of either ecclesiastical or lay wealth, the time had palpably come for the
poor man to enjoy his own again. Then, the advent of a weak government,
over which a powerful kinsman of the king and unconcealed adversary of the
Church was really seeking to recover the control, and the imposition of a
tax coming home to all men except actual beggars, and filling serfdom's
cup of bitterness to overflowing, supplied the opportunity, and the
insurrection broke out. Its violence fell short of that of the French
Jacquerie a quarter of a century earlier; but no doubt could exist as to
its critical importance. As it happened, the revolt turned with special
fury against the possessions of the Duke of Lancaster, whose sympathies
with the cause of ecclesiastical reform it definitively extinguished.

After the suppression of this appalling movement by a party of Order
comprehending in it all who had anything to lose, a period of reaction
ensued. In the reign of Richard II, whichever faction might be in the
ascendant, and whatever direction the king's own sympathies may have
originally taken, the last state of the peasantry was without doubt worse
than the first. Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with the
death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline, considering the
absence from his teaching of any tangible system of church government; and
Lollardry came to be the popular name, or nickname, for any and every form
of dissent from the existing system. Finally, Henry of Lancaster, John of
Gaunt's son, mounted the throne as a sort of saviour of society,--a
favourite character for usurpers to pose in before the applauding
assemblage of those who claim "a stake in the country." Chaucer's
contemporary, Gower, whose wisdom was of the kind which goes with the
times, who was in turn a flatterer of Richard and (by the simple expedient
of a revised second edition of his magnum opus) a flatterer of Henry,
offers better testimony than Chaucer to the conservatism of the upper
classes of his age, and to the single-minded anxiety for the good times