recovered mine heritage and the realm of England, the which I had near lost.’33
The Peasants’ Revolt did not end with the defeat in London. Related revolts occurred at St Albans (beginning 14 June), Bury St Edmunds (14 June), Norfolk (14 June), and Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire (15–17 June). On 15 June the townsfolk of Cambridge rioted against the University, particularly attacking Corpus Christi College. By the end, ‘all England south and east of a line drawn from York to Bristol had risen.’34 Not even the eventual defeat of the whole revolt could return Richard’s kingdom to its condition before the Black Death. As the historian Gerald Harriss says, ‘political society had always lived in fear of social revolution, and in 1381 it peered into the abyss and took heed.’35 Although there was retribution by the ruling class, and the attempts to tamp down wages continued, the poll tax passed by Parliament in 1382 was to be levied only on landowners. By 1389, justices of the peace had gained the power to set local pay scales. Wages rose steadily, and by the end of the century they were at a historic high. Increasingly peasants held their land not in return for servile duties but on payment of rent. Landlords who lived from rent, yeoman farmers who paid it, and free wage-labourers (unable to find that rent) were becoming more widespread.
THE MURMURINGS OF THE LOLLARDS
The rise of the Wycliffe heresy coincided with the Peasants’ Revolt. John Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire around 1330 and became a leading theologian at Oxford just as strains within the English church itself, and between that Church and Rome, were becoming more visible. In London in 1312 the mayor and aldermen complained that the monasteries and other religious landlords around the City paid nothing toward the upkeep of the City wall and defences, despite raking in a third of all the City’s rental income and owning, by some estimates, almost two-thirds of the land. The Church hierarchy was seen by many as corrupt, worldly and incapable of giving spiritual guidance, and in defiance barbers, cordwainers and other artisans were opening their shops on Sundays. In 1468 shoemakers defied a Papal Bull which directed them to stop Sunday trading, saying that ‘the pope’s curse was not worth a fly’.36
The Black Death removed a good number of priests, as many high-ranking clergy fled the stricken areas. This meant that in order to bury the dead and perform marriages and baptisms, new untrained clergy emerged. These people often owned no land and lived in poverty. The orthodox Christian view was that man was sinful and all his privations were directed by God, but some of the new clergy – and John Ball is a representative figure in this context – felt the pain of the peasants. Ball’s religious standpoint was evangelical, and he talked to his audience directly.
This new fervour coincided with John Wycliffe’s attack on Rome. The English Church paid too much money to the pope, in Wycliffe’s view. He opposed the Church hierarchy and justified this belief with a ‘true reading’ of the Bible. Even more heretically, he believed the Bible should be printed in English: ‘Englishmen learn Christ’s law best in English. Moses heard God’s law in his own tongue; so did Christ’s apostles.’ This was a revolutionary view, because religion could now be used for the people instead of against them. The Church authorities responded by declaring: ‘By this translation, the Scriptures have become vulgar, and they are more available to lay, and even to women who can read, than they were to learned scholars, who have a high intelligence. So the pearl of the gospel is scattered and trodden underfoot by swine.’37
Wycliffe appealed to a wider public by presenting his views to Parliament and having them printed in a tract, accompanied by additional notes and explanations. In March 1378, after the Parliament had met, he was hauled to the Palace of Lambeth to answer for his views. The proceedings had barely begun before an angry crowd gathered with the aim of protecting him from persecution. Two years later – the year of the Peasants’ Revolt – Wycliffe and his followers were dismissed from Oxford, but this merely created an evangelical corps that preached throughout the country. In 1382 the crowd again interrupted the Synod at Blackfriars when it discussed Wycliffe’s doctrines. The London supporters of Wycliffe were sophisticated enough to support his views despite the fact that they detested his patron, John of Gaunt. Although London was not as important a centre of support for Wycliffe as Oxford, it was said that ‘Londoners began to grow insolent beyond measure . . . they not only abominated the negligence of the curates but detested their avarice.’38
Wycliffe died in 1384, leaving the first English-language Bible to be completed by his associate, John Purvey. Such was the impact of Wycliffe’s teachings that thirty years later they were condemned by the Council of Constance as heretical; his body was exhumed from its resting place in his parish of Lutterworth, and burnt. The ashes were eventually scattered into the river Swift, but, as Thomas Fuller recorded: ‘This brook conveyed them to the Avon, the Avon to the Severn; the Severn to the narrow seas; they into the main Ocean; and thus the ashes of Wycliffe were the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed the whole world over.’39 Yet it was less the current of the tides and more the activity of Wycliffe’s followers, armed with the unique weapon of the Wycliffe Bible, that spread his message.
Wycliffe’s followers were known as Lollards and were strongest in the counties around London, Kent, Sussex and Essex. The origin of the term is disputed, but its most likely root is the Dutch word for ‘mummer’, related to the word ‘lullaby’: it refers to the Lollards’ habit of talking or singing in a low voice to, as their persecutors said, ‘conceal heretical principles or vicious conduct under a mask of piety.’40 In May 1394 the Lollards presented a petition to Parliament which struck at the roots of corruption in the Church, blaming ‘conformity with the precedents of Rome’ for ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ leaving the national Church. It lambasted the ‘English priesthood derived from Rome’ for ‘pretending a power superior to angels’. It attacked idolatry in terms that would become part of mainstream Puritanism and echo in the debates of the English Revolution. And it insisted on the separation of Church and state: ‘the joining of the offices of prince and bishop, prelate and secular judge, in the same person, is plain mismanagement and puts the kingdom out of the right way.’ It also offered the view that ‘the taking away of any man’s life, either in war or in courts of justice, is expressly contrary to the New Testament.’41
By the early fifteenth century the state was engaged in severe repression of Lollardy, including, for the first time, burning lay-heretics at the stake. In 1414 there was an attempted Lollard rising in London in response to the arrest on Twelfth Night of ‘certain persons called Lollards, at the sign of the Axe, without Bishop’s Gate’. Sir John Oldcastle, friend of King Henry V and a model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, was already being held in the Tower for Lollardy. He escaped and tried to raise an insurrection which involved the kidnap of the king. The plan failed, and Oldcastle was executed alongside some thirty-eight others on the so-called ‘Lollard gallows’ besides St Giles.
‘JACK CADE THE CLOTHIER MEANS TO DRESS THE COMMONWEALTH’
In 1450 the counties of Kent, Sussex and Essex were once again the forcing ground for a rebellion which found its way to London, just as they had in 1381 and during the Lollard unrest. Jack Cade’s revolt followed the pattern of the earlier risings in that it benefited from some elite support, in this case from the House of York – soon to be conducting the larger struggle of the Wars of the Roses. Indeed some of Cade’s supporters claimed that he was a cousin of Richard, duke of York. In addition he had the support of some knights and squires, but it was nevertheless an overwhelmingly popular movement. However, the popular forces involved were no longer peasants as they had been in 1381: now they were composed of agricultural labourers, yeomen farmers, artisans, traders and merchants. They rose because Henry VI had extorted tax from them at home and engaged them in the Hundred Years War in France, from where raiding parties threatened the coast.
The rebellion began in Kent and Cade marched his supporters to Blackheath, just as Wat Tyler had done seventy years before. They numbered 46,000 according to the account of William Gregory, mayor of London in the year following the rebellion.42 The demands they made in ‘A Proclamation Made by Jack Cade, Captain of Ye Rebels in Kent’ were more directly
