Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Dan Jones
achieved in an astonishingly short time the total paralysis of government, the terrorisation of the most important men in the state and the destruction of the Savoy Palace and many other beautiful buildings. Public order dissolved, and was restored only at the highest cost to the Crown. And after a period of what amounted to military rule across London, the country remained at risk of terror from within for months, first fearing a repeat of the rebellion, and subsequently brutalised by a judicial counter-terror that lasted for most of the rest of the year. It would change the course of English history for ever.
Outside London, the rebellious spirit proved infectious, and there were major revolts in Essex, Kent and East Anglia, as well as more isolated riots and urban disorder in Somerset, Sussex, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire and Yorkshire. Even once the troubled summer had faded into autumn, plotting continued throughout England, and the subject of lower-order resistance, present in literature from the middle of the fourteenth century, became a real concern for the well-to-do.
In short, the rebellion was both a comprehensive damnation of English government and a startling announcement of the new political consciousness of the common folk of England. The lower orders, who had for generations been treated by the landed and powerful as little more than beasts of burden and battlefield fodder, showed themselves to be dangerous, politically aware, and capable both of independent military organisation and blistering anger. England’s nobility, merchants, lawyers and wealthy churchmen-most of whom had long suspected in the labouring class a tendency to viciousness-were confirmed in all their worst fears. The revolt marked the beginning of a rebellious tradition among the English lower orders which has been repeated ever since-from Jack Cade’s rebels in 1450 to Robert Ket’s in 1549; from Lord Gordon’s riots in 1780 to the famous ‘poll tax’ rebellion of our own time, in the early spring of 1990.
Over the centuries, the Peasants’ Revolt-to use the slightly misleading shorthand that historians have given the rebellion-has found its place in the corpus of great events in English history. The year 1381 is a signpost on the road from the battle of Hastings in 1066 and Magna Carta in 1215 to Bosworth in 1485, the Armada in 1588 and everything beyond.
But what do we really know about it?
The truth is that, as with many historical phenomena, telling the whole story of the revolt can be like trying to nail a jelly to the wall. The sources are fragmentary, incomplete and strongly slanted in favour of the rebels’ victims. The revolt’s causes-economic, social, political and legal-were myriad, and its geographical spread was wide. The terror that was struck into the hearts of those who recorded the revolt has lingered on. England’s monastic chroniclers recorded the rebels’ crimes and England’s lawyers documented their punishments. All did so with extreme prejudice, smearing the memories of the hated peasants with the ordure of their disgust, and staining the historical memory of the revolt with class hatred. Partly as a consequence, this class dimension has, over the years, attracted historians with a greater interest in applying historical theory than in fulfilling the historian’s most important duty: to tell, as accurately as possible, a cracking good story.4
This book is an attempt to redress the balance: to bring back to life one of the most colourful episodes in our history. In 1381 the peasants burst onto the historical record, and they left, for all the prejudice of their victim-biographers, a wealth of vivid, violent, hysterical and occasionally hilarious reactions to posterity. Their story is a frenzied, bloodied trip into an under-explored period of English history. And its inevitable, gory conclusion-both tragic and reassuring-is a reminder of the cold truth of revolt: that even the most righteous rebels usually end up with their heads on spikes.
In writing this new narrative of the revolt, I have aimed to make the causes succinct, the action as vivid as it was then, and the consequences and vengeance wreaked by a humiliated government as terrible as they seemed to a chastened people. The result, I hope, is a journey into a world both profoundly different and remarkably similar to our own. The Peasants’ Revolt takes us somewhere dimly lit and obscure: a world that could be unfair and outrageous; where death, pain, disease, discomfort and misery formed the fabric of everyday life for all but the very rich; a world where a large chunk of the population lived in some form of legal bondage to the land; a world of severe discipline and ingrained violence; a world where a man’s last vision might be his own intestines burning in a pile on the ground.
But this was also a world of life, colour and touching humanity, where ambition could take a man from serfdom to prosperity; where charity and social responsibility, as much as chastisement and rebuke, bound lords and their lessers; and where, among the filth, poverty and violence, there was a belief in the potential to make things better. Clearly, this was also a superstitious, deeply hierarchical world, often idiotically governed and ripe with casual brutality. But working on the drafts of this in London between 2007 and 2009, it was occasionally surprising how close it felt!
Dan Jones London, 2009
In 1390 John Gower, the famous Kentish landowner and poet, reflected at great and gloomy length on the state of the world he saw around him. He was writing a cheerless book called Vox Clamantis (‘The Voice of One Crying Out’), in which he described how man grew increasingly feckless, corrupt and base, turning from God, obsessed by material gain, and ripe for divine punishment.
Nowhere, thought Gower, was the iniquity of the world and the wrath of the Almighty quite so obvious as in the events of June 1381, when the flocks of rural yokels-many of them from his own county-had descended on London, torching houses, slaughtering their social superiors, and terrifying the life out of anyone who got in their way.
‘Behold,’ he wrote, remembering London that summer, ‘it was Thursday, the Festival of Corpus Christi, when madness hemmed in every side of the city.
Going ahead of the others, one captain urged them all to follow him. Supported by his many men, he crushed the city, put the citizens to the sword, and burned down the houses. He did not sing out alone, but drew many thousands along with him, and involved them in his nefarious doings. His voice gathered the madmen together, and with a cruel eagerness for slaughter he shouted in the ears of the rabble, ‘Burn! Kill!’
The captain was Wat Tyler. He was leading a shabby but well-organised army in an attack on the private palace of the figurehead of government and the man whom the English populus blamed for everything that had gone awry in recent years-John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster.
‘What had been the Savoy burned fiercely in the flames, so that Lancaster did not know which path to take,’ Gower wrote. He then turned to Tyler’s other crimes against London’s ancient buildings. ‘The Baptist’s house, bereft of its master, fell to the sword and was soon ashes because of the flames. Holy buildings burned in wicked fires, and shameless flame was thus mixed with a sacred flame. The astonished priests wept with trembling heart and fear took away their body’s strength.’
Gower was a man given to melancholy. In that, he was a man of his time. He had grown up in a world of sufficient hardship to turn any man to apocalyptic woe. When Gower was seven, England had gone to war with France, sparking a conflict that would put Kent and the rest of the south coast in perpetual danger of looting and raiding. When he was eighteen, the first wave of a vicious plague that wiped out between 40 and 50 per cent of the English population swept across the country, returning in epidemic after epidemic throughout Gower’s middle years. When he was fifty-two, Tyler’s mob had wrought carnage upon towns, cities and manor houses from Canterbury to York. And the very next year an earthquake had shaken the country, in many places quite literally to its foundations.
But of all this misery, it was the revolt of 1381 which made the most profound impression on Gower. He saw it with his own eyes, and thought it symbolic of the madness, faithlessness and viciousness of man, which had angered God so much that he sent down acts of destruction worthy of the Old Testament.
With the exception of Chaucer, who remembered the brutal massacre of 140 Flemish merchants by an assorted mob of Londoners and invaders from the shires in rather breezy terms