Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 Read online

  SUMMER OF BLOOD

  The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

  DAN JONES

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Part I

  Chapter One - Parliament

  Chapter Two - Lancaster

  Chapter Three - Collections

  Chapter Four - A Call to Arms

  Chapter Five - A General and A Prophet

  Part II

  Chapter Six - Blackheath

  Chapter Seven - The True Commons

  Chapter Eight - The Bridge

  Chapter Nine - First Flames

  Chapter Ten - Under Siege

  Chapter Eleven - War Council

  Chapter Twelve - Mile End

  Chapter Thirteen - The Tower

  Chapter Fourteen - The Rustics Rampant

  Chapter Fifteen - Crisis

  Chapter Sixteen - Smithfield

  Chapter Seventeen - Showdown

  Part III

  Chapter Eighteen - Retribution

  Chapter Nineteen - The Bishop

  Chapter Twenty - Counter-Terror

  Chapter Twenty-One - Norwich

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Vengeance

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Author’s Note

  Index

  A Note on Sources

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MAPS

  Rebellious towns in Essex and Kent,

  May and early June 1381

  Bishop Despenser’s journey and clashes

  with rebels, June 1381

  FOREWORD

  ‘A revell! A revell!’1

  No one could forget the noise when Wat Tyler led his ragtag army of roofers and farmers, bakers, millers, ale-tasters and parish priests into the City of London on a crusade of bloodthirsty justice. It filled the City for days: frantic screaming and cries of agony that accompanied acts of butchery and chaos. It was as if, thought one observer, all the devils in hell had found some dark portal and flooded into the City.2

  Tyler’s army screamed on Corpus Christi, the morning on which they stormed over London Bridge and swarmed from the streets of Southwark, leaving smouldering brothels and broken houses behind them as they headed for the streets of the capital. They howled with demented joy when they sacked and burned down the Savoy-one of the greatest palaces in Europe and the pride of England’s most powerful nobleman. They screeched like peacocks when they dragged royal councillors from the Tower and beheaded them, and again when they joined native Londoners in pulling terrified Flemish merchants from their sanctuary inside churches and hacking them to death in the streets.

  The great rebellion of summer 1381, driven by the mysterious general Wat Tyler and the visionary northern preacher John Ball, was one of the most astonishing events of the later Middle Ages. A flash rising of England’s humblest men and women against their richest and most powerful countrymen, it was organised in its early stages with military precision and ended in chaos.

  Between May and August rebellion swept through virtually the entire country. It was sparked by a series of three poll taxes, each more recklessly imposed than the last, and all played out against a background of oppressive labour laws that had been imposed to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. But more broadly the rebellion was aimed at what many ordinary people in England saw as a long and worsening period of corrupt, incompetent government and a grievous lack of social justice. Like most rebellions, it was the sum of many murky parts. There was a radical cabal at the centre proposing a total overhaul of the organisation of English government and lordship. Their zeal swept along thousands of honest but discontented working folk who agreed with the general sentiment that things, in general, ought to be better. And at the fringes there were many opportunistic plunderers, disgruntled score-settlers and the incorrigibly criminal, to whom any opportunity for violence and theft was welcome.3

  The rebellion’s focal point and moment of high drama came in London on the festival weekend of Thursday 13 to Sunday, 16 June. On that weekend a crowd of thousands, who had marched to London from the Kentish capital of Canterbury on a sort of anti-pilgrimage, joined with an excited mob drawn from the common people of the capital to demonstrate, riot and pass judgement on their rulers. They came within a whisker of taking down the entire royal government. London, which had been riven with faction and anti-government sentiment for nearly five years, collapsed into anarchy within hours of the rebels’ arrival on the south bank of the River Thames. Finding no shortage of allies within its walls, the rebels achieved in an astonishingly short time the total paralysis of government, the terrorisation of the most important men in the state and the destruction of the Savoy Palace and many other beautiful buildings. Public order dissolved, and was restored only at the highest cost to the Crown. And after a period of what amounted to military rule across London, the country remained at risk of terror from within for months, first fearing a repeat of the rebellion, and subsequently brutalised by a judicial counter-terror that lasted for most of the rest of the year. It would change the course of English history for ever.

  Outside London, the rebellious spirit proved infectious, and there were major revolts in Essex, Kent and East Anglia, as well as more isolated riots and urban disorder in Somerset, Sussex, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire and Yorkshire. Even once the troubled summer had faded into autumn, plotting continued throughout England, and the subject of lower-order resistance, present in literature from the middle of the fourteenth century, became a real concern for the well-to-do.

  In short, the rebellion was both a comprehensive damnation of English government and a startling announcement of the new political consciousness of the common folk of England. The lower orders, who had for generations been treated by the landed and powerful as little more than beasts of burden and battlefield fodder, showed themselves to be dangerous, politically aware, and capable both of independent military organisation and blistering anger. England’s nobility, merchants, lawyers and wealthy churchmen-most of whom had long suspected in the labouring class a tendency to viciousness-were confirmed in all their worst fears. The revolt marked the beginning of a rebellious tradition among the English lower orders which has been repeated ever since-from Jack Cade’s rebels in 1450 to Robert Ket’s in 1549; from Lord Gordon’s riots in 1780 to the famous ‘poll tax’ rebellion of our own time, in the early spring of 1990.

  Over the centuries, the Peasants’ Revolt-to use the slightly misleading shorthand that historians have given the rebellion-has found its place in the corpus of great events in English history. The year 1381 is a signpost on the road from the battle of Hastings in 1066 and Magna Carta in 1215 to Bosworth in 1485, the Armada in 1588 and everything beyond.

  But what do we really know about it?

  The truth is that, as with many historical phenomena, telling the whole story of the revolt can be like trying to nail a jelly to the wall. The sources are fragmentary, incomplete and strongly slanted in favour of the rebels’ victims. The revolt’s causes-economic, social, political and legal-were myriad, and its geographical spread was wide. The terror that was struck into the hearts of those who recorded the revolt has lingered on. England’s monastic chroniclers recorded the rebels’ crimes and England’s lawyers documented their punishments. All did so with extreme prejudice, smearing the memories of the hated peasants with the ordure of their disgust, and staining the historical memory of the revolt with class hatred. Partly as a consequence, this class dimension has, over the years, attracted historians with a greater interest in applying historical theory than in fulfill
ing the historian’s most important duty: to tell, as accurately as possible, a cracking good story.4

  This book is an attempt to redress the balance: to bring back to life one of the most colourful episodes in our history. In 1381 the peasants burst onto the historical record, and they left, for all the prejudice of their victim-biographers, a wealth of vivid, violent, hysterical and occasionally hilarious reactions to posterity. Their story is a frenzied, bloodied trip into an under-explored period of English history. And its inevitable, gory conclusion-both tragic and reassuring-is a reminder of the cold truth of revolt: that even the most righteous rebels usually end up with their heads on spikes.

  In writing this new narrative of the revolt, I have aimed to make the causes succinct, the action as vivid as it was then, and the consequences and vengeance wreaked by a humiliated government as terrible as they seemed to a chastened people. The result, I hope, is a journey into a world both profoundly different and remarkably similar to our own. The Peasants’ Revolt takes us somewhere dimly lit and obscure: a world that could be unfair and outrageous; where death, pain, disease, discomfort and misery formed the fabric of everyday life for all but the very rich; a world where a large chunk of the population lived in some form of legal bondage to the land; a world of severe discipline and ingrained violence; a world where a man’s last vision might be his own intestines burning in a pile on the ground.

  But this was also a world of life, colour and touching humanity, where ambition could take a man from serfdom to prosperity; where charity and social responsibility, as much as chastisement and rebuke, bound lords and their lessers; and where, among the filth, poverty and violence, there was a belief in the potential to make things better. Clearly, this was also a superstitious, deeply hierarchical world, often idiotically governed and ripe with casual brutality. But working on the drafts of this in London between 2007 and 2009, it was occasionally surprising how close it felt!

  Dan Jones

  London, 2009

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1390 John Gower, the famous Kentish landowner and poet, reflected at great and gloomy length on the state of the world he saw around him. He was writing a cheerless book called Vox Clamantis (‘The Voice of One Crying Out’), in which he described how man grew increasingly feckless, corrupt and base, turning from God, obsessed by material gain, and ripe for divine punishment.

  Nowhere, thought Gower, was the iniquity of the world and the wrath of the Almighty quite so obvious as in the events of June 1381, when the flocks of rural yokels-many of them from his own county-had descended on London, torching houses, slaughtering their social superiors, and terrifying the life out of anyone who got in their way.

  ‘Behold,’ he wrote, remembering London that summer, ‘it was Thursday, the Festival of Corpus Christi, when madness hemmed in every side of the city.

  Going ahead of the others, one captain urged them all to follow him. Supported by his many men, he crushed the city, put the citizens to the sword, and burned down the houses. He did not sing out alone, but drew many thousands along with him, and involved them in his nefarious doings. His voice gathered the madmen together, and with a cruel eagerness for slaughter he shouted in the ears of the rabble, ‘Burn! Kill!’

  The captain was Wat Tyler. He was leading a shabby but well-organised army in an attack on the private palace of the figurehead of government and the man whom the English populus blamed for everything that had gone awry in recent years-John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster.

  ‘What had been the Savoy burned fiercely in the flames, so that Lancaster did not know which path to take,’ Gower wrote. He then turned to Tyler’s other crimes against London’s ancient buildings. ‘The Baptist’s house, bereft of its master, fell to the sword and was soon ashes because of the flames. Holy buildings burned in wicked fires, and shameless flame was thus mixed with a sacred flame. The astonished priests wept with trembling heart and fear took away their body’s strength.’

  Gower was a man given to melancholy. In that, he was a man of his time. He had grown up in a world of sufficient hardship to turn any man to apocalyptic woe. When Gower was seven, England had gone to war with France, sparking a conflict that would put Kent and the rest of the south coast in perpetual danger of looting and raiding. When he was eighteen, the first wave of a vicious plague that wiped out between 40 and 50 per cent of the English population swept across the country, returning in epidemic after epidemic throughout Gower’s middle years. When he was fifty-two, Tyler’s mob had wrought carnage upon towns, cities and manor houses from Canterbury to York. And the very next year an earthquake had shaken the country, in many places quite literally to its foundations.

  But of all this misery, it was the revolt of 1381 which made the most profound impression on Gower. He saw it with his own eyes, and thought it symbolic of the madness, faithlessness and viciousness of man, which had angered God so much that he sent down acts of destruction worthy of the Old Testament.

  With the exception of Chaucer, who remembered the brutal massacre of 140 Flemish merchants by an assorted mob of Londoners and invaders from the shires in rather breezy terms (‘He Jakke Straw, and his meynee/Ne made never shoutes half so shrille/Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille’1), Gower’s reaction broadly represented the appalled majority of England’s rich and powerful. The revolt was pregnant with significance-in the eyes of contemporaries it became, variously, a sign from God, the work of Satan, a fit of lunacy, a monkish plot, a heretic crusade, a city siege and, in the words of the French chronicler Jean Froissart, ‘a rustic tragedy’.

  Rooting through the archives of Cambridge’s University Library in 1895, the celebrated Victorian historian G. C. Macaulay discovered a hitherto unknown work by John Gower. It was called the Mirour de l’omme, and had been written around 1378. Though no less glum than Vox Clamantis, it had been written before the revolt, rather than after it. In that sense, it added a new dimension to Gower’s pious condemnation of Tyler’s rebellion. In it, the poet actually seemed to have predicted a popular uprising.

  In his eyes, the 1370s had been taut with expectation of a catastrophic failure of the social order-one in which the angry mob would break its shackles and turn on the powerful men of England with terrible force. England’s neighbour, France, had already seen such a revolt, in the Jacquerie of 1358, when the common people in the Oise valley, north of Paris, had risen up against their lords, in protest against punitive taxation and the inept conduct of the war with England. In the Mirour, Gower wrote:

  There are three things of such a sort,

  that they produce merciless destruction

  when they get the upper hand.

  One is a flood of water,

  another is a raging fire

  and the third is the lesser people,

  the common multitude;

  for they will not be stopped

  by either reason or discipline.

  Gower, Chaucer and their contemporaries referred to the ‘lesser people’ in a number of different ways. The monastic chroniclers, writing in Latin, usually called them rustica and villani, from which English translations over the years have given us ‘yokel’, ‘rustic’, ‘serf’, ‘villein’, ‘churl’, ‘bondsman’ and, of course, ‘peasant’. There are two common connotations: these people were uneducated rural folk, and (especially in the case of serf, villein, churl and bondsman) they were to some extent ‘tied’ to the land via ancient, hereditary, personal obligations to their landlords.

  Though the rising is commonly called the Peasants’ Revolt, it is that translation which causes most problems. The word ‘peasant’ has become so commonplace over the years that it is now all but cliché. It is all too easy in thinking about the peasants to fall back on the vision of dirty, ill-educated farmhands in sackcloth, leading short, identical lives of brutal frugality.

  The truth is more complicated. By the late fourteenth century the English economy had grown very diverse, and particularly in the south-east there was a flourishing mar
ket economy. The ordinary people of England were not simply self-sustaining tenant farmers-they had jobs, trades and specialities. The laws concerning England’s labourers referred to carters and ploughmen, shepherds and swineherds, domestic servants, carpenters, masons, roofers, thatchers, shoemakers, goldsmiths, horse-smiths, spurriers, tanners, plasterers and ‘those who provide carriage by land or water’. England was not yet a nation of shopkeepers but it was a diverse and sophisticated nation nonetheless, with an economy that joined communities to one another and the country to the markets of continental Europe.

  The everyday folk in England’s rural communities lived in villages-straggling clutches of two-roomed thatched houses populated by small families of three or four people. They were not quite the dense, nucleated villages we know today, but they were organised settlements all the same and they had social structures and mores to govern life. Village houses were usually set along a main road, in the middle of which stood a church, perhaps a village green, where animals were grazed, and the village manor. Around the village would be three or four large fields-sprawling acres of unfenced land divided into strips. Each family rented a strip from the local lord, who would also have a large portion of the land set aside for himself.

  Between the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the end of the fourteenth century, large numbers of the common people of England paid their rent for the small plots of land that fed them in the form of compulsory, hereditary labour service for a lord. Systems of tenure and the jurisdictions of lords varied across the country and did not always fit neatly and discretely with the organisation of the village, but lordship existed everywhere. As a rough rule, the lord would demand a certain number of days’ free or compulsory paid labour from his tenants every year. Froissart described the peasants’ typical duties: they were ‘bound by law and custom to plough the field of their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain; they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, and perform all manner of tasks of this kind’. In reality, there was more to it than this, but the principle of labouring for one’s lord endured. There was little freedom to swap lords and in many areas serfdom (the total ownership of a servant by his or her master) still ran strong. A runaway serf, if caught, would have his back whipped, or his ears cropped, or his face branded.