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By Root 1392 0

to a new subsidy. Their primary demand was the dismissal of venal ministers together with the King’s mistress, who was generally credited with being both venal and a witch. In addition they wanted annual Parliaments, election rather than appointment of members, and a long list of restraints upon arbitrary practices and bad government. Two of their strongest discontents were directed not against the government, but against abuses of a foreign Church hierarchy and the demands of a laboring class grown disobedient and disorderly. These issues, too, were great with significance: one was to lead to the ultimate break with Rome and the other, much sooner, to the Peasants’ Revolt.

The strenuous and jubilant England Coucy had known in the aftermath of Poitiers had grown sadly disgruntled. Pride of conquest and wealth of ransoms had thinned like smoke, buoyant energy and confidence were sunk in quarrels and frivolity, the widened empire had shriveled, English fleets were swept ignominiously from the Channel, bellicose Scots on the border—whom Edward had been fighting even longer than he had the French—were as unsubdued as ever. England’s heroes—Henry of Lancaster, Chandos, the Prince of Wales—were dead or dying; the good Queen was replaced by a strumpet who was believed to have established her dominion over the King by restoring his sexual potency through the enchantments of a friar skilled in the black arts. The once exuberant Edward who had looked down on victory from the windmill at Crécy was now a foolish infatuated old man “not stronger in mind than a boy of eight.” The high tide of success had turned to loss, with every loss paid for by disrupted trade and renewed taxes. A fifty-year reign of incessant warring was coming to a close in a rising sense of wasted effort and misrule.

England by now had caught the contagion of lawlessness which the war had spread upon the continent. Soldiers, returning with the habit but no longer the fruits of pillage, formed small bands to live by robbery, or as retainers of lords and knights who returned to find their demesnes impoverished as a result of the Black Death. A whole generation, from the sack of Caen at Edward’s first landing to the raid in the Aargau, had accustomed itself to brigandage and resorted to it easily at home. According to a complaint in Parliament, companies of men and archers, sometimes under a knight, “do ride in great routs in divers parts of England,” and take possession of manors and lands, ravish women and damsels and bring them into strange counties, “beat and maim and slay the people for to have their wives and their goods,” hold them prisoner for ransom, and “sometimes come before the justices in their sessions in such guise with great force whereby the justices be afraid and not hardy to do the law.” They commit riots and “horrible offenses” whereby the realm is in great trouble, “to the great mischief and grievance of the people.” Royal justice made no serious effort to restrain them because the King was dependent for military forces on the same nobles who were responsible for the disorders.

The resulting breakdown of justice was a major cause of the Commons’ anger. In the Vision of Piers Plowman, which first appeared in 1377, the figure of Peace petitioning against Wrong, in the person of a King’s officer who has carried off his horses and grain and left a tally on the King’s Exchequer in payment, complains that he cannot bring him to law because “he maintaineth his men to murder mine own.” Private lawlessness equally was on the rise. “Tell me,” asked the Bishop of Rochester, a sympathizer of the Commons, “why, in England, so many robberies remain unpunished when in other countries murderers and thieves are commonly hanged? In England the land is inundated by homicides and the feet of men are swift to the shedding of blood.”

Outlawry among free peasants had increased because their command of higher wages, as a result of depopulation, brought them in constant conflict with the law. The Statute of Laborers, in a world that believed in fixed conditions, still