persons’ for daily informing him that ‘good is evil and evil is good’. But the proclamation immediately went on to refute those who ‘say that our sovereign lord is above his laws to his pleasure and he may make it and break it as him list’ by insisting that ‘the contrary is true, and else he should not have sworn to keep it’. Moreover, the proclamation also contradicted those who ‘say that the king should live upon his commons, and that their bodies and goods be the king’s’. Again, for Cade’s followers ‘the contrary is true, for then needeth he never Parliament to sit to ask good of his commons . . .’. The proclamation also raised directly economic grievances about lordly extortion and the use of political power by the aristocracy to get and keep property.43
To start with, Henry raised an army to confront the rebels and they dispersed. But the cause was popular even among Henry’s soldiers and fear at the dissolution of his own forces made the king quit the capital and retire to Kenilworth in Warwickshire. On the first day of July 1450 the rebellion moved its forces to Southwark, Cade setting up at the White Hart. The ‘Proclamation’ had won the approval of many in London already discontented with Henry’s rule and Cade’s forces, perhaps now numbering 25,000, crossed London Bridge and entered the City. There was some looting but the main work of the insurrection was the execution of the king’s henchmen. William Crowemere, sheriff of Kent, was beheaded in a field at Aldgate, while the detested lord treasurer, Lord Saye and Sele, was ‘beheaded in Cheap before the Standard’, according to Gregory.
As the rebel occupation of London wore on, however, support from the elite drained away – especially when Cade proposed levying rich Londoners to sustain his supporters. The Common Council raised a force of Londoners to confront the rebels on the night of 5–6 July, and from 10pm to 8am there was fierce fighting on London Bridge. The drawbridge was set alight and the Marshalsea prison was broken open; ‘many a man was slain and cast into the Thames’, records Gregory. The rebellion was defeated and the price of 1,000 marks put on Cade’s head. He was eventually killed by the sheriff of Kent while retreating through the Weald of Sussex. His naked body was brought to London where he was beheaded and quartered. His head was set on London Bridge where only days before those of the rebellion’s enemies had been. There was widespread repression, especially in Kent, where beheadings were so numerous that ‘men call it in Kent the harvest of the heads’.
Cade was immortalized by Shakespeare in The Second Part of King Henry VI, although the Bard mocks Cade’s lowly origins, his supposed claims of noble origin and his promises of relieving the economic distress of the poor. Yet Shakespeare surely catches an authentic note when he has the rebel leader say: ‘For our enemies shall fall before us, inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes’. This levelling tone was submerged beneath the dynastic squabbles of the Wars of the Roses which followed five years after the end of the rebellion.
The division of the country in that conflict, with the South and East in support of the House of York and the West and North in support of Lancaster, prefigured the geographical division of the country in the English Civil War. As A. L. Morton observed, ‘Supporting the Lancastrians were the wild nobles of the . . . most backward and feudal elements surviving in the country. The Yorkists drew their support from the progressive South, from East Anglia and from London, even if this support was not usually very active.’44 The victory of the House of York therefore was also the victory of the areas in which feudalism had been most eroded by emerging market relations, and for this reason it secured the support of the nascent market-oriented classes for the Tudor monarchy over the next century.
THE REFORMATION OF LONDON
One final revolution helped to complete London’s transformation from a feudal to an early modern capital: the dissolution of the monasteries. The experience of the Lollards foreshadowed what now became English Protestantism, but Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the final establishment of an English Protestant Church was also a moment of economic transformation as well as a political and ideological milestone in the establishment of the early modern nation state. It could scarcely be otherwise when the Church that Henry nationalized was a major economic force in its own right. Some churches like St Mary Spital and St Mary Clerkenwell owned property in sixty parishes. Over 100 English monasteries held property in London.45 In all, twenty-three major religious houses in or near the City were taken over by the king between 1543 and 1547. In most cases they were immediately sold off to raise revenue for the Crown’s wars in France and Scotland. This economic revolution broke the Church’s grip on large numbers of shops and tenements that had been bequeathed to the monasteries over the centuries.
Aristocrats new and old were among the beneficiaries; the duke of Norfolk inherited a new mansion on the site of Holy Trinity Priory and called it, unimaginatively, Duke’s Place. Lord Lumley’s mansion was on the site of Crutched Friars. The lord treasurer, the soon-to-be marquess of Winchester, sold off the stones and lead that had once been Austin Friars and built himself a townhouse. The Charterhouse passed to three aristocratic owners before becoming, in 1614, a school and home for poor gentlemen. The ‘inns’ of abbots and priors that lined much of Holborn, the Strand and Fleet Street became hostels for travellers: those of the abbots of Glastonbury, Lewes, Malmesbury, Peterborough, and Cirencester were reborn as the Dolphin, Walnut Tree, Castle, Bell and Popinjay Inns. Others became residences for nobles and rich aldermen: the bishop of Worcester’s inn became Somerset House, the bishop of Bath’s inn became Arundel House, the bishop of Carlyles’s inn became Bedford House. Norwich Place passed through several hands before it came into those of the duke of Buckingham in the 1620s. Its river gate, York Watergate, still runs down the side of Charing Cross Station. The king’s new Palace of Whitehall, with its tiltyard for jousting, cockpit and tennis court, expanded on the archbishop of York’s confiscated palace. All of it, save James I’s Banqueting House, was destroyed by fire in 1698.
The emerging ‘middling sort’ also gained from the dissolution of monastery land. Housing for ‘Noble men and others’ was built on the land of Whitefriars, St Mary Spital and Holywell Priory. Tenements for ‘brokers, tiplers, and such like’ were built near St Bartholomew-the-Great. Two livery companies, the Mercers and the Leathersellers, gained new halls. St Mary Graces was demolished to make way for naval stores and a ships’ biscuit factory. Ploughs, no doubt, were beaten into swords at St Clare’s, conveniently near the Tower, when it became an armoury. A wine tavern opened at St Martin-le-Grand and there was glass-blowing (and a tennis court) at Crutched Friars. Belief in the Almighty was replaced by the willing suspension of disbelief as theatres rose on the sites of Blackfriars – soon home of the Queen’s Revels and Blackfriars Playhouse – and Holywell Priory, later to house the Curtain and the Theatre. Due to a legal loophole, the grounds of former monasteries were still beyond City regulation, making these sites ideal for industry, theatres and crime. Some monasteries did, however, retain a religious function, becoming Protestant churches. Others were converted into institutions of pastoral care as schools or hospitals.46 Broadly speaking, the anonymous poem ‘Skipjack England’ contained an estimate not too far from the truth:
The Abbeys went down because of their pride
And men the more covetous rich for a time;
Their livings dispersed on every side,
Where once was some prayer, now places for swine.47
THE BOUNDARIES OF LORDSHIP
Slowly, over the time in which the rebellions took place, feudal society faded and an incipiently modern world came into view. The revolts themselves, and the economic changes they reflected, were staging posts in the shift from a feudal economy – based on the militarily enforced labour service of the peasantry – to a commercial-capitalist economy, based on market-driven profits expropriated by a new trading class from labourers working for wages. The driving force of these changes was the people now becoming known as ‘the middling sort’ – yeomen farmers, traders, merchants and masters who could mobilize their apprentices. The power of the aristocratic nobility was being challenged, its old Church transformed.
