With him they rode nearly as far as
Bletchingley, and Nigel laughed much to hear him talk; but always
under the raillery there was much earnestness and much wisdom in
all his words. He rode at his ease about the country, he said,
having sufficient money to keep him from want and to furnish him
for the road. He could speak all the three languages of England,
the north, the middle and the south, so that he was at home with
the people of every shire and could hear their troubles and their
joys. In all parts in town and in country there was unrest, he
said; for the poor folk were weary of their masters both of the
Church and State, and soon there would be such doings in England
as had never been seen before.
But above all this man was earnest against the Church its enormous
wealth, its possession of nearly one-third of the whole land of
the country, its insatiable greed for more at the very time when
it claimed to be poor and lowly. The monks and friars, too, he
lashed with his tongue: their roguish ways, their laziness and
their cunning. He showed how their wealth and that of the haughty
lord must always be founded upon the toil of poor humble Peter the
Plowman, who worked and strove in rain and cold out in the fields,
the butt and laughing-stock of everyone, and still bearing up the
whole world upon his weary shoulders. He had set it all out in a
fair parable; so now as he rode he repeated some of the verses,
chanting them and marking time with his forefinger, while Nigel
and Aylward on either side of him with their heads inclined inward
listened with the same attention, but with very different feelings
--Nigel shocked at such an attack upon authority, and Aylward
chuckling as he heard the sentiments of his class so shrewdly
expressed.
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