of the French Jacquerie a quarter of a century earlier; but no
doubt could exist as to its critical importance. As it happened, the
revolt turned with special fury against the possessions of the Duke of
Lancaster, whose sympathies with the cause of ecclesiastical reform it
definitively extinguished.

After the suppression of this appalling movement by a party of Order
comprehending in it all who had anything to lose, a period of reaction
ensued. In the reign of Richard II, whichever faction might be in the
ascendant, and whatever direction the king's own sympathies may have
originally taken, the last state of the peasantry was without doubt
worse than the first. Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with
the death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline,
considering the absence from his teaching of any tangible system of
church government; and Lollardry came to be the popular name, or
nickname, for any and every form of dissent from the existing system.
Finally, Henry of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's son, mounted the throne as
a sort of saviour of society,--a favourite character for usurpers to
pose in before the applauding assemblage of those who claim "a stake in
the country." Chaucer's contemporary, Gower, whose wisdom was of the
kind which goes with the times, who was in turn a flatterer of Richard
and (by the simple expedient of a revised second edition of his magnum
opus) a flatterer of Henry, offers better testimony than Chaucer to the
conservatism of the upper classes of his age, and to the single-minded
anxiety for the good times when

Justice of law is held;
The privilege of royalty
Is safe, and all the barony
Worshipped is in its estate.
The people stands in obeisance
Under the rule of governance.

Chaucer is less explicit, and may have been too little of a politician
by nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his
incidental remarks concerning the lower classes. In his "Clerk's Tale"
he finds room for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people,"
its levity, untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity,
and the folly of putting any trust in it. In his "Nun's Priest's Tale"
he further enlivens one of the liveliest descriptions of a hue-and-cry
ever put upon paper by a direct reference to the Peasants' Rebellion:--

So hideous was the noise, ah bencite!
That of a truth Jack Straw, and his meinie
Not made never shoutes half so shrill