For coming to understand bills of exchange and something of international banking well enough to use them in the story, I am grateful to Raymond de Roover’s works, especially Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Of course there is the small bother that the word “smuggling” is from the 1600s, and therefore Daved could not smuggle the gold into England. Hence the need for “illegal conveyance.” Nor could Cade’s rebels “loot” in London, that being a Hindu word unavailable in England in the 1400s. They couldn’t even be a “mob,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The English uprising in the summer of 1450 did follow the course of events detailed here—or something like the course of events given here. The several contemporary and near-contemporary chronicles agree on what happened but not always on which day or in which order things occurred. My reconstruction of the course of events derives from what seems to me most likely—that the London government could put up with Lord Saye’s and Crowmer’s deaths, brutal though they were, but turned on Cade when he began wholesale seizures of property and money. That this ordering differs from I. M. W. Harvey’s conclusions Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 does not lessen in the slightest my great indebtedness to that very fine coverage of the revolt and its aftermath.
Concerning London itself, some readers will find my description of it at variance with the cliche of filth-ridden streets stinking of garbage and ankle-deep in mud too prevalent in some presentations of medieval London. Whatever may have happened during the breakdown in society that came with the Renaissance and Reformation, the plethora of medieval civic laws concerning streets—paving, repair, and cleaning as well as lighting—would seem to indicate an active effort in all those areas. Certainly John Stow in his later Survey of London, when talking about officials in the city’s wards, includes scavagers (non sic) whose job was to keep a ward clean. Regular, frequent removal of waste was expected and failure fined. London probably smelled in ways we would now find unfamiliar, but have you choked on the exhaust of a passing bus lately?
The biblical quotations are translated from John Wycliff’s Middle English version of the Bible.
The Sempster's Tale Page 33