ecclesiastics, especially the monks, were harder still, and the
ecclesiastics were served by lawyers of their own cloth, whose sharp
practice became proverbial. Thus the law declined to recognize rights in
property existing in fact, with the inevitable result of the peasant
rising in 1381, known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion. Popular rage perfectly
logically ran highest against the monks and the lawyers. Both the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon de Sudbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the
Chief Justice were killed, and the insurgents wished to kill, as Capgrave
has related, "all the men that had learned ony law." Finally the rebellion
was suppressed, chiefly by the duplicity of Richard II. Richard promised
the people, by written charters, a permanent tenure as freemen at
reasonable rents, and so induced them to go home with his charters in
their hands; but they were no sooner gone than vengeance began. Though
Richard had been at the peasants' mercy, who might have killed him had
they wished, punitive expeditions were sent in various directions. One was
led by Richard himself, who travelled with Tresilian, the new Chief
Justice, the man who afterward was himself hanged at Tyburn. Tresilian
worked so well that he is said to have strung up a dozen villeins to a
single beam in Chelmsford because he had no time to have them executed
regularly. Stubbs has estimated that seven thousand victims hardly
satisfied the landlords' sense of outraged justice. What concerns us,
chiefly, is that this repression, however savage, failed altogether to
bring tranquillity. After 1381 a full century of social chaos supervened,
merging at times into actual civil war, until, in 1485, Henry Tudor came
in after his victory at Bosworth, pledged to destroy the whole reactionary
class which incarnated feudalism. For the feudal soldier was neither
flexible nor astute, and allowed himself to be caught between the upper
and the nether millstone. While industrial and commercial capital had been
increasing in the towns, capitalistic methods of farming had invaded the
country, and, as police improved, private and predatory warfare, as a