The Peasants' Revolt of 1381

History in Depth

GENERAL EDITOR: Gwyn A. Williams

D. S. Chambers: Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance R. B. Dobson: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381

W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley: Spain under the Bourbons 1700-1833 Roger Mettam: Government and Society in Louis XIV's France

J. R. Pole: The Revolution in America 1754-1788 H. C. Porter: Puri.tanism in Tudor England

Jane Rendall: The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment 1707-1776 Edward Royle: The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh

Dorothy Thompson: The Early Chartists Henry S. Wilson: Origins of West African Nationalism

The Peasants' Revolt of 1381

R. B. DOBSON Professor of History, University of York

Second Edition

M MACMILLAN

To my mother and in memory of my father

Selection and editorial matter © R. B. Dobson 1970, 1983 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 1983 978-0-333-25504-9

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First Edition 1970 Second Edition 1983

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ISBN 978-0-333-25505-6 ISBN 978-1-349-16990-0 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16990-0

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION

NOTE ON TRANS LA TIONS

THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE REVOLT

LIST OF AUTHORITIES

PART I: The Background to the Peasants' Revolt

xi X111

xv XIX

I

32

36 45

I The Character of the English according to John Trevisa 53 2 The Lay Population of English Counties and Towns

according to the Poll Tax Returns of 1377 and 1381 54 3 The Clerical Population of English Dioceses according

to the Poll Tax Returns of 1377 and 1381 58 4 The Black Death of 1348-9 according to Henry

Knighton 59 5 The Statute of Labourers, 1351 63 6 The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers: 69

A. According to Henry Knighton B. Trespasses on the Statute of Labourers, 1373-5 C. A Preference for Bond Service, 1350

7 Commons' Petition against Vagrants, 1376 72 8 Peasant Discontents and Resistance before 1381: 75

A. Commons' Petition against Rebellious Villeins, 1377 B. The Bocking Petition, c. 1300-30

C. Revolt of the Villeins of Darnall and Over, 1336

9 Political Protest in the Good Parliament of 1376 83 10 Poem on the Death of Edward III 88 II A Disastrous Start to a New Reign, 1377: according to

the Vita Ricardi II 91 12 Desertion from the English Army, 1380 94 13 Proposals to protect Shipping at London, 13 80 95 14 John Gower foresees the Peasants' Revolt 97

vi THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

PART II: The Three Poll Taxes and the Outbreak of Revolt

IS The Grant of the First Poll Tax, 1377: 103 A. According to Thomas Walsingham B. According to the Rolls of Parliament

16 The Grant of the Second Poll Tax, 1379: according to the Anonimalle Chronicle 105

17 The Northampton Parliament of 1380 and the Grant of the Third Poll Tax: according to the Rolls of Parliament III

18 Appointment of Commissioners to enforce payment of the Third Poll Tax, March 1381 II9

19 The Outbreak of the Revolt according to theAnonimalle Chronicle 123

20 The Outbreak of the Revolt according to Thomas Walsingham 131

21 The Outbreak of the Revolt according to Henry Knighton 135

22 The Outbreak of the Revolt according to Froissart 137 23 The Rebels in Canterbury according to Jurors' Present-

ments 145 24 The Indictment of two Essex rebels 148

PART III: The Rebels in London, 13-1sjune 1381

2S The Rebels in London according to the Anonimalle Chronicle ISS

26 The Rebels in London according to Thomas Walsing-ham 168

27 The Rebels in London according to Henry Knighton 181 28 The Rebels in London according to Froissart 187 29 The Peasants' Revolt according to the 'monk of West-

minster ,

199 30 The Peasants' Revolt according to the Continuator of

the Eulogium Historiarum 204 31 The Peasants' Revolt according to City of London

Letter Book H 208

CONTENTS VU

32 The Treachery of London Aldermen according to the London Sheriffs' Inquisitions: 212 A. The inquisition of 20 November 1382 B. The inquisition of 4 November 1382

33 The Indictment of Walter atte Keye, Brewer, of Wood Street, London 226

34 Royal Letters of Pardon to Paul Salesbury of London 228

PART IV: The Rising in the Eastern Counties

35 The Risings in the Eastern Counties according to the Anonimalle Chronicle 235

36 The Risings in the Eastern Counties according to Henry Knighton 237

37 The Rising in Cambridge according to the Rolls of Parliament 239

38 John Wrawe and the Burgesses of Bury St Edmunds according to Thomas Walsingham 243

39 The Depositions of John Wrawe 248 40 Two Suffolk Rebels and the 'Great Society' 254 41 The Revolt in Norfolk according to Thomas Walsing-

ham 256 42 The Death of Sir Robert Salle according to Froissart 261

PART V: Elsewhere in England

43 The Rebels at St Albans according to Thomas Walsing-ham 269

44 Panic in Leicester according to Henry Knighton 277 45 The Bridgwater Rising: 279

A. According to the pardon of Thomas Engilby B. According to the accusations against Sir William Coggan

46 The Riots at York: 284 A. According to a parliamentary petition, November-December

1380 B. According to the York 'Memorandum Book' C. According to the York jurors' presentments, August 1381

47 The Riots at Scarborough 289 48 The Riots at Beverley 294

VID THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

49 Rising of the Villeins of the Abbot of Chester 297 50 Rising of the Tenants of the Priory of Worcester 299

p ART VI: Suppression and Survival

51 'The Ax was Scharp' 305 52 The Suppression of the Revolt according to the

Anonimalle Chronicle 305 53 The Suppression of the Revolt according to Thomas

Walsingham 306 54 The Suppression of the Revolt according to Henry

Knighton 3 13

55 The Suppression of the Revolt according to Froissart 315 56 Royal Commission to keep the Peace in London, 15

June 1381 317

57 The Trial and Pardon of John Awedyn of Essex 319

58 A Tall Story: Oxfordshire Rebels as French Agents 321

59 A New Conspiracy in Kent, September 1381: John Cote's Confession 322

60 Post-mortem and Pardon: the Westminster Parliament of November-December 1381 325

61 The Persistence of Revolt: 333 A. A conspiracy in Norfolk, 1382 B. An abortive rising in Kent, 1390 C. An attack upon property in London, 1412

62 The Complaints and Requests of the Commons of Kent, 1450 336

63 The Disappearance of English Villeinage: 342 A. Royal Manumissions in Yorkshire, 1338 B. Manumission by the Bishop of Hereford, 1419 C. Bondsmen not to enjoy the Liberties of the City of London,

1387 D. Parliamentary Petition to enforce Villein Disabilities, 1391

64 The Twelve Articles of Memmingen, 1525 346

PART VII: Interpretations o.f the Peasants' Revolt

65 A 'Wamying to Be Ware' 357 66 'Tax Has Tenet Us AIle' 358

CONTENTS IX

67 The Causes of the Revolt according to Sir Michael de la Pole. 1383 362

68 The Causes of the Revolt according to Thomas Walsingham: Jack Straw's Confession 363

69 The Causes of the Revolt according to Froissart 369 70 The Significance of John Ball: 372

A. John Ball according to Thomas WaIsingham B. Ball and Wycliffe according to Henry Knighton C. Ball and Wycliffe according to the Fasciculi Zizaniorum

71 The Literature of Protest: 379 A. John Ball's letter to the Essex Commons B. The letters of Jakke Mylner, Jakke Carter, Jakke Trewman

andJohn Ball C. Song of the 'Yorkshire Partisans', 1392 D. A Song of Freedom, c. 1434 E. 'Cryste may send now sych a Yere', c. 1450 F. Song of the Kentish Rebels, 1450

72 Geoffrey Chaucer and the Peasants' Revolt 386 73 John Gower and the Peasants' Revolt 387 74 The Life and Death of Jacke Strawe. 1593 389 75 Edmund Burke and the Peasants' Revolt 392 76 Thomas Paine and the Peasants' Revolt 394 77 Robert Southey's Wat Tyler 396 78 Engels on the Peasant Risings of the Middle Ages 399 79 William Morris's Dream of John Ball 403

BIBLIOGRAPHY 405 ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 413 INDEX 421

LIST OF MAPS

England in 138 I 100 London in 1381 152 Eastern England in 1381 232

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the copyright owners and publishers of the follow­ing volumes, who have kindly given permission to reproduce excerpts in the original or translation:

Columbia University Press, New York, Chaucer's World, com­piled by E. Rickert; Historical Poems of the XWth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins.

Longmans, Green & Co., England under the Lancastrians, ed. J. H. Flemming.

Manchester University Press, The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333-1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith.

Oxford University Press, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, ed. K. Sisam; The Great Revolt of 1381, by C. Oman.

Translations from Crown-copyright records in the Public Record Office, London, are printed by permission of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office.

General Editor's Preface

Historical perception demands immediacy and depth. These qualities are lost in attempts at broad general survey; for the reader of history depth is the only true breadth. Each volume in this series, therefore, explores an important historical problem in depth. There is no artificial uniformity; each volume is shaped by the problem it tackles. The past bears its own witness; the core of each volume is a major collection of original material (translated into English where necessary) as alive, as direct and as full as possible. The reader should feel the texture of the past. The volume editor provides interpretative notes and introduction and a full working bibliography. The volume will stand in its own right as a 'relived experience' and will also serve as a point of entry into a wider area of historical discourse. In taking possession of a particular historical world, the reader will move more freely in a wider universe of historical experience.

*

In this volume Dr R. B. Dobson examines in depth one of the most dramatic and celebrated episodes in English and European history, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Here, for the first time, are made available sequences of evidence in depth which enable the reader to reconstruct the crisis for himself. The volume stands as a vital contribution to the history of medieval society and to the history of 'pre-industrial' revolt in general.

The core of the volume is the Revolt itself. The social and economic experience of the fourteenth-century peasantry, too complex to lend itself to full documentation, finds expression in a number of significant documents - statutes, petitions, chronicles, poems - which give the reader a grip on realities and then the documentation bodies out into a vivid, rich, complex and contradictory narrative, a re-living of experience, almost a symphony of discord.

xiii

xiv THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

The structure of the book is narrative; the reader can 'read the story' for himsel£ The most striking feature of this narrative is the wealth of sources employed. Four or five chroniclers, often contradictory, are brought to bear on every important incident; significant and often colourful evidence is presented from government and judicial records. The first outbreaks over the Poll Taxes, the risings in Kent and Essex, the celebrated entry into London and the death of Wat Tyler are covered in all their fullness and complexity. The great bulk of the material has been newly translated, and often for the first time, from the original LaWl and Norman-French. The scope of the collection extends to detailed coverage of the risings in the Eastern counties and to areas which have in the past escaped the historian. Perhaps most striking of all is the reconstruction of the repression, not only from chronicles but from commissions and individual trials, and the recovery of a tradition of peasant struggle, with a sugges­tion of comparison with the German revolt in the sixteenth century.

For while Dr Dobson eschews any crude sociology of revolt, he is not content with narrative, however remarkable in its totality. A final section on interpretations of the revolt ranges from contemporary comment, through Gower, Burke and Paine, to William Morris and Friedrich Engels and adds a whole dimension to the reader's perception. The student of history, it has been said, should read documents until he hears their authors speaking; here, on the Peasants' Revolt, and for the first time, he can do just that; and directly, for the literature of protest, the dark and enigmatic songs of rebels are given him. 'We are the People of England', said Chesterton, 'That never have spoken yet.' Here, some of them, in a hurling time of our history, fmd vOice.

GWYN A. WILLIAMS

Preface

My first and greatest debt is to Professor Gwyn williams of the University of York., the general editor and founding-father of this series. This book owes its genesis to his original conception of a collection of documents which might enable students to analyse precise historical problems in depth and hence avoid the dangers of 'that wilderness of general surveys from which we are all trying to escape'. In this respect at least I have observed the spirit as well as the letter of Professor Williams's original com­mission; for, as the reader will soon be aware, there is little that is 'general' about this book. The great revolt of 1381 - as I tty to show in my short introduction to the documents - might serve as an excellent representative instance of the popular rebellion in pre-industrial Western Europe. But the primary purpose of this volume is to reveal the distinctive rather than symbolic significance of what was, after all, a unique and unparalleled catastrophe in English history.

The Peasants' Revolt of 1 3 8 1 is a subject for which it is genuinely possible to 'let the documents tell the story' - hence its appearance in this series. I have accordingly adopted as a general principle the translation of as many documents as possible in their entirety rather than the inclusion of a long series of fragmentary extracts from many sources. As the course of events in 1381 is related in all its complexity by contemporary participants and observers themselves, I have made no attempt to re-tell the story in my introduction, which is confined to a quite brief consideration of the problems raised by the rebellion and its original authorities. The more technical issues are discussed in short introductions to each document, in which I assess the reliability of a particular source and its implications for the study of the great revolt. Footnotes have been used as sparingly as possible but are intro­duced where further elucidation of the text appeared helpful. It seemed important not to allow the theories and interpretations

xvi THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

of recent historians to intervene between the original sources and the reader. Therefore the last document in the book is an extract from William Morris's Dream of John Ball, published in 1888, that is just before the intensive modern academic study of the Peasants' Revolt began. For the most important secondary works written since that date the reader is referred to the books and articles listed in Sections 4 and 6 of the bibliography. These provide a detailed guide to the issues raised in the following pages, especially if read in the light of Professor Postan's very recent warning 'against too naive or too economic a sociology of rebellion - a sociology which considers every rebellion as a direct reaction to intensified oppression or deepening poverty'.

The obligations incurred by me during the compilation of this book are too numerous to be acknowledged in full. But I would like to mention the name of Professor Williams once again, this time for his continued support and interest, without which the collection of documents would never have been completed. His own enthusiasm for revolutionary activity has at times had a greater influence on my choice of documents than either of us expected. I also owe much to my other colleagues in the History Department at York, particularly to Professor G. E. Aylmer, Professor G. Lef[, Dr M. C. Cross, Dr M.J. Angold and Mr P. Rycraft. Dr G. A. Holmes was kind enough to look at my typescript at short notice and suggest various additions. My thanks also go to Professor 1. H. Butler and his fellow members of the Medieval History Department at the University of St Andrews where I gave my first lecture on the Peasants' Revolt.

I have profited greatly from the advice of Professor G. R. Potter, who read all the proofs of this book with his usual salutary vigilance. Mrs V. Liversidge typed most of a sometimes untidy manuscript with her customary efficiency and willingness; and I am also grateful to Miss A. Hewitt and Miss J. Hallett for their helpful secretarial assistance. Mr Bernard Barr of the York Minster Library added to his many services to the study of history at York by placing his expertise in medieval Latin at my disposal. I am only too conscious that my translations from Latin and

PREFACE XVll

Norman-French have at times been less than elegant; and there may even be occasions when, as Henry Knighton wrote of the rebels of1381, I 'have leapt before I looked'. Without Mr Barr's assistance I would have fallen from grace more often and more heavily: without my wife's encouragement and forbearance I might not have leapt at all.

Introduction to the Second Edition

The starting-point of this book, first published in 1970, was the conviction that the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 might be both too mysterious and too important a subject to be left entirely to the modem interpretations of the professional historian. Whatever the inadequacies of this collection of sources, that conviction at least seems even more warranted now than it was ten years ago. Although what happened in England during the early summer of 1381 continues to pose a host of difficult questions, few of these have been brought much nearer to solution by either the statistical techniques of the economic historian or the theoretical concepts of the sociologist. The problems raised by the greatest of all popular revolts in medieval England may be profound but they are neither recondite nor arcane. Accordingly the second editipn of this volume is presented in the renewed belief that the Peasants' Revolt remains, and should remain, a genuine 'free for all', a topic upon which every reader can without undue effort come to his or her own conclusions. Needless to say, the following pages offer only a representative selection of the many original auth­orities available for the study of the great rebellion of 1381; but in the absence of any major documentary discoveries during the last ten years, I can only hope that they may continue to serve their original purpose as an introductory guide for those who wish to see exactly what can, and what cannot, be known about the most famous and mysterious popular rebellion in English history.

Nor can there be any doubt, six hundred years after the third poll tax and the famous meetings at Mile End and Smithfield, of the increasing fascination of the Peasants' Revolt. This too is as it should be; for if one believes, with the late Lucien Febvre, that history should be deliberately 'problem-orientated' and that it is the duty of the historian to harrass and bombard contemporary society with questions, contrasts and comparisons fronl. the past, then the importance of our all having our own views about the

xx THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

significance ofWat Tyler and John Ball needs no urging whatso­ever. Is there a problem in later medieval English history, after all, which raises wider issues? No one would deny that the out­break of a general insurrection in the third year of Richard II often allows us to observe late fourteenth-century social tensions and popular grievances almost impossible to detect in any other way. But how fundamental and enduring were those tensions and grievances? To ask the most basic question once again, is it more significant tor our understanding of pre-industrial English society that a general insurrection did occur in 1381 or that such a cataclysmic event was never repeated? Was popular rebellion in that year the product of governmental mismanagement, of a distressing but temporary period of social 'disequilibrium', or of an absolutely inescapable antagonism within the social order? Should we see the Peasants' Revolt as the extreme but logical manifestation of the crucial division between those who endured 'the pain and travail, rain and wind in the fields' and those who profited from that travail? Or was the rebellion, as some historians have argued consistently for many years, essentially a sort of historical accident or sport - to be explained, if explicable at all, in terms of the unpredictability of crowd behaviour rather than the logic of economic developments? On these grand issues opinion seems even more divided in 1981 than it has been since the study of the Peasants' R(7Tolt began. At one extreme, for example, Professor Rodney Hilton has been at pains to stress the radical nature of a rebel programme which seriously envisaged the division of the estates of both church and magnates among the peasants and so the achievement of a greater social rev()lution than England has in fact ever experienced. l At the other extreme stands Dr Alan Macfarlane's recent aild ingenious thesis that medieval England was not a peasant society at all in any meaningful sense of that admittedly ambiguous phrase. Such a view would

1 R. H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1973), especially pp. 220-30. Professor Hilton's book is much the most stimulating study of the Peasants' Revolt to have appeared since the first edition of this collection of documents.

INTRODUCTION xxi

seem difficult to reconcile with the concept of a genuine Peasants' Revolt in 1381; and so indeed it proves when Dr Macfarlane proceeds to argue that what happened in 1381 was less a full-scale peasant revolt than a very mild 'affair', whose most distinctive feature by the standards of continental rebellions was its order and restraint. l The possibility, to which I alluded in the first edition of this book, that the Peasants' Revolt might be in danger of becoming all things to all men seems even more disconcertingly real than I could then have imagined.

Indeed of all the remarks made in the original introduction to this collection perhaps the most misguided was the comment that 'The time is not yet ripe for a new interpretation of the Peasants' Revolt'. It needs no urging that the historiography of the Peasants' Revolt during the last decade provides a classic instance of the general rule that societies tend to receive the type of history they consider relevant to their own needs. The connection between a renewed interest in the English Peasants' Revolt and such diverse manifestations of popular unrest as Castro's revolution in Cuba, the May Days of 1968 in Paris and the Vietnamese War may seem tenuous enough; but it was partly because an increasing number of individuals around the globe, and in England too, were increasingly prepared to contemplate a 'world turned upside down' with interest and sometimes even enthusiasm that the late 1960s and 1970S saw such a boom in studies of peasant revolts in general and of 1381 in particular. The supplementary bibliography added to this volume will provide some impression of how great a boom it has been. Predictably enough, one of the incidental products of the recent revival of interest in the Peasants' Revolt has been a renewed attempt to present Wat Tyler and John Ball as founding heroes of a sustained revolutionary tradition. Agricultural trade unionists at Thaxted in Essex continue to remember John Ball, entirely as William Morris would have approved, for his martyrdom 'in the cause of the emancipation of the people in their fight against the Dragon of Exploitation'. More interestingly still perhaps, May 1974 saw the appearance at

1 A. Macfarlane, The Origins tifEnglish Individualism (Oxford. 1978). p. 18S.

xxii THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

the Mermaid Theatre, London, of Beverley Cross's The Great Society, starring Bernard Miles as a medieval prototype of a modern militant shop-steward.1 New plays on the theme of the Peasants' Revolt have always tended to appear on the London stage at times of political turmoil and social conflict. Thus a comic opera entitled 'Wat Tyler, or the Armourer' opened at Covent Garden in 1793 a few months after Edmund Burke and Tom Paine had been debating the relevance ofWat Tyler to the revolutionary issues of their own time. Similarly the melodram­atic 'Life and Death of King Richard II; or Wat Tyler and Jack Straw' was produced at Astley's in the Westminster Bridge Road shortly after the passing of the First Parliamentary Reform Act in 1832; and in December 1869 George Augustus Sala satirised the passing of the Second Reform Act with his 'Wat Tyler M.P. : an Operatic Extravaganza' performed at the Gaiety Theatre. 2

Of much greater significance for the serious study of the English Revolt of 1381 has been the recent upsurge of interest in the peasantry as a social category, itself once again largely a development of the early 1970S and heavily influenced by the experience of peasant movements in south-east Asia and Latin America since the Second World War. As early as 1966 Professor Barrington Moore Jr. had put forward the controversial thesis that differing relationships between lords and peasants might be fundamental in determining whether particular states took the road towards parliamentary democracy, communism or fascism in our own time.3 However, the emergence of 'peasant studies' as a separate branch of academic historical and sociological enquiry perhaps first became absolutely evident in 1971 with the publication of Professor Eric Wolf's comparative study of modern peasant wars and of Professor Teodor Shanin's wide-ranging

1 J. Putterill,}ohn Ball and the Dragotl (Thaxted, n.d.), p. 4; The Times, 22 May 1974·

I A. Nicoll, A History of English Drama, J660-J900 (Cambridge, 1952-9), IV 551, v 555; King Richard II, ed. J. Dover Wilson (The New Shakespeare; Cambridge, 1939), p. !xxxv; Dictionary of National Biography, sub Sala.

~ Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins oj Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and PelLSIItIt in the Making of the Modern World (London, 19«7).

INTRODUCTION xxiii

anthology of the then recent literature on the subject.1 Three years later the Journal of Peasant Studies, which included a paper by Professor Hilton on 'Medieval Peasants - Any lessons?' in its first issue, was founded on the assumption that the general theme of the peasantry 'unites the historian, the economist, the political scientist, the anthropologist, the sociologist and the agricul­turalist in a common interest'.1 Such new and often multi­disciplinary approaches have already begun to make an impact on our understanding of the late medieval English peasantry itself At one extreme, the quantitative analysis of manorial court roll data has enabled Professor J. A. Raftis and his colleagues and disciples of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto to attempt a more ambitious and 'total' reconstitution of four­teenth-century peasant society than any of their predecessors;3 at the other, recent emphasis upon the need to discover generalised explanations of peasant unrest has encouraged Marxist and non-Marxist historians to reformulate old hypotheses in a more subtle and sensitive way than ever before.' Not perhaps that the entry of the Revolting Peasant into the mansion of Sociology has been without its dangers. According to Professor H. A. Landsberger, discussing the English Peasants' Revolt within the context of the most systematic attempt yet made to produce a general sociology of peasant rebellion, 'Our own interest in it, and our re-analysis of it, stems from our belief that its characteristics

1 E. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (London, 1971); cf. E. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, 1966); T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Societies (London, 1971).

I Journal of Peasant Studies, 1 (1974); and see the related Library o.fPeasant Studies, ed. T. B. Byres and C. A. Curwen, especially NO.3, The German Peasant War of 1525, ed. J. Bak (London, 1976).

3 J. A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Medieval English Village (Toronto, 19(4); and see the other works listed in Z. Razi, 'The Toronto School's Reconstitution of Medieval Peasant Society: A Critical View', Past and Present, no. 85 (1979), p. 141, n. I.

• See the debate (highly relevant to any attempt to interpret the Peasants' Revolt of1381) inaugurated by R. Brenner, 'Agrarian Class Structure and Econ­omic Developments in pre-Industrial Europe', Past and Present, no. 70 (1976), pp. 3D-7S; especially pertinent is R. H. Hilton, 'A Crisis of Feudalism', Past and Present, no. 80 (1978), pp. 3-19.

XXIV THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 13 8 I

are timeless, and that the lessons it contains are nearly as applicable to events today as they are to the time in which they occurred'.1 'Timeless characteristics' should however be a phrase to alarm any historian at any time. All due credit given to Professor Landsberger and the many others who have recently attempted to place the 1381 rising in a general comparative context, in 1981 it has to be admitted that the Peasants' Revolt seems to remain obstinately unique and still highly resistant to any efforts to make it conform to a generalised model of economic or social develop­ment in late medieval England, let alone western Europe or the world at large.

New interpretations of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 have ac­cordingly been exceptionally abundant during the decade since the first appearance of this book. What has been less noticeable, with a few important exceptions, is much in the way of recent ad­ditions to our factual knowledge of the events of I 3 8 lor of detailed new analysis of existing sources. Despite the very considerable attention paid to the great revolt in the last few years, there are undoubtedly still a great many important documentary discoveries to be made among the voluminous governmental archives surviving from the late fourteenth century. Thus of the compara­tively small amount of relevant original source-material to have been published in recent years, among the most important and still insufficiently consulted items are the inquisitions relating to the property of various rebels which appear in recent volumes of the Calendars of Inquisitions Miscellaneous. 2 The details provided in the preambles to these inquisitions not only do a good deal to strengthen the impression of a complete breakdown in law and order within East Anglia during the first two weeks of June 1381 but help to establish various important dates in the history of the rising. Accordingly it is now revealed that Thomas Baker of

1 B. H. Landsberger and H. A. Landsberger, 'The English Peasant Revolt of 1381', in Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change, ed. H. A. Landsberger (London, 1974), p. 95·

2 Calendars of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (P.R.O.), IV (1377-88); v (1387-93); VI (1392-99); VII (1399-1422).

INTRODUCTION xxv

Fobbing in Essex, according to Henry Knighton the very firSt instigator of rebellion, was drawn and hanged at Chelmsford (on 4July 1381) and not at St Albans as alleged by Jean Froissart.1

Even more interesting is the account of the circumstances surround­ing the case of the parson of Potton in Bedfordshire who on the evening of Thursday 13 June murdered his servant John Hobbe by stabbing him in the chest with a knife called a 'trenchour'; before the local coroner could take effective action there arrived a great company of rebels from various counties, confirmation (if such were needed) that large bands of insurgents roamed eastern England more or less at will during this tumultuous week. 2

More unexpected still is the allegation that a Cornish knight, Sir William Botriaux, apparently resident at the manor of Botelet five miles east of Lostwithiel, not only attacked the property of a neighbouring knight but led an armed assault of three hundred men on a weir belonging to the prior of Bodmin: he was said to have committed these offences on Wednesday 26 June, it having taken twelve days for news of Archbishop Sudbury's execution to reach southern Cornwall.3 This episode is clearly most worth attention as an episode of armed violence at the furthest possible geographical extreme from the original outbreak of the Peasants' Revolt in Essex and Kent; but it also provides yet one more example of the way in which members of the county gentry as well as others so often seized the opportunity of the great rising to payoff local scores and to seek violent and illegal resolution of pre-existing feuds and vendettas. Not sur­prisingly perhaps, the sources for the rising of 1381 reveal an England literally riven by innumerable bitter private disputes about debts, inheritance and the right to property.

Nor can there be much doubt that similar and even more exciting revelations lie in store for those who currently follow the footsteps of Andre Reville and consult the massive series of unpublished records still at the Public Record Office. The poll tax returns of 1377 to 1381 for example, somewhat surprisingly

1 Ibid., v ISO; see below, p. 315. 2 Ibid., IV 172. 3 Ibid., IV 101-2.

XXVI THE PEASANTS' REVOLT Of 1381

in view of their fundamental importance for the study of the size and social structure of the late medieval English population, cry out for more systematic publication than they have yet received. Thus it was on the basis of the admittedly fragmentary local returns arising from the poll tax of 1380-1, especially valuable because they usually record the occupations as well as the names of the taxpayers, that Professor Hilton recently concluded 'that the agricultural element was probably very much a minority' in and around the Norfolk town of North Walsham: only more detailed analysis of such returns will confirm, what seems highly likely to have been the case, that the risings in much of East Anglia during June 1381 were those of rural and urban textile workers rather than of peasants in any proper sense of that word. 1

Similarly Professor Hilton's use of the escheators' inquisitions of property confiscated after the defeat of the rebellion to analyse the social composition of the rebels (a still extremely difficult matter) demonstrates the need for a more complete and authori­tative edition of these records than is yet available. 2 An even greater desideratum would be the systematic collection of references to criminal trials for acts of mob violence in the last three decades of the fourteenth century. Only when such an arduous task is properly. under way, no doubt most effectively by a serie, oflocal studies of riot and affray, will it be possible to set the Peasants' Revolt fully into its chronoJ~lgical context. At present it is still impossible to assess whether the incidence of violent disorder was actually increasing in the years before 1381; nor can we yet be absolutely certain that the months immediately following the collapse of the great revolt di~ in fact witness significantly more disturbance in the English counties than was their usual lot at any time of the later middle ages. Almost any category of late medi­eval governmental record may indeed throw important light on violent activity in 1381 itself. It is, for example, from an undated aggrieved petition of the prior and community of the Hospital of St John at Clerkenwell that we receive proof of the complete

1 Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, pp. 170-4. I Ibid., pp. 178-84.

INTRODUCTION XXVll

destruction of two of their forges, located in Fleet Street and orig­inally built by the Templars, at the hands of'les insurrectours en temps de Richard nadgairs Roy dengleterre'; over twenty years later the Hospitallers' attempts to rebuild these forges were still being obstructed by the commons of London. 1

However, it is of course the vast records of governmental legal proceedings which have the greatest prizes to offer the future historian. Although several of these records have been used by previous scholars, many of the most important have still never been printed in full. Perhaps the most striking instance is an assize roll of twelve parchment membranes recording detailed presentments and inquisitions made before Sir Hugh de la Zouche and his fellow justices in consequence of Richard II's commission (dated at Waltham on 23 June 1381) empowering them to pass sentence on rebels guilty of insurrection in Cambridgeshire and the Isle ofEly.2 Although much consulted and partly transcribed and translated by historians of the Peasants' Revolt in Cambridge and Cambridgeshire, this invaluable plea roll undoubtedly deserves to be published in extenso. Perhaps no other original source for the history of the great revolt documents quite so thoroughly the hostility of the rebels towards those members of the local gentry who had served as poll tax commissioners, justices of the peace and members of other judicial commissions. Nor does this Cambridgeshire assize roll leave us in any doubt that the destruction of manorial court rolls and other documents could be a regular rather than intermittent objective of the in­surgents; and on occasion it even exposes, albeit briefly, the political ideology of some leading rebels and confirms the chroniclers' general impression of their readiness to contemplate

1 P. R. 0., Ancient Petitions (S.C. 8), 216/10787, 10788. Presumably the demolition of these forges occurred on Thursday 13 June when the Temple itself was destroyed (see below, pp. 156-7, 170, 184, 219).

2 P. R. 0., Just. Itin. 1/103, only partly printed in W. M. Palmer, 'Records of the Villein Insurrection in Cambridgeshire', The East Anglian (Ipswich), N.S., VI

(1895-6); cf. E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896), pp. 136-8; Victoria County History, Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, IT (1948) 399-402; m (1959) 10-12.

XXVlll THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 138 I

a radically new social order. Thus Adam Clymme, who ought no doubt to have figured in the first edition of this volume, was hanged for wandering around the countryside with arms dis­played and 'bearing a standard to assemble insurgents, command­ing that no man of whatever condition, whether free or bond (native), should obey his lord to perform any services or customs, under penalty of beheading, unless Clymme instructed them otherwise on behalf of the great company (magna societas)'.l More interesting still, and the one legal document I now most regret not including when this selection was originally made, is the indictment which records the sad story of John Shirle of Nottinghamshire. Here, belatedly, it is:

pleas held, on Thursday 16 July 1381, before Hugh la Zouche and his fellows, assigned to hear, punish and chastise the rebels and disturbers of the peace in the said county (of Cambridge).!

John ShirIe of the county of Nottingham was taken because it was found that he had been a vagabond [vagabundus] in various counties during the whole time of the disturbance, insurrection and tumult, carrying lies as well as silly and worthless talk from district to district, whereby the peace of the lord the king could rapidly be broken and the people be disquieted and disturbed. Among other damaging words, namcly after the proclamation of the peace of the lord the king made on the aforesaid day and year, when the justices assigned by the lord the king were holding sessions in the town, he said in a tavern in Briggestrete lBridge Street] in Cambridge, where many were assembled to listen to his news and worthless talk, that the stewards of the lord the king as well as the justices and many other officers and ministers of the king were more deserving to be drawn and hanged and to suffer other lawful pains and torments than John Balle, chaplain, a traitor and felon lawfully convicted. For John ShirIe said that he [Ball] had been condemned to death falsely, unjustly and for envy by the said ministers with the king's assent, because he was a true and worthy man, prophesying things useful to the commons of the kingdom and telling of wrongs and

1 P. R. O.Just. Itin. 1/103, memb. 10V; c( Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, p. 215. 2 Ibid., memb. sr. C( the account of the case in Powell, Rising in East Anglia,

pp. 54-5; and the translation printed in English Economic History: Select Documents, ed. A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown and R. H. Tawney (London, 1914), pp. 109-10.

INTRODUCTION xxix

oppressions done to the people by the king and the aforesaid ministers; and Ball's death would not go unpunished but within a short space of time he would well reward both the king and his said ministers and officers. These sayings and threats redound to the prejudice of the crown of the lord the king and to the contempt and manifest disturbance of the people. And thereupon the said John Shirle was immediately brought by the sheriff before the said justices sitting in Cambridge castle; and he was charged about these matters and was diligently examined as regards his conversation, his presence [in Cambridge] and his estate; and when these things had been acknowl­edged by him before the said justices, his evil behaviour and con­dition were made plainly manifest and clear. And thereupon trustworthy witnesses in his presence at the time when the above­mentioned lies, evil words, threats and worthless talk had been spoken by him, were requested; and they, being sworn to speak the truth about these matters, testified that all the aforesaid words imputed to him had indeed been spoken by him; and he, examined once again, did not deny the charges laid against him. Therefore by the discretion of the said justices he was hanged; and an order was made to the escheator to enquire diligently about his lands and tenements and his goods and chattels, and to make due execution thereof for the lord the king.

Even when conveyed through the formal phraseology of a legal process, the episode of John Shirle's summary trial and hanging at Cambridge a month after the collapse of the Peasants' Revolt makes vivid if melancholy reading. It is, after all, very rarely that a historian of the revolt has an opportunity to eaves­drop, however partially, on a conversation in a tavern. But what exactly should one make of that conversation? The case of John Shirle seems to present in microcosm, my real reason for citing it at length, the sort of intractable evidential problems with which the study of the Peasants' Revolt still abounds. Can one trust the testimony of the men who sat listening to Shirle in that Bridge Street tavern? Can one be certain of the impartiality of the royal justices? It is in any case an interesting comment upon the speed with which news could circulate through late four­teenth-century England that John Ball's death should be the subject of impassioned talk in Cambridge on the very day after

XXX THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 138 I

his hanging at St Albans on 15 July.l At the least, the record of Shirle's trial provides us with our only clear proof, outside the pages of the inevitably prejudiced chroniclers, that John Ball could be regarded as a popular martyr figure in areas far removed from those with which he is known to have been regularly associated. At the most, there is a strong probability that John Shirle's bitterness was representative of a very widely diffused sense of betrayal throughout England as a whole. Moreover Shirle's speedy demise does something to confirm a general impression that in 1381, as in late mediaeval England at any time, seditious words were regarded by the authorities as considerably more dangerous than violent and even murderous acts. But until more is known from the legal and other records of the period about the mainsprings of popular unrest, until cases analogous to that of John Shirle are unearthed, it is still hard to speculate as to exactly how many other rebels shared his sense of communal solidarity and of corruption in high places.!

The all-important chronicle sources for the Peasants' Revolt also still demand considerably more critical scrutiny than they have yet received. Admittedly in this sphere the days have passed when the late medieval historian can hope for miracles. Although the recent discovery by Dr Ian Doyle of John Benet' s fifteenth~entury English chronicle now at Trinity College, Dublin, reminds us that important finds may still be made,3 the chances of a signifi­cant new narrative account of the great revolt coming to light in the future must certainly be regarded as very slender. There can

1 See below, p. 381. 2 For a most illuminating analysis of the detailed grievances of some of the

rebels of June 1381, partly based on important new documentary discoveries among thejudicial records, now see A. Prescott, 'London in the Peasants' Revolt', The London Journal, 7 no. 2 (1981), pp. 125-43. No previous study of the great revolt has ever exposed quite so clearly how the generalised demand for justice at the heart of the insurrection often reflected, and readily dissolved into, existing personal vendettas and the quest for purely private revenge; cf. the examples at pp. 218-19, 228-30, 279-84, 288-9 below.

I 'John Benet's Chronicle for the years 1400 to 1462', ed. G. L. and M. A. Harriss, Camden Miscellany, XXIV (Camden Fourth Series, 9, 1972), pp. 151-233.

INTRODUCTION XXXI

accordingly be no real doubt that the four lengthy accounts of the insurrection provided by Thomas Walsingham, Henry Knighton, Jean Froissart and the author of the Anonimalle Chron­icle, all translated in this volume, will always remain the indispens­able four gospels of the Peasants' Revolt. Indeed the success of these four very different authors in conveying the dramatic excitement of events in and around London during June 1381 has sometimes distracted attention from the value of the more cursory but often partly independent comments made by other contemporary chroniclers. An ideally comprehensive anthology of the sources for the Peasants' Revolt would accordingly include not only the narratives of the so-called 'monk of Westminster' and the continuator of the Eulogium Historiarum (both presented in this volume) but the remarks to be found in the English con­tinuations of the popular Brut as well as in monastic annals compiled at Bury St Edmunds, Bermondsey and the two Cister­cian abbeys of Dieulacres in Staffordshire and Kirkstall in York­shire. I More detailed still is the account of 'this time of fury and insanity' at the small Bedfordshire town of Dunstable provided by an anonymous canon of the Augustinian priory there.2 Like the abbot of St Albans a dozen miles to the south, the prior of Dunstable was reluctantly compelled to concede a charter of liberties to the rebels. One of the clauses of this charter had the effect of creating a schism within the ranks of the insurgents, between the burgesses of the town who wished to prohibit the sale of meat and fish in Dunstable by anyone but themselves and the remainder of the mob who clearly advocated a much less restrictive policy. No other chronicler of the Peasants' Revolt provides so clear an indication that the alliance between peasants and townsmen so ubiquitous throughout much of southern and

1 The Brut, or The Chronicles of England, II, ed. F. Brie (Early English Text Society, O.S., 136, 1908), pp. 336-8; Memorials '?f St. Edmund's Abbey (Rolls Series, 1890-96), III 125-31; Annales Monastici (Rolls Series, 1864-69), ill 480; M. V. Clarke and V. H. Galbraith, 'The Deposition of Richard II', Bulletin of John Rylands Library, XIV (1930), pp. 164-81; The Kirkstall Abbey Chronicles (Thoresby Society, XIII, 1952), pp. 65-6, lIO-li.

2 Annales Monastici, III 418.

XXXII THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

eastern England in the summer of I381 may often have been based on very fragile foundations. l

In time no doubt the chronicles of late fourteenth-century England will be subjected to the same rigorously critical scrutiny that has long been applied to Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the various recensions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 2 When that day eventually comes, it seems only too likely that Thomas Walsingham, Henry Knighton and, above all, the inimitably mendacious Jean Froissart will be revealed as much more depen­dent on second-hand information, on inaccurate gossip and indeed on sheer wishful thinking than it is currently comfortable to admit. In particular it is becoming increasingly evident that many chroniclers' accounts of crucial episodes in the history of the rebellion have undergone conscious or unconscious distortion because of their authors' general political prejudices and assump­tions at the time of writing. Although somewhat over-schematic in its approach to the problems, Louisa Duls's analysis of the different ways in which the chronicles present the young Richard II's behaviour during June 1381 has made it very clear that Thomas Walsingham and his disciples were at deliberate pains to portray the thirteen-year old king in a much less heroic light than did the author of the Anonimalle Chronicle. Whereas the latter asserted that Richard did what he could to save Archbishop Sudbury and his fellow scapegoats from the fury of the mob on Friday 14 June, Walsingham gets very close to suggesting that a pusillanimous young monarch deliberately sacrificed the life of his archbishop in order to preserve his own.3

1 As Professor E. B. Pryde has pointed out in his valuable new survey of The Great Revolt of 1381 (Hist. Association Pamphlet, G 100, 1981, p. 29), any serious attempt to implement Richard U's promise at Mile End 'that all our subjects should be free to buy and sell in English cities, boroughs and market towns' would have ruined the latter's corporate revenues as well {lS their all-important trading privileges: see Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, II 21.

2 The conclusions of H. M. Hansen's 'The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the Chronicles', Journal of Medieval History, 6 (1980), pp. 393-415, seem to me how­ever to be seriously impaired by too rigid an application of the canons of modern literary textual criticism to chronicles which do after all convey genuine news about real events.

8 L. D. Duls, Richard II in the Early Chronicles (The Hague, 1975), pp. 13-28.

INTRODUCTION xxxiii

More thought-provoking still are the revelations offered by the Evesham chronicle known as the Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi SeCtlndi. George B. Stow Jr's new edition of this work, the single most substantial contribution to the chronicle literature for the great revolt in recent years, does of course confirm the traditional view that the author (perhaps Nicholas Herford, prior of Evesham Abbey from 1352 to 1392) was very heavily indebted to Walsingham. However the Vita is now fully revealed as providing an account of the Peasants' Revolt which goes much further than Walsingham and the other chroniclers in two interesting directions: in presenting the young Richard as a timorous sheep before the rebellious wolves and in condemning the commons themselves as bloodthirsty anarchists bent on a universal Gotterda·mmerung. No late fourteenth-century chronicle seems to illustrate quite so well the myth-making process whereby Wat Tyler and John Ball were rapidly converted into archetypal images of political and social sedition. Considerably more persuasive, but perhaps all the more dangerous for that reason, is Froissart's undoubtedly deliberate manipulation of his evidence for other and more chivalric purposes, above all in order to transform the young king into an exemplar of the ideally cour­ageous lord. Careful attention to the details of Froissart's famous narrative of the rebellion included in this volume will reveal how skilfully, for instance in his account of the delivery of the royal banners to the rebel companies at Mile End and their enforced surrender after Smithfield, he converted a confused series of incidents into an exemplary story of chivalric aventure. The notoriously difficult but not perhaps absolutely impossible problem of disentangling truth from fiction in Froissart's volumin­ous chronicles can hardly be said to have begun.1

In the case of the Anonimalle Chronicle's celebrated account of the Peasants' Revolt it has been less the veracity than the author-

1 See the recent perceptive comments of J. W. Sherborne, 'Charles VI and Richard II', in Froissart: Historian, ed. J. J. N. Palmer (Boydell Press, 1981). p. 53. It should be added that an important new edition of another of .he chronicle authorities for the revolt (translated as no. 29 below) has now appeared as The Westminster Chronic/e, 1381-94. ed. L. C. Hector and B. Harvey (Oxford, 1981).

XXXIV THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 138 I

ship of the narrative which remains in dispute. Not long before he died Professor V. H. Galbraith, the editor of the definitive edition of this chronicle in 1927, suggested a possible solution to an old mystery. In the early sixteenth century John Leland, the famous antiquary, claimed to have read an epitome of a now lost French chronicle written by a certain William de Pakington, a clerk prominent in the service of the Black Prince, Princess Joan of Kent and of Richard II himself. By general agreement the Anonimalle's description of events in London during the turbulent days of Wednesday 12 to Saturday 15 June is the most accurate to survive; and it was evidently composed by an author actually resident in the Tower of London at the time, who was also close to royal and governmental circles and who observed the activities of the rebels free from the more melodramatic fantasies and rhetoric characteristic of the monastic chroniclers. As Pakington was keeper of the king's wardrobe from 1377 until his death in 1390, he is accordingly a plausible candidate for the authorship of 'the most valuable of surviving contemporary accounts' of 1381.1 Such an identification, not absolutely proven of course, still leaves open the problem of how so detailed an account of the insurrection came to be inserted in the text of a monastic chronicle written at the Benedictine abbey of St Mary' s, York; and future analysis of the Al1011imalle Chrollicle may well suggest that its narrative of the insurr(""'";tion is not quite as artless a piece of literary composition as it may seem at first reading. However, despite the current conflicting opinions on nearly every other issue relating to the Peasants' Revolt, there seems no reason to question the general accura~y of the author's narrative nor his explicit statement that the revolt occurred in 1381 'because of the exceptionally severe tenths and fifteenths and other subsidies lightly conceded in parliaments and extortionately levied from the poor people' (no. 19 below).

Indeed in any review, however brief, of the most recent interpretations of the great revolt, it is probably true to say that

1 v. H. Galbraith, 'Thoughts about the Peasants' Revolt', in The Reign of Richard II, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. Barron (London, 1971), pp. 46-57.

INTRODUCTION xxxv

the three poll taxes of 1377-8 I still deserve to hold pride of place. Although some historians, understandably enough, have tried to avoid seeing the insurrection simply as a reaction to inordinately heavy taxation, the severity of that taxation still seems as note­worthy now as it did to Sir Richard Waldegrave, speaker of the commons who assembled in parliament at Westminster in Novem­ber 1381. For Speaker Waldegrave, admittedly a critic rather than an advocate of the prevail~ng governmental regime, the causes of the rebellion were four-fold: the burdens of taxation, the extrava­gance of the royal court, illegal aristocratic maintenance, and the failure of the crown to protect the homes of its subjects from French attack. In what Dr Maurice Keen has described as 'the most doleful words that were ever uttered by a speaker of the medieval commons', Waldegrave designated these as 'the out­rages and other things which was the cause that moved them to do the riot and the mischief that they did'.l Such complaints seem even more abundantly justified now that recent research has done so much to reveal not only the ferocity of national taxation in the years immediately before 138 I but also the severity with which governmental exploitation could bear on fourteenth­century local communities.2 Nor would it be difficult to reconcile such emphasis on royal taxation with the broader and more challenging thesis that the landlords offourteenth-ccntury England reacted to an alleged 'crisis of feudalism' by relying increasingly on the coercive powers of the state rather than of themselves as private individuals.3 More generally still, if one believes that what most needs explanation in 1381 is less localised tenant grievances and protest than the circumstances which brought those emotions together into an unparalleled mass movement, then it is hard to avoid invoking the levying and mishandling of the third poll tax as the all-important deus ex machina. The fact that the insurrection

1 Rotuli Parliamentorutn, III, 100; cf. M. H. Keen, England in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1973), pp. 272-3.

I See especially J. R. Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294-1341 (Past and Present Supplement no. I, 1975).

8 R. H. Hilton, 'A Crisis of Feudalism', Past and Present, no. 80 (1978), pp. 3-19.

XXXVI THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 13 81

brought to the surface a multiplicity of pre-existing local con­flicts, feuds and obsessions can hardly disguise the fact that at the outset it genuinely was the case that 'Tax has tenet us aIle' (no. 66).

Recent research has also done a great deal to confirm Speaker Waldegrave's belief that many of the rebels of 1381 had been thoroughly alienated from Richard II's government by its failure to protect them from the dangers of extremely brutal tip-and-run raids by French and Castilian fleets. Indeed for those who believe that unsuccessful and demoralising warfare is one of the more common precipitants of revolutionary· activity, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 - like that of Jack Cade in 1450 - can easily be made to conform to a general rule. The appearance of Castilian fleets in the English channel from 1372 onwards seems to have led to greater devastation along the southern coastline than had been known for centuries; and to some extent at least 'the Peasants' Revolt was the fruit of the Hundred Years' War'.l Professor Hilton has admittedly pointed out that the ravages of war seem to have been much more serious along the coasts of Hampshire anti Sussex, where there was comparatively little rebellion in 1381, than in Kent and Essex. 2 Nevertheless it may not be al­together a coincidence that villages and towns immediately to the north and south of the Thames estuary were among the very first to rise at the time of the outbreak of the great revolt: the in­habitants of southern Essex an~ northern Kent, like the Londoners themselves, were undoubtedly nervous about the dangers of a naval attack up the Thames in the years immediately before 1381.

Moreover, some of the insurgents of that year clearly did dis­criminate in their attacks on those members of the landed aris­tocracy who had most conspicuously failed to protect them against the external enemy; and that the Peasants' Revolt com­prised some elements of popular indignation at the failure of the English nobility to play their expected protective role in medieval society few would now wish to deny. There is now abundant

1 E. Searle and R. Burghart, 'The Defense of England and the Peasants' Revolt', Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, m (1972), p. 366.

I Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, p. 158.

INTRODUCTION XXXVll

evidence to suggest that many of the rebels of 1381, however prone to false rumour, were highly self-conscious subjects of the crown who followed the progress of the French wars with genuine interest and commitment: they were no doubt only too ready to articulate their disappointment when the conduct of war was being so badly mishandled and proving so expensive as it was in the late 13 70S and early 13 80S. A considerable number of the insurgents must have at some time been involved in the war effort themselves; and it is one of the ironies of the revolt that the hundredal organisation which lay at the basis of national defence was apparently used to ensure cohesiveness among the rebel companies during their march to London.1

Failure to prosecute successful war was not however the only failure of the government in the twenty years before the Peasants' Revolt. More generally, ifinevitably more speculatively, much of the recent spate of research devoted to late fourteenth-century English history has strengthened the old suspicion that many of the traditional institutions and even principles of church and state were then undergoing what would now be termed a pro­found crisis of credibility. Nothing of course is more difficult than to generalise with confidence about the popular mentality of any age; but it seems increasingly hard to deny that the revolt of 1381 occurred at a time of exceptional disaffection on the part of many different English social groups. In their understandable reaction from the deliberately propagated legend that John Ball was John Wycliffe's disciple, historians (myself included) have sometimes unduly discounted a not unimportant connection between those two ideologues - that the audience for their respective messages must certainly ha.ve sometimes overlapped. Wycliffe himself was one of the several contemporary observers of the English social scene who predicted a popular rebellion in the months and years immediately before 1381; and although he later condemned the revolt for its extremism he also claimed that

I Searle and Burghart, 'Defense of England', pp. 387-8. For an especially striking use of paid archers from the hundred of Hoxne in Suffolk (by James Bedyngfield on IS June 1381) see Powell, Rising in East Anglia, pp. 21, 130-1.

xxxviii THE PEASANTS ' REVOLT OF 1381

the majority of the rebels had been justified in many of their aims ('lieet maiores bonos instinetus habuerint').l Similarly Wat Tyler's famous demand at Smithfield that 'the goods of Holy Church should not remain in the hands of the religious' (no. 25) needs to be placed in the context of the many cries for clerical disendow­ment, apparently raised more vociferously in the decades around 1400 than at any other time in medieval English history.2 Thanks to Mr K. B. McFarlane's last researches on the subject as well as to recent investigation of vernacular Wycliffite treatises, Lollardy itself has now been interpreted as a more influential and intellec­tually appealing movement than it appeared only a few years ago. 'The chief characteristic of English religious life in the fourteenth century is the growth of moral fervour among the laity.'3 If so, the highly orthodox figures of William Langland and John Gower can hardly be presented as isolated Jeremiahs crying in the wilderness of late fourteenth-century England; and even Geoffrey Chaucer should be increasingly seen as the Voltaire of his age. These and many other possible examples now strengthen the temptation to set the events of 1381 against the background of a medieval critical 'Enlightenment', a partial and perhaps abortive but nevertheless thoroughly pervasive Aufkliirung.

Nor may it be too optimistic to conclude the introduction to the second edition of this book with the suggestion that in recent years a little progress has also been made in the case of the most notoriously intractable of all problems raised by the Peasants' Revolt. How can that revolt be related, if at all, to what we now know of the short and long-term developments of the late fourteenth-century English economy? To what extent was the insurrection the consequence of genuinely novel social and econ­omic tensions in the English countryside? It is even clearer now

1 M. Wilks, 'Reformatio Regni: Wyclif and Hus as Leaders of Religious Protest Movements', Studies in Church History, IX (1972), ed. D. Baker, pp. 125-7.

1M. D. Lambert, Medieval Heresy; Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus (London, 1977), p. 218.

B K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), pp. 224~; cf. Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. A. Hudson (Cambridge, 1978), p. 10.

INTRODUCTION XXXIX

than it was ten years ago that no uniform or simple answer to that all-important question will ever be forthcoming. Indeed some of the latest attempts to formulate an answer have had the paradoxical effect of making one even more aware of the com­plexities of the issues. Several praiseworthy attempts to elucidate the Peasants' Revolt by comparing it with other popular move­ments in late medieval Europe leave one with the impression that the English rising of I3 8 I seems a more rather than less distinctive and extraordinary episode when set within the context of rebellions across the Channel. The fact that so many popular insurrections occurred in western Europe during the five years between 1378 and 1382 is hardly likely to be a coincidence; but 'if there was a symphony, it was not at all played to time'.1 Moreover, now that so much recent research has by its very nature been at pains to stress the intense localism of the 'regional economies' of late medieval England the same remark has come to seem increasingly applicable to the so-called Peasants' Revolt itself But however different the grievances of the Kentish rebels from those of the London suburbs or the villages around Norwich, it does seem increasingly clear that they had all either been exacerbated or given a different dimension by the demographic disasters of 1348-9 and later. .

Recent studies have done nothing to make the Black Death seem a less catastrophic disaster than was previously believed and have indeed done a good deal to confirm that serious population decline was protracted well into the fifteenth century.2 The consequences of so profound and so sustained a demographic decline obviously could, and undoubtedly did, take many different forms. But whatever those forms, there does seem to be increasing evidence that in most parts of England only in the mid 1370S rather than earlier 'did plague really begin to bite hard into the traditional manorial economy'.3 The extent to which this

1 M. MoUat and P. Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages (London, 1973), p. 138.

2 See J. Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348-1530 (London, 1977).

3 J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150-1500 (London, 1980), p. 214.

xl THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

thirty-year delay was the effect of an often alleged feudal or seigniorial reaction in the generation immediately after the first onslaught of the Black Death still seems, at least to this author, a highly open issue. But unless the price and wage statistics labor­iously collected by historians over many years lead us seriously astray, it was only in the half-dozen years before the Peasants' Revolt that agricultural prices fell markedly at about the time when wage-levels began moving sharply upwards. l A sluggish market for their cash crops may of course have made the poll taxes of 1377-8 I all the more painful a burden to many of the English peasantry; but it is even more important to stress that the great revolt occurred at exactly that time when the mass of the English commons could at last look forward to an improved standard of life. Could the poll taxes themselves have been resisted so strenuously precisely because there had never been so many Englishmen in a position to pay taxation at all? To the extent that there were genuine economic reasons why the rebel­lion of 1381 was born of temporarily frustrated hope rather than of deep despair, Froissart's famous attribution of the revolt to 'the ease and riches that the common people were of' may have been truer than he knew. Less speculatively perhaps and possibly even more significantly, the plagues of the late fourteenth century had disrupted the tenurial stability of many English villages. At Thaxted in Essex, for example, less than a quarter of the holdings in the community were in the same family's hands in 1393 as they had been in the year before the Black Death.2 Such extreme lack of personal continuity, above all perhaps in those villages and towns (like Thaxted itself) which were increasingly devoted to textile and other industries, provided hot-house conditions for resentment at royal taxation, the enforcement oflabour legislation

1 For his advice on these issues, and especially on the significance of the fact that barley prices in particular were consistently lower between 1376 and 1396 than at any time since the first outbreak of the Black Death, I am grateful to Dr Bruce Campbell. See also Bolton, Medieval English Economy, pp. 68-81; J. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 1 (1866), p. 234.

2 Bolton, Medieval English Economy, p. 237; K. Newton, Thaxted in the Four­teenth Century, Essex Record Office Publications, no. 33 (1960).

INTRODUCTION xli

and seigniorial intervention of any kind. By 1381 indeed, if Dr Barbara Harvey's magisterial survey of the far-flung West­minster Abbey estates is at all representative, we may have to imagine large numbers of village communities whose inhabitants comprised an explosive mixture of peasants holding by new contractual tenancies and others by much more burdensome pre-Black Death tenurial arrangements.1

Such new and at times gross inequalities at the village level undoubtedly also help to explain why the 'abolition of serfdom was the keynote of the rising'. 2 Here again recent research has tended to confirm the view that a demand for freedom was the single most commonly held of the rebels' objectives. Nor is it difficult to understand why resentment against villein status, by no means a novel feature of the English rural scene, should have escalated so dramatically during the generation after the Black Death of 1348-49. The ability of many English peasants to take the fullest advantage of the new opportunities afforded by the availability of land in the years before the great revolt must often have been blocked by their liability to servile dues. Nor could the English tenantry of the 1370S be as certain as ourselves that villeinage would eventually 'wither away'. For many of them too the single most important advantage of the remission of villeinage would have been the right of access to the royal law courts in order to protect the terms on which they held their land from arbitrary change on the part of their landlords. The severity of the English law of villeinage showed few signs of abating in the years immediately after the Black Death;3 and in this as well as other spheres the slowness of English legal practices to adjust to new social pressures does a good deal to account for the apparently universal unpopularity of lawyers themselves in 1381. It is at least symbolically appropriate that the Anonimalle Chronicle

1 B. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1977), PP·244-67.

I Fryde, Great Revolt, p. 28. a P. R. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants in Medieval England: The Common Law

of Villeinage in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1980), p. 207.

xlii THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 138 I

should ascribe the outbreak of the rebellion in Kent to popular support at Gravesend for a villein from whom the agents of Sir Simon Burley attempted to extract an extortionate sum (no. 19). Here perhaps more than in any other way the English landlords were dangerously insensitive to peasant feeling. By resisting the enfranchisement of many individual villeins on principle they probably presented the rebels of 1381 with their single most cohesive and positive ideal. l Nor has that ideal lost its force: it is in their quest for what William Grindcobbe called 'a little liberty' that the rebels of 1381 arc always ensured most sympathy from posterity.

Exactly when, how and for what reasons the great revolt of 1381 has been remembered during the course of the last six hundred years is of course another and still insufficiently explored story. However it seems safe to assume that popular memories of the turbulent days of June 1381 remained potent ones for a generation or so before fading into a somewhat muddled oblivion during the course of the early fifteenth century. Indeed it would be by no means difficult to advance the case that there was more widespread co-operative revolt on the part of the English com­mons in the fifteen years after 1381 than there had been in the fifteen years before the great rising. It is well known, for example, that on several occasions in the 1380s and 1390S the parliamentary commons expressed their f.ars of another general rebellion (no. 61); and attention has recently been drawn to a previously neglected petition which seems to provide evidence of extensive peasant risings in southern England during the spring of 1388.2

In retrospeCt the first edition of this book probably under­estimated the extent to which the Peasants' Revolt was an event which in the short term did more to open than to close the possibility of forceful action on the part of the English commons.

1 See J. H. Tillotson, 'Peasant Unrest in the England of Richard II: some evidence from royal records', Historical Studies, XVI (1974-5), pp. 1-16.

I J. J. N. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1377-99 (London, 1972), pp. 237-8; cf. Reville, Le Soulevement des Travail/eurs d'Angleterre en 1381, pp. CXXIX-CXXXV.

INTRODUCTION xliii

Nevertheless it seems hard to deny that during the course of the fifteenth century popular revolt in both English village and English town became more localised and probably more muted, by no means easy to discern within the context of the political and religious movements of the later middle ages. In most ways the now orthodox view that the violent deeds and words of Wat Tyler and John Ball no longer seemed so necessary or appropriate in the more relaxed and variegated conditions of the fifteenth­century English rural and urban scene seems justifiable enough. How far the ideals of the rebels of 1381 continued to lead an 'underground existence' in the popular mentality of the following centuries is inevitably always likely to be a highly debatable matter.1 What the available evidence does make clear is that memories of Wat Tyler were always liable to be invoked by supporters of the English political status quo whenever the existing order was confronted with the threat of a rebellion with clear populist overtones. Only after the publication of the second part of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man in 1792 did the great revolt of 1381 gradually cease to be regarded as primarily 'A Warnyng to Be Ware', to such an extent that it could even be assimilated into the so-called Whig interpretation of history. 2

From this somewhat uncomfortable position the Peasants' Revolt was to be liberated once again more or less exactly a hundred years ago. It was in 1881 indeed that Henry George first crossed the Atlantic to preach in England his gospel of land­reform and the iniquities of 'unearned income'; and it was in 1881 too that H. M. Hyndman published England for All and founded the Democratic, soon to be Social Democratic, Federation. Above all perhaps 1881 is worth remembering as a year in which William Morris was already well embarked upon the path which led to his visionary - in all senses of the word - Dream of John

1 For an interesting preliminary attempt 'to trace continuities of underground ideas', see C. Hill, 'From Lollards to Levellers', in Rebels and Their Causes; Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton, ed. M. Cornforth (London, 1978), pp. 49-67.

I For J. R. Green, John Ball's words at Blackheath 'began for England the litera­ture of political controversy: they are the first predecessors of the pamphlets of Milton and of Burke' (History of the English People, 1881, I 457).

xliv THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381

Ball seven years later. After the 18805, in other words, the great revolt of 1381 could never seem quite the same again; whether one was a Marxist socialist, a non-Marxist socialist or neither, the events of that year had acquired a 'relevance' and 'signifi­cance' which still seem certain to prove enduring. Small wonder then that the correct interpretation of the Peasants' Revolt remains, as perhaps it should always remain, a highly personal and debatable matter. Even the most deliberately dispassionate assessment of what is in any case the largely imponderable original evidence for the revolt is bound to be conditioned by our own political and social predispositions. On the one hand, as Sir Richard Waldegrave's speech in the parliament of November 1381 has already reminded us, it would always be unwise to underestimate the fmancial and administrative ineptitude of Richard II's government as an essential catalyst of the rebellion. On the other hand, it seems equally fair to state that any inter­pretation of the Peasants' Revolt, whether that of Speaker Waldegrave or of Professor Guy Fourquin a few years ago, l

which neglects or unduly minimises the extent to which the lot of many Englishmen of the late fourteenth century was based on seigniorial exploitation none too willingly accepted can never be completely adequate. But how far such exploitation and such resentments actually caused the revolt or even made it inevitable is of course another matter entirely. For this author at least the linear patterns in the historical story, the operations of the dialectic, still remain highly obscure. Several readers of the intro­duction to the first edition of this volume were unconvinced, and perhaps rightly so, by my suggestion that 'the results of the great revolt appear to have been negative where they were not neg­ligible'. About the consequences of the great revolt, like nearly everything else, it is admittedly dangerous to be certain. But, all in all, the Peasants' Revolt still seems to me of most enduring

1 Professor Fourquin's us Soulevements Populaires au Moyen Age (Paris, 1972) is nevertheless essential reading for those who would wish to see Professor Roland Mousnier's famous concepts of la totalite du travail social and a societe des ordres systematically applied to medieval popular revolts.

INTRODUCTION xlv

importance less for what it achieved than for what it reveals -primarily of course about the vanished social world of England six hundred years ago but not a little about the political and other preconceptions of the many who have since fallen under its endlessly fascinating spell. l

Corpus Christi Day 1981

1 This sentence was written in June 1981 at a time when the six hundredth anniversary of the Peasants' Revolt was indeed being vigorously celebrated throughout the country, and especially in Kent, Essex and London, by a series of publications, lectures, academic conferences and other more public events. Despite, or because of, the enthusiasm of those who assembled in the rain at Blackheath on 4 May wearing lapel badges which read '1381 to 1981: Let's finish the job', it need hardly b:: said that contemporary attitude~ towards the great revolt proved to be as interestingly diverse and ambiguous as ever. Whether Tom Paine himself would have approved the Peasants' Revolt commemorative mural, heavily influenced by Picasso's Guemica, which temporarily adorns the urbanised wastes of the modern Mile End Road is impossible to know; but he would no doubt have been surprised as well as sorry to learn that as late as 1981 the City of London showed no inclination to follow his advice and erect a more permanent memorial to Wat Tyler at Smithfield (see no. 76 below).

For the historian of the Peasants' Revolt, 1981 was not however at all a dis­appointing year. In addition to the various new studies already in print and listed in the Additional Bibliography to the second edition of this collection (pp. 413-19 below), those interested in the events of six hundred years ago can look forward to the results of much important new work currently in progress. Of the latter it might not be invidious to mention Professor A. L. Brown's extensive researches into the unpublished documents at the Public Record Office, Mr Andrew Prescott's projected edition of the judicial records relating to the revolt, and future publication of the proceedings of the Past and Present Society's conference on 'The English Rising of 1381' held in London on I July 1981.