land
itself the misery of the people was deepening every hour. Men believed the
world to be ending, and the judgement day to be near. A few months after
the Peace came a fresh swoop of the Black Death, carrying off the Duke of
Lancaster. The repressive measures of Parliament and the landowners only
widened the social chasm which parted employer from employed. We can see
the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance both to the reactionary efforts
which were being made to bring back labour services and to the enactments
which again bound labour to the soil in statutes which strove in vain to
repress the strikes and combinations which became frequent in the towns and
the more formidable gatherings of villeins and "fugitive serfs" in the
country at large. A statute of later date throws light on the nature of the
resistance of the last. It tells us that "villeins and holders of land in
villeinage withdrew their customs and services from their lords, having
attached themselves to other persons who maintained and abetted them, and
who under colour of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors and
villages where they dwelt claimed to be quit of all manner of services
either of their body or of their lands, and would suffer no distress or
other course of justice to be taken against them; the villeins aiding their
maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords with peril to life
and limb as well by open assemblies as by confederacies to support each
other." It would seem not only as if the villein was striving to resist the
reactionary tendency of the lords of manors to regain his labour service
but that in the general overturning of social institutions the copyholder
was struggling to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to be
recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held on lease.

[Sidenote: John Ball]

A more terrible outcome of the general suffering was seen in a new revolt
against the whole system of social inequality which had till then passed
unquestioned as the divine order of the world. The Peace was hardly signed
when the cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the words of "a mad
priest of Kent" as the courtly Froissart calls him, who for twenty years to
come found audience for his sermons in spite of interdict and imprisonment
in the stout yeomen who gathered round him in the churchyards of Kent.
"Mad" as the landowners held him to be, it was in the preaching of John
Ball that England first li