The estates’ mutual dissatisfactions and distrust are recorded by chroniclers, polemicists and satirists during the fourteenth and into the fifteenth centuries — mostly from the point of view of the governing ranks. Voicing the anxieties of those threatened by peasant unrest, John Gower in Vox Clamantis — completed in 1381, the year of the Peasants’ Revolt — surveys the three estates of Richard’s realm and takes to task, at length and in detail, the first and second estates for failing in their duty and allowing the rebellion to occur: ideally ‘There are the cleric, the knight, and the peasant, the three carrying on three [different] things. The one teaches, the other fights, and the third tills the fields.’^[45] He depicts a nightmare vision of the commons in the form of beasts, over-running the fertile garden of the land, from which emerged the jackdaw ‘Wat’ [Tyler], and John Ball.^[46] In the forefront, rebellious asses ‘contrary to nature’ were carried away by sudden revolt, and no longer useful: ‘They refused to carry sacks to the city any more and were unwilling to bend their backs under a heavy load.’ They defied nature, wanting the tails of tigers, the horns of wild beasts, and the trappings of horses. An ox ran amok ‘contrary to its rightful duties’ and forgetful of ‘its own nature’; swine and dogs rebelled, the cat no longer followed ‘its natural ways’ but joined with the fox in unnatural alliance with the dogs; the ranks of birds exchanged colours, calls and natures in horrible confusion, domestic and wild no longer separated. The scenes epitomise confusion of natural order, as Gower emphasises in the midst of this nightmare.^[47]

Gower uses a political rhetoric in which the ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ properties of animals serve for oblique comment on human behaviour. We know that Bartholomew, in his accounts of the properties of the bee, cow, dog, ass and ox, stresses their natural and useful properties: the ass, for example, is a melancholy, cold and dry animal, naturally heavy, slow and sluggish, stolid and uncomplaining, burden-carrying, long-suffering, used to lowly and scant food.^[48] His descriptions of the ideal and ‘natural’ properties of the workers who were supposed to serve patiently at the bottom of society can help us to appreciate the drama of Gower’s vision of the ‘unnatural’ ass, ox and other beasts, threatening society’s very foundations. Conversely, we have better insight into Bartholomew’s emphasis on the plight of the superannuated dog and ass if we consider it in the light of early Franciscan involvement with the poorest in society.