They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields.

And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." It was the tyranny of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism.

A spirit fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime which condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball: "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman ?" [Sidenote: William Langland] More impressive, because of the very restraint and moderation of its tone, is the poem in which William Langland began at the same moment to embody with a terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of the time, its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery of the poor, the selfishness and corruption of the rich.

Nothing brings more vividly home to us the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed the rich from the poor than the contrast between his "Complaint of Piers the Ploughman" and the "Canterbury Tales." The world of wealth and ease and laughter through which the courtly Chaucer moves with, eyes downcast as in a pleasant dream is a far-off world of wrong and of ungodliness to the gaunt poet of the poor.

Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put to school and received minor orders as a clerk, "Long Will," as Langland was nicknamed from his tall stature, found his way at an early age to London, and earned a miserable livelihood there by singing "placebos" and "diriges" in the stately funerals of his day.