Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (45 page)

On Friday, 14 June, he made the short journey to Mile End on his horse. He was accompanied by the mayor of London, William Walworth, and some of the household knights. He was already showing signs of personal courage worthy of a king. When the royal party approached the rebels knelt upon the ground, and some of their number shouted, ‘Welcome, King Richard. We wish for no other king but you.’ Richard then asked them what else they wanted. They wanted ‘the traitors’, by which they meant the officials who had taxed them and harassed them beyond measure. They wanted to remove a government of scoundrels. The king replied that he would surrender to them any men who were convicted of treachery according to the law. It was a convenient answer to turn away wrath. One of their other demands was that all serfs should be given their freedom, and that land should be rented at fourpence per acre (0.4 hectares). Richard agreed to these proposals. Certain ‘traitors’, however, were already being summarily despatched. A group of rebels had entered the Tower, in the king’s absence, and had dragged out the archbishop of Canterbury and other officials who were sheltering there. All of them were beheaded on Tower Hill, the site of public execution.

More blood was to be shed in this fortnight’s storm. The people of London and the suburbs were confronted by groups of rebels and asked ‘With whom holdest thou?’ If they did not reply, ‘With King Richard and the commons’, they were beaten up or even beheaded. The rebels declared that they would have no king with the name of John, a clear reference to John of Gaunt. All over England the manors of lords were now being pillaged, and their inhabitants killed. Lawyers and justices were seized, and tax records burned. The proceedings of one manorial court are typical; the heading of one page reads
curia prima post rumorem et combustionem rotulorum
: ‘this is the first court after the revolt and the burning of the rolls’.

War and plague had done their work. At approximately the same moment of the fourteenth century, popular rebellions emerged in neighbouring nations. In Flanders the commons had rebelled against their count, Louis, and swept him out of the country; the Jacquerie, in France, unleashed a wave of riot and bloodshed in Paris, Rouen and the surrounding countryside. In Florence a popular revolt of the wool carders and other workers, the
ciompi
, destroyed the political structure of the city.

The morning after the young king’s ride to Mile End, on 15 June, Richard came to parley with the rebels at Smithfield. Wat Tyler waited for him there at the head of 20,000 insurgents. As soon as Tyler saw Richard, he rode up to him and began to converse with him. There is a hint that at this point he seemed to be threatening the king, or at least treating him disrespectfully. He began to play with his dagger, and then laid his hand on the bridle of the king’s horse. At this point, fearing treason, the mayor of London stabbed a short sword into Tyler’s throat. Tyler rode a little way, fearfully wounded, and was taken to the hospital of St Bartholomew beside Smithfield.

The rebels were shocked and angered at the event; some of them drew their bows. The young king galloped up to the front line of archers. ‘What are you doing?’ he called out to them. ‘Tyler was a traitor. Come with me, and I will be your leader.’ He did literally lead them a little way north into Islington, where 1,000 armed men had been summoned by the mayor. It seems likely that the rebels had walked into a hastily improvised trap. The leaders fell to their knees, and begged for pardon. Some of the court wished to punish them on the spot, but the king wisely desisted. He ordered the rebels to return to their homes, and forbade any stranger from spending the night in the city. Soon afterwards Tyler was taken from the hospital of St Bartholomew and beheaded in Smithfield itself.

A few days later Richard revoked the charter of emancipation he had granted to the crowd at Mile End, on the ground that it had been extorted from him by violence. He travelled to Essex in order to observe the aftermath of the now extinguished revolt. A group of villagers there asked him to remain faithful to the pledges he had made to them a few days before. His retort, as described by
one contemporary chronicler, is worth recording for the insight it shows into the temperament of the king. ‘You wretches’, he said, ‘are detestable both on land and on sea. You seek equality with the lords, but you are unworthy to live. Give this message to your fellows: rustics you are, and rustics you will always be. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example to posterity.’ A parliament was called later in the year, where it was proposed that the state of bondage known as villeinage should be abolished. The Lords and the Commons, their vital interests as landlords at stake, unanimously voted against any such action. This marked the essential conclusion of the rebellion.

In some areas, such as the recalcitrant county of Essex, the punishments were harsh. The leaders of the rebels were beheaded. John Ball was arrested in St Albans, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered. Wat Tyler had gone before him. After their deaths, they were enshrined as heroes in folk memory. Yet in other regions the reaction of the authorities was more moderate than might have been expected. It is clear that they did not wish to inflame a still dangerous situation.

The unsuccessful rebellion has been called in retrospect ‘the peasants’ revolt’, suggesting that the rebels came from the lowest agricultural class. But the court records show that the participants were generally the leaders of village life, and acted as bailiffs, constables and jurors in their neighbourhoods. It can be argued that these men, far from being accidental or opportunistic rebels, were in fact enunciating real and important grievances. They were of course protesting against the judicial commissions set up to claim the poll tax, but they were also objecting to the corruption of justice by the local magnates. The ordinances and statutes concerning labour, after the Black Death, had materially changed the role of law. It was no longer an instrument of communal justice; it had instead become the machinery of exaction designed to control and discipline the lower classes. The rebels were also protesting against an increasingly futile war, for which they had to pay. They were denouncing greedy landlords. They were violently opposed to a noble class that had shown little interest in the condition of the countryside.

And, as their claims and demands came together, a more general sense of protest was being enunciated against the conditions of life in the fourteenth century. ‘Ah, good people,’ John Ball declared in a sermon to the rebels on Blackheath, ‘matters will not go well in England until everything is held in common and there are neither villeins nor gentlemen. These gentlemen dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and labour, the rain and wind in the fields. Let us go to the king. He is young. Let us show him in what servitude we live.’

Other wandering preachers dwelled on the age-long theme of equality and justice, going from parish to parish and calling to the villagers just as they were leaving church; their theme was that all things under heaven should be held ‘in common’. The day of 13 June – the day when the king’s barge turned back to the Tower in the face of the rebels – was Corpus Christi, the feast of the body of Christ in which the whole community was deemed to be a token of that holy body. It was a day of village celebrations and processions, in which the eucharist was carried in triumph around the streets and lanes of each community. So the rebels had, in a sense, pronounced themselves to be holy by marching or riding in a host. They were pronouncing the sacredness of fellowship. The holy bread is made up of many grains. Christ is the miller.

It was claimed at the time that Ball was a follower of Wycliffe, and that Lollardy itself was one of the causes of sedition. Since the Lollards were in no sense a popular movement, the connection is in many respects implausible. But ideas of change and renovation were in the air. Wycliffe had taught that the right of property was founded in grace and that no sinful man was entitled to the services of others; the theories of the scholar could easily be translated into the slogans of the people. So Ball, in his sermon at Blackheath, taught that all men were created equal, and that the ranks and stations of the social hierarchy were the inventions of their oppressors. God wished them to recover their original liberty.

Songs and sayings flew out of the rebellion like sparks from a fire. ‘Jack Trueman would have you know that falseness and guile have reigned too long. Truth has been put under a lock. Falseness reigns in every flock . . . Sin spreads like the wild flood, true love, that was good, is fled, and the clergy work us woe for gain . . .
Whoever does wrong, in whatever place it fall, does a wrong to us all . . . With right and with might, with skill and with will; let might help right, and skill go before will, and right before might, so goes our mill aright . . . The commons is the fairest flower that ever God set on an earthly crown.’

The consequence of the revolt was unease and even dread. A chronicler, recording troubles eleven years after the events here related, remarked that ‘men all over England were sure that another general insurrection was at hand’. For more than two centuries the fear most expressed by the authorities was that of local rebellion. A revolt of the masses could trigger disaster for the state. Sporadic revolts after 1381 did indeed take place, often in the form of ‘rent strikes’ against oppressive landlords. In the face of unbearable tensions, however, attempts were made to appease and accommodate the demands of the peasants. No further poll tax was ever exacted, not at least in the medieval period. The slow abolition of serfdom, and the rising prosperity of those in work, created a sense of freedom that had found one manifestation in the revolt. It also encouraged a greater relaxation of the old feudal order.

The living standards of the agricultural workers improved perceptibly over a generation. Real wages grew, despite the attempts at legislation prohibiting any such rise, and a poem such as ‘How the Ploughman learned the Paternoster’ reveals the profusion of meat, fish and dairy products in the households of the labourers:

Life expectancy also rose. The historians of dress have noted that clothing became brighter, and more luxurious, and jewellery more evident, in the latter years of the fourteenth century.

The king himself had passed a test of fire. He had confronted, and defeated, the first and last popular rebellion in English history. His later behaviour suggests that his belief in himself, and in the essential divinity of kingship, was thereby redoubled. At the age of fifteen he was truly a king whose presence alone was enough to command large crowds of people into obeying his will. He was 6 feet (1.8 metres) in height, with blond hair and a round, somewhat feminine face; he had flared nostrils, prominent cheekbones
and heavy eyelids. John Gower, at the beginning of the king’s reign, described him as ‘the most beautiful of kings’ and the ‘flower of boys’. He may have been indulging in a little flattery, but the chroniclers of the period were at one in emphasizing Richard’s beauty. He looked the part.

His manner, however, was considered to be abrupt. He was inclined to stammer, when he was excited, and he flushed easily. His temper was somewhat uncertain, and he was always quick to assert his royal dignity. His words to the rebels of Essex, whether he actually uttered them or not, are in that sense characteristic. Other accounts of his speech and behaviour tend to corroborate them. ‘I am a king,’ he said to one earl, ‘and your lord. I will continue to be king. I will be a greater lord than ever I was before, in spite of all my enemies.’ His anger was terrible, just like that of his Plantagenet ancestors. He once drew his sword on the archbishop of Canterbury, and would have killed him had he not been restrained. One chronicler, known only as ‘the monk of Evesham’, described him as being extravagant in dress and imperious in temper; he was frightened of war and preferred to spend the night ‘carousing with friends’ and indulging himself in ‘unmentionable’ ways. This has often been taken as an allusion to Richard’s possible homosexuality, but to a monk many things may be unmentionable.

The emphasis on his royalty meant that he cared deeply for ceremony and for spectacle. He enjoyed dressing up. On one occasion he wore a costume of white satin on which were hung cockle-shells and mussel-shells plated in silver; his doublet was adorned with orange trees embroidered in gold thread. He loved to preside at tournaments, but he was not so enthusiastic about true battles. One of his relatives, Thomas of Lancaster, declared at a later date that ‘he is too heavy in the arse, he only asks for drinking and eating, sleeping, dancing and leaping about’. The medieval texts often refer to ‘leaping about’ without explaining what is meant by it. Thomas of Lancaster went on to say, according to the chronicler Froissart, that ‘this is no life for men-at-arms who ought to win honour through deeds of arms and put their bodies to work’.

In 1383 the young king declared that he was now prepared to rule in person, having taken the precaution of marrying Anne, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, at the beginning of
the previous year. Both parties were fifteen years old, and Anne was described by a chronicler as ‘a tiny scrap of humanity’. Now bolstered by formidable marital relatives, and by his own assumption of power, Richard felt able to choose his advisers beyond the charmed circle of the hereditary lords. This was not to the taste of his uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock – dukes of Lancaster and Gloucester respectively – who withdrew from the court in protest against what they called ‘evil advisers’. Richard feared Gaunt and Woodstock, as possible claimants for the throne, and he filled his household with favourites. The new king was lavish in the grants of lands, castles and titles; he borrowed heavily, and was obliged to give the crown of England as security. The old lords, out of favour and denied gifts, were growing restless. It is the familiar story of jealousy and suspicion, compounded by the king’s own secretive and sensitive temperament. The court had become a dangerous place once more.