The Road Not Taken Read online

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  Failure and Consequences of the Peasants’ Revolt

  BY AROUND 10 p.m. on the night of 13 June the rebels had spent most of their destructive energy and massed around the Tower, where Richard and his courtiers huddled fearfully, flinching at the cacophony outside and the cries that the ‘malefactors’ be delivered up to justice. Scholars debate whether the true number of armed men defending the king was 1,200 or 600 (the latter is more likely) but on paper, with regular troops in a good defensive position, the loyalists should have been well placed. That was an assessment, however, based purely on military strength on paper. Once again the issue of morale was crucial. The assembled oligarchs seemed broken in spirit and mostly defeatist in outlook. This had all along been the problem. If the king’s men had had the courage and ingenuity to keep the rebels at bay and prevent them irrupting into London for just twenty-four hours after their arrival at Blackheath, they would probably have dispersed because of food shortages, for food supply was always Tyler’s major headache.1 Even when the rebels entered London, the problem did not entirely abate, for medieval cities always lived on a knife edge of subsistence and could not accommodate the sudden appearance of an extra 3,000– 10,000 mouths. Yet the oligarchs continued listless and seemingly paralysed until the night of 13 June. Only then, when disaster stared them in the face, did hard-line opinion start to emerge. Mayor William Walworth argued vociferously that the king should use all the force at his disposal. Richard, though, inclined to pacific methods and now thought that his earlier refusal to negotiate had been a mistake.2 He sent out two of his knights to parley with the chanting rebels outside, offering a full pardon if they would all disperse at once; this message was laughed out of court. When the guffaws ceased, the rioters told the envoys that they would leave only when the ‘traitors’ were surrendered. Richard then sent a second message, asking the rebels to put their demands in writing; this was regarded as merely insulting. Walworth took his chance and argued for an immediate offensive against the rebels. He saw no future in negotiations, especially as the young king was known to be hot-tempered and lost control of his emotions easily.3 He argued for a four-part sortie, coordinating with Sir Robert Knolles (who would attack the rear) to catch the drunken and slumbering rebels unawares. Walworth received the enthusiastic support of John Philipot and Nicholas Brembre, two other wealthy merchants who were hawkish hard liners and feared the mob more than they hated Gaunt. Yet Salisbury, a veteran of Crécy and the one man in the Tower with campaign experience, overruled them. His opinion was that a sortie would soon bog down in inconclusive street fighting. In this he was probably right, for in the small hours of the 14th another rebel force from St Albans under Jack Straw began entering London from the north. Salisbury thought it better to lull the rebels by making concessions and backed the king in advocating negotiations.4

  Richard therefore decided on a general muster of loyalists and announced a rendezvous at Mile End at 7 a.m. on the 14th, to which he also invited the rebels, asking them to put their grievances to him in person. It was agreed that the earlier fears of calling out anti-rebel elements in the City had been overtaken by events, and in inviting lobbying from the rebels Richard had the ulterior purpose of coaxing them away from the Tower so that their intended victims within could escape. Moreover, since Mile End was outside the city gates, if the rebels flocked to hear his words, this would give the loyalists the chance to close the gates against them once more. Some think the entire idea and the initiative at Mile End was a purely personal project by the juvenile Richard.5 The young king left the Tower with an impressive entourage – Thomas and John Holland, the Earls of Oxford and Warwick, Sir Aubrey de Vere, Thomas Percy, William Walworth and Queen Joan, his mother; significantly none of the ‘most wanted’ personalities were in the party. With great difficulty the royal cavalcade forced its way through the throng outside. One of Tyler’s chief lieutenants, Thomas Farringdon, got close enough to the king to cry out a demand for ‘that false traitor the Prior’.6 When Richard gave the ambiguous and enigmatic answer that he would have all that was just, Farringdon seemed satisfied and went back to the Tower to supervise operations there. But the incident seriously unnerved Sir John Holland and the Earl of Kent, who abandoned Richard and galloped off across Whitechapel fields. Once arrived at Mile End, Richard sent his mother back to the Tower with the tip-off for Hales, Sudbury and the other execrated ones to make good their escape. He was encouraged by the crowd of rebels waiting for him to believe that they had lifted the siege of the Tower but may have been disappointed that none of the rebellion’s ringleaders (Tyler, Straw, Ball) was there to meet him. He asked the rebel representatives what they wanted. To his relief there was no mention of a purge of government or the execution of the guilty. Instead there was a very lawyerly manifesto calling for a charter of rights in the countryside, the abolition of fiefs, the setting of a rent limit of 4d an acre and an end to financial oppression through manorial courts, royal courts and the tax system.7 Richard’s presence at such a parley was profoundly disingenuous. His main aim was to lure the enemy away from the Tower, and to do so he would have agreed to almost anything. Warming to his theme, he promised the rebels liberties ensured by royal charters guaranteed with the king’s seal. Then he overplayed his hand. He told them that in return for getting these charters, the rebels must now scour the land and deliver all traitors to him.8 He seems to have been carried away by the euphoria of the moment and granted the rebels something they had not asked him for. But it was a classic non-meeting of minds. By traitors Richard evidently meant the ‘wicked men’ who had seduced and misled his subjects (i.e. Tayler, Straw, Ball et al.). The rebels interpreted his words as carte blanche to execute the traitors in the Tower. Maybe Richard counted on just such a misunderstanding of the ambiguity, hoping that the wanted men at the Tower had meanwhile flown the coop. Yet it could be said that by his unwary remarks he had brought many subsequent murders within the compass of the law.9

  Richard may not have noticed that what he had agreed to was in essence the abolition of feudalism in all but name. The manifesto presented at Mile End, and even more that promulgated next day at Smithfield, alerts us to some of the profound issues at play in the rebellion. Apart from the complex situation in urban areas, and especially London, as already mentioned, three main elements may be discerned. Towns and cities were involved in a struggle to get charters of incorporation as boroughs from feudal overlords, usually churchmen. At St Albans, Dunstable, King’s Lynn and Bury St Edmunds we can detect an obvious and open conflict between the towns and the local abbeys, where the abbots were the overlords.10 Despite their role as supposed representatives of Christian charity, abbots and bishops were invariably more recalcitrant than the lay proprietors or the king. Often the town–Church conflict was confused with and overlaid by another kind of urban conflict – that between the ‘have nots’ who were free men and the wealthy merchants who formed the town oligarchy. It might be said that the situation in Winchester, Beverley and Scarborough was of this type.11 This is why local government was often as unpopular as central government, albeit for different reasons. Mayors and other officials were theoretically constrained by votes and elections, but massive corruption meant they often coopted and re-elected themselves, before levying unmandated taxes and running up debts with consummate arrogance; the town of Beverley in Yorkshire provided almost a textbook example of this.12 The second element was the more pervasive and bitterly contested. Basically, feudal lords were trying to put the clock back to the era before the Black Death and their villeins were trying to resist this. From the villeins the lord of the manor wanted compulsory labour, and from landless labourers he wanted their labour at the lowest possible rate – not the market price of 3d or 4d a day but the rate of 2d a day set artificially low by the infamous Statute of Labourers. The villein on the other hand wanted to be a tenant at a fixed rate, while the landless labourer wanted to be paid at the market rate.13

  This struggle betwee
n capital (if we may so term the feudal lords) and labour took many forms. Sometimes lords of the manor tried to rescind the custom, which was becoming the norm in the fourteenth century, whereby villeins commuted their days of compulsory labour (corvée) on the manorial demesne for a money payment. Sometimes the struggle was not so much about the principle of a money payment in lieu of corvée but the amount considered reasonable for ‘commutation’ with 4d an acre being widely regarded as the just price.14 At other times certain hawkish lords directed an out-and-out onslaught on the post-Black Death peasantry by levying charges to prevent migration, stopping the acquisition of free land by serfs and charging extra rents. At local level seigneurial courts were the instruments of social control used by the lords, for these enforced all the tenants’ obligations, reinforced the corvée system and demanded the repair of buildings on short-term leases. All the pre-1381 evidence from the seigneurial courts shows the lords defending their prerogatives with vigour.15 Their main problem was that it was difficult to find officials for these courts since the ‘middle sectors’ who manned the courts were the men in the middle in more ways than one, paid by and owing loyalty to the lords but under extreme pressure from their neighbours, the free peasants. Because of the general reluctance to serve as henchmen of the manorial lords as rent collectors, constables, ale tasters, etc, those refusing service were visited by heavy fines. At the limit the feudal lords had the royal tribunals and commissioners as back-up, which was why 1381 was not just about the parlous state of landlord–tenant relations but also about hatred of royal officialdom, as much through distaste at having to pay taxes for the pointless wars in France as about knee-jerk support for local exploiters.16 The interlinking of all the elements in the social system explains why 1381 was not just an aggregate of personal vendettas of villeins against lords but was a general rebellion, in which the rebels made the link between lordship and Plantagenet government in general. The rebels wanted an end to local corruption, where the courts were bullied and manipulated by the feudal lords, and genuinely local courts free from central government interference.17

  All these complexities and nuances were swept away by Richard II when he appeared to have conceded to the rebels unconditional surrender by the ruling class. Yet his initiative may be accounted a partial success, since the prospect of getting charters of freedom took the steam out of many rebels, who broke away from the main body, lured by Richard’s promise that they could collect their documents later that day at St Paul’s when his clerks had completed the laborious job of copying out each one by hand.18 Yet the wider aim of inveigling the rebels away from the Tower was not secured. The trembling worthies who had put their trust in the king and the Tower rather than decamp from London soon realised that they had in effect been offered up as sacrificial victims. Richard had left them behind with the assurance that he could draw the rebels away and allow them to escape, but mature reflection prompted the conclusion that they had been left behind to guarantee his safety, as any party containing them was bound to be attacked.19 When Queen Joan returned from Mile End with the depressing news that the crowd outside had not dispersed, Hales and Sudbury at least must have known that their last hour had come. Having persecuted Ball for so many years, the archbishop surely knew what to expect from a mob led by him. Sudbury said two Masses that morning and then confessed Hales and some others. Soon the crowd started taunting the guards, whose morale was already at rock bottom, with the news that food supplies in the Tower were running low.20 Suddenly the shouting and haranguing ceased and the gates were flung open; the rebels entered without resistance. It seems clear from all the circumstantial evidence that a plot had already been hatched to suborn the guards, and any lingering notion of resistance would have been dispelled by the news being brought back excitedly from Mile End, that the king had in effect caved in and admitted defeat. So appalled was the Knighton chronicler by this abject surrender (the result either of treachery or collusion) that he pretended only 180 men-at-arms had been left behind, when all other sources mention the figure of 600.21 The rebels were in grim and determined mood. Sudbury was plucked from his morning devotions in the chapel, haled outside to Tower Hill and beheaded. He did not die well: first he begged, pleaded and wept for his life, then, when the axe descended on his neck, it took no less than eight strokes to finish him off. Whether this was calculated cruelty by the executioners or simple incompetence does not appear. Also executed with Sudbury were Hales, Legge, Wiliam Appleton (Gaunt’s physician) and a gentleman named as Richard Somenor of Stepney.22 The future Henry IV was saved only because a guard hid him from the invaders. Queen Joan was roughly treated. Whereas on 12 June, as the rebels made their way to London, they had behaved respectfully when they overtook her coach on the way into London, this time they meted out insults and overfamiliarity, asking for kisses and embraces. When the terrified queen fainted, her servants bustled her out of the room and onto a waiting barge.23

  The depredations and executions at the Tower were a signal for another day of destruction, arson and murder. By now Tyler’s tight discipline was becoming unglued and the rebellion was in serious danger of collapsing into anarchy as an enraged mob sought to settle private scores under the rubric of finding ‘traitors’. Unscrupulous merchants settled old feuds by inciting the crowd against business rivals whom they fingered as ‘recreants’. Sir Robert Allen got a group of Kent rebels to evict Hugh Ware, a rival claimant to a piece of real estate, on his mere say-so that the property was his. A brewer, William Trenman, started expropriating the houses of Walworth’s ally Nicholas Brembre on similar grounds. John Butterwick, under sheriff of Middlesex, had his property despoiled by the Essex rebels at three separate locations outside the city walls, in Knightsbridge, Westminster and Ebury.24 But for more prominent rebel targets, death, not despoliation was the prescription. The immensely rich merchant Richard Lyons had already suffered at rebel hands in Suffolk as they searched for ‘Public Enemy Number Three’ (after Hales and Sudbury), Sir John Cavendish, the chief justice. Now the enraged mob found Lyons himself, dragged him out to Cheapside and beheaded him.25 Next on their list was Richard Imworth, notorious as the brutal jailer of the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark which the rebels had sacked on the night of the 12th. Imworth seems to have thought that the rebels would draw the line at breaching sanctuary in the hallowed Westminster Abbey so sat down at the altar there. He was dragged out without scruple or ceremony, manhandled along to Cheapside and beheaded.26 Another to suffer mob fury was an unfortunate valet named John of Greenfield, who made the mistake of saying some kind words about William Appleton, Gaunt’s physician, who had perished in the Tower. He too suffered the headsman’s axe. Yet the murderous anger of the crowd on 14 June particularly settled on foreign entrepreneurs, and this time Scandinavians and Genoese, as well as Flemings and Lombards, were swept up in the maw of the rebellion’s Moloch.27 As on the day before, Flemings were a favourite target; to the crowd they were no more than brothel-keepers, pimps and ponces who had grown fat on human weakness. Once again the victims had no other thought than seeking sanctuary, but once again their hopes were forlorn. About forty Flemings holed up in the church of St Martin in the Vintry. They were dragged out and beheaded. All day long the murder toll rose. Several hundred died that day, their heads set on pikes, borne round the city in triumph and then mounted on the gate of London Bridge.28

  Debtors had a gala day at the expense of creditors, forcing them to give up documentary evidence of their debts which were then destroyed. Insofar as there was direction to the actions of the crowd on 14 June, the ringmasters appear to have been Alderman John Horne and Thomas Farringdon; Horne was reported as acting as judge and jury in any case brought to his notice, invariably finding for debtors against creditors. Meanwhile Wat Tyler was pondering his next step. The wildest rumours circulated: he was going to burn London to the ground; he would take the king hostage; he would execute all nobles and bishops; he would make John Ball supreme and sole bishop in England, abolis
hing the clerical hierarchy. What Tyler actually did was to repudiate the deal negotiated by the rebels at Mile End in favour of a manifesto mark two.29 The second manifesto included the demand for punishment against ‘traitors to the crown’ which the rebel negotiators at Mile End had unaccountably omitted. In addition to the abolition of lordship, which the first manifesto had asked for, Tyler now additionally demanded the abolition of the episcopacy and the game laws, the redistribution of Church property as a windfall for the suffering classes, the common ownership of property, and a federalism of county ‘kingdoms’ with Wat Tyler as ‘king of Kent’.30 There was also a puzzling call for ‘no law but the law of Winchester’, which has had commentators baffled. It could refer to the 1285 Statute of Winchester, whose provisions were supplanted by the Statute of Labourers or, more likely, it referred to Domesday Book, already acknowledged as the rebels’ bible in the ‘Great Rumour’ of 1377. As against those who would make Wat Tyler a forerunner of the seventeenth-century Diggers in denouncing the ‘Norman yoke’,31 the emphasis on Domesday Book as the core of peasant ideology means that Tyler and his followers were neither campaigning for the old Anglo-Saxon constitution nor appealing to Magna Carta of 1215, usually regarded as the fount of English liberty. Domesday Book still had great talismanic power (the impact of Magna Carta had already faded), reinforcing as it did (or at least as it seemed to) the supremacy of local traditions and ancient rights against the despotism of central government.32 The second manifesto underlines two key aspects of the 1381 rebellion. Tyler and his clique of advisers mounted a sophisticated critique of the prevailing socio-economic structure. The hostile chroniclers ascribed to him genuinely revolutionary aims – and this is usually dismissed as elite paranoia – but at the very least it shows that revolutionary ideas cannot be considered ‘anachronistic’, even if the consciousness of the rebels was limited. The second facet of the manifesto underlines the essential weakness of Tyler’s movement. He continued to make a distinction between a ‘good’ king and ‘evil’ courtiers, not realising that in this sense the interests of the elite were unitary. The rebels had thrown away their best card by not taking him prisoner at Mile End and holding him hostage as surety for the fulfilment of the promises he had made there. The direct appeal to the king as putative saviour of his poor people was trusting and ingenuous and has rightly been described as ‘naive monarchism’.33