It was the collection of this very unpopular tax that precipitated the violent outbreak of a discontent that had been smouldering among the lower classes for the last thirty years. Ever since the Black Death a silent but bitter contention had been in progress between the landholding classes and their tenants, more especially those who were still villeins, and bound to the soil. The main stress of the struggle had come from the fact that the dearth of labourers, and the rise in wages which resulted from the Black Death, had caused the lords of the manors to press more hardly on their tenants. They tried to get all the labour they could out of the villeins, and refused to take money payments for their farms instead of days of labour on the lord's fields. It seems, too, that they strove to claim as villeins many who were, or wished to be, free rent-paying copyhold or leasehold tenants. Moreover, when forced to hire free labour, they tried to under-pay it, relying on the scale of wages fixed by the Statute of Labourers in 1350, instead of abiding by the laws of supply and demand. The pressure on the part of the lords led to combinations in secret clubs and societies among the tenants, who agreed to refuse the statutory wages, and determined to agitate for the removal of all the old labour-rents. Their idea was to commute all such service due on their little holdings into money-rents, at the rate of 4_d._ for every acre. [Sidenote: =Communist doctrines of the Lollards.=] But the rising of 1380 was due to many other causes beside the grievance of the villeins. Much discontent can be traced to the mismanagement of the French war, which was all laid on John of Gaunt's shoulders. Much more was due to the filtering down of the teaching of the Lollards to the lower strata of the nation. Wicliffe had always preached that unjust and sinful rulers, whether clerks or laymen, were cut off from the right to use their authority by their own manifest unworthiness, and had no just dominion over their fellow-men. He had especially protested against the wealth and pomp of the clergy, and urged that they ought to return to apostolic poverty. The wilder and more headstrong of his followers had pressed his teaching to the advocacy of pure communism, saying that riches were in themselves evil, and that all men should be equal in all things. John Ball, the best known of these fanatical preachers, was wont to perambulate the country delivering sermons on his favourite text-- "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?"