The Last Plantagenets (7 page)

F
OUR years had passed since the little king lost his shoe. He was growing into a handsome and confident boy, and measures were being taken already to find him a princess for a wife. The council governed the kingdom, and the queen mother (who was now a heavy load for any palfrey) governed the council. If the war against France was going on at all, it was going on badly. The treasury, as was always the case with Plantagenet kings, yawned with emptiness. And at this moment, in June 1381 to be exact, there came about one of the most dramatic, significant, and dreadful events in English history—the rebellion of the peasants.

Historians have found many words to apply to this upflaring of class discontent, including “mysterious.” It is true that it had many elements of mystery, particularly the suddenness with which it began and its almost instantaneous spread across the southern and eastern counties like a stubble field afire. Had the seeds of rebellion been carefully planted in advance? Had it been possible to do this with such secrecy that villeins by the tens of thousands were ready and waiting while their masters had no inkling of impending trouble?

The discontent was due to the land laws which held a large proportion of the peasants in a state bordering on peonage. They were called villeins and were allowed to cultivate some acres of land belonging to the lord of the manor, paying in lieu of rent by giving a portion of their time to the land reserved for the lord himself. This was called the
corvée
and it would not have been entirely unfair except for the “boons,” the right of the owner to call on them for extra work without remuneration at any time he saw fit, particularly if rain were expected and he wanted his crops harvested in time. The boon in that event might mean that the
poor villein’s own crops would be beaten down by the autumnal storms and go unharvested. There were other class restrictions under which the peasant labored. He was bound to the land and could never leave without his lord’s consent. His children were bound also. Nor were they allowed to marry save with seignorial approval.

The grim harvest of the Black Death had intensified these conditions. The villeins died in such numbers that it was no longer possible to cultivate all the land. At first this benefited the workmen because they could demand better terms for their labor but it did not take the law long to step in. It was stipulated that a man could not seek new employers and demand what he wished. He must remain on the demesne where he was born and work for his own lord
on the terms which had prevailed before the coming of the plague
. This was the worst kind of injustice because the shortage of crops had sent up the cost of living.

It also rankled in the minds of the yeomen that it was the longbow (even the least expert of them might have shot the plume off a French helmet at a hundred yards) which had won the great victories in France, not the armed knight on horseback. Had they not proven their worth? Should the sons of men who had drawn a stout bow at Crécy be subjected to such unfair laws?

Finally, because of the cost of the abortive struggle against the French, there had come the poll tax. Parliament had decided that a certain number of groats, which the common people called “thickpennies,” should be paid by everyone, the lowest rate being three groats for all over fifteen years of age. The peasants found this an intolerable burden on top of the penny on every hearth which had to be paid for the Romescot (Peter’s Pence). Already on the verge of starvation, they refused to be taxed further.

It should not be assumed that the peasants were involved in a solidly knit and secret organization. It was more certainly a deep-seated conviction they held in common, a bitterness of desire for full freedom, which led to the sudden outburst. Any discussion of what happened when this discontent reached the breaking point must begin with the story of a hedge priest named John Ball.

Jean Froissart, the French historian who had held office once at the English court and who wrote of English affairs, dubbed Ball the Mad Monk of Kent. Ball did not come from Kent but from Yorkshire, nor was he mad. Nevertheless, the label has stuck to him for nearly six hundred years. The validity of the causes for which he preached has been confirmed, the rights he sought for Peterkin the Ploughman and Jack Trewman and John the Miller have been granted and the march of social progress has gone so far beyond them that they seem almost quaint
in their modesty. But still in most writing on the period he is depicted as an incendiary, a fomenter of trouble, in short, a mad monk. A note of sympathy for the manner of his death is seldom expressed.

There is no source from which a picture of the man might be drawn and so, in lieu of the contemptuous term tossed off by a toady who knew no more of England than he could gather on the tilting grounds and on the edges of a gay court, it may be in order to quote from a work of pure imagination, the beautifully conceived fantasy by William Morris,
A Dream of John Ball
. The poet in Morris was convinced that there existed a great sense of beauty among the common men of those faraway days, that they dressed plainly but in the good taste of simple colors, that their voices were musical, that they lived in small homes of their own devising and building, which might have wattled doors and roofs of thatch but still had a certain beauty of their own; and that their husbandry was of such high order that the furrows they plowed were as straight as the road to heaven. And for John Ball, Morris saw him as one who shared with all great minds a dream of the equality of man.

It has been charged that Ball preached a form of communism and versions of what he said are given in some of the chronicles. None of them agree and all seem garbled and clumsy. Those who think of the years he spent on the road and the memories which remained in the minds of those who heard him, and moreover of certain later evidences of the honesty of his intent, may find it more enlightening to hear the phrases which Morris puts into the mouth of the inspired hedge priest.

What else shall ye lack when ye lack masters? Ye shall not lack for the fields ye have tilled, nor the houses ye have built, nor the cloth ye have woven; all these shall be yours, and whatso ye will of all that the earth beareth; then shall no man mow the deep grass for another, while his own kine lack cow-meat; and he that soweth shall reap, and the reaper shall eat in fellowship the harvest that in fellowship he hath won; and he that buildeth a house shall dwell in it with those he biddeth of his free will; and the tithe barn shall garner the wheat for all men to eat of when the seasons are untoward, and the raindrift hideth the sheaves in August; and all shall be without money and without price. Faithfully and merrily then shall all men keep the holidays of the church in peace of body and joy of heart. And man shall help man, and the saints in heaven shall be glad, because men no more fear each other; and the churl shall be ashamed, and shall hide his churlishness till it be gone and he no more a churl; and fellowship shall be established in heaven and on earth.

To say that John Ball was a hedge priest meant that he had no church and no charge, nor any post which linked him to the established order. Neither had he house nor table under which he could place his feet to partake of the loaf, the joint, and the jug of wine to which, surely, every good priest was entitled. It was equally true that he had no bed in which to sleep, no cell in monastery, no snug corner in a deanery. As his feet carried him hither and yon according to what he deemed to be the Lord’s will, he slept for the most part under hedges. Sometimes he preached boldly at village crosses but more often cautiously in thick woods by moonlight.

For twenty years he wandered over the face of England. Three times he was confined in the prison of the archbishop and finally he was put under a ban of excommunication. This made no difference, for he never ceased to preach what he believed, and what he believed sent his hearers into transports of wonderment and anticipation. His feet deserted early the relatively solid ground of Lollardy and carried him up high into a spiritual world where all men were equal. He always left hope behind him in the minds of those who had hung on his words. They must bide their time and be in readiness. When the right moment came, he, John Ball, would sound the bell.

This was heady stuff and some word of the gospel of unrest that he was spreading inevitably reached the ears of authority, hence his imprisonments. It is said that only the most courageous among the brawny tillers of the soil committed themselves to taking a part and that they found it wise to maintain strict conspiratorial silence. When one man who was pledged met another, whose sympathies were unknown, he would not resort to any of the usual artifices, a certain gesture, a low catchword, or perhaps a special manner of handshake. Instead he would whisper,

John the Miller grinds small, small, small
.

The other, if he also believed in the message of John Ball would answer,

The King’s son of heaven shall pay for all
.

This may sound clumsy and even nonsensical but it must be borne in mind that this was an age of deep faiths and that men had a hunger for
the poetic and the mystical which made such phrases sound warmly in their ears. There is nothing in the records to indicate that the use of these words ever led to any break in the seal of silence which had been imposed.

It is generally assumed that the messages in rhyme, which were distributed throughout the country, and were clearly the work of the bold hedge priest, did not get into circulation until the rising began. It seems more likely, however, that some of them at least had been used to strengthen the faith of the unhappy villeins through the years when the yoke rested heaviest on their shoulders and the day of reckoning seemed to get no closer. Otherwise the uprising would have lacked the spontaneity which brought the peasants out in tens of thousands in a matter almost of hours.

When the missives were written, and how they were distributed, must remain part of the mystery. All that can be set down as certain is that they came from the pen of John Ball and that they struck straight to the hearts of the common people.

A more direct appeal could be found in some of them, particularly the verses signed by such names as John the Miller, Jack Carter, and Jack Trewman. In these missives, or tracts as they soon came to be called, occurred such phrases as “make a good end of that ye have begun” and “now is the time,” which made it clear that these at least were issued after the insurrection had started.

The rebellion flared up first in green and richly fertile Kent, where villeinage had never been introduced. The scene was the village of Dartford, which lay seventeen miles southeast of London. It was a busy place and served as first stop on the famous pilgrimage road between the capital and Canterbury. Here a tegheler, or tyler named Wat was so incensed at the indecency of a poll-tax collector who insisted that the man’s daughter was old enough to pay the tax, and had proceeded to strip off her clothes to prove it, that he seized a hammer and knocked the collector’s brains out. Whether this indignant father was Wat the Tyler who later became leader of the march on London seems uncertain. There were two men of that name, one of them from Maidstone, and some historians claimed it was the latter who assumed command of the
peasant army. To this day, however, the site of Wat the Tyler’s house in Dartford is pointed out to visitors.

The incident threw the little Kentish town into an uproar. By nightfall hundreds of men had gathered, some with bows over their shoulders, some carrying pikes or oak quarterstaves, some armed only with flails and bill hooks or the crude handles of plows. Many had come from all the villages thereabouts and a contingent of hundreds had heard of what had happened and marched in from the Channel shore.

The next morning they marched south instead of north and came to Maidstone on the Medwige (Medway) River, a distance of more than twenty miles. The reason for this long detour was plain to all of them. John Ball was being held in the archbishop’s prison in Maidstone and, as he was the spiritual leader of the forces of discontent, he must be released before anything more could be done.

There was an archbishop’s palace of considerable size and beauty in Maidstone, which was said to have been built and presented to the episcopal see during the term of Stephen Langton of immortal memory. It was a graceful building of the native ragstone, with two Norman towers and a cluster of steeply angled roofs. It stood between the square-pillared church of St. Mary’s and the squat and gloomy prison where offenders against clerical law were held.

It is stated in one chronicle that when John Ball was last sentenced in the archbishop’s court he had cried out, “I can summon twenty thousand friends to win me free!” and that the somewhat sour-faced officials had paid no heed. There is nothing in the record of John Ball, who had wandered for so many years over flinty roads and rough forest paths to carry comfort to the common people of the land, to lend any substance to a charge of boastfulness. In addition to the improbability of such open bravado, it must be taken into account that he would not thus betray the strength of the movement, which had been kept under cover so carefully and for so long.

If he had been guilty of such an utterance, however, he would have found proof on this day that his friends were indeed rallying in sudden and almost unbelievable strength. There was no exercise ground for the inmates and the prison looked down directly on the street. Nevertheless, it would take a tall man to see through the small high windows. William Morris pictures the itinerant priest as “tall and big-boned, a ring of dark hair surrounding his priest’s tonsure,” so perhaps he could look out on the main road of Maidstone, which was the widest in all of England, and see the peasants pouring in, their improvised weapons over their shoulders; thousands of them, shouting, cheering, and calling for John Ball; many of them bare of torso and of leg, for who would risk damage to a
jerkin at such a time? From this he would have realized that circumstances had forced his hand, that this uprising of the embattled sons of the soil would precipitate the inevitable conflict. Secrecy was no longer possible or necessary.