Chaucer is less explicit, and may have been too little of a politician by nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his incidental remarks concerning the lower classes. In his "Clerk's Tale" he finds room for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people," its levity, untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity, and the folly of putting any trust in it. In his "Nun's Priest's Tale" he further enlivens one of the liveliest descriptions of a hue-and-cry ever put upon paper by a direct reference to the Peasants' Rebellion:-- So hideous was the noise, ah bencite! That of a truth Jack Straw, and his meinie Not made never shoutes half so shrill, When that they any Fleming meant to kill. Assuredly, again, there is an unmistakably conservative tone in the "Ballad" purporting to have been sent by him "to King Richard," with its refrain as to all being "lost for want of steadfastness," and its admonition to its sovereign to ...shew forth the sword of castigation. On the other hand, it would be unjust to leave unnoticed the passage, at once powerful and touching, in the so-called "Parson's Tale" (the sermon which closes the "Canterbury Tales" as Chaucer left them), in which certain lords are reproached for taking of their bondmen amercements, "which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements," while lords in general are commanded to be good to their thralls (serfs), because "those that they clept thralls, be God's people; for humble folks be Christ's friends; they be contubernially with the Lord." The solitary type, however, of the labouring man proper which Chaucer, in manifest remembrance of Langland's allegory, produces, is one which, beautiful and affecting as it is, has in it a flavour of the comfortable sentiment, that things are as they should be. This is--not of course the "Parson" himself, of which most significant character hereafter, but--the "Parson's" brother, the "Ploughman". He is a true labourer and a good, religious and charitable in his life,--and always ready to pay his tithes. In short, he is a true Christian, but at the same time the ideal rather than the prototype, if one may so say, of the conservative working man.