The Supression of the Peasants’ Revolt

On 2 July 1381, Richard issued a proclamation announcing that by the advice of his council he had revoked the letters patent of pardon 'lately granted in haste' to the rebels. The way was now open for full judicial inquiry and the new chief justice of the king's bench, Sir Robert Tresilian, began a tour of the disaffected dis­tricts with the king in his company. In Hertfordshire and Essex the severity shown moved even the monastic chroniclers to shocked protest; but, on the whole, the judicial proceedings reflect credit on the government. No mass reprisals were allowed; there were no tortures and very few attempts to convict without trial; and a surprisingly large number of persons whose guilt seems to have been clear, were either acquitted or punished with moderation. Tyler and Litster were already dead; Jack Straw was executed in London after confessing his guilt; John Wrawe was condemned to death after an elaborate trial in the course of which he tried to turn king's evidence; the Cambridge­shire captains were all hanged, as was William Grindcob; and John Ball was tried and executed at St. Albans. Certain Londoners and Sir Roger Bacon were acquitted. On 30 August the king ordered that all further arrests and executions should cease and all cases pending be transferred to the king's bench. The effect of this order was virtually to put an end to the capital sentences; and the parliament which met in the autumn, though it confirmed the king's revocation of his charters of manumission to the rebels, demanded also a general amnesty for all but a few specified offenders.

Popular Communism

The history of this astonishing movement reveals something of the magnitude and diversity of the social grievances which underlay it. Desire to be free of the disabilities of villeinage and of the hated labour laws was widespread, manifesting itself in the destruction of manorial records and in the attacks on judges and lawyers. At St. Albans and at Bury St. Edmunds, however, rebels were aiming, not merely at abolition of the abbot's trial rights but also at municipal charters for the towns which had grown up around the abbey walls; and the situation at Bury was further complicated by the dispute over the abbatial election, in which some of the townsmen had become involved. At Cambridge the rising was made the occasion for working off old grudges between town and gown. At Yarmouth the main cause of violence seems to have been a feud of long standing over the burgesses' market monopoly and control of harbour dues. Some of the urban riots clearly arose from a movement of the poorer elements in the town against the rich burgesses who composed the governing body; it is evident that there was much disaffection of this kind in London. Hatred of foreigners was widespread, partly because of commercial jealousies, partly as a result of the sheer unreasoning prejudice which a long war is apt to engender. The lower clergy who played a considerable part in the revolt had their own grievances —heavy taxation, both royal and papal, and the inadequate stipends to which they were condemned by the labour laws.

The strength and vitality of the community of the shire is an aspect of the movement which has attracted little attention. Serfs and artisans who figure in manorial and urban records mainly as appendages of manor or gild, appear in 1381 as active and self-conscious members of much larger social groups. In the eastern and south-eastern counties, politically the most preco­cious regions of medieval England, we find ourselves confronted with a kind of tribalism almost reminiscent of the age of Bede. Manorial and urban arrangements which ignore or cut across this tribalism have not, it seems, radically affected it. For, what­ever their tenurial or contractual commitments, the men of Kent—'totum illud germen Kentensium et Juttorum', as Walsingham, significantly, terms them—remain aware of themselves as a natural community, distinct from the community of their east Saxon neighbours, as from those of the North Folk and South Folk of the area of Anglian settlement. And, though most of the rebels were loyal to Richard II, some of their leaders may even have been contemplating the establishment of a many-headed monarchy, based upon the shires. According to 'Jack Straw's confession, Wat Tyler in Kent was to be the first of many county kings; and Geoffrey Litster, banqueting in state in Norwich castle, no doubt felt himself to be enjoying a fore­taste of his regal pomp. Himself a small artisan, he was idolus Nothfolkorum and it was in search of a charter for his county that he sent forth his ill-fated emissaries. Fantastic as such projects must appear, they were not, perhaps, wholly retrograde; for they drew their strength from an ancient sense of common worth and a common will in the shires which was to survive the inevitable failure of the class-war of 1381 and the withering away of an alien feudalism, to remain an indispensable ele­ment in the political development of the English as a free people.

As to the communism of John Ball, this was both less original and less significant than the agitated chroniclers supposed. Dr. Owst has shown that such crude egalitarian doctrines were the common coin of contemporary preachers; for they were of a kind to take root easily in the soil of medieval Catholicism. The people were accustomed to hear from their clergy and to see depicted on the walls of their churches, lurid representations of the fate awaiting the rich, the proud, and the oppressor at the Judgement Day. They had been taught to reverence poverty in the person of

Iesu Cryst of heuene,

In a pore mannes apparaille (Piers Plowman)

they knew that God is no respecter of persons and that rich men enter hardly into the kingdom of heaven. It cannot have been difficult for Ball to persuade an audience thus educated that the inequalities of wealth and status which they saw around them were contrary to the will of God, a violation of the divine order of creation. What made his teaching notorious was not his doc­trine of equality, for which he and others might claim warrant in Holy Writ, but the discreditable use that he made of it to further his personal ambitions and to incite his hearers to violence. The sentiments of the people, so far as we can perceive them, were anti-clerical but not, for the most part, anti-Chris­tian. Walsingham had heard of schoolmasters who were for­bidden by the rebels to instruct their pupils in the Christian faith, but the majority seem to have assumed the continuing existence of some kind of Church. Even if all the prelates are to be slain, John Ball will be there to assume their functions; if the rich possessioners are removed, the mendicants will suffice for the administration of the sacraments. It was almost inevitable that monastic chroniclers should exaggerate the subversive nature of the rebels' designs on religion, that they should have been deaf to the note of Christian piety which is unmistakable in some of the vernacular literature of the revolt.

Effects Of The Revolt

A rising of such dimensions presupposes some preparation, Unrest among the servile classes was of long standing and a petition presented to Richard II's first parliament shows that the landlords, mindful of the horrors of the Jacquerie, were already dreading the possibility of a similar movement among the English peasantry. Villeins, the petitioners alleged, were banding together to withdraw their services and had collected large sums of money in support of their cause. The circulation of such strange allegorical letters as those preserved by Walsingham and Knighton, and the rebels' conception of themselves as a 'Great Society' (Magna Societas) show some kind of organized agitation at work. Yet it remains very doubtful whether a general revolt would have resulted had not the nation been suffering from deep-seated political malaise. Sir Richard Waldegrave, the Suffolk knight who acted as Speaker in the parlia­ment of 1381, made this point in a speech which has been too little regarded. The causes of the Rising, he said, were the ex­travagance of the court and household, the burden of taxation, the weakness of the executive, and the inadequacy of the national defences. It is evident that the commons in parliament were at one with the rebels in their condemnation of these evils; and dissatisfaction with the government may well afford partial explanation of the support given to the Rising by members of the landowning classes in Norfolk and elsewhere. Intensified by the levy of the poll-tax, this discontent served to light the fires of revolution, which put government and landlords at the mercy of the rebel leaders, who seized the opportunity thus offered them to ventilate their social as well as their political grievances. The Rising itself, however, had no perceptible effect on the disabilities of peasants or artisans nor (except that, here and there, it may have given some added impetus to the leasing of the demesne) on the social and economic forces which were slowly transforming conditions of life and labour in town and countryside. Much of its importance lay in its revelation of the extent to which the government as a whole, and the duke of Lancaster in particular, had lost the confidence of the people. It came as the last of three successive indictments of the government within a decade; and its effects were felt in the sphere of political, rather than of social and economic history. The revolt did, indeed, kill the poll-tax; but it created an atmosphere of general nervousness which long outlasted its suppression. It encouraged the aris­tocracy to plunge once more into ill-considered enterprises abroad; and to Richard II, now growing to manhood, it had demonstrated the unique position accorded by popular senti­ment to the person of the king and the almost mystical power inherent in his sovereign word.

Questions:

1. How did Parliament develop?

2. What is the role of Edward I in the expansion of English power?

3. What do you know about “She-Wolf of France” and her role in the English history?

4. What king initiated the Hundred-Years War?

5. What were the main battles of the first period of the War? What did the English gain in France?

6. Describe the main reasons, events and consequences of the Peasant’s Revolt.