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Lords, Lollards, Heretics and Peasants in Revolt

I am the saviour of the poor.

William Longbeard

THE ‘COMMUNE’ OF LONDON

Westminster Abbey was consecrated in 1065, but the first monarch to be crowned there did not last twelve months. Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, lost his life the following year at the Battle of Hastings. Despite his victory, William of Normandy knew that he couldn’t control England without occupying London. As the twelfth-century Song of the Battle of Hastings had it: ‘London is a great city, overflowing with forward inhabitants and richer in treasure than the rest of the kingdom. Protected on the left side by its walls, on the right side by the river, it neither fears its enemies nor dreads being taken by storm.’ And indeed William could not conquer London by storm. An assault on London Bridge failed, and so William laid waste to Southwark and the countryside for miles around. He did, however, eventually gain the City but not without meeting opposition:

Upon entering the city some scouts, sent ahead, found many rebels determined to offer every possible resistance. Fighting followed immediately and thus London was plunged into mourning for the loss of her sons and citizens. When the Londoners finally realized that they could resist no longer, they gave hostages and surrendered themselves and all they possessed to the most noble conqueror and hereditary lord.1

William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. The London that William now ruled was already the largest and richest city in his kingdom, the centre of national and international trade, but it was not the political or royal capital. William’s need to guard himself ‘against the fickleness of the vast and fierce population’ led to the construction of three towers: Baynard’s Castle, Montfichet Tower and the White Tower. The first two were later demolished, but the limestone White Tower still dominates the Tower of London, surrounded now by the walls added in the thirteenth century.

The City government that would come to dominate the affairs of the capital was still embryonic. There would be no mayor for 100 years and the two sheriffs, royal appointees responsible for delivering tax to the Crown, were named the leading officials. But the City was already divided into twenty-four wards, and the aldermen who would represent them on the City’s governing council were beginning to appear. The trade guilds and fraternities were also in formation.

An important opening episode in the City of London’s long struggle with the Crown followed the death of Henry I in 1135. The succession was disputed between Henry’s daughter Matilda and Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois. The powerful group of nobles backing Stephen got their way, but at the cost of plunging the nation into nearly twenty years of civil strife. Chroniclers describe this period as one in which ‘Christ and his saints were asleep’, while Victorian historians called it simply ‘The Anarchy’.

Stephen’s base of support was in south-east England, but the Crown was too weak to impose order. This gave the City of London an unusual moment of leverage. In Stephen’s time of greatest danger, while held captive in Winchester by Matilda in 1141, he obtained the support of London by granting it virtual commune status. This is the closest the City came to being a self-governing urban confederation able to collect its own taxes and choose its own officials on the European model. In return, when Matilda tried to have herself crowned queen while she held Stephen captive, the masses of London rose and attacked her and her supporters at their pre-coronation feast. They were driven from the City and Londoners also provided the arms to free Stephen from his captivity in Winchester. The commune status of London was reasserted in 1191.

London first began to express its independence from the Crown in the twelfth century. This was, of course, nothing resembling democracy but rather the ability of the aldermen to select their own sheriff following the model of city states, like those in northern Italy. But the concessions that the City was able to extract from weak or cash-strapped monarchs fell far short of the ideal. Italian Republics or the communes found in Flanders and the Rhineland were widespread in the feudal period, but not in England. They were based on a pledge of allegiance among citizens that released them from aristocratic or royal control. This pact offered a completely different form of social coexistence: a ‘community of equals’ governed by a social contract.2 London never achieved this status, but its struggle for autonomy was a feature of the conflicts with the Crown in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What the London elite wanted was the liberty to appoint their own administrative leader, run their own legal system, gather their own taxes, and regulate their own trade. Even powerful monarchs might be minded to grant some of these wishes, if they thought it would enhance London’s prosperity and therefore their own income.

London’s would-be governing classes only began to achieve some autonomy in the reigns of King Richard I and King John, between 1189 and 1216. Richard’s absence in Palestine gave the City the chance to ally with John against Richard’s unpopular deputy, William Longchamp, Constable of the Tower. In return for supporting John’s claim to rule in Richard’s absence, London’s aldermen were given the right to choose a mayor. On Richard’s return, however, the City refused to back John’s attempt to take the throne in 1194. Yet when he eventually became king in 1199, and upon payment of a gift of 1,500 marks, he allowed the commune to stand. For the further sum of 3,000 marks the City was permitted to elect its own sheriff.

Paradoxically, King John’s defeat by the barons who forced him to sign Magna Carta in June 1215 at Runnymede was the event that finally institutionalized the concessions he had made to the City years before. In order to buy London’s loyalty against the barons, John granted the City a new charter in May 1215 that introduced the principle of an annually elected mayor. But a minority of the City sided with the barons and, despite John’s concessions, opened the gates to the barons a few days later. This allowed the barons to use the City as a base for their negotiations with the king, and as a result the City’s ‘ancient liberties and customs’ were inscribed in Magna Carta itself. From now on the sheriffs were elected by the City oligarchy and increasingly subordinate to the mayor. And the mayor was elected from among the aldermen each October at a gathering of the ‘commonal­ty’, those who had gained by inheritance, purchase, or apprenticeship the right to name the ‘citizen’ or ‘freeman’ of the City. From now on, mayor and aldermen became increasingly responsible for the law in the City.

This was obviously not democracy in the modern sense, since it excluded apprentices, masterless men, wage labourers, the poor in general and women in total. But neither was it a complete sham, for these excluded classes were not as numerous as they are now, and the ‘citizens’ represented a broad swathe of the population, many of whom were not part of the traditional feudal ruling class. These layers came to form the Common Council of the City, which the aldermen were likely to consult on matters of importance. By the fourteenth century the members of the Council were elected by wards and, sometimes, guilds. Although it may have been used earlier, the Guildhall was from the twelfth century the meeting place of City administration, such as it was. In 1411 the hall was rebuilt on a grander scale, and much of the original remains visible in the modern building.

The London oligarchy which ran this system was rich from land, commerce and trade, and royal patronage. They owned shops and tenements, warehouses and quays, urban and rural manors. They were traders, but not exclusively so and not in a single commodity – that would come later. As some trades and businesses prospered and others faltered, so power migrated from one section of the elite to another. But we should be careful of concluding that these interests always put the City elite at odds with the Crown. The City wanted self-government, but it also needed an economic and a foreign policy that suited its interests, and this was something that only the Crown could provide. Moreover, the Crown was a market in its own right and most members of the London elite profited directly from royal contracts and employment. Over half the sheriffs and aldermen between 1200 and 1340 whose interests can be identified held posts in the Royal Exchequer or the Royal Wardrobe, were royal suppliers or contractors, or were in some other way in Crown service.3

There were always, however, underlying tensions in the relationship between Crown and City. And at certain moments the voice of the citizens, and sometimes of the popular mass below them, could exploit these tensions with movements and demands of their own. One such moment was seized by William Longbeard.

THE REBELLION OF WILLIAM LONGBEARD

William Longbeard’s 1196 revolt is little studied by historians, but it is an early example of a class revolt in English history, and it was no accident that it happened in London.4 Longbeard’s true name was William fitz Osbern and he seems to have been a member of London’s elite: ‘in origin of the most noble citizens of London’. He was possibly a lawyer and seems to have taken part in the Third Crusade, which again suggests a relatively high social rank. Nevertheless, in the early stages of the revolt – which may have lasted for over a year – he appealed to the king to lift the burden of taxation on the poor. Longbeard’s complaint in particular was against the ‘insolence of the rich and powerful’ and their plans to place the tax burden upon the poor. A contemporary chronicler, Roger of Howden, records that ‘the rich men, sparing their own purses, wanted the poor to pay everything’, and notes that William Longbeard ‘becoming sensible of this, being inflamed by zeal for justice and equity . . . became the champion of the poor, it being his wish that every person, both rich as well as poor, should give according to his property and means, for all the necessities of the state.’5

Longbeard’s campaign began with his discovery of the Court’s plan to increase the burden of taxation on the poor. His followers, at least to begin with, seem to have been drawn from both the poor and the ‘middling people’. They were bound together by the taking of some sort of oath. William of Newburgh records that some 52,000 citizens were organized in Longbeard’s conspiracy, ‘the names of each being, as it afterwards appeared, written down’. Dominic Alexander considers these numbers vastly exaggerated, but Longbeard’s organization does seem to have been on an impressive scale. Certainly this initial phase of revolt was enough to provoke the nobles’ ‘indignation’ against this agitator. This may have been Longbeard’s motivation in crossing the Channel to France to see Richard I, in a bid to gain royal approval for his actions. He seems to have succeeded, since it is reported that on his return to London, Longbeard behaved ‘as if under the countenance of the royal favour’.6

It remained standard practice up to and including the start of the English Revolution for those rebelling against authority to claim that they were doing so in the name of the monarch. But Longbeard’s use of this stratagem may have had specific meaning at this moment. When Richard I came to the throne, he granted London extensive self-government after Henry II had limited it severely. ‘So the London elite, those families providing the Mayor and Aldermen, had only just attained a degree of self-government. The liberties granted by the King to London were new and could have been revoked, so Longbeard may have been trying to play the London elite and the King against each other.’7

Archbishop Hubert Walter had other ideas: he ‘was clearly intent on bringing royal power’ to repress Longbeard. Walter took action to suppress ‘rumours’, and also took hostages from wealthy Londoners to enforce quiescence. It seems this crackdown divided Longbeard’s supporters, silencing some of the better-off, and that Longbeard responded by appealing more directly to popular forces; Roger of Wendover’s account highlights the political organization that the rebellion entailed. Longbeard ‘in contempt of the king’s majesty, convoked assemblies of people, and binding many to him by oath at their meetings’ he at last ‘raised a sedition and disturbance in St Paul’s church’. William of Newburgh records what Longbeard said to his audiences:

I am the saviour of the poor. Oh poor, who have experienced the heaviness of rich men’s hands, drink from my wells the waters of the doctrine of salvation, and you may do this joyfully; for the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters. The people are the waters. I will divide the humble and faithful people from the haughty and treacherous people: I will separate the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness.8

Dominic Alexander comments on this remarkable speech, ‘He, or Newburgh for him, is directly associating the “poor” with the saved and the powerful with the damned. If still in the eleventh century “pauperes” could refer simply to the religious, here economic categories have fully invaded spiritual ones. Newburgh presumably intends his readership to understand the shocking social meaning of the message.’9 Longbeard reacted to Hubert’s intervention by ‘convoking public meetings by his own authority, in which he arrogantly proclaimed himself the king or saviour of the poor’, according to Newburgh.10

Longbeard’s message was popular, and his following substantial. Archbishop Walter’s strategy was to wait until he was apart from his followers and surprise him. Two ‘noble citizens’ thus watched for a time when he was ‘unattended by his mob’, now that ‘the people out of fear for the hostages had become more quiet’. In due course, on the orders of the Archbishop, they seized their opportunity to make an arrest. Longbeard and his party resisted, and in the struggle one of his assailants was killed with his own weapon. After the fight Longbeard’s party took refuge in St Mary-le-Bow, in the heart of the City. The Archbishop now laid siege to the troop and even took the sacrilegious action of breaking the sanctuary of the Church and setting it ablaze.11

The fire forced Longbeard’s group from the Church and, as he emerged, a relative of the assailant who had died in the original attack lunged at Longbeard and ‘cut open his belly with a knife’.12 All of the group were subsequently condemned to death by the king’s court, on the direction of Archbishop Walter. Longbeard was dragged from the Tower by horses to Tyburn, where he and his nine followers were all hanged. ‘In this yere was one William with the long berde taken out of Bowe churche and put to dethe for herysey’, recorded the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London.13 Others of his followers had to give hostages to the Archbishop as guarantors of good behaviour.

The Longbeard rebellion was over. But there is evidence that his reputation and ideas lived on in popular memory. And Longbeard’s rebellion was not the last, nor the greatest, challenge to feudal authority.

JEWS IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

The first sizeable Jewish immigration into Britain came with William the Conqueror in 1066. They were moneylenders from Rouen. As Christians were forbidden to lend money, Jews played this critical role in medieval society, not least for the Crown. In return they were supposed to enjoy royal protection. Both moneylending and the protection of the monarch were likely to make Jews, at particular times, the target of popular hostility. This was stoked by their designation as ‘Christ-killers’, and by the ideology that underpinned the Crusades from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century.

The Jews settled around Jew Street (now Old Jewry) and Cheapside. Until 1177 the only Jewish cemetery was in Cripplegate. From the middle of the twelfth century the rise of Italian banking houses gave the monarchs an alternative – Christian – source of finance. It was Richard I’s coronation that occasioned the first series of pogroms against Jews. Elders who came to pay their respects to the new king at Westminster unwittingly sparked a riot that left thirty Jewish families dead. John Stow records looting of the Jewish community in London during the Barons’ Wars, 1199–1216. In 1215 the Pope enacted a decree that all non-Christians (that is, Muslims and Jews) should have to wear distinguishing clothing to prevent them mingling with Christians. In 1262 a London mob attacked a synagogue at Lothbury in the heart of the City, killing 700 people. In 1282 the Bishop of London was ordered to destroy all synagogues in his diocese.

In 1275 Edward I issued the Statute of Jewry which prohibited Jews from charging interest on loans and ruled, on pain of forfeit, that they must collect all outstanding debts by the following Easter. The new Statute also made it law that all Jews from the age of seven had to wear a yellow felt badge six inches long and three inches wide. A poll tax of 3 pence was imposed on every Jew over the age of 12 years. Finally the Jews were ordered out of England. On 18 July 1290 every Jew was told to leave the country. About 16,000 Jews were forced to flee.

Jews were not the only ‘aliens’ who were the victims of the prejudice generated by the economic contradictions of medieval society. These paradoxes were ultimately rooted in the social structure defended by elites, but they could not help but affect the lives of ordinary Londoners. Consequently there could be a popular dimension to prejudice, although it was rarely universal or uncontested. Besides Jews there were many other trading communities in medieval London. Italian merchants could be found around modern day Lombard Street and excavations at One Poultry found a large tenement let to merchants from Lucca, Tuscany, in 1355. The site of Cannon Street station was once a walled enclave of German traders from the Hanseatic League, who had arrived in London in the mid-1200s. We know of the Flemish community and the peasants who invaded London in 1381 singled them out as a result of the trade wars that had been raging in the preceding period. One account reminds us that they suffered along with the elites as targets of the Revolt: ‘on Corpus Christi day, was the rising of Kent and Essex, and they ware called Jake Strawes men, and came to London, and . . . went to the tower of London, and there toke out sir Simon Beuerle (Sudbury) Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England . . . and divers other, and beheaded them at the Tower Hill, and slew many Flemings and other men.’14

THE CITY AND THE CROWN

Division between City and Crown also gave space to popular revolt in the thirteenth century. In 1245 Henry III’s establishment of two new fairs in Westminster, outside City jurisdiction, directly affecting trade and his repeated meddling with London government angered the City oligarchy. In the 1260s his polices of granting access to London markets to foreign traders, heavy taxation and royal favouritism further annoyed the City.

The first we know of St Paul’s Cross, the preaching cross and open-air pulpit in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, is in 1236 when a king’s justice convened a folkmoot, or general assembly of the people, to proclaim Henry III’s desire that London should be well governed. In 1259 a second meeting at St Paul’s Cross was more divisive when Londoners were summoned to swear allegiance to Henry. They did so, but only because the army held the gates of the city. Later they reassembled on the same spot and swore allegiance to Simon de Montfort, whose baronial challenge to Henry became the trigger for popular mobs to take to the London streets, besieging Henry’s Queen Eleanor in the Tower. One alderman was aghast at the intervention of the popular movement:

This mayor . . . has so pampered the City populace, that, styling themselves the ‘Commons of the City’, they had obtained the first voice in the City. For the Mayor, in doing all that he had to do, acted and determined through them, and would say to them, – ‘Is it your will that so it shall be’ and then, if they answered ‘Ya, Ya’, so it was done. And on the other hand, the aldermen, or chief citizens were little or not at all consulted on such a matter.15

The defeat of de Montfort’s revolt ended the popular movement. Henry III’s heir Prince Edward had a hand in the subsequent punishment of the City, and when he succeeded to the throne in 1272 he remodelled City government. Edward I finished the inner wall of the Tower begun by his father, and added an outer wall. This did not prevent a fresh outbreak of disorders in 1284, when a leading member of the Goldsmiths’ Company was killed in St Mary-le-Bow, the site of Longbeard’s last stand the century before. That and the riot at Newgate prison a year later gave Edward the pretext for an even harsher set of penal codes, and, when the mayor and aldermen protested, he replaced them with a royal warden. In 1289 a final humiliation was visited on the City: a royal treasurer was sent into Guildhall to take control of City finances.

This long night of exclusion for the City elite lasted through most of the reign of Edward II; some of its powers were returned in the charters granted in 1319 and in 1327, the year that Edward III came to the throne.

Much of Edward III’s reign was peaceable in the City of London, if bloody on the fields of the Hundred Years War. But in the late 1300s the relationship between the City and the Crown was becoming unstable once again. The debts of the Hundred Years War hung heavily around the neck of the monarchy and the glorious victories of the English archers, at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers a decade later, were fading from memory. But one aspect of the battles of the mid-century did perhaps linger in the minds of the men who fought in France. Those battles had meant that ‘the prestige of the armoured feudal cavalry had received its death blow’, because the longbow ‘placed the trained peasant archer on terms of equality with his lord, robbing the latter of his main claim to special consideration, his position as a specialist in war’.16

For much of his reign Edward III held sway over the City of London, even when unpopular policies like selling licences to Italian merchants raised royal revenues at domestic merchants’ expense. But as the king grew old, the City began to flex its muscles. The ‘good Parliament’ of 1376, as part of a wider purge of those loyal to the Crown, impeached three aldermen who were allies of the king. Power increasingly fell into the hands of the king’s son, the duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. At first he placated powerful London wool merchants by re-establishing the monopoly practice whereby English wool was only to be traded on favourable terms through Calais, then an English possession, the so-called Calais staple.

John of Gaunt also feted the rogue but popular member of the Court of Aldermen, John de Northampton. In doing so he set in train a three-way search for alliances in the City. The mayor and aldermen, fearing John of Gaunt’s alliance with Northampton, did their own deal with him. This required them to accede to Northampton’s demand that the Common Council be elected by the misteries or guilds, the craft organizations, rather than the wards, and that it be consulted by the aldermen twice a quarter. Thus the infighting among the elite paved the way for changes to the way London worked, and to the City constitution, that had radical implications for the future.

The following year, 1377, the tables turned again. Edward III died and Richard II, at barely eleven years old, became king. Meanwhile John of Gaunt remained the de facto ruler of the country, and was no lover of the City’s liberties. When it was rumoured that he intended to bring the City under royal control, a mob attacked his Savoy Palace, sited on the Strand with gardens running down to the Thames and one of the grandest palaces in Europe. It was an ominous foretaste of events during the revolt four years later. But John of Gaunt pressed on: in 1377 the Gloucester Parliament withdrew the concessions of the previous year and enabled Italian merchants to trade directly between Genoa and Southampton, thus revoking the monopoly of the Calais staple. The City was prepared to pay the Crown handsomely for this entitlement to be returned to them, but the Italian merchants’ pockets were deeper. Moreover, French naval strength constituted a threat to English merchant trade with which John of Gaunt seemed incapable of dealing. By the time the Peasants’ Revolt exploded a few years later, there were some among the City elite that looked on it with some sympathy, at least in its opening phases.17 As contemporary chronicler Canon Henry Knighton recorded, ‘During this crisis, the commons held the peaceful duke of Lancaster as their most hated enemy of all mortal men and would certainly have destroyed him immediately if they had found him . . .’.18

THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT

The greatest revolt of the feudal era in England took place in 1381. It was essentially a rural rising but the source of the trouble, as the peasant insurrectionists realized, lay in the capital; and it was to London they came to get redress. Wages had been rising because of the labour shortage created by the Black Death. All figures are estimates in this period, but the plague killed perhaps a third of London’s population of 45,000 when it first struck the city in 1349. There were further outbreaks in 1361 and 1368. However, the authorities attempted to depress wages to pre-Black Death levels by imposing the Statute of Labourers, that sought not only to reduce pay but also to prevent labourers from moving out of their locality and to ban day-labour in favour of a yearly contract. In addition the poll tax of 1380 was the latest of three such taxes raised since 1377; but the 1380 tax was three times higher – one shilling for every man and woman over the age of fifteen. It was, as one unknown poet wrote, a tax that ‘has tenet [harmed] us alle’. And, as with Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax in the 1980s, tens of thousands disappeared from the tax roll to avoid payment long before the revolt flared into the open.

The revolt began in Brentwood, Essex, on 30 May 1381 as a Royal Commission arrived to assess evasion of the third poll tax, and lasted through the first half of June. The uprisings spread rapidly, partly as a result of deliberate organization by the rebels and partly as a result of the use of feast days and other traditional moments of collective celebration, as well as the meetings of manorial courts and the visitation of royal justices, as occasions to spread dissension. The ‘hue and cry’ would be sent out and church bells rung to summon the rebels. John Ball, one of the leaders of the revolt, is said to have written:

John Ball greeteth you all

And doth to understand he hath rung your bell,

Now with might and right, will and skill,

God speed every dell.19

Surviving letters from John Ball to his supporters cryptically encourage the commons while urging them to disciplined, collective action. He urges them to stand ‘together in God’s name’, to ‘chastise well Hob the Robber’ and to observe one leader rather than act individually. Ball uses code to communicate with fellow rebel leaders. He is ‘John Schep’, while others include ‘John Nameles’, ‘John the Miller’, ‘John Carter’, ‘John Trewman’ and ‘Piers Plowman’.

Ball certainly had a previous record of opposition to authority, as noted by Jean Froissart – the remarkable French historian and sometime employee of the queen of England whose chronicle provides one of the greatest, if hostile, accounts of the rising.20 Froissart was deeply committed to the notion of medieval chivalry, and acutely sensitive to any affront to authority. Speaking of the peasants, he tells us:

These unhappy people of these said countries began to stir, because they said . . . they were neither angels nor spirits, but men formed to the similitude of their lords, saying why should they then be kept so under like beasts; the which they said they would no longer suffer, for they would be all one, and if they laboured or did anything for their lords, they would have wages therefor as well as other.21

John Ball was a former priest and Froissart records that he would ‘oftentimes on the Sundays after mass, when the people were going out of the minster, to go into the cloister and preach, and made the people to assemble about him, and would say thus:

Ah, ye good people, the matters goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall not do till everything be common, and that there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we may be all united together, and that the lords be no greater masters than we be.

Ball questioned why some were kept in servitude when we ‘all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve’. He asked how the aristocracy could show that ‘they be greater lords than we be’. As the Church was the main ideological institution of feudal society, all social conflict was addressed in theological terms, and clerics like Ball were educated men equipped to give political leadership. And some of them stood close enough to the people to share their grievances. There is an unmistakable economic content to Ball’s words when he says:

They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with poor cloth: they have their wines, spices and good bread, and we have the drawing out of the chaff and drink water: they dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and travail, rain and wind in the fields; and by that that cometh of our labours they keep and maintain their estates: we be called their bondmen, and without we do readily them service, we be beaten; and we have no sovereign to whom we may complain, nor that will hear us nor do us right.

Ball’s solution was to ‘go to the king, he is young, and shew him what servage we be in, and shew him how we will have it otherwise, or else we will provide us of some remedy’. He was confident that ‘if we go together, all manner of people that be now in any bondage will follow us to the intent to be made free; and when the king seeth us, we shall have some remedy, either by fairness or otherwise’.22

This is all of a piece with John Ball’s most famous saying, the rhetorical question that suggested an absence of class difference in Eden: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ The message made John Ball popular: ‘wherefore many of the mean people loved him, and such as intended to no goodness said how he said truth; and so they would murmur one with another in the fields and in the ways as they went together, affirming how John Ball said truth.’

The archbishop of Canterbury, however, did not love him. When he heard what Ball was preaching he ‘caused him to be taken and put in prison a two or three months to chastise him’. But this was useless, because ‘when this John Ball was out of prison, he returned again to his error, as he did before’. Froissart concludes: ‘it had been much better at the beginning that he had been condemned to perpetual prison or else to have died, rather than to have suffered him to have been again delivered out of prison.’23

Ball seems to have had particular appeal in London. Froissart records that ‘of his words and deeds there were much people in London informed, such as had great envy at them that were rich and such as were noble; and then they began to speak among them and said how the realm of England was right evil governed, and how that gold and silver was taken from them by them that were named noblemen: so thus these unhappy men of London began to rebel . . .’. Froissart even suggests that it was Londoners that ‘sent word to the foresaid countries that they should come to London and bring their people with them, promising them how they should find London open to receive them and the commons of the city to be of the same accord’, although it seems unlikely that the revolt was actually stirred up by the metropolis.24 At any rate it was the surrounding counties, especially Essex and Kent, that rose up in revolt with John Ball, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw at their head.25

A huge mass of rebels, some 60,000 in Froissart’s exaggerated estimate, now converged on London.26 And, as English peasants were accustomed to do, they bore arms – often the very same bows that had proved so effective at Crécy and Poitiers. The rebels caught up with the king’s mother on her way back from a pilgrimage, but she was unharmed. Having collected greater numbers in Canterbury and Rochester, the marchers arrived at Blackheath in South East London. There they took the family of one Sir John Newton hostage and sent him to Richard II, who was at the Tower of London with his courtiers. Sir John apologized profusely for the message he bore, which was a clear summons to the king to meet the rebels. Richard was forced to agree. ‘In the morning on Corpus Christi day King Richard heard mass in the Tower of London, and all his lords, and then he took his barge with the earl of Salisbury, the earl of Warwick, the earl of Oxford and certain knights, and so rowed down along the Thames to Rotherhithe, whereas was descended down the hill a ten thousand men to see the king and to speak with him.’

But the threat of the crowd was too terrifying for Richard to disembark as the rebels wanted. When the mob handed over a list of those they wanted executed, Richard refused this demand also. He would not even speak with them, and returned to the Tower, which ignited the anger of the crowd, and ‘they cried all with one voice, “Let us go to London”.’ As they moved towards London Bridge they pulled down the houses of the courtiers and the rich and broke open the Marshalsea prison. Finding the gates of the bridge closed the rebels threatened to take the city by storm, but Londoners inside the gates put their heads together, saying ‘Why do we not let these good people enter into the city? They are your fellows, and that that they do is for us.’ The gates were opened and the Peasants’ Revolt poured into the capital through Aldgate, where Geoffrey Chaucer had his lodgings.27

According to Froissart, the following day a crowd of some 20,000 followed John Ball, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw towards Westminster. Along the Strand they came to the Savoy Palace of the hated John of Gaunt, one of the main inspirers of the poll tax. The crowd – much more determined than it had been four years earlier – broke into the opulent residence and pillaged it, killing John of Gaunt’s servants. Then it was set on fire. At the same time the anger built up over many years was also spent in killing Flemish immigrants and those associated with the Italian merchants: ‘they brake up divers houses of the Lombards and robbed them and took their goods at their pleasure, for there was none that durst say them nay.’ Wat Tyler got his revenge on a rich merchant who had ill-treated him in the past, parading his severed head on spear-point.28

When they got to Westminster the rebels broke open the prison. They then surged back to the Tower to confront the king. That night the crowd assembled at St Katherine’s in front of the Tower of London, ‘saying how they would never depart thence till they had the king at their pleasure’. Richard was advised by ‘his brethren and lords and by Sir Nicholas Walworth, mayor of London, and divers other notable and rich burgesses, that in the night time they should issue out of the Tower and enter into the city, and so to slay all these unhappy people, while they were at their rest and asleep’. But the plan was not acted upon for fear it might provoke an even more extensive rising of the ‘commons of the city’.

The embattled royal party then decided that if force was not yet possible, fraud should be attempted. ‘The Earl of Salisbury and the wise men about the king said: “Sir, if ye can appease them with fairness, it were best and most profitable, and to grant them everything that they desire, for if we should begin a thing the which we could not achieve, we should never recover it again, but we and our heirs ever to be disinherited.”’ The following day when the crowd at St Katherine’s began ‘to cry and shout, and said, without the king would come out and speak with them, they would assail the Tower and take it by force, and slay all them that were within’, Richard decided that he would have to speak to them. He ‘sent to them that they should all draw to a fair plain place called Mile-end . . . and there it was cried in the king’s name, that whosoever would speak with the king let him go to the said place, and there he should not fail to find the king’.29

The king’s party rode out of the Tower hoping to reach Mile End Green. But ‘as soon as the Tower gate opened . . . then Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball and more than four hundred entered into the Tower and brake up chamber after chamber’. When they came on the archbishop of Canterbury, the ‘chief chancellor of England’, ‘these gluttons took him and strake off his head’. Three others met the same fate ‘and these four heads were set on four long spears . . . to be borne before them through the streets of London and at last set them a-high on London bridge, as though they had been traitors to the king and to the realm’. The crowd also broke into the bedroom of the king’s mother and – in an eerie precursor to the incident during the student demonstrations of 2010, when Prince Charles’s wife Camilla was poked with a placard pole in their car in central London – the peasants poked the princess with a stick and asked her for a kiss, though she suffered no worse.30

At Mile End Green the King came face to face with ‘three-score thousand men of divers villages and of sundry countries in England’. Wisely the King spoke to them ‘sweetly’, addressing them as ‘ye good people’ and asking ‘what lack ye? what will ye say?’ The reply was straightforward: ‘We will that ye make us free for ever, ourselves, our heirs and our lands, and that we be called no more bond nor so reputed.’

In this remarkable, unique confrontation between bondsmen and their overlord, the king replied: ‘Sirs, I am well agreed thereto. Withdraw you home into your own houses and into such villages as ye came from, and leave behind you of every village two or three, and I shall cause writings to be made and seal them with my seal, the which they shall have with them, containing everything that ye demand’. The king also agreed to ‘pardon everything that ye have done hitherto, so that ye follow my banners and return home to your houses.’

Some were satisfied with the undertakings that Richard gave them. But ‘Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball said, for all that these people were thus appeased, yet they would not depart so’; according to Froissart, some 30,000 stayed with them.31

The following day Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball assembled with some 20,000 at Smithfield, then the site of a horse market, and told the crowd that they had done ‘nothing as yet’. According to Froissart the plan was to take control of London. He records the crowd being told: ‘These liberties that the king hath given us is to us but a small profit: therefore let us be all of one accord and let us overrun this rich and puissant city.’ We cannot know how this scheme would have fared for at this moment, seemingly by accident, the king and a party of forty horsemen came into the area in front of the abbey of Saint Bartholomew. In Froissart’s account, when Wat Tyler saw the king he told his supporters, ‘Sirs, yonder is the king: I will go and speak with him. Stir not from hence, without I make you a sign; and when I make you that sign, come on and slay all them except the king; but do the king no hurt, he is young, we shall do with him as we list and shall lead him with us all about England, and so shall we be lords of all the realm without doubt.’ Tyler then rode out and asked the king if he saw his supporters ranged behind him. He told Richard that this mass were sworn to him in ‘faith and truth, to do all that I will have them’.

There then followed an exchange about the letters which the king had promised he would send to the counties freeing the peasants. But as this discussion took place Tyler ‘cast his eye’ on a squire in the king’s party that seems to have been an old enemy. He demanded that the king tell the squire to ‘Give me thy dagger.’ The king instructed him to do so, and Tyler then demanded that he ‘Give me also that sword.’ This was refused, and in the ensuing squabble the king ‘began to chafe and said to the mayor: “Set hands on him.”’ The mayor drew his sword and ‘strake Tyler so great a stroke on the head, that he fell down at the feet of his horse, and as soon as he was fallen, they environed him all about, whereby he was not seen of his company. Then a squire of the king’s alighted, called John Standish, and he drew out his sword and put it into Wat Tyler’s belly, and so he died.’32

Tyler’s supporters, on realizing that their leader had been killed, ‘arranged themselves on the place in manner of battle, and their bows before them’, as their forebears had done at Crécy and Poitiers. Richard rode out to confront them alone. He said: ‘Sirs, what aileth you? Ye shall have no captain but me: I am your king: be all in rest and peace.’ This seems to have been enough to divide the rebellion. Some began to ‘wax peaceable and to depart’, others did not. But now the king’s loyalists from the City began to arrive, and the balance of forces turned against the rebels. The king knighted John Standish, Tyler’s assassin, and two others and sent them to demand that the banners and letters freeing the bondsmen be returned, and that the crowd disperse. The gambit worked, and Richard tore up the letters granting freedom to the peasants. ‘Thus these foolish people departed, some one way and some another’, writes Froissart, ‘and the king and his lords and all his company right ordinately entered into London with great joy.’ John Ball and Jack Straw were caught and beheaded. Their heads, with Wat Tyler’s, were displayed on London Bridge. Richard II told his mother, ‘I have this day recovered mine heritage and the realm of England, the which I had near lost.’33

The Peasants’ Revolt did not end with the defeat in London. Related revolts occurred at St Albans (beginning 14 June), Bury St Edmunds (14 June), Norfolk (14 June), and Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire (15–17 June). On 15 June the townsfolk of Cambridge rioted against the University, particularly attacking Corpus Christi College. By the end, ‘all England south and east of a line drawn from York to Bristol had risen.’34 Not even the eventual defeat of the whole revolt could return Richard’s kingdom to its condition before the Black Death. As the historian Gerald Harriss says, ‘political society had always lived in fear of social revolution, and in 1381 it peered into the abyss and took heed.’35 Although there was retribution by the ruling class, and the attempts to tamp down wages continued, the poll tax passed by Parliament in 1382 was to be levied only on landowners. By 1389, justices of the peace had gained the power to set local pay scales. Wages rose steadily, and by the end of the century they were at a historic high. Increasingly peasants held their land not in return for servile duties but on payment of rent. Landlords who lived from rent, yeoman farmers who paid it, and free wage-labourers (unable to find that rent) were becoming more widespread.

THE MURMURINGS OF THE LOLLARDS

The rise of the Wycliffe heresy coincided with the Peasants’ Revolt. John Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire around 1330 and became a leading theologian at Oxford just as strains within the English church itself, and between that Church and Rome, were becoming more visible. In London in 1312 the mayor and aldermen complained that the monasteries and other religious landlords around the City paid nothing toward the upkeep of the City wall and defences, despite raking in a third of all the City’s rental income and owning, by some estimates, almost two-thirds of the land. The Church hierarchy was seen by many as corrupt, worldly and incapable of giving spiritual guidance, and in defiance barbers, cordwainers and other artisans were opening their shops on Sundays. In 1468 shoemakers defied a Papal Bull which directed them to stop Sunday trading, saying that ‘the pope’s curse was not worth a fly’.36

The Black Death removed a good number of priests, as many high-ranking clergy fled the stricken areas. This meant that in order to bury the dead and perform marriages and baptisms, new untrained clergy emerged. These people often owned no land and lived in poverty. The orthodox Christian view was that man was sinful and all his privations were directed by God, but some of the new clergy – and John Ball is a representative figure in this context – felt the pain of the peasants. Ball’s religious standpoint was evangelical, and he talked to his audience directly.

This new fervour coincided with John Wycliffe’s attack on Rome. The English Church paid too much money to the pope, in Wycliffe’s view. He opposed the Church hierarchy and justified this belief with a ‘true reading’ of the Bible. Even more heretically, he believed the Bible should be printed in English: ‘Englishmen learn Christ’s law best in English. Moses heard God’s law in his own tongue; so did Christ’s apostles.’ This was a revolutionary view, because religion could now be used for the people instead of against them. The Church authorities responded by declaring: ‘By this translation, the Scriptures have become vulgar, and they are more available to lay, and even to women who can read, than they were to learned scholars, who have a high intelligence. So the pearl of the gospel is scattered and trodden underfoot by swine.’37

Wycliffe appealed to a wider public by presenting his views to Parliament and having them printed in a tract, accompanied by additional notes and explanations. In March 1378, after the Parliament had met, he was hauled to the Palace of Lambeth to answer for his views. The proceedings had barely begun before an angry crowd gathered with the aim of protecting him from persecution. Two years later – the year of the Peasants’ Revolt – Wycliffe and his followers were dismissed from Oxford, but this merely created an evangelical corps that preached throughout the country. In 1382 the crowd again interrupted the Synod at Blackfriars when it discussed Wycliffe’s doctrines. The London supporters of Wycliffe were sophisticated enough to support his views despite the fact that they detested his patron, John of Gaunt. Although London was not as important a centre of support for Wycliffe as Oxford, it was said that ‘Londoners began to grow insolent beyond measure . . . they not only abominated the negligence of the curates but detested their avarice.’38

Wycliffe died in 1384, leaving the first English-language Bible to be completed by his associate, John Purvey. Such was the impact of Wycliffe’s teachings that thirty years later they were condemned by the Council of Constance as heretical; his body was exhumed from its resting place in his parish of Lutterworth, and burnt. The ashes were eventually scattered into the river Swift, but, as Thomas Fuller recorded: ‘This brook conveyed them to the Avon, the Avon to the Severn; the Severn to the narrow seas; they into the main Ocean; and thus the ashes of Wycliffe were the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed the whole world over.’39 Yet it was less the current of the tides and more the activity of Wycliffe’s followers, armed with the unique weapon of the Wycliffe Bible, that spread his message.

Wycliffe’s followers were known as Lollards and were strongest in the counties around London, Kent, Sussex and Essex. The origin of the term is disputed, but its most likely root is the Dutch word for ‘mummer’, related to the word ‘lullaby’: it refers to the Lollards’ habit of talking or singing in a low voice to, as their persecutors said, ‘conceal heretical principles or vicious conduct under a mask of piety.’40 In May 1394 the Lollards presented a petition to Parliament which struck at the roots of corruption in the Church, blaming ‘conformity with the precedents of Rome’ for ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ leaving the national Church. It lambasted the ‘English priesthood derived from Rome’ for ‘pretending a power superior to angels’. It attacked idolatry in terms that would become part of mainstream Puritanism and echo in the debates of the English Revolution. And it insisted on the separation of Church and state: ‘the joining of the offices of prince and bishop, prelate and secular judge, in the same person, is plain mismanagement and puts the kingdom out of the right way.’ It also offered the view that ‘the taking away of any man’s life, either in war or in courts of justice, is expressly contrary to the New Testament.’41

By the early fifteenth century the state was engaged in severe repression of Lollardy, including, for the first time, burning lay-heretics at the stake. In 1414 there was an attempted Lollard rising in London in response to the arrest on Twelfth Night of ‘certain persons called Lollards, at the sign of the Axe, without Bishop’s Gate’. Sir John Oldcastle, friend of King Henry V and a model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, was already being held in the Tower for Lollardy. He escaped and tried to raise an insurrection which involved the kidnap of the king. The plan failed, and Oldcastle was executed alongside some thirty-eight others on the so-called ‘Lollard gallows’ besides St Giles.

‘JACK CADE THE CLOTHIER MEANS TO DRESS THE COMMONWEALTH’

In 1450 the counties of Kent, Sussex and Essex were once again the forcing ground for a rebellion which found its way to London, just as they had in 1381 and during the Lollard unrest. Jack Cade’s revolt followed the pattern of the earlier risings in that it benefited from some elite support, in this case from the House of York – soon to be conducting the larger struggle of the Wars of the Roses. Indeed some of Cade’s supporters claimed that he was a cousin of Richard, duke of York. In addition he had the support of some knights and squires, but it was nevertheless an overwhelmingly popular movement. However, the popular forces involved were no longer peasants as they had been in 1381: now they were composed of agricultural labourers, yeomen farmers, artisans, traders and merchants. They rose because Henry VI had extorted tax from them at home and engaged them in the Hundred Years War in France, from where raiding parties threatened the coast.

The rebellion began in Kent and Cade marched his supporters to Blackheath, just as Wat Tyler had done seventy years before. They numbered 46,000 according to the account of William Gregory, mayor of London in the year following the rebellion.42 The demands they made in ‘A Proclamation Made by Jack Cade, Captain of Ye Rebels in Kent’ were more directly political than those of previous revolts: it observed the formality of recognizing the authority of the king and blaming ‘certain persons’ for daily informing him that ‘good is evil and evil is good’. But the proclamation immediately went on to refute those who ‘say that our sovereign lord is above his laws to his pleasure and he may make it and break it as him list’ by insisting that ‘the contrary is true, and else he should not have sworn to keep it’. Moreover, the proclamation also contradicted those who ‘say that the king should live upon his commons, and that their bodies and goods be the king’s’. Again, for Cade’s followers ‘the contrary is true, for then needeth he never Parliament to sit to ask good of his commons . . .’. The proclamation also raised directly economic grievances about lordly extortion and the use of political power by the aristocracy to get and keep property.43

To start with, Henry raised an army to confront the rebels and they dispersed. But the cause was popular even among Henry’s soldiers and fear at the dissolution of his own forces made the king quit the capital and retire to Kenilworth in Warwickshire. On the first day of July 1450 the rebellion moved its forces to Southwark, Cade setting up at the White Hart. The ‘Proclamation’ had won the approval of many in London already discontented with Henry’s rule and Cade’s forces, perhaps now numbering 25,000, crossed London Bridge and entered the City. There was some looting but the main work of the insurrection was the execution of the king’s henchmen. William Crowemere, sheriff of Kent, was beheaded in a field at Aldgate, while the detested lord treasurer, Lord Saye and Sele, was ‘beheaded in Cheap before the Standard’, according to Gregory.

As the rebel occupation of London wore on, however, support from the elite drained away – especially when Cade proposed levying rich Londoners to sustain his supporters. The Common Council raised a force of Londoners to confront the rebels on the night of 5–6 July, and from 10pm to 8am there was fierce fighting on London Bridge. The drawbridge was set alight and the Marshalsea prison was broken open; ‘many a man was slain and cast into the Thames’, records Gregory. The rebellion was defeated and the price of 1,000 marks put on Cade’s head. He was eventually killed by the sheriff of Kent while retreating through the Weald of Sussex. His naked body was brought to London where he was beheaded and quartered. His head was set on London Bridge where only days before those of the rebellion’s enemies had been. There was widespread repression, especially in Kent, where beheadings were so numerous that ‘men call it in Kent the harvest of the heads’.

Cade was immortalized by Shakespeare in The Second Part of King Henry VI, although the Bard mocks Cade’s lowly origins, his supposed claims of noble origin and his promises of relieving the economic distress of the poor. Yet Shakespeare surely catches an authentic note when he has the rebel leader say: ‘For our enemies shall fall before us, inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes’. This levelling tone was submerged beneath the dynastic squabbles of the Wars of the Roses which followed five years after the end of the rebellion.

The division of the country in that conflict, with the South and East in support of the House of York and the West and North in support of Lancaster, prefigured the geographical division of the country in the English Civil War. As A. L. Morton observed, ‘Supporting the Lancastrians were the wild nobles of the . . . most backward and feudal elements surviving in the country. The Yorkists drew their support from the progressive South, from East Anglia and from London, even if this support was not usually very active.’44 The victory of the House of York therefore was also the victory of the areas in which feudalism had been most eroded by emerging market relations, and for this reason it secured the support of the nascent market-oriented classes for the Tudor monarchy over the next century.

THE REFORMATION OF LONDON

One final revolution helped to complete London’s transformation from a feudal to an early modern capital: the dissolution of the monasteries. The experience of the Lollards foreshadowed what now became English Protestantism, but Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the final establishment of an English Protestant Church was also a moment of economic transformation as well as a political and ideological milestone in the establishment of the early modern nation state. It could scarcely be otherwise when the Church that Henry nationalized was a major economic force in its own right. Some churches like St Mary Spital and St Mary Clerkenwell owned property in sixty parishes. Over 100 English monasteries held property in London.45 In all, twenty-three major religious houses in or near the City were taken over by the king between 1543 and 1547. In most cases they were immediately sold off to raise revenue for the Crown’s wars in France and Scotland. This economic revolution broke the Church’s grip on large numbers of shops and tenements that had been bequeathed to the monasteries over the centuries.

Aristocrats new and old were among the beneficiaries; the duke of Norfolk inherited a new mansion on the site of Holy Trinity Priory and called it, unimaginatively, Duke’s Place. Lord Lumley’s mansion was on the site of Crutched Friars. The lord treasurer, the soon-to-be marquess of Winchester, sold off the stones and lead that had once been Austin Friars and built himself a townhouse. The Charterhouse passed to three aristocratic owners before becoming, in 1614, a school and home for poor gentlemen. The ‘inns’ of abbots and priors that lined much of Holborn, the Strand and Fleet Street became hostels for travellers: those of the abbots of Glastonbury, Lewes, Malmesbury, Peterborough, and Cirencester were reborn as the Dolphin, Walnut Tree, Castle, Bell and Popinjay Inns. Others became residences for nobles and rich aldermen: the bishop of Worcester’s inn became Somerset House, the bishop of Bath’s inn became Arundel House, the bishop of Carlyles’s inn became Bedford House. Norwich Place passed through several hands before it came into those of the duke of Buckingham in the 1620s. Its river gate, York Watergate, still runs down the side of Charing Cross Station. The king’s new Palace of Whitehall, with its tiltyard for jousting, cockpit and tennis court, expanded on the archbishop of York’s confiscated palace. All of it, save James I’s Banqueting House, was destroyed by fire in 1698.

The emerging ‘middling sort’ also gained from the dissolution of monastery land. Housing for ‘Noble men and others’ was built on the land of Whitefriars, St Mary Spital and Holywell Priory. Tenements for ‘brokers, tiplers, and such like’ were built near St Bartholomew-the-Great. Two livery companies, the Mercers and the Leathersellers, gained new halls. St Mary Graces was demolished to make way for naval stores and a ships’ biscuit factory. Ploughs, no doubt, were beaten into swords at St Clare’s, conveniently near the Tower, when it became an armoury. A wine tavern opened at St Martin-le-Grand and there was glass-blowing (and a tennis court) at Crutched Friars. Belief in the Almighty was replaced by the willing suspension of disbelief as theatres rose on the sites of Blackfriars – soon home of the Queen’s Revels and Blackfriars Playhouse – and Holywell Priory, later to house the Curtain and the Theatre. Due to a legal loophole, the grounds of former monasteries were still beyond City regulation, making these sites ideal for industry, theatres and crime. Some monasteries did, however, retain a religious function, becoming Protestant churches. Others were converted into institutions of pastoral care as schools or hospitals.46 Broadly speaking, the anonymous poem ‘Skipjack England’ contained an estimate not too far from the truth:

The Abbeys went down because of their pride

And men the more covetous rich for a time;

Their livings dispersed on every side,

Where once was some prayer, now places for swine.47

THE BOUNDARIES OF LORDSHIP

Slowly, over the time in which the rebellions took place, feudal society faded and an incipiently modern world came into view. The revolts themselves, and the economic changes they reflected, were staging posts in the shift from a feudal economy – based on the militarily enforced labour service of the peasantry – to a commercial-capitalist economy, based on market-driven profits expropriated by a new trading class from labourers working for wages. The driving force of these changes was the people now becoming known as ‘the middling sort’ – yeomen farmers, traders, merchants and masters who could mobilize their apprentices. The power of the aristocratic nobility was being challenged, its old Church transformed. The new classes were reading their English Bibles, grabbing some monastery land and wondering aloud (at times) about the virtue of kings and the idleness of nobles.

Over many decades the boundaries of lordship were being driven back and the commercialization and monetization of all exchange and social relations proceeded to undermine the structure of feudal society. The challenge to the old Catholic Church, the shift to the individual’s own Bible-led relationship with God at the expense of the prelate-dominated, hierarchically mediated relationship with God, was one ideological reflection of this change. The growth of Universities and Inns of Court, and the invention of the printing press, meant that Church was no longer the sole repository of knowledge. Printing, for instance, meant that one of the Church’s key services to the monarchy, the handwritten reproduction of documents, was rendered an anachronism. The English state at first benefited from putting itself at the head of these changes, most obviously through the Reformation.

The Tudors, especially Elizabeth I, enjoyed the crystallization of these elements as a period of national, Protestant, reaffirmation. English nationalism, in the era of Drake and Raleigh, was reborn. The Stuarts faced the dissolution of this temporary stability. There was still another century before all these elements would fuse in the mighty Civil War against monarchy but by 1540 the seeds had been sown. And ideas that were first mummered by Lollards in the 1380s would be cried aloud by Levellers in the 1640s.48