The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  After 1919 the dominance of the Labour Party on the left-centre of British politics gave the coup de grâce to any lingering hope of revolution still entertained on the Left. One expert commentator has put it like this: ‘Two of the prime assumptions of any Marxist party – a rejection by much of the working class of existing political institutions and a belief in the unity of “economics” and “politics” – did not hold. The Labour Party, therefore, was not free to choose between Marxism and reformism but only between varieties of reformism.’109 That rather makes it sound as though the Labour Party was reluctant not to have that choice. But by 1919 its ‘counter-revolutionary’ character was clear, and this would be seen to devastating effect in the General Strike. Both by background, temperament and ideology, the leaders of the Labour Party were the least imaginable candidates as revolutionaries. The performance of MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas in the ‘great betrayal’ of 1931 was so dispiriting that from his prison cell in Italy Antonio Gramsci suggested that this trio had performed the historical role usually reserved for Caesarism.110 Defenders of MacDonald point out that he was convinced that, should a left-wing party ever take command without a huge electoral mandate (unlikely), it would simply propel the extreme Right into fascist reaction.111 Since this is precisely what happened in Chile in 1970–3, there is a case for giving him the benefit of the doubt. MacDonald’s supporters make the further point that the interwar Labour Party knew its limitations and thus acted as the most effective defence against extreme action by either the Left or the Right.112 Revolutionaries and socialists of all stripes have suffered more than 100 years of disappointment with the Labour Party, which, apart from a brief leftward lacuna in 1945–51, has drifted ever more to the right, first from an ostensibly socialist party to a social-democratic one and finally, under the impact of Thatcherism and transmogrifying itself as ‘New Labour’, from a social-democratic to a neo-liberal party.113 It was always the Labour Party which, in the twentieth century, made the formation of a genuinely left-wing party very difficult almost to the point of impossibility. As for revolution, that was beyond the pale, for even left-wing members of the party like Sir Stafford Cripps thought that socialism could only ever emerge by consent not revolution.114 In defence of these Labour Party stalwarts it can perhaps be entered as a plea that some kind of psychic factor was at work, that they feared that socialism would usher in the void and the chaos world. Given that revolution means sailing into the unknown, and it is precisely this which is so alien to the entire British culture, perhaps we should leave the last word to Arthur Henderson:

  Revolution is a word of evil omen. It calls up a vision of barricades in the street and blood in the gutters. No responsible person … can contemplate such a possibility without horror … Revolution … will be veritable civil war. The prospect of social convulsions on this scale is enough to appal the stoutest heart. Yet this is the alternative that unmistakeably confronts us, if we turn aside from the path of ordered social change by constitutional methods.115

  THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT, 1381

  John Ball (mounted) meets Wat Tyler (standing front left) and his supporters at the gates of London; illumination from Jean Froissart, Chroniques de France, d’Angleterre, c.1460–80.

  Wat Tyler is wounded by William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, and taken to St Bartholomew’s Hospital; nineteenth-century lithograph.

  The Tower of London, from Froissart’s Chroniques.

  THE JACK CADE REBELLION, 1450

  Jack Cade attacking London at night; illustration from History of England by Henry Tyrell.

  Lord Saye and Lord Sele are brought before Jack Cade in 1450; illustration from Hutchinson’s Story of the British Nation, c.1923.

  THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE, 1536

  Aske affixing his proclamation to the door of York Cathedral; illustration from The Church of England: A History for the People by H.D.M. Spence-Jones, published. c.1910.

  Letter from Lord Darcy to Robert Aske.

  THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR OF THE 1640s

  The death warrant of Charles I, signed and sealed by the fifty-nine commissioners on 29 January 1648 (old style calendar, 1649 new style calendar).

  The Battle of Naseby, 14 June 1645.

  THE JACOBITE UPRISING, 1745–6

  Prince Charles Edward Stewart, pastel portrait by Maurice Quentin de la Tour.

  The Battle of Culloden, oil painting by David Morier, c.1746.

  Lord Lovat, Simon Fraser, being executed on Tower Hill for his part in the second Jacobite uprising; copper engraved print, c.1754.

  THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT OF 1838 – 1848

  An early daguerrotype taken in 1848 by William Kilburn, showing the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common.

  The charter for domestic workers.

  An attack on the Westgate Hotel, 4 November 1839, during the Newport rising; nineteenth-century engraving.

  THE GENERAL STRIKE OF 1926

  The wreckage of a bus after having been set on fire by strikers in South London.

  Women on horseback lead an Anti-Strike demonstration of 25,000 women marching from Victoria Embankment to the Royal Albert Hall.

  Volunteer transport and their police protection following the government’s successful call for recruits.

  Commuters at Paddington Station on the third day of the Strike, 6 May 1926.

  Congestion along the Embankment as commuters attempt to get to work during the Strike; photograph from The Illustrated London News, 8 May 1926.

  Trouble breaking out in Hammersmith Broadway during the passing of a milk lorry; photograph from The Illustrated London News, 15 May 1926.

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  Add. MSS

  Additional Manuscripts at the British Library

  AHR

  American Historical Review

  BIHR

  Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research

  DNB

  (The original) Dictionary of National Biography.

  EHR

  English Historical Review

  HMC

  Reports of the Historical Manuscript Commission

  NS

  New Series

  ODNB

  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

  OS

  Old Series

  PP

  Past and Present

  TRHS

  Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

  YLS

  Yearbook of Langland Studies

  1 The Origins of the Revolt of 1381

  1. Jean Froissart, Chronicles, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Brereton (1978), pp. 211, 213. See, in general H. M. Hansen, ‘The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the Chronicles’, Journal of Medieval History, 6 (1980), pp. 393–415.

  2. Aristotle, of course, identified four elements in causality: material, formal, efficient and final causes. Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, iii–vii; 5, ii.

  3. G. Christakos, Interdisciplinary Public Health Reasoning and Epidemic Modelling: The Case of the Black Death (2005), pp. 110–14.

  4. S. Scott and C. J. Duncan, Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations (Cambridge, 2001).

  5. Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made (NY, 2001).

  6. J. P. Byrne, The Black Death (2004), pp. 21–9.

  7. David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Harvard, 1997), pp. 29–33.

  8. For views additional to those mentioned see W. G. Napley, The Black Death and the History of Plagues, 1345–1730 (Stroud, 2000); O. J. Benedictow, The Black Death: The Complete History (Woodbridge, 2004); Stuart Borsch, The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study (Austin, Texas, 2005); John Hatcher, The Black Death: An Intimate History (2008); Benedict Gummer, The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Isles (2009).

  9. S. K. Kohn, The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (2002).

  10. J. M. W. Bean, ‘Plague, Popu
lation and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 15 (1963), pp. 423–37; J. Horrox, ed., The Black Death (Manchester, 1994); A. F. Butcher, ‘English Urban Society and the Revolt of 1381’, in R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston, eds, The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 84–111 (at pp. 86, 93, 95); Christopher Dyer, ‘Social and Economic Background to the Revolt of 1381’, in ibid., pp. 9–42 (at p. 21).

  11. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs and Leslie Watkins, eds, St Alban’s Chronicle: The Chronica Majora of Thomas Walsingham, 2 vols (Oxford, 2003), vol. 1, 1376–1394 (hereinafter St Alban’s Chronicle) pp. 342, 894, 900, 912, 916, 944.

  12. Butcher, ‘English Urban Society’; R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (1970).

  13. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 63–70; B. H. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers During the First Decade after the Black Death, 1349–1359 (NY, 1908).

  14. J. Bolton, ‘The World Upside Down: Plague as an Agent of Economic and Social Change’, in M. Ormrod and P. Lindley, eds, The Black Death in England (Stamford, 1996), pp. 26–32; Robert C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993).

  15. Rosamund J. Faith, ‘The Great Rumour and Peasant Ideology’, in Hilton and Aston, eds, English Rising, pp. 43–73; R. H. Britnell, ‘Feudal Reactions after the Black Death in the Palatinate of Durham’, PP 128 (1990), pp. 28–47. For the sumptuary laws see Alan Hunt, The Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke, 1996); Alan Hunt, The Governance of Consumption: Sumptuary Laws and Shifting Forms of Regulation’, Economy and Society, 25 (1996), pp. 410–27.

  16. As Charles Oman commented about the Statute of Labourers: ‘If legislation had not intervened, the period would have been a sort of golden age for the labourer, more especially the free labourer.’ Charles Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381 (1906).

  17. Vast amounts have been written about all this. See Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War (Cambridge, 1989); A. Curry, The Hundred Years War (Basingstoke, 1993); E. Perroy, The Hundred Years War (1959); D. Green, The Black Prince (Stroud, 2001).

  18. Jonathan Sumption, Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War, vol. 3 (2009), p. 75; David Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Sourcebook: Warfare in Modern Christendom (1999), p. 215.

  19. V. H. Galbraith, ed., The Anonimale Chronicle (Manchester, 1927) – hereinafter Anon. Chron. – pp. 63–5.

  20. See Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: the Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (NY, 1992); Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, King of Castile and Leon, Duke of Lancaster (1904).

  21. G. A. Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford, 1975); W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England, 1322–1377 (Yale, 1990).

  22. Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 237–40; Josiah Wedgwood, ‘John of Gaunt and the Packing of Parliament’, EHR, 45 (1930), pp. 623–5.

  23. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 301–7.

  24. A. A. Ruddock, Italian Merchants and Shipping in Southampton, 1270–1600 (Southampton, 1951), pp. 48–9.

  25. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 400–1.

  26. Goodman, John of Gaunt, p. 77.

  27. Alastair Dunn, The Peasants’ Revolt: England’s Failed Revolution of 1381 (2004), p. 41.

  28. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 103–5.

  29. Oman, Great Revolt, p. 2.

  30. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 105–11.

  31. Ibid., p. 111.

  32. G. H. Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396 (Oxford, 1995) – hereinafter Knighton’s Chronicle – pp. 206–7.

  33. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, p. 113.

  34. For the Northampton Parliament of November 1380 see HMC, XI, Appendix, part Seven. Some interesting details on the composition of the Parliament are available in N. B. Lewis, ‘Re-election to Parliament in the Reign of Richard II’, EHR, 48 (1933), pp. 364–94. The contribution of the clergy is assessed in A. K. McHardy, The Church in London, 1375–1392 (1977), pp. 1–17.

  35. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 111–18.

  36. Ibid., p. 113.

  37. For the scant detail avilable on Sudbury’s career see E. B. Fryde, D. E. Greenway, S. Porter and I. Roy, Handbook of British Chronology (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 86, 233, 258.

  38. Some of the older discussions on the collection and evasion of the Third Poll Tax are still valuable (e.g. Oman, Great Revolt, pp. 24–9, 162–3), but modern scholarship rests squarely on the definitive three-volume work by Carolyn C. Fenwick, The Poll Tax Returns of 1377, 1379 and 1381 (Oxford, 2005).

  39. T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vols (Manchester, 1933), iii, pp. 359–63.

  40. Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 208–9.

  41. Pioneering work was done on the Essex revolt by J. A. Sparvel-Bayly in Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, 1 (Colchester, 1878). This has largely been superseded by W. H. Liddell and R. G. Wood, Essex and the Great Revolt of 1381 (Chelmsford, 1982); see also Herbert Eiden, ‘Joint Action Against “Bad” Lordship: The Peasants’ Revolt in Essex and Norfolk’, History, 83 (1998), pp. 5–30, and the miscellaneous essays by Eiden in Marie-Louise Heckmann and Jens Rohrkasten, eds, Von Nowgorod bis London … Festschrift für Stuart Jenks (Göttingen, 2008).

  42. N. Brooks, ‘The Organisation and Achievement of the Peasants of Kent and Essex in 1381’, in M. Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore, eds, Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. H. C. Davis (1985), pp. 247–70 (at pp. 247–50).

  43. Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 208–9; Anon. Chron., pp. 134–5.

  44. Dan Jones, Summer of Blood (2009), p. 43.

  45. Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain (2009), pp. 55–6.

  46. Brooks, ‘Organisation and Achievement’, pp. 252–4.

  47. W. E. Flaherty, ‘The Great Rebellion in Kent of 1381 Illustrated from the Public Records’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 3 (1860), pp. 65–96.

  48. P. E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard I (Oxford, 1955).

  49. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 132–3.

  50. Frank McLynn, Lionheart and Lackland (2006), pp. 439–40.

  51. Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 214–15.

  52. Ibid., p. 218; ‘Wat Tyler’, ODNB, 55, pp. 770–2.

  53. Anon. Chron., pp. 135–8.

  54. Alan Harding, ‘The Revolt Against the Justices’, in Hilton and Aston, eds, English Rising, pp. 165–93.

  55. J. A. Tuck, ‘Nobles, Commons and the Great Revolt of 1381’, in ibid., pp. 195–8.

  56. Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 78.

  57. Vallance, Radical History, p. 57.

  58. Tyler continued to use Sir John Newton as go-between. Froissart, Chronicles, p. 216.

  59. David Horspool, The English Rebel (2009), p. 127; A. Reville and C. Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement des travailleurs d’Angleterre en 1381 (Paris, 1898), pp. 216–39.

  60. Froissart, Chronicles, p. 219.

  61. See R. Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (1949); C. M. Barron, Revolt in London, 11th to 15th June 1381 (1981).

  62. Anon. Chron., p. 137.

  63. Froissart, Chronicles, p. 212.

  64. Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 222–4. Ball’s speeches have been imaginatively reconstructed by William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (1895), pp. 27–41.

  65. The theory of the identity of Straw and Tyler is set out in F. W. D. Brie, ‘Wat Tyler and Jack Straw’, EHR, 21 (1906), pp. 106–11. The Chaucer reference is in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Nevill Coghill, trans. and ed., folio edn (1956), i, p. 275. Brie’s theory has been decisively refuted in Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 138, 147, 188–98, 206, 315, 360, 361.

  66. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, pp. 216–39.

  67. Oman, Great Revolt, pp. 49–50.

  68. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulvement
, pp. 190–8.

  69. Anon. Chron., pp. 139–40; Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 215, 222–4; St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 418–19.

  70. Froissart, Chronicles, p. 216.

  71. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 422–3; Anon. Chron., p. 138; Oman, Great Revolt, pp. 15–17.

  72. Froissart, Chronicles, p. 216.

  73. There is material on Salisbury in W. M. Ormrod, ‘The Peasants’ Revolt and the Government of England’, Journal of British Studies, 29 (1990), pp. 1–30.

  74. Anon. Chron., pp. 138–9.

  75. Goodman, John of Gaunt, p. 73.

  76. M. Aston, ‘Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasants’ Revolt’, PP 143 (1994), pp. 1–47.

  77. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, eds and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394 (Oxford, 1982) – hereinafter Westminster Chronicle – pp. 2–3.

  78. Bird, Turbulent London; Derek Keene, ‘Medieval London and Its Region’, London Journal, 14 (1989), pp. 99–111; J. L. Bolton, ‘London and the Peasants’ Revolt’, London Journal, 7 (1981), pp. 123–42; Robert Epstein, ‘London, Southwark, Westminster: Gower’s London Contexts’, in Sian Echard, ed., A Companion to Gower (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 43–60.

  79. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, p. 198.

  80. Anon Chron., p. 140; Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, p. 194.

  81. Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 216–17.

  82. Froissart, Chronicles, p. 217.

  83. Anon. Chron., p. 141.

  84. Ibid., pp. 141, 143–4.