast between the position of such a man or the yeoman, and the villeins, was most striking in every respect. The latter were mere chattels: the former were independent men; more independent perhaps in England than the people as a body have ever been economically, socially, and politically, at any other period of our history.

For in England—and this it is which renders our own country the most fitting field for the study of modern development—the enfranchisement of the peasantry and their settlement upon the land as free yeomen, took place at a much earlier date than in any other nation. These yeomen were in fact the mainstay of England for several hundred years, and their influence can be traced in our national history long before the enfranchisement of the serfs as a body. The