As no one meddled much with the villeins before 1349,
all went well until after Crecy, but in 1348 the Black Death ravaged
England, and so many laborers died that the cost of farming property by
hired hands exceeded the value of the rent which the villeins paid. Then
the landlords, under the usual reactionary and dangerous legal advice,
tried coercion. Their first experiment was the famous Statute of Laborers,
which fixed wages at the rates which prevailed in 1347, but as this
statute accomplished nothing the landlords repudiated their contracts, and
undertook to force their villeins to render their ancient customary
services. Though the lay landlords were often hard masters, the
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.
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