Great Tales From English History (25 page)

‘What can they show,’ asked Ball, ‘or what reasons give why they should be more the masters than ourselves? Except, perhaps, in making us labour and work, for them to spend.’

The Great Rising of 1381 sought to break the cycle of feudal bondage, the system whereby men gave their labour and their loyalty - and, in many ways, their very being - to the local lord of the manor in return for land and protection. For this reason later generations called the uprising the Peasants’ Revolt.

But to judge from the records, it might better have been called the Ratepayers’ Revolt, since the ledgers of the time show that the leaders and mouthpieces of the rebellion like John Ball, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw were substantial, tax-paying folk. Anything but peasants, they came from the upwardly mobile yeoman classes. They were village leaders who sat on juries - and their rebellion first exploded not in the poor and downtrodden areas of England but in the very richest counties, the fruitful orchards of Kent and Essex, close to London with its alluring wealth and progressive ideas.

Discontent had been stirred by a general conviction that things were awry at the top. Edward III had died in 1377, after the debacle of the ‘Good Parliament’, leaving the throne to his ten-year-old grandson Richard II. ‘I heard my father say,’ remarked one of William Langland’s dream mice, ‘that when the cat is a kitten the court is a sorry place.’

While Richard was a child, the court was in the hands of his uncle John of Gaunt, so named because he was born during a royal visit to Ghent in the Low Countries. Gaunt lacked the charisma of his elder brother, Richard’s father, the Black Prince, whose premature death was the more mourned because he was widely thought to be a reformer - and Gaunt positively prided himself on his lack of the common touch. ‘Do they think that they are kings and princes in this land?’ he had asked as he annulled the reforms of the Good Parliament. ‘Have they forgotten how powerful I am?’

Gaunt had maintained the dreary pursuit of war with France and Scotland, and the huge expenditure that this necessitated had kept the tax demands coming. The final provocation was the poll tax of 1380 - the third in four years. ‘Poll’ meant ‘head’ (thus counting per head, the same word we use for elections), and it was a new way of raising money. Previously, taxes had been levelled per household. They were known as ‘tenths’, ‘thirteenths’ or ‘fifteenths’, reflecting the fraction of your household wealth you were expected to pay. Now people were supposed to pay according to the number of heads polled in their homes - which automatically doubled your tax burden if you were married, and increased it still more if you had parents living with you, or children over the age of fourteen.

Not surprisingly, many people had conveniently ‘lost’ members of their family when the tax collectors called. Between 1377 and 1381, the Exchequer was faced with a mysterious fall of 33 per cent in the adult population, and correctly suspecting tax evasion, the government sent out fresh teams of examiners, with powers of arrest and escorts of armed guards, to root out the hidden evaders.

It was the arrival of one such commission in the Essex town of Brentwood at the end of May 1381 that provided the spark for rebellion. Led by John Bampton, the local Member of Parliament, the commissioners started summoning representatives from the area to account for the deficits in their payments. But those from the villages of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope felt they were being threatened. They refused to cooperate, and when Bampton’s armed escort attempted to arrest the villagers there was uproar. The tax commissioners were expelled from Brentwood, and Bampton fled to London in fear for his life.

Within days, much of Essex had risen in rebellion. Several thousand protesters headed for London, while down in Kent the standard of revolt was flown by Wat Tyler, who then lived in Maidstone but had earlier lived in Essex. Tyler may have been a link between the surprisingly well coordinated uprisings now occurring in these counties to the north-east and south-east of the capital.

On Monday 10 June, Tyler led some four thousand rebels to Canterbury, where they broke into the cathedral during the celebration of high mass, demanding that the monks depose the Archbishop Simon Sudbury. Sudbury was a leading member of the government, and Tyler’s followers denounced him as ‘a traitor who will be beheaded for his iniquity’. During these years, radical religious thinking was marching in step with social revolution. The Oxford philosopher John Wycliffe was teaching that men could find their own path to God without the help of priests, whose riches, power and worldliness he denounced. His followers, most of them from poor backgrounds, were called Lollards - literally, in Middle English, ‘mumblers’, a reference to their constant mouthing of their own private prayers to God.

When the rebels got to London they soon tracked down Archbishop Sudbury, who was hiding in the Tower along with Sir Robert Hales, the King’s treasurer. Both men were dragged out, to be beheaded by the crowds, who paraded their severed heads on poles in a triumphant procession to Westminster Abbey. In the bloody mayhem that followed, the protesters looked for more scapegoats - and found them in the immigrant merchant communities from Flanders and Lombardy, who had taken over royal money-raising from the Jews. It was lucky for John of Gaunt that he was away from London on yet another military campaign. But the mass looted his sumptuous palace by the Thames anyway, and even cornered the King’s mother, Joan, and asked her to kiss them. Now an elderly lady, the Fair Maid of Kent, whose beauty was said to have inspired the Order of the Garter all those years before, fainted clean away from the shock.

The one member of the court to rise bravely to the occasion turned out to be the ‘kitten’ - the fourteen-year-old King Richard II. On Saturday 15 June 1381, the boy rode out to the north-west of the city to the meadows of Smithfield, London’s meat market then as now. A small but self-assured figure, he was accompanied by about two hundred courtiers and men-at-arms, facing a much larger party of rebels on the other side of the field.

Wat Tyler came riding proudly out from the rebel ranks on a little horse, a lone figure, with just a dagger in his hand for protection. As he dismounted, he half bent his knee and took the boy king’s hand in a rough and jocular fashion. ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘be of good comfort and joyful!’

The rallying cry of the masses as they marched towards London had been ‘For King Richard and the true commons!’, for they nursed the fantasy attending the monarchy to this day that, personally, the monarch is somehow without fault. Royal mistakes are the fault of royal advisers and, at heart, the monarch is the people’s friend - ‘We shall be good companions,’ Tyler promised the king.

Richard evidently bridled at this familiarity. ‘Why will you not go back to your own country?’ he asked - by ‘country’ he meant Tyler’s own place or neighbourhood - and at this rejection, the rebel leader flared up angrily. Neither he nor his companions would leave, he swore vehemently, until they had got agreement to their demands. He then launched into his manifesto:

‘There should be equality among all people,’ he proclaimed, ‘save only the king . . . There should be no more “villeins” in England, and no serfdom or villeinage.’ All men should be ‘free and of one condition’ - and when it came to the Church, all its worldly goods should be confiscated. A reasonable amount should be set aside to provide the clergy with ‘sufficient sustenance’, but the remaining church property should be divided among the people of the parish.

It was a wish list of breathtaking idealism and impossibility, bolder than any Englishman has ever demanded face to face with his king. If Tyler really did deliver the people’s demands with the fluency and power with which the chronicler wrote it down, he was a man of remarkable eloquence and courage. He seems to have been the key to the revolt - and what happened next has been fiercely debated by historians. Was there a prearranged plan to set Wat Tyler up, or was it his own arrogance that provoked the denouement?

According to one chronicler, he concluded his great speech by calling for a flagon of water, then ‘rinsed his mouth in a very rude and disgusting fashion’ in Richard’s face. According to another, he was tossing his dagger from hand to hand ‘as a child might play with it, and looked as though he might suddenly seize the opportunity to stab the king’.

Tyler was ‘the greatest thief and robber in all Kent,’ called out one of the royal retainers, thereby provoking the rebel leader - as was perhaps the intention - to lunge at his accuser with his dagger. When the Mayor of London intervened, Tyler started to stab him, and would have injured him severely if the mayor had not been wearing armour beneath his costume - another clue that the royal party had come to Smithfield ready for trouble.

It was all the royal bodyguard needed. One promptly fell on Tyler, running him through with his sword. Mortally wounded, Tyler pulled himself up on to his horse and headed back towards his comrades. Then, crying out for help, he fell to the ground in the no man’s land separating the two sides. Angry archers in the watching rebel ranks began to flex their bows, and were only prevented from loosing their arrows by the sight of the boy King himself, spurring his horse forward and calling out to them with a personal appeal - they should come with him to the nearby fields of Clerkenwell, he cried, for further discussion.

Even allowing for the exaggeration of loyal chroniclers, Richard’s bravery and presence of mind were remarkable. He defused a moment that could have led to wholesale bloodshed, and his composure turned the tide which, until then, had been flowing in the rebels’ favour.

Wat Tyler’s followers took their grievously wounded leader to the nearby St Bartholomew’s Hospital, but the mayor had him dragged out and beheaded. No one stepped forward to take Tyler’s place, and the men of Kent - ‘enveloped’, as one observer put it, ‘like sheep within a pen’ - allowed themselves to be ushered homewards over London Bridge.

The great revolt continued to rage in other parts of the country. In St Albans, Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds, merchants and craftsmen rose to free their towns from the control of local abbeys, fighting for the right to function as independent communities. In Norfolk men rose up in town and countryside alike. But at the end of June royal troops advanced on Essex and mercilessly crushed all resistance they encountered. According to one chronicle, five hundred men perished. More reliable figures indicate that some thirty-one ringleaders were identified, tried and hanged on the gallows.

‘Rustics you were and rustics you are still,’ declared the young Richard later, on his tour of Essex. ‘You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher.’

The juvenile hero of Smithfield rescinded every concession he had granted under the pressure of rebellion - in his value system, promises made under duress did not count. The blithe courage that he had shown at Smithfield sprang from the mantle of divine appointment in which he would wrap himself for the rest of his reign. John Ball and Jack Straw were tracked down, tried and hanged, and in a Parliament that was summoned at the end of the year the knights, gentlemen and burgesses wasted no time in reaffirming the social restrictions that had provoked the uprising in the first place. Now that it was safe again to sneer, the rebels with their high-flown ideas of freedom and equality were dismissed as ‘the mad multitude’.

But Parliament never again tried a poll tax - well, at least not for another six hundred and nine years, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government imposed a ‘per head’ community charge on a reluctant country. Once again the electoral rolls displayed mysterious ‘disappearances’ - 130,000 names went missing in London alone - and once again the protesters came to the capital to fight pitched battles in the streets. In 1990, however, the rebels got their way. Mrs Thatcher was jettisoned by her colleagues - for their own survival. Her successor John Major wasted no time in dropping the poll tax, and was returned to power in the next general election.

The processes of democracy and consultation that we enjoy today saw their origins in the years whose story is told in this book. From the wise men who advised the Anglo-Saxon kings, via the first ‘social contract’ reluctantly agreed by the hapless Ethelred the Unready, the green shoots of freedom had started to flourish. The Norman Conquest seemed a setback, but that too enriched England’s cross-bred culture, not least her potent, subtle language - some of the most English things about England, we discover, have come from abroad.

In the Peasants’ Revolt we have heard cries for liberty and equality that resound to this day, and we have seen those demands brutally suppressed. Two steps forward, one step back. The economic power that the Black Death paradoxically shifted in the direction of ordinary working people would prove with time to be a key engine for change in the future. We have not yet heard much about women, tolerance, science, playwrights, walking on the moon, comfort or safety. Kings, warriors and ghastly beheadings have loomed considerably larger in our story than they will in future volumes. But, as we ‘take a break’ in 1381, monarchs and wars are not over - and nor are the beheadings.

GENERAL HISTORIES OF ENGLAND

Single-volume histories of England were out of fashion for many years, but have staged a glorious revival with Roy Strong’s
The Story of Britain
- with Norman Davies in
The Isles
providing a healthily subversive corrective to Anglocentric tendencies. Listed below are the other general histories that I have consulted, and I recommend all of them, from Charles Dickens’s romantic Victorian overview to the eye-witness accounts collected by John Carey.
The Oxford Companion to British History
is the ideal general reference work, and Alison Weir’s
Britain’s Royal Families
contains every conceivable date relating to England’s kings and queens. Christopher Lee’s
This Sceptred Isle
is built around some well chosen extracts from Churchill’s
History of the English-speaking Peoples
, but there is nothing like the real thing. Ackroyd and Scruton provide personal interpretations from the heart. Fernández-Armesto looks at the bigger picture.