Lawyers And Repression

From the preface of Brooks Adams' book, the Emancipation of Massachusetts, we read with regard to fourteenth century England:

'Now the courts may say what they will in support of the vested interests, for to support vested interests is what lawyers are paid for. Only, unhappily, in the process of argument courts and lawyers have caused blood to flow copiously, for in spite of all that can be said to the contrary, men have practically proved that they do own all the property they can defend, all the courts in Christendom notwithstanding.....'

'Thus the law declined to recognise rights in property existing in fact, with the inevitable result of the peasant rising in 1381, known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion. Popular rage perfectly logically ran highest against the monks and the lawyers. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Chief Justice were killed, and the insurgents wished to kill, as Capgrave has related, "all the men that had learned any law."  Finally the rebellion was suppressed, chiefly by the duplicity of Richard II. Richard promised the people, by written charters, a permanent tenure as freemen at reasonable rents, and so induced them to go home with his charters in their hands; but they were no sooner gone than the vengeance began. Though Richard had been at the peasants' mercy, who might have killed him had they wished, punitive expeditions were sent in various directions. One was led by Richard himself, who travelled with Tresilian, the new Chief Justice, the man who afterwards was himself hanged at Tyburn. Tresilian worked so well that he is said to have strung up a dozen villeins to a single beam in Chelmsford because he had no time to have them executed regularly. Stubbs has estimated that seven thousand victims hardly satisfied the landlords' sense of outraged justice. What concerns us chiefly is that this repression, however savage, failed altogether to bring tranquillity.'