ABSTRACT
New social doctrines—By no means the least important among the effects of the Great Plague was the spirit of independence which it helped to raise in the breasts of the villeins and labourers, more especially as they now gained some consciousness of the power of labour, and of its value as a prime necessity in the economic life of the nation. There was indeed a revolutionary spirit in the air in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and the villeins could not help breathing it. The social teaching of the author of Peres the Plowman, with his outspoken denunciation of those who are called the upper classes; the bold religious teaching of Wiklif and the wandering friars, and the marked political assertion of the rights of Parliament by the “Good Parliament” of 1376, were all manifestations of this spirit. It was natural, too, that, feeling their power as they did, the villeins should become restive when they heard from the followers of Wiklif that, as it was lawful to withdraw tithes from priests who lived in sin, so “servants and tenants may withdraw their services and rents from their lords that live openly a cursed life.”
