§ 1. INTRODUCTORY. RISE OF A WAGE-EARNING CLASS—The long reign of Henry III., although occasionally troubled by internal dissensions among the barons, was upon the whole a prosperous and peaceful time for the people in general, and more especially for those whom historians are pleased to call the lower classes. For by this time a remarkable change had begun to affect the condition of the serfs or villeins, a change already alluded to before, by which the villeins became free tenants, subject to a fixed rent for their holdings. This rent was rapidly becoming a payment in money and not in labour, for, as we saw, the lords of the manors were frequently in want of cash, and were ready to sell many of their privileges. The change was at first gradual, but by the time of the Great Plague (1348), money rents were becoming the rule rather than the exception; and though labour rents were not quite obsolete, it was an ill-advised attempt to extort them again that was the prime cause of Wat Tyler’s insurrection (1381). Before the Plague, in fact, villeinage in the old sense had become almost {41} extinct, and the peasants, both great and small, had achieved practical freedom. The richer villeins had developed into small farmers; while the poorer villeins, and especially the cottars, had formed a separate class of agricultural labourers, not indeed entirely without land, but depending for their livelihood upon wages paid for helping to cultivate the land of others. The rise of this class, that lived by wages and not by tilling their own land, was due to the fact that cottars and others, not having enough land of their own to occupy their whole time, were free to hire themselves to those who had a larger quantity of land. Especially would they become labourers at a fixed wage for the lord of a manor when he had commuted his rights to the unpaid services of all his tenants for a fixed money rent. Of course this change came gradually, but its effect is seen subsequently in the difficulties as to wages expressed in the Statute of Labourers, difficulties which first became serious after the Great Plague.