Foundations of Democracy

For a government to be by and for the people, the people—that’s those who aren’t born to privilege and rank—must have some chance to be involved. A century after King John signed the Magna Carta, the English peasant still had no such chance.
Upper class Englishmen spoke a language (Norman French) that the English peasant did not understand. Even if he had a case to take to court, the judge and lawyers spoke a different tongue. Even if he could have understood him, the armored, mounted medieval knight was considered invincible against any number of common folk and no one since Spartacus had ever said a word about serfs/slaves having any rights against the all powerful lord of the manor..
Several things would happen during the 1300 and 1400s to begin to change this. First of all a century long war would break out between everlastingly bitter rivals, England and France. But this war would result in three battles that would alter the social order of Europe forever.
It was accepted military doctrine that a peasant foot soldier had no chance against a mounted knight.. As long as that was true, there could be no equality between knight and peasant. (If I have the ability and legal right to kill you and there is nothing you can do to stop me or endanger me, there is no way you are my equal.)
The battles of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt (1346, 1356 and 1415) changed that perception forever. English and Welsh longbow men cut down the ranks of charging French knights in their suits of armor as if they were wheat in a field. Whole families of French nobility were wiped out.
A peasant with a weapon he could make for himself could be the equal or better of the best armored medieval warrior known. Chivalry—as a military force—was changed forever. (It might be noted that the knights at Crecy also faced the first known European field artillery. It would take a few more centuries, but the armored nobility was on its way out.)
These battles didn’t lead directly to democracy—but without them democracy would not have been possible. The next event that changed society forever was the Great Plague (or “Black Death”) of 1350 that may have killed half of Europe’s population. It’s affect in England was especially significant.
It created a labor shortage. Norman French nobles who came over with William after 1066 had never needed to learn the unwritten language of their English subjects. Sufficient was a bilingual foreman who could pass on the orders. But not now.
If you wanted the crops on your estate harvested, you had to go out and bargain with the surviving labor force. That meant speaking their language. The linguistic walls were beginning to crack.
In 1381 English became a written language again. A man named Geoffrey Chaucer took the crude peasant patois—with no structure or grammar left to it—and began to write down the tales told by religious pilgrims on their way to the great Cathedral at Canterbury. He wrote them in English—not Latin or Norman French. He became the father of modern written English
The final nail in the coffin of Norman French usage in England was driven in by the citizens of France. As the King in Paris became more powerful, Parisian French drowned out all the other French dialects. By the late 1400s, the upper classes in England became the only people anywhere in the world to still speak Norman French. By 1476 English became the legal language of England. Now a peasant could speak the same language as a judge or a king.
Then, possibly for the first time since Spartacus led his revolt before the birth of Christ, an actual peoples’ revolt broke out in parts of Europe. The man who led the revolt in England was Watt Tyler, leader of “The English Peasants Revolt” in the early 1380s.
He actually led about 50,000 peasants to London and occupied it. All the world seemed to be shaking. But it didn’t go anywhere at the time. When he tried to negotiate with members of the upper classes, he was treacherously killed. And the revolt dissolved in failure.
But a lot of people remembered that once there was a commoner who marched an army on London—and took it. They also remembered his wonderfully scatological slogan: “When Adam delved and Eve span—who then was gentleman?”
The gentlemen, the armored knights and courtiers, would hear versions of that question for the next few hundred years. In the 1400s, one more event occurred that helped make democracy possible in England. The nobility went to war with each other (The War of The Roses). They fought and killed each other until finally only about 50 families from before the war survived.
And now the stage was finally set. No monarch of the time could have dreamt a curtain was about to go up. Unlike Watt Tyler’s brief instant on the stage, this time the show would go on and on—until a document was written that claimed its legitimacy from “We The People … .”