Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

by Dan Jones

  The abbey was the place where the legal and mystical aspects of kingship came together-a place of awe and of profound sanctity. With sanctity came sanctuary, and to sully either in the abbey was taboo. As Gaunt knew from the Hawley affair, the Church took an extremely dim view of any violation committed here, and it was said that St Peter did likewise, and would severely punish transgressors on the Day of Judgement.

  So, of all the churches, chapels, monastic houses and hospitals in and around London, this should have been the place, if there were one, that the rebels dared not approach. Knowing this, and knowing that the streets of the City now flowed with the blood of the hundreds massacred by the demented mob, Imworth had thrown himself upon the mercy of the Westminster monks and entrusted his person to the sanctuary of the abbey.

  But if he thought that those who had shown the measure of their regard for the wrath of the Almighty and his saints by breaking out and murdering targets from churches all around the City would draw the line at entering Westminster, he was sorely mistaken. At 9 a.m. they arrived from London, beating what was now a well-trodden path.5 The previous day, the bloody array of ministers’ heads had been paraded down to the abbey, while a raiding party had also attempted to break into the treasury there, with the intention of destroying legal records.

  The new morning had not much dimmed their bloodlust, and as there were now rebels well familiar with the layout of the abbey, it seems that they had little difficulty pushing their way in and making for the high altar, where Imworth cowered, perhaps hoping that the mercy he had denied others might somehow be bestowed upon him.

  Imworth might have been vicious, but he was not stupid. With an instinct for the symbolism of his surroundings, he had chosen as his refuge the shrine of the Confessor. He would have banked on the first rebels to burst in immediately seeing the shrine, which stood just behind the altar, for it was visible all the way down the nave, a raised mound approached by two small steps on which pilgrims knelt in pairs, their knees polishing the stonework. He would have hoped that the sight of the shrine, flanked on either side by two pillars, one topped with a statue of the Confessor, the other with St John disguised as a pilgrim, would have brought to rebel minds the seriousness of the crime that they were about to attempt.6

  It should have, but when the rebels did break into the abbey, their hearts proved as hard as the smooth, cold floor of the nave. As they approached, the sound of their footsteps bouncing around and up into the vaulted roof, they would have recognised Imworth clinging, literally for his life, to one of these pillars, and beside him the gold feretory containing the coffin of the Confessor. Was there an exchange of words? Did Imworth try to appeal to his kidnappers’ God-fearing consciences? We do not know. All we do know is that alongside the high altar of the highest place of sanctuary in all of England, Richard Imworth, tormentor of men, was plucked from the pillar of the richly gilded shrine to England’s patron saint, hauled down the nave, outside into the cool morning air and off into London, to be beheaded at Cheapside.

  As the mob took Imworth up to the broad marketplace and bloodied makeshift chopping blocks of Cheapside, they chanced upon a valet named John of Greenfield, who made the grave error of ‘speaking well of John of Gaunt’s murdered physician William Appleton and other victims of the rebels’ murderous purges’. He was seized in Bread Street, the long north-south thoroughfare that ran through the City down to the riverside port of Queenhithe, dragged north up it to the Cheap and murdered with Imworth.

  By lunchtime, anarchy reigned. No law ruled now-nothing but the will of the rebels. There were no more lines to cross.

  By mid-morning news would have reached the royal base at the Queen’s Wardrobe and Baynard’s Castle that the abbey had been desecrated. There were still reports of house-burning and widespread violence in the City. Worse, rioting was breaking out across the south-east. There were pockets of popular disturbance in Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, where the senior royal judge, Sir John Cavendish, was reported dead. Some of these were merely in sympathy for the London rebellion, but others, very worryingly, were claiming the direction and protection of Wat Tyler himself.

  The day and night of chaos that had followed the Mile End conference had demonstrated the terrible error of the appeasement strategy Richard had pursued on the advice of his more timorous nobles. With the blood of his two most senior ministers and several hundred, largely innocent, inhabitants of London, Richard had bought nothing but anarchy, blasphemy, treachery, theft, extortion, arson and murder. Now he was faced with the worst threat to England’s internal order in living memory.

  Rumours swept through the City: Tyler was going to light fires in four corners of London and burn it to the ground; the king was going to be taken hostage; the Church was going to be abolished; John Ball was going to be the chief and only bishop in England; all other lords and bishops were going to be executed.

  Attempts to negotiate with the rebel leadership via messenger were proving fruitless: in the last twenty-four hours Tyler had three times refused to accept chartered peace terms on a par with those taken by the bands that had departed from Mile End, correctly surmising that with chaos came momentum for his movement. Any rational, political character to his aims had disappeared, and a muddled vision of a society shorn of all real administrative institutions came to the fore.

  Now, after days of holding back from his headstrong counsel, it seems that Richard finally started listening seriously to the advice of William Walworth. Walworth, confident in the resources he banked upon mustering through his own political and financial influence and that of his colleagues Nicholas Brembre and John Philipot, combined with the belligerent military know-how of the veteran Sir Robert Knolles, seems to have been a consistent voice favouring tough action against the rebels. He had advocated a decisive show of force against them since Thursday night; what had smacked of haughty recklessness then now seemed to be the only course of action left.

  The argument against military action was fear that the loyalty of the London commons could not be relied upon, and that to provoke them into full uproar with the radical Kentishmen would spell destruction for the City. But in the light of events since Mile End, that argument was defunct. In terms of public order, there was little left to maintain, and if the latest rumours were correct, then by Monday night, Tyler planned to have the whole City burning in any case. Stopping him was therefore imperative: if they succeeded, there was a slim chance that the City could be saved; if they continued negotiations with a rebel captain whom they now had good reason to suspect was acting in bad faith, it would certainly be lost. With the terror now spreading all over the south-east and East Anglia, and word likely to be leaking out of the country to England’s enemy across the Channel, the end of London could easily mean the fall of the whole realm.

  So on Saturday morning, as the holiest sanctuary in his realm was being vandalised by the mob, it seems that Richard must have given his permission to mobilise the well-armed private forces of soldiers like Knolles, and the resourceful merchant oligarchs-Walworth, Brembre, Philipot and their associates. The rebels were to be drawn once again outside the City walls, this time to the closest practical point to the new royal headquarters: the great playing fields and marketplace at West Smithfield, half a mile north of Baynard’s Castle and the Queen’s Wardrobe, just outside Aldersgate, the north-east entrance to the City wall. Messengers were briefed to make the proclamation that Richard was coming once more to meet the rebels, and that they should all remove to Smithfield in readiness for their king.

  The choice of Smithfield, rather than a return visit to Mile End, was not random. It was a logical site for negotiations with a massed band of rebels, for the fields were used to holding massive crowds on festivals and holidays, when fairs, markets and tournaments were held there. As such, it would have been familiar territory to many of the London insurgents, and probably a fair number of those rural rebels who had visited the capital for trade or f
estivities. In summoning his subjects there, Richard would once again have given them a sense of what we could now think of as home advantage, a placatory gesture that also no doubt played to Tyler’s pride, puffed up as it was by his unpunished intransigence in the peace negotiations that had taken place so far.

  If negotiations were all that were to take place at Smithfield, then this was a soothing environment in which to conduct them. It was also, however, a clever choice of venue in anticipation of Walworth’s armed strategy. Smithfield was physically walled on its eastern side by the precincts of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and its sister priory. To the north, a combination of the walls of the Charterhouse and the shallow waters of Faggeswell Brook provided awkward natural boundaries; while to the south-west, the deeper swells of the River Holborn and the City ditch controlled access back into London. In short, Smithfield was a welcoming but semi-enclosed environment, in which a pitched battle could be at worst contained and in the best case turned-even by a modest military force-into a rout. There was the whiff of bold, ruthless and calculating strategic planning behind the Smithfield meeting. Whether it would prove necessary to negotiate with the sword would be up to the character of the young king. And that, as had been proven by Mile End, was the great unknown.

  Richard himself, in anticipation of the most critical moment of his short life and shorter reign, gathered together his large retinue of nobles, knights and attendants, and set out on what might have been a final pilgrimage. Before he could once again meet his delinquent subjects, he needed to seek spiritual solace, and ask the favour of God for what he was about to face. So, following in the footsteps of the mob, Richard set out for Westminster and the shrine of the Confessor.

  SIXTEEN

  SMITHFIELD

  When the king with his retinue arrived there, he turned to the east … and the commons arrayed themselves in bands of great size on the west side … And when he was called by the mayor, this chieftain, Wat Tyler… approached the king with great confidence, mounted on a little horse so that the commons might see him… Thereupon the said Wat rehearsed the points which were to be demanded; and he asked that there should be no law except for the law of Winchester…

  Anonimalle Chronicle

  Smithfield, Saturday, 15 June, 5 p.m.

  The sun was settling low in the sky over Smithfield; the Smooth Field, field of meetings, place of death. Crowds streamed out of the Newgate and Aldersgate, filing north towards London’s ancient site of horse trading and racing, games, festivals, markets and fairs. Smithfield was a mixing ground for the rich and the humble, a playground for horse-fanciers and jockeys, tool-makers, stallholders and farmers driving plump-uddered cows and long-flanked, snuffling swine.1

  It was a place where livestock was slaughtered and traitors were butchered, where in 1305 the Scottish rebel William Wallace had been dragged naked at the heels of a horse, strangled, castrated and gutted, his bowels burned before him and his decapitated body hacked into four parts for dispatch about the realm. Like all places of regular public gathering, Smithfield brought together the local community to mingle, trade, marvel at the tilts of knights and look on at awful, bloody punishment. Wallace was not the first to be seen off in gruesome fashion there, and the thicket of elm trees clustered in the north-west corner of the field beyond the Horse Pool watering pond had held beneath their shade many rough and gory acts of justice over the centuries.

  Now, as Saturday afternoon wound towards an evening that capped a second day of anarchy in the City, masses of rebels began to arrive at Smithfield. Fanning out across the broad field towards the elms and the broken countryside to the west, they could quite easily have seen smoke still rising to the north from the Priory of St John of Jerusalem, the ruined home of the dead treasurer. Half a mile south of Smithfield was the battered Temple, ransacked on Thursday for its legal records. Back inside the City walls to the south-east lay the exhaling wrecks of houses torn down or smoked out, their inhabitants chased, threatened, harassed, intimidated, robbed, bullied or killed by the bands that had lost their discipline and their leadership, and had wallowed gluttonously in the lawlessness that had followed Richard’s timid showing at Mile End. The perpetrators of these deeds spread themselves about the field, properly ordered for the first time since they had camped on Blackheath, into large organised bands.2

  Richard approached Smithfield from Westminster, accompanied by 200 retainers. Depleted as he was, and ranked against-at the very least-several thousand rebels, his train must still have cut an impressive sight, the rich-clothed splendour of a royal party in marked contrast to the filth, soot and sweat of a woollen-clad rebel band, many of whom had spent more than a fortnight on the road. Close also to the king in spirit and probably in physical placement were Walworth and his trusted mercantile allies Philipot and Brembre.

  They had all spent the afternoon in preparation for whatever was to come at Smithfield, but Walworth and Richard had gone about it in very different ways. At 3 p.m. Richard had ridden with his grand retinue out from Baynard’s Castle and the Wardrobe and on to Westminster. He left his mother behind him at La Reol. Word was sent ahead to the dazed religious community of Westminster that in the light of the horror of Imworth’s murder, the king would be visiting.

  Shortly after passing through the village of Charing, Richard was met by a forward party of canons and vicars from the Collegiate Church of St Stephen. They arrived in a solemn procession, mantled all about in their copes, their feet bare against the cold earth. They accompanied the king back along the road to Westminster and up to the doors of the desecrated abbey.

  At the abbey, Richard had dismounted from his horse, and knelt before a cross that had been carried out to him. He was brought to the shrine of St Edward, where he knelt on the smooth pilgrims’ steps, tears rolling down his cheeks as he prayed devoutly to the Confessor for protection. Behind him, all of the knights and esquires in his retinue had engaged in similarly devout genuflections, weeping openly, while subtly jostling for position in the effort to appear the most pious and eager to make an offering to the saint’s remains.

  Richard left his own offering, then made his way out to the anchorage in the abbey garden. A hermit had lived in these grounds for some time, and Richard had repaired to this mystic man to make his confession and remain for a time in spiritual consultation.

  This, then, was the pious young king’s preparation for the greatest test of his life.

  Mayor Walworth had more pragmatic concerns. Before he left the City he had fitted himself with body armour beneath his fine clothes. He had then made sure that all those servants of the king who had access to and command of men and weapons were ready to act on his word. He must have advised London’s aldermen to be ready to join him in defending the City. While all at Westminster made their offerings to the shrine, Walworth’s mind would have been occupied with the likelihood that soon he would be called upon to raise arms to protect the City that had made his name and fortune.

  When Richard emerged from the garden, his soul refreshed from his conversation with the anchorite, the royal party set out for Smithfield. The rebels were always noisy, and their clamouring would have carried through the afternoon’s stillness as the royal retinue closed in on the meeting place.

  The party turned east when they arrived at Smithfield, keeping their distance from the bloc of rebels arrayed to the west, and stopped in front of the Priory of St Bartholomew. The huge, thickset Norman church of St Bartholomew-the-Great loomed behind them, while the massed ranks of the most troublesome popular army ever to be raised in England waited restlessly across the field to the north-west.3

  Walworth, beside the king, was ready. So was Richard. He called the mayor close and asked him to ride out to the ranked masses and demand that Tyler approach.

  Walworth had been eye to eye with Tyler before, staring across London Bridge two days earlier as the Kentish general directed the terror unleashed on Southwark and organised the storming of the bridge. Now the gap betwe
en these two rough-hewn leaders was not the swirling eddies of the Thames, but the smooth turf of Smithfield, bitten here and there by hoof-prints, dried piles of dung erupting from its surface like molehills. The mayor rode out to the rebels, stopped his horse before them and called for Tyler by name, summoning the chief author of all the weekend’s misery to show himself before the king.4 Then he wheeled around and returned to Richard’s side.

  As Walworth stood before Tyler’s ranks and bellowed the leader’s name, Tyler himself must have been filled with pride and self-importance. Not in his fondest imagination could he have predicted such a moment as this: the mayor of London summoning him, the general of an army of the shires, to come before the king. It was validation-elevation, even-the stuff of outlaw ballads and popular legend.5

  The royal retinue was set back a safe distance from the rebel ranks, and Tyler rode out towards it filled with supreme confidence. Thus far the rebels had triumphed in all their interactions with agents of the Crown. Whether outnumbering them in destructive rioting, outmanoeuvring them in negotiations or simply chopping off their heads and putting them on poles, Tyler and his fellow rebel leaders had shown themselves to be irresistible generals and persuasive demagogues. Tyler knew it. But he also knew that the key to all that had gone before in the revolt had been skilful management of popular momentum. From the early days in the villages to the massacres about the City, everything had been bound together by the fervent belief that still greater successes lay around the corner.