Page:The English Peasant.djvu/381

 of printing and of gunpowder, and even the Black Death, all fought like the stars in their courses against feudalism. If in the midst of the revolution caused by these important events, the serf not only dragged his head out of the collar, but sometimes became grasping and usurious, who was to blame but the society that set him the example?

Side by side with Brandt's satire on "the rude men of the country," one ought to study what the legists say of the condition of these rude men while these changes were going on, a condition which continued in some countries for centuries later. In his "Histoire des Paysans," M. Eugène Bonnemère quotes Renaudon as naming no less than ninety-seven seignorial rights which the lords in various places claimed as due from the enfranchised serfs. These exactions varied from pettifogging claims on the honey that the villein's bees extracted from the lord's flowers, on the rain-water that ran down the ruts of the roads, or for the dust the herds made in going from one pasture to another, until they reached what was nothing but organised pillage in the right called De prise de gîte et de pouvoirie. What the lords left, the clergy took; there was hardly a circumstance in life out of which the latter did not extract a fee.

Under such a load of exactions it is not surprising that the French peasants thought freedom no boon, and that their king, Louis X. (1315), had to goad them by insults and taxes to accept his generous offers to permit them to purchase their enfranchisement by "paying a sufficient recompense for the emoluments which their continuance in servitude was able to bring him or his successors." This system of exaction, instead of lessening, grew heavier with each generation. The discovery of gunpowder so altered mediaeval warfare that a different mode of fortification had to be adopted, the expense of which was extracted from the villein. A sense of the terrible debt owing to the peasants, the ages of wrong during which they had been treasuring up their wrath, rendered the lord afraid to put arms into their hands; he was therefore obliged to employ mercenaries, a class of professional fighters who were the scourge of Europe.

If we want to realize the condition of the labouring classes in these last days of feudalism, we ought to read the complaint of the