Before the end of Edward III's reign the French war had produced a crop of disgrace, disorder, and discontent. Heavy taxation had not availed to retain the provinces ceded to England at the Treaty of Bretigny in 1360, and hordes of disbanded soldiery exploited the social disorganization produced by the Black Death; a third of the population was swept away, and many villeins deserted their land to take up the more attractive labour provided in towns by growing crafts and manufactures. The lords tried by drastic measures to exact the services from villeins which there were not enough villeins to perform; and the imposition of a poll-tax was the signal for a comprehensive revolt of town artisans and agricultural labourers in 1381. Its failure did not long impede their emancipation, and the process of commuting services for rent seems to have gone on more rapidly in the first half of the fifteenth than in the fourteenth century. But the passionate preaching of social equality which inflamed the minds of the insurgents produced no further results; in their existing condition of political education, the peasant and artisan had perforce to be content with watching the struggles of higher classes for power. Richard II, who had succeeded his grandfather in 1377, reaped the whirlwind of Edward's sowing, not so much in the consequences of the war as in the fruits of his peerage policy. The fourteenth century which nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronage shrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, nor has it any real English meaning. Its etymological meaning of "equal" does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. But the peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of parliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament nor electors to the House of Commons, are not even equal to one another; and certainly they would deny that other people were equal to them. The use of the word in its modern sense was borrowed from France in the fourteenth century; but in France it had a meaning which it could not have in England. A peer in France claimed equality with the crown; that is to say, he was the ruler of one of the great fiefs which had been equal to the county of Paris when the count of Paris had been elected by his equals king of France. If the king of Wessex had been elected king of England by the other kings of the Heptarchy, and if those other kings had left successors, those successors might have claimed to be peers in a real sense. But they had no such pretensions; they were simply greater barons, who had been the tenants-at-will of their king.