190.
** Walsing, p.

209.
*** Froissard, liv.ii.chap.50, 51.Walsing.p.

239.
The expenses of these armaments, and the usual want of economy attending a minority, much exhausted the English treasury, and obliged the parliament, besides making some alterations in the council, to impose a new and unusual tax of three groats on every person, male and female, above fifteen years of age; and they ordained that, in levying that tax, the opulent should relieve the poor by an equitable compensation.

This imposition produced a mutiny, which was singular in its circumstances.
All history abounds with examples where the great tyrannize over the meaner sort; but here the lowest populace rose against their rulers, committed the most cruel ravages upon them, and took vengeance for all former oppressions.
{1381.} The faint dawn of the arts and of good government in that age, had excited the minds of the populace, in different states of Europe, to wish for a better condition, and to murmur against those chains which the laws enacted by the haughty nobility and gentry, had so long imposed upon them.

The commotions of the people in Flanders, the mutiny of the peasants in France, were the natural effects of this growing spirit of independence; and the report of these events being brought into England, where personal slavery, as we learn from Froissard,[*] was more general than in any other country in Europe, had prepared the minds of the multitude for an insurrection.