A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Though these laws had a powerful cumulative effect in fostering discontent, they did not themselves provoke mass revolt. The final trigger to England’s first major popular rebellion was Edward III’s costly war with France, which necessitated new financial levies. The first of three ‘Poll Taxes’ was levied in 1377. Although initially successful, the Poll Tax soon became a much hated and evaded financial instrument. Opposition culminated with the third tax of 1380, which differed from both its predecessors in the massive increase in the amount to be collected, £160,000, and in the rate, 12d on every man and woman over fifteen, which was triple that imposed in 1377. The move did not meet with the unanimous approval of those at the political centre. One key dissenter from the policy at court, Thomas Brantingham, Bishop of Exeter, resigned the treasurership of England. In 1326 his predecessor in both offices, Walter Stapledon, had been lynched by a London mob that held him responsible for the financial policies of Edward II. Perhaps Brantingham did not wish to see history repeat itself.

  Initially, the public responded with evasion, not resistance. There are forewarnings here of what would happen the next time a British government attempted to impose a Poll Tax. To avoid paying Thatcher’s tax, massive numbers disappeared from the electoral roll – 130,000 in London alone between 1989 and 1990. Similarly, in 1380, more than a third of those who had been registered for the tax in 1377 seemed to have disappeared from the rolls by 1380, with Essex seeing a massive decline of 36 per cent.* Aware of the problem, new commissioners were sent out on 16 March 1381 to track down the missing taxpayers. The two key figures behind this drive were the Chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, and the new Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales, both of whom would become particular objects of the rebels’ fury.12

  Grievances produced by the burden of taxation dovetailed with a period of political weakness at the top, caused by the death of Edward III in 1377. The King’s heir, Edward the Black Prince, had died in France the previous year, leaving the throne in the hands of a child-monarch, Richard II, Edward III’s grandson. The shadow of war and the dynastic uncertainty provoked by the King’s death led to fears – especially following the military humiliations of 1377–80 – of Franco-Castilian raids, or even a full-scale invasion. The Crown was clearly concerned about the circulation of these rumours, as well as hostile rhymes and slanders concerning the architects of the Poll Tax. In 1379, Parliament passed a statute ‘For punishment of devisers of false news and reporters of horrible and false lies concerning prelates, dukes, earls, barons, and other nobles and great men of the realm, whereof great peril and mischief might come to all the realm and quick subversion and destruction of the said realm if due remedy be not provided’.

  Revolt began in earnest in Brentwood, Essex, on 30 May with the arrival of a royal commission to assess evasion of the third Poll Tax, led by John Bampton, MP and JP for the county. The towns of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope refused to cooperate further with the effort to collect the tax. Serjeants-at-arms attempted to arrest the representatives from the resisting settlements, but were driven out of Brentwood. Fearing for his life, Bampton fled to London. The success of the townspeople of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford in sending the royal commission packing quickly led to a larger rising in Essex, with one chronicle stating that fifty thousand men had risen by 2 June. However, the numbers of rebels who marched on London, according to the research of historian Andrew Prescott, were much smaller than those given by contemporary chronicles – perhaps a few thousand. Nevertheless, their numbers were swelled considerably by Londoners themselves.

  Thomas Walsingham described the initial resistance as the work of ‘the rustics, whom we call “nativi” or “bondsmen”, together with other country-dwellers living in Essex [who] sought to better themselves by force and hoped to subject all things to their own stupidity’.13 But John Geoffrey, indicted later as a leading agitator of the Essex rebels, held the title of bailiff and was a literate local administrator. Overall, of 954 rebels whose names survive, the occupations of 283 were recorded. Of these, only five were unfree tenants. Most striking was the preponderance of Essex men who had served in the offices of village government, people like John Geoffrey. The rebels included fifteen tax collectors, the same number of village constables, and three bailiffs, illustrating the way in which the Statute of Labourers had eroded the power of village elites, hitherto trusted to regulate much of the daily life in their communities.14

  According to Walsingham, news of the Essex rebels’ deeds

  passed rapidly through the counties of Sussex, Hertford, Cambridge, Suffolk and Norfolk; and all the people expected great happenings. They wished to have everything themselves and would pursue their enterprise (however audaciously) wherever it should lead – many hoping for a better future but others fearing that all would end to the ruin of the kingdom.15

  Walsingham presented the rising as an elemental force, like a fire coursing through a field of stubble, the mass of the people naively caught up in its wake, following its path more in hope than in expectation. However, if the older claims of G. M. Trevelyan that Wat Tyler, John Ball and Jack Straw headed up a mass peasant organisation called ‘the Great Society’ are most likely an error created by a mistranslation – ‘Great Society’ is less plausible than the more literal translation of ‘big gang’ – it is clear that the speed and breadth of the rising were the result of considerable organisation. This is suggested not only by the number of counties in which risings took place, but also by the rebellion’s timing. We can find many references to peasant risings beyond East Anglia and the Home Counties. An attack was reported on Peterborough Abbey on 17 June, an assault was reputedly made by tenants on the priory at Dunstable, Bedfordshire; and there were village disturbances in Buckinghamshire and rumours of trouble in Leicestershire. The prior of Worcester Cathedral reported rebellion on his estates in the first week of July; news of disturbances came from Warwickshire around the same time, while on Wirral, the tenants of the Abbot of St Werburgh in Chester were in revolt against their lord as late as 29 July.16

  The risings began at the time of the major church feasts of Whitsun, Trinity and Corpus Christi. These were not only religious festivals, but occasions for summer games, processions and revels. The feasts also coincided with courts of leet (manorial courts) and ‘law days’ in the hundreds (larger administrative units), and with royal justices’ visitations of the counties to hold assizes. The rebels had chosen a moment representing the confluence of religion, festivity and legal authority. The lawful congregation of people for these events (including the legitimate carrying of arms by peasants for the biannual ‘view of arms’) was not just a good cover for seditious meetings; it also gave the rebels the opportunity to appropriate the existing apparatus for mass organisation and rallying. This included the use of the ‘hue and cry’ and the ringing of church bells to summon support, thus recalling the words of the leading rebel John Ball in letters attributed to him by the chroniclers Knighton and Walsingham:

  John Ball greeteth you all

  And doth to understand he hath rung your bell,

  Now with might and right, will and skill,

  God speed every dell.17

  In Kent, the spark to rebellion was the disputed status of one Robert Belling, then living in Gravesend. Belling was claimed as a serf by Sir Simon Burley, who sent two serjeants-at-arms to secure his arrest sometime before 5 June. The bailiffs of Gravesend refused to surrender Belling, but hoped to negotiate some form of cash redemption that would enable him to buy out Burley’s claims. However, Sir Simon’s demand for at least £300 in silver was far beyond Belling’s means: he was arrested and imprisoned in Rochester Castle. A large group of Kentishmen gathered on 5 June at Dartford. They then marched on Maidstone, where it was said they murdered a prosperous townsman, before proceeding to Rochester, which they reached the next day. The constable of the castle, Sir John Newton, wisely surrendered Belling to the rebels. Newton himself then joined their ranks. (According to the chronic
ler Froissart, this was the condition for his life being spared.)

  It is here, at the fall of Rochester Castle, that Wat Tyler’s name is first mentioned. As with most of our medieval and early modern rebel captains, we know precious little for certain about him. It is not even clear from where he originated. The late fourteenth-century Anonimalle Chronicle is emphatic in claiming that his hometown was Maidstone, while jurors who sat on later inquisitions stated that he came from Colchester in Essex. His most recent biographer accepts Froissart’s judgement that Tyler was from Maidstone, ‘a tiler of houses, an ungracious patron’.18 Whatever his origins, there is evidence that he was also identified as the key leader by rebels outside of London and Kent. William Grindecobbe, rebel leader in St Albans, requested that Tyler send a force of twenty thousand men to kill the Abbot and monks in return for the unquestioned leadership of the town.

  By early June, Tyler was certainly the leading figure among the Kentish rebels. They marched on Canterbury, reaching the cathedral on 10 June during the celebration of high mass, and demanded that the monks elect one of their number to replace Simon Sudbury, ‘for he who is now the Archbishop is a traitor who will be beheaded for his iniquity’. Although the Mayor and burgesses of Canterbury wisely declared their loyalty to ‘King Richard and the loyal commons of England’, ‘traitors’ were nonetheless identified among the Canterbury townsmen and were summarily executed by the rebels. But the violence meted out was not indiscriminate. The rebels targeted those who had close connections to the court and the royal council: Thomas Haseldene, who was controller of the household of John of Gaunt, the King’s uncle; and Thomas Orgrave, Under-Treasurer of England. They also seemed to know where the tax records were stored. Tyler forced William Septvans, Sheriff of Kent and a leading player in the Poll Tax enforcement commission of May 1381, to hand over his court rolls at the manor of Milton. They were then burnt. Other members of the gentry had their homes ransacked. Sir Nicholas Heryng lost 2 oxen, 27 sheep and 482 wool hides, together with goods and chattels worth £24, from his estates on Sheppey.

  It was probably around 11 June that Tyler’s men freed John Ball from the royal prison at Maidstone. We know more about Ball than about any of the other rebel leaders as a result of his clerical career, which saw him clash repeatedly with the authorities from the mid-1360s onwards. Ball himself suggested that he had been a chantry priest at York before moving to Colchester. His preaching had attracted royal displeasure long before the Peasants’ Revolt. A warrant issued by Edward III in February 1364 withdrew the King’s protection from him as a result of reports that he was wandering from place to place, preaching doctrine contrary to that of the established Church. Six months later, the then Bishop Sudbury ordered Ball’s arrest as an obdurate excommunicate. In 1366, Ball was ordered to appear before the Archbishop for re-offending; in April 1381, he was excommunicated again and imprisoned for radical preaching.19

  The late fourteenth century saw the emergence of a persistent English heretical tradition, a branch of medieval Christianity that stressed a return to a simpler faith purged of its worldly trappings. Lollardy, as this heresy was called by its opponents – the name probably originated from the medieval Dutch lollaerd, meaning mumbler or mutterer – centred on the ultimate authority of the Scripture in the vernacular, as opposed to Latin. Lollards also denied the priestly sacramental powers – anyone could baptise or hear confession – attacked the veneration of images, denied the efficacy of pilgrimages to the relics of saints, and disputed the carnal presence of Christ’s body in the Sacrament. There was an implicit egalitarianism to elements of Lollardy: the ‘democratisation’ of faith by making the Bible accessible in English; the diminution of the role of the priest as an intermediary between God and man; and, most powerfully, the attack on luxury and wealth.20

  Thomas Walsingham, the chronicler, suggested that Ball was influenced by the heretical ideas of John Wycliffe. This is unlikely. At this point the Lollard movement remained centred on Wycliffe’s Oxford, but Wycliffe himself was no social radical. He viewed the possibility that his theological arguments might be used to legitimise rebellion with the same repugnance that Martin Luther would later exhibit after the German Peasants’ War of 1525. Of course, Wycliffe, like Luther, could never control the interpretation of his ideas by others, especially at a popular level. But in contrast with later English revolts, like that led by Jack Cade in 1450, there is no evidence that Lollard ideas directly influenced the rebels of 1381.

  Nonetheless, if the Peasants’ Revolt had an ideologue, it was John Ball. We have only snippets of Ball’s thought, culled from reports of sermons and letters, but what remains indicates a preacher who harnessed orthodox phraseology and eschatology to revolutionary ends. Ball’s most famous utterance, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’, was a religious commonplace in the fourteenth century. However, according to Froissart, Ball turned this conventional statement on Christian humility into a radical call for social equality: ‘He tried to prove … that from the beginning all men were created equal by nature and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men against the will of God.’21 Other rhymes and sayings, attributed to Ball by Walsingham, see him hinting elusively at an apocalyptic, divinely ordained come-uppance for the greedy, covetous and lecherous: for instance, ‘Now pride is prized and covetousness thought wise, and lechery had no shame, and gluttony no blame. Envy reigns with treason, and sloth is high in season. God make the reckoning, for now is the time. Amen.’22

  Ball’s use of an alias, ‘John Trewman’, and letters of his addressed to ‘Jack Carter’ and other rebel captains remind us of some of the difficulties in properly identifying the leaders of popular rebellion. Both in the fourteenth century and later (with ‘Captain Swing’ and ‘Ned Lud’), rebels used pseudonyms to cover their real identities in the event that their revolt failed. This raises problems when deciding whether a pseudonym was one specific individual’s or whether it became part of a general nomenclature behind which a variety of people could hide. This is the case with ‘Jack Straw’. Jack or John Straw first appears in Walsingham’s narrative, administering oaths to the rebels. He is then superseded in the narrative by Tyler, only to reappear again after Tyler’s death. His precise identity is further clouded by the chronicler Henry Knighton’s description of the meeting between Richard II and the rebels at Smithfield on 15 June 1381: the King ‘was approached by their leader, Wat Tyler, who had now changed his name to Jack Straw’. Knighton’s comment, and the way in which Straw appears only episodically in Walsingham’s account, led some historians to claim that they were one and the same person. Though Walsingham and Froissart were clear that Straw and Tyler were separate individuals, we have little other evidence about Straw.

  By 12 June the Essex rebels had reached Dartford, though their numbers were probably far fewer than the sixty thousand given by some chronicles. On their way, they overtook the King’s mother – ‘Princess Joan’ – who had broken off her pilgrimage to the shrines of Kent after receiving news of the insurrection and was hurrying back to London. The rebels indulged in some ribald humour at the royal party’s expense, but otherwise left them unharmed. That same day, a deputation of London aldermen together with Bishop Brinton of Rochester met the Kentish rebels, now encamped at Blackheath, and urged them to disperse, but without success. Tyler’s men continued towards the capital.

  The royal messengers’ diplomatic failure was now clear and it was decided that the young King Richard had to make a personal appearance to prevent the rebels from advancing any further into London. He travelled to Greenwich, the chosen location, by barge – a safety precaution that allowed him to leave the Tower from a water gate. As a further security measure, rather than venturing on to the riverbank the King remained on the barge. At this meeting, the rebels handed over a list of figures to be executed as traitors. The King, unsurprisingly, refused to surrender them. In response, the rebels called for a personal interview with h
im. In an obvious attempt to stall until a suitable force could be raised to suppress them, Richard and his ministers asked for a postponement until 17 June, when another meeting would take place at Windsor Castle.

  The Kentish rebels did not heed Richard’s demand for a halt to their advance. By the morning of Thursday 13 June they had reached Southwark, where they came face to face with buildings closely identified with John of Gaunt and Archbishop Sudbury, chief architects of the hated Poll Tax. What followed, described in lengthy detail by several of the chroniclers, was a carnivalesque orgy of violence and devastation, meted out against both property and persons. Though the loss of life inflicted by the rebels was severe, and the destruction of goods and houses so serious that some buildings were completely demolished, this was not indiscriminate carnage. The individuals who suffered the terrible violence of the rebel host were identified either with those ‘traitors’ denounced in front of the King a day earlier or with ‘outsider’ groups who were seen to threaten the moral fabric of society and the prosperity of native-born inhabitants. The rebels also displayed their own sense of justice, breaking into the Marshalsea Prison and releasing ‘all the men held there for debt or felonies, and then they knocked down a handsome place of John [Richard] Imworth, lately marshal of the Marshalsea, and keeper of the prisoners there, and all the buildings of the jurors and quest mongers around the Marshalsea were torn down that night’. As we shall see, attacks on lawyers were a feature of many popular revolts. They were seen as the accessories of rapacious lords, enforcing laws heavily skewed in favour of the wealthy.

  The actions of the rebels in Southwark also show that the aim of their violence was to annihilate the property of ‘traitors’, not to appropriate it. Although looting did take place, their behaviour, even as reported by hostile commentators, demonstrates both that the violence was highly organised and that it symbolised the transformation of society that they sought to effect. The Anonimalle Chronicle reported that at one manor the rebels