A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  set fire to most of its abandoned contents, including books, clothes, linen: stove in wine barrels and drained them, pouring what wine was left on to the floor; banged together and smashed all the kitchenware; and all the while accompanied this behaviour, as if in self-congratulation of some praise-worthy feat, with shouts of ‘A revel! A revel!’23

  As the Kentish men were reducing parts of Southwark to rubble and ashes, the Essex rebels, encamped at Smithfield, launched a ferocious attack on the buildings owned by the Knights of St John, whose prior was another leading figure in the imposition of the Poll Tax: Sir Robert Hales, Treasurer of England. The Westminster Chronicle recorded that at the priory the rebels killed ‘everybody who offered opposition, burned down the entire structure, going on to consign to destruction in the ravening flames the manor of Highbury’.24 The Essex men then launched an assault on the Temple, a target both because it symbolised the power of the legal establishment and because its buildings were owned by the Order of St John. They took it apart with methodical precision: locked chests of documents were broken open in the Temple Church; rolls and books of the law students were collected from their individual cupboards and burnt in Fleet Street; even the roof tiles were stripped off.

  Most commented-upon was the assault on the Savoy, the London residence of the Duke of Lancaster, which had come into John of Gaunt’s possession in 1360. Walsingham described the palace as it was before the Great Revolt as finer than any other in the kingdom. Gaunt took great pride in it, with its orchard and fishponds that extended from the rear of the building down to the banks of the Thames. He had the good luck to be out of London when the rebels arrived at his residence: they would almost certainly have killed him. But he was less fortunate in that during his absence the Savoy was being used as a store for all his spare furniture and fixtures. As Henry Knighton recorded, these possessions were considerable: ‘no prince in Christendom had a finer wardrobe and scarcely any could even match it. For … there were such quantities of vessels and silver plate, without counting the parcel-gilt and solid gold, that five carts would hardly suffice to carry them.’

  Fine as these objects were, they were almost all obliterated in June 1381. Breaking into the Savoy, the rebels

  came into the palace and, coming into the wardrobe, took all the torches that they could find and set alight all the very valuable cloths and coverlets and beds, and all the valuable headboards, of which one, emblazoned with heraldic shields, was said to be worth a thousand marks, and all the napery and other goods that they could find, they carried them to the hall and torched them.

  As it had been at the Temple, the violence was systematic. Rather than risk their being recovered and returned to their rightful owner, gold and silver vessels and other precious objects were smashed with axes before being thrown into the sewers or into the Thames itself. Knighton recorded mournfully that the rebels ‘tore the golden cloths and silk hangings to pieces and crushed them underfoot; they ground up jewels and other rings inlaid with precious stones in small mortars, so they could never be used again’. Some of the violence directed at Gaunt’s possessions was clearly a substitute for attacking Gaunt himself.

  In order not to pass by any opportunity of shaming the Duke completely, they seized one of his most precious vestments, which we call a ‘jakke’, and placed it on a lance to be used as a target for their arrows. And since they were unable to damage it sufficiently with their arrows, they took it down and tore it apart with their axes and swords.25

  The discipline exerted over the rebels at the Savoy by their leaders was considerable. Two chroniclers state that those who were caught trying to loot any of Gaunt’s possessions were killed, though two of them, John Foxgone and Roger Plomer, were later indicted for stealing from the palace. Further evidence that not all of the rebels were able to resist the lure of the Duke’s possessions comes from Knighton, who claimed that thirty men were buried alive in the ducal wine cellar:

  Some of the rebels entered the wine cellar at the Savoy, and several drank so much sweet wine that they were incapable of leaving. They sang, joked and amused themselves in a tipsy fashion until the door was blocked by fire and stones. And so they died, for even if they had been sober they would have found themselves deprived of any exit. For the following seven days the trapped men were heard shouting and lamenting the enormity of their wickedness by the many people who visited the spot; but no one helped or consoled them in their trouble. And so those drunken men who came to consume wine perished in wine – to the number (so it was later said) of thirty-two or thereabouts.26

  It was also alleged that another group of rebels blew themselves up when they mistook barrels of gunpowder for more of the Duke’s valuables and cast them on to a bonfire. The damage done to the Savoy was severe: after 1381, when John of Gaunt needed to be in London he stayed at properties rented from the Bishop of Ely and the Abbot of Westminster, using what remained of his own palace essentially as a warehouse.

  The following morning, 14 June, the crowd moved on from the Savoy towards Westminster, where they burnt the house of Sir John Butterwick, Under-Sheriff of Middlesex, then broke open the gaol at Westminster and freed its inmates. The murderous inclinations of some of the rebels now became more evident. Both within and outside London, men of the law were targets for their violence. Sir John Cavendish, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and a pillar of East Anglian society, was apprehended in Suffolk and beheaded; Justice Edmund Walsingham was killed in Cambridge; while at Cheapside, a law student named Richard Legett was dragged from the high altar of St Martin’s Church and beheaded. The rebels turned their anger against foreign merchants and traders too, especially Flemish weavers who were resented for their success and the commercial privileges they enjoyed. On the same day that they burnt Butterwick’s house, they began massacring London’s Flemish inhabitants, beheading thirty-five in the street near the Church of St Martin in Vintry.

  While violence and destruction raged south and east of the city, the King took refuge in the Tower, along with Archbishop Sudbury and Treasurer Hales, his two half-brothers Thomas and John Holland, his half-sister Joan Holland, Duchess of Brittany, and his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby. The perimeter defences of the Tower of London were then much greater than those that remain today, but the manpower available to the defenders in June 1381 was limited. Chroniclers claimed that it was defended by a force of several hundred, but it is more likely, given other demands on military resources at this time, that it was a skeleton garrison complemented by the few knights who were personally attending Richard. Certainly, if they had any confidence in defending the Tower, the King’s entourage did not show it. Walsingham recorded that Richard’s armed attendants ‘appeared more like the dead than the living; for all their memory of past and glorious military deeds had been extinguished’. By the night of 13 June, the King could have looked from the turrets of the Tower to see its walls surrounded by his rebellious subjects and, in the distance, flames burning in Southwark, Fleet Street and Clerkenwell from the bonfires made from the possessions of some of his most wealthy and powerful subjects.

  However furious the mayhem he witnessed, Richard’s saving grace was that it was not directed at him. Those royal ministers, bishops and peers of the realm identified as traitors all had great reason to fear the rebels’ reprisals, but this was where accountability stopped. The rebellion was not regicidal in its intent. Nonetheless, Richard’s decision to leave the safety of the Tower on the morning of 14 June represented a considerable risk, given what was happening elsewhere. But it was to be the act that saved his government and signalled the beginning of the end of the revolt in London.

  Richard met the rebels at Mile End, where they demanded the surrender of ‘traitors’ for punishment, a general amnesty for their own actions, and a wholesale emancipation from all forms of serfdom and labour service. The King appeared as conciliatory as it was possible for him to be, and charters were endorsed with the Great
Seal of England, proclaiming the perpetual freedom from serfdom of the people of the counties represented at Mile End. These royal charters led to the disintegration of the rebel host, as men from some of the counties began to withdraw from London, feeling, mistakenly, that their grievances had been well redressed and their new freedoms guaranteed under the royal seal. This was the case with the bulk of the men from Essex and Hertfordshire. The Kentishmen, however, remained, which may explain the prominence of Wat Tyler in later accounts – a leader who emerged by default rather than one chosen by general acclamation.

  Though we are uncertain of the precise chronology, it seems that some of the rebels broke into the Tower shortly after the meeting at Mile End. The fullest account comes from Thomas Walsingham, who was safely ensconced in the scriptorium of St Albans when he wrote in his chronicle that those ‘who had formerly belonged to the most lowly condition of serf, went in and out [of the Tower] like lords; and swineherds set themselves above soldiers although not knights but rustics’.27 The rebels, Walsingham continued, entered ‘the chamber of the King and of his mother with their filthy sticks; and, undeterred by any of the soldiers, [began] to stroke and lay their uncouth and sordid hands on the beards of several most noble knights … and sat on the King’s bed while joking, and several asked the King’s mother to kiss them’.28 As they entered, Archbishop Sudbury attempted to escape from the Tower through a water gate, only to be foiled by the vigilance of a woman who noticed him fleeing. Captured, he was beheaded, but only, according to Walsingham, after eight blows from the executioner’s axe:

  He was first struck severely but not fatally in the neck. He put his hand to the wound and said: ‘Ah! Ah! This is the hand of God.’ As he did not move his hand … the second blow cut off the top of his fingers as well as severing part of his arteries. But the archbishop still did not die, and only on the eighth blow, wretchedly wounded in the neck and on the head, did he complete … his martyrdom.29

  Sir Robert Hales, John Legge, the serjeant-at-law who had attempted to indict the Canterbury rebels, the ducal surgeon Fr William Appleton, and Richard Somenour of Stepney, a tax collector from Middlesex, were also dispatched by beheading at the same spot as Sudbury on Tower Hill. In one more imitation of the ordinary processes of medieval justice, the severed heads of the ‘traitors’ were affixed to poles and displayed atop London Bridge. Archbishop Sudbury’s took pride of place, decorated by the rebels with a scarlet cap nailed through the prelate’s skull. (Although Sudbury’s torso was eventually buried with an inscription on his tomb celebrating his ‘martydom’, his head was not reunited with his body but taken back to Sudbury, Suffolk, where it remains to this day, mummified in the crypt of the Church of St Gregory.*)

  The executions of royal servants on Tower Hill did not halt the continuing negotiations between the King and his rebellious subjects. A second meeting between Richard and the rebels took place at Smithfield on the morning of Saturday 15 June. Richard was clearly worried that the meeting might not be a peaceful one – or foresaw that it would end in bloodshed. At three o’clock the previous afternoon he had prepared for his parley by praying at Westminster Abbey, at the shrine of his patron saint, Edward; while there, he was reported to have confessed his sins. When the rebels arrived at the abbey they found Richard Imworth, the notorious keeper of the Marshalsea Prison, ‘a tormentor without pity’. Desperately, Imworth wrapped his arms around the pillars of the Confessor’s shrine: the rebels prised him away, then sent him to the executioner’s block at Cheapside.

  The demands issued by the rebels on 15 June are more obscure in their meaning than those presented the day before. According to Henry Knighton’s account, they called for the ‘law of Winchester’ to be upheld. This was possibly a reference to the 1285 statute that provided common arms for the defence of communities and gave towns and villages responsibility for policing and for apprehending criminals. Interpreted in the broadest sense, this was a call for local self-government and regional autonomy. It is also possible that the reference to the ‘law of Winchester’ revealed a belief among the rebels in a repository of Anglo-Saxon laws that protected popular rights and freedoms.30

  The new demands were certainly more radical than those that had been presented on the 14th. They called for the abolition of lordship and the division of property between all men, including the wholesale disendowment of the Church’s wealth, later to become a common Lollard demand. Ecclesiastical estates, like those of the lords, were to be held in common. The Church hierarchy was to be abolished, with only one bishop and one ‘prelate’ to remain. Again, though, this radical levelling stopped at the person and dignity of the King, whose lordship, prerogative and estates were to remain untouched. As rebellions in other counties developed, it is possible that what was being envisaged here was a federation of ‘county-kingdoms’, each under the leadership of a rebel ‘captain’, with Kent already reserved for Wat Tyler. Taken together, the demands demonstrate the broad understanding of freedom employed by the rebels of 1381.

  At Smithfield, the King and his men arrayed themselves on the east side by St Bartholomew’s Priory, while Tyler’s men kept to the west. What followed remains the most famous incident of the Peasants’ Revolt. Caroline Barron has aptly likened the scene of Tyler’s death to the assassination of President Kennedy in the sense that no effective reconstruction can be created because there are so many conflicting accounts. With the exception of Froissart, who claimed that Tyler had a plan to seize the King and, upon a secret gesture to his rebel followers, massacre the royal attendants, all of the medieval chroniclers give Richard II the initiative for seeking a face-to-face encounter. The Anonimalle Chronicle stated that Tyler was summoned by the Mayor in the name of ‘Wat Tyler of Maidstone’. He came to the King with a proud bearing, it continued, mounted on a little horse in full view of the commons, and dismounted carrying a dagger in his hand, which he had taken from another man; then he took the King by the hand and, on half-bended knee, shook him firmly and for a long time by the arm, saying to him, ‘Brother, be of good comfort and joyful, for in the next fortnight you will have forty thousand more of the commons than you have at the moment, and we shall be good companions.’

  The King seemed confused by Tyler’s behaviour: ‘Why will you not go back to your own country [county]?’ he asked. Tyler responded angrily that neither he nor his companions would depart until they had their charter as they wanted it. He warned the lords of the kingdom that they would regret it if they did not concede to the rebels what they had demanded, namely, that there should be no law ‘but the law of Winchester’. To this, Richard reportedly gave the ambiguous answer that Tyler ‘could have all that he [Richard] could grant fairly’.

  All the chroniclers agreed that the subsequent descent into violence was a result of Tyler’s conduct. The rebel leader’s behaviour was portrayed as uncouth and provocative: ‘The said Wat Tyler demanded a jug of water for rinsing out his mouth because of the great heat that he felt, and then he proceeded to rinse out his mouth in a gross and disgusting way in front of the King and then he demanded a jug of ale, which he downed in a great mouthful.’ In Knighton’s account, Tyler’s behaviour was not only disgusting but deeply threatening: ‘He stood close the King, speaking for the others, and carrying an unsheathed knife, of the kind people called a dagger, which he tossed from hand to hand as a child might play with it, and looked as though he might suddenly seize the opportunity to stab the King if he should refuse their requests.’31

  Having received the King’s broad if ambiguous promise to comply with his demands, Tyler was about to ride back to his men when one of the royal valets reportedly insulted him, calling him ‘the single greatest thief and robber in all of Kent’. Tyler ordered the valet to approach him, but he refused. Tyler then demanded one of his attendants behead the valet. At this point Mayor Walworth reputedly intervened to reason with Tyler, but instead the rebel leader rushed towards the King and Walworth. Armed attendants came to Richard’s side to protect hi
m, while either the King or Walworth ordered them to arrest Tyler, causing him to strike out at the Mayor with his dagger. The chronicles differ as to what followed. Some claim Tyler missed Walworth; others that he struck him, but that the Mayor was saved by wearing armour concealed under his clothes. Walworth then retaliated, striking Tyler, though the mortal blows were landed not by the Mayor but by a royal esquire, Ralph Standish, who ran Tyler through repeatedly with his sword. Tyler nonetheless struggled back on to his horse and managed to ride a few paces back to his own supporters before collapsing.

  The rebels then took him to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, but Tyler was quickly seized by Walworth’s men, who dragged him back to Smithfield, where he was beheaded. By this point, given the severity of his earlier injuries, he may well already have been dead. His severed head was put on a pole and paraded in front of the remaining rebels. The scene at Smithfield could have descended into a deeper bloodbath, but Richard succeeded in convincing most of the other rebels to meet him at Clerkenwell Fields to the north, thus drawing them away from the City and allowing Walworth’s men and other loyalists the opportunity to regain control of it.

  Many narratives of the Peasants’ Revolt found in school textbooks end at this point, but this was not a rebellion that simply dissolved after its most famous leader was beheaded. Indeed, elsewhere in the country, rebellions had not yet reached their peak by the time that Tyler had been killed. Many of these county risings were only tenuously connected to the immediate trigger of revolt in Essex and Kent, the Poll Tax of 1381. The revolt at St Albans in Hertfordshire was the result of a long-standing conflict between the Abbey and the townspeople, who wished to throw off their status as villeins of the Abbot’s manor. The dispute was revived in 1381, late on Corpus Christi Day, as news of the revolt in London reached the town. By the next morning, the St Albans men had resolved to march on the City in order to secure their liberty as burgesses. Their demands were similar to those issued by the men of Kent, though they also claimed the ‘right to pasture cattle, to hunt and to fish, and also to erect hand-mills for the grinding of their own corn’. The St Albans men also apparently sought sanction for their actions from Wat Tyler – an indication of his status among rebels outside his native Kent.