Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  Alcohol also inevitably lead to violence. In 1306, court records state that members of elite village families in Bedfordshire were involved in an enormous, drink-fuelled brawl in which John Ketel, “twice juror and twice ale taster . . . broke the head” of Nicholas, son of Richard Smith and badly beat Richard Benyt, “and moreover did hamsoken upon him”; John, son of Henry Smith, four times juror, “struck Robert Stekedec and drew blood from him,” while his brother Henry Smith “pursued John [Smith] . . . with a knife in order that he might strike and wound him.” And these were the county’s intelligentsia.

  WE’VE HAD VICIOUS KINGS, AND WE’VE HAD IDIOT KINGS.

  And now, following the Plague, rural unrest was growing across Europe. In 1355, there was a new tax in France, set at 4 percent for the rich, 5 percent for the middle class, and 10 percent for the poor, further aggravating growing anger.

  There had been revolts of the poor before. Back in the 1190s, London’s downtrodden had been roused by a rabble-rouser called William Fitz Osbert, who called himself the “savior” of the poor and whose political career ended at Tyburn. There was the Pastoureaux revolt, or Shepherd’s Crusade, which broke out in northeast France in 1251. Some sixty thousand people “wandered in bedraggled, penniless bands from village to village in the northern provinces, finally descending on Paris as a horde incremented by thieves, vagabonds, gypsies and tarts.”17 They at first received sympathy from much of the population, but inevitably it turned violent and priests, nobles, and Jews were attacked, and numerous buildings burned down. The Parisians tired of them and drove the rustics to Rouen, and then the king, returning home from crusade, massacred them all.

  The Plague changed things, though, since everywhere there were differences in mortality between classes. In some areas twice as large a proportion of serfs died as of noblemen, and soon there was upward pressure on wages; the town of Coucy in France was among those that suffered “the fires of mischief” caused by a lack of laborers.

  In the early summer of 1358, widespread discontent in the French countryside erupted into the Jacquerie, so called because Jacques Bonhomme was an insulting term for peasant, after the simple clothes they wore, the jacques (from where we get jacket). In Paris it was led by a demagogue called Etienne Marcel, who brought a mob of three thousand people to storm the Grande Salle. Marcel and his followers burst into the chamber of the king’s son, the Dauphin, and shouted “We have business to do here,” the crowd seizing a royal counsellor and hacking him to death on the spot. Another royal adviser fled but the rebels caught and killed him, dragging his bloodied corpse out and throwing it into the courtyard below in front of a screaming mob. The Dauphin, terrified, was saved by Marcel, who smuggled him out in disguise. Paris was overrun by rioters, criminals, and students.

  The Dauphin’s family were at Meaux just outside of the capital when a swarm of peasants numbering nine thousand arrived “with great will to do evil,” threatening murder and rape; the Dauphin’s wife, sister, and infant daughter, as well as three hundred ladies and their children were guarded by a small, increasingly nervous band of lords and knights and were now imperiled. The mayor and magistrates of the town had sworn to the Dauphin that they would allow no “dishonor” to his family, but they proved craven and opened the gates to the rebels, giving them bread, meat, and wine. Now the rustics poured into the city and filled the streets with “savage cries” while the ladies trembled in fear. Their fortress was connected to the city only by a bridge and a strip of land between the river and a canal; as with the women of any sacked city, they knew what their fate would be if the rebels overran the castle.

  As the ladies prayed, at that very moment two southern knights were riding through the area, on their way back from travels, when they heard the commotion. Jean de Grailly, Captal de Buch, and Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, were on opposing sides in the war, the former loyal to the House of Plantagenet and the latter to the Valois claim. But they were also cousins and while the two houses were holding a truce they had gone on crusade in Prussia together to fight the pagans. They had no love for the Dauphin Charles, or his family, indeed for the northern Franchimen, as the Gascons and Occitans called them—but they could never allow noble ladies to be endangered by a mob in this way.

  The two Guyenne knights hastened to the town along with 120 men, and when they saw the castle where the women cowered, they did not hesitate. Along with twenty-five knights in bright armor with “pennants of argents and azure displaying stars and liles and coucgant lions,” the two men rode through the portcullis and fought the peasants in close-armed combat. The rebels were butchered—“killed like beasts”—and by the end of the day several thousand lay dead; just a few knights had been slain. Afterwards de Grailly and Phoebus burned down the town and the mayor was hanged, along with many other disloyal city folk, and they escorted the noble ladies back to safety.

  Most of the violence was centered on Paris, and the area just north of it, but soon the tide turned, and the revolt was crushed by an especially sinister nobleman, Charles of Navarre, known as Charles the Bad. Indeed, he was so immersed in plots that when the peasants had stormed the royal palace one of Charles’s men had been discovered close by with poison sewn in his clothing, apparently with orders to assassinate the Dauphin and his uncles. A second plan to kill him also had to be abandoned in 1359. When, in October 1360, the Dauphin was afflicted by an illness which caused all his hair and nails to fall out and he was left “dry as a stick,” it was believed that Charles of Navarre had poisoned him with arsenic; he continued to suffer ill-health afterwards.

  In England, rising wages led the authorities to enact hopeless laws aimed at restricting the “outrageous and excessive apparel of many people above their estate and degree, and to the great destruction of all the land.”18 Wages were fixed, and punishments doled out to anyone who left his land to find work elsewhere, but the law was widely ignored. The plague returned again in 1368, pushing up the cost of labor further, and in 1375 there was a bumper harvest and the price of food declined again; things had changed forever for the hierarchy, although many were unable or unwilling to accept it, least of all the now senile monarch.

  The pinnacle of chivalry in his glory days, King Edward had grown weak and melancholy and for the people too the last years of his reign had been miserable ones. Over the hot summer of 1375, people lived in dread of the plague returning; the old king, a widower now losing control of his faculties, grew infirm and depressed and was seemingly under the spell of his grasping mistress.

  Edward III finally died in 1377. only a day after a great feast at Windsor where he made his grandson Richard of Bordeaux a Knight of the Garter. A year before the king’s death. his eldest son Edward went to the grave, and so the crown passed to Richard, the Black Prince’s surviving son. A boy of only ten years was now on the throne.

  So on June 21, 1377 the guildmasters of London rode into the Black Prince’s former palace at Kennington, south of London, and swore their loyalty to the new king. There were many petitioners waiting to see the new monarch, among them John Wiltshire of London who requested that he confirm the right of he and his heirs to “hold a towel when our said king shall wash his hands before eating [breakfast] on the day of his coronation.” The records were checked, and it was found that this was indeed his family right.

  Edward III’s funeral was the grandest affair anyone alive would have ever seen, his hearse escorted by four hundred torchbearers and carried through Westminster Abbey with twenty-four knights dressed in black. Behind the coffin stood King Edward’s three surviving sons: John of Gaunt, Edmund of Langley, and Thomas of Woodstock. Along with their deceased siblings Edward and Lionel of Antwerp, the brothers had held a tight bond around a strong and unifying ruler—but over the next century their descendants would destroy each other in a war of unusual ferocity.

  A few weeks later there came Richard’s coronation, a brilliant display where “girls showered gold leaves on the king,” and a boy dressed as an
angel bowed to the monarch and offered him a crown.19 But such was the size of the throng that came to the king that the boy almost fainted, until carried onto the shoulders of his adult mentor Simon Burley.

  For the coronation a champion was appointed, to defend the new monarch.20 During the banquet he would ride into the hall fully armored and bearing arms where he would challenge anyone to deny the king’s right to the throne before throwing a gauntlet down. Richard’s uncle Gaunt gave the champion’s right to Sir John Dymoke, Lord of Scrivelsby in Lincolnshire, apparently the wish of the late king, and so it became theirs as a hereditary privilege. However, the champion turned up in his shining armor at the doors of Westminster Abbey too early and was only saved because Henry Percy, as marshal of the coronation, had placed himself by the door in case of trouble. Seeing the over-excited and possibly inebriated Sir John storm through, Percy stopped him, telling him to “take his ease, and rest awhile.” Then, during the banquet, Dymoke barged in, saying that if anyone questioned Richard’s right, he was “redy now till the laste houre of his brethe, with his bodie, to bete him like a false man and a traitor, on what other daie that shal be apoynted.”21 This tradition of throwing down the gauntlet has been maintained down the centuries, although it was once picked up—during the coronation of George III in 1760, by a woman who was worried “that so finely dressed a gentleman should lose his glove in so great a crowd.” The Dymoke family maintained the right since, with the sole exception of the coronation of William IV in 1830 when the authorities tried to cut costs; although the direct line of the family died out in 1875, relations of the Dymokes still carry out the role today.

  For two days in 1377, there was a public holiday in London while the city was cleaned and enormous statues of classical gods and bizarre creatures were placed on triumphal arches on the major roads, with musicians and jugglers at every corner. Richard’s procession went from the Tower of London to Westminster and before him marched the serjeant at arms at the head of armed troops, followed by esquires in the livery of their patrons, the mayor of London, alderman and sheriffs, as well as Gascon and German mercenaries. The city’s Goldsmith’s Company had paid for a castle to be built out of which free wine flowed, while between the turrets was a golden angel holding a crown, who as the king passed by descended to hand it to the monarch. On each turret a girl scattered gilt leaves at the crowds.

  After fifty years of rule by a great warrior monarch, at a time when life expectancy was barely half that, a boy sat on the throne. There was trouble ahead.

  Richard’s reign began with a series of military failures in the war against the French, and from the start it was ridden with factionalism. In Westeros, the realm is ruled by the Small Council, made up of a handful of men, among them the Hand, the Master of Coins, and the head of the Kingsguard; in real life the monarchs of England ruled with the help of the Royal Council, and with a boy on the throne they would wield more power than usual. Most powerful was Gaunt, who had in the last years of his father’s reign been raised to Duke of Lancaster and was the most obvious man to rule in the king’s name. And yet from the start Richard resented his uncle.

  Royal finances were often perilous and for most of the late medieval period the crown was in dire levels of debt; those in charge were always looking at new ways of extracting money from subjects, and the declining population had aggravated their problems. Taxes had already gone up twenty-seven times in Edward’s reign but desperate for money, the Council settled on the idea of a poll tax, levied not on land or wealth but on every member of a household who had reached adulthood; this was raised in 1377 and again in 1379, but when a third poll tax was issued in 1381, huge numbers of people simply disappeared off the register.

  And so in April 1381, the authorities sent armed men into Essex to enforce the tax, and three parishes in the county erupted into violence. Soon the villages of Essex and Kent emptied as armed men formed mobs—killing royal officials, breaking into prisons, and freeing the inmates.22 The uprising swelled to as many as fifty thousand men from the two counties marching on the capital. The Kentishmen reached the edge of London on June 12, and the following day they were let in, whether from fear or sympathy it is not known. Among its leaders were Wat Tyler and a radical priest called John Ball, who said that “things cannot go right in England . . . until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same.”23 Ball said the Lords “are clad in velvet and camlet lined with squirrel and ermine, while we go dressed in coarse cloth. They have the wines, the spices, and the good bread: we have the rye, the husks, and the straw, and we drink water.”24 This was dangerous stuff, and Archbishop Sudbury of Canterbury accused Ball of preaching heresy.

  What began with aims and some degree of organization descended into mob violence after the wine cellars of the city’s grand houses were looted. Soon after, and inevitably, the mob turned on unpopular targets such as Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, which they ransacked and burned, and foreigners, mostly Flemish immigrants.

  A contemporary, John Gower, wrote of Tyler that “his voice gathered the madmen together, and with a cruel eagerness for slaughter he shouted in the ears of the rabble, ‘Burn! Kill!’” Another, Thomas of Walsingham, described the “filthy” rustics with “uncouth and sordid hands” as “ribalds and whores of the devil.” It did not help that most of the male population was legally armed and would have had either a long bow, sword, or dagger on hand, and many had experience using them; indeed, since the reign of Edward I earlier that century regular longbow practise had been mandatory.

  The mob in a medieval city was a terrifying prospect, and this was made worse by the absence of any experienced leaders. Gaunt was in the North on his way to fight the Scots, where he fell out with Henry Percy, the first of his line to drop the French “de” from his name. Percy would become the first Earl of Northumberland and feature prominently in the unfolding tragedy, but his line was almost destroyed in the conflict. The two men did not get on, and when Gaunt arrived in Berwick, Percy’s soldiers refused him entry without their lord’s approval. “How cometh this to passe? Is there in Northumberland a greater sovereign than I am?” he asked. The men replied that they were following orders of the earl, “a principall and sovereigne of all the heads of Northumberland.”25 They knew no other king but the king in the North, whose name was Percy.

  Back in London the boy-king, alongside his cousin, Gaunt’s son Henry of Derby, cowered in the Tower on the eastern edge of the city when the mob stormed in, killing every nobleman they could find and ransacking the building. Henry, just fourteen, escaped only because an elderly soldier among the mob, who had previously been involved in the sack of the Savoy, now took pity and hid the boy. The Queen’s mother was humiliated by being forced to kiss low born men but, while the mob was distracted with destroying her chambers, an aide ferried her out, perhaps saving her from rape. The Archbishop of Canterbury was not so lucky; he almost escaped until he was spotted by one woman in the crowd and was beheaded.

  King Richard, just a few month’s older than his cousin, agreed to meet the rebellion’s leader, Wat Tyler, at Smithfield, outside the city. Tyler, a common laborer from Dartford,26 was said to have started the revolt by killing a tax inspector who sexually assaulted his daughter. Now he raised his hands aggressively to the monarch, but the young king held his nerve, even when the Kentishman made a series of outrageous demands that “men should be free and of one condition.”

  The atmosphere was calmed by the king’s calm demeanour, and the rebel leader then ordered for beers to be brought, but when one of the king’s men muttered that he was “the biggest thief in Kent,” Tyler drew his knife. The mayor, William Walworth, a former fishmonger, pulled out his own weapon and fatally stabbed Tyler.27 The king placated the stunned mob and offered safe passage home and an end to the Poll Tax, but afterwards royal forces massacred hundreds of men as they made their journey back to Essex and Kent, while many more were executed in bloody reprisals. Tyl
er was finished off by the mayor’s men while dying in the hospital; Ball was hanged at St Albans in the presence of the king. Fifteen rebels were executed in that town, to the north of London, drawn through the fields they had claimed and hanged from trees; some sympathizers had cut down the corpses for reburial, but the king ordered bailiffs to find them and make iron chains so that they could be re-suspended. The townsmen were ordered to rehang the putrefying corpses with their own hands.

  Serfdom, an economically obsolete system, ended during the fifteenth century; labor services were relaxed manor-by-manor, and fines for refusing feudal services declined, although it’s arguable that the revolt did not help. For Richard the violence left him with a lasting fear and dread of the London mob—although his real enemies were closer to home.

  *Gulf Arabs still have this practice, so that the notorious terrorist’s full name was Osama ibn Mohammed ibn Awad ibn Laden.

  20

  WILDFIRE

  Why is it no one trusts the eunuch?

  —VARYS

  Rome did not die. In the fifth century, while the West was overrun by Lombards, Vandals, Goths, Franks, and Saxons, in the East the Empire and people survived and thrived, and would continue for another thousand years, in a new city that was for many centuries the beating heart of Christendom. Its magnicifent churches would marvel blond-haired barbarians from the north, its greatest jewel being the Hagia Sophia. It is said that envoys of the Grand Prince of Kiev, upon entering the basilica, were moved to tears and could not tell whether they were on heaven or earth. Constantinople was the greatest city that was or ever will be.