n hand on Litster's camp,
and scattered the peasants of Norfolk at the first shock. Richard with an
army of forty thousand men marched in triumph through Kent and Essex, and
spread terror by the ruthlessness of his executions. At Waltham he was met
by the display of his own recent charters and a protest from the Essex men
that "they were so far as freedom went the peers of their lords." But they
were to learn the worth of a king's word. "Villeins you were," answered
Richard, "and villeins you are. In bondage you shall abide, and that not
your old bondage, but a worse!" The stubborn resistance which he met showed
that the temper of the people was not easily broken. The villagers of
Billericay threw themselves into the woods and fought two hard fights
before they were reduced to submission. It was only by threats of death
that verdicts of guilty could be wrung from Essex jurors when the leaders
of the revolt were brought before them. Grindecobbe was offered his life if
he would persuade his followers at St. Albans to restore the charters they
had wrung from the monks. He turned bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade
them take no thought for his trouble. "If I die," he said, "I shall die for
the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end my life
by such a martyrdom. Do then to-day as you would have done had I been
killed yesterday." But repression went pitilessly on, and through the
summer and the autumn seven thousand men are said to have perished on the
gallows or the field.

CHAPTER IV
RICHARD THE SECOND
1381-1400

[Sidenote: Results of the Peasant Revolt]

Terrible as were the measures of repression which followed the Peasant
Revolt, and violent as was the passion of reaction which raged among the
proprietary classes at its close, the end of the rising was in fact
secured. The words of Grindecobbe ere his death were a prophecy which time
fulfilled. Cancel charters of manumission as the council might, serfage was
henceforth a doomed and perishing thing. The dread of another outbreak hung
round the employer. The attempts to bring back obsolete services quietly
died away. The old process of enfranchisement went quietly on. During the
century and a half which followed the Peasant Revolt villeinage died out so
rapidly that it became a rare and antiquated thing. The class of small
freeholders sprang fast out of the wreck of it into numbers and importance.
In twenty years more they were in