The Peasants' Revolt Seemed to Win Nothing
The great rising of 1381 seemingly gained nothing. Serf labor was still exacted by force, and as late as 1537 the House of Lords rejected a bill to free all serfs completely. The enclosure of common land gathered speed. Thousands of landless tenants were driven into the towns and became penniless laborers. Thomas More said that sheep had taken the place of farmers.
In some ways the movement was good. Land exhausted by constant grazing recovered its nitrogen, and by 1500 only a tenth of the population were serfs. A class of farmers emerged who worked their own land, and little by little they gave the English people the independent, distinctive character that later produced the Commonwealth nations of Britain and laid the foundation of an unwritten constitution of unprecedented liberty.
The End of Feudal Economics
As industry and trade took on national importance and a money economy became linked with foreign commerce, feudalism ceased to be useful. When tenants worked and produced for a lord, they had no heart or motive to expand their work or to invent. But once free farmers and free merchants could sell their goods in a free market, the passion for profit quickened the pulse of the national economy. The villages sent more food to the towns, and the towns, to pay their debts, produced more goods. The exchange of surplus passed beyond local financial limits and guild monopolies and spread across England and overseas.
Merchant Companies and English Ships
Some guilds turned into "merchant companies" licensed by the king to sell English goods abroad. In the fourteenth century most of England's trade had been carried in Italian ships. Now Britain had built ships of its own that sailed the North Sea, the Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean. Genoese merchants and those of the Hanseatic League hated and resented the newcomers and fought them by piracy and by detaining their ships in port.
But Henry VII, firmly convinced that England's progress depended on its foreign trade, took shipping under state protection and made commercial treaties with other states that brought peace and order to maritime trade. By 1500 the "bold and adventurous" English merchants held the North Sea trade in their hands.
John Cabot and the Seeds of Empire
The far-sighted king, eyeing trade with China and Japan, commissioned Giovanni Caboto, an Italian navigator then living in Bristol as John Cabot, to seek a northern passage across the Atlantic (1497). On this voyage Cabot settled for discovering Newfoundland. On his second voyage (1498) he explored the coast from Labrador to Delaware. He died that year, and his son Sebastian entered the service of Spain.
Most likely neither the king nor his navigator knew that these voyages were laying the foundation of British imperialism and opening the door to a world for English trade and colonies, which in time would become the source of England's power and commerce.
Tariffs, Interest and Labor Rules
Customs tariffs gave domestic industry new life. Economic order lowered interest rates, sometimes to around five percent. Government decrees closely regulated working conditions and wages. One decree of Henry VII (1495) laid down the hours:
- From mid-March to mid-September, every craftsman and laborer had to be at work before five in the morning.
- He had half an hour for breakfast and an hour and a half for dinner and a nap, and could not stop work until about eight in the evening.
- From mid-September to mid-March, every craftsman and laborer had to be at work at dawn and stay until night, with no sleeping in the daytime.
Workers rested on Sundays and twenty-four other holidays a year and spent them in recreation and drinking. The government fixed "just prices" for many goods, and reports tell us that those who sold above the set price were arrested. According to the author, wage levels relative to prices in the late fifteenth century seem to have been higher than at the start of the nineteenth.
Unrest Among the Workers
The labor uprisings of this period show economic defects and a lack of political rights. Semi-communist propaganda continued almost every year, and workers were repeatedly told: "You are made of the same dough as the nobles and gentry, so why do they spend their lives in play and amusement while you toil? Why do they have everything in this world and you nothing?" There were many revolts against the enclosure of common land, and occasional disputes between merchants and craftsmen. We also hear of agitation for internal liberties, for workers' representatives in Parliament, and for lower taxes.
Jack Cade's Rising, 1450
In June 1450 a large and orderly force of town workers and farmers marched on London and camped at Blackheath. Their leader, Jack Cade, presented their grievances as a formal document: all the lower classes, burdened by taxes, levies and other abuses, could not live on the fruit of their own labor. The Statute of Labourers should be repealed, and a new ministry formed. The government accused Cade of favoring communism.
Henry VI's troops and the retainers of several nobles met the rebels at Sevenoaks (June 18, 1450). To everyone's astonishment the rebels won and poured into London. To put out the fire of their revolt, the royal council ordered the arrest of Lord Saye and William Crowmer, two ministers hated for their oppression. On July 4 they were handed over to the rebels, who were besieging the Tower of London. The rebels tried them, and when the two refused to defend themselves, beheaded both.
According to Holinshed, their heads were put on pikes and paraded joyfully through the streets, and from time to time the two severed heads were brought together so that their lips met in a bloody kiss. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Winchester signed a peace agreement with the rebels, granted some of their demands, and announced a general pardon. The rebels agreed and dispersed.
But Jack Cade attacked the castle of Queenborough one night. The government declared him a rebel, and on July 12, while they were trying to arrest him, he was badly wounded and killed. Eight of his accomplices were condemned to death, and the rest were pardoned by the king "amid the joy and delight of his subjects."