by John Gardner
Afterwards the French landed on the Isle of Wight.…[W]hen they had looted and set fire to several places, they took a thousand marks as ransom for the island. Then they returned to the sea and sailed along the English coastline continuously until Michaelmas. They burnt many places and killed, especially in the southeastern areas, all the people they could find. As they met with little resistance they carried off animals and other goods as well as several prisoners. It is believed that at this time more evils were perpetrated than had been caused by enemy attacks on England during the previous forty years.
In this same year, the French assaulted the town of Winchelsea.…While this battle was being fought, the French sent a group of their ships to burn the town of Hastings. In this same year, the French invaded England near the town of Rottingdean close to Lewes in Sussex.…3
And so it went. The English side fought bravely, from time to time. In Chaucer’s circle people told the story of the French-born servant of the prior of Lewes, who “fought so stoutly, fiercely, and persistently against his fellow Frenchmen that his stomach was pierced by their swords and his bowels dropped to his feet. Disregarding this injury, he pursued the enemy, trailing his intestines far behind him.”4 But though brave enough at times, England was weakened and half torn apart, like the heroic Frenchman, by internal violence.
Chaucer never tells us directly what he thought of this period, though much of his Canterbury Tales reflects, in covert form, his perception of what was wrong: a lack, on every side, of trust and patience, a simplistic notion that force might prevail, as it does, at least for a time, in bad marriages. But probably much of what was wrong not even Chaucer understood until much later.
The nation’s troubles had of course been building up for years, coming from all directions, insidiously growing, almost unnoticed or else stubbornly rejected as unthinkable. It had begun many years before the first of the plagues—in changing weather, in changing labor patterns, in changing attitudes toward law, religion, and intellectual inquiry—so that when it finally surfaced like a cancerous lump it was a cancer already metathesized, spread so universally that one could only make guesses at where it started. It was to surface most noticeably in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, of which Oman wrote in his excellent though partly outdated study,
To most contemporary writers the whole rising seemed an inexplicable phenomenon—a storm that arose out of a mere nothing, an ignorant riot against a harsh and unpopular tax, such as had often been seen before. But this storm assumed vast dimensions, spread over the whole horizon, swept down on the countryside with the violence of a typhoon, threatened universal destruction, and then suddenly passed away almost as inexplicably as it had arisen.5
Though the revolt was eventually crushed, what lay behind it remained basically unchanged—as no one knew better than Geoffrey Chaucer. Gradually, through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a spirit more dangerous than even the plague—or so many people thought—had been growing in England, as in much of the world, a spirit Chaucer would dramatize for his courtly audience in a major section of his Canterbury Tales, the so-called marriage debate which, rightly understood, runs from the tale of the Man of Law to the Franklin’s Tale: in the family, the state, even the Church, the old Anglo-Saxon idea of partial self-determination for all classes was reawakening.
In the eighth-century English epic Beowulf, lost and forgotten by Chaucer’s time, the basic principle had been enunciated: a king’s rights did not include violation of “the people’s land or the lives of men.” The French victory of 1066 had changed all that in England, replacing the direct relationship of the people and their king with what would become increasingly bureaucratic feudalism, which built walls of rank between the king and his subjects and meant, for the least of them, bondage. Edward’s war, which gave the lesser people new significance, helped to stir up in the lower classes a wish to return to the old ways, to freedom—and the war was only one force among many that pushed men toward rebellion against the fourteenth-century status quo.
We observed earlier that the forces of radical change were already afoot in England well before the plagues, that the plagues, in fact, were as devastating as they were partly because, over the years, hordes of peasants had escaped from the country where the lowest of their group, the villeins, were bound to the land, and had come to what they imagined would be the freer, easier life of the big-city ghettos, that is (not in the modern sense), “suburbs.” There, of course, they became odd-jobs laborers and often, since labor was overplentiful, thieves. If they were lucky—that is, if they managed not to starve, or die of sickness, or die by hanging or by some cutthroat’s knife—they might happen to get passage to France or Scotland as foot soldiers. They could get rich in war, since Edward and his lesser commanders paid wages and even the lowborn were free to keep booty; and in Edward’s time they could win their legitimate freedom from villeinage by noticeably courageous fighting. They returned to England professional killers, expert handlers of quarter-staffs, axes, knives, bows and arrows. Gangs grew up, both in town and in the country—numerous and fierce—gangs organized like battle units. Chaucer, in his old age, would be attacked by such outfits more than once. There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that labor was growing increasingly militant and dangerous, an ever-present threat to middle-class property and life, and that the villeinage system was already at this point weakened past repair. The same was happening all over Europe.
Ironically, the Good Parliament, for all its hatred of rebellious peasants, was itself a force that would ultimately spur the peasants to more violent rebellion. Brooding over memories of Crecy and Poitiers, Sluys and Espagnols-sur-Mer, both Lords and Commons were ruled by one dream, that of winning back provinces lost. No one seemed to understand that conditions had changed completely, that the circumstances which had given the Black Prince and Edward III their triumphs had vanished. France had learned how to deal with Edward’s tactics and had won away many of England’s allies, so that England was now too weak, and France too strong, for an English victory. Yet in 1376, years of unsuccessful expeditions and shrinking boundaries had not yet shown parliament what Gaunt and his marriage negotiators knew, that England’s only hope was peace. To the Commons it seemed that the only explanation for the stream of disasters must be the corruption or imbecility of old Edward’s (or later young Richard’s) ministers, and so again and again they tried and imprisoned or (especially in Richard’s time) beheaded them. The Lords, dependent on Commons for the necessary broadly based taxes, had no choice but to acquiesce.
Thus the power of what Geoffrey Chaucer saw as the bird-brained parliament grew by leaps and bounds in the seventies, and central government, repeatedly attacked and rebuked, began to totter. It seemed to the middle class a great leap forward when the widely representative Commons was able to impeach those financiers to the king (friends of Gaunt) whom they considered to be war profiteers. In most cases, if not in all, the government corruption they exposed was real. But one clear though unintended effect of the Commons witch-hunt was to undermine government credibility, so that when the peasantry burst into fiery rebellion in 1381, great numbers would believe that the king’s ministers were again all corrupt (as now they were not) and that the peasants’ best service to their king would be the murder of all his officials, starting with Gaunt.
As Commons grew stronger, extorting the aid of the king and magnates in its war on the peasants, the peasantry responded by organizing and by embracing more radical persuasions. We have no evidence, and there seems little likelihood, that there was ever any central committee of malcontents who coordinated strikes or issued orders for peasant uprisings; but there were bloody local strikes, as the Commons complained in 1377, and they were strikes not thought out by bumpkins. Yet though strikes took place all over England, and though some rebel peasants, especially in Norfolk, liked to speak of a “Great Society” (Magna societas), all who have studied the Peasants’ Revolt agree that it was by no means the result
of nationwide organization. It was the result, rather, of universally intolerable conditions (different conditions in different districts) and of the contagious idea that people had a right to resist unjust “auctoritee”—what Chaucer would call, speaking of the family but hinting at conditions in the nation as a whole, “the wo that is in mariage.”
In towns the idea of revolt was largely spawned in what we may as well call manufacturing plants. In the old days the master of a trade did his work on a small scale, with two or three apprentices, each of whom aspired to become, eventually, a master. But England’s increasing industrial activity—one more product of the war—had created by the late fourteenth century a class of great employers and a class of oppressed artisans with no hope of becoming masters. By false impediments and guild red tape, the employer deliberately made it difficult for his numerous employees to set up in business for themselves, so that apprentices who had completed their term of years must continue as poorly paid hirelings. These hirelings formed leagues and societies, usually disguised as religious orders, to work together for their rights.
One such person, of whom Chaucer must have heard numerous tales and whom he may have seen in action, since Chaucer had connections in that part of the country, was “the mad priest of Kent,” John Ball, remembered today chiefly for his preaching a sermon on the rhyme,
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman?
He seems to have known little or nothing of Wyclif or of the Oxford rationalists; in fact, all of his ideas have been shown to be commonplace opinions among the peasant priests. But he apparently preached those opinions with extraordinary gusto. Part of Ball’s program, his enemies claimed, was murder and the redistribution of land. The claim no doubt had some truth in it. He traveled up and down for twenty years, preaching discontent or, to put it another way, offering a vision that no one but the desperate or crazy would take seriously for centuries to come. What he offered, according to the hostile Anonimal Chronicle, was a kingdom of more or less equal peasants ruled by King Richard. At the time of the riots, the chronicler says, Ball advised the peasants “to get rid of all the lords, and of the archbishop and bishops, and abbots, and priors, and most of the monks and canons, saying that there should be no bishop in England save one archbishop only, and that he himself would be that prelate.…For which sayings he was esteemed among the commons as a prophet, and labored with them day by day to strengthen them in their malice—and a fit reward he got, when he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and beheaded as a traitor.”6 Other leaders rose, fanatical and persuasive, in every part of England, a strange hodgepodge of dedicated visionaries, thugs, and opportunists.
Chaucer’s England in the late 1370’s had still other troubles. Second only to the magnates, the moneyed men—the merchant leaders, burgesses, and craftsmen, mainly concentrated in London—might have been the country’s stabilizing power. But this group, like the magnates, could not overcome its private rivalries. And the Church, with its rich rents and lands, was just as bad. It was despised by Gaunt and all who stood behind him not only for its selfish misuse of power but also for its intellectual backwardness; it was insecure amid the discontents to which Wyclif was giving voice; and Church landowners, the most reactionary in England in terms of their demands of labor, services, and rents, had been the victims of riots by outraged villeins (for confinement in shackles, among other things) since before Chaucer’s birth.
One more source of trouble in the first few years of Richard’s reign was the presence, especially in London, of foreigners, particularly the Flemings. In those days the foreigners in England’s larger towns were not only the desperate and destitute one sees now in, for instance, Spanish Harlem or London’s East End. The fourteenth-century foreigner might be a fat, smiling merchant or manufacturer, and the destitute who skulked in their rags from street to street, peering around corners like alleycats, were as often as not native Englishmen, fugitive villeins, ne’er-do-wells willing to take any job, legal or illegal, since it seemed to them nothing could make their status any worse, not even hanging. The grievance of the impoverished Englishman against the foreigner, especially the rich one, was that, as it seemed to him, the foreigner was sucking the wealth out of the country and (as London merchants in fact claimed in parliament in 1381) secretly exporting England’s gold and silver, for which he gave in return only useless luxuries. Since there was no cash in the realm, according to peasant reasoning, money was hard to come by and wages were low. This was the crime of the foreign merchant. That of the manufacturer, especially the manufacturer from Flanders, was that he was an unfair competitor who ruined the native artisan by using the cheap labor of his fellow aliens—also women and children. The argument against foreign workers and manufacturers was of course not all wrong. Ever since Edward III had first tempted the Flemings and Zeelanders to Norfolk, skilled artisans as well as common laborers had been coming from abroad in herds.
Such was the state of affairs in rural and urban England in the seventies and early eighties. The nation was sitting on a powder keg, though no one knew quite what to do about it, not even Chaucer’s friend John Gower, who in his Mirour de l’Omme described the unrest and predicted social cataclysm but had no real advice to give on what might be done. Gower wrote,
There are three things
that bring merciless destruction
when given the upper hand:
a flood of water, a raging fire,
and the lesser people;
for the common multitude
can never be stopped,
neither by reason nor by discipline.
Mirour de l’Omme, 11. 26499-506)
Chaucer no doubt agreed. We find in his poetry some favorable portraits of members of the lower class: the stern, honest Parson on the Canterbury pilgrimage, or his brother the Plowman,
That hadde ylad of dong ful many a fother; [carried…load]
A trewë swynkere and a good was he, [worker]
Lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee.
God loved he best with al his hoole hertë
At allë tymës, thogh him gamëd or smertë, [took pleasure]
And thanne his neighëbor right as hymselvë.
He woldë thresshe, and therto dyke and delve, [make dikes]
For Cristës sakë, for every povrë wight, [creature]
Withouten hire, if it lay in his myght.
His tithës payde he ful faire and wel,
Bothe of his propre swynk and his catel. [labor…possessions]
And we find throughout the poetry a concern that the poor be treated fairly by those in authority over them. But for Chaucer (as for Shakespeare) the poor are, in general, amusing creatures, occasionally lovable, but sometimes foolish and always potentially dangerous. In the late 1370’s they no doubt seemed mainly dangerous, especially to Chaucer, away from England much of the time on business for the king and thus unable to keep an eye on what was happening.
The Bad Parliament of 1377, not exactly packed but certainly manipulated by Gaunt, had been reactionary to the bone, devoted to undoing the measures of the previous Good Parliament. How a conservative body of this kind could concede the first poll tax in English history has sometimes been considered a wondrous puzzle, but the answer is fairly simple. Gaunt’s purpose was to restore confidence in the monarchy, and that, he knew, must involve more than exonerating last year’s public villains. He must balance the budget (or come somewhere near it), and he must in any way possible forestall the criticism and hostility of the Commons, presumably by easing their financial burden—at the same time bringing in more money than ever before to the royal Exchequer. Gaunt’s solution was to switch from the usual subsidies on movable property (understandably unpopular with the merchants especially, whose large inventories were by such a tax their ruin) to a “tallage of groats,” that is, “a groat, or four pence [$4], from each lay person of either sex older than fourteen years”—except for “notorious paupers who begged publicly�
�—and “from all members, male or female, of the religious orders, and all ecclesiastics promoted to a benefice, twelve pence.”7
This strategy to some extent relieved the burden on merchants and manufacturers (though it stabbed Gaunt’s old foe, the Church), and at the same time, at least in theory, it widened the tax base. It was a clever idea, but not fair to the poor. If Gaunt was indeed the engineer of the plan, and as the king’s deputy he probably was, he deserved the hatred he received from the rebel peasants of 1381. Yet in Gaunt’s defense it must be said that (1) the Commons’ cooperation was desperately important to Gaunt’s laudable goal of winning back confidence in central government, that is to say, the crown and what we would call civil service; (2) John of Gaunt and all those close to him, including Chaucer, were in later years increasingly sympathetic toward the downtrodden and deeply concerned about their general welfare, though most peasants never forgave “King John” for his supposed cruelty, a “haughty indifference” which, fairly judged, showed only that (3) to Gaunt, as to everyone else in politics, the peasants were an unknown quantity in 1377. No one knew how many peasants there were, how much they could afford, or even that the regulations they lived by were different from vill to vill.
The peasants were quick to point out the inequity of Gaunt’s plan. They demonstrated, with the help of first-rate lawyers, that the plan was unfair, and, in rebellion against the unjust collection, they distorted the census, that is, lied about their numbers and thus paid a head tax on about one head out of ten. In 1379 Gaunt—or someone—responded with a new plan, a “sliding tax” in some ways comparable to our modern income tax, which acknowledged social differences. Historians have usually interpreted the graduated tax as a sign of the Commons’ recognition of the principle of social justice, but that interpretation is doubtful. No one really believed in 1379 that the peasants would explode into widespread violence. The reason for the graduated tax was simply that by virtue of being more just, it would be more easily collectable. The plan almost certainly came from Gaunt, not the Commons.
