A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  In south Essex in the spring of 1381 the tax commissioners had ordered the men of villages around Brentwood to appear there before a certain date and make their payments. The commissioners were a formidable group, four justices and the sheriff, but on 30 May they found themselves engulfed by a hostile crowd led by a Thomas Baker from the village of Fobbing. Baker was accompanied not just by his own villagers but by Essex men from a wide sweep of countryside – from Rainham, Billericay, Goldhanger and Mucking. The numbers were sufficient for the rebels to feel brave enough to threaten physical harm to one of the commissioners if he persisted. Instead, he got on his horse and spread the news. The stakes escalated. Heavily reinforced, the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas descended on the insurgent area, but he, too, was taken captive by a still bigger throng and made to swear he would never repeat the effort. When the rebels discovered the identity of informers who had named names, their heads were hacked off in short order. By 2 June something extraordinary had happened. At Bocking the leaders of another uproarious crowd had it swear an oath not just against wicked impositions but against feudal lordship itself. They would, they vowed, ‘have no law in England except only they themselves moved to be ordained’.

  Even as it began to kill those who claimed to be the officers of the king and make statements of astonishing radicalism, the rebellion professed fervent loyalty to the person of the fourteen-year-old king. Richard was still seen as saviour not oppressor, and they would liberate him from his captivity at the hands of evil men, like Gaunt, the Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury, and the treasurer Hales. And like many of the uprisings of the common people that broke out in Europe at the end of the fourteenth century, the English rising was fired by a sense that the world of the Black Death was a time of reckoning. If the hand of God struck down the mighty, reached through the walls of their castles, levelled their vanity and pulled them into their graves, why should they imagine they should escape the hand of the long-suffering people? The people would now do the work of God and his anointed king; they would be the rod of his punishment and inaugurators of a golden age of justice and Christian equality.

  This is what was being said at the gatherings, mobilized by flying pickets riding through the countryside. By the first week in June the revolt had gone beyond Essex into Kent, where another army, thousands strong, descended on Rochester Castle where they found a perfect symbol of their cause: a man imprisoned for his failure to come up with the ‘manumission’ money needed to change him from serf into free man. In Maidstone Wat Tyler, originally from Colchester in Essex, was elected as their general and captain. In Canterbury, John Ball, a priest from Colchester who had been excommunicated and then imprisoned for defying the ban, told the crowds to rid the world of all bishops and lords save only one Bishop of the People: John Ball. The priesthood, loaded with wealth, was an abomination that stank in God’s nostrils. Once purged, the country could be made a kingdom of the Lord, returned to the innocent state of long, long ago. ‘Things cannot go right in England and never will until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk but we are all one and the same,’ Froissart has Ball tell his flock:

  Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? And what can they show or what reason can they give why they should be more masters than ourselves? They are clothed in velvet and rich stuffs ornamented in ermine and other furs while we are forced to wear poor clothing. They have wines and spices and fine bread while we only have rye and refuse of the straw and when we drink it must be water. They have handsome manors . . . while we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field and it is by our labours that they . . . support their pomp. We are called slaves and if we do not perform our services we are beaten and we have no sovereign to whom we can complain . . . Let us go to the King and remonstrate with him; he is young and from him we may obtain a favourable answer, and if not we must seek to amend our conditions ourselves.

  So they marched, Wat Tyler, John Ball and Robert Cave, the baker from Dartford, the Three Dead, confronting the rich and the mighty with their day of judgement.

  12 June 1381 was a warm Wednesday. In the fields of Blackheath overlooking the Thames the rebel army was camped in what, to Londoners, must have seemed alarming force. If it was not the 50,000 described by Froissart, the army was certainly between 5000 and 10,000 strong. They were emphatically not a rabble. Many of them had got to the edge of London on horseback, and others in carts and wagons. En route their targets had been carefully selected: estates belonging to tax collectors or prominent members of the royal council and anything belonging to John of Gaunt. The sheriff of Essex, Sir John Sewale, had seen his house pillaged before the insignia of his office were torn from his clothing. Any document bearing the green wax seal of the Exchequer was marked for destruction. The manor house of the treasurer, Sir Robert Hales (‘Hob Robber’ as John Ball called him), at Highbury was ransacked and demolished. It was an army that knew what it was doing. And it believed itself patriotic. No one living within 12 miles of the south coast was permitted to join the march lest the French be tempted to attempt a landing. This paradoxical obligation on the part of a popular movement to demonstrate its loyalty, its responsibility and its political maturity would return time and again in British history to undo the most powerful weapon of any potential revolution: the refusal of deference. No crowd that forms itself into a line to petition a sovereign is ever going to make a revolution.

  Map showing areas of activity during the Peasants’ Revolt.

  None of this was apparent to the authorities in June 1381. Their immediate reaction to the appearance of the rebels on the outskirts of London was panic. John of Gaunt headed for his castles in Northumberland, was refused admission and was obliged to seek shelter in Scotland. His son Henry Bolingbroke ran for the Tower along with Archbishop Sudbury, Sir Robert Hales and Joan of Kent, the king’s mother, who took Richard with her. Confused arguments broke out over whether to show the rebels a hard line (as the Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth, consistently proposed) or to make at least a show of tactical negotiation. In the midst of all this chaos, Richard himself seems to have kept a composure astonishing in a fourteen-year-old. Perhaps he believed in the professed loyalism of the rebels; perhaps he even allowed himself a secret touch of sympathy with their hostility towards his guardians. At any rate, when the council asked him to see the leaders of the rebels, he showed no hesitation.

  To avoid capture, he travelled by barge downstream on the morning of 13 June from the Tower towards Blackheath in the company of Archbishop Sudbury and the earls of Warwick and Arundel. At some point between Rotherhithe and Greenwich the barge came close enough to the bank to hear the rebels, who demanded the head of John of Gaunt and fifteen other ‘traitors’ as a precondition of negotiations. Suddenly it did not seem a good idea to disembark. The barge returned to the Tower. Assuming that they had been rejected, the rebels unleashed the crowds on the city. The prisons were opened, beginning with the Marshalsea and the Fleet. Legal and financial records, the key, the rebels thought, to their tax assessments, were destroyed at the Temple and Lambeth Palace. A brothel on London Bridge, staffed by Flemish whores and owned by Walworth, burned down, and finally the crowd got to their choice target: the Savoy. First, John of Gaunt’s impressive cellars, full of Bordeaux wine, were drained; then his gold and silver plate was seized, but rather than steal it, the attackers dropped it from the Savoy terrace into the Thames. Emptied of its grandeur, the palace was burned to the ground.

  As the June sky was darkening, Richard climbed one of Henry Ill’s towers and looked out at the city. The sky over London was red with flames, while the Savoy, Clerkenwell hospital and the houses of many other rich and powerful merchants were falling in smoking ruin. Many in his position, and a good deal older than fourteen, would have collapsed in terror. But somehow Richard seemed to understand that the only way out of the desperate situation was to confront it head-on. Walworth suggested that to get th
e rebels out of the centre of the city, a meeting should be proposed at Mile End, then a rustic village well beyond the eastern gate. So, on the next day, Friday, 14 June, Richard rode on his palfrey, together with his mother and most of the court, through the jostling crowds to meet Wat Tyler and the rest of the leaders. The people on the highway spoke to him with startling familiarity and directness, demanding restitution for whichever officers had done them injury. As the milling throng closed in, some of Richard’s knights thought better of their body-guarding assignment and turned back to the city. At Mile End Tyler asked Richard’s permission to deal with the traitors as they deserved. Richard responded with calm intelligence that those who had already been sentenced by due process of law would, indeed, be punished. This was not the licence to lynch that the rebels had in mind. When they pressed him for an end to serfdom and a flat-rate rent of four pence an acre, he consented. If, however, Richard and his councillors imagined these tactical concessions would take the sting out of the revolt they were wrong. Richard’s apparent endorsement of the revolt had the effect of unloosing further retribution. Anyone marked as ‘foreign’ was hunted down, and perhaps 150 were killed. Thirty-five Flemings, who had replaced the Jews as the scapegoat of choice – the personification of money – were dragged from sanctuary in St Martin in Vintry and decapitated on the same block, one after another. At the Tower the crowd was big enough and in an ugly enough mood to persuade the garrison to open the gates. The armoury was plundered, and the royal beds tried out. Richard’s mother, Joan of Kent, was made to kiss one of the rebels. In the chapel of St John the crowd found Sudbury and Hales preparing for death. Before he was beheaded on Tower Hill, Sudbury made a speech to the crowd, warning them that if he were killed the country would be put under interdiction. The threat provoked only laughter, followed by grim resolve. Eight blows were needed to finish him. The heads of both men were stuck on the spikes reserved for traitors to the Crown. But it was the likes of Wat Tyler who now decided who was true and who was treacherous.

  Richard must have felt that there was a chance he might not survive, but he agreed nonetheless to a second face-to-face meeting at Smithfield on the Saturday morning. Before he left, he went to the great shrine that Henry III had built at Westminster and prayed to the king whom the Plantagenets had made their guardian saint, Edward the Confessor. When he reached Smithfield, he saw that the rebel leaders were on the west side of the field, the royal party on the east. Wat Tyler rode over to Richard, dismounted, briefly and unconvincingly bent his knees, but then rose, shook the king’s hand and called him ‘brother’. ‘Why will you not go home?’ Richard asked. Tyler is said to have responded with a curse and a demand for a new Magna Carta, this time for the common people, formally ending serfdom, pardoning all outlaws, liquidating the property of the Church and declaring the equality of all men below the king. As revolutionary as all this sounds (and undoubtedly was), all the demands, other than the pardon for outlaws, would, in fact, return as elements of English royal policy in the centuries to come. But that was for the future. When Richard replied in the affirmative (with the crucial loophole, ‘saving only the regality of his crown’), it was hard to know who was more flabbergasted – the rebels or the royals.

  Perhaps taken aback by the unexpected concession, for a moment no one did anything. A silence fell over the field, broken by Wat Tyler calling for a flagon of ale, emptying it, then climbing back on his mount, a big man on a little horse. And it was at that moment that history changed.

  Someone on the royal side was evidently unable to take the humiliation a moment longer. It was a royal esquire, a young man of the king’s own age, who shouted that Tyler was a thief. Tyler turned his horse, drew his dagger and rounded on the boy. The spell was broken. A mêlée broke out, and Walworth, who must have been beside himself with mortification, attempted to arrest Tyler. There was fighting, Tyler striking the mayor with his dagger, Walworth cutting Tyler through the shoulder and neck. He rode his horse a little way back, blood pouring from him, then fell to the ground where the king’s men were on him, finishing him off.

  It was the moment of truth. Once they had discovered Tyler’s fate, the rebel side might have attacked then and there. But before they could, Richard himself pre-empted the action with a show of astonishing courage and resourcefulness, riding straight to them shouting, famously: ‘You shall have no captain but me.’ The words were carefully chosen and deliberately ambiguous. To the rebels it seemed that Richard was now their leader just as they had always hoped. But the phrase could just as easily have been meant as the first, decisive reassertion of royal authority. In any event, it bought time for Walworth to speed back to London and mobilize an army that, just the day before, had been much too scared to show itself. At Smithfield the process of breaking the now leaderless army began cautiously and gently, with promises of pardons and mercy. Once back in London and Westminster, though, the king and council acted with implacable resolution. On 18 June, just three days after Smithfield, orders were sent to the disturbed counties, commanding the sheriffs to do whatever it took to restore the peace.

  In selected cases and places this meant swift, summary justice: gibbets and swinging bodies were soon on display. In London the man said to have beheaded Archbishop Sudbury was himself decapitated. But there were many local authorities that preferred to pacify with relative leniency, imprisoning rather than executing offenders. Only where there was continued resistance did the government show itself ferocious. At Waltham on 22 June the king faced another group of rebels who were asking for a restatement of his Mile End concessions. But they found a very different Richard, who turned on them with authentic Plantagenet rage:

  You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues. Rustics you were and rustics you are still: you will remain in bondage not as before but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However we will spare your lives if you remain faithful. Choose now which course you want to follow.

  Astounded by this new voice, many of the rebels did, indeed, decide to cut their losses and accept the king’s mercy. Others determined to fight. At Billericay on 28 June a force took on the royal troops and was routed. In Essex a special commission hanged nineteen of the leaders, and another twelve were executed by hanging and drawing. When the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay, asked for men who loved the king to appear in arms in his defence, one source records 40,000 as answering the call. It was all over.

  It’s never healthy for a teenager to get a premature sense of omnipotence, but in the circumstances how could Richard have avoided it? His father had won his spurs in France when he had barely been out of his adolescence, and all his young life Richard had been hearing about the preux chevalier (valiant knight), the flower of chivalry and so forth and on and on and on. Now that he had faced his first battle – one that, moreover, had called on great reserves of mental and physical courage – and had come through the firestorm a hero, it was understandable if he were a little carried away with the wonderfulness of being King Richard II. Equally understandable was the king’s lingering sense that it was the ‘official’ guardians of the realm – his uncle Gaunt and the great nobles of England, the men pressed on him by his mother as his political tutors and councillors – who had got him into the hideous mess of the rebellion in the first place. After the revolt was finished off, the Commons actually voiced their own sense that some of the rebels’ grievances were, in fact, not without substance. So they, too, evidently felt the Gaunt regime to blame for the crisis. What was more, amid the general meltdown of the magnates, their scurrying back to their estates, he, Richard, had kept his cool while they had lost theirs. So why should he not trust his own judgement when it came to choosing his companions and councillors?

  We have been conditioned by Shakespeare’s portrait of a feckless, wilful and petulant princ
e, designing his own disaster, to think from the beginning of Richard’s court and his councillors as a reflecting pool of his own vanity and the fish swimming in it as prize specimens of the ornamental, the greedy and the parasitic. In fact, they were not a bunch of orchidaceous nonentities but an interestingly mixed and able group, representing many of the communities that counted in late fourteenth-century England. The much-execrated Simon Burley had been the Black Prince’s choice of tutor for his son. Robert de Vere, who was absurdly suspected of homosexual affection for the king, was not only a notorious womanizer but came from one of the most ancient baronial families in the country. Michael de la Pole, who became Richard’s chancellor, represented the new social reality, coming as he did from a family of ennobled wool merchants. Thomas Mowbray, Richard’s boyhood boon companion, was a famous champion of the tilts and tournaments.

  The real sin of Richard’s court was that it paid insufficient attention to the ancient and powerful aristocracy – the Gloucesters, Arundels and Warwicks. As they began to smart at being set aside in offices and favours for Richard’s inner circle, so the impression began to be circulated that there was ‘something wrong’ with the king, and that he was, somehow, not a ‘give-em-hell’ native Plantagenet but rather a fancy, nancy boy with foreign, if not actually deviant, tastes. Never mind that Richard was built like all the rest of his forebears – 6 feet tall with long, flowing, blond hair. The late unlamented Edward of Caernarfon boasted the same Plantagenet features, too, and in crises Richard was already being ominously reminded by his enemies of the fate of Edward II. Somehow he wasn’t the real Plantagenet stuff. Real Plantagenets built fortresses. Richard was more interested in beautifying the great ceremonial space of Westminster Hall with a stunning hammerbeam roof, the better to display the mystique of his royalty. Real Plantagenets smelled of the battlefield. Richard apparently liked to bathe, and worse, to bathe frequently in bath-houses decorated with coloured tiles and walls. Real Plantagenets tore at their meat and slurped the drippings. Richard not only insisted on using spoons but also inflicted them on his nobles. A real Plantagenet would not have commissioned the first royal cookbook with 186 recipes packed with suspicious foreign spices like cardamom and spikenard. Real Plantagenets brought you blood-soaked victories over the ancestral enemies, the Scots and the French. Richard II brought you the handkerchief.