frightful a calamity been known; never since has it
been equalled. Men died by millions. All Europe had been swept by the
plague, as by a besom of destruction, and now England became its prey.
The population of the island at that period was not great,--some three
or four millions in all. When the plague had passed more than half of
these were in their graves, and in many places there were hardly enough
living to bury the dead.

We call it a calamity. It is not so sure that it was. Life in England at
that day, for the masses of the people, was not so precious a boon that
death had need to be sorely deplored. A handful of lords and a host of
laborers, the latter just above the state of slavery, constituted the
population. Many of the serfs had been set free, but the new liberty of
the people was not a state of unadulterated happiness. War had drained
the land. The luxury of the nobles added to the drain. The patricians
caroused. The plebeians suffered. The Black Death came. After it had
passed, labor, for the first time in English history, was master of the
situation.

Laborers had grown scarce. Many men refused to work. The first general
strike for higher wages began. In the country, fields were left untilled
and harvests rotted on the ground. "The sheep and cattle strayed through
the fields and corn, and there were none left who could drive them." In
the towns, craftsmen refused to work at the old rate of wages. Higher
wages were paid, but the scarcity of food made higher prices, and men
were little better off. Many laborers, indeed, declined to work at all,
becoming tramps,--what were known as "sturdy beggars,"--or haunting the
forests as bandits.

The king and parliament sought to put an end to this state of affairs by
law. An ordinance was passed whose effect would have made slaves of the
people. Every man under sixty, not a land-owner or already at work (says
this famous act), must work for the employer who demands his labor, and
for the rate of wages that prevailed two years before the plague. The
man who refused should be thrown into prison. This law failed to work,
and sterner measures were passed. The laborer was once more made a serf,
bound to the soil, his wage-rate fixed by parliament. Law after law
followed, branding with a hot iron on the forehead being finally ordered
as a restraint to runaway laborers. It was the first great effort made
by the class in power to put down an industrial revolt.

The pea