A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Before the fourteenth century, peasants played little role in English politics, although King Henry I is said to have dreamed, as early as the 1120s, of three angry peasants threatening him with a spade, a pitchfork and a scythe. As illustrated in John of Worcester’s Chronicle, for the peasants of Henry’s dream already to be carrying either a tax demand or a parchment schedule of their grievances is a portent of many such manifestos of reform yet to come. Henry II was occasionally approached by peasants (in the sources generally referred to as ‘rustics’) offering advice or prophesying doom. On one occasion, riding with his court, he was addressed in English by such a man who warned the King to pay greater respect to the Sabbath. Rather than reply in person, the King turned to one of his knights and, in French, told him to deal with ‘that rustic’. In the 1260s, during the turmoil of baronial rebellion against Henry III, peasants had become mixed up in the violence, on occasion claiming to act in the interests of the ‘community of the realm’, a highly significant concept that sought to join King, barons and peasantry into a single, indivisible and English political cooperative, committed to the welfare of the many rather than the few. For the most part, however, when peasant violence erupted it was incoherent, sudden and directed against particular injustices or individuals.

  As early as the 1220s, all but four of the peasants of the village of Sandford in Somerset had attacked their lord, Nicholas de Arundell, chasing him through the town to the church whose chaplain slammed the door in his face. The peasants then killed Nicholas, carrying his body to his house, which was set on fire in the hope that it might be supposed he had died by accident. Fifteen men and women were drawn and hung for this offence. Six others fled and were outlawed. In 1303, Archbishop Winchelsea’s local representative at the manor of Selling in Kent was set upon by villagers who

  threw him into filthy mud, and with his face turned to his horse’s tail, holding the tail in his hand instead of the bridle, led him with songs and dances through the middle of the village.

  They afterwards cut off the tail, ears and lips of the horse, mutilation of a lord’s animals and in particular of his horses, one of the greatest symbols of lordly privilege, being a popular means by which the poor could vent their fury against the rich. In the same year, Henry Bobbe of Lower Caldecote in Bedfordshire, having hung a local felon, was set upon by peasants and stabbed in the chest with a fork. But these were unconcerted expressions of rage or contempt, of little political significance.

  Only in the towns were there serious outbreaks of political violence: at London in the 1190s, when a movement gathered around William fitz Osbert, known as William Longbeard, claiming to represent the interests of the poor against the rich city oligarchy; again in London in the 1220s, when civil unrest had brutally to be suppressed; at Norwich and Winchester in the 1270s when Norwich Cathedral and one of the gates of Winchester were burned down in civic riots inspired by anti-monastic feeling; at Bury St Edmunds, in the 1320s, and at Canterbury in 1343, when the townspeople are said to have attacked the prior’s house, stealing forty horses and assaulting his men and servants. After the 1340s, something of this previously urban spirit of resistance leaped the city walls into the countryside. The peasant, the labourer, the skilled artisan, gradually began to impinge upon the concerns of a royal government convinced that the poor were growing rich at the expense of their social superiors and that government itself was starved of revenue through the refusal of the new-rich to pay tax.

  The labour shortage and the consequent rise in wages occasioned by the Black Death led to a rise in peasant expectations and opportunities. In a society accustomed to a shortage of land, there was suddenly a glut of empty fields waiting to be cultivated by peasants with the sense and resources to take advantage of changing circumstance. Lords who attempted to enforce old burdens, to demand boon work or unpaid labour, found themselves confronted by a peasantry keen to throw off the shackles of villeinage. Attempts by government to regulate wages and prices were as ineffective in the 1370s as in the 1970s. There had been widespread withdrawal of services from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s estates in Kent within only a few years of the great pestilence of 1348. In 1377, in the immediate aftermath of the Good Parliament, a great rumour spread across forty or more manors in southern England that the King was about to declare all manors named in Domesday (‘The King’s Book’, or ‘The Book of Winchester’) immune from labour services not mentioned in ‘The Book’.

  The Peasants’ Revolt

  In the early summer of 1381, these expectations burst out in the form of a ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, most acute in Kent and Essex but with outbreaks reported as far away as Derbyshire and York, in which the peasantry rose to demand an end to villeinage, to burn manorial records and to denounce the evil counsellors by whom the King had been led astray (generally identified as John of Gaunt, the King’s uncle, and the chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury). The immediate spur to their rebellion was the attempt by the government of the fourteen-year-old Richard II to impose a poll tax, the third in the past five years, intended to ensure that those who might otherwise escape the net of more traditional taxes would be forced to contribute to the costs of national defence. The tax of 1381 was set at a punitive rate of a shilling a head and, although hedged about with assurances that the rich should assist the poor, it was met with widespread resistance. As many as half a million contributors to earlier, lower taxes, simply disappeared from the tax roll. Attempts to redress this were met with armed resistance by three Essex villages convened at Brentwood on 30 May, and shortly afterwards a royal judge sent to reimpose order was sent packing by the mob.

  What little we know of the rebels themselves (chiefly from the record of their prosecution after 1381) suggests that their leaders were drawn from the upper levels of village society, from those who had experience as reeves, or bailiffs or constables, manorial officials accustomed to being obeyed, crudely or perhaps not so crudely literate, familiar with record keeping and accounting, quite able to organize themselves in resistance to their lords’ demands. Their self-appointed spokesman, Wat Tyler, himself bore a surname (from his trade as a tiler) that suggests that these were precisely the sort of artisans and skilled labourers who had most to gain from a relaxation in the burdens of villeinage.

  As rebellion spread across the Thames from Essex into Kent in the first fortnight of June 1381, Tyler and his mob stormed the cathedral and the archbishop’s palace at Canterbury. Where 200 years earlier the poor people of Canterbury had proved the most faithful supporters of Archbishop Thomas Becket, they now rampaged through Becket’s cathedral demanding the blood of their present archbishop. By 12 June, the rebels were in sight of London, and on the following day, the feast of Corpus Christi, in other circumstances one of the most joyous festivals of the medieval Church, marked by processions and celebrations, the King himself was rowed out to Greenwich from the Tower in order to view the mob. South of the Thames, the rebels looted Southwark, attacking the chief prison of the Marshalsea and releasing the prisoners. By some means unknown, they then crossed into the city itself, sacking the prisons, looting and destroying John of Gaunt’s great treasure house at the Savoy, their fires visible by the King, now sheltering in the Tower of London.

  Seeking, or at least pretending to seek reconciliation, the King rode out to Mile End on the following day, where he was greeted courteously and where he promised both to grant the rebels manumission (release from the bonds of villeinage) and to deal firmly with the ‘traitors’ and evil counsellors blamed for their actions. Even as he was parleying, however, another group of rebels broke into the Tower, made off with weaponry and flags bearing the royal arms, sat on the beds, and even tried kissing the King’s widowed mother. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the King’s cousin Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, were both seized by the mob. Bolingbroke narrowly avoided death. The archbishop was beheaded. The mob now began the systematic hunting down of foreigners within the city, executing at least 1
50 of them, for the most part Flemings involved in the wool and cloth trades.

  On the following day, the King rode out once again to meet the rebels, this time at Smithfield. He was greeted by Wat Tyler with a peremptory bow, a shake of the hand and an insistence that he call the King ‘brother’ (frer, and we might note here that even Tyler is imagined by the chroniclers employing a French salute). Tyler then delivered a series of demands before drinking off a flagon of ale. At some point, either in the heat of the moment or as part of a prearranged ambush, a struggle broke out between Tyler and the mayor of London, William Walworth, a successful fishmonger who, like the Poles or the Pulteneys of an earlier generation, had prospered by advancing loans to the crown. Walworth stabbed Tyler – the dagger he is said to have used is still displayed in the Fishmongers Hall – and the King, bravely distracted the mob, shouting ‘You will have no captain but me. Follow me to the fields and you will have what you wish!’ In the ensuing turmoil, the mob dispersed. Walworth achieved the ambition of all successful nouveaux-riches, being knighted by the King on the field of battle. Over the course of the next month or so, order was restored and a series of trials arranged throughout the southeast to bring the rebel leaders to justice. The most prominent of them were either executed or, in a majority of cases, imprisoned. The revolt was at an end. So, despite the best efforts of the elite to reimpose its authority, was villeinage.

  The end of villeinage

  The exact circumstances and chronology here remain obscure. Probably the process would have occurred with or without the rebellion of 1381. Lords unable to persuade their peasants to remain on the land, faced with the flight of labour to towns or other jurisdictions, slowly and in some cases reluctantly began once again to lease out the majority of their estates, transforming themselves from high farmers into rentiers. The processes of the twelfth century, in which a predominantly leasehold economy had yielded place to the great demesne estates of the Church and aristocracy, was put into reverse. Within a generation of 1381, and in many cases even before the turn of the century, land had been leased to a new generation of farmers, in many cases themselves the beneficiaries in the rise of prospects for the yeomanry and upper peasantry. The manor, itself the principal unit of land management and legal authority since the late eleventh century, declined, like villeinage, to a mere shadow on the landscape. In its place, fully formed, loomed the parish with its church wardens and its ability to function as a unit of tax collection and poor relief. The rural society of parishes known to Jane Austen and to Thomas Hardy was born from circumstances rather more revolutionary than the readers of either of these authors might suppose.

  In the meantime, the Peasants’ Revolt had to a large extent proved an urban rather than a rural phenomenon, its greatest crises fought out in towns such as Canterbury or York and ultimately in London. The very speed with which the rebels captured London, as in 1215 against King John or in 1264 against Henry III, and the near total paralysis to which this reduced royal administration, is an important indication of how easy it remained to cross the gulf between order and anarchy. Much as he might claim to control dominions stretching from Scotland to Spain, the King of England did not even possess the resources to prevent a few thousand peasants armed for the most part with staves and stones from seizing the very control-centre of his administration, making free with the King’s bedclothes, his private treasures and even his own mother. Those who witnessed the resulting spectacle were haunted by the memory of a world turned upside down. In his Parlement of Foules (c.1382), superficially an apolitical meditation on love as birds are shown gathering to choose their mates, Chaucer has the assembly suddenly interrupted by the noise of the lower orders, domestic and base birds capable only of incomprehensible cacophony: ‘Kek, kek! Kokkow! Quek quek!’

  Just so must the babble of the crowd have sounded to those in London a year before. John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, also resorted to animal metaphors, likening the peasantry to oxen or donkeys, demanding to be fed on the best hay and to be loaded with jewelled harness. In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s portrait of the ploughman is intended as satire precisely because, at a time of discontented labour, here was a peasant prepared to help his neighbours without pay, gladly taking on such detested jobs as muck-spreading and ditch-digging. More typically, Chaucer’s band of pilgrims included such base figures as a carpenter and a dyer, artisans displaying their wealth in high-quality clothes, fine livery and silver knives. The assumption made by most readers, that all of these figures rode rather than walked to Canterbury, is in itself an indication of the extent to which they had risen in the world, literally as well as figuratively. The Smiths and Bakers, Carpenters and Dyers who today rule the academic or political establishments, as their surnames proclaim, are themselves the heirs to such newly risen, horse-riding folk.

  Religious Radicals

  Two other consequences of the rebellion are worth considering. The first is the spotlight that it threw upon religious opinion. One of the principal targets of the Kent rebels had been the release from Maidstone gaol of John Ball, a radical preacher, previously a chantry chaplain, who had been in trouble with the Church authorities for nearly twenty years before his imprisonment in 1381. To Ball’s preaching is attributed what in fact was a popular English proverb: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then a gentleman?’, a rejection of the deference traditionally required by gentry and aristocracy, still resonating in socialist manifestoes well into the twentieth century. Letters attributed to Ball, urging on the rebels, contain some of the earliest contemporary references to Piers Plowman, itself a protest poem which had preached obedience and peaceful reform rather than Ball’s more radical message of social levelling. To the authorities, nonetheless, the association of rebellion with preachers, and perhaps especially of vernacular literature, was highly alarming.

  Ball himself was hung, drawn and quartered in July 1381. His activities, his apparent immunity from arrest or punishment for many years before 1381, and the fact that at Smithfield Watt Tyler had apparently demanded not only an end to villeinage but the complete disendowment of the Church, stripping ecclesiastical landlords of their wealth in order that they might live like the early apostles of Christ, all contributed to a determination to root out such radicals from the Church. The most obvious target for this counterattack was the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe.

  Wycliffe

  Already, in 1377, as a result of his teachings on papal authority and the eucharist, Wycliffe had been condemned by the Pope, who had ordered his imprisonment. By this time Wycliffe was proclaiming that the papacy, by its corruption and pursuit of wealth, had forfeited all entitlement to lordship. Since the bread and wine of the Mass continued to have the appearance of bread and wine, and since to have accidents without substance was to contradict the natural order, Christ could only be said to be present in the bread and wine figuratively or sacramentally. Without denying that Christ was thus present, Wycliffe in effect condemned the whole rigmarole of chantry masses for the souls of the dead, the feast of Corpus Christi and much else besides, arguing that the Church needed to return to its primitive purpose and teachings, jettisoning much that was late or corrupt.

  Wycliffe was a charismatic teacher. He commanded a close personal following in Oxford. However, his preaching that loyalty and obedience could only be won, as by Christ, through love, and his assertion that only through the Bible, where necessary translated into English, could mankind find truth and salvation, appeared to cut at the roots of the Church’s established authority and, in the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt, could be regarded as a dangerous incitements to the rejection of authority. In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that Wycliffe or any of his followers were involved in the 1381 revolt. John Ball was certainly no Wycliffite, and Watt Tyler’s demand for the disendowment of the Church and the seizure of its resources for the poor was part of a longer standing anticlerical tradition with no direct links to Wycliffe. Nonetheless, in 1382, the new
Archbishop of Canterbury insisted on the condemnation of ten of Wycliffe’s propositions, in theory condemning Wycliffe and his followers as heretics. Wycliffe himself died two years later, still unpunished but convinced that the papacy itself had become an arm of the Antichrist.

  For nearly twenty years after 1382, no decisive action was taken against Wycliffe’s followers, who went on to publish a series of increasingly anti-clerical tracts and to translate the entire Bible into English as a collaborative venture. The fact that, despite condemnation and prohibitions, at least 250 manuscript copies of this translation are known to survive supplies some indication of its success. By comparison, only 21 complete copies survive of the great Latin Gutenberg Bible, printed in Mainz in 1452, and there are as many manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible as there are copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare, printed in 1623. The intention behind the translation was that believers should return to simple scriptural truths, putting aside the theatrical props of a Church too concerned with statuary, pilgrimages and relics to correct its own corruption of Christ’s teaching. As a puritan creed, in tune with much else in Catholic spirituality, this form of Wycliffism, more pietist than intellectual, exerted considerable influence even at the royal court where a group of knights close to the King was accused by the chroniclers of being secret supporters of what was already being called ‘Lollardy’: a term of uncertain origin, perhaps from the English ‘loller’, an idle wastrel, or from the Latin ‘lolia’, the tares or weeds to be divided from good Catholic wheat.