William was true to his word. When Bishop Gundulf finished his work late in 1080, he was released to Rochester where he immediately began work on his beloved cathedral. Although it would not be finished until 1130, nearly three decades after his death, the wailing monk lived long enough to see substantial portions of the work completed. It would seem that he lived to be nearly eighty-four years old. William the Conqueror was not, however, so lucky. In 1087, only nine years after commissioning the construction of the White Tower, William I of England died, leaving his kingdom, his throne and his fortress to his son, William II, known as William Rufus (the red) because of his bright red hair. While the English may have understandably hated his father, Rufus was equally despised by his own Norman lords, but he did carry out substantial work on the White Tower and persuaded Gundulf, the wailing monk, to build one last castle in his bishopric of Rochester.
2
DANGEROUS LIAISONS
Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt 1381
Fourteenth-century England was a place of unprecedented social and economic turmoil. By mid-century the Black Death combined with the endless military campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War had reduced the workforce by nearly half and bled the Royal Treasury dry. Add to these disasters a series of bad laws, bad administration and pure bad luck and the result was the most devastating urban riot in the nation’s history. Fortunately the entire incident was recorded not only by numerous court chroniclers, but also by the greatest chronicler of the age, Jean de Froissart, and a young clerk named Geoffrey Chaucer.
When the beloved heir to the throne, Edward the Black Prince, died in 1376, his ageing father, Edward III, was left with a dilemma. Should the crown pass to his younger son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, or the Black Prince’s son Richard? Adhering to a strict interpretation of the succession laws, Edward left the crown to his nine-year-old grandson and appointed the massively unpopular Gaunt as head of the government and regent until Richard reached the age of majority. Gaunt, who had been appointed head of the English army in France on his brother’s death, was not pleased with his father’s choice of heir. Within a year of making these arrangements Edward III was dead, the new king was a ten-year-old child and John of Gaunt, though not king himself, was responsible for the management and welfare of England as well as the ongoing Hundred Years’ War with France.
The day after his grandfather’s death, Prince Richard was escorted to the Tower where he would be sequestered for his own safety until final plans for his coronation could be made. Three weeks later, the streets of London were festooned with banners and tapestries and lined with cheering crowds to welcome their new king as he rode to Westminster Cathedral and his coronation. It was a grand and awesome spectacle and, by all accounts, Richard II lived up to everyone’s expectations. He was an extraordinarily beautiful child; pale and aesthetic looking, with wavy golden locks that glistened like a halo in the sun ringing his delicate face. Dressed entirely in white for his investiture, the new king was, according to the chronicler Holinshed, ‘as beautiful as an arch-angel’. But beneath the fine medieval pageantry lurked a social cancer that had been eating away at English society for two generations.
Between 1348 and 1353 the Black Death had swept through England, taking the lives of nearly one-third of the population. To add to the devastation, more than a decade before the plague struck, England had begun a series of wars with France that had, by the time of Richard’s coronation in 1377, reduced the male population by another 25 per cent. This massive drop in the labour force left huge tracts of once-productive farmland untended and entire towns and villages deserted. The scarcity of farm labour brought about an acute shortage of food and an accompanying rise in prices as workers demanded higher wages, or simply left their farms in search of better paying jobs elsewhere. Understandably, landowners were desperate to keep their peasants (many of whom were serfs and legally tied to their manor) on the land and working. To make matters worse for everyone, as the economy imploded, taxes crept higher and higher to maintain government services and to fund the ongoing French wars.
As early as 1351 the government attempted to address the problem by imposing a wage and price freeze known as the Statute of Labourers. Among the provisions of the statute were the following:
All labourers under the age of thirty-six must work for the same wage as they received prior to 1348.
Any worker or servant who leaves his lord’s service without cause or licence would be imprisoned.
Any man who pays his servant more than their pre-1348 wage will be fined twice the amount of that labourer’s wage.
Anyone giving alms to the poor or gifts to beggars will be imprisoned.
This last clause was to make certain that everyone physically able to work did so. Despite the Statute of Labourers, serfs continued to steal away from their land, prices continued to rise and each new round of taxes became a heavier burden on everyone. By the time the young Richard II came to the throne, England was physically exhausted, nearing bankruptcy, and the people were growing increasingly restive. Only the natural human tendency to grumble rather than fight kept the nation from unravelling.
But John of Gaunt, Richard’s uncle and regent, was more concerned with making war on the French than bureaucratic details or public welfare. Much that could have been done to redress the problems was ignored or grossly mishandled. What taxes could be collected were promptly funnelled into the military rather than the projects for which they had been earmarked. At Gaunt’s urging, in November 1380 the new Chancellor (Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury) and the king’s sergeant-at-arms (John Legge, a member of the privy council) came up with a new, single-levy poll tax set at 3 groats (the equivalent of 1 shilling) to be paid by every person over the age of fifteen. For skilled tradesmen this was the equivalent of a week’s wages; for serfs who seldom even saw hard currency, it was nothing short of disastrous. Worse still, the 1380 levy was the third such tax to be passed in four years.
The tax collectors were resisted everywhere they went. Taxmen were run out of towns and villages while thousands of people temporarily disappeared. When the tax boxes returned to London, they contained less than two-thirds of what had been expected. To make up for the loss in revenue, in the spring of 1381 the tax men were sent out to collect the tax again – from everyone, whether they had paid the previous tax or not. Riots broke out wherever the taxman showed his face.
Anywhere people congregated, in churches, in public squares and at town markets, agitators were there inciting them to resist the extortionate tax. Among the most virulent opponents of government policy was a defrocked priest from Maidstone, Kent, named John Ball. He not only advocated refusing to pay the tax, but called for massive social changes including stripping the nobility of its power to impose such taxes. Ball was repeatedly arrested and thrown into jail. As soon as he was released, he returned to his personal crusade.
With the economy collapsing at an ever-increasing rate and people simply running away from their homes to escape the taxmen and the ‘enforcers’ who now accompanied them, by late spring thousands of starving, homeless peasants wandered England. In early June 1381, nearly twenty thousand dispossessed men and women from the county of Kent chose an ex-soldier and highwayman named Wat (or Walter) Tyler to be their leader, though it is equally possible that Tyler elected himself. In either case, he seems to have been a mesmerising speaker whose military experience provided him with a basic understanding of organisation and crowd control.
In a matter of days, Tyler began formulating an agenda. He and his motley band of followers marched along the River Medway. Their first stop was Maidstone, where they ransacked the local jail, freed all the prisoners and invited them to join the crusade. Among those who accepted the invitation was John Ball. Between Ball’s fiery rhetoric and Tyler’s organisational skills, the group quickly became a formidable force. Moving east from Maidstone, their next stop was Canterbury, where they gathered so many additional recruits that Frois
sart said ‘they departed [there] and all the people of Canterbury with them. . . . And in their going they beat down and robbed houses . . . and had mercy of none.’
Now turning back to the west, the mob moved slowly towards London, solidifying their plans. The only person to whom they would pay allegiance was King Richard. Everyone else in the ruling class, from the greatest nobleman to the humblest lawyer, was to be forced out of office and put on trial. Halfway along the 40-mile stretch between Canterbury and the capital lies the town of Rochester, and here the rebels seized the castle, ransacked it and took the family of Sir John Newton, the constable, prisoner. Newton himself was sent to London with a message for the king: Richard would meet with the rebels at Blackheath in three days to hear their demands. If Newton failed to deliver the message, or if the army was called out, his family would be killed. Over the next two days, Tyler’s army plodded steadily westward. Unknown to them, another rebel army even larger than their own was also converging on London from Essex, north-east of the capital.
For some reason, word of the rebels’ approach took the King’s Council and the government completely by surprise; certainly they should have been aware of the level of discontent in the country, and the tax riots could hardly have escaped their attention. Possibly, it was the sheer size of the uprising that overwhelmed them. The combined force of Tyler’s army and the Essex men has been estimated at more than one hundred thousand – nearly twice the population of London itself and three times the size of the largest medieval army ever assembled. Certainly it did not help matters that the government’s driving force and chief military mind, John of Gaunt, was in Scotland at the time.
Trying to come to grips with an unprecedented situation, the Council sent messengers to Windsor to bring King Richard to the safety provided by the Tower and the 1,200 troops stationed there. The Queen Mother, Joan (known as the Fair Maid of Kent), was also rushed to the Tower where she and her son were joined by virtually everyone in the government. The king’s uncle, the Earl of Buckingham, along with the Earls of Suffolk, Kent, Salisbury and Warwick were there, along with Sir Robert Hales, the Lord Treasurer, John Legge, who had devised the poll tax, and Simon Sudbury the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England. With them was Willian Walworth, a successful fishmonger serving as that year’s Lord Mayor of London. Everyone had their own idea of how to deal with the mob, but the king insisted that the only right thing to do was to meet them and hear their demands.
On 12 June 1381, the king and his ministers left the Tower by barge, sailing eastward to Greenwich, where they planned to disembark and walk the mile and a half to Blackheath. Even before they approached the mooring site, they could hear the shouting multitude. Tyler and the Kent contingent had come to Greenwich to meet them. Despite the king’s efforts to land and open a dialogue, the crowd only screamed and taunted him and his ministers. According to Froissart, ‘And when they saw the king’s barge coming, they began to shout, and made such a cry, as though the devils of hell had been among them. . . . And when the king and his lords saw the demeanour of the people, the best assured of them were in dread.’
In fact, Richard tried repeatedly to speak with the mob, shouting ‘I have come to speak with you – tell me what you want’, but his words were drowned out by shouts and insults. Left to his own devices, Richard might have continued his efforts, but Chancellor Sudbury, Warwick and Suffolk all knew they were in serious personal danger and urged the king to return to London and the safety of the Tower. Reluctantly, Richard agreed. But when the barges turned to leave, the action enticed the crowd to follow.
Moving faster than the rebels, the royal barges made it to the Tower before the mob hit the city walls where, as luck would have it, nearly sixty thousand screaming peasants from Essex joined them. When the guards at London Bridge refused to open the gates to Tyler and his followers, they threatened to burn down the surrounding suburbs and take the city by storm. To prove how serious they were, they rampaged through ultra-fashionable Fleet Street, which lay just outside the safety of the city walls, looting and burning the shops and homes of the merchants.
Whether this incident alone was sufficient cause for the gates of the city to be opened to the howling mob is unknown. What we do know is that thousands of apprentices, day labourers and servants in the city supported the rebels and it may have been their rearguard attack on London Bridge that finally opened the gates and unleashed a wave of discontent that engulfed the city. By the time the swarm from Kent crossed London Bridge, the Essex men had successfully stormed the gate at Aldgate. Simultaneously, nearly one hundred thousand angry, hungry peasants surged through the narrow streets and lanes of London, sacking and burning everything they could not eat or steal in an orgy of looting, murder and destruction.
Desperate to save their lives, homes and property, terrified Londoners offered them food, beer and wine. But the more the mob drank, the more uncontrollable they became. Froissart wrote that the rebels ‘rush[ed] into the houses that were the best provisioned . . . [where] they fell on the food and drink that they found. In the hope of appeasing them, nothing was refused them . . . and in their going they beat down abbeys and . . . diverse fair houses.’ Any home that suggested a prosperous owner was subjected to the same treatment. In their rampage, the mob attacked and destroyed the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons, setting the prisoners free and inviting them to join in wreaking vengeance on the city.
In the New Temple, the district housing the law courts and residences of most of the city’s lawyers and judges, they sacked and burned everything they could get their hands on, including the home of the hated Lord Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. Everywhere, books, tapestries and clothes were torn to shreds, tossed from windows and set alight in the streets. When a house was completely vandalised, it too was either pulled down or torched. At Lambeth Palace, London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, several of the buildings were burnt and all the tax records from the Chancery Office were thrown into the fire. Froissart records that a similar fate was meted out to John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace: ‘And when they entered [Gaunt’s house] they slew the keepers thereof and robbed and pill[ag]ed the house, and when they had so done, they set fire on it and clean destroyed and burnt it. And when they had done that outrage, they . . . went straight to the fair hospital of the [Knights of] Rhodes, called St John’s, and there they burnt house, hospital, Minster and all.’
Their anger spent and the day waning, the mobs converged on the Tower at Tower Hill and St Catherine’s Square. Here, they took up the less strenuous sports of hard drinking and taunting the young king and his ministers who they knew were trapped inside. They screamed alternately for the Chancellor, the Lord Treasurer, or anyone else involved in levying the hated poll tax, all the while insisting that, as Froissart put it ‘. . . they would never depart thence till they had the king at their pleasure’.
Now prisoners in their own fortress, Richard and his council gathered on the parapets of the Tower more than 100 feet above the seething, drunken mob. From there, in the eerie, orange half-light of more than thirty fires burning out of control across the city, the fourteen-year-old king and his frightened ministers looked down on a scene that could have been snatched straight from the mouth of hell. The resilient Tower was completely cut off from the outside world; the rioters had all the supplies of London to sustain them and the rioting continued into the night, punctuated by a chorus of cries and screams as hundreds of innocent citizens were murdered or roasted alive in their burning houses.
The sense of fear that had clutched at the ministers for two days was now replaced by galloping panic. Earlier that morning, while Richard and his ministers tried to talk to Tyler’s people at Greenwich, a messenger had arrived at the Tower with news that the rebellion was spreading through every county south and east of London. There were also reports of riots in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. In some areas the rebels were in effective control of entire cities. If something was not done soon, the country would co
llapse. Lord Mayor Walworth and the more resolute members of council insisted they would make a fight of it. In the Tower alone there were more than six hundred men at arms and at least as many archers. Sir Robert Knollys had about one hundred men at his fortified manor and nearly four hundred of John of Gaunt’s soldiers were still somewhere in the city. With luck a complement of nearly two thousand men could be raised and, although they were outnumbered nearly fifty to one, only a tiny fraction of the mob was armed, all of them were exhausted and most were now too drunk to stand. A well-trained force should be able to kill them off like flies.
The Earl of Salisbury, the oldest and most experienced of Richard’s councillors adamantly disagreed, advising the king, ‘Sir, if you appease the mob with fair words, that would be better; grant them all they ask, for if we begin something we cannot finish, nothing will ever be recovered, for us or for our heirs, and England will be a desert.’ It would take a lot more courage to face Wat Tyler and his screaming cut-throats than to turn the army loose on them, but even at fourteen years of age, Richard knew it was the wisest course of action. The trick was to arrange a meeting in such a way that it would draw the rebels out of London and provide Archbishop Sudbury, Treasurer Hales and John Legge a chance to escape from the Tower before they were torn to pieces.
The next morning, 14 June, both King Richard and Wat Tyler were ready. When, according to Froissart ‘on the Friday in the morning the people . . . began to . . . cry and shout, and said, without the king would come out and speak with them, they would assail the Tower and take it by force, and slay all them that were within’, Richard was ready to put his plan into action. Shouting down from the parapets he told the crowd he would meet with them and discuss their grievances if they would then disperse peacefully. As insurance against reprisals, the king signed a blanket pardon, there on the Tower wall, and sealed it in full sight of the mob. Handing it to two of his knights, he ordered it to be taken to the gates of the Tower and read aloud in public. The offer fell short of its mark; many of the rebels shouted down the heralds and went back to drinking and looting. Most, including Tyler, a few of his followers from Kent and the majority of the Essex men, agreed to meet the king at the place he suggested, a meadow known as Mile End, located well outside the city walls.
Tales From the Tower of London Page 3