Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  When the rebels got to London they soon tracked down Archbishop Sudbury, who was hiding in the Tower along with Sir Robert Hales, the King’s treasurer. Both men were dragged out, to be beheaded by the crowds, who paraded their severed heads on poles in a triumphant procession to Westminster Abbey. In the bloody mayhem that followed, the protesters looked for more scapegoats - and found them in the immigrant merchant communities from Flanders and Lombardy, who had taken over royal money-raising from the Jews. It was lucky for John of Gaunt that he was away from London on yet another military campaign. But the mass looted his sumptuous palace by the Thames anyway, and even cornered the King’s mother, Joan, and asked her to kiss them. Now an elderly lady, the Fair Maid of Kent, whose beauty was said to have inspired the Order of the Garter all those years before, fainted clean away from the shock.

  The one member of the court to rise bravely to the occasion turned out to be the ‘kitten’ - the fourteen-year-old King Richard II. On Saturday 15 June 1381, the boy rode out to the north-west of the city to the meadows of Smithfield, London’s meat market then as now. A small but self-assured figure, he was accompanied by about two hundred courtiers and men-at-arms, facing a much larger party of rebels on the other side of the field.

  Wat Tyler came riding proudly out from the rebel ranks on a little horse, a lone figure, with just a dagger in his hand for protection. As he dismounted, he half bent his knee and took the boy king’s hand in a rough and jocular fashion. ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘be of good comfort and joyful!’

  The rallying cry of the masses as they marched towards London had been ‘For King Richard and the true commons!’, for they nursed the fantasy attending the monarchy to this day that, personally, the monarch is somehow without fault. Royal mistakes are the fault of royal advisers and, at heart, the monarch is the people’s friend - ‘We shall be good companions,’ Tyler promised the king.

  Richard evidently bridled at this familiarity. ‘Why will you not go back to your own country?’ he asked - by ‘country’ he meant Tyler’s own place or neighbourhood - and at this rejection, the rebel leader flared up angrily. Neither he nor his companions would leave, he swore vehemently, until they had got agreement to their demands. He then launched into his manifesto:

  ‘There should be equality among all people,’ he proclaimed, ‘save only the king . . . There should be no more “villeins” in England, and no serfdom or villeinage.’ All men should be ‘free and of one condition’ - and when it came to the Church, all its worldly goods should be confiscated. A reasonable amount should be set aside to provide the clergy with ‘sufficient sustenance’, but the remaining church property should be divided among the people of the parish.

  It was a wish list of breathtaking idealism and impossibility, bolder than any Englishman has ever demanded face to face with his king. If Tyler really did deliver the people’s demands with the fluency and power with which the chronicler wrote it down, he was a man of remarkable eloquence and courage. He seems to have been the key to the revolt - and what happened next has been fiercely debated by historians. Was there a prearranged plan to set Wat Tyler up, or was it his own arrogance that provoked the denouement?

  According to one chronicler, he concluded his great speech by calling for a flagon of water, then ‘rinsed his mouth in a very rude and disgusting fashion’ in Richard’s face. According to another, he was tossing his dagger from hand to hand ‘as a child might play with it, and looked as though he might suddenly seize the opportunity to stab the king’.

  Tyler was ‘the greatest thief and robber in all Kent,’ called out one of the royal retainers, thereby provoking the rebel leader - as was perhaps the intention - to lunge at his accuser with his dagger. When the Mayor of London intervened, Tyler started to stab him, and would have injured him severely if the mayor had not been wearing armour beneath his costume - another clue that the royal party had come to Smithfield ready for trouble.

  It was all the royal bodyguard needed. One promptly fell on Tyler, running him through with his sword. Mortally wounded, Tyler pulled himself up on to his horse and headed back towards his comrades. Then, crying out for help, he fell to the ground in the no man’s land separating the two sides. Angry archers in the watching rebel ranks began to flex their bows, and were only prevented from loosing their arrows by the sight of the boy King himself, spurring his horse forward and calling out to them with a personal appeal - they should come with him to the nearby fields of Clerkenwell, he cried, for further discussion.

  Even allowing for the exaggeration of loyal chroniclers, Richard’s bravery and presence of mind were remarkable. He defused a moment that could have led to wholesale bloodshed, and his composure turned the tide which, until then, had been flowing in the rebels’ favour.

  Wat Tyler’s followers took their grievously wounded leader to the nearby St Bartholomew’s Hospital, but the mayor had him dragged out and beheaded. No one stepped forward to take Tyler’s place, and the men of Kent - ‘enveloped’, as one observer put it, ‘like sheep within a pen’ - allowed themselves to be ushered homewards over London Bridge.

  The great revolt continued to rage in other parts of the country. In St Albans, Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds, merchants and craftsmen rose to free their towns from the control of local abbeys, fighting for the right to function as independent communities. In Norfolk men rose up in town and countryside alike. But at the end of June royal troops advanced on Essex and mercilessly crushed all resistance they encountered. According to one chronicle, five hundred men perished. More reliable figures indicate that some thirty-one ringleaders were identified, tried and hanged on the gallows.

  ‘Rustics you were and rustics you are still,’ declared the young Richard later, on his tour of Essex. ‘You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher.’

  The juvenile hero of Smithfield rescinded every concession he had granted under the pressure of rebellion - in his value system, promises made under duress did not count. The blithe courage that he had shown at Smithfield sprang from the mantle of divine appointment in which he would wrap himself for the rest of his reign. John Ball and Jack Straw were tracked down, tried and hanged, and in a Parliament that was summoned at the end of the year the knights, gentlemen and burgesses wasted no time in reaffirming the social restrictions that had provoked the uprising in the first place. Now that it was safe again to sneer, the rebels with their high-flown ideas of freedom and equality were dismissed as ‘the mad multitude’.

  But Parliament never again tried a poll tax - well, at least not for another six hundred and nine years, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government imposed a ‘per head’ community charge on a reluctant country. Once again the electoral rolls displayed mysterious ‘disappearances’ - 130,000 names went missing in London alone - and once again the protesters came to the capital to fight pitched battles in the streets. In 1990, however, the rebels got their way. Mrs Thatcher was jettisoned by her colleagues - for their own survival. Her successor John Major wasted no time in dropping the poll tax, and was returned to power in the next general election.

  The processes of democracy and consultation that we enjoy today saw their origins in the years whose story is told in this book. From the wise men who advised the Anglo-Saxon kings, via the first ‘social contract’ reluctantly agreed by the hapless Ethelred the Unready, the green shoots of freedom had started to flourish. The Norman Conquest seemed a setback, but that too enriched England’s cross-bred culture, not least her potent, subtle language - some of the most English things about England, we discover, have come from abroad.

  In the Peasants’ Revolt we have heard cries for liberty and equality that resound to this day, and we have seen those demands brutally suppressed. Two steps forward, one step back. The economic power that the Black Death paradoxically shifted in the direction of ordinary working people would prove with time to be a key engine for change in the future. We have not yet heard much about women, tolerance, science, playwrights, wa
lking on the moon, comfort or safety. Kings, warriors and ghastly beheadings have loomed considerably larger in our story than they will in future volumes. But, as we ‘take a break’ in 1381, monarchs and wars are not over - and nor are the beheadings.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCE NOTES

  GENERAL HISTORIES OF ENGLAND

  Single-volume histories of England were out of fashion for many years, but have staged a glorious revival with Roy Strong’s The Story of Britain - with Norman Davies in The Isles providing a healthily subversive corrective to Anglocentric tendencies. Listed below are the other general histories that I have consulted, and I recommend all of them, from Charles Dickens’s romantic Victorian overview to the eye-witness accounts collected by John Carey. The Oxford Companion to British History is the ideal general reference work, and Alison Weir’s Britain’s Royal Families contains every conceivable date relating to England’s kings and queens. Christopher Lee’s This Sceptred Isle is built around some well chosen extracts from Churchill’s History of the English-speaking Peoples, but there is nothing like the real thing. Ackroyd and Scruton provide personal interpretations from the heart. Fernández-Armesto looks at the bigger picture.

  Our Island Story by H. E. Marshall is long out of print, but an American edition of 1920 has been lovingly digitalised and put on the Net by the Celebration of Women Writers project hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. It can be viewed in its entirety, with its illustrations, on www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/marshall/ england/england.html.

  Ackroyd, Peter, Albion: The Origins of the British Imagination (London, Chatto & Windus), 2002.

  Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Millennium Edition (London, Cassell), 2001.

  Carey, John (ed.), The Faber Book of Reportage (London, Faber and Faber), 1987.

  Churchill, Winston S., A History of the English-speaking Peoples, 4 volumes, Birth of Britain (London, Cassell), 2002.

  Davies, Norman, The Isles: A History (London, Papermac), 2000.

  Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel (London, Vintage), 1998.

  Dickens, Charles, A Child’s History of England, (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1998.

  Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Truth - A History and a Guide for the Perplexed (London, Black Swan), 1998.

  Johnson, Paul, The Offshore Islanders: A History of the English People (London, Phoenix), 1998.

  Lee, Christopher, This Sceptred Isle 55BC-1901 (London, Penguin Books), 1997.

  The Oxford Companion to British History, rev. and ed. John Cannon (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 2002.

  Rogers, Everett M., Diffusion of Innovations (New York, The Free Press), 1995.

  Schama, Simon, A History of Britain, 3 volumes (London, BBC Worldwide), 2001-2.

  Scruton, Roger, England - an Elegy (London, Pimlico), 2001.

  Strong, Roy, The Story of Britain: A People’s History (London, Pimlico), 1998.

  Strong, Roy, The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts (London, Pimlico), 2000.

  Weir, Alison, Britain’s Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy (London, Pimlico), 2002.

  Wood, Michael, In Search of England: Journeys into the English Past (London, Penguin Books), 2000.

  FURTHER READING AND PLACES TO VISIT

  Simon Schama’s landmark TV series A History of Britain has now been accompanied by a guidebook to the historical sites shown on screen - and to many more. It opens with Iron Age villages and the Avebury stone circles and progresses to the great castles of Edward I. English Heritage and the National Trust are the two principal custodians of our historic treasures, whose details are set out on their websites: www.English-Heritage.org.uk; www.nationaltrust.org.uk.

  Davidson, Martin, A Visitor’s Guide to A History of Britain (London, BBC Worldwide), 2002.

  c.7150 BC: Cheddar Man

  The bones of Cheddar Man can be seen at the Natural History Museum in London. There is a replica of his skeleton at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar, Somerset, part of the exhibition ‘Cheddar Man and the Cannibals’: www.cheddarcaves.co.uk. See www.ucl.ac.uk/boxgrove for details of the excavation of Britain’s very earliest human remains, the half-million-year-old legbone found at Boxgrove in Sussex. As this book went to press, English Heritage announced the exciting discovery of delicate engravings in the caves at Cresswell Crags near Worksop in Nottinghamshire, dating from around 10,000 BC - so our hunter-gatherer ancestors, it seems, had art! Catherine Hills offers an accessible and scholarly account of our country’s earliest waves of uninvited immigrants.

  Hills, Catherine, Blood of the British: From Ice Age to Norman Conquest (London, George Philip with Channel 4), 1986.

  c.325 BC: Pytheas and the Painted People

  In The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, Barry Cunliffe pulls together the fragments of our knowledge about this remarkable man, taking us by the hand on a delightful stroll through Celtic Gaul and Britain. If you would like to visit Stonehenge on the summer solstice in the company of modern Druids, ring the English Heritage hotline on 0870 333 1186. Paul Newman writes well about the prancing white horses on the hills.

  Chadwick, Nora, The Celts (London, Penguin Books), 1997.

  Cunliffe, Barry, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (London, Penguin Books), 2002.

  Delaney, Frank, The Celts (London, HarperCollins), 1993.

  Newman, Paul, Lost Gods of Albion: The Chalk Hill Figures of Britain (Trowbridge, Sutton Publishing), 1999.

  55 BC: The Standard-bearer of the 10th

  You can’t do better than read Julius Caesar’s own story of hitting Britain’s beaches, contained in his account of his campaigns in Gaul.

  Caesar, Julius, The Gallic War, trans. Carolyn Hammond (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1996.

  AD 1–33: And Did Those Feet? Jesus Christ and the Legends of Glastonbury

  Michael Wood’s poetic work of reportage In Search of England (see General Histories, above) tackles the fantasies of Glastonbury gently but firmly. For the sacred, visit www.glastonburyabbey.com. For the profane, you can find out about the annual pop music festival on www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk.

  AD 43: The Emperor Claudius Triumphant

  Barbara Levick’s recent biography paints a sympathetic portrait of the crippled emperor. You can find out how to visit the Roman remains at Colchester at www.colchestermuseums.org.uk.

  Levick, Barbara, Claudius (London, Routledge), 2002.

  AD 61: Boadicea, Warrior Queen

  Shrewdly separating fact from fiction, Antonia Fraser refers to the warrior queen as Boudicca when dealing with verifiable events, and as Boadicea when legend takes over. Tacitus’s Annals provides an almost contemporary version of the revolt. His Agricola tells us what his father-in-law, the Roman governor, did next, while his Germany describes the Germanic tribes whose descendants would eventually cross the seas to fill the void left by the Romans. The Museum of London has a standing exhibit on what happened when Boadicea came to town: www.museum-london.org.uk. Colchester is looking for volunteers to take part in its annual Boadicea chariot race on www.colchesterfestival.org.

  Fraser, Antonia, The Warrior Queens: Boadicea’s Chariot (London, Phoenix), 2002.

  Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. and intro. Michael Grant, rev. edn (London, Penguin Books), 1996.

  Tacitus, Agricola and Germany, trans. and intro. Anthony R. Birley, (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1999.

  Webster, Graham, Boudica: The British Revolt against Rome, AD 60 (London, B. T. Batsford), 1993.

  AD 122: Hadrian’s Wall

  After many years of restoration, Rome’s great English pleasure palace is now open again at Bath: www.romanbaths.co.uk. To visit Hadrian’s Wall, consult www.hadrians-wall.org.

  Drinkwater, J. F., and Drummond, A., The World of the Romans (London, Cassell), 1993.

  Potter, T. W., and Johns, C., Roman Britain (London, British Museum Press), 1992.

  AD 410-c.600: Arthur, Once and Future King

  Enter ‘King Arthur’ in
your search engine and more than a million pages will vie to take you back to Camelot. So read the man who started it all - the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, in accessible paperback. Of the real-life Arthurian sites, Tintagel Castle in Cornwall comes closest to what Hollywood would lead you to expect. For a genuine and spectacular taste of the Dark Ages, you have the choice of the British Museum or the Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk to see Beowulf brought to life: www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk; www.suttonhoo.org

  Barber, Richard, King Arthur, Hero and Legend (Woodbridge, Boydell Press), 1961.

  Carver, Martin, Sutton Hoo, Burial Ground of Kings? (London, British Museum Press), 1998.

  Monmouth, Geoffrey of, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London, Penguin Books), 1966.

  c.AD 575: Pope Gregory’s Angels

  Here is our first chance to sample the writing of Bede, who tells the story of the Angles in the slave market, complete with Gregory’s excruciating puns. An earlier but briefer account of the encounter can be found in the Life of Gregory by an anonymous monk of Whitby. According to this account, when the slaves told Gregory they were ‘Angli’ (Angles), he replied that they were ‘angeli Dei’ - ‘angels of god’.

  Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (trans. Leo Sherley-Price, intro. D. H. Farmer), (London, Penguin Books), 1990.