by Dan Jones
Late the previous evening a party of commons had passed by the small town of Huntingdon, on their way north, where-according to one chronicler-‘in their malice and villainy they intended to ravage the land and destroy good men’.3 Huntingdon was a necessary stage on the route north that linked London, Lincoln and York, because its large, five-arched stone bridge over the River Ouse, which had been erected in the 1330s, was the principal crossing point in the region.
It was most likely a combination of the added geographical security that the river border offered, the cheering news of Despenser’s progress through the Fens and a steeliness of collective nerve which emboldened Huntingdon’s townsmen. When the rebels arrived at the bridge, they encountered a belligerent crowd. William Wightman, an official from the Westminster bureaucracy, headed the townsmen, who must have been well armed, for they gave battle to the rebels, killing two or three and putting the rest to flight. It was a small but important victory, later rewarded by the king, who in December publicly thanked the borough for its loyalty and who the next year awarded Wightman a pension for his actions in repelling the invaders. They were deserved accolades: the little town of Huntingdon had shown greater spirit in defending its bridge than all London had shown on Corpus Christi.
That spirit travelled on the air a couple of miles north to Ramsey Abbey, where a band of rebels from Ely had been blackmailing the abbot in much the same manner as was occurring all across East Anglia-where the standard form was to invoke the menacing prospect of either John Wrawe or the late Wat Tyler sending thousands of rampaging commons unless liberties and court rolls were handed over. The Ely rebels had spent much of the night camped in Ramsey town, dining and drinking themselves to satiety on bread, wine, ale and other supplies they had extorted from the abbey. Consequently, they had been late rising that morning.
Hung over-or, at the very least, tired and confused-they presented an easy target for Despenser. His retinue bolstered by the men of Huntingdon keen to follow up their earlier victory, he laid into the rebel band, in what seems to have been an uneven skirmish. Those that fled were chased down and dispatched by the roadside. The trees around the towns, villages and highways of Huntingdonshire were decorated with the severed heads of the insurgents as a warning to anyone considering an attack on this remarkably resilient outpost of order.
And so Despenser pushed on towards his diocese. So far he had seen little to test his zeal. But the road back to Norwich was still littered with danger. From Huntingdon the bishop turned east, and set out towards Cambridge.
He reached the small university town on 19 June, arriving from the north-west. The castle that sat on the lone hill that emerged from the surrounding fenlands cast an impotent shadow over the troubled settlement below it. Travelling the relatively short distance from Huntingdon, Despenser would have heard of severe unrest in Cambridge.4 It had been caused by a combination of townsmen and agitators from the county. Rioting began with attacks on property belonging to a local landowner and Crown agent, Roger of Harleston, and spread outwards, involving factions from the whole of Cambridge society.
Harleston was one of the principal victims-he had been roundly punished for his inflammatory status in both town and county community. He was a burgess of the town and a conspicuously wealthy one, at that. But he was also tightly connected to the county administration, having held office as an MP, and a commissioner both for the labour laws and the poll tax. He was an aggressively acquisitive office-holder and land speculator with recent and lavish wealth throughout the town and the outlying county manors. In his unfortunate person was summed up every iniquity resented by the rebels at large, and his property paid the price in the days of rioting that took place over Corpus Christi weekend.
But as Despenser rode into town, he saw more than simply the piecemeal destruction of one wealthy social climber’s property portfolio. The town was a mess. Its economic and religious centres had been roundly despoiled. St Mary’s church, which had been terrorised and plundered on Sunday, bore the scars of a rambunctious desecration. Jewels and plate had been stolen, and the great university chest, in which were kept important documents and muniments pertaining to the scholars’ administration of their considerable jurisdiction in Cambridge, had been forcibly opened and raided.
Riding a hundred yards or so along the road, Despenser would have seen Corpus Christi College, which had also been invaded, and its books, letters, charters and other documents taken from it. The Carmelite house had suffered the same fate. Elsewhere a house belonging to the university bedel, William Wigmore, had been looted and destroyed.
The marketplace bore the signs of another riot. On Sunday, Despenser would have discovered, with merely the slightest of effort, that a great bonfire had been held to consign to oblivion all those charters that had been gathered from university strongrooms. A mob had gathered about the flames to throw in the plundered parchment. Ash mingled on the ground with thin slivers of sealing wax, scratched away from documents with sticks, knives and whatever other weapons had come to hand. A townswoman by the name of Marjery Starr had achieved brief notoriety for throwing ash up to blow about in the summer air, while shouting ‘Away with the learning of the clerks! Away with it!’
Marjery Starr’s spirit of jubilant vandalism had stolen into the whole city, and a mob comprising both townsmen and country rebels had laid waste the parks and property belonging to Barnwell Priory, a little way out from the town centre. The prior had been terrorised into signing a bond worth £2000 to submit to the rebels’ will. With John Cavendish, chancellor of the university, several days dead at the hands of Wrawe sympathisers, there was little choice for the university members but to follow suit; they had £3000 extorted from them, as well as a series of agreements concerning civil governance that were skewed as heavily in the townsmen’s favour as those previous had been against them.
Like the town, the surrounding countryside had also suffered. The roads in and out of town had been trampled in both directions by hoofs and human feet alike. County men, some of whom had been at least inspired by, and possibly even in contact with, Tyler’s rebels, had come to town to join in the attacks on Harleston’s townhouses; returning the favour, men from the town-including the first movers in the anti-Harleston riots at Cottenham on 9 June-had gone frequently in the opposite direction. As many as 160 mounted townsmen had ridden out on Saturday to the hospital at Shingay and the two manors at Steeple Morden and Giles (Guilden) Morden to join attacks inspired by county men who resented both the Hospitallers and the local landowner, Thomas Hasilden.
It is a shame that no record of Despenser’s conversation with Mayor Edmund Lister of Cambridge exists, for the bishop would have surely had some coruscating words for the supposed civic leader concerning his role in the city riots. Unlike in London and the other major towns affected by the revolt, the town hierarchy was extremely prominent in leading the rebellion. The mayor, claiming he had acted under duress and in the belief that the king had sided with the insurgents, had led them throughout much of the weekend, most notably against the university and the Priory of Barnwell. It was-Despenser would have seen-fairly clear that the county element of the Cambridge mob had been emboldened and enfranchised by the leadership, whether enthusiastic or otherwise, of mayor and burgesses.
Whatever was said by Despenser to Lister, it seems to have been effective, because, unlike in Peterborough and Huntingdonshire, there appears to have been little need for the bishop to show off his military competence. News of his own approach and the king’s extreme displeasure with rebels throughout his realm had arrived the previous day, swiftly winding down the rebellion. The town and countryside had been turned upside down, but there had been relatively little bloodshed, and no display of armed resistance. The matters of damaged property and extorted charters were serious, but could not merit summary justice against the upper reaches of the town’s hierarchy for fear of reducing the town to total anarchy. There was already quite enough of that in the surrounding countr
yside.
And with Cambridge, Despenser was closing in on his diocese. To get there he had to pass through one of the most dangerous and lawless parts of the country. What was left of Norwich, and who now ruled, he could not have known for sure. There was only one way to find out.
TWENTY-ONE
NORWICH
The bishop hurried towards Norwich, moving to North Walsham, the place the commons had chosen to wait for the King’s reply and the return of their colleagues. As the bishop crossed through the country the number of his forces increased. The knights and gentlemen of the area who had previously lain low for fear of the commons joined the bishop’s side when they saw him dressed as a knight, wearing an iron helm and a solid hauberk impregnable to arrows as he wielded a real two-edged sword…
THOMAS WALSINGHAM
East Anglia, Saturday, 22 June
Moving north-east towards his diocesan seat in Norwich, every mile took Despenser closer to the most perilous area of the revolt. Its western fringes, in which he had dismissed and dispatched bands of urban and rural rebels with a dashing combination of military aggression and ecclesiastical pomp, were its least organised. But as he pushed in the direction of the Norfolk coast, Despenser was riding into the rebel heartlands.
Norfolk, as the most northerly county to experience truly widespread rioting, was also the latest to rise. Whereas Suffolk and Cambridgeshire had both been infected with rebellion from Essex since before Corpus Christi, the eastern parts of Norfolk had remained calm until Monday 17th, when Despenser was far away at Burleigh.
Since then, nine of the fourteen peace commissioners for Norfolk, who had been appointed in November and December 1380, had been marked for attacks by the county commons. They included John of Gaunt, who owned property in the north-east of the county, William Ufford, duke of Suffolk, Robert Howard, Stephen Hales, Reginald de Ecceles and others.1 The bishop’s own manor at Hevingham had been plundered and its records burned.
During the previous weekend, rebel agitators had ridden through the villages of north-east Norfolk, inciting the local people to insurrection. And on that Monday, villagers from across the county had beaten a steady path towards Mousehold Heath, a large, rolling patch of heathland and forest close to Norwich.
They had gathered under the leadership of Litster, a dyer from the village of Felmingham. Litster seems, like Tyler and Ball, to have been capable of commanding large ranks of men by the force of his natural charisma, and he had associates responsible for some isolated rioting in the west of the county. He was also able to bring to his movement a calibre of support that made it very dangerous indeed: the presence of a significant number of Norfolk gentlemen.
Chief among Litster’s associates was Sir Roger Bacon. Bacon was a knight of Baconsthorpe, a manor some six miles from the north Norfolk coast, and half a day’s hard ride from Norwich. The cause of Bacon’s disgruntlement with the politics of the region and nation is obscure, but he very clearly held the nascent hierarchy in poor enough regard to risk his position by throwing in his lot with the rebel movement, knowing as he did so that he added immeasurably to the strength of the Norfolk insurgents.
Along with Bacon, Litster could count on the support of several other well-to-do county dignitaries, including Thomas Gyssing, son of one Sir Thomas Gyssing, who had sat as an MP for Norfolk in 1380. And the rebels were numerous enough and sufficiently threatening also to coerce others of the gentry into joining them. Sir Roger Scales, Sir Thomas Morley, Sir John de Brewes and Sir Stephen Hales, a poll tax controller, were all captured and forced to serve with Litster.
In mixing with gentry, Litster seems to have been indulging a fantasy of regality. As soon as his leadership was established, he began to style himself as ‘King of the Commons’-a position that reflected a common medieval type played out in the deliberately topsy-turvy summer games that were played at village festivals. Litster, however, set out permanently to invert the tradition. He forced Scales, Morley, Brewes and Hales to do his bidding as courtly servants, tasting his food and attending to a variety of similarly menial tasks. Litster doubtless took as much pleasure in the ritual humiliation of his social betters as he did in indulging his lofty social ambition-he may also have been dabbling with the ideology of restoring the kingdoms of the commons.
Whatever it was that motivated him, he had, on that Monday, assembled a large and willing crowd on Mousehold Heath. The target was Norwich. When the respected courtly knight and war veteran Sir Robert Salle rode out from the city to attempt negotiations, he was dragged from his horse and murdered.2 It was a taste of what was to follow.
In Norwich, Tuesday, 18 June was remembered as a day of bloodshed and plunder. Litster’s huge band swarmed in from the heath, entered the city-led by Bacon-and embarked upon a vicious orgy of violence and rapine. Huge crowds tore into the houses of those connected with the law and with royal government (one prosecution after the revolt named 800 defendants for a single attack). Salle’s house was smashed and robbed. The wealthy citizen Henry Lominor, who, like Salle, had been an MP in 1378, was robbed of goods worth 1000 marks. Reginald Eccles, a Justice of the Peace, had been snatched by a mob from his manor lodgings in Heigham; his house was looted, rebels making off with goods including his furred official gown. He was brought into the city melee, dragged to the pillory, stabbed in the stomach and beheaded.
Tax collectors were, naturally, at great peril, and Walter de Bixton, who represented the city at the parliaments where poll taxes had been granted, and was subsequently appointed a collector, had his house broken into and pillaged. John de Freston, archdeacon of Norwich, suffered similarly. The only way that marked townspeople could seek protection was by paying extortionate ransoms to protect their property.
As Norwich suffered, outbreaks of violence erupted right across the county. On the 18th, while Despenser was in Peterborough, there were riots in Rougham and Wyghton, Langford and Southery. One Robert de Gravele narrowly escaped death, agreeing, as his head was held on the block, to pay his tormenters 8 marks, 16 pence and 28 cows in return for his life.
By the next morning, the 19th, while Despenser was in Cambridge, the Norwich rebels had splintered outwards. They behaved more like the Essex men than the Kentishmen, dispersing around the county in small groups to pursue private quarrels, and indulge themselves in largely aimless plunder and extortion. Bacon and Litster headed east, taking a band across the broads and the marshland that sprawled out along the banks of the River Yare and on towards the coast to Great Yarmouth. There was a long-standing dispute at Yarmouth concerning the jurisdiction of a nearby port, and rights to the herring trade on which the town was built.
On arriving at Yarmouth the rebels broke open the jail and freed all the prisoners but three Flemings, whom they beheaded. Rioting ensued, and the houses of local gentlemen were smashed. The town’s charter of liberties was extracted from the town’s burgesses by menace; Bacon and Litster had it torn in two, and sent one half the few miles down the coast and across the county border into Suffolk, where they understood Wrawe was fomenting trouble around Beccles and Lowestoft. Bacon then turned north, riding along the coast and up to Winterton, stopping on the way to plunder and extort ransoms in Caister. Litster, too, went north, heading towards North Walsham and Thorpe Market.
Having destroyed their county town, and surely realising that the wrath of the Crown would not be delayed indefinitely, by the end of the week Bacon and Litster had run out of steam. Their followers were scattered about the county, and Wrawe had retreated from Beccles back towards Essex. Bacon seems to have tired of action, and brought his part in the rampage to an end.
Litster, however, had warmed to the grandeur, and by Friday, 21 June, he was to be found at Thorpe Market, comporting himself in as grand a fashion as befitted the King of the Commons. There were attacks on John of Gaunt’s manors around Gimingham, and extensive burning of court rolls. There were outbursts in Mundesley, Knapton, Southrepps, Northrepps, Sidestrand, Trunch and other places. Th
ere were similar extensive attacks on the manors of the abbey of St Benets-at-Holme in the Flegg. Litster’s men still rode about the countryside proclaiming the rising in his name.
Yet for all these noisome efforts, Litster’s revolt was splintering and beginning to lack structure or direction. Accordingly, at the end of the week, as Despenser was leaving Cambridge, Litster had decided to seek a resolution to his game. He sent two of his knightly retinue, Sir Thomas Morley and Sir John de Brewes, along with three of his trusted commons-John Trunch of Trunch, William Kybyte of Worstead and Thomas Skeet also of Worstead-with instructions to seek out the king and lobby for a pardon and a grant of manumission. As leverage for this royal charter, they provided the party with a large sum of money extorted earlier in the week from the citizens of Norwich as an alternative to having their houses fired and their lives extinguished.
Laden down with plundered wealth and heavy expectations, Litster’s envoys took the road south-west out of Norwich. Unfortunately for the commons in the party, they were passing along the very same road as, and in the direction of, Bishop Despenser. Close to the village of Icklingham, in south-west Norfolk, on the edge of the king’s forest, at a spot where a watermill narrowed the road, the two parties met.
Having sent one of their number away to find victuals, the rebel party was one man down when they met the bishop. Nevertheless, the ragtag quartet he encountered struck Despenser as odd. As they approached, he greeted the knights, and ordered them to declare on their loyalty whether there were any traitors to the king present in their party.
This presented Morley and Brewes with a dilemma. Their service as Litster’s knights attendant had been uncomfortable and distressing. Even as they had been granted leave to find Richard II, Brewes’ manor at Heydon had been robbed by the rebels and his manorial court records burned. The sight of the professionally armed and well-supported bishop would have been a welcome glimpse of a return to order. On the other hand, their treatment under the commons had turned their world so firmly upside down that they had all but lost hope of rescue. Numbers were now strongly in their favour, but who knew what the reaction of the commons at large might be if they were ever discovered to have betrayed their captors? Frightened and uncertain, they told Despenser that everything was well.