demnation of their wickedness. Edward made peace with France. By the Treaty of Bretigny a considerable part of France was to be his, and Frenchmen were to pay large sums of money to him.

10. The Labourers.-No one is ever the better for robbery. Englishmen had been in the habit of gaining riches by plunder, and money which is got without hard work is usually spent far too easily. The peace put an end to the chance of robbing Frenchmen, but it did not put an end to the expensive habits which had come to all sorts of people in England. Instead of trying to live more quietly and less extravagantly, Englishmen now began to try to get as much as they could from their neighbours. There was one class of people who suffered much. For a long time the land had been cultivated, not by labourers who work for a certain sum of money, but by serfs, or villeins, as they were then called. These villeins were men who had cottages, and lands of their own to cultivate. At one time they had not been badly off. As there was not much money in the country, many of them had paid rent not with money, but with work. They had done a certain number of days' work for their landlord instead of giving him a certain number of pounds or shillings. For some time, however, most of these villeins had paid money instead of working. It was now found that the landlords who had come back from France tried to make the villeins do more work than they had been accustomed to do, and even to make those of them do work who had not been obliged to work for many years. Besides these villeins there were

in the time of Edward III. a great many free labourers who worked for money as they do now. These, too, were hardly treated and forced to work very hard for very little pay.

11. The Black Death.-Whilst the villeins and labourers were grumbling, a terrible disease swept

over England. It was called the Black Death, and caused more destruction than any plague which has since destroyed men. We cannot tell exactly how many died, but it is supposed by some that at least one half of the people perished. This fearful death brought some hope to the serfs and labourers who

remained alive.

It is true that the rich died as well as the poor; but the land did not die. There was just as much work to be done as before, just as much corn to be reaped or sheep to be shorn, and only half as many reapers or shearers to do it. Instead of a master finding more men than he wanted, he could not find enough. The labourers naturally asked for more money than they had had before, and the villeins finding their work was more wanted, were less inclined to give as much of it as they had given before. The landlords, however, chose members of Parliament, and the villeins and labourers did not. The landlords, being in Parliament, made there what laws they pleased. One of the new laws made by them was known as the Statute of Labourers. By it any labourer was to be punished who asked for more wages than he had had before the Black Death. No wonder the labourers were very angry at being cheated in this way. A preacher named John Ball went about telling them not only that they had a right to as much as their labour was worth, but that there ought to be no more landlords. He was always repeating two lines

When Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then a gentleman?

till the villeins and labourers were ready to do anything.

12. The Last Days of Edward III.-It was not only the labourers who were dissatisfied. War with France broke out again, and the best leaders of the English were now dead. Edward III. lost his senses in his old age, and was unable either to fight or govern. The Black Prince was in ill-health. There

was a new French king, Charles V., who was too prudent to fight great battles. Step by step the English lost most of the land they had in France. The English nobles thought it would be a fine thing to rob the clergy, as they could no longer rob the French; and the king's third son, called John of Gaunt, that is to say, of Ghent, the town in Flanders where he had been born, cried out loudly that the clergy should have no more power in England, and began to turn them out of the offices which they held in the Government. It seems strange now that all the offices in the State should be filled by the clergy, and that a bishop should be Lord Treasurer to look after the king's money, or Lord Chancellor to decide lawsuits. But in those days no one who was not a clergyman knew enough to do anything which needed the exercise of a man's brains, and there was good sense enough still in England to remember this. The Black Prince, sick and wasted as he was, appeared in Parliament and declared against his brother. The Good Parliament, as it was called, turned off some of John of Gaunt's friends who had been getting money by cheating the king and the nation, and put the bishops back into office. But the Black Prince did not live long enough to do more. When he died, John of Gaunt did again as he liked, and soon after Edward III. died also. All the conquests of the early part of the reign had come to nothing, and Englishmen who had set out to rob Frenchmen were trying to rob one another. Warlike glory, when it does not come from self-defence, or from an attempt to protect the weak

against the strong, is like the apples which were once fabled to grow by the Dead Sea. Outwardly they were fair to look on, but they turned to dust and ashes in the mouth.

1. The Insurrection of the Peasants.-The reign of Richard II. brought more trouble. He was the son of the Black Prince, and though he was only ten years old it was hoped that he would be like his