‘Servants are now masters and masters servants,’ complained John Gower in Miroir de l’Omme (1380). As one writer put it in the early 1500s: ‘The peasants are too rich … and do not know what obedience means; they don’t take law into any account, they wish there were no nobles … and they would like to decide what rent we should get for our lands.’9 And according to another: ‘The peasant pretends to imitate the ways of the freeman, and gives himself the appearance of him in his clothes.’
