Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/52

44 77. Jad dhan dekhiye jándá addhá deiye wand.

When you see your money going share half of it: (insurance).

78. Tand nahin phitá, táni phit gai.

Not a thread, but the whole warp is broken.

79. Kar mazúri khá chúri.

Work and eat sweets.

HOUGH history has ignored the disagreeable fact, there is no real difficulty in showing that communism was publicly advocated in this country in the reign of that too glorious monarch Edward III. The disastrous outbreak of the English Jacquerie under the weak rule of his unfortunate successor has doubtless attracted all attention to itself to the oblivion of the older fact.

It took also, as we shall see, the milder form, much as the Wickliffe agitation did, of inculcating its principles by oral and literary means only; declining, at least until a more favourable season, the ultimate and inevitable voie de fait, which was probably intentionally reserved until the disbanded soldiery of Edward should be thrown broadcast into the land.

The original agitation to which I shall call attention was distinguished from the later and actual insurrection in a most important and vital point. It was, as we shall see, a communistic claim made in the name of the yeomen or farmers, and ignored utterly the serfs or agricultural labourers, who do not appear upon the stage in the new rôle of agitators until the next reign.

Though the later movement from its large volume and its well defined atrocities has exclusively engaged the attention of students, there is much in the earlier agitation that deserves careful consideration as well for its philosophical as its social bearings, notwithstanding that its inception never crossed the threshold of mere poetry.