Page:The English Peasant.djvu/21

 serf taught anything. "My soul," he said, "naturally detests serfs, this being my sentiment towards them, circumstances must determine when they are fit to have kindness shown them." It is an English proverb, "Have hund to godsib and stent thir oder hand." (Go about with a dog and clench your fist.)

Nevertheless the labourers could work in hope, for one of their own class, a Carpenter's Son, one who had died the death of a Slave, was held to be Sovereign Lord of this feudal society. The innate royalty of the labourer was thereby acknowledged, the Christian Conscience was on his side.

And so was the course of events. The Crusades, the Rise of Commerce, the French Wars, all worked to pull down the mighty from their seats and raise those of a low degree. The Crusades brought many a baron into pecuniary difficulties, what with the outfit and the expensive tastes he acquired; so that he was glad to get out of embarrassment by selling his serfs their liberty. The rise of Commerce created great towns, and towns obtained markets at which the toilers sold their produce and thus obtained the means to purchase freedom.

The change, however, came so gradually that serfdom was a possible condition for Englishmen even in Tudor times. But the revolution had commenced three hundred years earlier, so that by the close of the thirteenth century there was a large class of serfs who had been able to commute their services into money payments, and in the fourteenth century working for wages had become common.

The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman would be well-nigh as popular to-day as it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries if the language had not become archaic, for there is no book more thoroughly English in the best sense, none that better expresses the genius of the English labourer.

Langland's aim, however, was not to delineate the labourer but