Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [84]
Grain production on Ramsey manors was reduced by one half.16 In desperation, stewards and bailiffs strictly enforced work services on the surviving tenants, and sought to hold down the cost of hired labor with the help of a royal Statute of Laborers (1351), backed by a threat of the stocks. The main result they achieved was to stir resentment among both tenants and hired laborers. With depopulation, land inevitably fell in value and labor inevitably rose in price.
The Hundred Years War added heavy taxation to peasant burdens. For many years, “lay subsidies” (to distinguish them from taxes on the clergy) had been occasionally levied at the rate of a tenth or a twentieth on all movable goods above a certain figure. In the long reign of Henry III (1216-1272), the lay subsidy was collected only five times. In those of Edward I (1272-1307) and Edward II (1307-1327), marked by wars with Scotland, the royal tax collectors appeared in the villages a total of sixteen times.
Edward III imposed the tax three times in the first seven years of his lengthy reign, then as the war in France escalated, he needed it no fewer than twenty-four times (1334-1377).17 To facilitate collection, he changed the mechanics of taxation, putting the burden of it on the villagers themselves and charging the royal administration with the task of seeing that every village met its quota. The new method made it possible for the better-off peasants who filled the village offices to arrange distribution of the tax in their favor.18 Besides the lay subsidy, the village was afflicted with conscription, which itself was apparently a light burden—volunteers were found, and a village might perceive the army a good place to get rid of its bad characters—but each community had to pay for its own recruits’ equipment. Finally, in 1377, amid a succession of defeats in France, a poll tax was introduced: four pence per head on everyone over fourteen years of age, with only genuine beggars exempt. In 1379 a second poll tax was piled on top of a double subsidy, and in 1381 a third on top of a subsidy and a half. Wealthy taxpayers were rather piously requested to help pay the share of poor taxpayers.19
The accumulation of tax levies, the Statute of Laborers, and the other burdens, afflictions, and irritants resulted in the Peasant Rebellion of 1381. Sometimes known as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, from the name of one of its several leaders, the English revolt was part of a larger pattern. “A chain of peasant uprisings clearly directed against taxation exploded all over Europe,” says Georges Duby.20 If they were discernibly triggered by taxation, the risings had a broader content, both substantive and ideological. Another leader of the English rebels, the Kentish priest John Ball, preached that “things cannot go right in England…until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same.” Unsympathetic Froissart, chronicler of the nobility, may not be recording Ball’s words with reportorial exactness, but there is little doubt that the gist is accurate: “[The lords] are clad in velvet and camlet lined with squirrel and ermine, while we go dressed in coarse cloth. They have the wines, the spices, and the good bread: we have the rye, the husks, and the straw, and we drink water. They have shelter and ease in their fine manors, and we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain in the fields. And from us must come, from our labour, the things which keep them in luxury.” And the fiery preacher’s auditors, “out in the fields, or