A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [188]
It was now that Robin Hood’s legend took on its great popularity with the people, if not with the country gentlemen and solid merchants of the Commons. They complained bitterly how “out of great malice” laborers and servants leave at will, and how “if their masters reprove them for bad service or offer to pay them according to the said statutes, they fly and run suddenly away out of their service and out of their country … and live wicked lives and rob the poor in simple villages in bodies of two and three together.”
To keep them on the land, the lords offered many concessions, and towns welcomed the wanderers to fill the shortage of artisans, so that they grew aggressive and independent. They were most angry and seditious, and haughty about food, according to Langland, when their fortunes prospered. “They deign not to dine on day-old vegetables … penny ale will not do, nor a piece of bacon,” but rather fresh-cooked meat and fried fish, “hot-and-hot for the chill of their maw.” Joining with villeins and artisans, they learned the tactics of association and strikes, combined against employers, subscribed money for “mutual defense,” and “gather together in great routs and agree by such Confederacy that everyone shall aid the other to resist their Lords with a strong hand.” A generation ready to revolt against oppression was taking shape.
Return of the Black Death in 1374–75 in the same epidemic that had hastened Coucy’s departure from Lombardy thinned more hearths and reduced the tax yield. The recurring outbreaks were beginning to have a cumulative effect on population decline as they did on the deepening gloom of the century. In the poll tax of 1379 four villages of Gloucestershire were recorded as making no returns; in Norfolk six centuries later, five small churches within a day’s visit of each other still stood in deserted silence on the sites of villages abandoned in the 14th century. As before, however, mortality was erratic and there was no lack of land-hungry younger sons, poor relations, and landless tenants ready to take over ownerless property and keep land in cultivation.
Religious unrest was also disturbing the public mind and found its voice in an Oxford theologian and preacher, John Wyclif. Seen through the telescope of history, he was the most significant Englishman of his time. The materialism of the Church and the worldliness of its representatives were old complaints common to all Europe, but they were sharpened in England by antagonism to a foreign papacy. As elsewhere in Europe, there was a deep craving to detemporalize the Church and clear the way to God of all the money and fees and donations and oblations that cluttered it. In Wyclif the political and spiritual strains of English protestantism met and were fused into a philosophy and a program.
Master of Balliol when he was 36, he stimulated anti-clericalism and gained attention by his stirring sermons. On the issue of secular versus spiritual authority, he carried further the dangerous thoughts of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham and found himself champion of the English struggle against the supremacy of papal law over the King’s courts and against the payment of revenues to the papacy. As King’s chaplain in the 1360s he formulated ideas very attractive to the government on the relationship of church and state. In 1374 he served as the King’s envoy in the effort to reach