The storm that almost swept away all bulwarks of civilized and regular society seems to have been long in collecting itself. Perhaps a more sagacious legislature might have contrived to disperse it: but the commons only presented complaints of the refractoriness with which villeins and tenants in villenage rendered their due services;[415] and the exigencies of government led to the fatal poll-tax of a groat, which was the proximate cause of the insurrection. By the demands of these rioters we perceive that territorial servitude was far from extinct; but it should not be hastily concluded that they were all personal villeins, for a large proportion were Kentish-men, to whom that condition could not have applied; it being a good bar to a writ de nativitate probandâ that the party's father was born in the county of Kent.[416] After this tremendous rebellion it might be expected that the legislature would use little indulgence towards the lower commons. Such unhappy tumults are doubly mischievous, not more from the immediate calamities that attend them than from the fear and hatred of the people which they generate in the elevated classes. The general charter of manumission extorted from the king by the rioters of Blackheath was annulled by proclamation to the sheriffs,[417] and this revocation approved by the lords and commons in parliament; who added, as was very true, that such enfranchisement could not be made without their consent; "which they would never give to save themselves from perishing all together in one day."[418] Riots were turned into treason by a law of the same parliament.[419] By a very harsh statute in the 12th of Richard II. no servant or labourer could depart, even at the expiration of his service, from the hundred in which he lived without permission under the king's seal; nor might any who had been bred to husbandry till twelve years old exercise any other calling.[420] A few years afterwards the commons petitioned that villeins might not put their children to school in order to advance them by the church; "and this for the honour of all the freemen of the kingdom." In the same parliament they complained that villeins fly to cities and boroughs, whence their masters cannot recover them; and, if they attempt it, are hindered by the people; and prayed that the lords might seize their villeins in such places without regard to the franchises thereof. But on both these petitions the king put in a negative.[421]