1381 Revisited

3,967 words

Juliet Barker
1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt
Belknap Press, 2014

Despite rumors of civil war increasing across the United Kingdom, the English Civil War(s) of the 1640s are not getting much of a mention, even on alternative media. I wrote on the subject here a year ago, and there are certainly parallels between then and now, most notably the gross fallibility of authority, cultural decline, taxation and its misuse, and the so-called “period of autarchy” of Charles I. While we might now term it “political over-reach”, there has been plenty of autarchy on display recently from an embattled Labour government. But as an increasingly angry version of Burke’s “little platoons” begins to form across the UK, how long until they join hands? And, if such an insurrection does come about, might it be not so much the English Civil War 2.0 as a reboot of the “Peasants’ Revolt” of 1381?

Juliet Barker’s 2014 book, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (Belknap Press/Harvard UP), opens with something of an iconoclastic claim, that “this was not a ‘peasants’ revolt’ at all”:

[T]his was a name bestowed by 19th century historians who equated the chroniclers’ description of the rebels as rustici, meaning rural or country people, with peasants and serfs in particular… [This ignores] the range of the rebels, from servants and labourers living off wages, through the village elite who served as bailiffs, constables and stewards, to the ranks of the gentry.

The term “Peasants’ Revolt” thus being technically redundant (although I’ll use it here), alternatives such as the “great” or “diabolical insurrection” have come into use among historians. What might this devilish insurrection teach us about the current heated state of the UK, and England in particular?

I am sure the academic field of history will get along fine without clod-hopping laymen like me seeing historical parallels all over the place between the England of the late 14th century and that of the early 21st. That said, and call it “Peasants’ Revolt” or “diabolical insurrection” or what you will, the uprising of 1381 took place amid social instability four years after the death of a popular monarch, Edward III, who was succeeded by his ten-year-old grandson, Richard II, rather than the older and more capable John of Gaunt. In the context of what would follow, Edward’s reign would come to be seen as something of a golden age, despite the misadventures of his errant son, The Black Prince, in trying to run Gascony as an English sovereignty. Today, Britain lost probably the most popular monarch in its history three years ago, and although her son, now Charles III, was not ten years old on his accession to the throne, one could occasionally be forgiven for thinking him not much older.

A consequence of a coming transfer of power on the death of Edward in 1377 also meant that Britain’s leading aristocrats were not out hunting stag on their estates. Rather, they were hovering around the court in anticipation of a new monarch with whom to find favor, and so had left the south coast unguarded just as Charles V of France launched his long-planned revenge attack. “No English fleet,” writes Barker, “patrolled the Channel to protect the southern coast.” Again, this is not an unfamiliar scenario when viewing the south coast of England today, only now it is not the French actually invading, merely acting as efficient clerks for the people-smuggling equivalent of a travel agent.

So, with a boy-king, the French burning down English villages and repelled only by gangs of locals raised by abbots and merchants, and new and unpopular taxes, England was politically unstable, to say the least. But, out in the shires, ordinary people – that often-untapped source of power outside of war – were learning to group together and fight, largely because they were both undefended and surrounded. Even the Scots were allied with the French. But the rebels’ eventual enemy was neither French nor Scottish, it was English, specifically those in charge (although never the King). England, the center-pin of that “moated castle”, as Shakespeare’s character of John of Gaunt describes Britain in Richard II, was approaching boiling point. Enter the counties.

The importance of counties is now far less than it was in medieval Britain, which is divided into counties as the USA is divided into states, although the system is purely federal, and important legislation has long been centralized and is not decided at county level. Mayoral and council elections, as well as that for a Member of Parliament, are about the limit of the devolved system of government found in the US. Most of the counties in existence in 1381 still survive today, although counties are rarely recognized as separate identities by the BBC, for example, unless you happen to be watching a game of cricket. Matches between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire are still referred to by older cricket-watchers as the “Roses matches”, alluding to the “Wars of the Roses” of the mid-15th century onwards, and in which the two counties fought). Other than that, you hear little about counties now as separate entities. The two counties credited with starting the Peasants’ Revolt were in the south east, Kent and Essex, and the historical parallels remain tempting. The first town where revolt was known to have taken place in 1381 was the village of Fobbing in Essex, “not an obvious place to find a nest of insurgents”, the author notes. Today, the same could be said of the village of Epping, also in Essex, which is now generally held to be the first of the protests which are spreading throughout the nation.

The basic causes of the Peasants’ Revolt were the same in town and country:

[A]nger and frustration at years of heavy taxation with nothing to show for it, oppressive tolls and customs exacted by landlords… punitive labour legislation, and corruption and extortion by officialdom.

Britain introduced the first-ever poll tax under the boy-king Richard, and the second, and the third, which proved a tax too far. Firstly, local tax-collectors were attacked, often being stoned (in the medieval sense) and run out of town. Soon, however, the mob began striking at the direct servants of the judiciary and thus the crown. But if taxation was a main driver of the Peasants’ Revolt, so too were pay and working conditions.

The situation regarding employment, and of course transient workers, was obviously different in those undocumented times (although that too is reverting, with anonymous and fraudulent employment in the UK currently rising due to illegal immigration). Employment would have been purely meritocratic outside the higher echelons of government, where nepotism still reigned. Now, the British are often told that they need immigrants to pick the crops, but this is absurd and untrue. The government is decimating the farming industry, and much of the extractive work is mechanized. But in the 1380s, there are reports of crops rotting in the fields, and cattle roaming untended, the population having been ravaged by the Black Death just over a generation previously and not yet having fully replenished itself. They could have used some immigrants, and England’s constant warring in Europe did nothing to help the male population. So, it wasn’t lack of work that drove the rebels, this was not the “Jarrow Crusade” of 1936, when men marched to London demanding work. The spark that lit the hay bale in 1381 was a combination of working conditions (including land usage and the feudalistic principle of “villeinage”, or a tithed working tenant), pay, corruption, and taxes.

The older England became, of course, the more written records it produced, of various types, even pre-Gutenburg. The reign of Richard saw a flowering of English literature, and while the “chroniclers” provide many of the records from which historians such as Barker work concerning the medieval period, familiar names such as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer also provide social commentary:

Chaucer’s country parson [from The Canterbury Tales] voiced the frustration of many when he complained that greedy landlords demanded ‘more taxes, customs and tolls than duty or reason requires’, and that they took fines from their bondsmen that ‘might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements.’

The revolt itself may have started in the Home Counties, but it was always aimed at the invasion of London, and the rebel army was on a secular pilgrimage akin to that of Chaucer’s pilgrims. Today, London’s population is officially around 9,000,000, although undoubtedly higher. In the summer of 1381, based on tax records, London’s population is estimated by the author at around 50,000. And so, with a few thousand men arriving in the capital, albeit not heavily armed but capable and angry, you suddenly have a war on your hands. And the logistics once at the gates of London were simple. Use traitors. The men of Kent and Essex found fellow rebels waiting for them, and the coming of the rebel army was just that, a potential invasion, and the King had enemies inside the gates. London was a walled city then – you can still see sections of the old walls – and the rebels were let into the fortress by corrupt guardians of bridges, gates, and drawbridges.

The rebels were intent on destruction, both of property and of any documentation relating to taxation. Your tax records were not backed up to a cloud, they were on a piece of paper in the alderman’s house. So, if you burn down the alderman’s house, as well as killing him if he has not fled, then you don’t owe any tax. As well as razing entire villages to the ground, the rebels stole cattle, food, and domestic items such as kitchenware. But they rarely took gold and silverware, which more than once they destroyed and threw into the Thames, doubtless to provide income for future Dickensian mudlarks and, later still, beachcombers with metal detectors. The rebels were quite communistic in their outlook, and some rebels were executed by their fellows for pillaging. Juliet Barker stresses that the Peasants’ Revolt was not undertaken for personal advancement, but rather with sound (if insurrectionary) political principles in mind. The revolt came close to changing the constitution of England. These proto-Soviet ideals did not reach the rebels in Suffolk, however, to which the revolt had spread, as it did to many counties, and looting of the property of officials was rife. One unfortunate owner of a mill had his whole mill-stone taken, not exactly a “portable item”, as today’s thieves term such things as music systems.

The statistics are of interest. Whereas now the Western media will inflate the numbers at a Pride march or a climate change protest, and concomitantly under-report the attendance at a Tommy Robinson rally or a local protest against migrant hotels, the equivalent to the press in 1381 wildly over-estimated attendance at the Peasants’ Revolt:

How many rebels there were we do not know. The chroniclers predictably claim that between one hundred and two hundred thousand were eventually gathered in London but, even when joined by the Londoners themselves, the reality is likely to have been less than ten thousand.

Low-ranking football teams in England get a higher attendance at their home games. It is surprising what thousands of people can do so much more effectively that mere hundreds. Perhaps this is why the Romans organized their fighting units in hundreds. Thousands has the tang of potential revolt about it.

The most extraordinary event during the Peasants’ Revolt – and thus the key point of the book – is the meeting at Mile End between King Richard II, a boy of 14, and the “captains of the malefactors”, as the rebel chiefs were romantically named by the judiciary. The fact of this meeting taking place at Mile End illustrates another unintended but rewarding consequence of reading history; it occasionally concerns areas with which you are familiar. I have lived in Mile End, which is really the beginning of the old east end of London. The Mile End Road takes you from Bow to Tower Bridge, right past the Tower of London the rebels tried and failed to occupy. I cycled past it every day for a couple of years. I would have cycled past what was once a field in which perhaps the most curious parley in English history took place. The King of England, aged 14, met and talked with a band of rebels intent on murder. There is no modern equivalent. No one wants to kill the King just at the moment, as Charles III resembles a mentally handicapped gardener’s son. And if it is a politician you wish to slay, good luck with that. The armored governmental car is now the preferred mode of transport for the British political class, not a horse clad in mail.

Wat Tyler is the name most associated with the Peasants’ Revolt, along with John Balle and Jack Straw, and he is generally thought of as the leader of the rebel army. Tyler was killed not at the Mile End meeting, but a later appointment at Smithfield, now a famous meat market, then a center for cattle auction. One of the few details about this shadowy character is that he was run through by a gentleman-at-arms named Ralph Standissh, for insolence shown to the King, including a failure to doff his cap as a mark of respect. Some things do change, in a way. Our current King is careful to remove his shoes when he makes one of his many visits to a mosque in the UK. As a mark of respect. Balle and Straw, incidentally, were hung. Straw apparently read out an impassioned speech at the gallows which turned out to be an invention of some sensationalist chronicler, the equivalent of a paparazzo today. Historians, as Barker often shows, have to deal with a lot of fake news.

The boy-king – or his advisers – made a surprising number of concessions to the rebels at Mile End, and those offers had an ambiguity about them which caused many of the rebels to believe they could act with impunity. But this was no state dinner:

Richard’s concessions at Mile End may have persuaded the more moderate rebels from Essex and Hertfordshire to return home, but the execution of Sudbury and Hales, followed by their heads on poles being paraded through the streets, seems to have sparked off a frenzy of rioting and bloodshed more extreme than anything that had gone before.

One can see why things became heated. Heads on poles would have a tendency to produce that effect. Barker astutely points out that, in essence, the Peasants’ Revolt anticipated the French Revolution by over 400 years. The men of Kent and Essex, and the King’s men, may have had no guillotine, but there were plenty of beheadings. The severed heads were stuck on pikes or placed in trees for maximum visibility, pour encourager les autres.

Race even played a part in these essentially white times, with the Flemish being the unfortunate racial scapegoats. “Murdering Flemings,” the author notes, “was a popular medieval pastime.” There are regular reports such as that of a gang of rebels who broke into a jail to free the prisoners, of whom they found just one. They found three Flemish men, though, and they beheaded them, so it wasn’t a completely wasted journey. It set me thinking that, in all the time I lived in London, I don’t recall ever having met a Belgian. Perhaps this book explains why.

But, as Barker points out, the Peasants’ Revolt was not composed, even in large part, of peasants alone, and some of the rebel leaders, and many of the Royalists, both had and forged savage reputations. The image school tended to give you of the medieval aristocracy was one of effete men with pageboy haircuts, trotting along on brightly liveried horses and writing poetry about courtly love. A gang of largely bloodthirsty maniacs might have been nearer the truth, and on both sides. Many of those who fought to put down the rebellion had committed appalling crimes – beheading a local parson is one that sticks in the memory – but their punishment often received manumission if they had had a good war in France. This was also politically expedient, as the boy-king’s advisers must have known, as it enabled the raising of an army if necessary, which the Peasants’ Revolt ensured it was. And if you want an army to be well and efficiently led to take on the “captains of the malefactors”, then a bunch of rich berserkers would be a net asset.

A remarkable aspect of the Peasants’ Revolt was the level or co-ordinated organization. The logistics of communication between cities, which the rebels managed with remarkable speed, required men riding horses over great distances through English weather (although the Peasant’s Revolt largely took place in Summer). Three properties owned by the same tax auditor, in three different locations across the Home Counties, were destroyed on the same day by the same group of men, and all without chat groups:

The rebels were not a ragged bunch of agricultural workers forced to march on foot but were capable of covering long distances on horseback, spreading the revolt quickly and maintaining the element of surprise.

The meeting at Mile End, and the concessions Richard gave, was the key episode in this very short revolution. Once the rioting had been quelled and order restored, Richard’s advisers had him renege on everything. The rebels had never fought their king, just the corrupted administrative system that surrounded him. The revolt was not against the King but against bureaucracy. The rebels wanted “the documentation in place so that they had their new-found freedoms enshrined in letters patent or charters.”

In the end, the Peasants’ Revolt failed in its aims but succeeded in its principles. Some of the players fared well, some not. King Richard had at least come through his first major crisis and could go back to dealing with his advisers and reaching puberty. He would go on to marry a six-year-old bride, matching Mohammed in a nice piece of inter-faith reachout, and be murdered in a bleak northern castle in 1400. Thomas Walsingham, on the other hand, a high court functionary and extravagant chronicler (who tended to make himself the hero of his work), did not emerge so creditably at court:

Thomas Walsingham had wanted to create martyrs of archbishop Sudbury and the prior of Bury St. Edmunds. Instead, he made popular heroes out of Tyler, Straw, and Balle.

But the Peasants’ Revolt was an extraordinary episode in English history, and amid the carnage and heads on pikes, there are surely parallels to be drawn with today’s bubbling cauldron.

Coming to history late in life, and particularly that of my own country, books such as this are a joy for two reasons. Firstly, with my late arrival, I have to catch up on “big event” history, and 1381 looms large. Perhaps books such as Barker’s may be about to come into fashion, just as Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year came into vogue during Covid. Barker’s prose is comfortable and her descriptive powers lightly novelistic without being prosaic. But most enjoyable is her history of the quotidian, everyday existence of Englishmen in the 14th century. The history of ordinary life, away from wars and treaties and revolutions, is utterly compelling. I wrote recently about Nietzsche’s essay, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. In that, Nietzsche makes a tripartite division between the approaches to the study of history: the monolithic, the antiquarian, and the critical. Nietzsche favors the critical, and claims that the monolithic – what I just called “big event” history – is a little too expectant that the great cycles of history will continue to roll, just because they have always done so. The German dismisses the antiquarian as a sort of fastidious monomaniac pottering about among dusty documents, but if I had been a historian instead of a philosopher, it would have been the history of the ordinary that would have held my attention. Barker is very strong on this. Her descriptions of markets, dung-collectors, church services, cattle auctions, shop-keepers, the whole early apparatus of British society, is charming and atmospheric. In one passage, she describes the actions of one Margery Starre, who gathered up the ashes of burnt tax documents after a rebel raid on a tax-inspector, crying, “Away with the learning of clerks! Away with it!” Perhaps this was an early revolt against bureaucracy.

Another aspect which bears comparison with today’s situation in England is verbal dissent. Speaking out against the King now is like killing Flemings was then, a national pastime, but speak against the King – even one not old enough to shave – at the tail-end of the 14th century and it might be one of the last things you ever said, other than agreeing to have your soul commended to God while mounting the gallows. But taking actual action which (although it was not) seems to be against the King? The rebels would all have known it was success or death. The very fact that the rebels spoke out was in itself an insurrection the British are beginning to see the need for once again. Now, of course, verbal expression has been amplified to an extent impossible to over-estimate, and certainly not usefully comparable to an age which was still a century away from moveable type and thus printed books. But freedom of speech was far more verbal then. One man was indicted for “a rhyme in English words” which he recited in public and smacked of dissent.

Whatever shape the civil unrest which seems inevitably about to overtake the UK takes, it is unlikely to be as savage as the events of 1381, but anger is difficult to gauge. The British are currently hanging national flags on lamp-posts, and across the counties. “Operation Raising the Colours” it has already been named. The local council takes down the flags. The British people put them back up again. Tick-tock…

That’s the bit that interests me. Whatever is coming down the turnpike, the elements of something insurrectionary are surely in place in the UK, and indeed across Europe. As I write this, violent protests have broken out in Belgrade, but the Serbs aren’t rioting about a dead black gangster in a far-off country, or Palestine, or trans rights. They are rioting because a corrupt administration led directly to the collapse of a canopy at the Novi Sad central railway station. Fifteen people died, and now anti-government protesters want President Aleksandar Vučić out. They want their taxes spent properly, not to line the pockets of corrupt officials to kill people through their negligence.

In Britain, although immigration is what is directly ratchetting up the social tension, that itself remains partially a taxation issue. The British grumble about taxes but what really angers them is profligacy with the tax weal once they have paid up. They are getting tired of politicians talking about the investment of “government money” into various hare-brained schemes and boondoggles. There is no such thing as “government money.” Government are the stewards of taxes – the same ones beaten senseless or even killed in 1381 – and those paying into it don’t like to see their money wasted. And if they are confronted on a daily basis with images and reports of undocumented illegal immigrants in 4-star hotels, men who may or may not sexually assault their daughters, they are not just going to shrug their shoulders and make a nice cup of tea. And all of this is happening with the football season starting last weekend, and the Notting Hill Carnival the next, stretching already depleted police forces in major cities, and both potentially volatile. Two weeks later, on September 13, what is being touted as the largest-ever demonstration to protect free speech is due to take place in London. Perhaps Ms. Barker might contact her publisher in advance, and consider a sequel.