Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

by Dan Jones

  made it their business to send with all haste to every village, however small. Their aim was to get both the old and those men in their prime to join them equipped with such weapons as they could muster, allowing no excuses at all, so that those who refrained from joining them, and those who refused or disdained to do so, would know that they would have their possessions pillaged, their homes burned down or demolished and themselves be executed.

  The revolt was cast from the outset as a community rebellion-and there was a ‘with us or against us’ mentality that had dire consequences for those opposed.

  Bocking reflected the model of rebel organisation-sworn chapters or companies of men banded together by oath, led by the natural leaders of village society, in close communication with other bands of rebels and working to a common timetable-which revolved around strategic, coordinated strikes on selected targets. And as such the rural revolt can be seen not as a spontaneous, itinerant riot, but a carefully choreographed orgy of violence and retribution.

  At the same time as the Whitsunday conventicles in Bocking were starting a month’s rioting across Essex, the spirit of disorder was ghosting across the Thames and into Kent. Whitsun weekend had become a time for banding together, committing to the movement and readying the country community to rise as one. So communication began between the men in and around Barstaple hundred and the inhabitants of Dartford, which was one of the larger towns on the south bank of the estuary.

  The prominent figure in this early stage of the Kent rebellion was Abel Ker, an inhabitant of Erith, a small port village just upstream from Dartford, south of Fobbing, with close links to London through the trading traffic of the river. Ker, like Thomas Baker, was a prominent enough member of local society to command the respect and deference of his peers. On Whitsunday, he gathered together a sizeable band of villagers from Erith and from Lesnes, a couple of miles west along the river, and took them to the nearby Augustinian abbey of St Mary and St Thomas the Martyr.

  The abbey of Lesnes, like many other abbeys about England, was well endowed with land both in its own county and those surrounding it. Monastic communities tended to find themselves frequently in dispute with their tenants, and there was widespread ill feeling towards their use of their own courts to squeeze as much in the way of convenient labour services and feudal dues from their tenants as they could get away with. Lesnes had been a sloppily run institution throughout most of its recent history, with monastic discipline reaching a low point in the 1340s, when the Crown had had to be enlisted to help arrest vagabond and apostate monks. The abbot in 1381, William de Hethe, was obviously marked by men in the Dartford area as a prime example of bad lordship.

  Hethe was at home when Ker’s band bundled their way into the abbey. The rebels stormed in and took him hostage. They forced him to swear an oath in which he promised to be of the rebels’ company, a prospect that no doubt terrified him to the limit of his wits, but which was marginally preferable to death at the hands of an angry mob.

  The capture of the abbot was, for Ker’s rebels, an impressive coup-regardless of the fact that his oath (and the mea culpa that it implied) was made under duress. It held enormous propaganda value, and to a degree it legitimised their actions about the county. The policy of forcing their social betters to profess support for the rising soon became a motif of the rebellion at large, which tells us something important about the rebel mindset: they aimed not to overturn or transform society, but to correct it from the top down.

  Encouraged by his success at Lesnes, the next day-Whit Monday-Ker gathered together a small group from his conventicle and (presumably in a convoy of fishing boats) crossed the Thames to enter Essex. Assize sessions were due in Dartford under Sir Robert Belknap, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. Belknap was one of the two most senior judges in the country, and the prospect of answering to him for the attack on Lesnes Abbey and thus bringing to an end the successful protest after a single day held no appeal.

  So Ker took his band over the river to Rainham, another small village, about ten miles west of Fobbing, to gather new recruits. His men spent the day raising and swearing into Ker’s allegiance more than a hundred men from villages spread across southern Essex. Besides the ordinary villagers, Ker had specific targets for recruitment. He specifically targeted William Berland, a serving justice of the peace who had been an assessor for the 1379 poll tax. Ker’s methods were not subtle: he coerced as his recruiting agent one William Chaundeler of Prittlewell, a seafront village in Rochford hundred, out in the eastern islands of Essex. Chaundeler later claimed to have been forced against his will to instruct Berland and John Prittlewell Senior to rise and meet the rebels at Rainham. Whether they got their men or not is unclear, but by the morning of Tuesday, 4 June, Ker had managed to summon a sizeable force of both Essex and Kent men, all sworn by solemn oath to the rebel cause, one or two of them probably in fear for their lives. They crossed back into Kent and readied themselves for Belknap.

  Sir Robert Belknap was not merely a senior judge. He was a career lawyer who had been a favourite with both the royal court and with John of Gaunt from the early 1370s. Belknap was a familiar figure across the whole of the south-east, but not a popular one-those men who knew a little of London’s politics would have been aware of the contempt in which London’s populace held him. During Richard II’s coronation ceremony the citizens had erected a likeness of his head on a water conduit along the route of the parade, so that all who passed would see him spewing wine out of his ridiculous mouth.

  On Wednesday, 4 June, he arrived in Dartford on his regular Whitsun assize duty. He had been in Stratford, not far from London, on the day that Bampton and Gildesburgh were chased from Brentwood, and during his subsequent scheduled visits to Barnet, in Hertfordshire, and then down to Southwark, the famous first staging post on the pilgrims’ road to Canterbury, he would have heard the frantic reports coming back from Essex and Kent of the disorder that was spreading through the country. There must have been some advance word of his mood, because when it was learned that he was soon to arrive in Dartford at the scene of Ker’s arm of the rebellion, there was such consternation that people across the countryside were said to have proposed abandoning their homes in fear.

  But even with as grand a judge as Belknap at its head, fear of the law was quickly subsumed beneath popular anger against it. When the judicial train arrived at Dartford, the town dissolved into rioting. The chroniclers recall how ‘the commons rose against [Belknap] and came before him to tell him that he was a traitor to the King, and that it was of pure malice that he would put them in default… And they took him, and made him swear on the Bible that never again would he hold such a session, nor act as a judge in such inquests.’2

  The nonchalant tone belies a quite remarkable feat-one of the grandest judges in the country bewildered into submission by a band of rogues armed with recommissioned farm tools. Belknap, like Bampton before him, beat a hasty retreat.

  From the chronicles next comes a sense of unstoppable disorder-the flashpoint in Brentwood spreading like flames through tinder, and erupting into a fire that consumed the whole of the south-east of England. In fact, during the first ten days of June the rebels’ progress was phenomenally coherent, well organised and purposeful, as they unleashed a campaign aimed against agents of central government in the shires, and finally the national government itself. In south Essex, the Brentwood and Fobbing rebels continued to travel the county, raising villages, organising new sworn chapters or rebels, ensuring the coherence of the revolt and spreading the word that on Thursday, 6 June, the rebellion was to begin in earnest. It seemed that the authorities were powerless. Their usual monopoly of violence and control had been suddenly, ruthlessly broken by a group of ordinary working folk operating with an astounding level of organisation and coherence, and with a penchant for gruesome, summary dispensation of natural justice.

  The first thing that each new village saw as the leading Kent rebels visited during that week was
three gory standards. As Belknap was chased from the county, he had been compelled to give up the names of the jurors that had informed him of the perpetrators of the first Brentwood rising on 30 May. The rebels had tracked down three of them, severed their heads from their bodies and stuck them on poles. The bloody trophies went everywhere the rebel companies rode, their blackened, decaying features a warning: the time to rise had come, and the cause must be heeded.

  FIVE

  A GENERAL AND A PROPHET

  The Kentishmen, hearing of things most of them already desired, without delay assembled a large band of commons and rustics in the same manner as the men of Essex: in a short time they stirred up almost the whole province to a similar state of tumult.

  THOMAS WALSINGHAM

  Kent

  By Thursday, 6 June, all of Essex and Kent was in uproar. Voices declaring for the rebellion pealed, with the urgency of church bells, from village to village, and the rule of law began to dissolve into the rule of rough rebel justice.

  The rash of congregations and troublemaking took the authorities by surprise. The Crown had no army ready in the south-east. The nearest significant military force had left London in early May on a new, northern mission, once more commanded by Gaunt. It was now far away in the borders, insurance against the failure of the latest round of peace talks with the Scots.

  Without the threat of royal military intervention, and increasingly defiant of the authority of any travelling legal commissions, rebel bands took to the roads in great numbers. They crossed county borders and opened lines of communication between the now numerous fringes of the revolt. Adding fuel to the flames, two London butchers, Adam Attewell and Roger Harry, were riding throughout Essex and the City’s hinterlands, informing the rebel bands organising in the villages that if they came to London they could count on the support of urban allies.

  The Londoners had their own grievances, and though they were not exactly the same as the provincial rebels’, there were factions in the City who understood that inciting and stirring the lower orders in the countryside might provide a useful mask of disorder for them to settle some scores of their own-not least against property belonging to the absent Gaunt.

  But before they considered any move on London, there were targets closer to home for the shire rebels to consider. On 6 June, a mob formed in Coggeshall, a village near Colchester in the north of the county. Coggeshall was home to Sheriff Sewale. Like all other representatives of judicial authority in the county, Sewale was now in grave danger.

  For reasons best known to himself, as rebellion ripped through his county, Sewale had remained at home, and on 6 June he was barricaded, terrified, in his house next to the village chapel with Robert de Segynton, an exchequer clerk. A detachment of men from Bocking arrived in Coggeshall. There was a serious commotion. As the mob swelled outside the house, inside the two men grew desperate. The rebels made a barrage of hot threats against Sewale, which intimidated him so much that he thought seriously neither of raising arms against the rebels, nor of leaving his house. He simply sat inside, petrified, as outside the air rang with sinister promises of vengeance.

  Throughout Essex, other members of the higher judicial and administrative class shivered at home in anticipation of the arrival of the same terror. The rebels had a specific list of victims. It included Sewale, Gildesburgh and Bampton, as well as men like Walter Fitzwalter, who had acted as deputy to the office of the constable of England, Thomas Mandeville, William Berland, Geoffrey Dersham, a royal manor steward, Thomas Tyrell, the Chief Justice, Robert Belknap, Clement Spicer and Robert Rikeden. All of these men had been peace commissioners, they were significant landowners in the county and had performed some judicial or administrative role in it. To a man they were marked out for attacks on their property and, if possible, their persons.

  Rebel policy across the river in Kent was a bit different. Abel Ker, with his advance party of Essex recruits and early risers from Kent, based himself at Dartford. Having hounded Belknap out of the county, and encouraged two days of widespread vandalism and rioting, they proceeded to ride out and begin agitating in villages within a 10-mile radius of the town. On 5 June they had banded together in the town and identified their target for a 6 June strike: Rochester Castle.

  As the rebels flooded down towards Rochester, along the course of the old Roman road that cut down into the Medway villages and off towards Canterbury, they would have seen Rochester Castle looming: a huge, square fortress with an imposing Norman keep that had made a convenient prison since the twelfth century. King John had besieged it in the thirteenth century, digging mines beneath its walls then using burning pig fat to cause such a violent fire that a corner of the castle had collapsed. But by the late fourteenth century it had been repaired and occupied an important strategic position on both the London road and the Medway river. It should have been a bastion of county authority, and pretty much impenetrable, as the keep had walls 12 feet thick. It was a difficult target, built to keep prisoners in and invaders out.

  The Kent peasants may have been organised, but they were not set up to wage siege warfare. Their ambition, however, made up for their lack of coercive means. Relying on their ability to cause panic, rather than their capacity to breach stone defences, they descended on the castle.

  The irreverent lawlessness in the villages around the castle must either have infected or intimidated the castle’s guards, for without the suggestion of a struggle, they simply gave up their posts. A mob opened the castle jail, and freed the prisoners that were kept there. And to the band of felons they added another, even more valuable trophy: the castle’s keeper, Sir John Newton, was taken hostage.

  The addition of a noble hostage to their ranks swelled the confidence of the rebels, and a party splintered off from Rochester and made their way to Maidstone. All around and behind them, there was organised tumult. The Roman road had been effectively closed off to anyone who would not swear to be of rebel company. This paralysed a vital communication route in the south-east, as this busy thoroughfare was the direct road leading from London to Canterbury-in whose cathedral the relics of St Thomas à Becket made the town one of the most famous pilgrim sites in the country. The fall of the Roman road isolated the capital and royal government from any potential loyalists in the south-east. Anyone passing along the road was liable to be stopped and commanded to take an oath of loyalty to the rebel cause, to be faithful to King Richard and the true commons, to accept no king called John (a sign of hatred for Gaunt),1 to agree that they would be ready to rise with the rebels when summoned, and to pledge to convert as many of their neighbours to the same way of thinking as they could.

  Even among the chaos and rioting, then, a clear statement of ideology was emerging. The rebels fixated on the cult of kingship, but despised all those dripping poison into the king’s ear and spreading rot through the timber of government by their self-serving use of royal positions and power. And they saw themselves as the voices of true moral justice, on a mission to restore the natural order of things to the realm. They were the true commons indeed.

  And they knew their targets well. Maidstone contained property belonging to William Topclyve, one of those who had sat in judgement with Belknap at Dartford. He had an impressive house at the Mote that was an ostentatious symbol of the wealth and status he held as the archbishop of Canterbury’s steward and an important royal administrator. The rebels demonstrated their contempt for Topclyve and his class by joining with a party of excited townsfolk, running rampant through the building and razing it to the ground.

  Most important of all, by the time the rebels reached Maidstone, they had gained two important leaders. Of everything that took place in the hours after the fall of Rochester Castle, the most significant was the rise to power of John Ball and Wat Tyler.

  They were totally different in character and neither of them native to Kent, but Tyler and Ball were definitive of the subsequent events of the revolt. Tyler was an Essex man, probably from Colchester
, who had settled in Maidstone and seems to have known Kent well. Possibly he had fought in the ranks of one or more of the English armies that had been taken to the Continent in previous years, for he certainly had the ability to marshal, muster and command a disparate band of recruits on long marches and flash raids. He may well have been behind the remarkably mature command that went out early in the Kent revolt instructing anyone that lived within 12 leagues of the sea to remain in the villages for defence of the coasts against possible French invasion.2 He was a bold and inspirational general who seemed to leave a mark on many of those who came into contact with him. Certainly he outshone the other petty generals of the early stages of the revolt, for during the day that the rebels spent in Maidstone, he rose from an inconspicuous figure among many who joined in the rapine and plunder, to the overall commander of the riots.

  His first major act, as Maidstone fell, was to raid the prison, and release Ball.

  John Ball was a preacher, a poet, a maverick thinker and a natural rabble-rouser. He had been known to the Church, the secular authorities and the common people of the south-east for the best part of twenty years. Originally a priest in York, he had been imprisoned three times by the archbishop of Canterbury for being an incessant, heretical nuisance, preaching in churchyards and in public places across the region, railing against inequality, the corruption of the established Church and the tyrannies of the powerful against the powerless. His philosophy was in total defiance of medieval orthodoxy, and he had long been a thorn in the side of Archbishop Sudbury, under whose jurisdiction he practised much of his mischief. The archbishop had tried to subject Ball to everything from imprisonment to excommunication. If anything, this drove him to greater irreverence. By the time he was released from Maidstone, Ball had developed an ideology that called for an end to lordship in whatever form it could be found. In his enemies’ eyes, his radical egalitarianism meant an end to all ‘lords, archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors as well as most of the monks and canons so that there should be no bishop in England except for one archbishop, namely himself’.3