English, and the English and the Scots; for the rivalry between the
Italian republics; for the efforts of Rienzi to establish popular
freedom at Rome; for the insurrection of the Flemish weavers, under the
Van Arteveldes, against their feudal oppressors; for the terrible
"Jacquerie" in Paris; for the insurrection of Wat Tyler in England; for
the Swiss confederation; for a schism in the Church when the popes
retired to Avignon; for the aggrandizement of the Visconti at Milan and
the Medici at Florence; for incipient religious reforms under Wyclif in
England and John Huss in Bohemia; for the foundation of new colleges at
Oxford and Cambridge; for the establishment of guilds in London; for the
exploration of distant countries; for the dreadful pestilence which
swept over Europe, known in England as the Black Death; for the
development of modern languages by the poets; and for the rise of the
English House of Commons as a great constitutional power.

In most of these movements we see especially a simultaneous rising among
the people, in the more civilized countries of Europe, to obtain
charters of freedom and municipal and political privileges, extorted
from monarchs in their necessities. The fourteenth century was marked by
protests and warfare equally against feudal institutions and royal
tyranny. The way was prepared by the wars of kings, which crippled their
resources, as the Crusades had done a century before. The supreme
miseries of the people led them to political revolts and
insurrections,--blind but fierce movements, not inspired by ideas of
liberty, but by a sense of oppression and degradation. Accompanying
these popular insurrections were religious protests against the corrupt
institutions of the Church.

In the midst of these popular agitations, aggressive and needless wars,
public miseries and calamities, baronial aggrandizement, religious