by Frank McLynn
There is a closer consensus too about the mortality from the pandemic. All told, it reduced the world’s population from an estimated 450 million in 1300 to 350–375 million in 1400. Between 25 and 50 million of the total 75 million deaths were in Europe, which bore the major impact of the Death. Europe lost 30–60 per cent of its people (most experts opt for a figure in the 45–50 per cent range) and it took 150 years to regain the lost ground. Mortality was particularly heavy in the Mediterranean countries (an estimated 75–80 per cent) and relatively low in Germany (20 per cent). 100,000 people died in Paris, while the population of Florence declined from 110–120,000 in 1338 to 50,000 in 1351.9 The impact in England seems to have been about halfway between the experience of Germany and Italy. The generally agreed mortality rate is around 50 per cent, with urban areas predictably suffering more grievously than the countryside. England’s population may have declined from around 4 million to little more than 2 million. Local studies confirm the picture: no more than one-third of the taxable population survived the pandemic, with Rochester in Kent, for example, losing half its inhabitants, while Essex lost at least 50 per cent.10 Perhaps even worse, the disease became endemic, and there were further outbreaks in 1361–2, 1369, 1375, 1379–83 and 1389–93.11 The rapid demographic change resulting from the plague was just one of the reasons why ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ is a misnomer, for both town and countryside were hit by post-Black Death stresses, with the further implication that there can be no simple cut-off point between town and countryside or dichotomy between town and country.12
A catastrophically declining population produced a shortage of labour and thus, if the normal laws of supply and demand were allowed to work, rising costs of labour (wages). It was precisely this situation that the feudal elite of England was determined to prevent and the immediate result of the Black Death was the notorious Statute of Labourers of 1351. Work was made compulsory for all persons, male and female, under the age of sixty. All those who could be construed in any sense as ‘labour’ – i.e. not just peasants and agricultural labourers – were forbidden by law to charge pre-plague prices for their work or goods. This applied to a wide range of occupations: farmers, saddlers, tailors, fishmongers, brewers, bakers, carters, servants, carpenters, masons, roofers, thatchers, shoemakers, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, spurriers, tanners, plasterers, riverboatmen, as well as shepherds, ploughmen and swineherds.13 The punishments ordained for evasion of the law were tough: three days in the stocks for first offenders and 300 per cent fines of the ‘added value’ or mark-up applied by shopkeepers; at the limit there was imprisonment for repeat offenders or recidivists.
Some authorities claim that by 1370 70 per cent of the business of the king’s courts was tied up with trying to enforce this equivalent of the famous papal bull against the comet. 671 justices of the peace worked to enforce this statute alone.14 Ever since the Emperor Diocletian attempted price-fixing in AD 303 it had been obvious that certain market forces simply could not be overcome, but the feudal lords persisted. Alarmed by the ‘drift’ in costs and prices even in the teeth of such a draconian law, the elite tried to hit back at the lower orders in other ways, such as the reissue of the sumptuary laws in 1363, forbidding the masses to wear clothing associated with aristocratic privilege. Villages hit back by claiming exemptions from feudal levies and duties, claiming Domesday Book as their authority. In 1376–7 more than 100 villages asked for a copy of this book so that they could formulate their demands – this was the so-called ‘Great Rumour’.15 Meanwhile in the economic sphere a dual system began to operate. Alongside the statutory prices and incomes policy there rose up a black economy, adding another dualism to the many divisions already existing in English society.16
Alongside the profound long-term causes of the 1381 revolt were political precipitants caused by the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) between England and France. The early years of the war, with the glorious victories at Crécy and Poitiers and the martial fame of the Black Prince, saw England carrying all before her. But by the end of the 1360s, and for twenty years thereafter, the advantage switched to France.
The Black Prince was a devotee of chevauchée – a scorched-earth policy designed to bring the enemy to a rapid battle, both to save its citizens and restore its credibility. Chevauchée had been the tactic used by William the Conqueror to lure Harold of England to a premature battle at Hastings in 1066 and was a staple tactic of the Spaniards in the wars of reconquest (Reconquista) from the Moors from the eleventh century on. The Black Prince was an expert in Spanish affairs – his last great victory was at Najera in the Iberian Peninsula in 1367 – so he knew all about chevauchée, and it recommended itself to him also as a way round the manpower shortages in his armies caused by the Black Death. But from 1369 until his death in 1376 the prince was in decline, crippled by the mysterious illness (cancer or multiple sclerosis?) that would carry him off at the age of forty-five.17 The initiative shifted to France, where King Charles V found a warrior just as able as the Black Prince in the form of Bertrand du Guesclin, the so-called Eagle of Brittany. Trusting to Fabian tactics, Guesclin refused to be drawn by chevauchée. The only thing that prevented him from being a figure as famous as Joan of Arc was that he was not of noble birth. When the fastidious French aristocrats refused to serve under him, he recruited his own retinue.18 His death in 1380 should have helped the English, but at that very moment a new menace appeared in the form of marauding Scots. In the 1380s Scotland was a permanent thorn in England’s flesh, and this period of Caledonian dominance would culminate in victory at the Battle of Otterburn in 1388.
The 1370s saw many signal failures in France, especially the fiasco of an expedition commanded by Sir Robert Knolles in 1370.19 The lamentable showing of English arms on the continent severely disillusioned the ‘middling sectors’ in society – the knights, merchants and townsmen whose alienation would have significant effects since they were represented in the House of Commons. Such was the military advantage held by France from 1369 on that the decade of the 1370s was one of constant invasion fears in England – fears which did not abate until around 1386. As if the military debacle was not enough, Parliament also had to deal with an onslaught from John of Gaunt. Scion of the house of Lancaster and third surviving son of Edward III, Gaunt was effectively the power in the land even before Edward’s death in 1377, and even more thereafter when the ten-year-old Richard II succeeded to the throne. In an uncanny parallel with the Black Prince’s malady, Edward III was from the early 1370s in the grip of dementia.20 Both during these years and during Richard II’s minority there was no effective king in England; the realm was ruled by a series of councils with full executive authority, but controlled by the most powerful man in the kingdom, and this meant John of Gaunt.
Tyrannical, capricious, corrupt, venal, devious, Gaunt was sworn to loyalty to Richard by the Black Prince on his deathbed and kept his word, even though there were many dark suspicions that he hankered for the crown himself. Already associated with military failure in France, Gaunt further increased his massive unpopularity by despotic dealings with Parliament and the City of London. The famous Good Parliament of April–July 1376, held while Edward III was still alive, seemed at first to be a check to his powers as it denounced corruption at court, secured the dismissal of many key Gaunt henchmen and imposed a new set of councillors ready to change policies when the infant Richard II succeeded.21 But by intimidation and packing Parliament with his cronies, Gaunt struck back the next year. First he refused to admit the new councillors appointed by the Good Parliament and, in the Bad Parliament of 1377, revoked all the reforms of the year before.22
Next Gaunt proceeded to tighten the screws on the City of London, which had defied him by asserting its traditional rights and prerogatives. To show the burghers what they were dealing with, he unleashed one of his aristocratic thugs, Sir Ralph Ferrers. In 1378 this bravo burst into Westminster Abbey during Mass, violated sanctuary and killed a squire named Robert Hawley, who had taken ref
uge there. In the ensuing uproar Gaunt defiantly defended the indefensible and threw an armed guard around his protégé. Now in control of Parliament after the ‘packing’ in the Bad Parliament, at the parliamentary session in Gloucester in 1378 he forced the members to strip London fishmongers of their monopolies and had all rich merchants who opposed him ejected from their places and positions.23 Paranoid rumours of a most lurid kind arose in London, to the effect that Gaunt was planning to move all international trade away from London and set up Southampton as a commercial rival. Londoners were already uneasy about the growing importance of Southampton in Italian, and particularly Genoese, trade.24 When it was learned that the Genoese ambassaor in London, Janus Imperiali, was negotiating with Gaunt, supposedly over this very transfer of power, two assassins stabbed him to death in a London street (August 1378). The outraged Gaunt demanded that the two thugs (who were soon apprehended) should be arraigned for treason and that their trial should be held in Northampton, away from the influence of the London merchants who opposed him. The trial was delayed while Gaunt patched up an uneasy peace with the Scots, but in November 1380 he came south for the hearings. The two assassins pleaded guilty but conveniently implicated the three most powerful merchants who opposed Gaunt; consequently they lived with the shadow of treason over them.25 It became clear that one of the two thugs, John Algor, had framed the merchants at Gaunt’s bidding to save his own life. His accomplice John Kirkby was not so lucky. Condemned to a traitor’s end, he suffered the awful barbarity of being hanged, drawn and quartered. Gaunt had shown the political elite in London, by naked aggression and blatant power, what they might expect from him.26
Socio-economic factors, the war in France and Gaunt’s machinations were now to coalesce in spectacular fashion. The English military crisis in France reached an apogee in 1377, as French warships raided with impunity up and down the island coastline, further diminishing the credibility of Gaunt and his clique; some would even claim the impotence of England when faced with French privateers was one of the hidden triggers for the great revolt of 1381.27 Tired of the fiscal burden of the Hundred Years War, the parliamentary classes decided to decant it onto the lower classes. Before 1377, in the so-called ‘Lay Subsidy’, the English Crown took one-fifteenth of each household’s movable property in tax; land and capital were not subject to a levy. The catastrophic population decline as a result of the Black Death meant that the Lay Subsidy could no longer raise the huge sums necessary to pay for the war in France. It is significant and symptomatic of the mentality of the ruling elite that at no time did they consider simply cutting their losses and ending their war. Feudal notions of honour, to say nothing of the loss of the mouth-watering amounts of loot to be uplifted on French campaigns, ruled this out. With feudal lords still basking in the memory of Crécy, Poitiers, Sluys, Espagnols-sur-Mer and other ‘glorious’ exploits, they threw good money after bad and ordained heavier and heavier taxes to finance a losing game. Accordingly, for the first time ever in English history taxation was made universal. By the terms of the First Poll Tax of 1377 a levy of four pennies was taken from every man and woman over the age of fourteen, in an era when fourpence represented three days’ wages for an agricultural labourer.28 In this way the sum of £22,000 was raised, though it was not made clear whether the Poll Tax was to be a ‘one-off’ or whether it was to replace the Lay Subsidy permanently. There was violent antipathy to the new tax, not least because the worse-off members of society were being mulcted to support a war which benefited only the aristocrats, had produced no worthwhile results and was being waged incompetently. But at first there were only murmurings of protest. Encouraged by the lack of overt resistance, the Crown proposed a Second Poll Tax in 1379. This was an altogether more serious matter. Evidently poll taxes were here to stay. Although the explosion did not occur yet, it was clear to the perceptive that such a tax burden, added to the many existing grievances of the lower orders, heralded serious trouble. As Sir Charles Oman justly remarked of the Second Poll Tax: ‘Its relation to the rebellion is merely the same as that of the greased cartridges to the Indian Mutiny of 1857.’29
The Second Poll Tax was supposed to raise far more than the first, as it replaced the former flat rate with a sliding scale in which seven classes were identified: landowners from dukes to esquires; knights of the crusading orders; lawyers; townsmen and merchants; notaries, legal apprentices, pardoners and ‘common married men and women’; foreign merchants; and all religious. Despite the apparent hierarchy of status thus implied, the differential tax imposed outraged nearly everyone by its unfairness. It repeated the tax of fourpence for the humble layman and levied £6 13s 4d on dukes and archbishops, £4 on earls, £2 on barons and knights, £5 on judges and rich lawyers, £1 on merchants and 3s 4d on monks and priests.30 Despite all this, the Second Poll Tax raised less than the First, bringing in just £18,600. It became apparent that opposition to the tax was stiffening, mainly taking the form of evasion or getting officials (by threats or bribery) to depress and undervalue assessments. The sum raised was soon gobbled up by the cost of the chevauchée still being mindlessly operated in France. Just how inadequate the tax was to finance the army can be gauged from one simple statistic: the bill for the army in France for the first six months of 1379 was over £50,000.31 Further calamity came with the failure of a major expedition to France in 1380 under the 25-year-old Earl of Buckingham. Even while John of Gaunt was absent in Scotland, he had his agents call a new Parliament, which met in Northampton in November 1380. Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England, addressed the assembly in an atmosphere of urgency, tension and crisis.32 All were agreed that affairs had reached a dangerous pass. Sudbury told Parliament that the Crown was determined to rescue Buckingham by a new subvention, and to this end Richard II had already pledged most of the royal jewels as security for loans from merchants in the City of London. Further loans pledged against government funds were out of the question – it is not clear whether Sudbury told Parliament this was because Gaunt had reneged on a previous deal with the merchants. But Sudbury stressed that something had to be done quickly. The army needed reinforcement, the English coast was wide open to incursions by the Franco-Spanish fleets, and the wages of the English troops in Calais, Brest and Cherbourg were nine months in arrears. At this very juncture a revolt in the manufacturing towns of Flanders had cut off the main destination for the export of English wool. The wool industry collapsed, as did the revenues.33 Sudbury ended his peroration by asking Parliament for the unprecedented sum of £160,000 – eight times the uplift on the 1379 tax.
The Commons initially responded that Sudbury’s demands were preposterous and outrageous. Their exasperation would have been fuller had the disingenuous Sudbury revealed to them that he was working as Gaunt’s agent, that part of the huge sum demanded was to finance an entirely new, but as yet clandestine expedition to Portugal. Ferocious lobbying scaled down Sudbury’s demands and he agreed to a sum of £100,000. When it became clear that the government was in earnest about raising huge sums, the members immediately thought how they could best protect their own interests. The Northampton experience of November 1380 revealed a House of Lords cynically protecting the interests of the wealthy and a House of Commons cravenly buckpassing.34 It was a low point in English history and one that deserves to be studied closely by those who parrot mindless bromides about the glories of the British constitution. The Parliament at Northampton proved spineless, self-serving and cowardly. Alternative taxes would have alleviated at least part of the crippling burden which the Commons now proposed to lay on the common man and woman. On the other hand, poundage would have hit the mercantile interest and tenths and fifteenths would have impacted on landowners, everyone from the great feudal lords to the merest householder. It was therefore decided to dun the masses and the clergy.35 One-third of the £100,000 tax agreed would be raised from the clergy and two-thirds from the common people. Parliament resolved to impose another flat rate per capita tax of 1s 4
d–1s 8d, i.e. four or five times the burden of the previous tax, and a sum representing two weeks of arduous toil for an agricultural labourer. The government appointed collectors for each county and sub-collectors for villages and towns, backed by the power of mayors, constables and bailiffs.36 The complacent Parliamentarians seemed blithely unaware that they were on the edge of a precipice, and the only elite member to spot the obvious danger was England’s treasurer Thomas Brantingham, Bishop of Exeter, who abruptly and prudently resigned. In an evil hour the ambitious Sir Robert Hales took his place, unaware that he was accepting a poisoned chalice. Sudbury, exulting in the power he had enjoyed only since February of that year, seemed to feel that Gaunt’s patronage gave him all the protection he needed.37
The predictable response of the masses was tax evasion on a vast scale. The main tactic was for villages and rural communities to make false returns to the commissioners of taxes, largely through under-reporting the numbers of adults eligible to pay. A principal wheeze was not to count unmarried women (widows, aunts, sisters, young daughters, etc) on the grounds that, since they did not work for money, it was monstrously unjust to make them taxable. Roughly one-third of those liable to pay disappeared from the census rolls; it was as if a calamity as great as the Black Death had suddenly overtaken England. 458,720 men and women disappeared from sight. Whereas the First Poll Tax of 1377 had registered 1,355,201 souls, that of 1381 uncovered only 896,481. In general, the further away from London the locality, the greater the discrepancy between the 1377 and 1381 figures. In Bedfordshire numbers dropped by 27 per cent, in Norfolk by 25 per cent, in Kent by 22 per cent and in Berkshire by 31 per cent. Yet this was restraint itself alongside the figures recorded in the south-west and north-west of the country. Cornwall, for example, which had recorded 34,274 adult inhabitants in 1377, contained only 12,056 in 1381. Cumberland’s figures declined from 11,481 to 4,748, Westmoreland’s from 7,839 to 3,859 and Lancashire’s from 23,880 to 8,371.38 What had happened was that the tax collectors were bribed or coerced by, or in some cases simply colluded with, the communities they were investigating. Sir Robert Hales, who became treasurer on 1 February 1381, reacted with fury to the civil disobedience. Entirely new commissions of inquisition wielding draconian powers were sent into the countryside, backed by the armed force of royal serjeants-at-arms – little more than licensed thugs. They were told to concentrate initially on the counties of the south-east, on Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire and Yorkshire. The rumour ran that these new commissioners could levy amounts in excess of the taxes due, as ‘compensation’ for people’s previous mendacity, and that they could keep these sums for themselves.39 The new commissioners were given secret instructions to use all means necessary to force the nation to comply with the tax demands. This was something of an ‘open sesame’ to the licentious militiamen, who immediately turned to sexual molestation as their preferred method of enforcement. In each village the young unmarried girls were lined up, publicly groped and threatened with ‘virginity examinations’ if their fathers did not pay the full amount due. The notorious collector John Legge and his henchmen were fond of lifting up girls’ skirts in public (in an era when women wore no underwear), shaming the fuming parents into making a proper return and paying the appropriate taxes.40
