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Messengers are sent by the Essex rebels to the King, demanding liberty, Wednesday, 26th June, in the Year of Our Lord, 1381.
The men from Essex sent messengers to the King, then staying at Waltham after crushing the rebellion in Norfolk, to discover whether he planned to allow them to enjoy equal liberty as the lords. The King and his attendant council marvelled greatly at the temerity of the rebels. For a time they considered what reply to give, until the King himself made the following answer to the rebel leader, one Thomas Baker: ‘You wretched men, you who seek equality with lords are not worthy to live! You would certainly have been punished by the most shameful death if we had not been determined to observe the laws concerning the safe conduct of envoys. But as you have come here in the guise of envoys, you will not die here and now but may keep your miserable lives until you have accurately informed your fellows of our reply. So, relay this message to your colleagues from the King: Serfs you were, and serfs you still are; you will remain in bondage, though much worse than before. For as long as we live and, by the grace of God, rule over this realm, we will strive with all our power to suppress you so that the rigour of your servitude will be an example for all to come. Both now and in the future serfs will always have your misery as an example before their eyes; they will curse you and fear your fate.’
Immediately after the messengers had departed, on the 28th June, in the year of Our Lord, 1381, the King sent Sir Robert Knolles into Essex to crush the rebellion. Also commissioned was the warlike Bishop Despenser who had soundly routed the rebels in Norfolk.
The villeins had fortified their position using ditches, stakes, and carts tied together, selecting a battlefield next to woods and forests. But although there were eight thousand of them, they were easily routed by less than a hundred men-at-arms and retreated into the trees.
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The slaughter of the rebels, Thursday, 27th June, in the year of Our Lord, 1381
Sir Robert could not pursue the rebels into the forest but quickly surrounded the woods to try to cut off escape. Skirmishers were sent in and killed five hundred men. The rest of the rebel force fled. Sir Robert’s men captured eight hundred horses, which the rebels had brought to carry their loads. But, even after this victory, the malice of the rascals did not come to an end – for those who had escaped the slaughter reassembled once more and went to Colchester where they tried to incite the townsmen by means of urgent entreaties, threats and arguments, to yet new disturbances and madness. The aldermen of Colchester remained loyal to the King, so the rebels marched on. For they knew that Sir Robert was stalking them with an armed force. Near the village of Sudbury, in a surprise attack, when the rebels were making their usual proclamations of freedom on behalf of the True Commons, Sir Robert attacked them, killing as many as he wished. He captured Thomas Baker and the rebel leaders, and brought them to St Albans for punishment. All other survivors were sent to prison, or pardoned and allowed to return home in peace.
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Opinions as to why these evils occurred
All these evils befell the various regions of England at about the same time, almost on the same days, within the week of Corpus Christi, despite the long distances that separated them. Many held the negligence of Archbishop Sudbury and his provincial bishops responsible, for in their care lies the faith and stability of the Christian religion. Certainly they allowed John Wyclif and his followers to put forward the perverse and heretical view concerning the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ: namely that there was no miracle in the Eucharist, no transubstantiation. The Lollards extended their preaching throughout the country to the pollution of the people and so the nobles and the gentry almost followed their error; for Wyclif knew ‘”the common mob always follows their lords” and that the lesser men would follow the example of the greater. Nor was there any mitred bishop who dared oppose such evils and correct his impious sons by due chastisement. Many believe that the Lord sent these sufferings at the celebration of Corpus Christi, to show His will, in keeping with Holy Scripture, that the bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ. Some believe that Archbishop Sudbury, although it is credible that he ended his life a martyr, was punished by the horrible passion of his death because of his lukewarm attitude to Wyclif’s heresy. Thus he asked the Holy Spirit that he might be purged of sin (for there is no life in this world without sin) and then in the words of Proverbs XXIV v 16 “a just man falls down seven times in a day and rise again”, so he might be completely purified by his harsh and terrible passion in this life.
Others ascribed the cause of these evils to the sins of the lords, who proved faithless to God. For it is alleged that some of them believed there was no God, no sacrament of the altar and no resurrection after death: they thought that a man’s life, like that of a beast of burden, came to an end with his death. Moreover the lords were tyrants to their subjects, arrogant to their equals, and suspected by both. They lived their lives in debauchery, violated the marriage bond and wanted to destroy the church.
Others attributed the disaster to the crimes of the common people and alleged that because they lived in peace they wasted the benefits of peace. They poured scorn on the actions of the lords and spent sleepless nights in drinking, revelling and evil-doing. They lived in a land of peace, brawling, struggling and disputing with their neighbours. They pursued fraud and falsehood continually, gave way to lust, wallowed in fornication and were polluted with adultery: “They were as fed horses in the morning: every one chased after his neighbour’s wife” (Jeremiah V v 8). And besides all this, many of them listened to hedge priests like John Ball, wavered in their beliefs and the articles of the Faith. For which reasons it was supposed that God’s wrath had deservedly fallen on the children of unbelief.
III
The Feast of St Mary Magdalene, Monday, 22nd July, 1381
Nobody was barking, shattering the peace, waking half of Tonbridge.
‘Shut up, Nobody!’ Sophia shouted, across the dark yard, to the stables where the mastiff was chained up.
Nick was back, finally. Sophia got off her knees, sore from a day of praying in front of the fire. Her calves were numb; hundreds of pins and needles stabbed her under the skin, but she unbolted the door, racked open the latch. There stood Nick, bowed down under the lintel. She had to swallow the dryness at the back of her throat before she asked: ‘Did you get it?’
Nick replied, ‘We stole it from under their noses.’
Sophia breathed a sigh, the tightness of dread leaving her chest all at once. ‘Your plan worked?’
‘Ruth did a fine job of distracting the guards,’ Nick said. While Ruth paraded herself, Nick had removed the remains off the spike, wrapped them, and pegged it out of the castle gate as fast as he could run to the horses.
‘Ruth is all right?’ Sophia said.
‘Ruth is off to Dover to arrange our passage,’ Nick said, and entered the house, holding a bundle of cloth. He did not want to give Sophia the burden he bore. It was light, so light, too light, and yet it was nearly unbearable. ‘Here.’
‘This is it? This is really him?’ Sophia closed the door behind them.
‘It is Wat.’ Nick nodded. There was no doubt. They had branded a W and T into the wizened green flesh of the arm. W T: Wat Tyler. The rebel captain. W T: hero of the True Commons. Walter Tyler. “The Great Traitor” – whose quarters had been sent to the four corners of the realm as a warning to beware. It was high treason for them to steal his remains from the keep at Maidstone, but the theft was a revenge, the start of the vengeance he had sworn on all those who had killed their fathers. Even if it took bringing down Heaven, he would spill the blood of these Great Traitors.
‘Give it here,’ Sophia said.
Nick handed her the bundle, carefully, as if it was a child – their child – the son he wanted her to have after they were married out in Flanders. They would call him Wat. And he would be a free man, for his mother was free and his father had been able to buy his
freedom with the money his grandfather gave them.
Sophia cradled the bundle tight in one arm. She had to see for herself. To know. To know he was gone. To know that it was true, what folk said happened to him. She reached in under the cloth, delved, and found fingers – her father’s fingers. Dry and brittle, gone to bones, but she held the skeletal hand. The reek of dead flesh made her nose wrinkle. Hot tears stung her eyes and nose. ‘At least now we can lay you to rest with Mother.’
Nick stroked her shoulder. He would comfort her. They had not fled to Flanders because of this. The Justices were all over Kent looking for Wat Tyler’s daughter. It was a dangerous thing to be Sophia Tyler, but they had been given shelter in their village where Wat was a hero, a true hero, and always would be.
Nick knew how it had weighed so heavily on her to disobey her father’s last wishes, but it was important to say your goodbyes in this life, and your thank-yous. ‘We’ll bury him at dawn tomorrow.’
Sophia smiled. ‘He’d like that. He was always up with the lark on the farm. There was no stopping him.
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Author’s Note
History – ‘the big picture’ – is a myth. Paradoxically I had to do a degree in Modern History to find this out. I see History the subject as merely a collection of tall and small tales used by those in the present as propaganda for whatever political ends they have in mind. A ‘history’ for me is a tale, a story, that old, obsolete meaning of the word.
King Death is one such story, set in 1381, around the events of the English Revolution that failed. The Peasant’s Revolt. Wat Tyler’s Rebellion. The Great Revolt. It has been given many names. Most Englishmen living today do not know these names, or about the men and women who fought for their freedom, for justice, for equality. They have forgotten this epic struggle, its colourful characters, its momentous events, because they were deliberately not taught it in so-called history classes for political reasons (fear of communist revolution) and no one, save Melvyn Bragg, in recent times has dared write a novel or play about it. Ironically, it falls to an Irishman to remind them that there was an English ‘Braveheart’, an English Spartacus – a common man who very nearly changed the history of the whole world by making a stand against tyranny and corruption, and slavery.
All of the main characters in King Death are ‘historical figures’, ‘real people’, insomuch as they are recorded in the histories of the time, the chronicles. As you might imagine, a great deal was written of the lives of the chroniclers’ patrons, the great nobles and King Richard II, and very little was written about the commoners like Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and John Ball. I had to use what sources there were and make informed leaps of the imagination about the rest. One should not believe the chroniclers – as Dan Jones does completely in his ‘orrible ‘istory’, Summer of Blood – because theirs are hostile histories written to flatter the great men, the victors, and demonise the ordinary people, the losers, to enforce the status quo. One should read the primary sources, many to be found in R.B. Dobson’s The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and pay very close attention to what they do not say, and how they don’t say it. The glaring omissions. For instance – it is never overtly stated why the nobles were so terrified of the True Commons. It doesn’t take you to be a genius to work out that they were cowed in the face of a vast army of trained archers led by captains capable of articulating their grievances against their lords and the government. This was never a rabble of yowling peasants wielding sickles and hoes, except in the propaganda of the chronicles. Even the term ‘The Peasants’ Revolt’ is a part of this cover-up, used to belittle the rebels and undermine their aims of freedom, justice, and true community.
King Death – death, being the great leveller – attempts to correct the bias of these ‘mythistories’; but it is in the end, just a story. I make no claims that all my facts are correct; instead I can claim that they are as correct as my fictions. There are no certainties to be found in the past. There is no such thing as ‘the truth’ in an objective sense. ‘Fact’ / ‘Alt-fact’ checkers beware: this is a story woven from many stories, nothing more, nothing less, and I have chosen to tell it using Modern English, in the common tongue avec swear words, as a substitute for the Middle English of medieval times so that readers can bloody well enjoy it. As a new version of the old saying goes – a good writer should never let the truth get in the way of his story.
PATRICK CINNAMOND
Timeline
1314 – Battle of Bannockburn: Robert the Bruce defeats Edward I’s English army.
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1327 – Edward II is deposed by his wife Isabella and the nobles and Edward III becomes King of England.
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1334 – The Black Death sweeps through Europe, killing hundreds of thousands.
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1337 – The Hundred Years’ War commences as Phillip VI of France comes to the aid of Scotland against the English.
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1346 – Battle of Crecy: Edward III and his son Edward the Black Prince annihilate a massive French army with a host of archers armed with war bows.
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1356 – Battle of Poitiers: Using archers Edward III exacts a crushing defeat on the French, captures their king, John II, and holds him for ransom.
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1358 – The Jacquerie: under attack from the English and overtaxed by the war, French peasants rise in a bloody revolt against their lords.
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1360 – Treaty of Bretigny: Aquitaine ceded to England to become a new Principality under the Black Prince. Edward III gives up his claim to the French throne in return.
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1364 – John II of France dies in captivity in England, unable to pay his ransom.
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1367 – Battle of Najera: Using archers the Black Prince defeats the Castilians to restore Pedro the Cruel to the throne, thwarting French expansion into Spain.
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1369 – Edward III reasserts his claim to the throne of France.
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1371 – The French re-conquer Aquitaine.
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1375 – Treaty of Bruges: Edward III concedes loss of Aquitaine.
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1376 – French and Castilian fleets raid Plymouth, Weymouth, and Dartmouth; The Black Prince dies, weakened by old war wounds; The Good Parliament attacks the conduct of the war and impeaches corrupt royal advisors; John of Gaunt attempts to reform the constitution of London, meets mass protest and is forced to give up.
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1377 – French raiders attack Southampton, Poole, and overrun the Isle of Wight; English Parliament grants the first poll tax to fund the war they are losing; Edward III makes Lancaster a palatinate, independent of the Crown; Edward III dies and ten-year-old Richard II succeeds to the throne.
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1378 – The Great Western Schism: The war splits the church, with the French supporting Clement VII, an anti-pope based in Avignon, and the English supporting Pope Urban VI in Rome.
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1379 – English Parliament grants a second poll tax to fund John of Gaunt’s ill-fated chevauchées in France.
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1380 – French and Castilian fleets raid up the Thames, attacking Winchelsea, burning Gravesend and threatening London;English Parliament grants a third poll tax, set at three times the rate of the first one.
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1381 – The Great Revolt: overtaxed and under attack from the French, English freemen and serfs rise up against their lords.
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