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
