As a consequence of the great mortality among small tenant farmers and the labouring classes generally, and forced by the failure of legislation to practically cope with the "strike" organised by the survivors, the landowners quickly despaired of carrying on the traditional system of [p200] cultivation with their own stock under bailiffs. Professor Thorold Rogers has pointed out that "very speedily after the plague, this system of farming by bailiff was discontinued, and that of farming on lease adopted." The difficulty experienced by the tenant of finding capital to work the farms at first led to the institution of the stock and seed lease, which, after lasting till about the close of the fourteenth century, gave place to the ordinary land lease, with, of course, a certain fixity of tenure, which at this day we do not associate with that form of lease. Some landowners tried, with more or less success, to continue the old system; but these formed the exception, and by the beginning of the next century the whole tenure of land had been changed in England by the great mortality of 1349, and by the operation of the "trades unions," which sprung up at once among the survivors, and which are designated, in the statute against them, as "alliances, covines, congregations, chapters, ordinances and oaths." The people all at once learnt their power, and became masters of the situation, and although for the next thirty years the lords and landowners fought against the complete overthrow of the mediæval system of serfdom, from the year of the great mortality its fall was inevitable, and practical emancipation was finally won by the popular rising of 1381. Even to the last, however, the landowning class appear to have remained in the dark as to the real issues at stake. They claimed the old labour rents, by which their manor lands had been worked, as well as the money payments for which they had been commuted, and they desired that the old ties of the tenant in villainage to the soil of his lord should be maintained. Even Parliament was apparently at fault as to the danger which threatened the established system. It is impossible, however, to read the sermons of the period without seeing how entirely the clergy were with the people in their determination to secure full and entire liberty for themselves and their posterity, and it is probably to their countenance and advice that the preamble of an [p201] Act passed in the first year of Richard II. refers when it says: "Villains withdraw their services and customs from their lords, by the comfort and procurement of others, their counsellors, maintainers, and abettors, which have taken hire and profit of the said villains and land tenants, by colour of certain exemplifications made out of Domesday, and affirm that they are discharged and will suffer no distress. Hereupon they gather themselves in great routs, and argue by such a confederacy that everyone shall resist their lords by force."