The Road Not Taken Read online

  North of London and into East Anglia the rebellion was suppressed less easily. It is true that the outbreak in Ipswich collapsed ignominiously when John Preston, the rebel leader there, misread the situation after 15 June and had the temerity to approach Buckingham with a list of demands to be put to the king; he was arrested and executed on the spot.68 St Albans, another hotspot, was the scene of a tremendous struggle between the abbot and the townspeople, with the added peculiarity that the St Albans burghers appealed for their validation, not to Domesday Book but to the Anglo-Saxon charter of Offa; here, as in Bury St Edmunds, where the appeal was to the laws of King Cnut (Canute), there were glimmerings of the protest against the ‘Norman yoke’ that became so popular in the seventeenth century.69 The conflict in St Albans was so sulphurous that the abbey was just on the point of being burned to the ground when word came in that Tyler had been assassinated and the London rebels dispersed; even so, it took until the end of June for royal authority, and with it the hegemony of the abbot, to be restored. On 16 June Abbot de la Mare recognised the town as a borough, then confirmed Richard II’s general charter of manumission and was forced to pay £1,000 as compensation and ‘quitclaim’. News of this climbdown spread to neighbouring areas, forcing the abbot also to recognise Barnet, Rickmansworth, Redburn and Watford as boroughs. Only on 29 June with the arrival of Sir Walter Lee and a large body of cavalry and archers was the status quo ante restored.70 The rebels in Suffolk at first achieved greater things. Here the dominant personality was John Wrawe, a priest but sadly, as would later transpire, a coward. Raising men in Sudbury, he took his band first to Liston-on-Stour and Long Melford, recruiting as he went, and entered Bury St Edmunds to a rapturous welcome, not surprisingly, as this town, in its struggle with the local abbot for borough status, was another St Albans.71 The Suffolk rebels scored a great success by capturing and beheading Sir John Cavendish, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, in the village of Lakenheath. Next they plundered the home of their deadly enemy, the priory of St Edmunds at Bury and beheaded the prior, John Cambridge. A breakaway group rampaged in Thetford. Wrawe and his men occupied Bury St Edmunds for eight days, and this time looting and plundering distinguished the rebels as Wrawe, the ‘king’ of Suffolk, was too weak to restrain them. Anarchy continued until the Earl of Suffolk arrived in the county on 23 June with 500 men-at-arms.72 The Suffolk rebellion was interesting as a social phenomenon. Quite apart from the distinctive situation in Bury St Edmunds, it exhibited both private score-settling by the prosperous against the even more wealthy and bitter class conflict between landlords and prosperous tenants trying to throw off their villein status. Needless to say, Wrawe was soon identified by the royal party as a ‘monster’ of the ilk of Tyler, Straw and Ball. Even though he turned king’s evidence after the failure of the rising, this did not save him and he suffered the traitor’s fate of being hanged drawn and quartered.73

  There are strong grounds for saying that the rebellion in East Anglia was an offshoot of the original Essex rising, which spread from Essex to Suffolk and then to Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. Without question the insurrection in Norfolk was the most violent and turbulent outside London and, ominously, for the first time one can discern members of the gentry joining upper peasants and the urban proletariat. In Norfolk the Tyler of the piece was a dyer named Geoffrey Litster, but his second-in-command was Sir Roger Bacon, a gentleman. Other scions of the gentry serving with Litster, either voluntarily or under duress (naturally after the rebellion all claimed it was the latter) were Sir Roger Scales, Sir Thomas Morley, Sir John de Brewes and Sir Stephen Hales.74 The last two, who seem to have been initially very able, went straight for the jugular by raising men and besieging Norwich on 18 June. Their future nemesis, Henry Despenser, a 38-year-old warrior prelate and Bishop of Norwich, made good his escape as the pillaging hordes swept into the city with minimal resistance.75 Litster gave the town over to wholesale sack and rapine, targeting justices of the peace and tax collectors for decapitation. Reginald Eccles, a prominent JP, was one of the first to go to the executioner’s block. Litster devised a scam that seems to have been unique to him, whereby he extorted hefty ransoms from the most wealthy citizens in exchange for leaving their properties unscathed. One such burgher, Henry Lominor, had to pay £666 to secure freedom from pillage.76 The success he had secured in Norwich seemed to go to Litster’s head. He styled himself the ‘king of the Commons’, held court in Thorpe market and feasted lavishly in the great hall of Norwich Castle. He also insisted that Morley, Scales, Brewes and Hales act as his personal servants, performing such tasks as tasting his food to make sure it was not poisoned and generally working as lackeys.77 Meanwhile his men were laying waste the rest of north Norfolk, and sacked Yarmouth and other places. There seems to have been no attempt to coordinate action with Wrawe in Suffolk, and by the third week of June even Bacon was having second thoughts about his ‘king’. Yet there could be no doubt about the seriousness of the situation in East Anglia. Soon the rebellion was spiralling into Cambridgeshire, and on 15 June Wrawe’s men stormed into Cambridge, where the university was an object of particular detestation.78 In a classic manifestation of ‘town versus gown’ the citizens of Cambridge joined them in gutting the university library and sacking Corpus Christi College. The townsmen did not regard the university as an august seat of learning but rather as a bloodsucking leech that enjoyed privileges at their expense and practised ‘academic freedom’ while colluding in local constraints on liberty.79

  Despenser meanwhile made his base of operations at Burleigh, two days’ ride from Norwich and planned his counteroffensive. He was one of those warrior-bishops, like Odo of Bayeux under William the Conqueror, who relished the battlefield more than the pulpit.80 His first task was to construct a ‘heartland’ or defensive perimeter triangular in shape, bounded by Peterborough, Ely and Huntingdon. Once he had gathered a credible force, Despenser moved out against Peterborough, then under siege by the rebels. He achieved complete surprise, took the besiegers in the rear, and slaughtered large numbers of them. The survivors took sanctuary in the abbey church, but Despenser showed how much he really believed in God by violating sanctuary and butchering them.81 Elated by his easy triumph, Despenser recruited more men for his ultimate target: recapturing Norwich. First he relieved Cambridge on 19 June, angered and dismayed by the devastation he witnessed, with St Mary’s Church and Corpus Christi smoking ruins and dreadful tales of rebel mulcting and ‘fines’: £2,000 uplifted from Barnwell Priory outside the town and £3,000 from Cambridge University itself. Despenser now advanced cautiously on Norwich and immediately encountered serendipity. Finally rousing himself from his fantasies of kingship, Litster had decided to send envoys to the real king to ask for a pardon; he wanted it both ways, both the fruits of pillage and extortion and amnesty. The five envoys he selected were Morley and Brewes plus three commoners. Unfortunately for them, the travellers, pursuing a south-westerly track from Norwich to London, ran smack into Despenser’s advancing army on 22 June.82 Morley and Brewes dithered about how to comport themselves but finally betrayed the three commoner envoys to Despenser, who immediately beheaded them, though he had no licence or authority whatsoever to do so.83 The bloodthirsty bishop pressed on to Norwich on the 24th, but found it abandoned by Litster and the rebels. Pursuing them implacably, he ran them to earth on 26 June. Litster was forced to make a stand at North Walsham, but Despenser’s cavalry, led by the bishop himself, broke through the rebel lines with contemptuous ease. Despenser took no prisoners and executed all who surrendered. Litster he reserved for a traitor’s death by hanging, drawing and quartering, though again it must be emphasised that the bishop had no authority to declare anyone traitor, much less carry out the sentence.84 His draconian actions did the trick, however, and the rising in Norfolk collapsed as miraculously as the one in London after Tyler’s death. Knowing that Sir Roger Bacon had friends in high places, he spared him, and Bacon was later, predictably, pardoned. Whereas the elite were merciless an
d bloodthirsty against the lower orders, they were prepared to take a ‘boys will be boys’ approach to their own rebellious kind.

  Richard II and his government had regained their grip on the nation by the end of June. By mid-July the country was pacified and the principal rebel leaders had been executed. Unfortunately between July and November, when he was finally forced to call a halt, Richard positively wallowed in the reign of terror he had unleashed, becoming an addict of martial law and a devotee of cruel and unusual punishment.85 Historians differ on the death toll during and after the Peasants’ Revolt (as they do about the toll in most conflicts), but no one opts for a figure lower than 1,500, with some going as high as 7,000. A climate of fear descended on the nation and the mantle of repression and terror was dense, with a single word out of place sufficing to consign one to the gallows. The plethora of severed heads stuck on gates and gibbeted corpses added to the ambience of chaos. Neighbours ‘fingered’ each other as rebels, and servants informed against masters; the atmosphere was perfect for the settling of old grudges and private scores.86 By November, when Parliament met, the reprisals were themselves becoming a threat to political stability. Different special commissioners were operating in the same county, and all of them were cutting across the work of judges in the regular judicial system. An entire new set of escheators had to be appointed to deal with forfeited property, and malicious litigants had begun to clog up the work of the courts by inserting charges of treason and rebellion into pre-existing lawsuits.87 The November Parliament was determined to assert itself against the king and his officials. A titanic struggle ensued. Deeply unhappy about Richard’s blatant perfidy in so flagrantly repudiating the pledges he had made at Mile End and Smithfield, the Commons were forced to back down on this issue when the king used overt menaces to force the ratification of his repeal through Parliament.88 Yet the Commons extracted a price. They insisted that the king do something about the coterie of worthless cronies who surrounded him in his household and hinted that in their view the rebels had had more than a ghost of a case. The king was forced to agree to a general pardon for the rebels, excepting only around 100 named prominent leaders who had not yet been run to earth and who were expressly excluded from the amnesty. This conciliatory gesture by Richard, so at odds with his bloodthirsty antics over the previous five months, is sometimes set down to the influence of his future wife Anne of Bohemia (whom he married in June 1382). Even so, Richard wanted to exclude the citizens of Cambridge, Canterbury and Bury St Edmunds from the pardon. He got his way only with Bury St Edmunds, which had to pay a fine of 2,000 marks to have the sentence of outlawry lifted.89

  The skeleton at the feast at the convocation of the London Parliament in November 1381 was John of Gaunt, one of the prime causes of the revolt. Whether through military calculation or a more devious political Machiavellianism – possibly reckoning that whoever won between Tyler and Richard II he could emerge as tertius gaudens – Gaunt made no attempt to march towards the scenes of murder and conflagration in London that June but remained in Scotland, justifying his inaction by negotiating what seemed a favourable treaty with the Scots. When he did finally march south, the wildest rumours circulated. One was that he was advancing on London with 20,000 men to make himself king; another was that he had freed all his serfs and was going to assume power at the head of a peasant army.90 Meanwhile Gaunt’s long-standing rivalry with Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, burst into the open. Northumberland shut the castle of Bambrugh against Gaunt, saying he could not receive him without explicit approval from the king. A loose cannon, whom the juvenile Richard II could not control, Gaunt came to Westminster for the Parliament in November with a huge retinue of men. Northumberland did likewise and, since London backed him against their hated Lancastrian enemy, there were even fears that the City would arise again and the erstwhile pro-Tyler levies make common cause with Percy’s troops. In the end Richard II had to intervene to patch up the quarrel.91 There are grounds for thinking that Richard remained suspicious of Gaunt. Although he had modelled himself on Gaunt – to the point where the king’s critics said that he had all the vices of ‘time-honour’d Lancaster’ without any of his virtues – Gaunt had never mentored him properly or given him any significant guidance; Richard essentially had a disastrous childhood with no worthwhile male rolemodels.92 Richard used Tresilian and his other acolytes to rain terror on the ex-rebels, using charges of treason, especially those of the swearing of oaths of confederacy against the institution of lordship and waging war against the king – ironically the one thing the rebels had not done. Gaunt and the other freelance dispensers of justice – including the aptly named Despenser – had to make do with private prosecutions through the Court of Common Pleas, which invariably had less successful outcomes than the king’s terror.93

  The Peasants’ Revolt was a seismic event in English history. The lower orders rose up with a vengeance, killing ‘traitors’, beheading or manhandling royal officials, justices of the peace, escheators and tax collectors, murdering foreigners in the rage of xenophobia, attacking property, burning court records and manorial documents, stealing landlords’ cattle, timber, hay and other goods, practising petty theft, grand larceny and blackmail, taking back enclosed land into common use, forcing servants to leave their lords, withdrawing rents, tithes, corvée and other services by tenants, refusing to recognise courts and tribunals, to say nothing of the many acts of private grudge-settling and personal vendetta. There could be no disguising the scale, scope or extent of the rebellion: 105 villages in Essex went on the warpath, 118 in Kent, 72 in Suffolk and 35 in Hertfordshire, apart from the many town risings already mentioned.94 Although the conflict setting the rebels against the king and his officials was savage and bloody, one surprising aspect of 1381 is the low level of violence by and against feudal lords. Most landowners offered no resistance to the rebels until after 15 July when the king began his suppression of the rising. Most of the great nobles and magnates avoided arbitrary force in their dealings with the angry insurrectionists, perhaps tacitly conceding that the rebels had a point and there had been significant abuses of power by officialdom.95 Although there were peasants in the rising, the rebellion was no more a rural jacquerie than the Pacific Ocean is pacific. The key social elements taking part were craftsmen and tradesmen, and the key to the initial success of the rising was the support for it by these elements in London.96 There are two main perspectives in the theory of revolutionary causation, one stressing the Marxist notion of increasing immiseration, the other popularised by Alexis de Tocqueville that stresses the increasing expectations generated by rising prosperity (see Appendix). All the evidence suggests that 1381 was a Tocquevillian revolution. Not only were many of the key rebel players middle-aged, they were artisans and skilled workers, with a sophisticated understanding of law and government; insofar as peasants were to the fore in the rising they were ‘upper’ peasants, the most wealthy species of the genus.97 The focus of rebellion was London and the south-east, then as now the most prosperous part of the country. Surprise had sometimes been expressed that in East Anglia the leadership seems almost to have devolved on the ‘middle sectors’ – clergymen, squires, knights – and it has been suggested that East Anglia exhibited anomie at its most glaring in the contrast between villages where free men had never disappeared and neighbouring ones which saw the manorial system at its most extreme.98

  What were the consequences of the rebellion of 1381? Some commentators have expressed scepticism that anything at all was achieved after so much bloodshed, but this is an exaggeration. It is true that Richard II at once declared his abolition of serfdom null and void and that it would take two centuries of socio-economic change, not a sudden decree, to extirpate villeinage. Yet some indices of change were visible even in the near aftermath of the rising. ‘Copyhold’ tenure was increasingly set down in the manorial court rolls, while many landlords abandoned demesne cultivation and farmed out parcels of land to contractors at a set fee.99 If these we
re gradual and long-term changes, some of the results of 1381 were immediate and even dramatic. In November 1381 Parliament gave up on the Poll Tax and opted to levy taxes on trade; no one ever again attempted to introduce this ill-starred venture until the disastrous events of 1990. Parliament too found a new lease of confidence and dug in against royal excesses. It refused to allow general alarm at the recent social unrest to be used as an excuse to increase the power of prelates.100 Indeed, the Peasants’ Revolt made Parliament reluctant to vote taxes at all, which in turn stymied English initiatives in the Hundred Years War. It may therefore not be an exaggeration to say that the events in England in 1381 were actually a turning point in the conflict with France, and that thereafter, until final defeat in 1453, England was always on the back foot.101 Moreover, England remained uneasy and restive for the rest of the decade, with conspiracies and rumours of conspiracies, especially in Norfolk, Sussex and Kent, rife for the rest of the 1380s, some of which were blamed on the continuing problem of Lollardism.102 At the level of personalities one can discern a varied impact of 1381. It is likely that Richard II’s great success at Smithfield on 15 June gave him both an exaggerated idea of his own abilities and a false idea of the scope of kingly power, thus leading to the absolutist tendencies that would bring him to disaster and death in 1399.103 In this connection it is interesting that the three aristocrats who were the principal suppressors of the rebels in 1381 – the Earls of Buckingham, Arundel and Warwick – were the three leaders of the 1388 oligarchic purge against the king. Richard had already made it clear that he preferred the company of toadies to aristocrats and, paranoid and vindictive as he was, distrusted both his subjects and his nobles.104 Those who loathed and despised the most avid agents of Richard’s thirst for blood in 1381 enjoyed mixed consolation. Despenser died in his bed after narrowly avoiding being dubbed traitor for opposing Henry IV in 1399. But Nicholas Brembre and Chief Justice Tresilian were executed for high treason on the say-so of the ‘Merciless Parliament’ of 1387.105 John of Gaunt continued in the same old way, always the despot, always the trimmer. The revolt would not have changed his attitudes as he was always a man who preferred compromise, manipulation and ‘transformation’ of an opponent over confrontation, rebellion or ambitions for the throne.106 If there was one clear winner of the Peasants’ Revolt it was Gaunt, ironically the one man who had done more than any other to trigger it.