ing the uprising. The vagrant priest had rung
his bell to some purpose. In every county, from Somerset to York, the
peasants flocked together, "some armed with clubs, rusty swords, axes, with
old bows reddened by the smoke of the chimney corner, and odd arrows with
only one feather."

At Whitsuntide, early in June, 1381, the great uprising began--the Hurling
time of the peasants--long to be remembered with horror by the governing
classes. A badly ordered poll-tax was the match that kindled the fire.

The poll-tax was first levied, in 1377, on all over fourteen years of age.
Two years later it was graduated, every man and woman of the working class
being rated at 4d., and dukes and archbishops at L6 13s. 4d. More money was
still wanted by the Government, and early in 1381, John of Gaunt, the chief
man in the realm, called Parliament together at Northampton, and demanded
L160,000. Parliament agreed that L100,000 should be raised, and the
clergy--owning a third of the land--promised L60,000. But the only way of
raising the L100,000 that the Government could think of was by another
poll-tax, and this time everybody over fifteen was required to pay 1s. Of
course, the thing was impossible. In many parishes the mere returns of
population were not filled in; numbers evaded payment--which spelt ruin--by
leaving their homes. L22,000 was all that came to hand.

Then a man named John Legge came to the assistance of the Government, and
was appointed chief commissioner, and empowered to collect the tax.

The methods of Legge and his assistants provoked hostility, and when the
villagers of Fobbing, Corringham, and Stanford-le-Hope, in Essex, were
summoned to meet the commissioner at Brentwood, their reply was to kill the
collectors.

The Government answered this by sending down Chief Justice Belknap to
punish the offenders, but the people drove the chief justice out of the
place, and Belknap was glad to escape with his life.

This was on Whit-Sunday, June 2nd, and two days later the revolt had spread
to Kent; Gravesend and Dartford were in tumult. In one place Sir Simon
Burley, a friend of Richard II., seized a workman, claiming him as a
bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of L300; while at
Dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife
and daughter of one John Tyler.[36]

Thereupon this John Tyler, "being at work in the same town tyling of an
house, when he heard thereof, caught his la