Aristocratic luxury, gambling, profligate wars--Jacques Bonhomme pays for them all. At Crecy and Poictiers, the lords are taken prisoners; have to provide heavy ransoms, which, being debts of honour, like gambling debts, are more binding than debts of honesty. But Jacques Bonhomme's back is broad, it will bear everything. Broad as it is, it will not bear this last straw. The tidings of Flemish freedom have, perhaps, in some way reached his dull ear, taught him that bondage is not, as his priest, no doubt, assures him it is, a changeless ordinance of God, that the yoke, though strong, may be broken. He strikes, arms himself with clubs, knives, ploughshares, rude pikes, breaks out into a Jacquerie, storms the castles of the oppressor, sacks, burns, slays with the fury of a wild beast unchained. The lords are stupefied. At last they rally and bring their armour, their discipline, their experience in war, the moral ascendency of a master-class to bear. The English gentlemen, in spite of the hostilities, only half suspended, between the nations, join the French gentlemen against the common enemy. Twenty thousand peasants are soon cut down, but long afterwards the butchery continues. Guillaume Callet, the leader of the Jacquerie, a very crafty peasant, as he is called by the organs of the lords, is crowned with a circlet of red-hot iron. In England, during the same period serfdom, we know not exactly how, is breaking up. There is a large body of labourers working for hire. But in the midst of the wars of the great conqueror, Edward III., comes a greater conqueror, the plague called the Black Death, which sweeps away, some think, a third of the population of Europe. The number of labourers is greatly diminished. Wages rise. The feudal parliament passes an Act to compel labourers, under penalties, to work at the old rates. This Act is followed by a train of similar Acts, limiting wages and fixing in the employers' interest the hours of work, which, in the pages of imaginative writers, figure as noble attempts made by legislators of a golden age to regulate the relations between employer and employed on some higher principle than that of contract. The same generous spirit, no doubt, dictated the enactment prohibiting farm labourers from bringing up their children to trades, lest hands should be withdrawn from the land-owner's service. Connected with the Statutes of Labourers, are those bloody vagrant laws, in which whipping, branding, hanging are ordained as the punishment of vagrancy by lawgivers, many of whom were themselves among the idlest and most noxious vagabonds in the country, and the authors of senseless wars which generated a mass of vagrancy, by filling the country with disbanded soldiers. In the reign of Richard II., the poll tax being added to other elements of class discord, labour strikes, takes arms under Wat Tyler, demands fixed rents, tenant right in an extreme form, and the total abolition of serfage. A wild religious