A Distant Mirror (70 page)

Twenty thousand peasants were camped outside the walls demanding parley with the King. While they promised him safety, they shouted for the heads of Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hailes, the Chancellor and Treasurer, whom they held responsible for the poll tax, and for the head, too, of the arch “traitor,” John of Gaunt, symbol of misgovernment and a failing war. John Ball harangued them with a fierce call to cast off the yoke they had borne for so long, to exterminate all great lords, judges, and lawyers and gain for all men equal freedom, rank, and power.

In agitated council, the government could find no course but to negotiate. Richard II, a slight fair boy of fourteen, accompanied by his knights, rode out to meet the insurgents and hear their demands: abolition of the poll tax and of all bonds of servile status, commutation at a rate of four pence an acre, free use of forests, abolition of the game
laws—all these to be confirmed in charters sealed by the King. Everything the rebels asked was conceded in the hope of getting them to disperse and go home.

Meanwhile, partisans had opened the city’s gates and bridges to a group led by Wat Tyler, who gained possession of the Tower of London and murdered Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hailes. Balked of Gaunt, they flung themselves upon his palace of the Savoy and tore it apart in an orgy of burning and smashing. At Wat Tyler’s order, it was to be not looted but destroyed. Barrels of gunpowder found in storage were thrown on the flames, tapestries ripped, precious jewels pounded to bits with ax heads. The Temple, center of the law with all its deeds and records, was similarly destroyed. Killing followed; Lombards and Flemings (hated simply as foreigners), magnates, officials, and designated “traitors” (such as the rich merchant Sir Richard Lyons, who had been impeached by the Good Parliament and restored by Lancaster) were hunted down and slain.

In the hectic sequence of events, only Richard moved in a magic circle of reverence for the King’s person. Perched on a tall war-horse before the peasants, a charming boy robed in purple embroidered with the royal leopards, wearing a crown and carrying a gold rod, gracious and smiling and gaining confidence from his sway over the mob, he granted charters written out and distributed by thirty clerks on the spot. On this basis, many groups of peasants departed, believing in the King as their protector.

While in London, Sir Robert Knollys, the Master of War, was urgently assembling an armed force, Wat Tyler, inflamed by blood and conquest, was exhorting his followers toward a massacre of the ruling class and a takeover of London. He was no longer to be satisfied by the promised charters, which he suspected were hollow, and he knew he would never be included in any pardon. He could only go forward toward a seizure of power. According to Walsingham, he boasted that “in four days’ time all the laws of England would be issuing from his mouth.”

He returned to the camp at Smithfield for another meeting with the King, where he put forth a new set of demands so extreme as to suggest that their purpose was to provoke rejection and provide a pretext for seizing Richard in person: all inequalities of rank and status were to be abolished, all men to be equal below the King, the Church to be disendowed and its estates divided among the commons, England to have but one bishop and the rest of the hierarchy to be eliminated. The King promised everything consistent with the “regality of his crown.” Accounts of the next moments are so variously colored by the
passions of the time that the scene remains forever obscure. Apparently Tyler picked a quarrel with a squire of the King’s retinue, drew a dagger, and in a flash was himself struck down by the short sword of William Walworth, Mayor of London.

All was confusion and frenzy. The peasants drew their bows; some arrows flew. Richard, with extraordinary nerve, ordering no one to follow, rode forward alone, saying to the rebels, “Sirs, what is it you require? I am your captain. I am your King. Quiet yourselves.” While he parleyed, Knollys’ force, hastily summoned, rode up and surrounded the camp in mailed might with visors down and weapons gleaming. Dismayed and leaderless, the peasants were cowed; Wat Tyler’s head displayed on a lance completed their collapse, like that of the Jacques at the death of Guillaume Cale.

Ordered to lay down their arms and assured of pardons to encourage dispersal, they trailed homeward. Leaders, including John Ball, were hanged and the rising elsewhere in England was suppressed—with sufficient brutality, if not the wild massacre that had taken place in France after the Jacquerie. Except for scattered retribution, the English revolt, too, was over within a month, defeated more by fraud than by force. The pardons issued in the King’s name were revoked without compunction, and the charters canceled by a landowners’ Parliament on the grounds that they had been issued under duress. To a deputation from Essex who came to remind the King of his promise to end villeinage, Richard replied, “
Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.”

The assumptions of autocrats are often behind the times. Economic forces were already propelling the decline of villeinage, and commutation continued, despite the crushing of the revolt, until the unfree peasant gradually disappeared. Whether the revolt hastened or delayed the process is obscure, but the immediate outcome encouraged complacency in the ruling class, beginning with the King. Perhaps intoxicated by success, Richard developed all the instincts of absolutism except the toughness to quell his opponents, and was to end as the victim of one of them. The military saw no need for improvement; the Church was stiffened against reform. Alarmed by the Lollards’ leveling doctrines, the privileged class turned against them. In Gower’s “Corruptions of the Age,” the poet denounced them as breeders of division between church and state sent into the world by Satan. Lollardy went underground, long postponing the Protestant separation.

In these “
days of wrath and anguish, days of calamity and misery,” the laboring men’s revolt seemed to many but one more tribulation signifying, like the Black Death, the anger of God. An anonymous
poet, associating the rising of the peasants with an earthquake that occurred in 1382 and with the “pestilens,” concluded that these three things

Even the French raids on the English coast could be taken, as the monk Walsingham suggested, as the Lord “calling men to repentance by means of such terrors.” Seen in these terms, revolt conveyed no political significance. “Man cannot change,” a Florentine diarist wrote at this time, “that which God, for our sins, has willed.”

How much impact the insurrection in England had on revolutionary sentiment abroad is uncertain. With or without it, war and its attendant demon, taxes, would have supplied enough fuel for discontent. Yet war could hardly have failed to give employment and spread money—to armorers, carters, grain dealers, bakers, horse-breeders, and a hundred other trades besides the archers, foot soldiers, and servants in the army. Contemporaries are silent on the subject of war as economic stimulus, but very vocal about its unequal burden on the poor. “It should be an established principle,” wrote Villani, “that war ought not to be paid for out of the purses of the poor but rather by those to whom power belongs.”

This was not a principle recognized by the Duc d’Anjou, whose pursuit of money provoked a new wave of insurrection in France beginning in February of 1382. His projected inheritance of the Kingdom of Naples had just been jeopardized by the overthrow of Queen Joanna by a rival. Against the advice of Coucy, who was summoned again from Picardy for consultation, Anjou was bent on leading an army to Italy. At a meeting with the Provost of Merchants and principal bourgeois in January 1382, he seems to have wrung consent for a new sales tax on wine, salt, and other merchandise. In fear of popular reaction, the edict was issued secretly and the bidding for the lucrative post of tax-collector was held behind closed doors in the Châtelet. Many came willingly enough to bid, but hesitated to make the public announcement. No less apprehensive, the court remained at Vincennes outside the walls.

When tradesmen and travelers spread news of the new tax, an outcry of angry refusal was voiced in riots at Laon, Amiens, Reims, Orléans, and Rouen, as well as in Paris. As spokesman for the bourgeois of
the capita], Jean de Marès, an aged, respected, and eloquent advocate who had served under every King since Philip VI, tried in vain to persuade Anjou to rescind the order. Shopkeepers locked out tax-collectors who came to evaluate their merchandise; citizens seized arms, rang the tocsin, and rampaged through tax offices. That the agitation was heated by “the example of the English,” and even by “letters and messages from the Flemings” was common belief. Concerted action, however, was less a fact than a fear of the ruling class.

The riots burst into violence at the end of February in Rouen, capital of Normandy. Here the tax on wine injured important vintners who wished to excite popular resistance without compromising themselves. They harangued artisans and poor workers of the cloth trade about the shame of submitting to the tax while distributing free wine among them. To shouts of
“Haro!”
against the government,
“Haro!”
against tax-collectors (an obscure cry implying rebellion), a company of 200 intoxicated drapers rushed for the city hall to ring the tocsin. So began the famous Harelle.

Gathering adherents, the drapers sacked the houses of the rich, broke open coffers, threw furnishings into the streets, smashed windows and wine barrels, and let the contents flow after drinking all they could hold. Priests, pawnbrokers, Jews, and the houses of all former mayors were attacked, while the tocsin rang all night. The rich fled for refuge to monasteries, and a few royal officials and tax-collectors were killed. The chief of the drapers’ guild, a fat, simple-witted character called, for his bulk, Jean le Gras, was dragged against his will to leadership of the mob and paraded through the streets on a throne, thus compromising the upper bourgeois in spite of their effort to remain behind the scenes.

In climactic assault, the rioters, joined by many of the better class, attacked the Abbey of St. Ouen, hated for its large land holdings and the privileges it maintained against the town. Doors were smashed with axes, rent registers and charters burned, and the Abbé forced to sign remittances of all dues owed by the town. The fact that these documents were formulated in proper legal language testifies to the role of the upper bourgeois in the affair. Afterward, in a solemn if not sober assembly in the market place, the crowd petitioned their fat “King” to declare them “free of the yoke of taxes,” while some “laughed and shook their heads” at the performance.

Fearing royal punishment, the upper bourgeois sent delegates to Vincennes to plead for pardon. The Royal Council, fearing in its turn the spread of rebellion to other towns, advised the boy King to conceal his wrath and “appease the people who were very riotous.” With appropriate
display of the sacred aura of kingship, Charles VI was sent to Rouen, where the town’s leaders, evidently nervous of the agitation they had unleashed, promised a fixed sum in aids in return for the King’s pardon. Underneath the temporary lid, the struggle was unresolved, and wrath on both sides only awaited another chance.

In the same moment that Rouen was subdued, Paris rose. No one had yet ventured to proclaim the new levy in public until one herald, on being offered a bonus, rode into the market place and, having won all ears by announcing a reward for the return of gold plate stolen from the palace, then cried out the new tax and, setting spurs to his horse, galloped away. As the news sped through the streets, people gathered in angry groups, vowing with “terrible oaths” never to pay, and plotting resistance. Arrests of the agitators brought in porters, tinkers, candle-makers, pastry cooks, knife-grinders, cowl-makers—the small tradesmen, artisans, and servants of Paris. Next morning, March 1, when a tax-collector was seen to demand payment from a woman vendor of watercress at Les Halles, the market people fell upon him and killed him.

In an instant Paris was in an uproar. People ran through the
quartiers
calling on their neighbors to arm “for the liberty of the country” and rousing them with fierce yells and threats. “If you do not arm as we do,” cried one, “we will kill you right here in your own house!” Then, in “terrible tumult,” the crowd broke into the Hôtel de Ville in the Place de Grève, where they seized 3,000 long-handled mallets normally used by the police. Mounted with cylindrical heads of lead and wielded with both hands, these had been stored by Hugues Aubriot in case of need against the English, and now gave their name to the insurgents as Maillotins.

So armed, they inspired extra terror. While they were absorbed in rampage throughout the right bank, nobles, prelates, and officials, hurriedly filling carts with their valuables, escaped to Vincennes. Belatedly, the Maillotins closed the gates, fastened street chains, and posted guards to block the exodus of the rich, even bringing back some whom they caught. They hunted down notaries, jurists, and everyone connected with taxes, invaded churches to drag tax-collectors from sanctuary, seized one from the altar of St. Jacques, where he was clinging in terror to a statue of the Virgin, and cut his throat. Records everywhere were burned, the Jewish quarter looted as always. “Turn Christian or we will kill you!” a Jewish woman was ordered. “She said she would rather die,” an onlooker testified, “so they killed and robbed her.” The Jews again sought shelter in the Châtelet, but were turned
away by officials in fear of the Maillotins. Of some thirty persons murdered the first day, half were Jews.

The upper bourgeois were anxious both to contain the rising and to use it to force concessions from the crown. They quickly mobilized a militia to resist both the rebels and armed intervention by the King. Squads were stationed at street crossings and scouts sent up into church towers to watch for the approach of men-at-arms. “They soon showed themselves so strong,” wrote Buonaccorso Pitti, a Florentine banker in Paris, that the Maillotins in time obeyed them, with the result that the bourgeois were able to use the armed rebels in their own struggle against the crown.