Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

by Dan Jones

  And they were not alone. Just as the English rebels had mimicked the (Jacques) who had terrorised the French nobility during the 1350s, so there was an explosion in other lower-class rebellions across Europe during the fifteenth and especially the sixteenth centuries. There were savage uprisings of the agricultural and urban lower orders in Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Finland and Switzerland in the 250 years that followed Tyler’s rebellion. All took different forms and involved different local grievances, but all demonstrated that as the medieval period gave way to early modernity the ordinary men (and women) of Europe’s kingdoms were beginning by turns to understand, appreciate, resent, defend and vocalise their own place in the social compact. They could communicate complex ideas and move en masse and with abstract purpose. They could appoint and follow leaders in a form that mirrored the political construction of the states and kingdoms they inhabited. And they were prepared to suffer the hideous, vengeful punishments that their insurrection earned them in the name of their righteous cause.

  But Tyler’s rebellion showed that the English lower orders were among the most advanced in terms of their political development. And so they remained. By the time of Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450-the next great rising of the English people, led once again from the south-east-the feudal aspects of the great agreement had withered. Serfdom was dead. Cade led an overtly political rebellion, rather than one that demanded the end of lordship or great social reconstitution. His rebels protested policy, not the principles on which society was formed. But even in Cade’s context, the compact lived on: the people toiled, and their masters protected them. When it worked, all went well. When it did not, the results were bloody.

  Finally, the revolt left us a great story, which was immediately reflected on and retold by some of the great English writers. Chaucer and Gower both wrote about the rebellion-and both paid close attention to the animal instincts of the rebels. From Elizabethan times onwards, the rebellion proved fertile territory for playwrights and historians. John Stow included it in his history, as did other sixteenth-century London chroniclers, and the most popular story was that of one ‘John Tyler’, usually of Deptford, who brained a sexually lascivious tax-collector to defend the honour of his daughter. Stow first mentioned the rebellion in 1566, at a time when the fear of popular rebellion would still have reverberated, following Wyatt’s rebellion of 1553 against Queen Mary I. Soon the rebellious mob as a terrifying and herdly rabble had become a staple of English literature. Though he never tackled Tyler, Shakespeare dealt with rebellious mobs on numerous occasions. In Henry VI, Part II, Jack Cade was sent up as a pompous ignoramus in a way that would perhaps have amused Thomas Walsingham, when he accuses Lord Say (shortly before cutting off his unfortunate head and sticking it on a pole):

  Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school … It will be prov’d to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.

  Likewise, in what were most likely his additions to the play Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare has More remonstrate with a mob protesting the appearance of foreigners who were taking away Englishmen’s jobs:

  Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

  Hath chid down all the majesty of England.

  …

  And that you sit as king in your desires,

  Authority quite silenced by your brawl,

  And you in ruff of your opinions clothed:

  What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught

  How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

  How order should be quelled, and by this pattern

  Not one of you should live an aged man,

  For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

  With selfsame hand, self reasons and self right

  Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

  Would feed on one another.5

  This is not far from being an alternative version of another English chancellor’s arguments with a rabble: Walsingham’s speech for Sudbury as he was dragged to his fate on Tower Hill has a more desperate poignancy but at the core it is the same: the hopeless invocation of reason against the rabble.

  It was not long before Tyler’s rebellion became more than just grist to the playwrights’ mills, and began to be appropriated for political analogy. In 1642 an anonymously written pamphlet called ‘The Just Reward of Rebels’ used the Kent and Essex rebels’ experience as a warning to the Irish rebels of the time; while the most popular eighteenth-century rendition of the story (a chapbook called simply ‘The History of Wat Tyler and Jack Strawe’) gained popularity around the times of the Jacobite and American revolts against the Hanoverian crown.

  In the eighteenth century, Tyler’s revolt interested writers including Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, who used it as material for contemporary arguments about political theory.6 Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, Friedrich Engels saw in the upheaval of 1848 parallels with Europe’s history of medieval class revolt.7 Even in the twentieth century, Marxist historians gravitated towards the subject of Tyler’s rebellion as a rare occasion of life imitating theory.

  But perhaps the finest piece of writing about the revolt was by the young Romantic poet Robert Southey, who claimed to be descended from Wat Tyler himself and, as a lusty twenty-something, wrote a play about his supposed ancestor in three frantic nights of work. Like most writers on the revolt, Southey was most fascinated by John Ball, and it is to him that he gave perhaps the best lines in his play (which was published, to Southey’s great embarrassment, some two decades after he wrote it, by which time the author had become a hoary old conservative and Poet Laureate).

  This epilogue started with the details of John Ball’s death; it seems fitting that it ends with Southey’s gloriously imagined version of the mad priest’s swansong:

  John Ball

  [to Sir John (sic) Tresilian]

  The truth, which all my life I have divulg’d

  And am now doom’d in torment to expire for,

  Shall still survive-the destin’d hour must come,

  When it shall blaze with sun-surpassing splendour,

  And the dark mists of prejudice and falsehood

  Fade in its strong effulgence. Flattery’s incense

  No more shall shadow round the gore-dyed throne;

  That altar of oppression, fed with rites,

  More savage than the Priests of Moloch taught,

  Shall be consumed amid the fire of Justice;

  The ray of truth shall emanate all around,

  And the whole world be lighted!

  In the end, the story of the revolt of 1381-the Peasants’ Revolt, or the Great Revolt, or Tyler’s Revolt, or whatever else we want to call it-is the story of the relationship between the small men and the great men. The burning injustice that became a mass movement; the small, ungracious serving man who faced down his liege lord, and nearly won; the maverick churchman who preached from the heart instead of from the prayerbook; the fragile victory of a boy wearing the crown of a king; the heroism and the hubris so evident on both sides, likewise the humanity and the cruelty; the fleeting brilliance of a great protest against fundamental wrongs, which may have failed, but inspired the poets five hundred years later: all these sing to us through the centuries, and are what, I think, makes history still worth reading; and worth writing, too.

  A revell!

  NOTES

  Foreword

  1 Westminster Chronicle.

  2 Walsingham.

  3 This model of understanding popular rebellion has been best developed by Eric Hobsbawm. For a specific discussion with regards to 1381, the reader should consult Prescott, Judicial Records.

  4 Leader of the theorists is R. Hilton. See Bond Men Made Free for an example of great historical and theoretical rigour but a lack of compelling narrative.

  Introduction

  1 In The Nuns Priest�
�s Tale, Chaucer uses the memory of the revolt as an extended simile for the hullabaloo created when the human and animal characters in that story are chasing a fox.

  2 As remembered by the chronicler Henry Knighton.

  3 Ibid.

  4 A classic account of labour legislation is B. H. Putnam ‘The enforcement of the statutes of labourers during the first decade after the Black Death’ (1908).

  5 As described in the Statute of Labourers, which wrote the Ordinance of Labourers into official law in 1351.

  6 This complaint was made at the October parliament of 1377, the first of Richard II’s reign.

  7 For a scholarly account of the Great Rumour, see R. J. Faith, ‘The Great Rumour of 1377 and Peasant Ideology’ in The English Rising of 1381 (Past and Present Society Conference proceedings, 1981). Faith explains the position of rabble-rousers (described in the parliamentary petition of 1377 as ‘counsellors, procurers, maintainers, and abettors,’ stirring the countryside up with ‘counsel… and manipulation’) such as one John Godefray, who appeared before Wiltshire justices, accused of having counselled villeins that ‘exemplifications … by record of the book of… Domesday’ would prove them to be free.

  8 Complaint made at the Good Parliament, held April-July 1376. The standard one-volume account is GH Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford 1975).

  9 Description from the chronicle Vita Ricardi II, quoted in Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt.

  1 PARLIAMENT

  1 Parliament in the fourteenth century was not a place for politicking and party sniping, but a bartering shop between king and political community. Deals were struck in which the Crown traded concessions for reform and better governance for access to the parliamentary commons’ grasp of the national wealth in the form of taxation. Between Crown and the commons in Parliament sat the nobility, whose interests tended to side with the Crown. The Crown relied on influential lords in the upper chamber to broker compromise that suited the national interest but also paid for government policy.

  2 According to the Parliament Rolls.

  3 Ibid.

  2 LANCASTER

  1 See ‘A Note on Sources’ for further reading about the Janus Imperial case.

  2 The two best biographies of John of Gaunt are S. Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (repr. London, 1964) and A. Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Harlow, 1992).

  3 COLLECTIONS

  1 Henry Knighton.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid.

  4 A CALL TO ARMS

  1 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  2 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  5 A GENERAL AND A PROPHET

  1 Partly because of Gaunt’s notorious obnoxiousness and partly because of his deep regard for the rights of the Crown there was a popular, if mistaken, supposition that the duke of Lancaster coveted the throne for himself.

  2 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  3 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  4 Anonimalle Chronicle-see also H. Eiden, ‘Joint action against “bad” lordship: The Peasants’ Revolt in Essex and Norfolk’, History, vol. 83 (1998).

  5 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  6 BLACKHEATH

  1 The Anonimalle Chronicler suggests there were 50,000 on Blackheath Hill and 60,000 in the Essex party north of the Thames. Froissart guessed at 60,000 on the hill.

  2 The Anonimalle Chronicle mistakenly places the earls of Buckingham and Suffolk in the Tower with Richard. Buckingham was either in Wales (as Froissart suggests) or Brittany during the revolt; Suffolk was in East Anglia.

  3 We follow Froissart’s version of events here: though not always reliable, he did have some decent sources at court, and it seems plausible that the rebels, having seized Newton, would put such a valuable resource to good use.

  4 Certainly it stuck in the mind of the Westminster Chronicler, who remembered the ‘A revell!’ cries.

  7 THE TRUE COMMONS

  1 For this and more on Corpus Christi, see M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, (Cambridge, 1991).

  2 For a convenient description of Richard’s coronation, readers can consult Richard II, by N. Saul (Yale, 1997).

  3 This idea is explained in G. L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation (Oxford, 2005), p. 251.

  4 These are the words that Froissart put in Ball’s mouth as typifying his stock sermons on the unholy inequality that pervaded in England. They are also filtered through the translation of Berners, which adds to their elegance, even if it detracts from their authenticity.

  8 THE BRIDGE

  1 Gower, Vox Clamantis.

  2 For a discussion of accusations levelled at aldermen connected with Walworth in the aftermath of the revolt, see Bird, Turbulent London.

  3 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  4 Ibid.

  9 FIRST FLAMES

  1 For details of the history and architecture of the Temple, see Baker, Medieval London.

  2 For timing see Westminster Chronicle.

  10 UNDER SIEGE

  1 Prescott, ‘Portrait Gallery’.

  2 For more neat examples of the private feuds that played out during the rebels’ time in London, see Prescott, ‘Portrait Gallery’.

  3 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  4 Ibid.

  11 WAR COUNCIL

  1 Walsingham.

  2 Froissart.

  12 MILE END

  1 London inquisition before the sheriffs of 20 November 1382, reprinted in Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt and Oman, Great Revolt. We must, however, bear in mind that politics lie behind much of what is recorded in the sheriffs’ inquisition. There is a chance that Farringdon is erroneously placed here.

  2 Flaherty, ‘Great Rebellion in Kent’ records that Thomas Noke of the Hundred of Tenham was accused after the revolt of killing James French at Mile End.

  3 Only the Anonimalle Chronicle places Tyler at Mile End. While the Anonimalle’s author seems largely reliable with his description of events in London, on this occasion there is cause for doubt. The totally different character between the demands made at Mile End and the following day at Smithfield seem to bear out the supposition drawn from the rest of the chronicles, i.e. that Tyler was absent from this meeting, and probably closer to the wilder, more militant group of rebels that surrounded the Tower.

  4 Anonimalle Chronicle.

  13 THE TOWER

  1 Several of the chroniclers record that Sudbury said Mass that morning. The medieval Mass was strikingly dissimilar to anything experienced in the mainstream Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. For a brief glimpse of the Tridentine Mass-a reasonable approximation of the high medieval ceremony-recreated in a modern setting, see nytimes.com/packages/html/us/20071104_LATINMASS_FEATURE/index.html and liturgy.dk/default.asp? Action=Details&-Item=559, for a Scandinavian interpretation.

  2 M. Aston, ‘Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni’, in Past and Present (1994).

  3 Walsingham.

  4 Ormrod, ‘The Peasants’ Revolt and the Government of England’, Journal of British Studies, 29 (1990) adds physical evidence to Walsingham’s lurid account of the sack of the Tower.

  5 According to Walsingham.

  6 Although by this point in his account it is almost certain that Walsingham’s account of Sudbury’s death is more hagiography than hard, historical fact-the sentiments of Sudbury’s supposed argument ring true. One suspects, however, that Walsingham’s portrayal of Sudbury’s Christ-like compassion for his executors may be a step too far.

  14 THE RUSTICS RAMPANT

  1 Froissart records the ‘great venom’ of those who stayed behind in London, with the intention to slay and rob the folk of the City. Read as a whole, the chroniclers seem to infer a greater malice in the rebels who remained in London after the departure of eastern rebels following Mile End.

  2 The chroniclers differ on the number of executions that took place on Tower Hill. The Anonimalle Chron
icler claims that Sudbury, Hales and Appleton were killed there, shortly followed by John Legge and ‘a certain juror’, and that these were the heads carried to Westminster, while three others executed around the City, presumably about midday, were added to the grisly display once the procession returned to London Bridge. The monk of Westminster agrees that five were killed on Tower Hill, but implies that all five were killed together. Walsingham and Froissart record that Legge was killed with Sudbury, Hales and Appleton (but do not mention the juror); Knighton, in a muddled account, records seven Tower Hill executions.