e memory of others was lost. He is right in making Richard II.
incarnate the claim to divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronial
ambition which ultimately broke up the old mediaeval order. But divine
right had become at once drier and more fantastic by the time of the
Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part of the
thing; for he came at a later stage in a process of stiffening which is
the main thing to be studied in later mediaevalism. Richard himself was
possibly a wayward and exasperating prince; it might well be the weak
link that snapped in the strong chain of the Plantagenets. There may
have been a real case against the _coup d'etat_ which he effected in
1397, and his kinsman Henry of Bolingbroke may have had strong sections
of disappointed opinion on his side when he effected in 1399 the first
true usurpation in English history. But if we wish to understand that
larger tradition which even Shakespeare had lost, we must glance back at
something which befell Richard even in the first years of his reign. It
was certainly the greatest event of his reign; and it was possibly the
greatest event of all the reigns which are rapidly considered in this
book. The real English people, the men who work with their hands, lifted
their hands to strike their masters, probably for the first and
certainly for the last time in history.

Pagan slavery had slowly perished, not so much by decaying as by
developing into something better. In one sense it did not die, but
rather came to life. The slave-owner was like a man who should set up a
row of sticks for a fence, and then find they had struck root and were
budding into small trees. They would be at once more valuable and less
manageable, especially less portable; and such a difference between a
stick and a tree was precisely the difference between a slave and a
serf--or even the free peasant which the serf seemed rapidly tending to
become. It was, in the best sense of a battered phrase, a social
evolution, and it had the great evil of one. The evil was that while it
was essentially orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is, the
emancipation of the commons had already advanced very far, but it had
not yet advanced far enough to be embodied in a law. The custom was
"unwritten," like the British Constitution, and (like that evolutionary,
not to say evasive entity) could always be overridden by the rich, who
now drive their great coaches through Acts of Par