16 STATE INTERFERENCE IN SOCIAL AFFAIRS. [1385-99. follies, which are not positive wrongs, public or private, to their own certain penalties. But there is an exceptional school, which, seeing a large amount of suffering and crime in existing society, appears somewhat too much enamoured of the ancient principle of perpetual interference, acting under the system by which "the discipline of an ariny was transferred to the details of social life."* It is held that, under this discipline, "in the distribution of the produce of land men dealt fairly and justly with each other; and in the material condition of the bulk of the people there is a fair evidence that the system worked efficiently and well."+ To determine the state of the producing classes, a comparison is entered into of the rate of wages with the price of food; and it is held that in the old time, a labourer with a penny could buy more bread, beef, beer, and wine, than the labourer of the nineteenth century can do for a shilling. Be it so. But what shall we say of the system, when we regard the excessive fluctuations of price ?—the result of the complacency with which "statesmen did not care for the accumulation of capital." "They desired," says the encomiast of the past, "to see the physical well-being of all classes of the commonwealth maintained at the highest degree which the producing power of the country admitted; and population and production remaining stationary, they were enabled to do it." The producing power of the country was so variable that, in 1387, wheat at Leicester was sold at two shillings a quarterin 1390, at sixteen shillings and eightpence.§ Where, with this imperfect and irregular production, was the stationary population? Dying of famine, to maintain the due proportion between population and production. The whole theory of "population and production remaining stationary" is a paradox, utterly opposed to any condition of society which could by possibility exist after the abolition of slavery. The instant at which the lords of the soil could no longer control the amount of the population upon their own demesnes-the instant that the system of free labour superseded serfage-the instant that the towns were ready to absorb the superabundant population of the country, and to increase their own population with no restraint but the ordinary laws by which the number of mouths to eat is proportioned to the amount of profitable labour to be performed that instant there was an end of any possible power to keep population and production stationary. If, as the historian we have quoted believes, the population in the middle of the sixteenth century was five millions, the evidence is equally clear that it did not exceed two millions and a half at the end of the fourteenth century. The data for calculating the population at either period are exceedingly uncertain. Less than a million and a half were assessed to the poll-tax of Richard II., but which number did not include the people of Durham, Chester, and Wales. Undoubtedly there was a considerable increase in a century and a half. But what increase would there have been could the system of interference, founded upon the principle of keeping population and production stationary, have been successful? In our view, there was an end of the system when its broad foundation of slavery was at an end; and all subsequent laws for regulating wages, for fixing a maximum price on articles of necessity, and for surrounding trade with every species of arbitrary regulation in the vain *Froude, "History of England," vol. i. p. 13. + Ibid. p. 19. Ibid. p. 26. "Chronicon Pretiosum." 1385-99.] STATE INTERFERENCE IN SOCIAL AFFAIRS. 17 endeavour to prevent fraud, were very useless attempts to prolong a controlling power when its vital principle had perished. It is of little consequence that for several centuries after the foundations of the mediaval feudality were utterly gone, endeavours of every kind were made to preserve the same regulating powers of authority which grew out of the original relations of lord, vassal, and serf. One by one they crumbled away in England; and as they more and more lost all vitality, and became mere incumbrances of legislation, the great body of the people more and more felt the possibility of increased production keeping pace with increased population; and their various comforts-positive luxuries when compared with the average household conveniences and gratifications of the fourteenth century-went on increasing, in the exact proportion of the national advance in wealth and knowledge under the self-regulating action of modern society. But we venture to believe that we should fall into a grievous error if we were to accept the enactments which imply an organisation assigning to every man his certain place, and regulating all his dealings with his fellow men upon an absolute scale, as a complete evidence of the real condition of the people. The enactments themselves prove that they were, in a great degree, inoperative. We have mentioned the Statute of Diet and Apparel of 1368, and that it was repealed in the following year.* Is not this proof that grooms and servants" could not be limited to meat once a day, and cloth of two marks the whole piece for their dress? The ordinance which regulates apparel regulates also the price at which the cloth is to be sold. Could the varying cost of the material of cloth allow this enactment to attain the slightest permanency? After the next session of parliament, the people, as to diet, apparel, and the price of cloth, became, in the words of the repealing Act, "as free as they were before." After the pestilence, the Act of the 25th of Edward III. regulates wages. By the 12th of Richard II. wages are again regulated, because "servants and labourers will not serve and labour without outrageous and excessive hire." In the 7th year of Henry IV. labourers and artificers are to be sworn to serve after the form of these two statutes of Edward III. and Richard II., and if they refuse to do so, to be put in the stocks. Need we go farther to show that all such enactments were but blind devices to struggle against the only laws that could be operative in such matters? In less than a century after the first Act regulating wages of Edward III., a very different scale is given by the 23rd of Henry VI., but with this important condition-" that such as deserve less shall take less." The Statute does not say, " that such as deserve more shall take more. "" But the exception to the scale, in favour of the payers of wages, proves that the whole scheme was a fallacy. Of the same flimsy construction was all the boasted protection of the humbler classes, by state supervision, against what is termed "the money-making spirit" of the traders. They had far higher need of protection against those who went on seeking, however vainly, to beat down wages by scales and penalties. Out of the exercise of the spirit of exchange, throwing off its state shackles one by one, have grown all the material blessings of modern civilisation. When * Vol. i. p. 479. VOL. II. 18 STATE INTERFERENCE IN SOCIAL AFFAIRS. [1385-99. England became commercial, which it did rapidly in and after the reign of Edward III., the feudal organisation of society was thenceforth an impossibility. In every attempt to maintain that organisation, by what has been called "a higher code" for the production and distribution of wealth than the laws of supply and demand, we see only the dissolving shadow of a power once supreme, retreating and diminishing before a great expanding reality. Family dissensions-Conduct of the war with France-Suspicions of Lancaster-Scots and Frenchmen cross the Border-Projected invasion of England by France-Disputes of the king and the parliament-Commission of Regency-Secret Council of the kingGloucester and other nobles take arms-The King's advisers declared traitors-Battle of Otterbourne-Richard assumes the government-Truce with France and ScotlandRichard in Ireland-His marriage with Isabella of France-The king becomes despotic Coup d'état-Murder of Gloucester-Quarrel of Hereford and Norfolk-Their banishment-Wretched condition of the country-Death of John of Gaunt-Richard seizes his possessions-The king goes to Ireland-Henry of Lancaster lands at RavenspurBetrayal of Richard by the Percies-A Parliament called-Richard's deposition-Henry claims the kingdom. THE political intrigues of the reign of Richard II. are so complicated, and have been so obscurely related, that, from the first days of his accession, when John of Gaunt, in parliament, indignantly repelled some vague accusations against himself of designs upon the throne, till, twenty-two years afterwards, the king was deposed by the son of the same John of Gaunt, we are walking in a labyrinth of family quarrels, accompanied with a more than usual amount of hatred and dissimulation. At the age of twelve Richard was placed on the throne. For ten years he had little share in the government, though he was put forward, as in the instance of the insurrection of 1381, to act in his personal character of king. In 1382 he married Anne of Bohemia, a prudent and amiable princess, who restrained many of the impulses of his levity and 20 THE KING'S GUARDIANS-WAR WITH FRANCE. [1383. fitful passions. But he surrounded himself with favourite ministers, who evidently fomented the jealousy which he constantly felt of his uncles. John, the duke of Lancaster, appears to have possessed many of the high qualities of a statesman-prudent, but not an enemy to improvement-generous without prodigality-having great wealth and influence, but not employing his power in any proved disloyalty to his royal nephew. Thomas, the duke of Gloucester, was less scrupulous in the modes by which he controlled the immature king; and the early impatience of Richard under his stern tutelage, and the cherished hatreds of his adult age, were at last terminated by open hostility and secret murder. During the twenty-two years in which Richard bore the name of king, for one-half of the period he was an unwilling puppet in the hands of austere guardians; and when he broke loose from their authority in the second half of his reign, he had been so long controlled by others that he had never acquired the power of self-control; and thus, with many qualities which might have made him respected in any other position, he became a tyrant without the force of character that makes tyranny successful, and perished through the consequences of his own violence and rashness. The war with France was feebly conducted, previous to a short truce in 1384. Henry Spenser, the bishop of Norwich, led an expedition into Flanders in 1383, ostensibly for a crusade against the pretensions to the papacy of Clement, a Frenchman. The expedition was, in reality, to support the Flemings in that resistance to the government of their duke which, in the previous year, had received such a check by the intervention of France. The Italian pope, Urban VI., was supported by England, and by the Flemings and German States. Part of the cost of this adventure was voted by parliament; part was raised by voluntary contributions. Had this expedition given assistance to the burghers of Bruges and Ghent and Ypres, before the fall of their great leader Philip Artevelde at the battle of Rosebecque, the democratic cause might have had a different issue. The martial bishop took Gravelines and Dunkirk, and defeated the forces of the count of Flanders; but the French again crossed the frontier, and the bishop fled to England, to be censured in parliament and fined, for having failed in this partisan warfare. In that year, Richard proposed a measure for the conclusion of the war with France, which gives to this great quarrel an air of the ludicrous, ill-assorting with the miseries which it brought upon both countries. The king of England was seventeen years of age. There is a letter in the public records from Richard to the duke of Lancaster, in which he gravely proposes that the quarrel between England and France should be determined by a single combat between himself and the French king, Charles VI., who was then in his fifteenth year. It does not appear that John of Gaunt gave any encouragement to this precocious heroism. He concluded the truce with France in 1384, in which Scotland was comprehended. But the Scots refused to desist from warfare, and the duke led an army across the border, burning towns and cutting down forests. On his return to England he was again assailed by suspicions of disloyalty. A Carmelite friar put into the hands of Richard a paper, professing to disclose a conspiracy to deprive him of his crown, and give the kingdom to his uncle. Lancaster maintained his innocence, and demanded that the slanderer should be committed to safe |