Nor was this growth in wealth the only, or indeed the most striking part of the town’s history during these three centuries from the time of Henry the Second to the time of Henry the Seventh. Trade is pretty much the same wherever it exists at all, and from its narrow dominion much of human energy will always make a way to escape. When Englishmen had spent a measure of their force in creating a nation of shopkeepers, there was still enough of buoyant and exuberant strength left to elaborate an art of government which has affected the history of the world; and the truly characteristic part of the mediæval story is that which enables us to measure the political genius with which the forerunners of our modern democracy shaped schemes of administration for the societies they had created of free workers. There was much to be done in the new ordering of life.[22] Already in the twelfth century a new force had declared itself when in France the middle and lower classes for the first time found a voice in literature. From that time onwards poets of the people and teachers of socialism, writing in the vulgar tongue for common folk, proposed startling questions and boldly pressed home their conclusions. Nothing was safe from their criticism; as they discussed the original rights of men, the “social contract” between the people and their lords, the tyranny of nobles, or the rights of peasants,[23] these new thinkers among the people gave warning of growing energies too big and passionate to live at ease in the narrow bondage of mediæval custom and tradition. The inevitable changes however came slowly, and those who lived in the midst of the movement were themselves unconscious of the real transformation that was going on. Even at the end of the fourteenth century the writer of Piers Ploughman, when he paints for us the picture of the feudal world as it then was, has no dream that its bondage can ever be broken, that there is any escape out of the prison-house of mediæval society. For the first time we there see England, not as it appeared to historians and satirists of the court or the monastery, but as it looked to one standing in the very midst of that vast “field full of folk from end to other”—to the poet who walked among the people with his heart full of charity and pity, who by day mixed with the crowd at the fair, or watched the bargainings in the market-place, or travelled along country by-ways and entered the hovels of the poor, and at night sat in the ale-house among beggars and mendicant friars. But while he shows us all the trouble and confusion of that tumultuous crowd, the social order remains to him simple and unchangeable—fixed, in his belief, as firmly as the decrees of God and nature could establish it. He could only repeat the old time-honoured counsels of work and obedience as the final remedy for all social ills: “Counsel not the commons the King to displease.” But it was more than possible that work and obedience might still leave, as it had left before, life empty of all but misery. Then the last solace lay in resignation.