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His father, Jacob, had been Governor of Ghent, and had made himself a great name by leading a revolt against the Count of Flanders, and driving that tyrant out of the country on one occasion. Philip was a quiet man, who attended to his own affairs and took no part in public business; but in the year 1381 the good people of Ghent found themselves in a very great difficulty.

And in those wars of Creçy and Poitiers, the constancy, the dauntless heart, and the steady hand of the English archers, which broke the chivalry of France, what is it but the constancy of Waterloo, the squares, the charge, the Duke's words, spoken quietly as the words of fate, decreeing an empire's fall, "Stand up, Guards!"? And in 1381, the tramp of the feet of the hurrying peasants, sons and grandsons of the archers of Creçy, in the great Revolt, indignant at ingratitude and wrong, what is it but the prelude to the supremacy of the People of England, to the Petition of Right, to Cromwell's Ironsides, to Chartism and Reform Acts, and the Democracy, self-governing, imperial and warlike of the present hour?

Though the lay landlords were often hard masters, the ecclesiastics, especially the monks, were harder still, and the ecclesiastics were served by lawyers of their own cloth, whose sharp practice became proverbial. Thus the law declined to recognize rights in property existing in fact, with the inevitable result of the peasant rising in 1381, known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion.

He reminded them of the iniquity of the government which was in power from 1378 to 1381, and that all who were then present had to lament, some a father, others a grandfather, put to death by its tyranny. He assured them they were now in the same danger, and that the city was sinking under the same disorders.

Farther on is the Strait of Le Catene, so called because in 1381 Lewis of Hungary actually put chains across it to protect the inner portions. Opposite to the channel is Perasto, to the left the Valle di Risano, to the right the Gulf of Cattaro.

After 1381 a full century of social chaos supervened, merging at times into actual civil war, until, in 1485, Henry Tudor came in after his victory at Bosworth, pledged to destroy the whole reactionary class which incarnated feudalism. For the feudal soldier was neither flexible nor astute, and allowed himself to be caught between the upper and the nether millstone.

In the period following the pestilences of the fourteenth century the difficulty in recruiting the ranks of the priesthood made the practice more frequent The charters of manumission issued by the king to the insurgents of 1381 would have granted freedom on a large scale had they not been disowned and subsequently withdrawn.

And all this time the war with Venice continued. At first it promised success, at Pola, for instance, where Luciano Doria was victorious, but at last beaten at Chioggia, and not knowing where to turn to make terms, the supremacy of the seas passed from Genoa to Venice, peace coming at last in 1381. Then the Genoese turned their attention to the affairs of their city.

A considerable body of Christian Serbs had stood up in Murad's line at the battle of Konia in 1381, before the treachery of another body of the same race gave him the victory eight years later at Kosovo. So little did the Osmanli state model itself on the earlier caliphial empires and so naturally did it lean towards the Roman or Byzantine imperial type.

Thus the nobles of the people and the Guelphs repossessed themselves of the government, which was lost by the plebeians after it had been in their possession from 1378 to 1381, when these changes took place.