irit of the townsmen was, as we shall see,
crushed by the failure of their outbreak of despair. It was from a new
quarter that help was for a moment to come. No subject is more difficult
to treat, as nothing is more difficult to explain, than the communal
revolt which shook the throne of Richard II., and the grievances which
prompted it. But one thing is clear; it was a revolt against oppression
which veiled itself under the form of law. The rural tenants found
themselves in a mesh of legal claims--old services revived, old dues
enforced, endless suits in the King's courts grinding them again to
serfage. Oppression was no longer the rough blow of the rough baron; it
was the delicate, ruthless tyranny of the lawyer-clerk.

Prior John of Cambridge, who, in the vacancy of the abbot, was now in
charge of the house, was a man skilled in all the arts of his day. In
sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
pronounced him the superior of Orpheus, of Nero, of one yet more
illustrious but, save in the Bury cloisters, more obscure, the Breton
Belgabred. He was a man "industrious and subtle;" and subtlety and
industry found their scope in suit after suit with the farmers and
burgesses around. "Faithfully he strove," says his monastic eulogist,
"with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he
owned as his foes, his "adversaries;" but it was the rustics who were
especially to show how memorable a hate he had won. It was a perilous
time in which to win men's hate. We have seen the private suffering of
the day, but nationally too England was racked with despair and the
sense of wrong; with the collapse of the French war, with the ruinous
taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had swept away half the
population; with the iniquitous labour-laws that, in the face of such a
reduction, kept down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords;
with the frightful law of settlement that, to enforce this wrong,
reduced at a stroke the free labourer again to a serfage from which he
has yet fully to emerge. That terrible revolution of social sentiment
had begun which was to turn law into the instrument of the basest
interests of a class, which was with the Statute of Labourers and the
successive labour-regulations that followed to create pauperism, and
with pauperism to create that hatred of class to class which hangs like
a sick dream over us to-day. The earliest, the most awful instance of