This ordinance met with so little regard that a statute was made in parliament two years after, fixing the wages of all artificers and husbandmen, with regard to the nature and season of their labour. From this time it became a frequent complaint of the commons that the statute of labourers was not kept. The king had in this case, probably, no other reason for leaving their grievance unredressed than his inability to change the order of Providence. A silent alteration had been wrought in the condition and character of the lower classes during the reign of Edward III. This was the effect of increased knowledge and refinement, which had been making a considerable progress for full half a century, though they did not readily permeate the cold region of poverty and ignorance. It was natural that the country people, or uplandish folk, as they were called, should repine at the exclusion from that enjoyment of competence, and security for the fruits of their labour, which the inhabitants of towns so fully possessed. The fourteenth century was, in many parts of Europe, the age when a sense of political servitude was most keenly felt. Thus the insurrection of the Jacquerie in France about the year 1358 had the same character, and resulted in a great measure from the same causes, as that of the English peasants in 1382. And we may account in a similar manner for the democratical tone of the French and Flemish cities, and for the prevalence of a spirit of liberty in Germany and Switzerland.[413]