The Road Not Taken Page 3

  It should not have been a surprise when the tolerance of the common people finally snapped. After all, peasants and artisans who had already been bullied by the general rules of feudal lordship, by the Statute of Labourers and the sumptuary laws, had first had an unjust and unprecedented tax imposed on them to promote an unpopular and pointless war and then, when they tried to evade the exactions, were visited by the likes of John Legge and his locusts. Yet the government was taken completely unawares. The fuse was lit in the village of Brentwood, Essex, on 30 May 1381. The royal commissioner Sir John Bampton was confronted by sullen villagers, who told him flatly that he would get no more money from them. When he ordered the ‘malefactors’ arrested, a hostile crowd forced his serjeants-at-arms to back off. Bampton’s party fled to London in disarray, leaving the villagers slightly appalled at the easy victory they had won and apprehensive about the consequences.41 At first they hid in the woods, fearing reprisals, but word soon reached them that other Essex villages had declared solidarity with them. Soon the royal commissioners were in full flight from the villages of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope, and the trouble spread in the early days of June to Bocking, Coggeshall and Temple Cressing. Braintree, Dunmore, Ashen, Dedham, Little Henny and Gesingthorpe were other villages who supplied able-bodied men for a campaign of resistance. Although there is no evidence of a prior conspiracy, the Essex rebels acted with admirable speed and efficiency, both now and later.42 All males who could bear arms were summoned to a rendezvous, where they organised themselves into military companies and took an oath to hunt down and target those royal officials, well known to them, who were a byword for corruption and injustice. The first leader of the Essex rebels to be clearly identified was one Thomas Baker of Fobbing, whose daughter was said to have been sexually molested by the tax inspectors.43 Yet in retrospect it was perhaps no surprise that Essex took the lead in the rebellion. The spirit of disaffection was clearly there in the county’s response to the Third Poll Tax. Despite their proximity to London, the inhabitants defiantly declared a head count everyone knew to be risible: their taxable population of more than 48,000 in 1377 had apparently shrunk in three years to 30,748.44

  Within days six government men were dead, executed in the manner that would become the norm during the rising: beheading. The government was powerless to raise a posse and order it into Essex, for its normal source of manpower for such an expedition, Kent, was sucked into the rebellion within days. One version of the origins of the 1381 revolt was that in Essex the trigger was the royal commissions, while in Kent it was the corrupt officialdom of the royal courts that was to blame. A local magnate named Sir Simon Burley claimed a man named Robert Belling as his serf, but the claim was resisted by Belling and his associates. When the royal sergeants were called in where the local bailiffs feared to tread, the result was a general explosion.45 Here the early ringleader was Abel Ker from the village of Erith, near Dartford. After summoning the villagers of Kent to a grand rendezvous, he sent his newly formed levies at first against the local abbot, who ruled the abbey of Lesnes and with whom Erith had a long-standing conflict; the luckless prelate was forced at axe-point to sign up to the rebellion.46 Next Ker crossed the Thames to confer with the Essex rebels. He brought back with him a sizeable force of Essex men thirsting for action. Their first objective was confrontation with Sir Robert Belknap, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, a widely hated John of Gaunt protégé. Belknap arrived in Dartford on assize duty on 4 June, confident he could quell all disturbances, but the town rose against him, took him captive, and made him swear on the Bible that he would never appear in Kent again as a law-giver before releasing him. Before doing so, however, they forced him to divulge the names of the people who had informed him about the Brentwood incident on 30 May. Once he revealed the names, the rebels mercilessly tracked down three of them, beheaded them and stuck their heads on poles.47 Almost overnight, and it seemed by magic, the Kent and Essex rebels seemed to have the south-east of England at their mercy. Whether by luck or judgement, they had times their rebellion brilliantly, when the government had little force with which to oppose them. The only army within the borders of England was on the frontier with Scotland under Gaunt, as he sought to hammer out an agreement with the turbulent Scots. Most of the king’s best troops had already embarked (or were at Portsmouth waiting to do so) on yet another quixotic foreign campaign, this time to help the King of Portugal fight Spain.48 In any case the military gap between so-called regular troops and the rebels was not large, since many of the insurgents had had fighting experience in France; this was yet another way in which the Hundred Years War interconnected with the Great Revolt of 1381.

  For a while the rebellions in Essex and Kent followed different courses. In Essex Thomas Baker led his host in pursuit of the sheriffs, constables, royal manor stewards, justices of the peace and even retired commissioners on their ‘most wanted’ list: prominent names were those of Sir John Bampton, Walter Fitzwalter, Thomas Mandeville, William Berland, Geoffrey Dersham, Thomas Tyrell, Clement Spicer, Robert Rikeden and Sheriffs Sewale and Gildesburgh. It is said that most of these, and certainly Sewale, made little attempt to escape, but sat at home paralysed by fear, as if unable to comprehend the catastrophe that had overwhelmed them.49 All these men were prominent Essex landowners. In Kent Abel Ker took his men to Rochester Castle to force the issue against Sir Simon Burley. This worthy had declared he was willing to recognise Belling’s claim to be a free man rather than a villein provided he was given a ‘severance payment’ of £300 in silver – a demand way beyond Belling’s means as Burley knew. The royal serjeants rode roughshod over the bailiffs at Gravesend, arrested Belling and confined him in Rochester Castle. This was accordingly a prime target for the Kent rebels. On paper this should have been an impossibly tough nut to crack for men who knew nothing of siege warfare; the fortress’s walls were twelve inches thick and it had been the scene of ferocious resistance to King John in 1215, when he took it only after using trebuchets and Greek fire against the defenders.50 Yet in a crisis the moral element is often more important than the material, and so it proved here. Worn down by remorseless psychological warfare, the constable of the castle, Sir John Newton, finally threw in his hand when the castle guards abandoned their posts. He surrendered the citadel and the rebels freed all prisoners. Froissart claims that Newton saved his life only by agreeing to join the rebels. The town of Rochester, maybe comprising around 3,500 souls at the time, joined the insurrection with avidity.51

  Around the time of the ‘siege’ of Rochester, the rebels also swept through Maidstone and it was from this town that there hailed the greatest figure associated with the 1381 rising: Wat Tyler. Little is known about Tyler and virtually everything that is known is controversial. Around forty at the time of the revolt (a birth date of 4 January 1341 has been assigned to him), Tyler seems to have been a veteran of the French wars. Some say that on his return he had turned highwayman and emerged from a life of outlawry to be a leader of the wretched of the earth. All the evidence suggests both that he had the gift of oratory and considerable military experience. Certainly after the taking of Rochester Castle he emerges as the clear leader of both the Kent and Essex rebels.52 Directing operations methodically, Tyler decided to ‘mop up’ in Kent before considering his next move. On 10 June parties of rebels converged on Cressing Temple, seat of the wealthy Knights Hospitallers, whose prior was the detested treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. The invaders sacked the manor, looted it, then pulled it to the ground and gutted it. They also broke into Sheriff Sewale’s house, destroyed all the documents they could lay hands on and beat the sheriff up. The pattern was repeated in Essex, where John Ewall, escheator of the county, was captured in Coggeshall and murdered. Next day the Essex rebels were at Chelmsford, where more official records were burned.53 The hostility to lawyers, government officials and their archives and records was noteworthy. Although much private settling of scores inevitably went on during the rebellion, it was never
a simply mindless explosion of fury but visited its wrath on rational targets. There was a particular loathing of justices of the peace and commissioners of trailbaston, showing that the rebels’ hatred was both locally and centrally directed: locally against the corruption of local justice by the power of feudal landowners, and centrally against the king’s judges, who rode roughshod over the traditions and rights of local communities. Trailbaston – the quasi-judicial royal commission charged with seeking out high crimes such as homicide, rape, arson, extortion and conspiracy – was a particular grievance. Wat Tyler asserted, with reason, that much of the work of the trailbaston commissioners was simply a revenue-raising scam. As a penalty for ‘conspiracy’ they could order seizures of goods, but the said treason was defined in a most elastic way, essentially being whatever the commissioners said it was.54

  Tyler’s seizure of Canterbury on 10 June marked the point where the authority of central government effectively collapsed – it would not be restored until the end of the month. The rebels burst into the cathedral but, disciplined by Tyler, waited until Mass was over before forcing the monks to elect a new Archbishop of Canterbury. They declared Sudbury a traitor and announced that he would be beheaded when caught. Tyler made it clear that Sudbury was the target, not the Church in general, by sacking the archbishop’s palace but leaving the monastic property alone. Mayors, bailiffs, officials and oligarchs were all forced to take an oath to ‘King Richard and the true commons’. There was no resistance, and it was later alleged that the feudal aristocracy had uniformly displayed arrant cowardice during the crisis in early June.55 Canterbury, a ‘city’ of about 7,000 inhabitants, was convulsed as the rebels went in search of further malefactors. Three ‘traitors’ were dragged out and beheaded and further victims were murdered at their posts, including John Tebbe, a former bailiff and member of parliament, who had served on one of the hated royal commissions, and John Tece, a manorial official and former bailiff. Another target on the rebels’ list, William Medmenham, could not be traced, so they had to content themselves with vandalising his extensive properties. Houses of other ‘villains’ who had made themselves scarce were plundered and destroyed, notably those of Sir Richard de Hoo, Thomas Garmwenton and Sir Thomas Fog. As in Rochester, the townsfolk collaborated avidly with the rebels.56 The day’s triumph was crowned with the surrender of Canterbury Castle after an assault led by Tyler and Abel Ker. The Sheriff William Septvanz, a prime mover in the enforcement commission of May 1381 that sought to recover the unpaid Poll Tax, was forced to release all prisoners and handed over all documents and records, which were predictably consumed in a bonfire. Tyler then proceeded to ransack Septvanz’s manor at Milton, again destroying all paperwork. Other unpopular oligarchs also suffered. Sir Nicolas Heryng’s estate at Sheppey saw major depredations, with the loss of 2 oxen, 27 sheep, 482 wool hides and goods and chattels worth £24.57 Late in the day royal heralds arrived to express the king’s astonishment at such contumacy. Tyler replied with aplomb that the men of Kent and Essex had risen to save the king from the traitors who surrounded him. After an exchange of messages it was finally announced that Richard II had agreed to meet the rebels at Blackheath.58

  Tyler now had to decide whether to march on London. The decision had to be based on numbers and the chances of success. How great were the rebel numbers and what was the number of ‘loyalists’ opposing them? Medieval chroniclers, as prone to exaggeration as ancient historians, claimed 50,000 rebels in Kent and 50,000 in Essex, making at least 100,000 in all. A more judicious estimate is around 10,000 men in arms – still a huge number for this era and certainly greater than anything the authorities could summon – of whom some 3,000 accompanied Tyler on his march to London.59 Meanwhile the response of the Crown had been astonishingly tepid. Neither the gentry of the Home Counties nor the militia in London had been called up, and it has been pointed out that there was no competent military leader on the king’s council at the time: John of Gaunt was in Scotland, Thomas Woodstock was in the Welsh marches and Edmund, Earl of Cambridge was on the high seas en route to Portugal, the recall of his expedition having arrived in Portsmouth just too late. There was therefore little military force Richard II could employ against the rebels in the short term, for Froissart’s claim that there were 8,000 loyal armed men in London at the time was merest fantasy.60 Tyler had his spies in London and was remarkably well informed about the situation in the capital; indeed, right at the start of the revolt two London butchers, Adam Atewell and Roger Harry, rode out to tell the rebels that they had thousands of sympathisers in the metropolis. The long feud between the City of London and John of Gaunt was fundamental, with the common people hating Gaunt as a tyrant and the City merchants detesting him as much for his meddling in London affairs as for his disastrous foreign policy. Within London there was further conflict, for only one-quarter of the population were full citizens with the right to vote, hold office or sit on juries. Lower-class Londoners had every reason to detest even the elite opposed to Gaunt, since these people in turn were guilty of corporate corruption, guild protectionism, monopolies and cartels.61 There was thus a turbid stew in London that a clever politican could stir and, in the early stages of the revolt, Tyler was certainly that. The report that the king was willing to meet the rebels at Blackheath may have been one of Tyler’s ‘expedient exaggerations’, but it certainly worked to convince the rank and file to follow their leader. Besides, if they were not to press on to London, what had been the point of the rising in the first place?

  The rebels trekked out of Canterbury on the morning of Tuesday, 11 June and began arriving at Blackheath on the evening of the 12th. They passed through Maidstone (the earlier visit appears to have been a mere raid), releasing all prisoners from the jail. It is in the period 11–12 June that two other rebel leaders appear clearly at the side of Wat Tyler.62 Released from Maidstone Jail was the well-known hell-fire preacher and rabble-rouser John Ball, an old enemy of Archbishop Sudbury. Ball and Sudbury had crossed swords many years before in York and Ball had been a thorn in the archbishop’s side for twenty years and more. In the parlance of the time he was a ‘hedge priest’, that is, he was an itinerant preacher with no parish or living, hardly surprising since he had been excommunicated for his heresy. Froissart described him as ‘crack brained’, but to Froissart and the other chroniclers anyone who questioned the system of entrenched feudal privilege was by definition insane.63 Ball’s message was simple: Jesus Christ himself had told his followers to practise communism, which is why communal living and sharing wealth were the form of social organisation noted in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles before St Paul gained the upper hand and perverted the message of Jesus. St Francis and the early Franciscans were the only true inheritors of Christ’s mantle but, sadly, the Franciscan order had also been transmogrified so as to accommodate man’s sinfulness. In a word, Ball denounced the entire history of the Church, including such ‘accretions’ as the papacy, to say nothing of political bishops. As with Mussolini and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci 550 years later, Sudbury decided that this was a voice that had to be permanently silenced and he prescribed a similar remedy: imprisonment for life. Ball has always fascinated historians, for his speeches and letters survive, enabling us to see into his mind in a way we cannot with Wat Tyler.64 The other emergent leader in these days was Jack Straw, an altogether shadowy figure. It was at one time fashionable to argue that Straw and Tyler were one and the same, but this view has now been decisively refuted; the basis for the view was always highly circumstantial, resting as it did heavily on the unarguable fact that Chaucer, who lived through the Peasants’ Revolt, mentioned Straw but not Tyler.65 Since no reliable records were left by the rebels, we cannot know how the chain of command operated: whether Tyler, Straw and Ball formed a genuine triumvirate, whether Tyler was primus inter pares or indeed whether the decisions of the leaders had to be ratified by a rebel council or open meeting.