England's radical past: the Peasants' Revolt
The uprising of 1381 was a serious but ultimately foiled threat to the established order, but it's easy to forget how revolutionary the rebels' demands really were
The Great Uprising which wracked England for much of 1381 was a major challenge to the established order. Taking place under a king who had just turned 14, it saw armed insurrection across the country, widespread looting and destruction and the murder of two of England’s most important public officials, Simon Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury and lord chancellor, and Sir Robert Hales, lord high treasurer. The demands made by the rebels, in a largely agricultural and often brutally hierarchical society in which villeinage was still common, were startlingly radical, even viewed from the early 21st century.
This is not a concise history of the Peasants’ Revolt. If you want to know more about the rebellion, I can only recommend my old friend Dr Alastair Dunn’s The Peasants’ Revolt: England’s Failed Revolution of 1381. Melvyn Bragg called it “stunningly good”, and Alastair is a very fluent and persuasive writer as well as a first-class historian. You can hear him join Lord Bragg, Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary University of London and Professor Caroline Barron of Royal Holloway on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time in 2006.
The origins of the rebellion
The Peasants’ Revolt would not have happened when and how it did without the extraordinary societal upheaval and dislocation following the Black Death, the bubonic plague pandemic which swept across Europe and the Middle East in the mid-14th century and killed perhaps as much as half the population. Think about that for a moment: look out into the street, or think about the last time you were outside, and imagine one person of every two you see simply disappearing. The first known case of the plague in England was a Gascon sailor in Weymouth in June 1348, and it had reached London by the autumn. By 1349 it had spread nationwide. The disease had burned itself out by the beginning of 1350, though there was a recurrence in 1361-62 with a mortality rate as high as 20 per cent, and another, slightly less deadly, in 1369.
The effect on the economy was profound. The halving of the population radically altered the relationship between landowner and labourer, and the shortage of labour meant that wages rose sharply. With no real understanding of how economic systems worked, the government saw demands for higher wages as seditious and evidence of moral decline, and the poet John Gower wrote of workers, “they are sluggish, they are scarce, and they are grasping. For the very little they do they demand the highest pay.” In June 1349 Edward III introduced the Ordinance of Labourers, which prescribed earnings as pre-pandemic levels, set price controls, required all those under 60 to work and placed restrictions on labour mobility. The Statute of Labourers passed by Parliament two years later sought to reinforce this, but it was an impossible task.
As economic opportunities improved over the 1360s and 1370s, the ruling classes nonetheless sought to use coercion to maintain the traditional order of society. In 1363, Parliament passed the Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel, a sumptuary law which placed stringent restrictions on what various social classes could eat and wear: only landowners with an income of more than £1,000 a year and their families were free from its provisions. It was quickly repealed as unworkable but the lesson was not taken to heart and attempts to control economic circumstances persisted.
At the same time the government was under severe financial pressure because of its military commitments in France. What became known as the Hundred Years’ War had begun in 1337 when Edward III asserted his claim to the throne of France, and by the 1370s the costs of this ongoing conflict were almost unimaginably huge: garrisons at Calais and Brest cost £36,000 a year to maintain, and a six-month campaign could cost £50,000. The ordinary income of the Crown, without seeking taxation through Parliament or taking out loans, was around £30,000, clearly inadequate to sustain the long-term war effort. Consequently the royal coffers always needed fresh injections of cash.
The poll tax: a warning from history
When Margaret Thatcher introduced the Community Charge to replace domestic rates in 1990 (it had been introduced, poisonously, to Scotland a year before), the levy was quickly dubbed the “poll tax”, as which it remains almost universally known. This term for a capitation tax arose from desperate attempts to finance the war in France in the 1370s. Parliament sat from January to March 1377, with Sir Thomas Hungerford, MP for Wiltshire, presiding over the Commons and being recorded in the rolls as the first speaker of the House (“avait les paroles pur les communes d’Angleterre en cet parliament”), and approved a universal charge of four pence on every man and woman over 14, with a reduction for married couples and an exemption for genuine beggars. (An average unskilled labourer might earn three pence a day.) The measure raised around £22,000 but was deeply unpopular, and it became known as the “Bad Parliament”.
Edward III died of a stroke in June 1377, aged 64, leaving his 10-year-old grandson Richard to inherit the throne. Military setbacks meant that more money was required, and, after resorting to forced loans, the new king’s advisers had to return to Parliament in 1379. MPs and peers assembled in April, and there was genuine support for the young king but deep unhappiness at the scale of the financial demands and suspicions of corruption among Richard’s ministers. A new poll tax was agreed, but this time it was a sliding scale based on the rank and position of the taxpayer, with those liable divided into men of rank, men of law, civic notables and others. Two commissions were appointed, one to assess liability and the other to collect the tax.
The poll tax of 1379 was intended to raise £50,000. At the top of the scale, the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, and the Duke of Brittany, John of Montfort, were each liable for 10 marks, while single men and women over 16, or married men on behalf of themselves and their wives, were to pay four pence, as in 1377. Again, beggars were exempt. Alongside the measures approved by Parliament, the Convocations of the Provinces of Canterbury and York provided for similar levies on the clergy. Although it was in some ways a fairer and more proportionate tax, it was bitterly resented and evasion was widespread. The commissioners ended up raising only £18,600, less than half the expected revenue. And the mood in the country was now toxic.
The match was thrown on to gunpowder in May 1381, when John Bampton, a justice of the peace, arrived in Brentwood in Essex to investigate non-payment of the poll tax. He summoned local representatives to appear before him on 1 June to explain the failure to pay and also to make good the arrears, but they arrived armed and told him that the tax had been paid and no more money would be forthcoming. Bampton attempted to have their leader, Thomas Baker, arrested, and violence erupted, in which three of his clerks and several local men who had agreed to act as jurors were killed. Bampton quickly retreated to London, but the revolt had begun.
A revolutionary blueprint
As I said, this is not a history of the Peasants’ Revolt. The insurrection spread with frightening speed, from Essex to Kent and Suffolk, and within a week Rochester Castle had surrendered to rebels. Groups from all three counties, as well as from Norfolk, seemingly in co-ordination, converged on London, and by 12 June, less than a fortnight after violence had first broken out, the Kentish rebels arrived at Blackheath, just south-east of the capital. They would have been able to see the Tower of London, the seemingly impregnable fortress where Richard II had taken up residence since coming by river from Windsor Castle two days before. With him were his mother, Joan, Countess of Kent, Archbishop Sudbury, Hales, the lord treasurer, and the earls of Arundel, Salisbury and Warwick. But the king had only 200 soldiers or so, the garrison of the Tower and his personal bodyguard. Many senior military commanders were in France, while the bulk of Richard’s domestic forces were in the North to guard against a Scottish invasion.
The Kentish rebels entered the city across London Bridge in the afternoon of 13 June, while insurgents from Essex advanced towards Aldgate from the north. The defences were opened to them, either out of fear or sympathy, and they surged into the heart of London. The Marshalsea prison in Southwark was ransacked, as were those at the Fleet and Newgate, and the houses of Flemish merchants were attacked. The Essex rebels approached Smithfield and Clerkenwell Priory, the headquarters of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, of which Sir John Hales was grand prior. It was burned down, after which the rebels travelled west along Fleet Street to the Temple, also owned by the Knights of St John but leased to lawyers. The mob systematically emptied the buildings of papers and books, hated symbols of the administrative state, burned them, and demolished the buildings. They then moved to the Savoy Palace, the London home of John of Gaunt, destroyed the contents including pounding precious metals with hammers and throwing tapestries and other into the river, and then burned what remained of the fabric of the buildings.
The scale and thoroughness of the destruction must have been terrifying. Two things are particularly striking: again and again, documents and books are burned. This was methodical and overwhelming violence against the inanimate tools of royal administration, the means by which records were kept and tax liabilities recorded. The other notable fact is that this was not looting in the conventional sense, as almost nothing was stolen. The rebels proclaimed themselves “zealots for truth and justice, not thieves and robbers”, and one rioter at the Savoy Palace who was found keeping a silver goblet for himself was killed by his comrades for the offence.
By the next day, 14 June, it was obvious that the king had lost any control. There was more violence and destruction at Westminster, and the prisons there and at Newgate were opened. There were simply not enough armed man in the Tower even to think about dispersing the rebels, so Richard, with extraordinary bravery and composure, agreed to meet representatives of the rebels at Mile End in east London, travelling on horseback with only a small retinue. He was 14 years old, remember, a tall young man, certainly—he would be six feet at his tallest, in an age when the average man was around 5’7”—but still a boy, only just eligible for his own poll tax of 1377 and too young to be liable for the second levy of 1379. In terms of sheer brute force, he and his bodyguard could easily have been overpowered and killed.
Yet that was not quite the mood. As he rode from the Tower to Mile End, a distance of two miles, he was harangued and accosted by Londoners complaining of injustices, but the rebels had stressed their loyalty to the king and their opposition only to those institutions and individuals, like the church and the king’s counsellors, who separated the monarch from his people. Their slogan was “With King Richard and the true commons of England”. It would be a standard trope of mediaeval rebellions—it is repeated in very similar terms during the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536—but the fact that Richard II was allowed to reach Mile End unharmed suggests it held largely true in this instance.
When the king reached Mile End, a spokesman for the rebels emerged to present him with a written petition. The demands were extensive and revolutionary:
The abolition of villeinage, by which serfs were tied to the land and prevented from leaving without their lord’s permission, and were required to work on their landlord’s property as part of their rent;
All feudal dues and services should be scrapped and replaced by a rent of 4d. per acre;
Agreement “that there should be no law within the realm save the law of Winchester”, the meaning of which is unclear but may have referred to the Statute of Winchester of 1285, the principal means of law enforcement until the passage of the Metropolitan Police Act 1829, and seems to have represented an ideal of self-regulating village communities;
The surrender of various royal officials including Sudbury and Hales for execution;
A general pardon and amnesty for all those involved in the uprising.
This was a complete re-ordering of society. At Blackheath on 12 June, John Ball, a radical priest recently freed from prison in Maidstone, had preached a radical and anti-hierarchical sermon to the Kentish rebels.
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.
The formal demands of the rebels presented to the king two days later were not quite this utopian but they went a long way towards a much freer society with greater power and economic liberty for the labouring classes. The references to “the law of Winchester” were a reaction to the imposition of royal justice into the localities to enforce collection of the poll tax, and amounted to a rejection of almost any kind of centralised authority.
Richard refused to surrender officials to the mob for certain murder: irrespective of their personal qualities, the ability to exercise justice was a central prerogative of monarchy and he was unlikely to give that up readily. To what must have been the astonishment of the rebels, however, he agreed to everything else, and an army of 30 clerks started drawing up pardons and charters abolishing serfdom, which would be sent to every manor and shire under the king’s seal. We cannot know if this was a ruse to placate the insurrection, in whose hands he had literally placed his life, a sincere endorsement of their demands or a rush of blood to a 14-year-old head. But for a moment, it seemed as if the rebels had gained an unimaginably huge victory and set in train a social revolution.
Events unravelled, as they so often do. A force of rebels separate from the one at Mile End had moved towards the Tower in the late morning, where the gates had been opened in anticipation of Richard’s return. Around 400 insurgents stormed into the fortress and met no resistance from a garrison which was probably paralysed by fear as well as heavily outnumbered, and they knew what they wanted. Sudbury and Hales were found at prayer in St John’s Chapel in the White Tower, the central keep of the castle, and seized along with William Appleton, John of Gaunt’s physician, and John Legge, a royal sergeant. All four were taken to Tower Hill and beheaded, after which their heads were paraded through the streets then eventually displayed on London Bridge.
(There is a huge ‘what if’ moment too: the rebels also came across 14-year-old Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s youngest son by Blanche of Lancaster, and intended to execute him too until a royal guard, John Ferrour, interceded on his behalf. It is significant because Bolingbroke would rebel against Richard 18 years later, force the latter’s abdication and have himself crowned King Henry IV. Richard was sent to Pontefract Castle where he starved to death early in 1400, aged only 33. Had Bolingbroke been killed that June day in 1381, who knows how Richard’s reign might have unfolded?)
On learning that the Tower of London had been taken, Richard went from Mile End to the Great Wardrobe, another royal mansion at Blackfriars where jewels and armour were kept. The king must have decided the rebels could not be accommodated after this outrage: the Earl of Arundel was appointed chancellor in the place of the butchered Archbishop Sudbury, and, with the Essex rebels beginning to disperse in satisfaction at Richard’s earlier concessions, plans were formed to take on the remaining Kentish faction under Wat Tyler, a follower of John Ball and seemingly unimpressed by the apparent victory won at Mile End. In the late afternoon and evening of 14 June, Tyler’s men roamed through the city, seeking out and killing anyone who worked for John of Gaunt, anyone involved in the legal system and, more generally, distrusted and hated foreigners.
The following day, 15 June, Richard agreed to meet the rebels again at Smithfield, near the Augustinian priory of St Bartholomew (now the Anglican church of the excellent Fr Marcus Walker, and an architectural feast). This time the king, like his immediate companions wearing a steel corselet, took a retinue of 200, including men-at-arms, professional hard bastards who would have known they more than had the measure of rough Kentish peasants and labourers. With the royal party at the east of Smithfield, a broad, grassy area stretching from the London Wall to the east bank of the Fleet, the rebels, more than 1,000 in number, were drawn up at the west end.
Tyler rode forward on a pony, either on his own initiative or summoned forth by the king. He greeted Richard cordially but with a familiarity which the king’s companions found deeply shocking.
Brother, be of good cheer, for you now have 40,000 men at your back, and we shall all be good friends!
Richard asked why the rebels had not dispersed, and Tyler, becoming surly, told him that they would do so when their demands were met. When pressed on what these demands were, he expounded an even more extensive and radical manifesto than had been presented at Mile End the previous day. As well as the abolition of serfdom and the primacy of “the law of Winchester”, he demanded the redistribution of ecclesiastical land and wealth, especially that of the large abbeys which dotted the English countryside; free rights for all to fishing and hunting (these prerogatives were ruthlessly policed); and the effective disenfranchisement of the nobility, with the common people recognising only the king as their lord.
This was the stuff of egalitarian dreams but was impractical and unthinkable for the king. Anything might have happened at that moment. One of the king’s retinue seems to have shouted that Tyler was “the greatest thief in Kent”, enraging the rebel leader who had already compounded his disrespect to the monarch by rinsing out his mouth and spitting water at his feet. Somehow an altercation broke out, probably by Richard ordering Tyler seized for contempt, and William Walworth, the lord mayor of London, rode forward to accost the rebel. Tyler stabbed at Walworth with a dagger, which glanced off the mayor’s breastplate, and Walworth, perhaps thinking Tyler was making towards the king, struck at him with his baselard, a short sword.
Tyler had seen the blow coming and hauled on his pony’s reins to escape it, but, after Walworth injured him, he lost his balance and fell, his foot catching in the stirrup. The pony panicked and tried to escape, dragging Tyler in a trail of blood behind it, and the king’s men at arms descended on him. A squire, Ralph Standish, stabbed Tyler repeatedly, wounding him fatally, and the rebel leader was beheaded, his head placed on a pole. In a situation of such high tension, with anxious, frightened and armed men at close quarters, the outcome was almost inevitable.
It was Richard, the extraordinarily composed boy-king, who took control of the situation. The rebels, seeing their leader hacked down and butchered, were already putting arrows to their bows, but the king rode forward and addressed them in a loud voice.
Sirs, would you kill your king? I am your rightful captain, and I will be your leader. Let all those who love me, follow me!
Somehow, Richard had judged the mood perfectly. The mob followed him to Clerkenwell Fields, where he offered them pardons to disperse and go home. The movement had been decapitated as figuratively as its leader had literally been, and the impetus simply ebbed away. They complied, and London was safe. The reversal of fortune within 24 hours was stunning.
The aftermath of Tyler’s death
Violence continued to break out all over the country: there were insurrections in Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire among other places. But with royal government in London secure, it was a matter of time before these were suppressed, and the gravity of the threat on 13-15 June probably made it easier to persuade figures of authority to follow the king’s instructions and reimpose order. By November, there was general peace, though fear of further violence would linger for some years, and it is noticeable that many landowners did not pursue policies of harsh retribution but simply tried to draw a line under the episode. Parliament reconvened on 3 November and did not seek to impose another poll tax, instead reaching an agreement that the military effort in France would be scaled back to reduce expenditure.
Richard, having just turned 15, married Anne of Bohemia, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, on 20 January 1382. It would be an unpopular and childless marriage, but the king was distraught when Anne died of plague in 1394, at the age of only 28. The rest of his reign, another 17 years, would be turbulent and wracked by arguments over royal finances, leading to his eventual deposition by Bolingbroke in 1399.
The king is horribly maligned by Shakespeare’s characterisation in The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, written in around 1595. Richard was intelligent and well-read, and tended to stammer when agitated, but the idea that he was an unsually cruel or vindictive man is hard to support. He was, of course, shaped by the fact that he became king as a boy: at his long coronation ceremony in 1377, the 10-year-old Richard had fallen asleep. He was too small to wear the crown, which had been held by the Earl of March, and had to be carried out of Westminster Abbey at the end of the service by Sir Simon Burley.
There have been repeated suggestions that Richard suffered from some kind of mental illness which profoundly affected his behaviour as king. Anthony Steel’s 1941 biography pronounced a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but this was dismissed as without foundation in a review some months later by V.H. Galbraith, then professor of history at the University of Edinburgh and later second director of the Institute of Historical Research and regius professor of modern history at Oxford. Nigel Saul’s biography of 1997 accepts the notion that Richard did not have an identifiable disorder but argues that he was extremely narcissistic and, by the end of his reign, his “grasp on reality was becoming weaker”.
For all that, his composure in those few days of June 1381 are truly extraordinary. Shakespeare probably captured the essence of Richard’s view of kingship when he has the sovereign declare in act 3, scene 2:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord
However elevated his view of his powers and prerogatives, though, when faced with mortal danger to himself and an existential threat to his crown, he acted calmly, decisively, bravely and even with relative moderation. He allowed the rebels to disperse from Clerkenwell—almost certainly the right judgement—rather than attempt a retributory massacre, and managed to navigate an episode which could easily have brought him down.
Conclusion
Inevitably I have provided more of a potted history of the Great Uprising than I intended yet less than is satisfactory. Still, I return to the point I originally wanted to make: the demands presented by the rebel leaders, first at Mile End then at Smithfield, were for a societal and economic revolution. In some ways, they wanted more far-reaching and radical change even than, say, the Chartists: the People’s Charter of 1838, drawn up for the London Working Men’s Association nearly half a millennium later, called for universal (male) suffrage, secret ballots and the abolition of the property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament.
The rebels of 1381 wanted the whole pattern of English land ownership and hierarchy, and the reach of central government, upended and replaced with, effectively, a patchwork of small, self-governing communes. Before the modern nation state had even really been conceived, they were rejecting its fundamental precepts in favour of a kind of extreme libertarianism or proto-anarchism: effectively the rebels wanted the common people to be left alone to work their land in a comfortable condition, without interference from church or state.
It was utterly impossible for any mediaeval monarch to make any significant concessions in this direction. In a sense they were not even real proposals for ordering society so much as the warm bath of a daydream of how much better the world might be; understandable in those living the harsh brutality of everyday life in 14th-century England, with the savage divine judgement of the plague which had killed half the population still within living memory, but simultaneously radical and advanced to a hopeless degree, yet also imagining a paradisal state of early man (remember what Ball had said at Blackheath: “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?”).
We cannot really see the Peasants’ Revolt, at least as articulated in its formal demands, as a coherent blueprint for society. It was spurred, certainly, by popular activism in the face of deep-seated economic and societal causes, and it is easy to see why the Left likes to include the rebels of 1381 in an intellectual lineage of mass agitation for liberty which extends back through the birth of the Labour Party in 1900, the Chartists of the 19th century, the Quakers and other dissenters of Georgian England and the 17th-century radical movements like the Levellers, the Diggers and the Fifth Monarchists. But it is a very loose ancestral link.
To think about the Peasants’ Revolt requires you to adopt a mindset which is completely divorced from that of the modern era: it is one which conceives of a world in which God is all-powerful and almost all events are attributable to some kind of divine interaction, in which the rule of an hereditary monarchy, bearing God’s sanction, is a generally accepted fact and loyalty to him a religious obligation, and one which regards “the economy” (a term they would not have understood) as externally established fact, not a creation of man or susceptible to change or influence except by the most simplistic of methods. It is a Christian world in which the transit from birth to death is short, hard and often filled with suffering, but a step towards the eternal life of the eventual Second Coming and the Last Judgement. Mediaeval and early-modern men and women were just like us, as I used to tell my students at St Andrews, except that they were completely different: completely human, with all the glories and frailties of that condition, but shaped by utterly different forces, beliefs and assumptions.
Here endeth the lesson. Now, don’t kill your landlords.