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
religions protests against the corrupted institutions of the
Church.


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