A Radical History Of Britain
Page 8
As in London, there were ritualistic elements to the violence in St Albans. One of the rebels’ demands had been the right to ‘free warren’, that is, to take rabbits that had roamed on to their land. After Richard II had conceded their charter, they marked their new liberty by attaching a live rabbit to the pillory in St Albans town, a gesture that also repudiated the Abbot’s judicial authority. As in London, the gaol was broken open and the occupants released on condition that they swore to be loyal to the town and community. There are echoes, too, of the demands of 15 June, with their obscure reference to the ‘law of Winchester’ in the St Albans rebels’ claims based on charters issued by Offa, founder of the Abbey, once again demonstrating a belief in a body of English law that protected popular rights and freedoms.
At some point on 16/17 June, Richard’s order countermanding his earlier charter concessions reached St Albans. This counter-charter protected the Abbey and its buildings and threatened dire punishment to any who challenged it. For the moment, however, this act of retrenchment was a dead letter. Some time on the 16th, Abbot de la Mare buckled to popular pressure and recognised St Albans as a borough and the townsmen as burgesses. On the 17th, this was followed by the Abbot’s confirmation of the grant of general manumission made by Richard II to the men of Hertfordshire. The townsmen also extorted a bond of £1000 to keep faith with the agreement, and a quitclaim of all rights the Abbot had previously claimed from the townsmen. To commemorate their victory over the Abbey, the townspeople walked its newly defined boundaries, celebrating with toasts of beer at points along the way. News of the St Albans rebels’ success spread to the surrounding areas of Barnet, Rickmansworth, Redburn and Watford, which then pressed for their own charters, granted on 17 and 18 June. Abbot de la Mare had caved in, well aware that military aid was unlikely to reach him in time. It would not be until 29 June that a force of fifty men-at-arms plus a large body of archers reached St Albans under the command of Sir Walter Lee.
In Suffolk, further risings were led by John Wrawe, a former priest from the Sudbury area. On 12 June, he led a group of Essex men to the border with Suffolk and proclaimed that he had come to redress the grievances of all men. The next day, Wrawe’s followers attacked the manor of Overhall, owned by Sir Richard Lyons, a hated financier. Wrawe’s men entered Bury St Edmunds on 14 June and the next day the prior of the Abbey, John Cambridge, was captured and beheaded, his skull fixed to a pike and carried back to Bury. The prime target of the Suffolk rebels was Sir John Cavendish, a substantial landowner in East Anglia who had his principal residence in Bury. Cavendish attempted to escape but was too well known to get far, and the rebels overtook him at Lakenheath where a woman named Katherine Gamen reputedly prevented him from escaping on to the river by pushing off a waiting boat. Cavendish was beheaded on the riverbank at the hands of one Matthew Miller.
The Suffolk rebels displayed a ghoulish sense of humour, first making the head of Cavendish appear to confess its sins to Prior John Cambridge, then making the two exchange kisses. Cavendish and Cambridge were joined on the pillory by the head of John Lakenheath, a monk who had been responsible for managing the Abbey’s lordship over the town and its outlying tenants. Like the rebels of St Albans, their Bury confreres believed in ancient, pre-Conquest charters, this time those of Cnut, which guaranteed their civic freedoms. Thomas Walsingham claimed that, as with Archbishop Sudbury, it took eight blows of the executioner’s axe to decapitate Lakenheath.32 At Ipswich there were further assaults, here led by John Battisford, a parson, and Thomas Sampson, a tenant farmer, which saw the houses of the Archdeacon of Suffolk and John Cobat, a Poll Tax collector, attacked and looted. It has been suggested that the severity of rebel actions in Suffolk was a result of greater social tensions than elsewhere, as increasingly prosperous tenants tried to escape their villein status. Overall, the Suffolk risings appear to have been the most violent of all those outside of London, and also involved the highest-status individuals: the rebels here included two knights, Roger Bacon and Thomas Cornerd.
Higher-status individuals can be found joining local risings in other parts of East Anglia too. In Cambridgeshire, leading citizens as well as poorer townsfolk joined in an assault on the university’s jurisdiction over the town. The rising in Norfolk overall was probably deliberately instigated by Wrawe’s men in a bid to spread the Suffolk insurrection to the neighbouring counties, but the rising in north Norfolk occurred independently of any action elsewhere. Led by Geoffrey Litster, a dyer from Felmingham, the north Norfolk rebels met on Mousehold Heath just outside Norwich on 16 June in order to prepare for a march on the city. Once inside, they proceeded to attack individuals and buildings associated with government and the law. Again, the rebels co-opted to their own cause the traditional sites for the execution of justice. The JP Reginald Eccles was captured and butchered with knives at the town pillory. Litster established himself as ‘king of the Commons’, reputedly presiding over his own court at Thorpe Market and banqueting in the hall of Norwich Castle. According to Walsingham, Litster forced local nobles to wait upon him: ‘As lord Stephen de Hales was an honourable knight, Littestere chose him to cut up and taste his food before he ate it himself; and he gave the rest of the knights other duties.’33
The Norfolk rising was not extinguished by royal commission but through the personal efforts of Henry Despenser, the ‘warrior’ Bishop of Norwich. Thomas Walsingham, who as Prior of Wymondham had direct experience of Despenser’s administration, was underwhelmed by his diocesan, describing the man as immature, unlearned and arrogant. At times of crisis, however, Despenser’s bullish personality and his evident courage and loyalty to the monarchy outweighed his deficiencies as a bishop. Again according to Walsingham, Despenser initially had with him only eight men-at-arms and a few archers. However, like many late medieval English bishops, he was more aristocratic hard-man than mild-mannered man of the cloth. At Icklingham he met Sir William Morley and Sir John Brewes who, along with some of the rebels, had been dispatched by Litster to take his messages to the King. Despenser had their rebel escorts decapitated and displayed their heads at Newmarket. From 25 to 26 June, Despenser’s retinue, strengthened further by local loyalists, engaged with Litster’s men at North Walsham. The rebels had blocked the road to that town by excavating a ditch and constructing barricades from doors, gates and fences. But these barriers were no match for a marauding prelate, as Walsingham breathlessly reported:
Without delay the warrior bishop, ready to fight in open battle and indignant at the audacity of the ruffians, ordered his trumpeters and buglers to sound. He himself seized a lance in his right hand, sharply spurred his horse and threw himself on the rebels with such force and courage that he reached the ditch like a whirlwind and more quickly than the arrows of his men. There was no work for the archers as a hand-to-hand battle began straight away. The warlike priest, like a wild boar gnashing its teeth, spared neither himself nor his enemies. He chose to fight where the danger was greatest, stabbing one man, knocking down another and wounding a third. Nor did he cease his violent struggles until the whole crowd which fell on him when he reached the ditch were ready to fly.34
The ferocity of Despenser’s charge broke the rebel lines. Shortly afterwards, Litster was captured and summarily sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Walsingham reported that the Bishop, having heard Litster’s confession and given him absolution for his sins, accompanied him to the gallows, ‘thereby performing despite his victory a work of mercy and piety. He held up the rebel’s head to prevent it knocking on the ground while he was being dragged to the place of his hanging.’35
By mid-June, the Crown itself was ready to take punitive action against the remaining rebels. On the 17th, an expedition of twelve horsemen and twenty-five archers was sent from London to Kent under the leadership of the King’s half-brother Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent, and Sir Thomas Trivet. On 20 June, the Earl of Suffolk together with five hundred men-at-arms entered Suffolk to suppress the risings there. On the 28t
h, Essex rebels making a last stand at Billericay were massacred by the Duke of Buckingham’s men. By the end of the month, Richard’s regime felt confident enough to renege publicly on the promises that it had given the rebels at Mile End. On the 30th, the Crown issued orders commanding villeins to submit to those same conditions that they had fought so hard to throw off during the rising. The King himself took a keen personal interest in the prosecution of former rebels, setting out on 1 July from London to Chelmsford, where he stayed for seven days, overseeing the royal commission. It inflicted thirty-one capital sentences, twelve of whose recipients were subjected to the additional penalty of being dragged to the gallows. It is here that Richard reputedly said, ‘Rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher.’
Richard confirmed these words on 2 July, when all of the charters of manumission he had granted were formally rescinded and cancelled. On 10 July, John Wrawe, captured towards the end of June, was brought to trial before the sheriffs of London. He turned King’s evidence, naming twenty-four of his accomplices. Even this didn’t save him. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered the following year. John Ball was tried at the Moot Hall, Bury St Edmunds, on 14 July, and similarly sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The execution was carried out the following day and his remains were sent to the four corners of the kingdom. The other rebels in Bury had to wait until 13 October to be sentenced. The Cornishman Sir Robert Tresilian, described even by the sympathetic chronicler as ‘cunning like a serpent’, had manipulated the trial juries to ensure the conviction of thirty-six rebels, sixteen of whom were dragged to the gallows and hanged.
The aftermath of the Great Revolt established a pattern for those medieval and early modern rebellions that followed. After the risings were put down by force (usually followed by immediate summary executions), royal justice imposed the severest penalties of law – hanging, drawing and quartering – upon those identified as ringleaders. Their quartered bodies were parcelled out around the realm to serve as grisly reminders of the penalties for treason. Royal propaganda would follow the judicial and military repression of revolt, in the form of hostile chronicles and sermons on the duty of obedience. The legal machinery for dealing with discontented peasantry was also tightened, as in the case of the Statute of Cambridge of 1388, which strengthened the existing Statute of Labourers and established most of the foundations for later Tudor Poor Law, including for the first time making the distinction between ‘sturdy’ (able-bodied) beggars capable of work and ‘impotent’ beggars, incapacitated by old age or illness.
As a result, historians have often claimed that the main consequences of rebellion in the medieval and early modern periods were negative, leading to a retrenchment of noble power, wealth and privilege as England’s often factious upper classes briefly unified in the face of the threat from below. Yet, however much Richard II may have wished, vindictively, that in the wake of the Great Revolt his subjects would be returned to an incomparably harsher form of human bondage, this was not to be the case. Though laws such as the Statute of Cambridge again attempted to restrict the freedom of movement of workers, and a further statute of 1389 gave JPs the power to set pay rates, Richard’s monarchy could not return England to the way it had been before the Black Death. As the historian Gerald Harriss has eloquently put it, ‘political society had always lived in fear of social revolution, and in 1381 it peered into the abyss and took heed’.36 Wages rose steadily, by the end of the fourteenth century reaching a historic high, and the conditions of villeinage were increasingly relaxed.
If this were not the immediate act of manumission that Tyler had demanded, it was emancipation all the same. More and more labourers were released from servile obligations and instead held their land through the payment of fixed rent and a moderate entry fine. Living conditions also improved: labourers’ rations at harvest time now included as much as a pound of meat a day. Exotic items such as deep-sea fish, cod and herring found their way into the peasant diet. Life expectancy rose to an average of thirty-five by 1450: an appallingly low figure by modern standards but much better than that for industrial workers in mid-nineteenth-century British cities (Liverpool, for example.) Some yeoman families, such as the Pastons of Norfolk, did so well out of the changes of the late fourteenth century that they moved from being ‘good pleyn husbondmen’ permanently into the gentry class. The bitter invective of the boy-king Richard, often invoked to show the futility of popular insurrection, was, in fact, so much spitting in the wind.
It was not simply that both Richard and the rebellious peasants were wrestling, albeit from opposite directions, with insurmountable environmental, social and economic forces. The events of 1381 made England’s rulers aware for the first time that the established order, and not just its personnel, might be overturned through the actions of the common people. The memory of the revolt etched itself into all aspects of life. For example, a land grant of 1382 from Mettingham Castle in Suffolk described how the lease would be affected if there were another rising of the commons. The threat from the collective power of the peasantry was implicit in many laws passed after 1381. Some, such as an anti-poaching statute of 1389, suggested that the people were already gathering to rise once more. It complained not only that ‘when good Christian people be at church hearing divine service’ servants and labourers were often out engaging in illicit hunting, but also that ‘sometimes under such colour they make their assemblies, conferences, and conspiracies for to rise and disobey their allegiance’.37 Elite literature, as in the anonymous poem ‘God Save the King and Keep the Crown’, increasingly recognised the important political, as well as economic, role that the commons had to play:
The leste lygge-man with body and rent
He is parcel of the Crown.38
Popular rebellion remained more than a mere phantom threat, despite the fierce repression that had followed the Peasants’ Revolt. The affluent and self-confident yeoman classes in particular were growing in political assertiveness. As the memory of 1381 continued to resonate, new rebel captains would emerge in the fifteenth century, some directly challenging royal authority.
3
JACK CADE’S REBELLION
On 10 March 1431, an elderly Essex priest and lapsed heretic, Thomas Bagley, was burnt alive at St Paul’s Cross in front of thousands of Londoners, while the Archbishop of Canterbury rammed home the message of the gruesome spectacle with a dire public warning of the punishments for heresy. But this attempt to terrorise the people failed. That spring, a public pamphleteering campaign began, flagrantly promoting heretical and subversive opinions. Some of this propaganda smacked of social revolution, with its plans not only to disendow Church lands but also to do away with the King, lords and ecclesiastical hierarchy, and, it was alleged, redistribute the titles among the commons. Rebel ‘bills’ (anonymous broadsheets often posted on walls and doors or simply scattered in the streets) issued as late as May 1431 called for the replacement of bishops and peers with men from the lower ranks: a London weaver, John Cok, would be made Duke of Gloucester and Lord of Westminster, while another citizen, Ralph Bukberd, was to be installed as head of the Carmelite friars of London.1 The Crown was deeply concerned about the impact that the rebels’ bills were having on the population and issued a proclamation on 13 May against ‘bille casters and keppers’ and against those who read the bills aloud to spread the message to the illiterate majority.2
The billing campaign, which originated in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, was probably instigated by a weaver and bailiff called William Perkins, who operated like previous rebels under an assumed name – ‘Jack Sharp of Wigmoreland’. (Perkins’s nom de guerre struck resonances not just with ‘Jack Straw’ but also, through ‘Sharp’, with the territorial base of the Mortimer clan, inherited by Richard, Duke of York.) Perkins was accompanied by John Russell, a man with a record of criminal and heretical activities stretching back fifteen years. The rebels planned to make an e
nergetic assault on Salisbury Cathedral, raze its buildings to the ground and carry off its goods and relics.
On 15 May, the Lollard rebels marched on Abingdon to attack the Abbey from the neighbouring village of East Hendred. Two days later, Perkins’s followers made their presence known in the village of Frome, then in east Somerset. There, a dyer from the town and other Lollards distributed subversive religious literature, again exhorting others to rise up and attack religious houses. According to one chronicler, the rebels at Abingdon said that they would have three priests’ heads for a penny. The ringleaders of the revolt were finally captured on 19 May, condemned to death before Duke Humfrey (a.k.a. the Duke of Gloucester, and Henry VI’s Lieutenant and Keeper of England) and beheaded. Perkins’s head was set on London Bridge as a sober warning to the Lollard contingent that the authorities well knew existed in London, while his quartered body parts went to two other main centres of trouble, Oxford and Abingdon. Russell was captured two months later and hanged as a common thief. Elsewhere in the country, other Lollard sympathisers, including several women, were rounded up and summarily executed.3