The Peasant Revolt and Its Leaders, 1381
The great uprising of the peasants in 1381 was a very different matter from the local insurrection made by FitzOsbert. Two centuries had passed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been admitted in the Great Charter.
The Peasant Revolt was national. It was carefully prepared and skilfully organised, and its leaders were men of power and ability—men of character. It was not only a definite protest against positive evils, but a vigorous attempt to create a new social order—to substitute a social democracy for feudal government.34
The old feudal order had been widely upset by the Black Death in 1349, and the further ravages of pestilence in 1361 and 1369. The heavy mortality left many country districts bereft of labour, and landowners were compelled to offer higher wages if agriculture was to go on. In vain Parliament passed Statutes of Labourers to prevent the peasant from securing an advance. These Acts of Parliament expressly forbade a rise in wages; the landless man or woman was “to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood two years before the pestilence.” The scarcity of labour drove landowners to compete for the services of the labourer, in spite of Parliament.
Discontent was rife in those years of social change. The Statutes of Labourers were ineffectual; but they galled the labourers and kept serfdom alive. The tenants had their grievance because they were obliged to give labour-service to their lords. Freehold yeomen, town workmen, and shopkeepers were irritated by heavy taxation, and vexed by excessive market tolls. All the materials were at hand for open rebellion, and leaders were found as the days went by to kindle and direct the revolt.
John Ball, an itinerant priest, who came from St. Mary’s, at York, and then made Colchester the centre of his wanderings, spent twenty years organising the revolt, and three times was excommunicated and imprisoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury for teaching social “errors, schisms, and scandals,” but was in no wise contrite or cast down.
Chief of Ball’s fellow-agitators were John Wraw, in Suffolk, Jack Straw, in Essex—both priests these—William Grindcobbe, in Hertford, and Geoffrey Litster, in Norfolk. In Kent lived Wat Tyler, of whom nothing is told till the revolt was actually afire, but who at once was acknowledged leader and captain by the rebel hosts.
From village to village went John Ball in the years that preceded the rising, organising the peasants into clubs, and stirring the people with revolutionary talk. It was the way of this vagrant priest to preach to the people on village greens, and his discourses were all on the same text—“In the beginning of the world there were no bondmen, all men were created equal.”35 Inequalities of wealth and social position were to be ended:
“Good people, things will never go well in England, so long as goods be not kept in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom men call lords greater folk than we? If all come from the same father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride?
“They are clothed in velvet, and are warm in their furs and ermines, while we are covered in rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the wind and rain in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state.
“We are called slaves; and if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice.”
The poet, William Langland, in “Piers Plowman,” dwelt on the social wrongs of the time; Ball was fond of quoting from Langland, and of harping on a familiar couplet:
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”
Besides the sermons, some of the rhymed letters that John Ball sent about the country have been preserved:
“John Ball, Priest of St. Mary’s, greets well all manner of men, and bids them in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to stand together manfully in truth. Help truth and truth shall help you.
“John Ball greeteth you all,
And doth to understand he hath rung your bell.
Now with right and might, will and skill,
God speed every dell.
John the Miller asketh help to turn his mill right:
He hath ground small, small:
The King’s Son of Heaven will pay for it all.
Look thy mill go right, with its four sails dight.
With right and with might, with skill and with will,
And let the post stand in steadfastness.
Let right help might, and skill go before will,
Then shall our mill go aright;
But if might go before right, and will go before skill,
Then is our mill mis-a-dight.”
Sometimes it is under the signature of John Trueman that John Ball writes:
“Beware ere ye be woe;
Know your friend from your foe;
Take enough and cry “Ho!”
And do well and better and flee from sin,
And seek out peace and dwell therein—
So biddeth John Trueman and all his fellows.”
A more definite note was struck when it seemed to Ball and his colleagues that the time was ripe for revolution, and the word was given that appeal must be made to the boy-king—Richard was only eleven years old when he came to the throne in 1377.
“Let us go to the King, and remonstrate with him, telling him we must have it otherwise, or we ourselves shall find the remedy. He is young. If we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the name of serf, or are held in bondage, will follow us in the hope of being free. When the King shall see us we shall obtain a favourable answer, or we must then ourselves seek to amend our condition.”
In another letter John Ball greets John Nameless, John the Miller, and John Carter, and bids them stand together in God’s name, and beware of guile: he bids Piers Plowman “go to his work and chastise well Hob the Robber (Sir Robert Hales, the King’s Treasurer); and take with you John Trueman and all his fellows, and look that you choose one head and no more.”
These letters and the preaching were accepted by willing minds. John Ball was in prison—in the jail of Archbishop Sudbury at Maidstone—in the spring of 1381, but the peasants were organised and ready to revolt. If Wat Tyler is the recognised leader of the rebel forces—“the one head”—John Ball’s was the work of preparing the uprising. The vagrant priest had rung his bell to some purpose. In every county, from Somerset to York, the peasants flocked together, “some armed with clubs, rusty swords, axes, with old bows reddened by the smoke of the chimney corner, and odd arrows with only one feather.”
At Whitsuntide, early in June, 1381, the great uprising began—the Hurling time of the peasants—long to be remembered with horror by the governing classes. A badly ordered poll-tax was the match that kindled the fire.
The poll-tax was first levied, in 1377, on all over fourteen years of age. Two years later it was graduated, every man and woman of the working class being rated at 4d., and dukes and archbishops at £6 13s. 4d. More money was still wanted by the Government, and early in 1381, John of Gaunt, the chief man in the realm, called Parliament together at Northampton, and demanded £160,000. Parliament agreed that £100,000 should be raised, and the clergy—owning a third of the land—promised £60,000. But the only way of raising the £100,000 that the Government could think of was by another poll-tax, and this time everybody over fifteen was required to pay 1s. Of course, the thing was impossible. In many parishes the mere returns of population were not filled in; numbers evaded payment—which spelt ruin—by leaving their homes. £22,000 was all that came to hand.
Then a man named John Legge came to the assistance of the Government, and was appointed chief commissioner, and empowered to collect the tax.
The methods of Legge and his assistants provoked hostility, and when the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham, and Stanford-le-Hope, in Essex, were summoned to meet the commissioner at Brentwood, their reply was to kill the collectors.
The Government answered this by sending down Chief Justice Belknap to punish the offenders, but the people drove the chief justice out of the place, and Belknap was glad to escape with his life.
This was on Whit-Sunday, June 2nd, and two days later the revolt had spread to Kent; Gravesend and Dartford were in tumult. In one place Sir Simon Burley, a friend of Richard II., seized a workman, claiming him as a bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of £300; while at Dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife and daughter of one John Tyler.36
Thereupon this John Tyler, “being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand, and ran reaking home; where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words, and strake at the tyler; whereupon the tyler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with his lathing staff, so that the brains flew out of his head. Wherethrough great noise arose in the streets, and the poor people being glad, everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler.”
Now, with the fire of revolt in swift blaze, it was for the men of Kent to see that it burned under some direction. Authority and discipline were essential if the rising was not to become mob rule or mere anarchy, and if positive and intolerable wrongs were to find remedies.
At Maidstone, on June 7th—after Rochester Castle had been stormed, its prisoners set free and Sir John Newton its governor placed in safe custody—Wat Tyler was chosen captain of the rebel hosts.
History tells us nothing of the antecedents of this remarkable man. For eight days, and eight days only, he plays his part on the stage of national events: commands with authority a vast concourse of men; meets the King face to face, and wrests from sovereignty great promises of reform; orders the execution of the chief ministers of the Crown, and then, in what seems to be the hour of triumph, is struck to the ground, and goes to his death.
Under the accredited leadership of Wat Tyler the revolt at once took form. Five days were spent in Kent before the peasant army marched on London. The manor houses were attacked, and all rent rolls, legal documents, lists of tenants and serfs destroyed. The rising was not a ferocious massacre like the rising of the Jacquerie in France; there was no general massacre of landlords, or reign of terror. The lawyers who managed the landowners’ estates were the enemy, and against them—against the instruments of landlord tyranny—was the anger of the peasants directed. In the same way John of Gaunt, and not the youthful King, was recognised as the evil influence in government; and while a vow was taken by the men of Kent that no man named “John” should be King of England, the popular cry was “King Richard and the Commons,” and all who joined in this were accounted friends of the insurgent populace.
Blackheath was reached on the evening of June 12th, and early the following morning, which was Corpus Christi Day, John Ball—released by a thousand hands from his prison at Maidstone—preached to the multitude on the work before them:
“Now is the opportunity given to Englishmen, if they do but choose to take it, of casting off the yoke they have borne so long, of winning the freedom they have always desired. Wherefore, let us take good courage and behave like the wise husbandman of scripture, who gathered the wheat into his barn, but uprooted and burned the tares that had half-choked the good grain. The tares of England are her oppressive rulers, and the time of harvest has come. Ours it is to pluck up these tares and make away with them all—the wicked lords, the unjust judges, the lawyers—every man, indeed, who is dangerous to the common good. Then shall we all have peace in our time and security for the future. For when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will enjoy equal freedom and nobility, rank and power shall we have in common.”
Thirty-thousand men—yeomen, craftsmen, villeins, and peasants, were at Blackheath, and these were soon joined by thousands more from Surrey.
John Wraw and Grindcobbe came to consult with Wat Tyler, and then returned to Suffolk and Hertford to announce that the hour had come to strike.
The Marshalsea and King’s Bench prisons, and the houses of ill-fame that clustered round London Bridge, were destroyed before Wat Tyler led his army into the city. An attempt to meet the King in conference was frustrated by the royal counsellors. Richard came down in the royal barge as far as Rotherhithe, but was dissuaded by Sir Robert Hales, and the Earls of Suffolk, Salisbury, and Warwick, from “holding speech with the shoeless ruffians.”
Richard rowed back swiftly to the Tower, and Tyler and his army swept into London. The city was in the hands of the rebel captain, but the citizens welcomed the invaders, and offered bread and ale when Tyler proclaimed that death would be the instant punishment for theft.
John of Gaunt’s palace at the Savoy, on the river strand, was the first place to be burnt; but Henry, Earl of Derby, John of Gaunt’s son (eighteen years later to reign as Henry IV., in place of Richard), was allowed to pass out uninjured, and a wretched man caught in the act of stealing off with a silver cup was promptly executed.
The Savoy destroyed, the Temple—a hive of lawyers—was the next to be burnt, and before nightfall the Fleet Prison and Newgate had been demolished.
Again Tyler demanded conference with the King, and Richard, lying in the Tower with his counsellors, unable to prevent the work of conference, boldly decided to come out and meet the rebels. Mile End was appointed for the conference, and to Mile End Richard came with a very modest retinue. The King was only fifteen, but he was the son of the Black Prince, and he had both courage and cunning. He was fully aware that the people did not lay on him responsibility for the sins of the Government. “If we measure intellectual power by the greatest exertion it ever displays, rather than by its average results, Richard II. was a man of considerable talents. He possessed along with much dissimulation a decisive promptitude in seizing the critical moment for action.”37
At Mile End Tyler stated the grievances of the people. But first he asked that all traitors should be put to death, and to this the King agreed.
Four positive articles of reform were put forward, and were at once assented to by the King:—
1. A free and general pardon to all concerned in the rising.
2. The total abolition of all villeinage (forced labour) and serfdom.
3. An end to all tolls and market dues—“freedom to buy and sell in all cities, burghs, mercantile towns, and other places within our kingdom of England.”
4. All customary tenants to become leaseholders at a fixed rental of fourpence an acre for ever.
That all doubts might be removed, thirty clerks were set to work on the spot to draw up charters of manumission, and banners were presented to each county. At nightfall thousands returned home convinced that the old order was ended, and that the Royal charters were genuine assurances of freedom.
But Tyler and the bulk of the men of Kent and Surrey remained in the city. It seemed to Wat Tyler that better terms still were to be wrung from the King. It looked that night as though the insurrection had triumphed completely. Not only were the charters signed and the royal promises given, but several in high office, whom Tyler held to be “traitors,” had gone to their doom. Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, Archbishop Sudbury, the Chancellor—a gentle and kindly old man, “lenient to heretics”—John Legge, the hated poll-tax commissioner, with Appleton, John of Gaunt’s chaplain, and Richard Lyons, a thoroughly corrupt contractor of Edward III.’s reign, were all dragged out of the Tower and beheaded on Tower Hill on Friday, June 15th.
On Tyler’s request for another conference with Richard on the following day, the King saw he had no choice but to yield. For the second time Wat Tyler and Richard met face to face. The conference was held at Smithfield, in the square outside St. Bartholomew’s Priory. The King and two hundred retainers, with Walworth the mayor, were on the east side of the square. Tyler and his army were on the west side, opposite the Priory.
In the open space Tyler, mounted on a little horse, presented his demands; more sweeping were the reforms now asked for than those of the previous day.
“Let no law but the law of Winchester38 prevail throughout the land, and let no man be made an outlaw by the decree of judges and lawyers. Grant also that no lord shall henceforth exercise lordship over the commons; and since we are oppressed by so vast a horde of bishops and clerks, let there be but one bishop in England; and let the property and goods of Holy Church be divided fairly according to the needs of the people in each parish, after in justice making suitable provision for the present clergy and monks. Finally, let there be no more villeins in England, but grant us all to be free and of one condition.”
Richard answered that he promised readily all that was asked, “if only it be consistent with the regality of my Crown.” He then bade the commons return home, since their requests had been granted.
Nobles and counsellors stood in sullen and silent anger at the King’s words, but were powerless to act. Tyler, conscious of victory, called for a draught, and when his attendant brought him a mighty tankard of ale, the rebel leader drank good-humouredly to “King Richard and the Commons.” A knight in the royal service, a “valet of Kent,” was heard to mutter that Wat Tyler was the greatest thief and robber in all the county, and Tyler caught the abusive words, drew his dagger, and made for the man.
Mayor Walworth, as angry as the nobles at the King’s surrender, shouted that he would arrest all who drew weapons in the King’s presence; and on Tyler striking at him impatiently, the Mayor drew a cutlass and slashed back, wounding Tyler in the neck so that he fell from his horse. Before he could recover a footing, two knights plunged their swords into him, and Tyler, mortally wounded, could only scramble on to his little horse, ride a yard or two, call on the commons to avenge him, and then drop—a dead man.39
And with Wat Tyler’s death the whole rebellion collapsed. Confusion fell upon the people at Smithfield. Some were for immediate attack, but when Richard, riding out into the middle of the square, claimed that he and not Tyler was their King, and bade them follow him into the fields towards Islington, the great mass, convinced that Richard was honestly their friend, obeyed. At nightfall they were scattered.
Wat Tyler’s body was taken into the Priory, and his head placed on London Bridge.
Walworth hastily gathered troops together, and the leader of the rebels being dead, the nobles recovered their courage.
The rising was over; the people without leaders were as sheep for the slaughter. Jack Straw was taken in London and hanged without the formality of a trial; and on June 22nd Tresilian, the new chief justice, went on a special assize to try the rebels, and “showed mercy to none and made great havock.” The King’s charters and promises were declared null and void when Parliament met, and some hundreds of peasants were hanged in various parts of the country.
John Ball and Grindcobbe were hanged at St. Albans on July 15th, John Wraw and Geoffrey Litster suffered the same fate.
All that Wat Tyler and the peasants had striven for was lost; but the rising was not quite in vain. For one thing, the poll-tax was stopped, and the end of villeinage was hastened.
The great uprising was the first serious demonstration of the English people for personal liberty. “It taught the King’s officers and gentle folks that they must treat the peasants like men if they wished them to behave quietly, and it led most landlords to set free their bondsmen, and to take fixed money payments instead of uncertain services from their customary tenants, so that in a hundred years’ time there were very few bondsmen left in England.”40