Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/350

 roamed about in quest of high pay or more abundant food, thus rapidly bringing down the rate of wages even below the price which had been fixed by law. And then the stewards of the manors, in order to check the migration of free labourers as well as of the serfs, committed in many cases the crowning injustice of falsifying their service-rolls, destroying some records and perhaps inventing others, so that the sons of men who had bought their freedom with a price found themselves claimed and held to labour after a life of comparative liberty. It is more than probable that the rural classes were in a worse condition in 1380 than they had been in 1340.

It is only when we keep in mind these various predisposing causes, and consider how long and systematically the English peasant had been prepared for his revolt, that we can appreciate the effect of the taxation laid upon him in the reign of Richard II. In an evil hour, in the first year of Richard's reign, the King's Council determined to raise money by means of a capitation tax—taxa hactenus inaudita, as Walsingham describes it which was graduated according to the position and age of the contributor, down to a minimum of a groat for every child above the age of sixteen. This first poll-tax was proposed in 1377 or 1378, and levied in 1379. It was intensely unpopular, and the amount