The Road Not Taken Read online

  Finally, we must examine the impact of the rising on literature, and its reputation down the centuries, for otherwise the revolt would be of purely antiquarian interest. It is a commonplace that the great English poets of the late fourteenth century – Chaucer, Langland and John Gower – viewed the rebellion with loathing and detestation and, indeed, how could it be otherwise, for their careers depended on the favour of great lords. Gower makes it quite clear that, however corrupt English society is – and he gives many examples of this – any alternative, such as the Peasants’ Revolt is even worse; at least fraudsters and embezzlers are examples of the ‘banality of evil’ and are not manifestations of Satan himself.107 Gower tacked on what is now Book One of his Vox Clamantis as an afterthought following the events of 1381, having written what are now Books Two–Six in 1378–81. Gower is not in the class of Langland and Chaucer and Vox Clamantis is usually thought deficient in structure, architecture and resolution, not helped by the poet’s notorious habit of plagiarising large chunks of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Book One of Vox Gower clumsily changes tack several times in an attempt to make his dream allegory fit the facts of the rebellion. First he portrays the rebels as (literally) wild animals; his point is that in rebelling the peasants have abandoned their humanity. Wat Tyler himself is portrayed as a jay, persuading the other animals to devilry in a manner familiar from medieval beast fables.108 Then Gower confusingly drops the wild-beasts motif and shifts to the tale of Troy as an allegory of London in 1381 (both admitted invaders). After the poet has told us how he flees Troy to escape death at the hands of the Greeks/rebels and skulks in a wood, he proceeds to make good his escape in a ship (the ship of state?). The ship, which at times seems to double as the ill-fated Tower of London, is almost engulfed by a hurricane/cyclone before coming to safe haven. Presumably the lack of any naturalistic sequence in the poem is meant to suggest the dimensions of a nightmare, for Gower, in common with all the chroniclers, thought that 1381 represented the unleashing of forces that were literally satanic. This is made explicit in his portrait of Wat Tyler: ‘Just as this Devil was placed in command over the army of the lower world, so this scoundrel was in charge of the wicked mob. A harsh voice, a wicked expression, a very faithful likeness to a death’s head – these things gave token of his appearance.’109

  William Langland was also deeply influenced by the events of 1381. It is now the consensus among Langland scholars that the famous three rescensions of his Piers Plowman are all the work of a single author, that they were composed in the chronological order denoted by the A-B-C sequence and that the ‘C’ version represents Langland’s ‘cleaning up’ his social criticism in the light of the events of 1381, so that the blame for that ‘unnatural’ event falls largely on the peasantry and so that he is completely dissociated from Lollardism or any hint of sympathy for the rebels.110 This was all the more necessary, since some Langland experts view Piers Plowman as a classic manifestation of the ‘divided self’, with Langland’s conscious impulses conservative and in favour of hierarchy and authority and his unconscious ones working in the opposite direction.111 Yet another ‘dream allegory’, Piers Plowman is an ambitious attempt to investigate the true meaning of Christianity in both a practical and contemplative sense. It has been likened to Blake’s Prophetic Works, Wordsworth’s The Prelude and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets but, with its multiple narrators and consciousnesses, overlapping voices (both of the author and the characters), its frequent digressions and its confusing tacking between naturalistic analysis and religious mysticism, it often brings Laurence Sterne to mind; certainly the shorthand tag ‘surrealist’ seems the most appropriate brief description.112 Langland is a far more valuable source for 1381 than Gower, as he provides a deep, albeit idiosyncratic, description of the forces at play instead of lapsing into the most fantastical type of allegory. However, Langland’s chief deficiency as a social critic is that he can never transcend the medieval mindset whereby rebellion among the lower orders in society must always be perceived as contra naturam and against natural order, being a literally diabolical manifestation of the underworld or Hell, with Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball as minions of Satan.113

  Only in the seventeenth century, in the Cromwellian era of radical thought, was the true significance of 1381 apprehended. Whereas official Roundhead propaganda tried to make Wat Tyler and Jack Straw forerunners of Cromwell as fighters against royal tyranny, the Levellers saw Tyler as the first man to try to throw off the detested ‘Norman yoke’. Yet it was not until the late eighteenth century that the high tide of pro-Tylerism was manifested. Whereas William Morris in The Dream of John Ball would see his hero as an egalitarian outlaw in the tradition of Robin Hood (who had himself been rescued from his medieval ‘placing’ as a merely thuggish outlaw),114 Robert Southey concentrated on the martyr of Smithfield. After writing a play on Tyler in 1794, Southey composed a poem to mark the place in Smithfield where he was assassinated:

  This is the place where England’s injur’d sons

  Rebell’d against their sovereign, for they found

  His yoke was grievous. Pass not lightly on!

  This is a place may well invite thy mind

  To serious musings. Monarchs here may learn

  If they oppress their people, if they waste

  Their blood, and rob from the poor labourer

  His hard earn’d mite, that there may come a day

  Of vengeance. Here the citizens should think

  That not by tumult and mad violence

  Can peace be forc’d, and Order and Reform

  But by the calm, collected public voice –

  Marking our father’s errors, be we wise!115

  Another great radical, Tom Paine, made an even more trenchant attack on the conservatism of Edmund Burke, whose anti-revolutionary thinking in many ways showed scant improvement on Gower and Langland. After describing Tyler as ‘an intrepid, disinterested man’, Paine continued to a withering evisceration of the views of Burke, of whom it was once well said that his ideology commits us to blaming the sailors if a ship encounters a storm at sea: ‘All his [Tyler’s] proposals made to Richard were on a more just and public ground than those which had been made to John by the barons, and notwithstanding the sycophancy of men like Mr Burke who seek to gloss over a base action of the Court by traducing Tyler, his fame will outlive that falsehood. If the barons merited a monument to be erected in Runnymede, Tyler merits one in Smithfield.’116

  3

  Jack Cade

  ENTIRE BOOKS HAVE been written about the events of 1381 and, in a single chapter devoted to the general theme of revolution, it is not possible to do justice to every sub-theme or to explore down every byway: for instance, we have said nothing about the role of women in the revolt or the possible involvement of freemasonry.1 The Peasants’ Revolt was a unique event, triggered by particular events, which could have followed a very different course; in particular the denouement could have turned out otherwise. There was nothing predetermined or fated about it, and historical inevitability cannot explain it. Yet an overemphasis on its uniqueness risks making it a ‘one-off’ one-dimensional phenomemon.2 All worthwhile historical analysis involves a combination of the particular, the specific, the contingent and the aleatory with the more general features of society in a given historical epoch. Marx’s famous statement: ‘Men make history but they do not make it in circumstances of their own choosing’ has become a historian’s cliché, but it is true. To set the revolt in a proper context, it is worth examining the thesis that the fourteenth century in Europe was an era of general crisis. Any suggestion of ‘general crisis’, however tentative, usually has the devotees of absolute historical uniqueness on their hind legs, yet it cannot be denied that in certain historical periods social and economic turbulence is observable over a wide range of roughly comparable societies. The famous examples are the 1640s and the explosion of Europe into general revolution in the late 1840s.3 There are strong grounds for asserting that fourte
enth-century Europe was another such era, exhibiting as it did signs of malaise and crisis in a number of spheres: climatic, demographic, cultural, religious, financial, socio-economic. Indeed, some historians are prepared to go even further and claim that there are grounds for postulating a worldwide crisis, most obviously in relation to the Black Death but also embracing calamitous events in Japan, China, Korea, India, south-east Asia and the rise of Tamerlane in central Asia.4 It will therefore be useful to place the Peasants’ Revolt in context, working inwards from the most general to the most specific factors, especially as the 1450 rising under Jack Cade is often considered the Mark Two version of the peasants’ rebellion.

  The deep structure of 1381 was that the peasantry had suffered almost a century of instability in living standards, had often hovered on the brink of starvation, and were determined that the great lords should not arrest their improved economic position and thrust them back to the breadline. Those who stress the ‘hidden hand’ of Malthusian pandemics like to argue that Europe, overpopulated at the end of the thirteenth century, then suffered a violent reaction, mainly caused by the Black Death, which saw Europe’s population halved. On worst-case estimates France may have lost two-thirds of its population in the fourteenth century to plague, epidemics of disease, crop failure and the Hundred Years War. Naturally, the worst era was that of 1350–1420, immediately after the Black Death. The more temperate zones seem to have fared best, with a mortality of 40 per cent in Germany, 50 per cent in Provence and 70 per cent in Tuscany.5 Not all of this can be attributed to the Black Death. Earlier in the century there were two other great disasters. The great cattle plague of 1315–21 (murrain and rinderpest) coincided with what has been called the ‘Great Famine’ of 1315–22, characterised by quasi-biblical flooding in northern Europe from late 1314 to late 1316 and again in the winter and spring of 1321, accompanied by failed grain harvests, mainly of winter crops. In 1316 the price of wheat soared to 325 per cent of the price the year before; wheat harvests in 1315–22 produced only 40–60 per cent of the normal yield, and some 15–20 per cent of the population of Europe perished from famine.6 Some say the consequences of 1315–22 lasted two years and the peasantry was just revovering when it was engulfed by the Black Death. One of the reasons the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was largely a middle-aged rising was that disproportionate numbers of the young had been carried off by the Black Death.7 The situation was at its worst in England, where the first three Edwards were warlike and expansionist and plunged the nation into the disastrous and costly wars of Scottish independence. Heavy taxation after the disaster of Bannockburn in 1314 coincided with the worst famine period. Moreover these taxes were directed not at landed income, which would have hit the feudal lords, but at movable goods – seed corn, ploughs, agricultural tools and implements, etc – which impacted most grievously on the peasantry.8

  At the most basic level, then, the crisis of the fourteenth century involved catastrophic population losses, especially in the period 1350– 1420, largely though not wholly attributable to the Black Death.9 Fear of famine ranked second only to plague as a perennial terror, since crop failure was a recurrent reality and bad harvests bore mainly on the poor, thus accentuating the pre-existing social inequality. Langland’s poem Piers Plowman repeatedly refers to this issue, as also the wafer-thin margin of subsistence for the peasantry, who endured scarcity of food before every harvest and a short-lived abundance thereafter, provided the harvests did not fail.10 Some scholars refer the uncertainties of the weather, especially the great rains of 1315–17, to a distinct climate change. On this view, the so-called Medieval Warm Period, lasting from about 950 to 1250, then gradually morphed into the ferocious Little Ice Age, which lasted from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth; the fourteenth century would therefore have been a transition period, with the associated climatic uncertainties and warm summers no longer dependable.11 Millenarians and eschatologists were always on the lookout for distinctive features of the weather which they could interpret as the wrath of God or the coming of the end of times. There was an apocalyptic element in the Peasants’ Revolt, fed by the great storm of May 1381, which seemed to presage disaster; there had been a similar reaction to a ferocious gale in 1362.12 Population losses and the uncertainties of the rural life paradoxically led to a ‘population implosion’ in English towns, and this was particularly noticeable in Kent. This phenomenon played its part in the revolt of 1381 since the new urban immigrants resented the power of the old, entrenched families who had survived the Black Death, making them form common cause with their countryside brethren. This was yet another reason why a rigid distinction between the revolt in the towns and the countryside in 1381 will not work. Demographic changes in the 1360s and 1370s prepared the way for violent conflict by underlining the gap between the new urban immigrants and their aspirations and the old methods of government and social control in towns and cities.13

  Contributing to the sense of chaos in the fourteenth century was a general financial collapse of a kind that would not be seen again until the twenty-first century. The disastrously poor calibre of English leadership and elite savoir faire can be gauged by the decision of Edward III to add to Europe’s woes and diminish its population still further by launching into the Hundred Years War. Just as Bannockburn had been followed by the Great Hunger and the cattle plague, so the ‘glories’ of Crécy were followed almost immediately, as if by some malign pre-established harmony, by the Black Death. Edward III has had a good press from historians and has certainly been overrated. His martial skills were not of the order of Richard I the Lionheart’s, his judgement was poor and his main domestic legacy was the attempt to defy the laws of economics in the Statute of Labourers.14 It may be an exaggeration to say, as one historian has, that he was ‘an avaricious and sadistic thug … a destructive and merciless force’, but this is closer to the truth than the ‘Perfect King’ hagiography accorded him by the mainstream academic establishment today.15 Yet the obvious social instability caused by battle deaths and post-battle wounds, the plunder and pillage of the French countryside and the rape and mayhem visited on the French peasantry with the subsequent production of banditry, had even worse unintended consequences. Europe’s financial system depended heavily for lubrication on the three great banking houses of Florence – Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciavioli. Edward III borrowed 1,365,000 gold florins to finance his campaigns in France and, after early reverses, suspended payment on the debt in May 1339, still owing 800,000 florins to the Bardi and Peruzzi houses. This is said to have been the first of only a few such defaults in English history.16 The Bardi bank was particularly badly hit, for in 1340 Robert of Naples added to their woes by defaulting on his debts with them. The Bardis tried at first to escape their predicament by leading a revolt against the Florentine government in November 1340, but this failed; their banking house limped on until finally collapsing in 1346.17

  As if all this was not enough, the years immediately before the Peasants’ Revolt saw the medieval world embroiled in a religious crisis, often termed the Great Schism or (to differentiate it from the earlier one of 1054) the Western Schism, when two rival popes battled for supremacy. Religion was supposed to be the ultimate social cement in the so-called Age of Belief, the solid backbone of society that provided eternal and unshakeable truth, yet here was the Church itself in chaos and disarray. The situation was one memorably summed up by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick: ‘Who’s to doom when the judge himself is dragged before the bar?’18 The college of cardinals elected a Neapolitan as Pope Urban VI in 1378, mainly, they claimed, to appease the mob, but immediately regretted what they had done when Urban proved despotic, paranoid and given to violent outbursts of temper. They then elected another pope to replace him (Clement VII). But Urban refused to abdicate, so Clement set up a rival court at Avignon. There had been rival popes before, but the novelty of the 1378 imbroglio was that this time a single group of princes of the Church had created both the pope and
the ‘antipope’.19 What might have been thought a collective act of temporary madness by the cardinals quickly spiralled out of control, as the two popes became the focus for rivalries between the European powers. France, Spain, Burgundy, Savoy, Naples and Scotland opted for the Avignon pope, while England, Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire, northern Italy, Hungary and Scandinavia recognised the incumbent at Rome.20 The schism continued after the death of the principals. Boniface IX was crowned in Rome in 1389 while Benedict XIII became the new Avignon pope in 1394. The rivalry created fanatical hatreds among religious zealots. After complex and tortuous negotiations the situation was finally resolved in 1417 with the election of Martin V, though a diehard Avignon faction held out until 1429.21