Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/367

 Jack Miller, Jack Carter, Piers Ploughman, John Trewman, appear again and again in these moving appeals; and perhaps some of them, if not all, stood for the names of men who were familiar in the country-side. The parable of the mill was manifestly a favourite one amongst the rebels.

Unfortunately for the peasants, or at any rate for the victims on whom the worst of the vengeance was to fall, they could not or did not follow the advice of John Schep on all points. They did not stand together; guile overtook them in the borough, and they could not tell their friends from their foes. The vast majority of them unquestionably "sought peace and held therein," but the few who became violent—and the turbulent citizens were perhaps more responsible for the violence than the rustics themselves—gave some sort of warrant for the repudiation of the terms which had been granted by Richard, and on the faith of which so many thousands of the serfs had gone quietly home.

There are but slight traces of generosity in the treatment of the peasants when all danger was at