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Chapter II: FOR NOW IT IS TYME TO BE WAR
The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it a “curiously spontaneous” rebellion.
Barbara Tuchman, in her fourteenth-century history, A Distant Mirror, said that the rebellion spread “with some evidence of planning.”
Winston Churchill went further. In The Birth of Britain he wrote, “Throughout the summer of 1381 there was a general ferment. Beneath it all lay organization. Agents moved round the villages of central England, in touch with a ‘Great Society’ which was said to meet in London.”
The spark of the rebellion was being fanned vigorously, and finally the signal was given. Even though he had been arrested, excommunicated, and even now was a prisoner in the ecclesiastic prison at Maidstone, in Kent, letters went out from priest John Ball and from other priests who followed him. Clerics were then the only literate class, so letters must have been received by local priests and were obviously intended to be shared with or read aloud to others. They all contained a signal to act now, which could put to rest the concept that the rebellion was simply a spontaneous convulsion of frustration that just happened to affect a hundred thousand Englishmen at the same time. This from a letter from John Ball: “John Balle gretyth yow wele alle and doth yowe to understande, he hath rungen youre belle. Nowe ryght and myght, wylle and skylle. God spede every ydele [ideal]. Now is tyme.” From priest Jakke Carter: “You have gret need to take God with vowe in alle your dedes. For now is tyme to be war.” From priest Jakke Treyman: “Jakke Trewman doth you to understande that falsnes and gyle have reigned too long, and trethe hat bene sette under a lokke, and falsnes regneth in everylk flokke … God do bote, for now is tyme.”
One letter from John Ball: “Saint Mary Priest” is worth quoting in its entirety. Even with the medieval English spelling, the meaning will be clear. Lechery and gluttony were frequent points in his accusations of high church leaders. “John Balle seynte Marye prist gretes wele alle maner men byddes hem in the name of the Trinite, Fadur, and Sone and Holy Gost stoned manlyche togedyr in trewthe and helpez trewthe, and trewthe schal helpe yowe. Now regneth pride in pris [prize] and covetys is hold wys, and leccherye withouten shame and glotonye withouten blame. Envye regnith with tresone, and slouthe is take in grete sesone. God do bote for now is tyme amen.”
In all the letters quoted, the emphasis has been added to identify the common signal “now is tyme.” More evidence of planning and organization would come.
The violence erupted in Essex, prompted by new and more stringent efforts to collect a third poll tax. The idea of having special commissioners to enforce the tax collection had come from the king’s sergeant-at-arms, a Franciscan friar named John Legge. That idea would cost him his head a few weeks later.
The commissioners in some instances attacked their duties overzealously. Some were reported to have examined young girls to see if they had engaged in sexual intercourse, as an aid to determining whether or not they were fifteen years of age and so taxable. One man, John of Deptford, was arrested after he struck the tax gatherer who had raised his daughter’s dress to see if she had pubic hair, evidence of taxable age.
In some areas the tax collectors were either simply ignored or beaten up by the villagers. A great local lord, John de Bamptoun, set himself up in the town of Brentwood in Essex and demanded that the men of the neighboring towns come to him with complete lists of names and their tax money. Over a hundred men responded to his orders – not to pay the taxes, but to inform him that they had no intention of doing so. Optimistically, de Bamptoun ordered his two sergeants-at-arms to arrest the hundred villagers and put them in prison. The crowd angrily attacked the royal officers and de Bamptoun counted himself lucky to be allowed to flee back to London.
In response, the government sent back Sir Robert Bealknap, chief justice of common pleas. Sir Robert came armed with specific indictments and statements signed by jurors. (In those days, jurors were the opposite of independent. They were witnesses, literally those with “wit-ness” or “possession of knowledge” of the matter at hand, and frequently they were the accusers as well). In spite of Bealknap’s ponderous authority, his reception was no better than that previously accorded to Bamptoun. The locals seized the royal party and forced Bealknap to reveal the names of the jurors who had named and sworn against de Bamptoun’s assailants. With that information, parties set out to hunt them down. Jurors caught were beheaded and their heads mounted on poles as examples to others, while those who couldn’t be found had their houses burned or pulled down. As for the chief justice, he was berated as a traitor to the king and to the kingdom but in the end was permitted to return to London. Not allowed to go with him were his three clerks, who were recognized as the same clerks who had been with de Bamptoun. They were beheaded.
Meanwhile in Kent, the county just south of Essex across the Thames, a knight of the king’s household, Sir Simon Burley, had come to Gravesend and had leveled against a freeman named Robert Belling the charge that Belling was Burley’s serf. He set a fine of three hundred pounds in silver as the price of Belling’s liberty. The men of Gravesend were outraged at both the charge and the fine, a sum they declared would ruin Belling entirely. The royal officer responded by having Belling bound and thrown into the dungeon at nearby Rochester Castle. At the same time, a tax commission had arrived in Kent on a mission similar to that of Sir Robert Bealknap in Essex; the Franciscan sergeant-at-arms John Legge came armed with specific indictments against a number of people in the county. They had planned to establish the seat of the Kentish inquiry at Canterbury, but were driven off by the local citizenry.
As word of these events spread, the men of Kent began to gather, centered on the town of Dartford. A group of Essex men crossed the Thames in boats to join them. Showing not just organization but perhaps discipline as well, the leaders decreed that no men who lived within twelve leagues (about thirty-six miles) of the sea would be allowed to join their march, because those men might be needed at home to help fight off any surprise French attack on the English coast.
The Kentish mob moved not toward London but away from it, heading east to lay siege to Rochester Castle, where they demanded the release of Robert Belling. After just half a day, and no recorded defense, the constable of the castle opened the gates to the rebels. They released Belling and every other prisoner, then turned south to Maidstone, where they arrived on June 7. There they were joined by more men, including one known as Walter the Tyler. Remarkably, he was immediately acknowledged by thousands of men as their supreme commander and gave his name to the rising: “Wat Tyler’s Revolt.” Nothing is known of Wat Tyler’s prior life nor of the means by which a supposedly disorganized mob acknowledged his leadership on the very day he arrived.
One of Tyler’s first acts was to free John Ball, the “Saint Mary Priest” of York, from the church prison at Maidstone, and Ball became the unofficial chaplain of the expedition from that point forward.
Still moving away from London, Tyler took his force farther east to Canterbury, the seat of the leading churchman in England. That Tyler planned all along for his rude army to march on London is indicated by the rebels’ first act upon their arrival at Canterbury on Monday, June 10. Thousands of rebels crowded into the church during high mass. After kneeling, they shouted to the monks to elect one of their number to be the new archbishop of Canterbury, because the present archbishop (who was off in London with the king, who had recently appointed him chancellor of the realm) “is a traitor and will be beheaded for his iniquity,” as indeed he was before the week was over. The rebel leaders then asked for the names of any “traitors” in the town. Three names were provided, and the three men were sought out and beheaded. Then the rebels left the town, allowing just five hundred Canterbury men to join them because Canterbury was near the coast and the balance of the men would be needed in the event of an attack by the French.
On the same day (June 10) that Tyler took over Canterbury in Kent, the gathering Essex mob sacked and burned a major commandery of the Knights Hospitallers called Cressing Temple. This wealthy manor had been given to the Knights Templar in 1138 by Matilda, the wife of King Stephen. When the Templars were suppressed by Pope Clement V, all of their property in Britain, including this manor of Cressing, was given to the Hospitallers. The church owned one-third of the land surface of England at that time and suffered losses comparable to those inflicted over the next few days on the Knights Hospitallers, who seemed to be on an especially aggressive hit list of the rebel leaders.
The following day, June 11, the rebels in both Essex and Kent turned toward London. Even with the burning, beheading, and destruction of records along the way, their purpose and discipline were such that both groups, upwards of a hundred thousand men, made the seventy-mile journey in two days, reaching the city at almost the same time.
Warned of the rebels’ approach, the fourteen-year-old Kind Richard II moved from Windsor to the Tower of London, the strongest fortress in the kingdom. He was joined there by an entourage that included Sir Simon Sudbury who was both archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor; Sir Robert Hales, who was both the king’s treasurer and the prior of the order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (the Hospitallers); Henry Bolingbroke, who would one day depose Richard and take the throne himself as Henry IV: the earls of Oxford, Kent, Arundel, Warwick, Suffolk, and Salisbury; and other peers and lesser officials, including the chief justice Sir Robert Bealknap, the unsuccessful tax collector John de Bamptoun, and the hated Franciscan sergeant-at-arms, John Legge. They all had reason to fear for their lives at the hands of the rebel horde advancing on the city.
On June 12, the Essex men began arriving at Mile End, near Aldgate. Across the river, the Kentish rebels gathered at Southwark, at the south end of London Bridge. Confederates and sympathizers streamed out of London to join them. One Kentish group came through nearby Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames, and sacked the archbishop’s palace there, burning the furnishings and all the records they could find. (On the same day, across the river in the Tower, from where he could see the smoke rising from his palace, the archbishop returned the Great Seal to the king and asked to be relieved of his public duties as chancellor.) Other rebel groups broke open the prisons on the south side of the river, including the ecclesiastic prison of the bishops of Winchester on Clink Street, a location that gave the name “the clink” to prisons everywhere. On smashing open the Marshalsea prison in Southwark, the mob searched for its commander, Richard Imworth, famous for his cruelty. Unable to locate Imworth, they contented themselves for the moment, with the destruction of his house.
Messengers went out to the rebels from the king, asking the reason for this disturbance of the peace of the land. The answer came back that uprising was dedicated to saving the king and to destroying traitors to king and country. The king’s reply to this was to ask the rebels to cease their depredations and wait until he could meet with them to resolve all injustices against them. The rebels agreed and asked the king to meet with them early in the morning of June 13 at Blackheath on the Thames, a few miles from London. The men of Kent gathered at the meeting place on the south bank of the river and the men of Essex on the north. The king and his party left the Tower in four barges but only got as far as the royal manor at Rotherhithe, near Greenwich, where Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hales persuaded the party to get no closer to the rebels. Upon learning that the king was not coming to them as promised, the Kentish leaders sent the king a petition asking him for the heads of fifteen men. Their list included the archbishop of Canterbury, the prior of the Hospitallers, Chief Justice Bealknap, and the tax collectors John Legge and John de Bamptoun. Not surprisingly, the royal council would not agree to these demands, and the barges returned to the Tower. Each on their own side of the river, the Essex men moved toward Aldgate and the Kentish faction marched back toward Southwark and London Bridge. For reasons we shall probably never know, Aldgate was undefended, and the Essex rebels simply walked into the city. As much mystery attaches to the approach of the Kentish mob to London Bridge. No attempt was made to man the fortified gatehouse, and the drawbridge was lowered for them to cross.
Moving through the city, the rebels touched nothing until they reached Fleet Street. There they attacked the Fleet prison and released all the inmates. They destroyed two forges that the Hospitallers had taken over from the Templars. Some joined a London mob and went to the Savoy Palace of the hated royal uncle, John of Gaunt, pausing on the way only to destroy any houses they could identify as belonging to the Hospitallers. The Savoy Palace itself was destroyed in a mood of rage. Furniture and art objects were smashed, linens and tapestries were burned. Jewels were hammered to powder. Finally the building was set aflame, boosted by the addition of several kegs of gunpowder.
From the Savoy the rebels returned to the Hospitaller property between Fleet Street and the Thames, to buildings leased by that order to lawyers who practiced before the king’s court in the adjoining royal city of Westminster. They vandalized and burnt the lawyers’ buildings, burnt their records, and killed anyone who registered an objection. They destroyed the other Hospitaller buildings on the property, with one exception. Instead of burning the rolls and records stored in the church where they found them, they went to the trouble of carrying them out into the high road for burning, avoiding any damage to the church itself. One historian goes so far as to say that certain of the mob “protected” the church from damage. This attitude was an anomaly in the midst of an orgy of destruction of church property and church leaders. This property, too, had been taken from the Templars and given to the Hospitallers, and even today that portion of the City of London is known simply as “The Temple.” The church that was left unscathed by the rebels had been the principal church of the Knights Templar in England. This attitude toward the old Templar church stands out in marked contrast to the mob’s feeling for the grand priory of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell, where they turned next. Still seeking out Hospitaller property for destruction along the way, they arrived at Clerkenwell and embarked upon an effort of total destruction. While the Templar church still stands today, all that remains of the principal Hospitaller church at Clerkenwell is the underground crypt.
Some of the mob went from London into the City of Westminster, where they released all of the prisoners in Westminster prison. Moving back into London, they did the same at the famous Newgate prison, taking chains and shackles to place on the altar of a nearby church.
One group went to the Tower to seek an audience with the king. When they were unsuccessful, they laid siege to the Tower. Word was sent out by the rebel leaders to the bands still roving the city that every member of the Chancery and Exchequer, every lawyer, and anyone who could write a writ or letter should be beheaded. Ink-stained fingers were enough to condemn a man to death on the spot. The church at that time had a virtual monopoly on literacy, so the victims were most likely to be administrative clerics, who. also held a near monopoly on what we might now think of as the "civil service" of the king's government.
So far, the king's council had appeared numbed into inactivity, but something had to be done, and finally a plan was agreed upon. It could not be based on force, because they had no force. The weapons they did have were trickery and deceit. Word was cried out in every ward of the City that on the following morning of Friday, June 14, the king and his council would meet with the rebels and that all of their demands would be satisfied. The promise was easily made because there was no intention to keep it. The place selected was the open fields at Mile End, outside the City beyond Aldgate. It was expected that this move would achieve the initial goal of pulling the rebels out of the City. In fact, most of them did go, but Wat Tyler and his chief lieutenant, Jack Strawe, stayed behind with several hundred men. Their "chaplain," the priest John Ball, stayed with them. The rebel leadership had something more important to do than meet with the king to discuss manumission of villeinage and serfdom.
In· those days, the Thames came right up to and inside the south wall of the Tower, so there was direct access by means of
a. water gate. As the king's party made ready to go to Mile End on Friday morning, the archbishop of Canterbury tried to escape by boat. He was recognized, and the ensuing hue and cry caused his crew to beat its way back through the water gate to the safety of the Tower..
As promised, the king's party left the Tower to meet the rebels at Mile End. Chroniclers tell us that he was accompanied by such dignitaries as the earls of Kent, Warwick, and Oxford, as well as by the mayor of London and "many knights and squires." What they do not tell us is why he was not accompanied by two of his very highest officials, Sir Simon Sudbury, who was the archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of the realm, and Sir Robert Hales, who was prior of the order of the Knights Hospitaller and the king’s treasurer. We shall never know whether they chose to stay behind or were ordered to do so. There is also no record of who spoke for the rebels at Mile End while Tyler, Strawe, and Ball were on a mission more important to them back in London.
At the meeting place all seemed to go well. The rebels asked two things: first, that they should have the right to hunt down and execute all traitors to the king and common people, and second, that no man should be bound to another in serfdom or villeinage. Every Englishman should be a free man. As to the first request, the king agreed that all "traitors" should be put to death, provided that they were proven guilty under the law. He asked that all such accused be brought to him for trial. As to the request for universal freedom, he had brought about thirty clerks with him, who began speedily grinding out writs of manumission.
As soon as the king was safely out of the City, Tyler, Strawe, and Ball made their move. Incredibly, their plan was to take the Tower of London with a few hundred ill-armed men. The Tower had been built to be the most secure fortress in Britain, so secure that it housed the royal mint. It was equipped with a heavy gate, an iron portcullis, and a drawbridge. At the time of Tyler's approach, the Tower was manned by professional soldiers, including hundreds of experienced archers. It had leadership and authority in the person of Archbishop Sudbury and, even more so, in the person of Sir Robert Hales, commander of a military order.
Here again, there had to have been collusion and friends on the inside. Tyler and his small band found the drawbridge down, the portcullis up, the gate open. They simply walked into the Tower. No contemporary chronicler refers to so much as a scuffle.
Inside, the archbishop had sung a mass and had confessed the prior of the Hospitallers and others. The rebels found him at prayer in the chapel of the Tower. A priest tried to hold them. back by holding the consecrated host in front of them, a practice known to tum aside all manner of demons and evil spirits, but the rebels simply brushed him aside. The archbishop was beaten to the floor and dragged out of the chapel and out of the Tower by his arms and hood. Others dragged out the prior of the Hospitallers, while still others searched the rooms for their proscribed victims. Among these were the Franciscan sergeant-at-arms and tax collector John Legge and another Franciscan friar, William Appleton, physician and counselor to John of Gaunt. The captured men were all led out to Tower Hill, where a great crowd had gathered. With background roars of approval, the rebels struck off the heads of their special prisoners, which were put on poles and taken to be mounted on London Bridge. As an aid to identifying the archbishop of Canterbury, they took his miter along and nailed it to his head.
After the execution, the rebels and the London mob broke out through the City, looking for additional victims. One man was beheaded simply because he spoke well of Friar William Appleton, whom the rebels had executed at Towel1Jill. By the time their fury had abated, the rebels had beheaded about 60 of their enemies. An especially noteworthy target was Richard Lyons, the wealthy London burgess who had been impeached and found guilty of many acts of corruption by the Parliament of 1376. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment, but his influence was such that appeals to the king by his friends hadresulted.in his being restored to freedom. There was no appeal from the judgment of the rebel mob that pulled him from his house and summarily chopped off his head.
While the rebels 'foamed the City with their hit list, the rebel leadership mounted another unexplained project of its own. A group was organized and sent out from London by Wat Tyler, commanded by his lieutenant Jack Strawe and apparently guided by Londoner Thomas Farndon. They marched about six miles out of London for the very specific purpose of destroying the Hospitaller manor at Highbury, which a contemporary chronicler said had been '''recently and skillfully rebuilt like another paradise."
Word ·of the rebel violence at the Tower and in the City reached Mile End, and the royal party came back to London. They did not return to the fortress of the Tower but went directly to the king's wardrobe near Castle Baynard, where his clerks continued to execute writs of manumission. Many of the rebels took those writs for themselves or their villages and headed back to their homes.
History gives us no clue as to how or why it was arranged, but agreement was somehow reached that the king would meet again with the rebels at Smithfield on the following day, Saturday, June
15. In the/early morning of that day, the king and his party were met by the prior and canons of Westminster Abbey, all barefoot, who led them to the abbey cathedral for services, accompanied by a number of curious rebels.
The king heard mass at the high altar and left a gift for the abbey. Rebels behind the altar recognized Richard Imworth, the hated tormentor and marshal of the Marshalsea prison, hiding in the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor. When Imworth saw that he had been spotted, he clamped his arms around one of the marble columns of the shrine and cried for mercy. The unmoved rebels pried his arms loose from the column and carried him out to Cheapside, where he was publicly beheaded.
Gradually the rebels gathered to await the king at Smithfield. They lined up on one side of the great open field, while the king's party and its escort lined up on the opposite side, in front of St. Bartholemew's Hospital.
What happened next is usually cited as the result of the insulting behavior of Wat Tyler, but was more likely the result of a plan. Any force grossly outnumbered is likely to give thought to a, victory by means of the death of the opposing leader. In any case, Mayor William Walworth was sent over to the rebel side to invite Wat Tyler to meet with the king. Tyler would be far from his men, and he recognized the danger. As a safety measure he demonstrated a hand signal, upon which the rebels should charge forward and kill everyone except the king. Accompanied by just one man carrying a banner, Tyler rode across the broad field.
All of the accounts of what happened during the next few minutes were written from the viewpoint of the government, not the rebels, and most of those accounts were recorded by people who weren't there. It appears that Tyler recited a list of demands to the king that included the repeal of laws of serfdom and of the game laws, the end of men being declared out-law (outside the protection of the law), the seizure of church property and its division among the people who worked it, and the appointment of just one bishop of the church for all of England.
Putting aside all of the versions of the cause, what happened was that at one point Mayor Walworth drew his baselard (a double-edged dagger) and struck at Tyler, cutting his neck. Ralph Standish, one of the king's squires, drew his sword and stabbed Tyler twice. Tyler tried to tum his horse back to his own men, but dropped to the ground, mortally wounded.
The confused mob on the other side of the field could not clearly see what had happened. The young king was said to have cantered over to the rebel side, whether alone or with escorts we don't know, and to have held up his hand. He told the rebels that he would personally be their "chief and captain" and that they could look to him for the accomplishment of all their goals. He told them to meet with him at the fields by Clerkenwell, where the Hospitaller priory was still burning. At this, he rejoined his own group, which quickly moved off toward Clerkenwell, leaving the confused rebels discussing what they should do next. Some went out to pick up their dying leader and take him into St. Bartholemew's Hospital.
It took the rebels about an hour to reach a common decision and to set off for Clerkenwell. During that time, and probably earlier, Sir Robert Knolles, starting with about two hundred retainers of his own, was gathering forces in London to oppose the rebels, their courage undoubtedly strengthened by the news that Wat Tyler had fallen. Mayor Walworth, too, sent out word for every able-bodied man to grab such weapons as he could and make all speed to Clerkenwell to support the king.
At· Clerkenwell the rebels demanded the heads of those who had struck down Wat Tyler. As they argued and demanded, the armed Londoners gathered around and behind them. Finally Sir Robert Knolles could inform the king that six thousand men had gathered to protect him. The rebels at Clerkenwell were outnumbered. The king now demanded that they disperse to avoid punishment for their actions. Seeing their predicament, the rebel band began to break up. The only organized group was made up of men of Kent, led by Jack Strawe and John Ball. They were led out of the City, back over London Bridge, which they had crossed in triumph just three days earlier.
Upon the breakup of the rebels, William Walworth went looking for Wat Tyler. He found him having his grave wounds tended at St. Bartholemew's Hospital and ordered that he be dragged outside, where his head was struck off. Mounted on a pole, it was sent to relace the heads of Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hales on London Bridge.
Therein the field, King Richard knighted William Walworth, Ralph Standish, and other burgesses of the City. For London the rebellion was over, but not so outside the city, where the rebellion had its expression in dozens of towns, manors, and priories at locations hundreds of miles apart.
While the revolt in London has received most of the attention of history, our quest for evidence of organization requires that we take a brief look at events in other parts of England, where the rebellion went on even after Tyler's death.
On Wednesday, June 12, when the rebels were gathered outside the walls of London, sacking Lambeth Palace and breaking open the Marshalsea prison, a priest named John Wrawe appeared at Liston in Suffolk with a band of rebels, sending out messages of recruitment to nearby towns. His first move was to destroy the manor at Liston belonging to that same Richard Lyons who had been impeached for fraud and corruption by the Good Parliament of 1376 and then pardoned by the crown. (Lyons himself was taken from his townhouse and beheaded by the rebels in London. The attack on Lyons's estate was certainly not mere happenstance.)
Wrawe’s next target was Bury St. Edmunds, the largest town in Suffolk. It was totally ruled by the local monastery, which had consistently refused to grant any municipal rights to the craftsmen and traders of the town. The rebels were permitted to enter, after threatening to kill anyone who opposed them. Townsmen were ready to" guide the mob to their immediate sack of the homes of officials of the order, including that of the prior, who fled at their approach to the monastery at Mildenhall, about twelve miles away. The next day the prior decided to try to get farther away by boat but found rebels on the riverbank, blocking his escape. He managed to elude his pursuers and make for the woods, accompanied by a local guide. The guide went back to the rebels and informed them that the prior was in the woods, so they circled the area, then gradually closed the ring and found the prior. Taking their prisoner at dawn to Mildenhall, they cut off his head and mounted it on a pole. It became their banner as they marched back to Bury, where they placed the head in the public pillory.
Next came news of the escape route of Sir John Cavendish, / chief justice of the realm and chancellor of Cambridge University. His flight was thwarted at the ferry at Brandon, near Mildenhall, when a woman cut loose and pushed off the only available boat before Cavendish could get to it. He was seized and beheaded on the spot and his head sent back to Bury to join the head of the prior, already in the pillory. The mob found ghoulish amusement in putting Cavendish’s lips to the prior’s ear as if in confession, and pushing their lips together to kiss.
Wrawe stayed a week in Bury, forcing the monks to give up records and taking their silver and jewels as bond for a charter of freedom drawn up for the town. During that week he also sent out
messengers and envoys to spread the rebellion, who in some cases
demanded gold and silver as ransom to save private and church
property from destruction. In addition, he dispatched a force of
about five hundred men to take nearby Nottingham Castle.
Although it was well fortified with high walls and a series of draw
bridged moats, there appears to have been no resistance to the
rebels, who looted the castle of its portable valuables.
To the north of Suffolk, in the county of Norfolk, the principal
leader was Geoffrey Litster, not a "peasant" but a prosperous
wool dyer. His second-in-command was Sir Roger Bacon of
Baconthorpe.
" Their first objective was the capture of Norwich, where Litster
made the castle his headquarters. Several houses of prominent
citizens were sacked and a justice of the peace named Reginald
Eccles was dragged to the public pillory, where he was stabbed in
the stomach and then beheaded. Sir Roger Bacon took a contingent out of Norwich to the port town of Great Yarmouth, which
had angered its neighbors with a charter that required all living
within seven miles of Great Yarmouth to do all of their trading in
the town, regardless of the opportunities to buy for less or sell at
a higher price elsewhere. This must have been a very specific target, because Bacon did not bum the charter. Instead, he tore it in
two and sent one half to Litster and one half to Wrawe.
To the west, a band of rebels attacked the property of the Hospitallers at the market town of Watton. From the preceptor they
extracted a written forgiveness of all debts to the' order, plus a
promise of a subsequent money payment in compensation for
past transgressions.
While all this was happening, messengers came 'into Cambridgeshire from London and from John Wrawe in Suffolk, both
reporting high levels of success and urging the locals to rise. On
June 14 the first rebel attack in Cambridgeshire singled out a manor of the Knights Hospitaller at Chippenham. The next day the revolt exploded at a dozen different places throughout the county. Men rode through the county announcing that serfdom had ended. One man, Adam Clymme, ordered that no man,. whether bound or free, should obey any lord or perform any ser· vices for him, upon pain of beheading; unless otherwise ordered by the Great Society (magna societas)~ All-out rage was directed at tax collectors, justices of the peace, and religious landowners. Attacks were made on the religious orders at Icklington, Ely, and Thomey, and on the Hospitallers' manor at Duxford.
On Saturday, June 15, the day Wat Tyler was struck down in London, certain prominent citizens of the city of Cambridge, burgesses and bailiffs among them, rode out with the full approval of their mayor to meet the rebels and plan their common attack on the University. They met the rebels in two groups, the first about fifteen miles from the 'City, attacking the Knights Hospitallers' manor at Shingay, and the other a couple of miles farther on, destroying the house of Thomas Haseldon, controller to the duke of Lancaster.
The combined forces returned to the city, where a signal for the rising of the town was given by tolling the bells of Great St. Mary's Church. The first religious target was the University, where the mob went to the house of the chancellor, Sir John Cavendish. They had not yet learned of his execution .by the rebels at Bury· St. Edmunds, so upon finding him not at home they smashed the furniture and anything else breakable.
Next on the list was wealthy Corpus Christi, College, to which as many as one 'out of six townspeople paid rent. Everyone had vacated 'the college premises in fear of the rebels, who gave themselves over to an evening frenzy of smashing, burning, and stealing.
The next day was Sunday, and in some churches tried to have business as usual. A mob broke into Great St. Mary's Church while mass was in progress and carried off records and anything they could find in the way of jewels and silver. They. broke into the House of the Carmelites (on the site later occupied by Queen's College) and carried off records and books, which they burned in the marketplace.
A group of about a thousand rebels left the city to attack the priory at nearby Barnwell. There they pulled down walls and vandalized the buildings. Giving vent to specific grievances, they chopped down trees that they had been forbidden to use for firewood or lumber and drained ponds in which they were not allowed to fish.
The rising in Yorkshire requires special consideration, not only because it took place so far from London, but because of the primary involvement of craftsmen and others of the towns. The absence of any material participation of the rural population has even led some historians to the conclusion that the rising in Yorkshire was not really part of the Peasants' Rebellion, even though it occurred at the same time. If there were no peasants, how could it have been part of a peasant rebellion? The truth is that the major impacts of the revolt had come from substantial cooperation between rural and town dwellers, as we have seen at Cambridge, Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans, and nowhere more than in London itself. That being the case, it appears foolish to say that events involving farmers only were part of the rebellion, but events involving townspeople only were not. Certainly there was communication with the other rebels, and, even more certainly, a high degree of organization in the risings at York, Scarborough, and Beverly.
These three Yorkshire towns are situated like points of an equilateral triangle about forty to fifty miles apart, a great traveling distance, in those times. Scarborough is on the sea, and was reputed to be the only safe harbor between the Humber and the Tyne. Beverly, due south of Scarborough, boasted a thriving industry in woolen yarns and textiles. York, to the west, laterally about midway between Scarborough and Beverly, was the largest city in the north and the second largest city in England. On June 22,1381, one week after the death of Wat Tyler, royal letters patent were sent to just five towns in the north. These letters called for public mourning for the deaths of Archbishop Sudbury, Sir Robert Hales, and Chief Justice Sir John Cavendish. :1 More important, the letters decreed that the local authorities were to permit no illegal assemblies whatsoever. Three of the five letters went to York, Scarborough, and Beverly. The royal court's fears were totally justified, but the letters arrived too late to prompt any preventive measures-the riots had begun five days before they were written. By Monday, June 17, the rebels in York had news of the revolt in London that had started just four days earlier on June 13. On that one day of June 17, 1381, the mob in York attacked the headquarters of the Dominican order, the friary of the Franciscans, St. Leonard’s Hospital, and the Chapel of St. George.
A few days later, a former mayor of York named John de Gisburne appeared at Bootham Bar, one of the gates of York, with an armed party on horseback. They forced their way in and joined other rebels in the city. Most interestingly, de Gisburne's men were wearing a "livery" (a uniform item of decoration or clothing common to a group). In this case, it appears to have been a white woolen hood. Similar livery showed up in Beverly and Scarborough, where the records have left us a better description. The livery there was described as a white capuchon with a red liripipe. The capuchon was a common item of medieval clothing, a hood attached to enough cloth to cover the shoulders like a shawl The point at the back of the hood was often drawn out to a long exaggerated taper, much as the toes of shoes were exaggerated. This long point was the liripipe, which could also end in a tasseled decoration. The livery, then, was a white hood with a red tail or tassel.
It would take about six square feet of woolen cloth to make one hooded shawl. In all three cities we are told that about fifteen hundred of these liveries were used by the rebels. That would require about one thousand square yards of white woolen cloth, plus the decorative red tails. Such material involved a great deal of cost and a great deal of work, more work than could have been executed in a few days in total secrecy. John de Gisburne had brought a supply of liveries with him from outside York to distribute to the rebels in the city, and most likely they came from Beverly, where the principal industry was the manufacture of woolen textile products. We have no idea how they got to Scarborough, where over five hundred men were reported to be wearing them. The presence of this common uniform not only speaks to preparation, but to the involvement of all three towns in some kind of common effort.
Common to all three towns, too, was the swearing of oaths of the "all for one and one for all" type used to seal a fraternal bond. Another distinctive feature of the Yorkshire risings is the principal target of the violence. Although church property was attacked, the antireligious activities were a sideshow to the attacks on the ruling families, the wealthy merchants who comprised oligarchies in each town to the exclusion of the lesser merchants and craftsmen. We read in later indictments that the Scarborough leaders included William de la Marche, draper; John Cant, shoemaker; Thomas Symson, basket maker. ,In Beverly we find rebel leaders Thomas Whyte, Tiler and Thomas Preston, skinner. In York, Robert de Harom, mercer, was accused as one passing, out "liveries of one color to various members of their confederacy:
In his very authoritative ,Oriental Despotism, Karl A. Wittfogel wrote: "The rise of private property and enterprise in handicraft and commerce created conditions that resulted in social conflicts, of many kinds, among urban commoners. In medieval Europe such conflicts were fought out with great vigor. Not infrequently the social movements assumed the proportions of a mass (and class) struggle which in some towns compelled the merchants to share political leadership with the artisans."
Mr. Wittfogel would have understood exactly what the rebels of York, Beverly, and Scarborough were about. And if the concept of a ruling oligarchy of certain families is a confusing one, one might shed light on it by studying the power structure of county government today in much of the American Southeast.
Although there were dozens of other incidents in England, we shall look at just one more, the revolt against the Benedictines of St. Albans, the largest landowners in Hertfordshire.
Back on June 14, the day the rebels broke into the Tower of London, men arrived at St. Albans saying that they had been commanded to· collect all of the able-bodied men of St. Albans and Barnet. These men were to arm themselves with any available weapons and follow the messengers to London, and they were quickly assembled because the abbot gave his approval as a means to divert the mob away from his own domains. As the men of St. Albans approached London, they came upon]ack Strawe and his band destroying the Hospitaller manor at Highbury. They enthusiastically joined in the fun and then followed Strawe back to London. In the City, their leaders met with Wat Tyler to discuss their desire to take the rebellion home to St. Albans. He instructed them as to the manner in which they should seek their freedom from the abbey. Abbey swore to obey his commands explicitly, and Tyler in tum told them that if they had any trouble with the abbot, the prior, or the monks, he would march on St. Albans with twenty thousand men to "shave. their beards" (cut off their heads).
The Benedictines of St. Albans had held autocratic sway' over the town and the countryside for over two hundred years. They were well known for scrupulously guarding every prerogative of the abbey and for zealously collecting every fee and every service due them under the 'ancient manorial contracts. They could not be expected to voluntarily yield a single point of freedom from manorial obligation to town or tenants, especially under their current abbot, Thomas de la Mare. :
The St. Albans mob returned from London to great rejoicing, as they spread the word that the king had freed all serfs and villeins. Messengers went out in all directions, issuing orders from the rebel leader, William Grindcobbe, that all men must arm themselves and gather the next day, Saturday, June 15. Those who refused would suffer death and the destruction of their houses.
On the Saturday, a mob of several thousand men assembled and were administered an oath to be faithful and true to their brothers-in-arms. Marching to the abbey, they demanded and gained entrance. Next they demanded the release of all the men being held in the church prison. In freeing the prisoners, they agreed that one was guilty and not worthy of freedom, so they took him out to the mob in front of the abbey gates, where he was beheaded.
About 9:00 A.M. a rider galloped up to the rebels. He was Richard of Wallingford, a substantial tenant farmer on abbey land. He had stayed behind in London to get a letter from the king that would reestablish ancient peasant claims relating to rights of grazing, hunting,' fishing, and other freedoms.
Armed with the king's letter, written just that morning, the leaders demanded to meet with the abbot. Reading their letter, the abbot responded that the rights spoken of were very ancient and had been terminated generations ago. He shrewdly maneuvered the leaders into a negotiating posture, while outside the impatient rebels broke fences and gates, tore down walls, and generally vandalized the monastic property. They drained the fishponds and hung a dead rabbit on a pole as a banner to proclaim the end of the strict game laws.
Hours went by in debate, until word arrived of the death of Wat Tyler. The attitude of the rebels changed instantly, as did that of the abbot. He pressed his advantage, and with the sure knowledge that Tyler's support column would not be coming, while the royal troops most assuredly would, the rebels caved in, even agreeing to put up two hundred pounds to compensate for damaged property.
The rebels were right. The royal troops were on the way, accompanied by a new chief justice, Robert Tresilian. The new chief justice was out for blood. The announcement came that all writs issued by the king to the rebels were null. and void. On June 18 royal letters went out charging all sheriffs to put down the rebels in their districts and charging all knights and nobles to assist in the effort. The government's numbness and shock having now apparently worn off, the counter-rebel forces, far better armed for battle than their adversaries, set about the task of dispersing the rebels and arresting their leasers. Now was the time for judicial vengeance.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it a “curiously spontaneous” rebellion.
Barbara Tuchman, in her fourteenth-century history, A Distant Mirror, said that the rebellion spread “with some evidence of planning.”
Winston Churchill went further. In The Birth of Britain he wrote, “Throughout the summer of 1381 there was a general ferment. Beneath it all lay organization. Agents moved round the villages of central England, in touch with a ‘Great Society’ which was said to meet in London.”
The spark of the rebellion was being fanned vigorously, and finally the signal was given. Even though he had been arrested, excommunicated, and even now was a prisoner in the ecclesiastic prison at Maidstone, in Kent, letters went out from priest John Ball and from other priests who followed him. Clerics were then the only literate class, so letters must have been received by local priests and were obviously intended to be shared with or read aloud to others. They all contained a signal to act now, which could put to rest the concept that the rebellion was simply a spontaneous convulsion of frustration that just happened to affect a hundred thousand Englishmen at the same time. This from a letter from John Ball: “John Balle gretyth yow wele alle and doth yowe to understande, he hath rungen youre belle. Nowe ryght and myght, wylle and skylle. God spede every ydele [ideal]. Now is tyme.” From priest Jakke Carter: “You have gret need to take God with vowe in alle your dedes. For now is tyme to be war.” From priest Jakke Treyman: “Jakke Trewman doth you to understande that falsnes and gyle have reigned too long, and trethe hat bene sette under a lokke, and falsnes regneth in everylk flokke … God do bote, for now is tyme.”
One letter from John Ball: “Saint Mary Priest” is worth quoting in its entirety. Even with the medieval English spelling, the meaning will be clear. Lechery and gluttony were frequent points in his accusations of high church leaders. “John Balle seynte Marye prist gretes wele alle maner men byddes hem in the name of the Trinite, Fadur, and Sone and Holy Gost stoned manlyche togedyr in trewthe and helpez trewthe, and trewthe schal helpe yowe. Now regneth pride in pris [prize] and covetys is hold wys, and leccherye withouten shame and glotonye withouten blame. Envye regnith with tresone, and slouthe is take in grete sesone. God do bote for now is tyme amen.”
In all the letters quoted, the emphasis has been added to identify the common signal “now is tyme.” More evidence of planning and organization would come.
The violence erupted in Essex, prompted by new and more stringent efforts to collect a third poll tax. The idea of having special commissioners to enforce the tax collection had come from the king’s sergeant-at-arms, a Franciscan friar named John Legge. That idea would cost him his head a few weeks later.
The commissioners in some instances attacked their duties overzealously. Some were reported to have examined young girls to see if they had engaged in sexual intercourse, as an aid to determining whether or not they were fifteen years of age and so taxable. One man, John of Deptford, was arrested after he struck the tax gatherer who had raised his daughter’s dress to see if she had pubic hair, evidence of taxable age.
In some areas the tax collectors were either simply ignored or beaten up by the villagers. A great local lord, John de Bamptoun, set himself up in the town of Brentwood in Essex and demanded that the men of the neighboring towns come to him with complete lists of names and their tax money. Over a hundred men responded to his orders – not to pay the taxes, but to inform him that they had no intention of doing so. Optimistically, de Bamptoun ordered his two sergeants-at-arms to arrest the hundred villagers and put them in prison. The crowd angrily attacked the royal officers and de Bamptoun counted himself lucky to be allowed to flee back to London.
In response, the government sent back Sir Robert Bealknap, chief justice of common pleas. Sir Robert came armed with specific indictments and statements signed by jurors. (In those days, jurors were the opposite of independent. They were witnesses, literally those with “wit-ness” or “possession of knowledge” of the matter at hand, and frequently they were the accusers as well). In spite of Bealknap’s ponderous authority, his reception was no better than that previously accorded to Bamptoun. The locals seized the royal party and forced Bealknap to reveal the names of the jurors who had named and sworn against de Bamptoun’s assailants. With that information, parties set out to hunt them down. Jurors caught were beheaded and their heads mounted on poles as examples to others, while those who couldn’t be found had their houses burned or pulled down. As for the chief justice, he was berated as a traitor to the king and to the kingdom but in the end was permitted to return to London. Not allowed to go with him were his three clerks, who were recognized as the same clerks who had been with de Bamptoun. They were beheaded.
Meanwhile in Kent, the county just south of Essex across the Thames, a knight of the king’s household, Sir Simon Burley, had come to Gravesend and had leveled against a freeman named Robert Belling the charge that Belling was Burley’s serf. He set a fine of three hundred pounds in silver as the price of Belling’s liberty. The men of Gravesend were outraged at both the charge and the fine, a sum they declared would ruin Belling entirely. The royal officer responded by having Belling bound and thrown into the dungeon at nearby Rochester Castle. At the same time, a tax commission had arrived in Kent on a mission similar to that of Sir Robert Bealknap in Essex; the Franciscan sergeant-at-arms John Legge came armed with specific indictments against a number of people in the county. They had planned to establish the seat of the Kentish inquiry at Canterbury, but were driven off by the local citizenry.
As word of these events spread, the men of Kent began to gather, centered on the town of Dartford. A group of Essex men crossed the Thames in boats to join them. Showing not just organization but perhaps discipline as well, the leaders decreed that no men who lived within twelve leagues (about thirty-six miles) of the sea would be allowed to join their march, because those men might be needed at home to help fight off any surprise French attack on the English coast.
The Kentish mob moved not toward London but away from it, heading east to lay siege to Rochester Castle, where they demanded the release of Robert Belling. After just half a day, and no recorded defense, the constable of the castle opened the gates to the rebels. They released Belling and every other prisoner, then turned south to Maidstone, where they arrived on June 7. There they were joined by more men, including one known as Walter the Tyler. Remarkably, he was immediately acknowledged by thousands of men as their supreme commander and gave his name to the rising: “Wat Tyler’s Revolt.” Nothing is known of Wat Tyler’s prior life nor of the means by which a supposedly disorganized mob acknowledged his leadership on the very day he arrived.
One of Tyler’s first acts was to free John Ball, the “Saint Mary Priest” of York, from the church prison at Maidstone, and Ball became the unofficial chaplain of the expedition from that point forward.
Still moving away from London, Tyler took his force farther east to Canterbury, the seat of the leading churchman in England. That Tyler planned all along for his rude army to march on London is indicated by the rebels’ first act upon their arrival at Canterbury on Monday, June 10. Thousands of rebels crowded into the church during high mass. After kneeling, they shouted to the monks to elect one of their number to be the new archbishop of Canterbury, because the present archbishop (who was off in London with the king, who had recently appointed him chancellor of the realm) “is a traitor and will be beheaded for his iniquity,” as indeed he was before the week was over. The rebel leaders then asked for the names of any “traitors” in the town. Three names were provided, and the three men were sought out and beheaded. Then the rebels left the town, allowing just five hundred Canterbury men to join them because Canterbury was near the coast and the balance of the men would be needed in the event of an attack by the French.
On the same day (June 10) that Tyler took over Canterbury in Kent, the gathering Essex mob sacked and burned a major commandery of the Knights Hospitallers called Cressing Temple. This wealthy manor had been given to the Knights Templar in 1138 by Matilda, the wife of King Stephen. When the Templars were suppressed by Pope Clement V, all of their property in Britain, including this manor of Cressing, was given to the Hospitallers. The church owned one-third of the land surface of England at that time and suffered losses comparable to those inflicted over the next few days on the Knights Hospitallers, who seemed to be on an especially aggressive hit list of the rebel leaders.
The following day, June 11, the rebels in both Essex and Kent turned toward London. Even with the burning, beheading, and destruction of records along the way, their purpose and discipline were such that both groups, upwards of a hundred thousand men, made the seventy-mile journey in two days, reaching the city at almost the same time.
Warned of the rebels’ approach, the fourteen-year-old Kind Richard II moved from Windsor to the Tower of London, the strongest fortress in the kingdom. He was joined there by an entourage that included Sir Simon Sudbury who was both archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor; Sir Robert Hales, who was both the king’s treasurer and the prior of the order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (the Hospitallers); Henry Bolingbroke, who would one day depose Richard and take the throne himself as Henry IV: the earls of Oxford, Kent, Arundel, Warwick, Suffolk, and Salisbury; and other peers and lesser officials, including the chief justice Sir Robert Bealknap, the unsuccessful tax collector John de Bamptoun, and the hated Franciscan sergeant-at-arms, John Legge. They all had reason to fear for their lives at the hands of the rebel horde advancing on the city.
On June 12, the Essex men began arriving at Mile End, near Aldgate. Across the river, the Kentish rebels gathered at Southwark, at the south end of London Bridge. Confederates and sympathizers streamed out of London to join them. One Kentish group came through nearby Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames, and sacked the archbishop’s palace there, burning the furnishings and all the records they could find. (On the same day, across the river in the Tower, from where he could see the smoke rising from his palace, the archbishop returned the Great Seal to the king and asked to be relieved of his public duties as chancellor.) Other rebel groups broke open the prisons on the south side of the river, including the ecclesiastic prison of the bishops of Winchester on Clink Street, a location that gave the name “the clink” to prisons everywhere. On smashing open the Marshalsea prison in Southwark, the mob searched for its commander, Richard Imworth, famous for his cruelty. Unable to locate Imworth, they contented themselves for the moment, with the destruction of his house.
Messengers went out to the rebels from the king, asking the reason for this disturbance of the peace of the land. The answer came back that uprising was dedicated to saving the king and to destroying traitors to king and country. The king’s reply to this was to ask the rebels to cease their depredations and wait until he could meet with them to resolve all injustices against them. The rebels agreed and asked the king to meet with them early in the morning of June 13 at Blackheath on the Thames, a few miles from London. The men of Kent gathered at the meeting place on the south bank of the river and the men of Essex on the north. The king and his party left the Tower in four barges but only got as far as the royal manor at Rotherhithe, near Greenwich, where Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hales persuaded the party to get no closer to the rebels. Upon learning that the king was not coming to them as promised, the Kentish leaders sent the king a petition asking him for the heads of fifteen men. Their list included the archbishop of Canterbury, the prior of the Hospitallers, Chief Justice Bealknap, and the tax collectors John Legge and John de Bamptoun. Not surprisingly, the royal council would not agree to these demands, and the barges returned to the Tower. Each on their own side of the river, the Essex men moved toward Aldgate and the Kentish faction marched back toward Southwark and London Bridge. For reasons we shall probably never know, Aldgate was undefended, and the Essex rebels simply walked into the city. As much mystery attaches to the approach of the Kentish mob to London Bridge. No attempt was made to man the fortified gatehouse, and the drawbridge was lowered for them to cross.
Moving through the city, the rebels touched nothing until they reached Fleet Street. There they attacked the Fleet prison and released all the inmates. They destroyed two forges that the Hospitallers had taken over from the Templars. Some joined a London mob and went to the Savoy Palace of the hated royal uncle, John of Gaunt, pausing on the way only to destroy any houses they could identify as belonging to the Hospitallers. The Savoy Palace itself was destroyed in a mood of rage. Furniture and art objects were smashed, linens and tapestries were burned. Jewels were hammered to powder. Finally the building was set aflame, boosted by the addition of several kegs of gunpowder.
From the Savoy the rebels returned to the Hospitaller property between Fleet Street and the Thames, to buildings leased by that order to lawyers who practiced before the king’s court in the adjoining royal city of Westminster. They vandalized and burnt the lawyers’ buildings, burnt their records, and killed anyone who registered an objection. They destroyed the other Hospitaller buildings on the property, with one exception. Instead of burning the rolls and records stored in the church where they found them, they went to the trouble of carrying them out into the high road for burning, avoiding any damage to the church itself. One historian goes so far as to say that certain of the mob “protected” the church from damage. This attitude was an anomaly in the midst of an orgy of destruction of church property and church leaders. This property, too, had been taken from the Templars and given to the Hospitallers, and even today that portion of the City of London is known simply as “The Temple.” The church that was left unscathed by the rebels had been the principal church of the Knights Templar in England. This attitude toward the old Templar church stands out in marked contrast to the mob’s feeling for the grand priory of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell, where they turned next. Still seeking out Hospitaller property for destruction along the way, they arrived at Clerkenwell and embarked upon an effort of total destruction. While the Templar church still stands today, all that remains of the principal Hospitaller church at Clerkenwell is the underground crypt.
Some of the mob went from London into the City of Westminster, where they released all of the prisoners in Westminster prison. Moving back into London, they did the same at the famous Newgate prison, taking chains and shackles to place on the altar of a nearby church.
One group went to the Tower to seek an audience with the king. When they were unsuccessful, they laid siege to the Tower. Word was sent out by the rebel leaders to the bands still roving the city that every member of the Chancery and Exchequer, every lawyer, and anyone who could write a writ or letter should be beheaded. Ink-stained fingers were enough to condemn a man to death on the spot. The church at that time had a virtual monopoly on literacy, so the victims were most likely to be administrative clerics, who. also held a near monopoly on what we might now think of as the "civil service" of the king's government.
So far, the king's council had appeared numbed into inactivity, but something had to be done, and finally a plan was agreed upon. It could not be based on force, because they had no force. The weapons they did have were trickery and deceit. Word was cried out in every ward of the City that on the following morning of Friday, June 14, the king and his council would meet with the rebels and that all of their demands would be satisfied. The promise was easily made because there was no intention to keep it. The place selected was the open fields at Mile End, outside the City beyond Aldgate. It was expected that this move would achieve the initial goal of pulling the rebels out of the City. In fact, most of them did go, but Wat Tyler and his chief lieutenant, Jack Strawe, stayed behind with several hundred men. Their "chaplain," the priest John Ball, stayed with them. The rebel leadership had something more important to do than meet with the king to discuss manumission of villeinage and serfdom.
In· those days, the Thames came right up to and inside the south wall of the Tower, so there was direct access by means of
a. water gate. As the king's party made ready to go to Mile End on Friday morning, the archbishop of Canterbury tried to escape by boat. He was recognized, and the ensuing hue and cry caused his crew to beat its way back through the water gate to the safety of the Tower..
As promised, the king's party left the Tower to meet the rebels at Mile End. Chroniclers tell us that he was accompanied by such dignitaries as the earls of Kent, Warwick, and Oxford, as well as by the mayor of London and "many knights and squires." What they do not tell us is why he was not accompanied by two of his very highest officials, Sir Simon Sudbury, who was the archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of the realm, and Sir Robert Hales, who was prior of the order of the Knights Hospitaller and the king’s treasurer. We shall never know whether they chose to stay behind or were ordered to do so. There is also no record of who spoke for the rebels at Mile End while Tyler, Strawe, and Ball were on a mission more important to them back in London.
At the meeting place all seemed to go well. The rebels asked two things: first, that they should have the right to hunt down and execute all traitors to the king and common people, and second, that no man should be bound to another in serfdom or villeinage. Every Englishman should be a free man. As to the first request, the king agreed that all "traitors" should be put to death, provided that they were proven guilty under the law. He asked that all such accused be brought to him for trial. As to the request for universal freedom, he had brought about thirty clerks with him, who began speedily grinding out writs of manumission.
As soon as the king was safely out of the City, Tyler, Strawe, and Ball made their move. Incredibly, their plan was to take the Tower of London with a few hundred ill-armed men. The Tower had been built to be the most secure fortress in Britain, so secure that it housed the royal mint. It was equipped with a heavy gate, an iron portcullis, and a drawbridge. At the time of Tyler's approach, the Tower was manned by professional soldiers, including hundreds of experienced archers. It had leadership and authority in the person of Archbishop Sudbury and, even more so, in the person of Sir Robert Hales, commander of a military order.
Here again, there had to have been collusion and friends on the inside. Tyler and his small band found the drawbridge down, the portcullis up, the gate open. They simply walked into the Tower. No contemporary chronicler refers to so much as a scuffle.
Inside, the archbishop had sung a mass and had confessed the prior of the Hospitallers and others. The rebels found him at prayer in the chapel of the Tower. A priest tried to hold them. back by holding the consecrated host in front of them, a practice known to tum aside all manner of demons and evil spirits, but the rebels simply brushed him aside. The archbishop was beaten to the floor and dragged out of the chapel and out of the Tower by his arms and hood. Others dragged out the prior of the Hospitallers, while still others searched the rooms for their proscribed victims. Among these were the Franciscan sergeant-at-arms and tax collector John Legge and another Franciscan friar, William Appleton, physician and counselor to John of Gaunt. The captured men were all led out to Tower Hill, where a great crowd had gathered. With background roars of approval, the rebels struck off the heads of their special prisoners, which were put on poles and taken to be mounted on London Bridge. As an aid to identifying the archbishop of Canterbury, they took his miter along and nailed it to his head.
After the execution, the rebels and the London mob broke out through the City, looking for additional victims. One man was beheaded simply because he spoke well of Friar William Appleton, whom the rebels had executed at Towel1Jill. By the time their fury had abated, the rebels had beheaded about 60 of their enemies. An especially noteworthy target was Richard Lyons, the wealthy London burgess who had been impeached and found guilty of many acts of corruption by the Parliament of 1376. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment, but his influence was such that appeals to the king by his friends hadresulted.in his being restored to freedom. There was no appeal from the judgment of the rebel mob that pulled him from his house and summarily chopped off his head.
While the rebels 'foamed the City with their hit list, the rebel leadership mounted another unexplained project of its own. A group was organized and sent out from London by Wat Tyler, commanded by his lieutenant Jack Strawe and apparently guided by Londoner Thomas Farndon. They marched about six miles out of London for the very specific purpose of destroying the Hospitaller manor at Highbury, which a contemporary chronicler said had been '''recently and skillfully rebuilt like another paradise."
Word ·of the rebel violence at the Tower and in the City reached Mile End, and the royal party came back to London. They did not return to the fortress of the Tower but went directly to the king's wardrobe near Castle Baynard, where his clerks continued to execute writs of manumission. Many of the rebels took those writs for themselves or their villages and headed back to their homes.
History gives us no clue as to how or why it was arranged, but agreement was somehow reached that the king would meet again with the rebels at Smithfield on the following day, Saturday, June
15. In the/early morning of that day, the king and his party were met by the prior and canons of Westminster Abbey, all barefoot, who led them to the abbey cathedral for services, accompanied by a number of curious rebels.
The king heard mass at the high altar and left a gift for the abbey. Rebels behind the altar recognized Richard Imworth, the hated tormentor and marshal of the Marshalsea prison, hiding in the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor. When Imworth saw that he had been spotted, he clamped his arms around one of the marble columns of the shrine and cried for mercy. The unmoved rebels pried his arms loose from the column and carried him out to Cheapside, where he was publicly beheaded.
Gradually the rebels gathered to await the king at Smithfield. They lined up on one side of the great open field, while the king's party and its escort lined up on the opposite side, in front of St. Bartholemew's Hospital.
What happened next is usually cited as the result of the insulting behavior of Wat Tyler, but was more likely the result of a plan. Any force grossly outnumbered is likely to give thought to a, victory by means of the death of the opposing leader. In any case, Mayor William Walworth was sent over to the rebel side to invite Wat Tyler to meet with the king. Tyler would be far from his men, and he recognized the danger. As a safety measure he demonstrated a hand signal, upon which the rebels should charge forward and kill everyone except the king. Accompanied by just one man carrying a banner, Tyler rode across the broad field.
All of the accounts of what happened during the next few minutes were written from the viewpoint of the government, not the rebels, and most of those accounts were recorded by people who weren't there. It appears that Tyler recited a list of demands to the king that included the repeal of laws of serfdom and of the game laws, the end of men being declared out-law (outside the protection of the law), the seizure of church property and its division among the people who worked it, and the appointment of just one bishop of the church for all of England.
Putting aside all of the versions of the cause, what happened was that at one point Mayor Walworth drew his baselard (a double-edged dagger) and struck at Tyler, cutting his neck. Ralph Standish, one of the king's squires, drew his sword and stabbed Tyler twice. Tyler tried to tum his horse back to his own men, but dropped to the ground, mortally wounded.
The confused mob on the other side of the field could not clearly see what had happened. The young king was said to have cantered over to the rebel side, whether alone or with escorts we don't know, and to have held up his hand. He told the rebels that he would personally be their "chief and captain" and that they could look to him for the accomplishment of all their goals. He told them to meet with him at the fields by Clerkenwell, where the Hospitaller priory was still burning. At this, he rejoined his own group, which quickly moved off toward Clerkenwell, leaving the confused rebels discussing what they should do next. Some went out to pick up their dying leader and take him into St. Bartholemew's Hospital.
It took the rebels about an hour to reach a common decision and to set off for Clerkenwell. During that time, and probably earlier, Sir Robert Knolles, starting with about two hundred retainers of his own, was gathering forces in London to oppose the rebels, their courage undoubtedly strengthened by the news that Wat Tyler had fallen. Mayor Walworth, too, sent out word for every able-bodied man to grab such weapons as he could and make all speed to Clerkenwell to support the king.
At· Clerkenwell the rebels demanded the heads of those who had struck down Wat Tyler. As they argued and demanded, the armed Londoners gathered around and behind them. Finally Sir Robert Knolles could inform the king that six thousand men had gathered to protect him. The rebels at Clerkenwell were outnumbered. The king now demanded that they disperse to avoid punishment for their actions. Seeing their predicament, the rebel band began to break up. The only organized group was made up of men of Kent, led by Jack Strawe and John Ball. They were led out of the City, back over London Bridge, which they had crossed in triumph just three days earlier.
Upon the breakup of the rebels, William Walworth went looking for Wat Tyler. He found him having his grave wounds tended at St. Bartholemew's Hospital and ordered that he be dragged outside, where his head was struck off. Mounted on a pole, it was sent to relace the heads of Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hales on London Bridge.
Therein the field, King Richard knighted William Walworth, Ralph Standish, and other burgesses of the City. For London the rebellion was over, but not so outside the city, where the rebellion had its expression in dozens of towns, manors, and priories at locations hundreds of miles apart.
While the revolt in London has received most of the attention of history, our quest for evidence of organization requires that we take a brief look at events in other parts of England, where the rebellion went on even after Tyler's death.
On Wednesday, June 12, when the rebels were gathered outside the walls of London, sacking Lambeth Palace and breaking open the Marshalsea prison, a priest named John Wrawe appeared at Liston in Suffolk with a band of rebels, sending out messages of recruitment to nearby towns. His first move was to destroy the manor at Liston belonging to that same Richard Lyons who had been impeached for fraud and corruption by the Good Parliament of 1376 and then pardoned by the crown. (Lyons himself was taken from his townhouse and beheaded by the rebels in London. The attack on Lyons's estate was certainly not mere happenstance.)
Wrawe’s next target was Bury St. Edmunds, the largest town in Suffolk. It was totally ruled by the local monastery, which had consistently refused to grant any municipal rights to the craftsmen and traders of the town. The rebels were permitted to enter, after threatening to kill anyone who opposed them. Townsmen were ready to" guide the mob to their immediate sack of the homes of officials of the order, including that of the prior, who fled at their approach to the monastery at Mildenhall, about twelve miles away. The next day the prior decided to try to get farther away by boat but found rebels on the riverbank, blocking his escape. He managed to elude his pursuers and make for the woods, accompanied by a local guide. The guide went back to the rebels and informed them that the prior was in the woods, so they circled the area, then gradually closed the ring and found the prior. Taking their prisoner at dawn to Mildenhall, they cut off his head and mounted it on a pole. It became their banner as they marched back to Bury, where they placed the head in the public pillory.
Next came news of the escape route of Sir John Cavendish, / chief justice of the realm and chancellor of Cambridge University. His flight was thwarted at the ferry at Brandon, near Mildenhall, when a woman cut loose and pushed off the only available boat before Cavendish could get to it. He was seized and beheaded on the spot and his head sent back to Bury to join the head of the prior, already in the pillory. The mob found ghoulish amusement in putting Cavendish’s lips to the prior’s ear as if in confession, and pushing their lips together to kiss.
Wrawe stayed a week in Bury, forcing the monks to give up records and taking their silver and jewels as bond for a charter of freedom drawn up for the town. During that week he also sent out
messengers and envoys to spread the rebellion, who in some cases
demanded gold and silver as ransom to save private and church
property from destruction. In addition, he dispatched a force of
about five hundred men to take nearby Nottingham Castle.
Although it was well fortified with high walls and a series of draw
bridged moats, there appears to have been no resistance to the
rebels, who looted the castle of its portable valuables.
To the north of Suffolk, in the county of Norfolk, the principal
leader was Geoffrey Litster, not a "peasant" but a prosperous
wool dyer. His second-in-command was Sir Roger Bacon of
Baconthorpe.
" Their first objective was the capture of Norwich, where Litster
made the castle his headquarters. Several houses of prominent
citizens were sacked and a justice of the peace named Reginald
Eccles was dragged to the public pillory, where he was stabbed in
the stomach and then beheaded. Sir Roger Bacon took a contingent out of Norwich to the port town of Great Yarmouth, which
had angered its neighbors with a charter that required all living
within seven miles of Great Yarmouth to do all of their trading in
the town, regardless of the opportunities to buy for less or sell at
a higher price elsewhere. This must have been a very specific target, because Bacon did not bum the charter. Instead, he tore it in
two and sent one half to Litster and one half to Wrawe.
To the west, a band of rebels attacked the property of the Hospitallers at the market town of Watton. From the preceptor they
extracted a written forgiveness of all debts to the' order, plus a
promise of a subsequent money payment in compensation for
past transgressions.
While all this was happening, messengers came 'into Cambridgeshire from London and from John Wrawe in Suffolk, both
reporting high levels of success and urging the locals to rise. On
June 14 the first rebel attack in Cambridgeshire singled out a manor of the Knights Hospitaller at Chippenham. The next day the revolt exploded at a dozen different places throughout the county. Men rode through the county announcing that serfdom had ended. One man, Adam Clymme, ordered that no man,. whether bound or free, should obey any lord or perform any ser· vices for him, upon pain of beheading; unless otherwise ordered by the Great Society (magna societas)~ All-out rage was directed at tax collectors, justices of the peace, and religious landowners. Attacks were made on the religious orders at Icklington, Ely, and Thomey, and on the Hospitallers' manor at Duxford.
On Saturday, June 15, the day Wat Tyler was struck down in London, certain prominent citizens of the city of Cambridge, burgesses and bailiffs among them, rode out with the full approval of their mayor to meet the rebels and plan their common attack on the University. They met the rebels in two groups, the first about fifteen miles from the 'City, attacking the Knights Hospitallers' manor at Shingay, and the other a couple of miles farther on, destroying the house of Thomas Haseldon, controller to the duke of Lancaster.
The combined forces returned to the city, where a signal for the rising of the town was given by tolling the bells of Great St. Mary's Church. The first religious target was the University, where the mob went to the house of the chancellor, Sir John Cavendish. They had not yet learned of his execution .by the rebels at Bury· St. Edmunds, so upon finding him not at home they smashed the furniture and anything else breakable.
Next on the list was wealthy Corpus Christi, College, to which as many as one 'out of six townspeople paid rent. Everyone had vacated 'the college premises in fear of the rebels, who gave themselves over to an evening frenzy of smashing, burning, and stealing.
The next day was Sunday, and in some churches tried to have business as usual. A mob broke into Great St. Mary's Church while mass was in progress and carried off records and anything they could find in the way of jewels and silver. They. broke into the House of the Carmelites (on the site later occupied by Queen's College) and carried off records and books, which they burned in the marketplace.
A group of about a thousand rebels left the city to attack the priory at nearby Barnwell. There they pulled down walls and vandalized the buildings. Giving vent to specific grievances, they chopped down trees that they had been forbidden to use for firewood or lumber and drained ponds in which they were not allowed to fish.
The rising in Yorkshire requires special consideration, not only because it took place so far from London, but because of the primary involvement of craftsmen and others of the towns. The absence of any material participation of the rural population has even led some historians to the conclusion that the rising in Yorkshire was not really part of the Peasants' Rebellion, even though it occurred at the same time. If there were no peasants, how could it have been part of a peasant rebellion? The truth is that the major impacts of the revolt had come from substantial cooperation between rural and town dwellers, as we have seen at Cambridge, Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans, and nowhere more than in London itself. That being the case, it appears foolish to say that events involving farmers only were part of the rebellion, but events involving townspeople only were not. Certainly there was communication with the other rebels, and, even more certainly, a high degree of organization in the risings at York, Scarborough, and Beverly.
These three Yorkshire towns are situated like points of an equilateral triangle about forty to fifty miles apart, a great traveling distance, in those times. Scarborough is on the sea, and was reputed to be the only safe harbor between the Humber and the Tyne. Beverly, due south of Scarborough, boasted a thriving industry in woolen yarns and textiles. York, to the west, laterally about midway between Scarborough and Beverly, was the largest city in the north and the second largest city in England. On June 22,1381, one week after the death of Wat Tyler, royal letters patent were sent to just five towns in the north. These letters called for public mourning for the deaths of Archbishop Sudbury, Sir Robert Hales, and Chief Justice Sir John Cavendish. :1 More important, the letters decreed that the local authorities were to permit no illegal assemblies whatsoever. Three of the five letters went to York, Scarborough, and Beverly. The royal court's fears were totally justified, but the letters arrived too late to prompt any preventive measures-the riots had begun five days before they were written. By Monday, June 17, the rebels in York had news of the revolt in London that had started just four days earlier on June 13. On that one day of June 17, 1381, the mob in York attacked the headquarters of the Dominican order, the friary of the Franciscans, St. Leonard’s Hospital, and the Chapel of St. George.
A few days later, a former mayor of York named John de Gisburne appeared at Bootham Bar, one of the gates of York, with an armed party on horseback. They forced their way in and joined other rebels in the city. Most interestingly, de Gisburne's men were wearing a "livery" (a uniform item of decoration or clothing common to a group). In this case, it appears to have been a white woolen hood. Similar livery showed up in Beverly and Scarborough, where the records have left us a better description. The livery there was described as a white capuchon with a red liripipe. The capuchon was a common item of medieval clothing, a hood attached to enough cloth to cover the shoulders like a shawl The point at the back of the hood was often drawn out to a long exaggerated taper, much as the toes of shoes were exaggerated. This long point was the liripipe, which could also end in a tasseled decoration. The livery, then, was a white hood with a red tail or tassel.
It would take about six square feet of woolen cloth to make one hooded shawl. In all three cities we are told that about fifteen hundred of these liveries were used by the rebels. That would require about one thousand square yards of white woolen cloth, plus the decorative red tails. Such material involved a great deal of cost and a great deal of work, more work than could have been executed in a few days in total secrecy. John de Gisburne had brought a supply of liveries with him from outside York to distribute to the rebels in the city, and most likely they came from Beverly, where the principal industry was the manufacture of woolen textile products. We have no idea how they got to Scarborough, where over five hundred men were reported to be wearing them. The presence of this common uniform not only speaks to preparation, but to the involvement of all three towns in some kind of common effort.
Common to all three towns, too, was the swearing of oaths of the "all for one and one for all" type used to seal a fraternal bond. Another distinctive feature of the Yorkshire risings is the principal target of the violence. Although church property was attacked, the antireligious activities were a sideshow to the attacks on the ruling families, the wealthy merchants who comprised oligarchies in each town to the exclusion of the lesser merchants and craftsmen. We read in later indictments that the Scarborough leaders included William de la Marche, draper; John Cant, shoemaker; Thomas Symson, basket maker. ,In Beverly we find rebel leaders Thomas Whyte, Tiler and Thomas Preston, skinner. In York, Robert de Harom, mercer, was accused as one passing, out "liveries of one color to various members of their confederacy:
In his very authoritative ,Oriental Despotism, Karl A. Wittfogel wrote: "The rise of private property and enterprise in handicraft and commerce created conditions that resulted in social conflicts, of many kinds, among urban commoners. In medieval Europe such conflicts were fought out with great vigor. Not infrequently the social movements assumed the proportions of a mass (and class) struggle which in some towns compelled the merchants to share political leadership with the artisans."
Mr. Wittfogel would have understood exactly what the rebels of York, Beverly, and Scarborough were about. And if the concept of a ruling oligarchy of certain families is a confusing one, one might shed light on it by studying the power structure of county government today in much of the American Southeast.
Although there were dozens of other incidents in England, we shall look at just one more, the revolt against the Benedictines of St. Albans, the largest landowners in Hertfordshire.
Back on June 14, the day the rebels broke into the Tower of London, men arrived at St. Albans saying that they had been commanded to· collect all of the able-bodied men of St. Albans and Barnet. These men were to arm themselves with any available weapons and follow the messengers to London, and they were quickly assembled because the abbot gave his approval as a means to divert the mob away from his own domains. As the men of St. Albans approached London, they came upon]ack Strawe and his band destroying the Hospitaller manor at Highbury. They enthusiastically joined in the fun and then followed Strawe back to London. In the City, their leaders met with Wat Tyler to discuss their desire to take the rebellion home to St. Albans. He instructed them as to the manner in which they should seek their freedom from the abbey. Abbey swore to obey his commands explicitly, and Tyler in tum told them that if they had any trouble with the abbot, the prior, or the monks, he would march on St. Albans with twenty thousand men to "shave. their beards" (cut off their heads).
The Benedictines of St. Albans had held autocratic sway' over the town and the countryside for over two hundred years. They were well known for scrupulously guarding every prerogative of the abbey and for zealously collecting every fee and every service due them under the 'ancient manorial contracts. They could not be expected to voluntarily yield a single point of freedom from manorial obligation to town or tenants, especially under their current abbot, Thomas de la Mare. :
The St. Albans mob returned from London to great rejoicing, as they spread the word that the king had freed all serfs and villeins. Messengers went out in all directions, issuing orders from the rebel leader, William Grindcobbe, that all men must arm themselves and gather the next day, Saturday, June 15. Those who refused would suffer death and the destruction of their houses.
On the Saturday, a mob of several thousand men assembled and were administered an oath to be faithful and true to their brothers-in-arms. Marching to the abbey, they demanded and gained entrance. Next they demanded the release of all the men being held in the church prison. In freeing the prisoners, they agreed that one was guilty and not worthy of freedom, so they took him out to the mob in front of the abbey gates, where he was beheaded.
About 9:00 A.M. a rider galloped up to the rebels. He was Richard of Wallingford, a substantial tenant farmer on abbey land. He had stayed behind in London to get a letter from the king that would reestablish ancient peasant claims relating to rights of grazing, hunting,' fishing, and other freedoms.
Armed with the king's letter, written just that morning, the leaders demanded to meet with the abbot. Reading their letter, the abbot responded that the rights spoken of were very ancient and had been terminated generations ago. He shrewdly maneuvered the leaders into a negotiating posture, while outside the impatient rebels broke fences and gates, tore down walls, and generally vandalized the monastic property. They drained the fishponds and hung a dead rabbit on a pole as a banner to proclaim the end of the strict game laws.
Hours went by in debate, until word arrived of the death of Wat Tyler. The attitude of the rebels changed instantly, as did that of the abbot. He pressed his advantage, and with the sure knowledge that Tyler's support column would not be coming, while the royal troops most assuredly would, the rebels caved in, even agreeing to put up two hundred pounds to compensate for damaged property.
The rebels were right. The royal troops were on the way, accompanied by a new chief justice, Robert Tresilian. The new chief justice was out for blood. The announcement came that all writs issued by the king to the rebels were null. and void. On June 18 royal letters went out charging all sheriffs to put down the rebels in their districts and charging all knights and nobles to assist in the effort. The government's numbness and shock having now apparently worn off, the counter-rebel forces, far better armed for battle than their adversaries, set about the task of dispersing the rebels and arresting their leasers. Now was the time for judicial vengeance.
