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

  Tyler and Ball in combination were a dangerous prospect: the captain and the prophet; military nous married to popular demagogy. Together they provided a military and a visionary hub for rebels to cluster around. As support swelled for them, they picked up a travelling following, who moved between towns with them, but they also had a catalytic effect on villagers and townsmen all along the pilgrim road.

  From Maidstone, Tyler’s men marched back across the Kent Downs to the road, and during the weekend of 8 and 9 June they made their way to Canterbury. Trouble flared all the way along the road, as the rebels hunted for royal officials, servants of Gaunt and county administrators. They were looking out for men such as Thomas de Haselden, the controller of John of Gaunt’s household, and Sir Thomas Osgrave, the sub-treasurer of England, and Nicholas Herring, an escheator, JP, poll tax investigator and steward of the king’s lands in the county. Having a considerable contingent of Essex men among them, who may have known of the attacks that had begun against Sir John Sewale, they also had their sights set on William Septvantz, the sheriff of Kent.4 And, of course, there was also petty plunder. A horse was seized back at Chalk, and the nearby town of Gravesend was incited to riot. Without the castle to provide a looming figure of authority, and with Sir John Newton sequestered to the rebel ranks, the area around Rochester remained chaotic. Fires and riots spread across the countryside, the air alive with smoke and fury. All the way from Rochester to Canterbury, villages began to burn. In Frindsbury, a house was set on fire, and a little way east along the pilgrim road, to the south of the Isle of Sheppey, there was further uproar. Houses were destroyed in the small market town of Sittingbourne, and one John Godwot was killed in Borden, a village about half a mile away. In Faversham, where the road began to cut through the woods on its approach into Canterbury, rioting caused damage to a limeworks.

  Wat Tyler’s men marched through the chaos, adding to it and inciting it as they went until, just before noon on Monday, 10 June, they arrived in the city of Canterbury. The city was ready for them.

  Meanwhile, in Essex, Monday, 10 June was also marked as a day of decisive action. As in Kent, separate gangs coalesced into great mobs, with the aim of decapitating royal government in any sense they could.

  Bands of rebels from all across Essex and northern Kent converged at nearby Cressing Temple. This was the site of the wealthy and imposing Hospitallers’ estates, and as such was naturally associated with the Church, the landowning class in the county and the misgovernment of the country at large-for the prior of the Hospitallers, Sir Robert Hales, was also England’s treasurer. The rebels descended on the Cressing estates and sacked the manor. They stole armour, vestments, gold and silver, burned books, helped themselves to the food victualled there and drank three casks of wine. Then they pulled the building to the ground and set fire to it.

  They could have smelled the smoke in Coggeshall, just three miles to the east. There, Sheriff Sewale was still at home, barricaded behind his door since before the weekend. As he quivered inside, men pushed into the village. There were representatives from at least forty different settlements terrorising the inhabitants. Some went to the abbey and raided it for muniments and charters-but others went to Sewale’s house. This time threats were not enough. Sewale was not as lucky as he had been on 6 June. His house was overrun. He was beaten up and his clothing torn, and the house relieved of any official documents that the rebels could find. Sewale escaped with his life, but the escheator of Essex, John Ewell, was not so lucky: he was captured in Coggeshall and murdered.

  With the sheriff of Essex toppled, royal power was symbolically extinguished. The next day the rebels moved on to Chelmsford, where there was a ceremonial burning of royal records in the streets. Anything with green sealing wax attached-the sign of a financial document-was given special attention. From that point on, the rebel gangs split back into their component parts, fanning out through the county and beyond in the pursuit of disorder and adventure.

  Down in Kent, events were taking an even more serious turn.

  Tyler’s men entered Canterbury before noon. It seemed that there were thousands of them, pouring into the city with the momentum of a weekend’s rioting behind them. High mass was under way in the cathedral when the rebels arrived. Evidently still keenly disciplined by Tyler, they knelt before the monks and then called on them to elect one of their number to be archbishop, ‘for he who is archbishop now [i.e. Sudbury] is a traitor, and will be beheaded for his iniquity’.5

  Their next action was to summon before them the mayor, bailiffs and citizens of the town and force them to take oaths of faith and loyalty to ‘King Richard and the true commons’. Then the rebels demanded to know the names of any traitors in the town. Three names were handed over, and the victims were dragged out of their houses and beheaded in the street.

  The vicious riots that began with the murders of these supposed traitors would consume Canterbury for the best part of the next month. There was fertile ground in the city in which rebellion could take root: urban government had been riven by faction and royal administrators had suffered attempts to obstruct their business for the past three years. Now many suffered violence, ruin and death. They included William Medmenham, whose property was targeted all over the county, and John Tebbe, a former bailiff and MP who had served on royal commissions in the 1370s. Medmenham’s house was vandalised and stripped of its goods-and Tebbe was murdered. John Tece, a manorial official and another former bailiff, was also killed, and houses belonging to various other lords, including Sir Richard de Hoo, Thomas Garmwenton and Sir Thomas Fog, were plundered. All across Canterbury, Tyler’s rural army joined with the artisans and servants of the city in delivering it into chaos.

  In Canterbury, just as in Rochester, the fall of the castle was the principal sign of the rebels’ dominance. Tyler led a party up to the castle, with Abel Ker alongside him. They broke into the jail and freed four of the prisoners chained up in the dungeon. Then, just as their Essex counterparts had done that same day, the Kent rebels turned on the sheriff. They took William Septvantz into their custody and swore him to the same oath that they had imposed upon the mayor and citizens. They demanded that Septvantz hand over all his books containing legal records of the Crown and county and any royal writs in his possession. The collection numbered about fifty in total, and the rebels heaped them in the street in a great public bonfire. To be sure that they had obliterated every piece of royal writing that they could find, they then marched the terrified Septvantz out of town to his manor of Milton, where more writs were kept. These, too, were consigned to the flames.

  This, then, was the scene in Canterbury after an entire afternoon of looting and terror: blood ran in the streets, clotting with the fragments of parchment, jagged lumps of broken sealing wax, the ash from bonfires and the charred splinters of destroyed houses. The city and suburbs were in uproar, heaving with insurgent townsmen and aliens from towns and counties miles away. Smoke drifted up from vandalised buildings, blowing out across the Kent downs; and everyone from Canterbury to Dartford quaked at the name of the new pillars of county authority: Wat Tyler and John Ball.

  Though the Roman road was in rebel hands, word had still reached London of the chaos in Kent, and on Tuesday, 11 June, royal messengers arrived in Canterbury. They had been sent from the royal court at Windsor, under the authority of the teenage king and his royal council, and they demanded to know why the commons were acting in so monstrous a fashion. They exchanged messages with the rebels throughout the day, and Tyler explained on behalf of his men that they had risen to save the king and the kingdom from traitors, and that they would not desist.

  It was a brazen message to send. Clearly the rebels understood the strength of their position-perhaps also they felt they had nothing to lose. Certainly it resonated with the royal council, because by the end of the day, a decision came down from Windsor: Richard sent word that he would meet the rebels in person at Blackheath, on the outskirts of London itself, the next day.<
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  The offer to negotiate with a king was almost too good to believe. Trusting to his lord’s good word, and driven by the incredible momentum that had swept his movement along even in its early days, Tyler gathered together his men, organised them for a quick march, and set them out-like pilgrims in reverse-on the greatest mission of all their lives: the advance on London.

  PART II

  SIX

  BLACKHEATH

  The men of Kent and Essex had attracted an army of about one hundred thousand commons and rustics. They were joined by men from all parts who were oppressed by debt or feared the censure of the law because of their misdeeds, and they formed so large a conglomeration of plebeians that no one could remember seeing or hearing of the like. And so the mob came to the place called ‘le Blakheth’ where they decided to view their numbers and count the multitude of their fellows …

  THOMAS WALSINGHAM

  Blackheath, Wednesday, 12 June

  Even with a keen eye and on a clear day, the great south-eastern point of the Tower of London is not quite visible from the hill at Greenwich, which juts up in front of Blackheath, into the gentle countryside close to the banks of the River Thames. But to the tens of thousands of rebels who gathered on the heath, among the scratchy dark green undergrowth in the late afternoon of Wednesday, 12 June, the Tower’s presence would have been felt; as imposing and impossibly grand as if they were actually standing before its thick and heavily fortified walls.

  Before them lay the wide maw of the Thames. The best route along the river was by boat, and on a busy day the Thames-even this far from the crowded and stinking docks that cut into the City walls upstream-would have been a noisy, teeming thoroughfare, the powerful tidal waters busy with London’s famously foul-mouthed boatmen. Probably the rebels who looked down from the hill saw fewer fishing boats than usual, for the chaos of the last few days had involved a high proportion of men from the Essex fishing villages in the Thames estuary. But the river on Wednesday, 12 June was busy with a different sort of traffic. There had been a flurry of activity all afternoon, with boats bearing messengers between the rebel captains and the king shuttling urgently back and forth through the rough, grey sink.

  There had been a steady stream of rebels up to the hill all afternoon-men from Kent and Essex mingling with reinforcements picked up as they moved through the suburban manors and villages that clustered around the capital. It had been known since Tuesday that the men of Kent were coming and the news had infected the villages close to the City with the same sense of agitation that had gripped the shires during the previous fortnight. Right around London’s orbit, villages emptied of their excitable inhabitants, all racing to join the excitement taking place along the riverbanks.

  As they arrived in their tens of thousands, wild rumours had begun to circulate among the swelling band. As many as sixty thousand people were expected on the hill, with the same number approaching from Essex and Hertfordshire to congregate on the opposite bank of the Thames.1 It was suggested that the earl of Buckingham was preparing to join the rebel camp. (There were those who said they had seen him in the crowd, and others who said that it was merely a Kentishman who looked like him.) Others passed on a story that Joan of Kent, the queen mother, had bestowed her blessing upon the rebels as she encountered one of the blockades set up on the road from Canterbury, the route along which so many of the rebels had ridden that day. It was a day of high excitement. Legends were already in the making.

  Upstream, the royal household had just arrived at the Tower of London. Once agreement to meet Tyler’s rebels had been made, the royal court had moved rapidly to leave its sanctuary at Windsor, and had made its way from royal suburbia to the impregnable safety of the City’s ancient fortress. In the name of royal security, this was the only practical option.

  When the royal train had entered the City, Richard had been met by the mayor, William Walworth, and a trusted group chosen from his closest supporters-men such as Nicholas Brembre, John Philipot and Robert Launde. They had seen him through the City and into the Tower. By evening Richard was embedded among a depleted court that included these Londoners, Treasurer Hales, his half-brother Thomas Holland, the earl of Kent, as well as the earls of Arundel and Warwick, and the earl of Salisbury, a veteran soldier who had fought in France with Richard’s father. The court also included 600 courtiers, soldiers and servants.2 Among these was Richard’s cousin, Henry of Derby, and his close friend Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, both of them teenagers-Derby was not much older than Richard himself, while Oxford was a rather immature nineteen-year-old. The company of contemporaries would have been cold comfort. Richard would have wished for the reassuring presence of Derby’s father, John of Gaunt, or their other senior uncle, Edmund Langley, earl of Cambridge.

  Unfortunately neither was close. Gaunt, of course, was in Scotland, and Cambridge was in Plymouth, about to set sail with a fleet bound for Portugal. He had been forced to anchor the fleet offshore, for fear of attacks from angry villagers along the south coast. The court also missed the earl of Buckingham, who was occupied at the head of the army in France; Sir Simon Burley, Richard’s tutor and a senior knight of the household, was also absent.

  Shorn of experience and holed up in a fortress, they faced a situation that was acutely disturbing. When the Tower was built it had been the first great monument to the power of the Norman kings; now it was fast becoming the bolthole of a terrified court, run to ground by its own insurgent people.

  If the feeling at court was tense, however, in the rebel camp jubilation reigned. With king and court a mere hour or so upriver, to Tyler and his followers their liege lord was now tantalisingly close. It was the promise of contact with him which had spurred those who had made the march from Canterbury; and it was the prestige of negotiating with the king himself which bolstered Tyler’s position of command. Now, as they waited in the cool of the evening for the next boat to bring word from the Tower, the mere sense that a message was coming directly from the young king himself would have filled the rebel rank-and-file with a combination of foreboding and quasi-religious ecstasy.

  Wise to the value of their hostages, Tyler’s rebels had maintained in their service Sir John Newton, the keeper of Rochester Castle.3 Being a knight, he was a useful messenger, so they sent him up to the Tower to announce their arrival. Newton was sent to negotiate the terms of a meeting between king and commons, and although he must have felt the greatest apprehension about his task, after a week in rebel company, no doubt he was glad to go.

  As they waited for Newton’s return, the rebels decided to make the most of the south bank. By six o’clock in the evening they had announced their presence in Southwark, the town directly adjacent to the bottom end of London Bridge. Southwark was in the hinterlands of the City, famous for its brothels, prisons and generally unsavoury character. It was an area of colourful ribaldry, where drinkers and pimps rubbed shoulders with cripples, transvestites and whores. The rebels had again, just as in Maidstone, Canterbury and Rochester, engaged in their favourite pastime of jail delivery, ransacking the Marshalsea-where London’s prisoners were kept, under the watch of the marshal, Richard Imworth-and removing all the prisoners held there for debt and felony.

  The marshal was no hero either to the London citizens or to those in the suburbs. He had had the good sense to flee, earlier in the day, to the City proper. In his absence, the Southwark townsmen rose in partnership with the rebels.

  This joint venture between Tyler’s rebels, the Southwark mob and the native Londoners opposed to John of Gaunt’s policy of using the marshal’s office to attempt to bully and control the City was the first open sign that rural and urban rebels were now working in perfectly destructive harmony. (More than likely this was premeditated-during the earlier part of the week, vanguard parties of rebel sympathisers had been passing with relative freedom in and out of the City gates, spreading word of the movement that was building to the south-east.)

  At the head of the revolt Wat Ty
ler, Jack Straw and John Ball must have been filled with a surreal sense both of achievement and of giddy expectation. Ball’s philosophy spoke of standing steadfast, true and firm, and of seizing the great moment that God had provided. He would have watched the riots of the ordinary people of England with a feeling that they were a product of divine fate. And he would also have been pleased with a muddled, gloriously inverted time when sins were to be stood on their heads-a time of what he called in his famous sermons ‘lechery without shame’ and ‘gluttony without blame’.

  Ball’s mystic urgency, backed by the enthusiastic army of thousands that Tyler and regional lieutenants like Ker had mustered, would have created in the leaders’ minds a sense that they were about to embark upon the greatest ‘summer game’ ever played. Looking west along the river with Ball’s words in his ear, and then across at his ragtag but determined rank-and-file, Tyler would have felt a great confidence that the game he planned on the grandest scale-to turn London inside out and jest with the king himself-was destined for success.

  Before long, out of the river traffic and into the noisy encampment, thick with rumour and expectation, finally came the word that all were waiting for: the royal messenger had arrived.

  The king sent word that he would meet the rebels for a conference on the banks of the Thames the next morning. It was a momentous announcement, and vindicated in the rebel minds the purpose and divinity of their mission: to correct the iniquities of the kingdom and demonstrate before their young king the tyranny of his advisers. That the king had declined to meet that evening, opting rather for the safety of the next morning’s light, presented a minor practical problem. With the numbers of rebels camped on Blackheath far exceeding the provisions available, around a quarter of the peasant army were required to spend the night hungry. But it hardly mattered. There was plunder to be had on the south bank for those who could not last until morning. For the rest, food was the last thing on their minds. With the knowledge of the king’s agreement to meet them, Tyler and Ball no doubt thought that their position as the scourges of wickedly used authority was about to be given royal blessing.