stened to a declaration of the natural equality
and rights of man. "Good people," cried the preacher, "things will never be
well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be
villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater
folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in
serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how
can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they
make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are
clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are
covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we
oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses;
we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is
of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." It was the tyranny
of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism. A spirit
fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime
which condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball:

"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"

[Sidenote: William Langland]

More impressive, because of the very restraint and moderation of its tone,
is the poem in which William Langland began at the same moment to embody
with a terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of the time,
its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery of the
poor, the selfishness and corruption of the rich. Nothing brings more
vividly home to us the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed
the rich from the poor than the contrast between his "Complaint of Piers
the Ploughman" and the "Canterbury Tales." The world of wealth and ease and
laughter through which the courtly Chaucer moves with, eyes downcast as in
a pleasant dream is a far-off world of wrong and of ungodliness to the
gaunt poet of the poor. Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put
to school and received minor orders as a clerk, "Long Will," as Langland
was nicknamed from his tall stature, found his way at an early age to
London, and earned a miserable livelihood there by singing "placebos" and
"diriges" in the stately funerals of his day. Men took the moody clerk for
a madman; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant pride that made him
loth, as