The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  85. Jones, Summer of Blood, p. 94.

  86. Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 107–9.

  87. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 418–19.

  88. S. Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity 1361–99 (Oxford, 1990), p. 96.

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

  90. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 184–5.

  91. Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 88; Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, p. 202.

  92. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 4–5.

  93. Oman, Great Revolt, p. 18.

  94. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 162, 210.

  95. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 288–93, 430–1; Anon. Chron., pp. 145–6; Westminster Chronicle, pp. 6–8; Barron, Revolt in London, op. cit.

  96. Quoted in A. Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester, 2001) pp. 243–4.

  97. Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 212–13; St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 542–9; R. F. Green, ‘John Ball’s Letters: Literary History and Historical Literature’, in B. Hanwalt, ed., Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 180–90.

  98. For those who think it was so influenced see M. Aston, ‘Lollardy and Sedition, 1381–1431’, PP 17, pp. 1–44 (esp. pp. 1–5); A. Hudson, Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), p. 69.

  99. Hudson, Premature Reformation; A. Kenny, Wycliff (Oxford, 1985).

  100. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 500–3.

  101. Ibid., pp. 74–99; Kenny, Wycliff, pp. 42–55; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, pp. 100–10; Goodman, John of Gaunt, pp. 241–3.

  102. William Langland, Piers Plowman, 23, ll, 274–5: ‘They preach to men of Plato to prove it by Seneca That all things under Heaven ought to be in common.’

  2 Failure and Consequences of the Peasants’ Revolt

  1. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, p. 190.

  2. Nigel Saul, Richard II (1999), p. 67.

  3. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 68, 92, 116.

  4. Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 218–19.

  5. Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 95

  6. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, pp. 195–6.

  7. Anon. Chron., p. 144.

  8. Saul, Richard II, p. 68.

  9. Jones, Summer of Blood, p. 127.

  10. St Albans was a locus classicus (St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 442–79). See in general R. Faith, ‘The Class Struggle in Fourteenth Century England’, in R. Raphael, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (1981), pp. 50–80.

  11. Oman, Great Revolt, pp. 13–19.

  12. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, pp. 160–9.

  13. See, for example, C. Dyer, ‘The Rising in 1381 in Suffolk’, in C. Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (1994), pp. 228–30.

  14. Oman, Great Revolt, p. 10.

  15. Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 126; Musson, Medieval Law.

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

  17. R. H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the Rising of 1381 (1973), pp. 186–207.

  18. Barron, Revolt in London, p. 5.

  19. For an estimate of Richard’s ruthlessness see G. B. Stow, ‘Richard II in Thomas Walsingham’s Chronicles’, Speculum, 59 (1984), pp. 68–102.

  20. Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 91–5.

  21. Knighton’s Chronicle, p. 210; Anon. Chron., p. 138; St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 422–3.

  22. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 6–7; St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 424–31.

  23. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 424–5.

  24. Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 216–17; Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, pp. 210–12.

  25. For Lyons see A. R. Myers, ‘The Wealth of Richard Lyons’, in T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke, eds, Essays in Medieval History (Toronto, 1969), pp. 301–29; Holmes, Good Parliament, pp. 108–14.

  26. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 8–9; Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, p. 212.

  27. Anon. Chron., pp. 145–6; Westminster Chronicle, pp. 6–9; St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 288–93, 430–1.

  28. Barron, Revolt in London, pp. 14–16.

  29. Saul, Richard II, pp. 68–70.

  30. Anon. Chron., p. 147; Knighton’s Chronicle, p. 147; Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 164–5.

  31. For example, Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (2001), pp. 44–6.

  32. Rosamund Faith, ‘The Great Rumour of 1377 and Peasant Ideology’, in Hilton and Aston, English Rising, pp. 43–73.

  33. G. Grauss, ‘Social Utopias in the Middle Ages’, PP 38 (1967), pp. 4–19 (at pp. 16–17).

  34. Saul, Richard II, pp. 68–70.

  35. Oman, Great Revolt, p. 73.

  36. Jones, Summer of Blood, p. 139.

  37. Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 224–5.

  38. Ibid.; Westminster Chronicle, pp. 8–11.

  39. Anon. Chron., p. 147; St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 436–7; Knighton’s Chronicle, p. 218.

  40. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 164–6.

  41. Anon. Chron., p. 148; Knighton’s Chronicle, p. 219.

  42. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 437–9; Froissart, Chronicles, p. 226.

  43. Anon. Chron., p. 148; Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 220–1.

  44. Ralph Standish was from a Lancashire family. For full details see Thomas Cruddas Porteus, A History of the Parish of Standish, Lancashire (Wigan, 1927). Standish succeeded his father to the lordship of the manor in 1396 and died in 1418.

  45. Saul, Richard II, pp. 70–1.

  46. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 438–9

  47. Ibid.

  48. Anon. Chron., p. 149.

  49. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 12–13.

  50. May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307–1399 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 413–14.

  51. Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 227–8.

  52. The overall balance of forces is discussed in Eleanor Searle, ‘The Defence of England and the Peasants’ Revolt’, Viator, 3 (1972), pp. 365–88. There are pointers too in Ormrod, ‘The Peasants’ Revolt’.

  53. Some of these issues are discussed, inconclusively, in Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 152–87. See also Barron, Revolt in London, pp. 6–8, and Saul, Richard II, pp. 70–1.

  54. Jones, Summer of Blood, p. 162.

  55. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 16–17.

  56. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, p. 193.

  57. Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 240–1.

  58. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 496–501.

  59. Ibid., pp. 542–9.

  60. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, pp. 198–9.

  61. A. J. Prescott, ‘“The Hand of God”: The Suppression of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381’, in Nigel J. Morgan, ed., Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom (Donnington, 2004), pp. 317–41.

  62. Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 310–11. A slightly differently worded version is given in Horspool, English Rebel, p. 135.

  63. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 518–23.

  64. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, pp. 186–207; cf. Oman, Great Revolt, pp. 13–19.

  65. R. B. Dobson, ‘The Risings in York, Beverley and Scarborough, 1380– 1381’, in Hilton and Aston, English Rising, pp. 112–42 (at pp. 113–15); Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, pp. 160–9.

  66. Oman, Great Revolt, p. 142.

  67. Dobson, ‘Risings in York’, pp. 135, 140.

  68. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis Le Soulevement, pp. 253–6.

  69. Prescott, ‘The Hand of God’.

  70. Dunn, Peasant’s Revolt, p. 125.

  71. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 442–77.

  72. Oman, Great Revolt, pp. 104–10.

  73. Exhaustive details about the risings in Suffolk are contained in E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896).
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  74. C. Dyer, ‘The Rising of 1381 in Suffolk’, in C. Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (1994), pp. 228–30.

  75. Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 257–8; Eiden, ‘Joint Action’.

  76. Although Froissart has a tall story about a one-man defiance of the rebels by a knight he calls Sir Robert Salle (Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 222–4).

  77. Powell, Rising in East Anglia, p. 30.

  78. Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 258.

  79. D. R. Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 1, The University to 1546 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 87–8.

  80. Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 129

  81. For full details of his controversial career see R. Allington-Smith, Henry Despenser: The Fighting Bishop (Dereham, 2003).

  82. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 490–4.

  83. Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 260–1.

  84. J. A. Tuck, ‘Nobles, Commoners and the Great Revolt of 1381’, in Hilton and Aston, eds, English Rising; pp. 194–212 (at pp. 196–7); cf. also Herbert Eiden, ‘Norfolk 1382: A Sequel to the Peasants’ Revolt’, EHR, 114 (1999), pp. 370–7.

  85. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 494–5.

  86. Prescott, ‘Hand of God’.

  87. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 18–19.

  88. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 516–19, 550–63; Knighton’s Chronicle, pp. 240–1.

  89. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 518–23; C. D. Liddy, ‘The Estate of Merchants in the Parliament of 1381’, Historical Research, 74 (2001), pp. 331–45.

  90. Anon. Chron., pp. 151–6.

  91. St Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 562–73.

  92. Goodman, John of Gaunt, pp. 80–90.

  93. J. A. Tuck, ‘Richard II’, ODNB, 46, pp. 724–38.

  94. A. J. Prescott, ‘Judicial Records of the Rising of 1381’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London (1984), passim.

  95. Reville and Petit-Dutaillis, Le Soulevement, pp. 175–240.

  96. Tuck, ‘Nobles, Commons’, pp. 194–212 (at p. 202); Ormrod, ‘Peasants’ Revolt’.

  97. Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 9, 14.

  98. Christopher Dyer, ‘Social and Economic Background to the Revolt of 1381’, in Hilton and Aston, English Rising, pp. 9–42 (esp. pp. 15–17).

  99. Ibid.

  100. C. Dyer, ‘A Redistribution of Incomes in 15th Century England?’, PP 39 (1968), pp. 11–33.

  101. Tuck, ‘Nobles, Commons’, p. 211.

  102. J. J. N. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1377–79 (1972), p. 11.

  103. Aston, ‘Lollardy and Sedition’, pp. 1–5.

  104. R. H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II (Oxford, 1968), p. 19.

  105. Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt’, p. 141.

  106. Saul, Richard II, pp. 183–4, 193.

  107. W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development (Oxford, 1875), ii, p. 463.

  108. David Aers, ‘Vox Populi and the Literature of 1381’, in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 1999), p. 441.

  109. Eric Stockton, The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle, 1962), p. 65.

  110. Ibid.

  111. Derek Pearsall, William Langland: Piers Plowman, a New Annotated Version of the ‘C’ Text (Exeter, 2008), p. 2.

  112. David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (1980), p. 61.

  113. C. Muskatine, Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer (Notre Dame, 1972), pp. 88, 106.

  114. William Morris, The Dream of John Ball, pp. 17–20.

  115. Linda Platt, ed., Robert Southey: Poetical Works, 1793–1810 (2004), v, pp. 170–1.

  116. Tom Paine, The Rights of Man (1915 edn), ii, pp. 236–7; cf. 1998 edn (Oxford), p. 284.

  3 Jack Cade

  1. For women, S. Federico, ‘The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), pp. 159–83. For freemasonry see John J. Robinson, Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry (NY, 1989).

  2. ‘Although unique in its scale, geographical extent and the degree of violent energy that it released, the 1381 revolt must also be seen in the context of previous acts of disturbance and protest.’ Alistair Dunn, The Great Rising of 1381 (Stroud, 2002), p. 30.

  3. For the 1640s see Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (NY, 1967).

  4. William S. Atwell, ‘A Seventeenth-Century “General Crisis” in East Asia?’ in Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, eds, The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (1997), p. 235.

  5. For a general survey see Joseph Canning, Hartrunt Lehmann and J. M. Winter, eds, Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times (2004).

  6. Henry S. Lucan, ‘The Great European Famine of 1315–17’, Speculum, 5 (1930), pp. 343–77.

  7. Wiliam Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, 1996), pp. 186–7.

  8. Ian Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315–1322’, PP 59 (1973), pp. 3–50.

  9. Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, The Middle Ages (1972), pp. 25–71; Peter Billen, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (NY, 2001).

  10. Piers Plowman, vi, ll, 280–91; viii, ll, 168–91; cf. also R. W. Frank, ‘The ‘Hungry Gap’; Crop Failure and Famine: the 14th century Agricultural Crisis and Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 4 (1990), pp. 87–104.

  11. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (NY, 1971); Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History (2000).

  12. M. W. Blomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, 1962), p. 114.

  13. See especially A. F. Butcher, ‘English Urban Society and the Revolt of 1381’, in Hilton and Aston, eds, English Rising, pp. 84–111.

  14. The classic defences of Edward III are in May McKisack, ‘Edward III and the Historians’, History, 45 (1960), pp. 1–15 and W. M. Ormrod, ‘Edward III and the Recovery of Royal Authority in England, 1340–1360’, History, 72 (1987), pp. 398–422. Hagiography is evident in Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the Nation (2006). See also C. J. Rogers, ed., The Wars of Edward III: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999).

  15. For the negative comments see Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague (2001), pp. 37, 39.

  16. C. M. Reinhart and K. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, 2009), p. 87.

  17. Ephraim Russell, ‘The Societies of the Bardi and the Peruzzi and Their Dealings with Edward III, 1327–1345’, in George Unwin, ed., Finance and Trade under Edward III (1962), pp. 93–135; Armando Sapori, La crisi delle compagnie mercantile dei Bardi e dei Peruzzi (Florence, 1926).

  18. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Ch. 132.

  19. John Holland Smith, The Great Schism, 1378 (NY, 1970).

  20. Walter Ullmann, The Origins of the Great Schism: A Study in Fourteenth-Century Ecclesiastical History (Hamden, CT, 1967).

  21. Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), p. 14.

  22. Derek Pearsall, William Langland: Piers Plowman, a New Annotated Bibliography of the ‘C’ text (Exeter, 2008), p. 7.

  23. Piers Plowman, iii, 38–67; v, 175; vii, 105–7; viii, 147; x, 9; xi, 31–41; xii, 5–10, 276–93; xv, 29; xx, 113; xxii, 364–72, 383.

  24. P. R. Szittya, The Anticlerical Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, 1986), pp. 249–64; W. Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge, 1989); L. Clopper, ‘Songs of Rechelesnesse’: Langland and the Franciscans (Ann Arbor, 1997).

  25. Piers Plowman, ix, 27–64.

  26. Coghill, ed. and trans., The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

  27. Piers Plowman, xi, 199–203; xii, 60, 107–10.

  28. C. Muskatine, Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer (Notre Dame, 1973), pp. 107, 122, 172.

  29. V. H. Galbraith, ‘Thoughts about the Pe
asants’ Revolt’, in F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. M. Barron, eds, The Reign of Richard II (1971), pp. 46–57.

  30. G. Kriehn, ‘Studies in the Sources of the Social Revolt in 1381’, AHR, 7 (1902), pp. 254–85, 458–84.

  31. See Michael Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History (Yale, 1986).

  32. There are literally dozens of articles and sections of books devoted to this theme. A random sample might include R. H. Hilton and Christopher Hill, ‘The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’, Science and Society, 17 (1953), pp. 340–51; Robert Brenner, ‘Dobb on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2 (1978), pp. 121–40; Stephan R. Epstein, ‘Rodney Hilton, Marxism and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’, PP 195 (2007), Supplement 2, pp. 248–69.

  33. Christopher Dyer, Daily Life in Medieval England (1994), pp. 36–141. Here might be the place to acknowledge my debt to Dr Dyer, surely the doyen of English social history in the fourteenth century.

  34. Dyer, ibid., and additionally his Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society (Cambridge, 1980) and Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c.1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989).

  35. Eileen White, ‘The Great Feast’, Leeds Studies in English, NS, 29 (1998), pp. 401–10.

  36. Christopher Dyer, ‘Did the Peasants Really Starve in Medieval England?’, in Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds, Food and Eating in Medieval Europe (1998), pp. 53–71.

  37. Piers Plowman, viii, 329–38.

  38. Christopher Dyer, ‘Piers Plowman and Plowmen: A Historical Perspective’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 8 (1994), pp. 155–76.

  39. This theme is particularly explored in K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (1981).

  40. For Langland on beggars see Piers Plowman, viii, 28–35, 208–88; ix, 61–187. On minstrels, ibid., Prologue, 35; vii, 96, 108. On hermits, ix, 193, 241; xvii, 6–34. On the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, viii, 228, 288; ix, 63, 176.

  41. R. W. Frank, ‘The ‘Hungry Gap’, YLS, 4 (1990), pp. 87–104; B. A. Hanawalt, ‘Reading the Lives of the Illiterate London’s poor’, Speculum, 80 (2005), pp. 1067–86; Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 59–74.

  42. Richard W. Kaueper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988), pp. 355–60, 366–76. Cf. the remark in M. Moffat and P. Wolff, Ongles bleus: Jacques et Ciompi (Paris, 1970): ‘If there was a symphony, it was not at all played to time.’ Ibid., p. 139. I would prefer to use the symphonic analogy in another way. A Beethoven symphony is very different from, say, a Prokofiev symphony in melody, tone, mood, harmonies, use of dissonance, etc, etc, yet both are clearly symphonies, utilising traditional sonata form. Historians perhaps concentrate too much on the content of rebellions while sociologists concentrate too much on their form. Here as elsewhere I am in favour of a ‘dialectic’ of the general and the specific.