Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

by Dan Jones

  HENRY KNIGHTON

  Essex, May 1381

  The prosperous market town of Brentwood was a familiar stop on the busy trading road through Essex that connected London with Colchester. Originally known as Burnt Wood, it was a relatively young town, hacked out of the thick Essex woodland by the canons of Osyth Priory in the 1170s. It was part of the county’s diverse, healthy economy, which was driven by (but by no means solely reliant on) the wool trade with Flanders. Served by clusters of villages that were dotted along the banks of the Thames estuary, Brentwood was a natural hub for the county’s traders. Many inhabitants of the economically busy and geographically mobile shire would have been familiar with its streets, and with the market that drew together traders, hawkers and farmers from across the shire on a regular basis.

  On Thursday, 30 May, the town of Brentwood hummed with the presence of several hundred such local villagers. The most senior men from the rural settlements in and around the hundred of Hinckford, including the villages of Fobbing, Corringham, Stanford, Mucking, Horndon, Billericay, Rawreth, Ramsden, Warley, Ginge, Goldhanger, Ingatestone and other places farther afield, had been summoned to town to participate in peace sessions before the county justices, led by Sir John Gildesburgh. Influential local men sat in judgement of the lesser, who mingled around the town in a state of taut anticipation.

  On the surface, this was part of the familiar yearly ritual of medieval life. Late May and early June was a time of business and merrymaking in England. It was a time of popular religious observance, with the festivals of Whitsun, Trinity and Corpus Christi following closely upon each other, giving rise in the villages and towns to fairs, festivals, pageants, processions and ‘summer games’-social rituals of playful mischief and controlled disorder, where labourers played at being lords and the lords tried to bear it all with good humour. This year there was added tension: a great storm had blown up earlier in the month, exciting and stirring the lower orders, and sending a portentous crackle through the air.

  Whitsun, which was to be celebrated on the coming weekend, was a familiar time of official administration. The central law courts in Westminster were on vacation, and the royal justices made their routine county visits. Manorial courts-private law courts held by local landowners-also held their sessions, at which they would take views of frankpledge-oaths from all the adult males in their jurisdiction that they would agree to keep their tithing (little arrangements of ten or so households) in good order, and present any misdemeanours before the court. All in all, it was a busy time, at which men and women congregated, communicated and travelled through the local area-the perfect time for mobilising large groups of people.

  Between Christmas 1380 and Whitsun 1381 Essex and every other county in England had grown used to seeing the members of royal commissions. Almost as soon as the Northampton parliament had granted the tax, collectors had been appointed right across the country, to take receipt of the money gathered by individual communities.

  There had been a strange ferocity about the government’s demands. What had not been revealed to the Northampton parliament about the huge sum demanded was that it was to fund not one but two military tasks. The first was indeed the sustenance of the earl of Buckingham’s French front; but the second was to equip an entirely new army to be sent to Portugal. John of Gaunt had grand territorial designs on Castile, and by his insistence a fleet was to be equipped in May under his brother, Edmund Langley, earl of Cambridge.

  With such huge obligations to fulfil, a new treasurer had been appointed on 1 February. Direction of the exchequer had been handed over to Sir Robert Hales, prior of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, and owner of several fine estates in Essex and Hertfordshire.

  Throughout February, Hales had carried out ‘viewings’, or audits, of the tax receipts. They were grim, riddled with evasion. In Essex, which had declared a taxable population of nearly 48,000 in 1377, the eligible folk of the county now claimed to number just 30,748. Similar numbers were reported all across the country. To believe the returns, it would seem that the population across the whole of the south-east had fallen between 20 and 50 per cent in the space of two years. In the century of the Black Death, this was not unprecedented-but as there had been no serious outbreaks of plague in recent years, it was clear that those villages and towns that were declaring a depleted population and paying an accordingly reduced tax bill were engaged in blatant fraud.

  The main tactic was to refuse to acknowledge unmarried females. Widows, sisters and daughters levied a burden on communities which they could not make good by work, so it made sense to exclude them from the community levy, especially if they were new additions to the tax roll, when their inclusion seemed the most unjust.

  By mid-March the government had reached the limit of its patience. The members of the king’s council were furious, and blamed corruption and dishonesty on the part of the collectors and the leading figures in the localities. The response-quickly rumoured to be at the behest of a royal householder and serjeant-at-arms, John Legge-was to launch royal commissions of inquisition to go into the countryside and find out what was happening.

  These commissions were dispatched under orders to ‘investigate and inspect’ copies of the original assessments, and compare their findings with ‘oaths of the constables and bailiffs of each vill and borough’ as to the true number of eligible taxpayers lurking undeclared. They were commanded to extract in full the shortfall, and pay it into the exchequer. The date for final payment of the entire £66,666 lay tax contribution was dragged forward from 2 June to 21 April.

  So it was that counties like Essex and towns like Brentwood had been subjected to a second round of government interference in their lives. The inspecting commissions quickly gained a reputation for ugly methods. Their official instructions also commanded them to ‘seize and arrest all those whom you find acting in opposition or rebellion to the above commands’; such men were ‘to be held in… prisons where they are to stay until we make provision for their punishment’. Muscle was provided to each commission in the form of a pair of royal serjeants-at-arms assigned to travel with them. Serjeants-at-arms

  -such as Legge-were effectively royal thugs, heavily armed members of the king’s bodyguard who expected to intimidate with their might and worship as members of the royal household, and-frequently

  -their sheer physical size.

  Ill feeling spread fast. Rumours circulated concerning the harsh and disrespectful methods of the commissioners. Word spread that in one village (after the revolt the tradition sprang up that it was Fobbing, an Essex estuary village close to Brentwood) a commissioner ‘shamelessly lifted the young girls’ skirts to test whether they had enjoyed intercourse with men’.1 This would make them liable for taxation, but it was not a test to which any decent parent would consent-‘many would rather pay for their daughters than see them touched in such a disgraceful way’.2

  Possibly as a result of their apparently gleeful heavy-handedness, it was also rumoured that the government was trading in poll tax commissions, by allowing court favourites to buy a licence to collect the tax shortfall, and keep any profits above what was owed to the exchequer for themselves. Whether any of this was true or not, it is clear that the aggression and contempt shown towards the villagers of the south-east by certain zealots on the tax commissions were provocative in the extreme, and in protest against what the chronicler Henry Knighton summed up as ‘the imposition of new and almost unbearable burdens which appeared to be endless and without remedy’, the people of the region began to conceive of a plan to resist.

  Just such a plan had been gestating in Essex for some time. In all of the incursions into the shires, royal government was represented by familiar local faces from the gentry landowning class. In Essex the three most prominent were Sir John de Gildesburgh, Sir John de Bampton, a former sheriff and royal steward, and Sir John Sewale, the sheriff of Essex. Since the later years of Edward III’s reign all three had been active in transacting royal
business in the county. Bampton was a particularly notorious figure. In 1377 he had been one of the panel appointed to oversee the recruitment and training of archers and men-at-arms to resist invasion, and to provide for beacons to be lit across the county in the horrible event that the French landed. The following year he had been appointed a JP. In March, Gildesburgh and Sewale had sat on the panels to investigate the paltry returns that had reached the exchequer in payment for the third poll tax. Now Bampton and Gildesburgh returned at the head of peace commissions. Though these were regular events in the judicial calendar, to the majority of people in Brentwood their nominal purpose was immaterial. These were simply more royal commissions, making more punitive incursions into Essex life. A whisper of resistance went around.

  Those men who gathered for the 30 May peace sessions in the town were there to represent their villages. As such, they included men of some local seniority, many of whom could claim to be representative of the interests and ideas of the broad mass of those with whom they lived and worked. Villager after villager would have spoken of their frustration with the incessant demands and interference of the machinery of royal justice; its lack of equity, and the misgovernment of the realm in the name of an innocent young king. That sentiment, allied with the mischievous spirit of the season and the electric foreboding that had come with the storms, had manifested itself in a readiness to resist and rebel-to stand against Gildesburgh, Bampton, Sewale and all those like them.

  As the day’s peace sessions progressed, Bampton and Gildesburgh called before them various representatives of the villages in Hinckley.

  Fobbing, represented by a man called Thomas Baker, was a village in high foment. During the days leading up to 30 May, Baker had ‘[taken] courage and beg[u]n to exhort and ally himself with the men of his village. These men leagued themselves with others and in turn they contacted their friends and relations so that their message passed from village to village and area to area.’3

  We do not know what business Bampton called Baker forward on, but it was assumed afterwards that it was connected with the earlier poll tax investigations. Our main source records that, sitting there in his pomp, Bampton commanded Baker and his associates to make on behalf of Fobbing ‘a diligent enquiry [into tax evasion], give their reply and pay their money’.4 Baker’s men, who had been waiting, no doubt nervously, for this moment, ‘replied that they would pay nothing at all’,5 arguing that Bampton himself had just months earlier accepted their previous payment-which made his current commission little more than a thinly veiled excuse for yet another new tax.

  Bampton was taken aback by the insolence. He snapped back with a threat and a pointed reference to the armed serjeants that flanked him. But numbers and solidarity between the different sets of villagers all assembled in Brentwood made the Fobbing men bold. Bampton’s tartness served not to subdue but to embolden them and their allies from all the other villages gathered in the town. As a mob, more than a hundred villagers told Bampton outright ‘that they would not deal with him nor give him any money’.6 Knighton later recorded that they were ‘delighted that the day had come when they could help each other in the face of so urgent a necessity’.

  Livid at this display of insubordination, Bampton ordered his bodyguards to arrest the malefactors. By the letter of his commission it was a reasonable demand. But realistically, he was being absurd. Two serjeants were ample to deal with a couple of recalcitrant defendants, but against a mob they were useless. The commons advanced menacingly towards the two increasingly pathetic serjeants and the entire commission realised their lives were in jeopardy. The villagers were armed-rudely, but capably-and Bampton’s party fled, heading for home before their throats were slit. They rode hard south-west along the road back to London, bound for the royal council, their tails between their legs and a hail of arrows from the contemptuous mob following swiftly behind them.

  Out of a mixture of frustration, belligerence and resentment, the first blow of the irate lower orders against what they saw as the overzealous and pompous agents of an incapable government had been struck. The village rebels disappeared into the forest that surrounded the town. As the night set in, the first band of rebels to have taken arms shivered beneath the trees. When the sun rose on the first day of June, the Great Revolt had begun.

  FOUR

  A CALL TO ARMS

  The commons took to the woods, for fear that they had of [Sir John Bampton’s] great malice. They hid there for some time, until they were almost famished; and afterwards they went from town to town inciting other people to rise against the great lords and good men of the country.

  Anonimalle Chronicle

  Whitsun 1381

  Brentwood brought everything that had been hidden into the open. Many things that had been secret in the hearts and whispers of ordinary men were now known. Having driven Gildesburgh and Bampton from town with bows, arrows and volleys of violent threats, the angry crowd, realising that what was done was serious and dangerous, scrambled for the thickets and leafy anonymity of the woods. One set of royal officials had been sent packing, but there were more crawling around the county. Before long they would return, seeking retribution, punishment and bloodshed.

  But the woods were no place for ordinary folk to live, and after nightfall hunger drove the rebels back on to the roads and into the open. The next day they began to venture back to their villages to report to their kinsmen and neighbours the detail of what had happened. The response far and wide throughout the villages along the estuary was common determination that what had started should not be an isolated flare-up, but the beginning of a county-wide rebellion against the constant encroachments of oppressive royal justice and the impositions of lordship.

  But there was no real model for ordinary English villagers seeking to mobilise large-scale protest against the established order of lordship and justice. The county had to be raised by improvised methods. So the rebels began, said the Anonimalle chronicler, to go ‘from place to place to stir up other people to rise against the lords and great folk of the country’. Men, almost certainly on horseback, given the speed of the rising, were sent out from village to village, proclaiming the start of a movement and whipping up rebellious fervour.

  The leader of the first rebel company, which drew its followers from across the hundred of Barstaple, was Thomas Baker. Lurid rumours swept around of his personal motives: the chroniclers heard suggestions that he had been the avenging father whose daughter was molested by the hands of the tax inspectors. Perhaps that was true. What is certain is that he was a man of resolution and organisational skill, and well connected in Essex, Kent, Suffolk and Hertfordshire.

  Soon the names of Baker and Fobbing were known across Essex, as runners and riders passed news of the movement he directed for miles around. They found like-minded men both in north Essex, close to Colchester, and south, beyond the broad Thames estuary, in Kent.

  In Brentwood, Baker had been in contact with men from Bocking, a village comparable in size to Fobbing, situated farther north, in Hinckford hundred. The Bocking men would have carried back with them enthusiastic reports of Bampton and Gildesburgh’s humiliating defeat, and they too began to move out into the county and spread the message of open insurrection. Village by village, the whole county began to move.

  By Whitsun-Sunday, 2 June-it was clear that there were hundreds of willing men and women throughout Essex who would stand together and advance what had begun. This raised some practical questions. Clearly, it would not do simply to have the county plunged into anarchy. There was a clear and present need for structure.

  So, as Bocking prepared to celebrate Whitsun, the village filled with men. Eight villages within a 10-mile radius sent representatives: Coggeshall and Stisted to the south-east; Braintree and Dunmowe to the south-west; and Ashen, Dedham, Little Henny and Gestingthorpe, all to the north or north-east. All would have come knowing the symbolism of their meeting place. Bocking had a long history as a place where the lower orders had a
ttempted to resist the legal impositions of their manorial overlords. Sixty years earlier their ancestors had pursued a long legal battle with the priors of Christ Church, Canterbury, to try to wriggle free of some of the burdensome feudal obligations that came attached to their land and lives. Rich in this history of determined independence, it was a fitting meeting-place in 1381.

  A large meeting was convened. There were no minutes, and what was said is lost, but a later legal case would allege that it was here that the assembled villagers rose ‘treacherously against the lord king’. As a mark of the general commitment to what was sure to be a dangerous and perhaps fateful undertaking, all swore oaths to work together with one aim: ‘to destroy divers lieges of the lord king and to have no law in England except only those they themselves moved to be ordained’. With that, the foundations for the county rebellion were laid.

  It was very likely agreed at Bocking who constituted legitimate targets of the rebellion, and the methods by which recruits could be gathered. All men present agreed to catch and kill royal ministers and officials, and those whom they held responsible for the dismal governance of the country and the perceived corruption of justice that had repeatedly been visited on the common folk of the country, most recently by the poll tax commissions. First among these targets was Sheriff Sewale. Others included all those who had exercised positions of royal government or onerous private lordship in the county. Woe betide anyone who counted in both categories.

  Violent coercion was also approved as a legitimate part of the recruitment drive. One observer wrote that the rebels ‘went to the manors and townships of those who would not rise with them, and cast their houses to the ground or set fire to them’.1 According to Thomas Walsingham, the St Albans chronicler, ‘men of just two villages’-Fobbing, perhaps also Bocking-had