Page:The English Peasant.djvu/29

 back to your comrades and bear the king's answer, you were and are rustic, and shall remain in bondage, not that of old but infinitely worse. For as long as we live, and by God's help rule over this realm, we will attempt by all our faculties, powers, and means to make you such an example of fear to the heirs of your servitude as that they may have you before their eyes and you may supply them with a perpetual ground of cursing and fearing you."

And now Richard knew how to keep his word: 1,500 of these brave men were searched out in various parts of the country, and hung and gibbeted as an example of fear to the heirs of their servitude.

The boy-king was only a tool in the hands of his Council. The Council itself was powerless before the determination of the lords not to let the people go. When the royal message addressed to the Parliament that met immediately after the quelling of the Insurrection, suggested that it would be well to enfranchise and set at liberty the serfs, Parliament replied, that the king's grant and letters were null and void, their serfs were their goods, and the king could not take their goods without their own consent. "And this consent," they declared, "we have never given, and never will give, were we all to die in one day."

And in this Pharaoh-like spirit they persisted. The impossible Statutes of Labourers were re-affirmed, their execution being enforced by cumulative penalties, and in case of final inability to pay, the labourer was to have forty days' imprisonment; anyone attempting to leave his place of residence without an official letter was to be put in the stocks; all who up to the age of twelve years had been employed in husbandry must remain in that occupation, even if already apprenticed to another.

In fact, the attempt on the part of the landless labourer to free his children by apprenticing them in the towns was directly forbidden by the Statute 7 Hen. IV., c. xvii., on pain of a year's imprisonment. And not content with closing to the poor serf