A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Divided interests in the Third Estate complicated the struggle. The petty bourgeois were seeking to wrest control from the ruling oligarchy of merchants and masters of guilds, and both parties used the rising agitation of the working class for their own ends. They had inflammable tinder in the unhappy ranks of the unskilled and in dispossessed peasants, driven into the cities by the wars, who created a reservoir of anger and misery.

  The late King’s ministerial structure, like the financial, was soon riddled by the uncles’ efforts to remove his councillors. Bureau de la Rivière, whom Charles V had loved and wished to have buried at his feet, was accused of treason by a spokesman of the Dukes but was saved when Clisson threw down his glove in the presence of the whole court and no one dared take up the awful challenge. In fear of reprisals, Rivière afterward left office, d’Orgement and Mercier were eventually pushed out, and another of the former councillors, Jean de La Grange, Cardinal of Amiens, found good reason to depart.

  La Grange was disliked by the young King, who had been led by the Cardinal’s enemies to believe that he kept a familiar demon. On one occasion when Charles was ten, he had crossed himself at the Cardinal’s approach, crying, “Flee from the Devil! Throw out the Devil!”—to the considerable annoyance of that prince of the Church. On learning that the young King, on his accession, had said to a friend, “This is the moment to revenge ourselves on this priest,” Cardinal La Grange put his treasure in safekeeping and fled to Avignon, never to return.

  The sensational fall of the Provost of Paris added to the sense of crumbling authority. Hugues Aubriot was a man in his sixties who had won the favor of Philip of Burgundy by extravagant banquets and gifts, and the favor of the bourgeois by construction of the first sewers and by vigorous repair of walls and bridges. But he was marked for destruction by the clergy, whom he openly insulted, and by the University, which he scorned as that “nursery of priests” and whose privileges he combatted and members he arrested on any pretext. It was said that he reserved two dungeons in the Châtelet expressly for scholars and clerics. At the funeral of Charles V, when Aubriot refused to allow the University to take precedence in the procession, a furious fracas broke out between the Provost’s sergeants and the scholars, ending with many of the University wounded and 36 thrown in jail. “Ha, that rabble!” Aubriot exclaimed. “I am sorry that nothing worse happened to them.”

  Aubriot’s intervention in the case of the Jews gave the University its handle for revenge. Accused of heresy, sodomy, and being a false Christian, and, specifically, of “profaning the sanctity of baptism” by returning the Jewish children, he was brought to trial before the Bishop of Paris in May 1381. Besides charges of voicing contempt for the Eucharist, failure to take communion at Easter, and public disrespect of the clergy, he was accused of neglect of a virtuous wife, of buying virgins, and having “recourse to sorcery that his passions might triumph,” of imprisoning husbands to have freedom with their wives, of cohabiting bestially with women against nature and having carnal relations with Jews.

  Convicted, but spared a death sentence by Burgundy’s influence, he was exposed on a wooden platform in front of the cathedral, where, on his knees and hatless, he was obliged to beg for absolution and vow an offering of candles for the baptized Jews he had returned to their parents. Absolved by the Bishop and Rector of the University, he was then condemned to perpetual penitence in prison on bread and water. His removal, contributing to the weakening of government, left the people of Paris readier to rise.

  Coucy during these uneasy happenings remained in the Royal Council on good terms with the Dukes, each of whom desired his support. One of Anjou’s first acts as Regent, on September 27, had been to confirm Coucy in lifetime possession of Mortaigne on the Channel, bestowed on him by the late King. In addition to grand estate, Coucy clearly possessed a personal power of attraction and a faculty for not making enemies. In the great game of “who’s in, who’s out,” he was always able to work with whoever held power, perhaps owing to political sophistication gained from the circumstances of his marriage. After accomplishing the treaty of peace with the Duke of Brittany in January 1381, he was sent once more as ambassador to the English at Montreuil to negotiate a dispute over terms of the truce. Later in the year, documents show him paying spies for information on Calais, Guînes, and other English fortresses. While charged with defense of the frontier, he was recalled to Paris in May to advise Anjou on his projects in Italy.

  Spoiling for a kingdom, Anjou needed money. Informed of the treasure stored by Charles V at Melun for the use of his son, Anjou laid hold of it by the direct expedient of threatening to execute the guardian of the fund. The Monk of St. Denis, however, does not vouch for this story because “one never knows the truth about these things that take place in the shadow.” Whatever Anjou obtained, it was not enough. He continued pressing for aids through 1381, winning a few grants here and there, but generally meeting sullen resistance.

  While France smoldered, true revolt erupted in June 1381 in England, not of the urban class but of the peasants. In a country whose economy was largely rural, they were the working class that mattered. The third poll tax in four years, to include everyone over the age of fifteen, was the precipitant. Voted in November 1380 by a subservient Parliament to finance Lancaster’s ambitions in Spain, the collection brought in only two thirds of the expected sum, not least because tax commissioners were easily bribed to overlook families or falsify their numbers. A second round of collecting became necessary, which could have been foreseen as an invitation to trouble if the lords and prelates and royal uncles of Richard’s government had paid attention to the constant complaints of rural insubordination. They did not, and brought upon themselves the most fearful challenge of the century.

  At the end of May, villages in Essex on the east coast just above London refused payment; the resistance spread with some evidence of planning, and burst into violence in Kent, the adjoining county south of the Thames. Peasants mingled with yeomen from the French wars armed themselves with rusty swords, scythes, axes, and longbows blackened by age, and triumphantly stormed a castle where a runaway villein had been imprisoned. Electing Wat Tyler, an eloquent demagogue and veteran of the wars, as their commander-in-chief, they seized Canterbury, forced the mayor to swear fealty to “King Richard and the Commons,” and liberated from the Archbishop’s prison the idealogue of the movement, John Ball. He was a vagrant priest, scholar, and zealot who had been wandering the country for twenty years, frequently hauled in by the authorities for prophesying against Church and state and preaching radical doctrines of equality.

  Although the poll tax was the igniting spark, the fundamental grievance was the bonds of villeinage and the lack of legal and political rights. Villeins could not plead in court against their lord, no one spoke for them in Parliament, they were bound by duties of servitude which they had no way to break except by forcibly obtaining a change of the rules. That was the object of the insurrection, and of the march on the capital that began from Canterbury.

  As the Kentishmen swept forward to London, covering the seventy miles in two days, the Essex rebels marched southward to meet them. Abbeys and monasteries on the way were a special object of animosity because they were the last to allow commutation of servile labor. In the towns, artisans and small tradesmen, sharing the quarrel of the little against the great, gave aid and food to the peasants. As the sound of the rising spread to other counties, riots and outbreaks widened.

  The “mad multitude” on its march from Kent and Essex opened prisons, sacked manors, and burned records. Some personally hated landlords and officials were murdered and their heads carried around on poles. Others, in fear of death, fled to hide in the same woods where villein outlaws frequently hid from them. Certain lords were forced by the rebels to accompany them “whether they would or not,” either to supply needed elements of command or the appearance of participation by the gentry.

  At the same time, peasant spokesmen swore to kill �
�all lawyers and servants of the King they could find.” Short of the King, their imagined champion, all officialdom was their foe—sheriffs, foresters, tax-collectors, judges, abbots, lords, bishops, and dukes—but most especially men of the law because the law was the villeins’ prison. Not accidentally, the Chief Justice of England, Sir John Cavendish, was among their first victims, along with many clerks and jurors. Every attorney’s house on the line of march reportedly was destroyed.

  If the Jacquerie 23 years earlier had been an explosion without a program, the Peasants’ Revolt arose out of a developing idea of freedom. Though theoretically free, villeins wanted abolition of the old bonds, the right to commute services to rent, a riddance of all the restrictions heaped up by the Statute of Laborers over the past thirty years in the effort to clamp labor in place. They had listened to Lollard priests, and to secular preachers moved by the evils of the time, and to John Ball’s theories of leveling. “Matters cannot go well in England,” was his theme, “until all things shall be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.… Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?”

  Wyclif’s spirit, which had dared deny the most pervasive authority of the time, was abroad. What had happened in the last thirty years, as a result of plague, war, oppression, and incompetence, was a weakened acceptance of the system, a mistrust of government and governors, lay and ecclesiastical, an awakening sense that authority could be challenged—that change was in fact possible. Moral authority can be no stronger than its acknowledgment. When officials were venal—as even the poor could see they were in the bribing of tax commissioners—and warriors a curse and the Church oppressive, the push for change gained strength.

  It was encouraged by the preachers’ castigation of the powerful. “The tournaments of the rich,” they said, “are the torments of the poor.” They regularly denounced “evil princes,” “false executors who increase the sorrows of widows,” “wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people,” and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for “lowness of blod or foulenesse of body,” for deformed shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft, and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stuffed with pride—of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power, comeliness, strength, children, treasure—“prowde in lokynge, prowde in spekyng,… prowde in goinge, standynge and sytting.” All would be drawn by fiends to Hell on the Day of Judgment.

  On that day of wrath, said the Dominican John Bromyard in terms that spoke directly to the peasant, the rich would have hung around their necks the oxen and sheep and beasts of the field that they had seized without paying for. The “righteous poor,” promised a Franciscan friar, “will stand up against the cruel rich at the Day of Judgment and will accuse them of their works and severity on earth. ‘Ha, ha!’ will say the others, horribly frightened, ‘These are the folk formerly in contempt. See how they are honored—they are among the sons of God! What are riches and pomp to us now who are abased?’ ”

  If the meek were indeed the sons of God (even if they too were scolded by the preachers for greed, cheating, and irreverence), why should they wait for their rights until the Day of Judgment? If all men had a common origin in Adam and Eve, how should some be held in hereditary servitude? If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

  At its climax on the outskirts of London, the Peasants’ Revolt came to the edge of overpowering the government. No measures had been taken against the oncoming horde, partly from contempt for all Wills and Cobbs and Jacks and black-nailed louts, partly from mediocre leadership and lack of ready resources. Lancaster was away on the Scottish border, Buckingham was in Wales, and the only organized armed forces were already embarking at Plymouth for Spain under the command of the third brother, Edmund of Cambridge. Except for 500 or 600 men-at-arms in the King’s retinue, the crown controlled no police or militia; London’s citizens were unreliable because many were in sympathy and some in active connivance with the rebels.

  Twenty thousand peasants were camped outside the walls demanding parley with the King. While they promised him safety, they shouted for the heads of Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hailes, the Chancellor and Treasurer, whom they held responsible for the poll tax, and for the head, too, of the arch “traitor,” John of Gaunt, symbol of misgovernment and a failing war. John Ball harangued them with a fierce call to cast off the yoke they had borne for so long, to exterminate all great lords, judges, and lawyers and gain for all men equal freedom, rank, and power.

  In agitated council, the government could find no course but to negotiate. Richard II, a slight fair boy of fourteen, accompanied by his knights, rode out to meet the insurgents and hear their demands: abolition of the poll tax and of all bonds of servile status, commutation at a rate of four pence an acre, free use of forests, abolition of the game laws—all these to be confirmed in charters sealed by the King. Everything the rebels asked was conceded in the hope of getting them to disperse and go home.

  Meanwhile, partisans had opened the city’s gates and bridges to a group led by Wat Tyler, who gained possession of the Tower of London and murdered Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hailes. Balked of Gaunt, they flung themselves upon his palace of the Savoy and tore it apart in an orgy of burning and smashing. At Wat Tyler’s order, it was to be not looted but destroyed. Barrels of gunpowder found in storage were thrown on the flames, tapestries ripped, precious jewels pounded to bits with ax heads. The Temple, center of the law with all its deeds and records, was similarly destroyed. Killing followed; Lombards and Flemings (hated simply as foreigners), magnates, officials, and designated “traitors” (such as the rich merchant Sir Richard Lyons, who had been impeached by the Good Parliament and restored by Lancaster) were hunted down and slain.

  In the hectic sequence of events, only Richard moved in a magic circle of reverence for the King’s person. Perched on a tall war-horse before the peasants, a charming boy robed in purple embroidered with the royal leopards, wearing a crown and carrying a gold rod, gracious and smiling and gaining confidence from his sway over the mob, he granted charters written out and distributed by thirty clerks on the spot. On this basis, many groups of peasants departed, believing in the King as their protector.

  While in London, Sir Robert Knollys, the Master of War, was urgently assembling an armed force, Wat Tyler, inflamed by blood and conquest, was exhorting his followers toward a massacre of the ruling class and a takeover of London. He was no longer to be satisfied by the promised charters, which he suspected were hollow, and he knew he would never be included in any pardon. He could only go forward toward a seizure of power. According to Walsingham, he boasted that “in four days’ time all the laws of England would be issuing from his mouth.”

  He returned to the camp at Smithfield for another meeting with the King, where he put forth a new set of demands so extreme as to suggest that their purpose was to provoke rejection and provide a pretext for seizing Richard in person: all inequalities of rank and status were to be abolished, all men to be equal below the King, the Church to be disendowed and its estates divided among the commons, England to have but one bishop and the rest of the hierarchy to be eliminated. The King promised everything consistent with the “regality of his crown.” Accounts of the next moments are so variously colored by the passions of the time that the scene remains forever obscure. Apparently Tyler picked a quarrel with a squire of the King’s retinue, drew a dagger, and in a flash was himself struck down by the short sword of William Walworth, Mayor of London.

  All was confusion and frenzy. The peasants drew their bows; some arrows flew. Richard, with extraordinary nerve, ordering no one to follow, rode forward alone, saying to the rebels, “Sirs, what is it you require? I am your captain. I am your King. Quiet yourselves.” While
he parleyed, Knollys’ force, hastily summoned, rode up and surrounded the camp in mailed might with visors down and weapons gleaming. Dismayed and leaderless, the peasants were cowed; Wat Tyler’s head displayed on a lance completed their collapse, like that of the Jacques at the death of Guillaume Cale.

  Ordered to lay down their arms and assured of pardons to encourage dispersal, they trailed homeward. Leaders, including John Ball, were hanged and the rising elsewhere in England was suppressed—with sufficient brutality, if not the wild massacre that had taken place in France after the Jacquerie. Except for scattered retribution, the English revolt, too, was over within a month, defeated more by fraud than by force. The pardons issued in the King’s name were revoked without compunction, and the charters canceled by a landowners’ Parliament on the grounds that they had been issued under duress. To a deputation from Essex who came to remind the King of his promise to end villeinage, Richard replied, “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.”

  The assumptions of autocrats are often behind the times. Economic forces were already propelling the decline of villeinage, and commutation continued, despite the crushing of the revolt, until the unfree peasant gradually disappeared. Whether the revolt hastened or delayed the process is obscure, but the immediate outcome encouraged complacency in the ruling class, beginning with the King. Perhaps intoxicated by success, Richard developed all the instincts of absolutism except the toughness to quell his opponents, and was to end as the victim of one of them. The military saw no need for improvement; the Church was stiffened against reform. Alarmed by the Lollards’ leveling doctrines, the privileged class turned against them. In Gower’s “Corruptions of the Age,” the poet denounced them as breeders of division between church and state sent into the world by Satan. Lollardy went underground, long postponing the Protestant separation.