The rebellion in England may be compared with the far more
terrible Jacquerie [25] in France, a few years earlier. The French peasants,
who suffered from feudal oppression and the effects of the Hundred Years' War,
raged through the land, burning the castles and murdering their feudal lords.
The movement had scarcely any reasonable purpose; it was an outburst of blind
passion. The nobles avenged themselves by slaughtering the peasants in great
numbers.
[25] From Jacques, a common French name for a
peasant.
EXTINCTION OF SERFDOM
Though these first great struggles of labor against
capital were failures, the emancipation of the peasantry went steadily on
throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By 1500 A.D. serfdom had
virtually disappeared in Italy, in most parts of France, and in England. Some
less- favored countries retained serfdom much longer. Prussian, Austrian, and
Russian serfs did not receive their freedom until the nineteenth century.
CONDITION OF THE PEASANTRY
The extinction of serfdom was, of course, a forward step
in human freedom, but the lot of the English and Continental peasantry long
remained wretched. The poem of Piers Plowman, written in the time of
Chaucer, shows the misery of the age and reveals a very different picture than
that of the gay, holiday-making, merry England seen in the Canterbury Tales.
One hundred and fifty years later, the English humanist, Sir Thomas More, a
friend of Erasmus, published his Utopia as a protest against social
abuses. Utopia, or "Nowhere," is an imaginary country whose
inhabitants choose their own rulers, hold all property in common, and work only
nine hours a day. In Utopia a public system of education prevails, cruel
punishments are unknown, and every one enjoys complete freedom to worship God.
This remarkable book, though it pictures an ideal commonwealth, really
anticipates many social reforms of the present time.
