Unfortunately the new government proved wholly unable either to conduct the struggle with France successfully or to pluck up courage to make a humiliating peace--the only wise course before them. The nation was too proud to accept defeat, and persevered in the unhappy attempt to reverse the fortunes of war. An almost unbroken series of petty disasters marked the first three years of King Richard. The worst was the failure of the last great devastating raid which the English launched against France. Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III., took a powerful army to Calais, and marched through Picardy and Champagne, past Orleans, and finally to Rennes in Brittany, but accomplished nothing save the ruin of his own troops and the wasting of a vast sum of money. Meanwhile taxation was heavy, the whole nation was seething with discontent, and--what was worst--no way was visible out of the miserable situation; ministers and councillors were repeatedly displaced, but their successors always proved equally incompetent to find a remedy. The Great Revolt of 1381. This period of murmuring and misery culminated in the Great Revolt of 1381, a phenomenon whose origins must be sought in the most complicated causes, but whose outbreak was due in the main to a general feeling that the realm was being misgoverned, and that some one must be made responsible for its maladministration. It was actually provoked by the unwise and unjust poll-tax of one shilling a head on all adult persons, voted by the parliament of Northampton in November 1380. The last poll-tax had been carefully graduated on a sliding scale so as to press lightly on the poorest classes; in this one a shilling for each person had to be exacted from every township, though it was provided that "the strong should help the weak" to a certain extent. But in hundreds of villages there were no "strong" residents, and the poorest cottager had to pay his three groats. The peasantry defended themselves by the simple device of understating the numbers of their families; the returns made it appear that the adult population of England had gone down from 1,355,000 to 896,000 since the poll-tax of 1379. Thereupon the government sent out commissioners to revise the returns and exact the missing shillings. Their appearance led to a series of widespread and preconcerted riots, which soon spread over all England from the Wash to the Channel, and in a few days developed into a formidable rebellion. The poll-tax was no more than the spark which fired the mine; it merely provided a good general grievance on which all malcontents could unite. In the districts which took arms two main causes of insurrection may be differentiated; the first and the most widespread was the discontent of the rural population with the landowners and the Statute of Labourers. Their aim was to abolish all villein-service, and to wring from their lords the commutation of all manorial customs and obligations for a