“Yea, quoth Patience, and hente out of his poke A piece of the Pater Noster and proffered to us all. And I listened and looked what livelihood it were; Then was it ‘Fiat voluntas tua’ that should find us all. ‘Have, Actyf,’ quoth Patience, ‘and eat this when thee hungreth Or when thou clomsest for cold or clyngest for drought; And shall never gyves thee grieve nor great lord’s wrath, Prison nor other pain for—_patientes vincunt_.”[24]
Such was Langland’s final solution for the disorders of his time. But the English were not a patient people, and the problem of the reorganization of society had become a very serious one towards the close of the Middle Ages, and was perhaps more urgent to men’s fears and consciences in the fifteenth century than it had ever been before, or was to be again till our own day. It was a pressing question for humble folk, for shopkeepers and traders and artisans and journeymen who in the absence of privilege were driven to think of liberty; and in the crowded lanes, the mean workshops, the disorderly market-place, the little thatched Common Hall of the mediæval town, great principles of freedom found their early home, and fought their way to perfection and supremacy. It was not enough that the burghers should create societies of free men—”_gentlemen_,” as Piers Ploughman would have said,[25] to whom the great difference that distinguished between man and man was not wealth or poverty, labour or ease, but freedom or bondage. This was the easier part of their task, and was practically finished early in their history. It was a longer and more difficult business to discover how the art of government should be actually practised in these communities, and to define the principles of their political existence. But in these matters also the burghers became the pioneers of our liberties, and their political methods have been handed down as part of the heritage of the whole people. As by degrees the multitude of privileges promised and confirmed left the important towns with no more demands to make, they turned their energies to the work of framing those elaborate and highly artificial constitutions which mark the highest point to which their proud and self-sufficient independence had attained. Instead of tamely accepting the pattern or the theory of its neighbours, every town was making its own peculiar experiment in the art of governing, with a vivacity and a restless ingenuity proper to the culminating moment of their activity.