by the Black Death on the peasants who survived.^175 In 1377 Richard II
was compelled by the gentry to legislate against villeins who affirmed
themselves ‘to be quite and utterly discharged of all manner of servi-
tude, due as much from their bodies as from their tenures’. The justices
of the peace were issued with special commissions to punish all such
rebels, and told to fine their maintainers and abettors also, ‘as their
estates [i.e. status] and the extent of their evil-doing demands’.^176
The Commons in parliament were afraid of the destruction of the
estatof landlords in England by ‘the same peril that had come upon
France by the rebellion and alliance of villeins against their lords’.^177
The Jacquerieof 1358 and the so-called ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ which finally
erupted in England in 1381 were seen as especially dangerous because
of their ‘maintainers and abettors’ among the burgesses. Movement to
a town was a villein’s route to freedom, and French legislation was early
concerned to control entry to the estate of burgess and define its rights
and obligations. Beaumanoir describes a custom that no burgess might
engage in private war like a gentleman, and records an ordinance made
‘for the profit of the gentry throughout the realm’ (i.e. one of the new
‘général établissements’ that were not just for the royal demesne), which
forbade any lord but the king to grant a burgess a fief.^178 In parlement
at Whitsun 1287 Philip IV issued a detailed ordinance on the way bour-
geoisiesshould be created and held in his kingdom, so as to avoid, he
said, the frauds by which his subjects were sorely aggrieved. Someone
aspiring to be a bourgeoismust go to the prévôtof the town, or the
mayor where he had the necessary authority, and give security that,
within a year and a day, he would buy premises in the town worth at
least sixty sous. The provost or mayor must then certify the fact to the
lord of the aspiring bourgeois, who would not enjoy a burgess’s legal
protection till it was done. The lord’s chartered privileges, his right to
pursue his serf and recover him from bourgeoisieand his continued
jurisdiction over the new burgess’s inherited property, were to be safe-
guarded.^179
Of course the real anxiety concerned not the merchants and regis-
tered burgesses but the crowds of artisans who moved less controllably
between town and country. In 1378 the Commons in the English
226 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^175) Harding, England in the Thirteenth Century, 77–8; R. Faith, ‘The “Great Rumour” of
1377 and Peasant Ideology’, in The English Rising of 1381, ed. R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston
(Cambridge UP, 1984); R. H. Britnell, ‘Feudal Reaction after the Black Death in the Palatinate
of Durham’, Past and Present, 128 (1990).
(^176) SRii. 2–3.
(^177) RPiii. 21b (no. 47).
(^178) R. Cazelles, ‘The Jacquerie’, and A. F. Butcher, ‘English Urban Society and the Revolt of
1381’, in The English Rising of 1381; Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, ii. 257 (§ 1499),
356–7 (§ 1671–2).
(^179) Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 314.