hill a ten thousand men to see the king and to speak with him.’
But the threat of the crowd was too terrifying for Richard to disembark as the rebels wanted. When the mob handed over a list of those they wanted executed, Richard refused this demand also. He would not even speak with them, and returned to the Tower, which ignited the anger of the crowd, and ‘they cried all with one voice, “Let us go to London”.’ As they moved towards London Bridge they pulled down the houses of the courtiers and the rich and broke open the Marshalsea prison. Finding the gates of the bridge closed the rebels threatened to take the city by storm, but Londoners inside the gates put their heads together, saying ‘Why do we not let these good people enter into the city? They are your fellows, and that that they do is for us.’ The gates were opened and the Peasants’ Revolt poured into the capital through Aldgate, where Geoffrey Chaucer had his lodgings.27
According to Froissart, the following day a crowd of some 20,000 followed John Ball, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw towards Westminster. Along the Strand they came to the Savoy Palace of the hated John of Gaunt, one of the main inspirers of the poll tax. The crowd – much more determined than it had been four years earlier – broke into the opulent residence and pillaged it, killing John of Gaunt’s servants. Then it was set on fire. At the same time the anger built up over many years was also spent in killing Flemish immigrants and those associated with the Italian merchants: ‘they brake up divers houses of the Lombards and robbed them and took their goods at their pleasure, for there was none that durst say them nay.’ Wat Tyler got his revenge on a rich merchant who had ill-treated him in the past, parading his severed head on spear-point.28
When they got to Westminster the rebels broke open the prison. They then surged back to the Tower to confront the king. That night the crowd assembled at St Katherine’s in front of the Tower of London, ‘saying how they would never depart thence till they had the king at their pleasure’. Richard was advised by ‘his brethren and lords and by Sir Nicholas Walworth, mayor of London, and divers other notable and rich burgesses, that in the night time they should issue out of the Tower and enter into the city, and so to slay all these unhappy people, while they were at their rest and asleep’. But the plan was not acted upon for fear it might provoke an even more extensive rising of the ‘commons of the city’.
The embattled royal party then decided that if force was not yet possible, fraud should be attempted. ‘The Earl of Salisbury and the wise men about the king said: “Sir, if ye can appease them with fairness, it were best and most profitable, and to grant them everything that they desire, for if we should begin a thing the which we could not achieve, we should never recover it again, but we and our heirs ever to be disinherited.”’ The following day when the crowd at St Katherine’s began ‘to cry and shout, and said, without the king would come out and speak with them, they would assail the Tower and take it by force, and slay all them that were within’, Richard decided that he would have to speak to them. He ‘sent to them that they should all draw to a fair plain place called Mile-end . . . and there it was cried in the king’s name, that whosoever would speak with the king let him go to the said place, and there he should not fail to find the king’.29
The king’s party rode out of the Tower hoping to reach Mile End Green. But ‘as soon as the Tower gate opened . . . then Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball and more than four hundred entered into the Tower and brake up chamber after chamber’. When they came on the archbishop of Canterbury, the ‘chief chancellor of England’, ‘these gluttons took him and strake off his head’. Three others met the same fate ‘and these four heads were set on four long spears . . . to be borne before them through the streets of London and at last set them a-high on London bridge, as though they had been traitors to the king and to the realm’. The crowd also broke into the bedroom of the king’s mother and – in an eerie precursor to the incident during the student demonstrations of 2010, when Prince Charles’s wife Camilla was poked with a placard pole in their car in central London – the peasants poked the princess with a stick and asked her for a kiss, though she suffered no worse.30
At Mile End Green the King came face to face with ‘three-score thousand men of divers villages and of sundry countries in England’. Wisely the King spoke to them ‘sweetly’, addressing them as ‘ye good people’ and asking ‘what lack ye? what will ye say?’ The reply was straightforward: ‘We will that ye make us free for ever, ourselves, our heirs and our lands, and that we be called no more bond nor so reputed.’
In this remarkable, unique confrontation between bondsmen and their overlord, the king replied: ‘Sirs, I am well agreed thereto. Withdraw you home into your own houses and into such villages as ye came from, and leave behind you of every village two or three, and I shall cause writings to be made and seal them with my seal, the which they shall have with them, containing everything that ye demand’. The king also agreed to ‘pardon everything that ye have done hitherto, so that ye follow my banners and return home to your houses.’
Some were satisfied with the undertakings that Richard gave them. But ‘Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball said, for all that these people were thus appeased, yet they would not depart so’; according to Froissart, some 30,000 stayed with them.31
The following day Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball assembled with some 20,000 at Smithfield, then the site of a horse market, and told the crowd that they had done ‘nothing as yet’. According to Froissart the plan was to take control of London. He records the crowd being told: ‘These liberties that the king hath given us is to us but a small profit: therefore let us be all of one accord and let us overrun this rich and puissant city.’ We cannot know how this scheme would have fared for at this moment, seemingly by accident, the king and a party of forty horsemen came into the area in front of the abbey of Saint Bartholomew. In Froissart’s account, when Wat Tyler saw the king he told his supporters, ‘Sirs, yonder is the king: I will go and speak with him. Stir not from hence, without I make you a sign; and when I make you that sign, come on and slay all them except the king; but do the king no hurt, he is young, we shall do with him as we list and shall lead him with us all about England, and so shall we be lords of all the realm without doubt.’ Tyler then rode out and asked the king if he saw his supporters ranged behind him. He told Richard that this mass were sworn to him in ‘faith and truth, to do all that I will have them’.
There then followed an exchange about the letters which the king had promised he would send to the counties freeing the peasants. But as this discussion took place Tyler ‘cast his eye’ on a squire in the king’s party that seems to have been an old enemy. He demanded that the king tell the squire to ‘Give me thy dagger.’ The king instructed him to do so, and Tyler then demanded that he ‘Give me also that sword.’ This was refused, and in the ensuing squabble the king ‘began to chafe and said to the mayor: “Set hands on him.”’ The mayor drew his sword and ‘strake Tyler so great a stroke on the head, that he fell down at the feet of his horse, and as soon as he was fallen, they environed him all about, whereby he was not seen of his company. Then a squire of the king’s alighted, called John Standish, and he drew out his sword and put it into Wat Tyler’s belly, and so he died.’32
Tyler’s supporters, on realizing that their leader had been killed, ‘arranged themselves on the place in manner of battle, and their bows before them’, as their forebears had done at Crécy and Poitiers. Richard rode out to confront them alone. He said: ‘Sirs, what aileth you? Ye shall have no captain but me: I am your king: be all in rest and peace.’ This seems to have been enough to divide the rebellion. Some began to ‘wax peaceable and to depart’, others did not. But now the king’s loyalists from the City began to arrive, and the balance of forces turned against the rebels. The king knighted John Standish, Tyler’s assassin, and two others and sent them to demand that the banners and letters freeing the bondsmen be returned, and that the crowd disperse. The gambit worked, and Richard tore up the letters granting freedom to the peasants. ‘Thus these foolish people departed, some one way and some another’, writes Froissart, ‘and the king and his lords and all his company right ordinately entered into London with great joy.’ John Ball and Jack
