The Road Not Taken Read online

  By the evening of 12 June Tyler’s main force was at Blackheath, with vanguard patrols thrown out as far as Southwark and Lambeth. There were two very encouraging signs. From London came a host of sympathisers in boats, while the Essex contingents collaborated beautifully. After capturing Colchester, the Essex men performed the by now almost ritualistic ceremony of destroying court rolls and legal documents, adding a new refinement by coercing any landlords they could lay their hands on into signing new leases and charters. It was noticed that there was a higher level of general anti-religious feeling in Essex than in Kent, particularly evinced by the sack of Waltham Abbey and the consigning of all its records to the flames. From Colchester the Essex men moved on to London to effect a junction with Tyler. By the evening of 12 June they were at Blackheath, with the vanguard strung out in the fields around Mile End.66 The paralysis at central government level in face of the rebels was matched by that in London. The mayor and his colleagues seem to have been frightened to call out the loyalists in the city, fearful that this would trigger a general uprising of the London proletariat in retaliation and even apprehensive of the reactions of the ‘better sort’; the ruling clique on the council knew that there was a ‘bitter and unscrupulous minority’,67 just waiting for a chance to unseat the incumbents. Three of the London aldermen indeed openly declared for Tyler and the rebels. One of them, John Horne, had an interview with Tyler that night and gave him secret encouragement.68 That evening the rebels gave London a taste of what it might expect if it did not quickly come to heel. The Southwark houses of all jurors and questmongers (professional legal informers) who had done City marshal Richard Imworth’s dirty work were raided. Imworth himself, also governor of Marshalsea Prison, fled at the approach of the rebels, who at once threw open the prison doors and released all the captives. The rebels then moved further along the south bank, stormed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth, destroyed records and visited devastation on all his vestments, portable property and wine cellar, carrying off vast quantities of wine.69 The raiders returned to Blackheath to receive Tyler’s congratulations: true to his orders, they had not looted indiscriminately or at random but had plundered specific targets. He was also delighted to hear that the people of Southwark had welcomed the insurgents as deliverers. As the heath was lit up by hundreds of campfires that night of 12–13 June, Tyler had every reason to be satisfied. The feelings of euphoria were topped off by the arrival of Sir John Newton, still the hapless go-between, who told Tyler that the king would meet the insurgents next day.70 The only slight worry for the rebel leaders was that food supplies at Blackheath did not suffice for such a host; it was feared that hungry men would go on the rampage the following day and abandon the careful discipline inculcated by Tyler.

  While the rebels awaited the morning in a state of euphoria, feelings in the royal household were very different. The fourteen-year-old Richard II had moved his court from Windsor to the Tower of London, the better to deal with the crisis, but now the courtiers were feeling beleaguered. Crammed into the Tower confines were 600 soldiers, officials and servants. Among those present were William Walworth (Mayor of London), Treasurer Hales and his half-brother Thomas Holland, leading courtiers Nicholas Brembre, John Philipot and Robert Launde and the Earls of Kent, Arundel, Warwick and Salisbury – the last a veteran of the wars in France. Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Richard’s cousin Henry of Derby were no more than callow teenagers.71 Most of all, Richard lamented the absence of any first-division military talents. The Earl of Buckingham was in France, Edmund Langley, Earl of Cambridge, was on the high seas bound for Portugal and John of Gaunt was at that very moment in Edinburgh. Richard did not even have as consolation the company of his old tutor Sir Simon Burley, the senior knight of the royal household. Having passed a gloomy and anxious night, Richard was not encouraged next morning by the arrival of Sudbury, whose solution to the crisis was to surrender his seals of office. Richard insisted the archbishop stay in his post and ordered him, Hales, Warwick and Salisbury to accompany him on his parley with the rebels. Richard had been reluctant to meet them face to face, but finally yielded to the agonised pleas of Sir John Newton, whose children were being held hostage by Tyler.72 Richard set out on a barge with his four worthies, leaving the Tower by the Water Gate; four other barges accompanied him. They sailed first to Greenwich, then on to Rotherhithe, where the rebels were assembled on the river bank. As the barges approached, the ululations of the triumphant rebels could be heard and, also, if some of the more fanciful chronicles can be believed, the whizzing of arrows shot into the air in excitement by rebel bowmen. Alarmed by all this, Richard took the advice of his four counsellors. Salisbury argued that it would be madness to land: not only could the rebels seize the king and hold him hostage but they, his courtiers, had no guarantee they would not be butchered on the spot.73 Richard therefore sent word that he would not be stepping ashore. Instead he received a deputation on board but was alarmed to find that his insurgent subjects were in no mood for negotiations. They presented demands. As an earnest of the king’s good faith, they required him to surrender at once the five ‘most wanted’ men on their list: John of Gaunt, Chancellor Sudbury, Treasurer Hales, John Fordham, the Keeper of the Privy Seal and Sir John Plevington, Chief Baron of the Exchequer.74 Later they would require the delivery of other ‘traitors’ named as John Bampton, John Legge, Sir Robert Belknap and Sir Ralph Ferrers. The king adamantly refused to surrender a single one of those named and ordered the barges to put about for the Tower. In great fear of being assailed by a shower of arrows, the boatmen did so, leaving the rebels fuming about the abortive outcome. Yet even after this overt demonstration of where Richard’s true loyalties lay, they continued to profess loyalty to him and to draw a distinction between a ‘good’ king and the ‘evil’ courtiers who had misled him, the absent Gaunt above all.75

  The disappointment over the king was soon forgotten as the rebels made 13 June a day to remember. It was the Feast of Corpus Christi, which in medieval England was not just a religious festival but an occasion for processions, organised games, revelry and misrule. Some say that the impressive organisation of the rebels was because they used the proximity of the religious festivals of Whitsun, Trinity and Corpus Christi as cover for their activities, including mass rallies and the bearing of arms, sanctioned by the traditional ceremony, the ‘view of arms’.76 If the absence of four major armies (respectively in France, Portugal, Scotland and Wales) may have been chance rather than calculation by the rebels, the congruence of these festivals was certainly not. The fiesta-like resonance of Corpus Christi explains the frequent cries of ‘A revel! A revel!’ noted by the chroniclers as the rebels went about their destruction of Lambeth Palace.77 This particular Corpus Christi became a byword for a spree of systematic looting and an orgy of mayhem and violence. The key to the day’s events was the securing of London Bridge. In those days the bridge resembled the modern Ponte Vecchio in Florence, as it was a commercial street with shops along its entire length and a stone chapel in the centre; a drawbridge at the Southwark end controlled access to London from the south bank of the Thames.78 Mayor Walworth, a pro-government hard liner, sent Alderman John Horne to Southwark with a stern warning not to enter the City of London, but he chose an inapt envoy for Horne was one of the three aldermen who supported the rebels. Instead of delivering the warning, Horne told the insurgents that they had plenty of latent support in London and that hatred of Gaunt particularly disposed Londoners in their favour.79 He found the rebels in Southwark, devastating the approaches to the Thames. The latent thread of xenophobia in the revolt was in evidence as the plunderers pulled down a Southwark brothel and tipped the Flemish prostitutes inside into the street. The rebels sent word into London that they would not loot or plunder any property except that of the ‘traitors’. With many a wink and nod, Horne got London Bridge’s gatekeeper to let down the drawbridge. The men of Kent poured into London.80

  London was now torn apart by a thr
ee-pronged assault. A mob of sympathisers from within the City attacked Ludgate, the stone entrance to the City on London Wall. Many private grudges were settled that day, a frequent feature being the beheading of their masters by apprentices.81 Meanwhile the men of Essex, encamped overnight at Smithfield outside the city walls, began a systematic destruction of the property of the hated Hospitallers, associated particularly with Sir John Hales. At first the Kentish contingents proceeded slowly, opening all jails and releasing the prisoners. But the pace of occupation became hectic with the securing of Ludgate. The next obvious target was Fleet Street and then the Strand, the most affluent, upmarket part of London, seat of the wealthiest men in the kingdom. By this time the three previously distinct groups were beginning to merge, with the men of Kent moving up from London Bridge, the Essex levies pouring in through Aldgate, having browbeaten and coerced the gatekeepers there, and the homegrown London rebels pointing out to their allies the most obvious targets.82 The first objective for the fused forces was the Fleet Prison, which was broken into with ease; the disgorged prisoners swelled the throng of excited rioters. Fleet Street was also the location of a number of houses owned by Richard Imworth, all of which had their roofs stripped before being gutted.83 Moving along Fleet Steet, the rebel army next attacked the New Temple, headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller, of which Treasurer Hales was the prior. The enraged crowd burst into the seven-acre grounds on the riverside, looting and despoiling, with special destructive attention given to official documents. They ripped the tiles off the roofs of all houses, torched them, pillaged the treasure house of the Temple’s round church and again destroyed all the rolls and parchments they could find. Next to be destroyed were the questmongers’ houses and any property remotely associated with lawyers, for whom the rebels always entertained a particular animus.84 By about 4 p.m. Fleet Street was an inferno, with fires blazing the length of it. Finally it was time for the pièce de résistance, John of Gaunt’s glittering Savoy Palace on the Strand.

  The Savoy Palace was the showpiece of the age. Built with the proceeds of plunder seized during the Crécy–Poitiers golden age of the Hundred Years War, it cost £35,000 to build – a third of the estimated annual wage bill for the entire English army.85 Huge walls protected the palace from the hurly-burly of the Strand, while within those walls were state apartments, the great hall, cloisters, a chapel and fishponds, stables and thatched cottages for Gaunt’s servants. Gates on the north allowed access to the Strand and opened on the south onto the Thames. The elated men of Essex and Kent found that London’s rebels had already beaten them to the punch and had begun the work of wholesale desecration, but there was still plenty for the latecomers to do.86 All the emphasis was on pure destruction. Precious furniture, glittering tapestries, sparkling linen joined beds, coverlets, chairs and tables in a massive bonfire; the palace itself was then set alight. There was no attempt to carry off the masses of gold, jewellery and silver plate; most of it was ground into small pieces to prevent its being melted down and reconstituted. One of Gaunt’s jerkins or padded jackets was brought out and used for target practice.87 Anything that the bonfires would not consume was hurled into the sewers. The luckless few who tried to loot were put to death at once on Tyler’s orders, in one case by being thrown into the bonfire. Altogether Gaunt’s losses on this one day of mayhem were estimated at £10,000 apart from the loss of the palace itself.88 There was no proscription on making free with Gaunt’s wine cellar, and soon a breakaway group of some forty men was enjoying a massive binge below stairs. Suddenly there was a huge explosion. The rioters had thrown three barrels onto the bonfire. Thought to contain gold and silver, they turned out to general horror to be gunpowder. The palace’s structure had already been weakened by the fires, but the explosion provided the coup de grâce. The entire building began to crash down around the rebels’ ears. Timber and stonemasonry crashed down and blocked the entrance to the wine cellar, trapping the revellers inside. With the Savoy crumbling, those above ground rapidly decamped. The entombed drinkers were abandoned to their self-inflicted Tartarus. Londoners later related that the cries for help from the unfortunates walled up alive went on for seven days, but in vain. Thirty-two corpses were later counted.89 In the wild sauve qui peut scramble for safety no one gave any thought to their bibulous comrades. The survivors went in search of fresh prey. After liberating Westminster Jail, the rebels doubled back on their tracks to free Newgate Jail near Ludgate. As night fell, the raging fires and huge plumes of smoke from the Savoy lit up the city in a hellish tableau.90

  The next prominent victim of the rioters was Roger Legett, lawyer and professional questmaster, who even the partisan chroniclers admit was a dubious character. He fled for sanctuary to the chapel of St Martin-le-Grand but was dragged from the altar, manhandled all the way to Cheapside and there beheaded. The mob clearly cared little for the rights of sanctuary, but ingenious propagandists made the point that Gaunt and his ilk were now being treated to a dose of their own medicine; the memory of the outrages by Sir Ralph Ferrers and others of Gaunt’s henchmen still rankled. The fury of the crowd was all the greater, for in their eyes the absent Gaunt was ‘the one who got away’.91 That evening the rebels carried out eighteen more documented executions and probably many more. Their next target was the Priory of St John of Jerusalem in the suburban fields of present-day Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller. The insurgents destroyed all the priory buildings, gutted the main structure and started an inferno that took a week to burn itself out.92 Then there were more beheadings, some of masters by apprentices, others of foreigners who were deeply loathed by the Londoners. At this juncture it becomes possible to discern two elements in the revolt unique to London. One was the struggle of a nascent proletariat against wealthy merchants within the guilds. This was distinct and different from the Gaunt–City struggle. Masters operating a closed shop had created many artificial barriers so that their apprentices could never become masters themselves. In response the dispossessed or journeymen apprentices had formed primitive unions; the outbreak of an initially rural revolt gave them a golden opportunity to avenge themselves on their exploiters. The complexity of the struggle in London becomes clear when we appreciate that the Gaunt–City conflict and the master–apprentice contest went on alongside quite separate faction-fighting between the various guilds. Finally, in what one observer has called ‘playing Peisistratus’93 (after the Athenian demagogue-tyrant of old), certain wealthy individuals took the side of the rioters against their own class, either out of jealousy or ambition or to settle private scores. The other special element in the London revolt was xenophobia. Alien merchants, particularly the Flemings and Lombards, were alleged to be sucking the wealth out of England and remitting it abroad. Flemings were particularly hated as they were thought to use cheap labour in Flanders and thus put English employees out of work.94 The deep cause behind the hatred was that Flemings had filled the entrepreneurial gap left by the Jews after Edward I expelled them in 1290. Moreover, after 1370 greedy governments had sold them export-duty exemptions, allowing them to undercut domestic merchants. At least seven Flemings were murdered on the night of 13 June, but in the entire course of the revolt thirty-five were caught and beheaded; some authorities think the true figure for men of Flanders killed in London on 12–15 June to be of the order of 140–160.95

  13 June was also notable for the fiery rhetoric of John Ball. The Feast of Corpus Christi was an appropriate moment for Ball to set out his theological wares, since the masses were traditionally summoned on this date by the ‘hue and cry’ and the ringing of church bells. Whether Ball used the imagery of the bell in his sermon this day is unknown, but a quatrain attributed to him by the chroniclers is the following:

  John Ball greeteth you all

  And doth to understand he has rung your bell

  Now with might and right, will and skill

  God speed every dell.96

  We do know for certain that he preached on one of his fav
ourite motifs:

  When Adam delved and Eve span

  Who was then the gentleman?

  He developed a primitive form of what would be later known as the labour theory of value: the feudal lords had sumptuous raiment, fine wines and the choicest food, but the source of all this was the surplus extracted from the serfs. He argued, as Rousseau would 400 years later, that the origin of social inequality was Man’s sinfulness; God had created us all equal but evil men had enslaved and oppressed others, creating something known as private property that was supposed to be sacrosanct. Another strand in his thought was apocalyptic or eschatological. Ball believed that as punishment for this sinfulness, mankind would eventually reap a divine come-uppance; like many millenarians and chiliasts, Ball seemed to think that social revolution might precipitate the coming of divine vengeance.97 Ball had to be careful how far to push this line of argument, for the vast majority of the insurgents simply wanted to be freeholders, not to share everything in common. Much debate has centred on whether Ball or the rebels in general were influenced by the thought of the Lollard sect, led by John Wycliff.98 Wycliff, sometimes thought of as Martin Luther avant la lettre, denied the doctrine of transubstantiation and so subverted the supremacy and thaumaturgy of the entire priestly caste. Moreover, by holding that the clergy was irrelevant and that all authority depended on whether the holder enjoyed God’s grace, he implicitly threatened secular lordship as well.99 Some of the chroniclers held Wycliff responsible for the 1381 rebellion,100 but two factors decisively rebut the allegation. In the first place, the great nobles did not necessarily view Wycliff’s views as socially seditious and were indifferent to theological niceties. At one time, for his own reasons, John of Gaunt publicly supported Wycliff when he was being tried for heresy. At his trial in 1377, Gaunt made a dramatic intervention, lost his temper with the Bishop of London, who was acting as president of the court, and threatened to drag him out of St Paul’s Cathedral by his hair. This gave the London crowd the excuse to riot, which they did, driving Gaunt out of the capital at great speed.101 Secondly, Wycliff was no social egalitarian. His radical stance, like Luther’s, was confined to Church matters alone. Just as Luther vehemently denounced the peasants’ revolt in Germany in the 1520s, so Wycliff held aloof from the 1381 explosion in England. The true religious supporters of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 were the mendicant orders, themselves bitter enemies of Wycliff. As William Langland pointed out, it was the friars, not the Lollards, who preached communism most fervently.102