Wat Tyler and his peasant-followers demanded that the existing remnants of villeinage should be abolished, and that the land-rent be payable in money and not in personal services, and also that the trades and market-places be free from vexatious tolls and imposts. But Wat Tyler fell--the insurrection was suppressed--the barons and lords compelled the king to break the promises he had made, and the "shoeless ribalds," as the nobles called the insurgent rustics, were forced back to their former condition. But in a little over a century afterward, villeinage wholly disappeared. Contumely, oppression, and even butchery proved in the long run quite powerless against the efforts of the oppressed classes to reconquer their freedom. The wars of the roses dissolved many of the old liens, destroyed various domestic relations, and yet, with all their devastations, on the whole rather promoted the emancipation of land and labor. Richard III. made various regulations favorable to the peasantry and destructive of the still remaining vestiges of servitude. On this account, as well as for other reasons, some historians defend the memory of Richard III.; and it really seems that at first Richard was a good and upright man. But violent passions, lust of power, hatred of whoever opposed him or stood in his way, drove him step by step to measures of violence and to murder; and so he stands in history, a hideous and accursed monster in human form, reeking in the blood of his victims. Nations and parties often run the same career of violence and crime as individuals. Let the pro-slavery faction of to-day, which already begins to move in the bloody tracks of Richard, take warning! Under the Tudors but few traces of the former villeinage are to be found; still it survived until the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. But throughout the whole of the centuries during which rural servitude was slowly but steadily passing away, relics of a very stringent personal servitude, almost equal to slavery, lingered in the baronial manors and castles, in the personal relation between the masters and their retainers and menials. Against these remains of rural villeinage, vassalage, and slavery, the Henries and Elizabeths exercised their royal power, and issued decrees bearing on the subject generally, as well as others relating to special cases.[19] It is not necessary to record here--what every student in history knows--that in proportion as servitude began to decay, the prosperity of England increased, and that from its final abolition in every form dates the uninterrupted growth in wealth and power of the English nation. The abolition of rural servitude gave a vigorous impulse to agriculture, and secured to it its present high social significance; and now the old nobility all over Europe are proud to be agriculturists. Agriculture is now a science, and it is by freedom that it has thus reached the highest honor in the hierarchy of knowledge and labor.