Peasants' Revolt

“ They were rather the revolts of the poor against the rich, of debtors against creditors, of men who had scantly legal rights or none at all, against those who had the protection of the existing laws; and they were joined by the poor of the towns as well as by the peasantry of the country districts. The peasants generally began the revolt and the townsmen followed, but this was not always the case. Sometimes the mob of the cities rose first and the peasants joined afterwards. In many cases, too, the poorer nobles were in secret or open sympathy with the insurrectionary movement. ”

“ Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants: their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice; their scorn of the immorality of the nobles and the infamy of the court; their resentment at the perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.
The Peasant Rising
From the eastern and midland counties the restlessness spread to all England south of the Thames. But the grounds of discontent varied with every district. ”

“ But, dangerous as the great peasant insurrection appeared for many weeks, and manifold as were the characters and passions which blazed forth in it, the peasants themselves were little more than an undulating mass; the greater part of their demagogues and leaders belonged to another class; on the whole, it appears to us that the intelligence and capacity of the leaders, whether peasants or others, was but small, and equally small the warlike capacity of the masses. ”

“ Both the Pope and the great barons were against him, and in 1198 Archbishop Hubert was compelled to resign the judiciarship.
The Peasant Revolt and its Leaders, 1381
The great uprising of the peasants in 1381 was a very different matter from the local insurrection made by FitzOsbert. Two centuries had passed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been admitted in the Great Charter.
The Peasant Revolt was national. ”

“ Almost everywhere the peasants arose and threatened death and destruction to the authorities and existing laws. Nothing is more easy than, with preconceived opinions, either to proclaim this war a noble struggle for freedom, or, on the other hand, to trample under foot the just sighs of the deeply injured peasants. ”

“ But they have done so in spite of the protest of the other peasants, only their economic position making it possible, and their friend the official has not been able to prevent, therefore, the other peasants from giving a violent character to their protest. ”

“ The recent uprising of the peasantry offered a good opportunity for this tendency. It says: “The recent rebellion, aimed, under the pretext of a crusade, against the whole nobility, and led by a robber chief, has, for all days to come, put the stain of faithlessness on the peasants, and they have thereby forfeited their liberty and become subject to their landlords in unconditional and perpetual servitude. The peasant has no sort of right over his master’s land save bare compensation for his labor and such other reward that he may obtain. ”

“ Want and misery finally drove the peasants to despair, and under the name of Bagaudæ, or banditti, they began an insurrection which may be placed on a level with the most terrible peasant wars which find a place in history. ”

“ The nobility and the Church, those who held the bulk of the wealth of the community, were relieved of all taxation, the whole burden of which fell upon the mercantile and laboring classes—an unfair exaction that threatened to crush industry out of existence. And to picture the condition of the peasantry, the tyranny of the feudal customs, it will serve to repeat the oft-told tale of the peasants who, after their day’s hard labor in the fields, were forced to beat the ponds all night long in order to silence the croaking of the frogs that disturbed some noble lady’s slumbers. ”

“ At a time when the necessities of the state had been great enough to be made the pretext of a dreadful revolution, they were not only almost exempt from contributing to its relief, but were enriched by the common distress; and while the rest of their countrymen beheld with unavailing regret their property gradually replaced by scraps of paper, the peasants became insolent and daring by impunity, refused to sell but for specie, and were daily amassing wealth. ”

“ If the cheated Grangers became violent, all was lost. How we socialists worked to hold them back! There were days and nights when Ernest never closed his eyes in sleep. The big leaders of the Grangers saw the peril and were with us to a man. But it was all of no avail. The Oligarchy wanted violence, and it set its agents-provocateurs to work. Without discussion, it was the agents-provocateurs who caused the Peasant Revolt. ”

“ The result was those terrible insurrections of the peasants—the very threat of which alarmed the nobles—the ruin of landed property, and the failure of those sources from which a nation should derive its prosperity and its strength. ”

“ They desolated the open country; burned and plundered the villages; and by cutting off all means of communication or subsistence, reduced even the inhabitants of the walled towns to the most extreme necessity. The peasants, formerly oppressed, and now left unprotected by their masters, became desperate from their present misery; and rising every where in arms, carried to the last extremity those disorders which were derived from the sedition of the citizens and disbanded soldiers. ”

“ Throughout Germany similar slaughter of the peasantry and wholesale executions took place. In many places the reprisal took the dimensions of a massacre, and it is said that by the end of the frightful struggle more than a hundred thousand of the peasants had been slain. As for its political results, the survivors were reduced to a deeper state of servitude than before. Thus ended a great struggle which had only needed an able leader to make it a success and to free the people from feudal bonds. It ended like all the peasant outbreaks, in defeat and renewed oppression. ”

“ I was seventeen when, in 1861, the peasants were freed of the violence of the landlords, but were so badly supplied with land that the laboring masses were again forced to go into slavery to the wealthy. The agitations among the peasants provoked terrible executions. ”

“ On the other side, complaints were heard at that time of the insolence shown by the wealthier peasants; of the luxury, in which they tried to rival their masters; and of the arrogance and defiant demeanour of the peasantry in general. The oppression endured by any particular class of the civil community does not usually lead to violent disturbances and outbreaks, unless and until that class is awakened to a higher sense of its own importance and has acquired an increase of power. ”

“ Even the glory of successful warfare shed no radiance on a peasant's hut. He fought for his master, and not for himself, and scarcely for his country. He belonged to his master as completely as if he could be bought and sold. Christianity teaches the idea of a universal brotherhood; Feudalism suppressed or extinguished it. Peasants had no rights, only duties,--and duties to hard and unsympathetic masters. Can we wonder that a relation so unequal should have been detested by the people when they began to think? ”

“ One village rose against another. It was not a question of the transfer of riches from one class or individual to another, but of the destruction of treasures, of agriculture, and of the economic stability of the State. The instincts of proprietorship inherent in the peasantry irresistibly grew as these seizures and partitions took place. The mental attitude of the peasantry upset all the plans of the Revolutionary Democracy. By converting the peasants into a Petite Bourgeoisie, it threatened to postpone to an indefinite date the triumph of Socialism. ”

“ The first great successful peasant rebellion was the fight for freedom made by the people of the four forest cantons in Switzerland. The weapons with which they overthrew the chivalry of Europe, rude pikes made by tying their scythes to their alpenstocks, may still be seen in the historical museums of Basel and Constance. They proved that man for man the peasant was as good as the noble. The free peasant soldier had come into being. These free peasants did not really secede from the Empire till 1499, and were formally connected with it till 1648. ”

“ And whatever may be thought of the extravagance or narrow-minded bigotry of many of their tenets, it is impossible to deny the praise of devoted courage to a few hundred peasants, who, without leaders, without money, without magazines, without any fixed plan of action, and almost without arms, borne out only by their innate zeal, and a detestation of the oppression of their rulers, ventured to declare open war against an established government, supported by a regular army, and the whole force of three kingdoms. ”

“ Many persons, frightened and scandalized at this spectacle, have declared the peasantry as irreclaimably perverse. This is at the same time an injustice, and a very false appreciation of their character. The peasants regard us almost as their enemies. They comprehend nothing of our civilization, contribute nothing to it of their own accord, and they think themselves authorized to profit by its disasters, whenever they can. ”

“ A population dispersed and scattered about a country did not present, as in cities, a formidable mass, capable of resistance. Peasants rarely communicated with each other, and could not support any demand, or establish any common right. Man requires some intelligence to make him sensible of the advantages of liberty, and the peasant class was then [290] brutified by ignorance. ”

“ As soon as the peasant emerges from his revolutionary period and becomes the undisputed owner of his land, he supports the readiest that government which not only respects his property, but also protects it from devastation through foreign invasion and civil war. This explains the support given by the French peasants to the victorious Napoleonic Empire, and their hostility to the urban revolutionaries as soon as the latter appeared to be the instigators of civil war. ”

“ Yes, the curse of the peasantry is that it is scattered, disjointed, backward. Moreover, the interests of the various peasant groups do not coincide. The peasants arose and fought adroitly against their local slave-holders, yet they stopped in reverence before the all-Russian slave-holder. The sons of the peasants in the army did not understand that the workingmen were shedding their blood not only for their own sake, but also for the sake of the peasants. ”

“ No doubt the mass became infected with the peasant spirit, for peasants formed the bulk of the army, especially when the townsman became the munition-worker. The peasant's mind is both childlike and suspicious, slow to anger, secretive, inclined to deep reflection. He attaches himself slowly, and only after long proof, to those who win his reluctant confidence, and deeply tenacious are his purposes. He will defend his land to the death; he loves it as he loves liberty. He insists on his independence as he insists upon equality, and only upon that principle will he submit to discipline. ”

“ The peasants, too, had to work on the roads for nothing, leaving their farms and little plots of ground whenever they were ordered. They could not earn enough to live on, and what with heavy dues to their lords, and the State interference with trade, they were in a wretched plight, and discontent was widespread. ”

“ The genuine peasant is never ashamed of his rank and calling; he is rather inclined to look down on every one who does not wear a smock frock, and thinks a man who has the manners of the gentry is likely to be rather windy and unsubstantial. In some places, even in French districts, this feeling is strongly symbolized by the practice of the peasantry, on certain festival days, to dress the images of the saints in peasant’s clothing. History tells us of all kinds of peasant insurrections, the object of which was to obtain relief for the peasants from some of their many oppressions ”

“ No doubt the peasantry may be got to rise in some bloody "jacquerie." They might be drawn into some agrarian revolution—like the Pougatchef revolt in the eighteenth century—which would satisfy their craving for possessing and extending the soil they cultivate. But the hunger for land once satisfied, the peasantry would again become conservative, like the French peasant proprietor after the French Revolution, and so far from joining any mere "intellectual" revolution, they would dread such a revolution as a possible reaction and as a menace to their newly acquired rights. ”

“ The peasant uprising now assumed serious proportions in different parts of the Empire, everywhere the peasants showing moderation in their demands, together with a great capacity for organized action, but everywhere also insisting upon the necessity of a move in the sense of land nationalization. ”

“ Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory. ”