Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/354

 If we could penetrate more deeply into the historical sources of human action, and trace each visible effect back through its proper channel to the centre of its causation, how dazzling would be the light which would thus be shed on the course of every national and personal development. How interesting, for example, it would be if we could recognise the exact measure of the survival of race antagonism between the English serf and the feudal and manorial lords, who had inherited three centuries of mutual enmity. How more than interesting to mark the descent from the political philosophy of Greece—or it may be only the separate and transitory re-creation—of that idea of universal equality which was the very motive and mainspring of the Peasants' Revolt! But to pursue such inquiries as these would be a task out of proportion with the scope of the present work, much as it might help us to comprehend the last few years of Wyclif's life. It would be difficult to say for how long a period in the reign of Edward III. the serfs had been in a state of masked revolt. Oppression and over-taxation, callous injustice and blind revenge, grinding servitude and malignant hate, disorders of a hundred kinds, robbery and violence on the highways by men whose demoralisation arose out of resistance to intolerable wrongs, seditious talk and seditious plots, clamourings for leaders and abortive attempts to lead, attacks on the houses of the barons and on the King's officers, no security for innocence and no encouragement for loyalty, all the essentials of revolt short of the massing of the people for concerted