The Peasants' Revolt of 1381
History in Depth
GENERAL EDITOR:
Gwyn A. Williams
D. S. Chambers: Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance
R. B. Dobson: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381
W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley: Spain under the Bourbons 1700-1833
Roger Mettam: Government and Society in Louis XIV's France
J. R. Pole: The Revolution in America 1754-1788
H. C. Porter: Puri.tanism in Tudor England
Jane Rendall: The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment 1707-1776
Edward Royle: The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh
Dorothy Thompson: The Early Chartists
Henry S. Wilson: Origins of West African Nationalism
The Peasants' Revolt
of 1381
R. B. DOBSON
Professor of History, University of York
Second Edition
M
MACMILLAN
To my mother and in memory of my father
Selection and editorial matter © R. B. Dobson 1970, 1983
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 1983 978-0-333-25504-9
All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced or
transmitted, in any form or by any
means, without permission
First Edition 1970
Second Edition 1983
Reprinted 1989
Published by
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ISBN 978-0-333-25505-6
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Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
xi
X111
PREFACE
xv
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
XIX
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION
NOTE ON TRANS LA TIONS
THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE REVOLT
LIST OF AUTHORITIES
I
32
36
45
PART I: The Background to the Peasants' Revolt
The Character of the English according to John Trevisa
The Lay Population of English Counties and Towns
according to the Poll Tax Returns of 1377 and 1381
3 The Clerical Population of English Dioceses according
to the Poll Tax Returns of 1377 and 1381
4 The Black Death of 1348-9 according to Henry
Knighton
5 The Statute of Labourers, 1351
63
6
69
I
53
2
The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers:
54
58
59
A. According to Henry Knighton
B. Trespasses on the Statute of Labourers, 1373-5
C. A Preference for Bond Service, 1350
7 Commons' Petition against Vagrants, 1376
8 Peasant Discontents and Resistance before 1381:
72
75
A. Commons' Petition against Rebellious Villeins, 1377
B. The Bocking Petition, c. 1300-30
C. Revolt of the Villeins of Darnall and Over, 1336
9 Political Protest in the Good Parliament of 1376
10 Poem on the Death of Edward III
II
A Disastrous Start to a New Reign, 1377: according to
the Vita Ricardi II
12 Desertion from the English Army, 1380
13 Proposals to protect Shipping at London, 13 80
14 John Gower foresees the Peasants' Revolt
83
88
91
94
95
97
vi
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
1381
PART II: The Three Poll Taxes and the Outbreak of Revolt
IS The Grant of the First Poll Tax, 1377:
A. According to Thomas Walsingham
B. According to the Rolls of Parliament
16 The Grant of the Second Poll Tax, 1379: according to
the Anonimalle Chronicle
17 The Northampton Parliament of 1380 and the Grant
of the Third Poll Tax: according to the Rolls of
Parliament
18 Appointment of Commissioners to enforce payment
of the Third Poll Tax, March 1381
19 The Outbreak ofthe Revolt according to theAnonimalle
Chronicle
20 The Outbreak of the Revolt according to Thomas
Walsingham
21 The Outbreak of the Revolt according to Henry
Knighton
22 The Outbreak of the Revolt according to Froissart
23 The Rebels in Canterbury according to Jurors' Presentments
24 The Indictment of two Essex rebels
103
105
III
II9
123
13 1
135
137
145
148
PART III: The Rebels in London, 13-1sjune 1381
2S The Rebels in London according to the Anonimalle
Chronicle
26 The Rebels in London according to Thomas Walsingham
The
Rebels in London according to Henry Knighton
27
28 The Rebels in London according to Froissart
29 The Peasants'
, Revolt according to the 'monk of Westminster
30 The Peasants' Revolt according to the Continuator of
the Eulogium Historiarum
31 The Peasants' Revolt according to City of London
Letter Book H
ISS
168
181
18 7
199
204
208
CONTENTS
VU
32 The Treachery of London Aldermen according to the
London Sheriffs' Inquisitions:
212
A. The inquisition of 20 November 1382
B. The inquisition of 4 November 1382
The Indictment of Walter atte Keye, Brewer, of
Wood Street, London
226
34 Royal Letters of Pardon to Paul Salesbury of London 228
33
PART IV: The Rising in the Eastern Counties
35 The Risings in the Eastern Counties according to the
Anonimalle Chronicle
36 The Risings in the Eastern Counties according to
Henry Knighton
37 The Rising in Cambridge according to the Rolls of
Parliament
38 John Wrawe and the Burgesses of Bury St Edmunds
according to Thomas Walsingham
39 The Depositions ofJohn Wrawe
40 Two Suffolk Rebels and the 'Great Society'
41 The Revolt in Norfolk according to Thomas Walsingham
42 The Death of Sir Robert Salle according to Froissart
235
237
239
243
248
254
256
261
PART V: Elsewhere in England
The Rebels at St Albans according to Thomas Walsingham
269
Panic
in
Leicester
according
to
Henry
Knighton
44
277
45 The Bridgwater Rising:
279
43
A. According to the pardon of Thomas Engilby
B. According to the accusations against Sir William Coggan
46 The Riots at York:
A. According to a parliamentary petition, November-December
284
1380
B. According to the York 'Memorandum Book'
C. According to the York jurors' presentments, August 1381
47 The Riots at Scarborough
48 The Riots at Beverley
289
294
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381
VID
49
50
Rising of the Villeins of the Abbot of Chester
Rising of the Tenants of the Priory of Worcester
297
299
p ART VI: Suppression and Survival
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
'The Ax was Scharp'
The Suppression of the Revolt according to the
Anonimalle Chronicle
The Suppression of the Revolt according to Thomas
Walsingham
The Suppression of the Revolt according to Henry
Knighton
The Suppression of the Revolt according to Froissart
Royal Commission to keep the Peace in London, 15
June 1381
The Trial and Pardon of John Awedyn of Essex
A Tall Story: Oxfordshire Rebels as French Agents
A New Conspiracy in Kent, September 1381: John
Cote's Confession
Post-mortem and Pardon: the Westminster Parliament
of November-December 1381
The Persistence of Revolt:
305
305
306
3 13
315
317
319
321
322
325
333
A. A conspiracy in Norfolk, 1382
B. An abortive rising in Kent, 1390
C. An attack upon property in London, 1412
62
63
The Complaints and Requests of the Commons of
Kent, 1450
336
The Disappearance of English Villeinage:
342
A. Royal Manumissions in Yorkshire, 1338
B. Manumission by the Bishop of Hereford, 1419
C. Bondsmen not to enjoy the Liberties of the City of London,
1387
D. Parliamentary Petition to enforce Villein Disabilities, 1391
64 The Twelve Articles of Memmingen, 1525
346
PART VII: Interpretations o.f the Peasants' Revolt
65
66
A 'Wamying to Be Ware'
'Tax Has Tenet Us AIle'
357
358
CONTENTS
IX
67 The Causes of the Revolt according to Sir Michael de
la Pole. 1383
68 The Causes of the Revolt according to Thomas
Walsingham: Jack Straw's Confession
69 The Causes of the Revolt according to Froissart
70 The Significance ofJohn Ball:
363
369
372
71 The Literature of Protest:
379
A. John Ball according to Thomas WaIsingham
B. Ball and Wycliffe according to Henry Knighton
C. Ball and Wycliffe according to the Fasciculi Zizaniorum
A. John Ball's letter to the Essex Commons
B. The letters of Jakke Mylner, Jakke Carter, Jakke Trewman
andJohn Ball
C. Song of the 'Yorkshire Partisans', 1392
D. A Song of Freedom, c. 1434
E. 'Cryste may send now sych a Yere', c. 1450
F. Song of the Kentish Rebels, 1450
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
Geoffrey Chaucer and the Peasants' Revolt
John Gower and the Peasants' Revolt
The Life and Death ofJacke Strawe. 1593
Edmund Burke and the Peasants' Revolt
Thomas Paine and the Peasants' Revolt
Robert Southey's Wat Tyler
Engels on the Peasant Risings of the Middle Ages
William Morris's Dream ofJohn Ball
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
362
386
387
389
392
394
396
399
403
405
413
421
LIST OF MAPS
England in 138 I
London in 1381
Eastern England in 1381
100
152
232
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the copyright owners and publishers of the following volumes, who have kindly given permission to reproduce
excerpts in the original or translation:
Columbia University Press, New York, Chaucer's World, compiled by E. Rickert; Historical Poems of the XWth and XVth
Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins.
Longmans, Green & Co., England under the Lancastrians, ed.
J. H. Flemming.
Manchester University Press, The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333-1381,
ed. V. H. Galbraith.
Oxford University Press, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, ed.
K. Sisam; The Great Revolt of 1381, by C. Oman.
Translations from Crown-copyright records in the Public Record
Office, London, are printed by permission of the Controller of
H.M. Stationery Office.
General Editor's Preface
Historical perception demands immediacy and depth. These
qualities are lost in attempts at broad general survey; for the
reader of history depth is the only true breadth. Each volume in
this series, therefore, explores an important historical problem in
depth. There is no artificial uniformity; each volume is shaped by
the problem it tackles. The past bears its own witness; the core of
each volume is a major collection of original material (translated
into English where necessary) as alive, as direct and as full as
possible. The reader should feel the texture of the past. The
volume editor provides interpretative notes and introduction and
a full working bibliography. The volume will stand in its own
right as a 'relived experience' and will also serve as a point of
entry into a wider area of historical discourse. In taking possession
of a particular historical world, the reader will move more freely
in a wider universe of historical experience.
*
In this volume Dr R. B. Dobson examines in depth one of the
most dramatic and celebrated episodes in English and European
history, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Here, for the first time,
are made available sequences of evidence in depth which enable
the reader to reconstruct the crisis for himself. The volume stands
as a vital contribution to the history of medieval society and to
the history of 'pre-industrial' revolt in general.
The core of the volume is the Revolt itself. The social and
economic experience of the fourteenth-century peasantry, too
complex to lend itself to full documentation, finds expression
in a number of significant documents - statutes, petitions,
chronicles, poems - which give the reader a grip on realities and
then the documentation bodies out into a vivid, rich, complex
and contradictory narrative, a re-living of experience, almost a
symphony of discord.
xiii
xiv
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381
The structure of the book is narrative; the reader can 'read the
story' for himsel£ The most striking feature of this narrative is
the wealth of sources employed. Four or five chroniclers, often
contradictory, are brought to bear on every important incident;
significant and often colourful evidence is presented from
government and judicial records. The first outbreaks over the
Poll Taxes, the risings in Kent and Essex, the celebrated entry
into London and the death of Wat Tyler are covered in all their
fullness and complexity. The great bulk of the material has been
newly translated, and often for the first time, from the original
LaWl and Norman-French. The scope of the collection extends
to detailed coverage of the risings in the Eastern counties and to
areas which have in the past escaped the historian. Perhaps most
striking of all is the reconstruction of the repression, not only
from chronicles but from commissions and individual trials, and
the recovery of a tradition of peasant struggle, with a suggestion of comparison with the German revolt in the sixteenth
century.
For while Dr Dobson eschews any crude sociology of revolt,
he is not content with narrative, however remarkable in its
totality. A final section on interpretations ofthe revolt ranges from
contemporary comment, through Gower, Burke and Paine,
to William Morris and Friedrich Engels and adds a whole
dimension to the reader's perception. The student of history, it
has been said, should read documents until he hears their authors
speaking; here, on the Peasants' Revolt, and for the first time,
he can do just that; and directly, for the literature of protest, the
dark and enigmatic songs of rebels are given him. 'We are the
People of England', said Chesterton, 'That never have spoken
yet.' Here, some of them, in a hurling time of our history, fmd
vOice.
GWYN A. WILLIAMS
Preface
My first and greatest debt is to Professor Gwyn williams of the
University of York., the general editor and founding-father of
this series. This book owes its genesis to his original conception
of a collection of documents which might enable students to
analyse precise historical problems in depth and hence avoid the
dangers of 'that wilderness of general surveys from which we are
all trying to escape'. In this respect at least I have observed the
spirit as well as the letter of Professor Williams's original commission; for, as the reader will soon be aware, there is little that
is 'general' about this book. The great revolt of 1381 - as I tty
to show in my short introduction to the documents - might
serve as an excellent representative instance of the popular
rebellion in pre-industrial Western Europe. But the primary
purpose of this volume is to reveal the distinctive rather than
symbolic significance of what was, after all, a unique and
unparalleled catastrophe in English history.
The Peasants' Revolt of 1 381 is a subject for which it is genuinely
possible to 'let the documents tell the story' - hence its appearance
in this series. I have accordingly adopted as a general principle
the translation of as many documents as possible in their entirety
rather than the inclusion of a long series of fragmentary extracts
from many sources. As the course of events in 1381 is related in
all its complexity by contemporary participants and observers
themselves, I have made no attempt to re-tell the story in my
introduction, which is confined to a quite brief consideration
of the problems raised by the rebellion and its original authorities.
The more technical issues are discussed in short introductions to
each document, in which I assess the reliability of a particular
source and its implications for the study of the great revolt.
Footnotes have been used as sparingly as possible but are introduced where further elucidation of the text appeared helpful. It
seemed important not to allow the theories and interpretations
xvi
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
1381
of recent historians to intervene between the original sources and
the reader. Therefore the last document in the book is an extract
from William Morris's Dream of John Ball, published in 1888,
that is just before the intensive modern academic study of the
Peasants' Revolt began. For the most important secondary works
written since that date the reader is referred to the books and
articles listed in Sections 4 and 6 of the bibliography. These
provide a detailed guide to the issues raised in the following
pages, especially if read in the light of Professor Postan's very
recent warning 'against too naive or too economic a sociology
of rebellion - a sociology which considers every rebellion as a
direct reaction to intensified oppression or deepening poverty'.
The obligations incurred by me during the compilation of
this book are too numerous to be acknowledged in full. But I
would like to mention the name of Professor Williams once
again, this time for his continued support and interest, without
which the collection of documents would never have been
completed. His own enthusiasm for revolutionary activity has at
times had a greater influence on my choice of documents than
either of us expected. I also owe much to my other colleagues
in the History Department at York, particularly to Professor
G. E. Aylmer, Professor G. Lef[, Dr M. C. Cross, Dr M.J. Angold
and Mr P. Rycraft. Dr G. A. Holmes was kind enough to look at
my typescript at short notice and suggest various additions. My
thanks also go to Professor 1. H. Butler and his fellow members
of the Medieval History Department at the University of St
Andrews where I gave my first lecture on the Peasants' Revolt.
I have profited greatly from the advice of Professor G. R.
Potter, who read all the proofs of this book with his usual
salutary vigilance. Mrs V. Liversidge typed most of a sometimes
untidy manuscript with her customary efficiency and willingness;
and I am also grateful to Miss A. Hewitt and Miss J. Hallett for
their helpful secretarial assistance. Mr Bernard Barr of the York
Minster Library added to his many services to the study of history
at York by placing his expertise in medieval Latin at my disposal.
I am only too conscious that my translations from Latin and
PREFACE
XVll
Norman-French have at times been less than elegant; and there
may even be occasions when, as Henry Knighton wrote of the
rebels of1381, I 'have leapt before I looked'. Without Mr Barr's
assistance I would have fallen from grace more often and more
heavily: without my wife's encouragement and forbearance I
might not have leapt at all.
Introduction to the Second Edition
The starting-point of this book, first published in 1970, was the
conviction that the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 might be both too
mysterious and too important a subject to be left entirely to the
modem interpretations of the professional historian. Whatever the
inadequacies of this collection of sources, that conviction at least
seems even more warranted now than it was ten years ago.
Although what happened in England during the early summer of
1381 continues to pose a host of difficult questions, few of these
have been brought much nearer to solution by either the statistical
techniques of the economic historian or the theoretical concepts
of the sociologist. The problems raised by the greatest of all
popular revolts in medieval England may be profound but they
are neither recondite nor arcane. Accordingly the second editipn
of this volume is presented in the renewed belief that the Peasants'
Revolt remains, and should remain, a genuine 'free for all', a
topic upon which every reader can without undue effort come to
his or her own conclusions. Needless to say, the following pages
offer only a representative selection of the many original authorities available for the study of the great rebellion of 1381; but in
the absence of any major documentary discoveries during the last
ten years, I can only hope that they may continue to serve their
original purpose as an introductory guide for those who wish to
see exactly what can, and what cannot, be known about the
most famous and mysterious popular rebellion in English history.
Nor can there be any doubt, six hundred years after the third
poll tax and the famous meetings at Mile End and Smithfield, of
the increasing fascination of the Peasants' Revolt. This too is as it
should be; for if one believes, with the late Lucien Febvre, that
history should be deliberately 'problem-orientated' and that it is
the duty of the historian to harrass and bombard contemporary
society with questions, contrasts and comparisons fronl. the past,
then the importance of our all having our own views about the
xx
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381
significance ofWat Tyler and John Ball needs no urging whatsoever. Is there a problem in later medieval English history, after
all, which raises wider issues? No one would deny that the outbreak of a general insurrection in the third year of Richard II
often allows us to observe late fourteenth-century social tensions
and popular grievances almost impossible to detect in any other
way. But how fundamental and enduring were those tensions
and grievances? To ask the most basic question once again, is
it more significant tor our understanding of pre-industrial English
society that a general insurrection did occur in 1381 or that such
a cataclysmic event was never repeated? Was popular rebellion in
that year the product of governmental mismanagement, of a
distressing but temporary period of social 'disequilibrium', or of
an absolutely inescapable antagonism within the social order?
Should we see the Peasants' Revolt as the extreme but logical
manifestation of the crucial division between those who endured
'the pain and travail, rain and wind in the fields' and those who
profited from that travail? Or was the rebellion, as some historians
have argued consistently for many years, essentially a sort of
historical accident or sport - to be explained, if explicable at all,
in terms of the unpredictability of crowd behaviour rather than
the logic of economic developments? On these grand issues
opinion seems even more divided in 1981 than it has been since
the study of the Peasants' R( olt began. At one extreme, for
example, Professor Rodney Hilton has been at pains to stress the
radical nature of a rebel programme which seriously envisaged the
division of the estates of both church and magnates among the
peasants and so the achievement of a greater social rev()lution than
England has in fact ever experienced. l At the other extreme
stands Dr Alan Macfarlane's recent aild ingenious thesis that
medieval England was not a peasant society at all in any meaningful
sense of that admittedly ambiguous phrase. Such a view would
7T
1 R. H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the
English Rising of 1381 (London, 1973), especially pp. 220-30. Professor Hilton's
book is much the most stimulating study of the Peasants' Revolt to have appeared
since the first edition of this collection of documents.
INTRODUCTION
xxi
seem difficult to reconcile with the concept of a genuine Peasants'
Revolt in 1381; and so indeed it proves when Dr Macfarlane
proceeds to argue that what happened in 1381 was less a full-scale
peasant revolt than a very mild 'affair', whose most distinctive
feature by the standards of continental rebellions was its order and
restraint. l The possibility, to which I alluded in the first edition of
this book, that the Peasants' Revolt might be in danger of
becoming all things to all men seems even more disconcertingly
real than I could then have imagined.
Indeed of all the remarks made in the original introduction to
this collection perhaps the most misguided was the comment that
'The time is not yet ripe for a new interpretation of the Peasants'
Revolt'. It needs no urging that the historiography of the Peasants'
Revolt during the last decade provides a classic instance of the
general rule that societies tend to receive the type of history they
consider relevant to their own needs. The connection between a
renewed interest in the English Peasants' Revolt and such diverse
manifestations of popular unrest as Castro's revolution in Cuba,
the May Days of 1968 in Paris and the Vietnamese War may seem
tenuous enough; but it was partly because an increasing number
of individuals around the globe, and in England too, were
increasingly prepared to contemplate a 'world turned upside
down' with interest and sometimes even enthusiasm that the
late 1960s and 1970S saw such a boom in studies of peasant
revolts in general and of 1381 in particular. The supplementary
bibliography added to this volume will provide some impression
of how great a boom it has been. Predictably enough, one of the
incidental products of the recent revival of interest in the Peasants'
Revolt has been a renewed attempt to present Wat Tyler and
John Ball as founding heroes of a sustained revolutionary tradition.
Agricultural trade unionists at Thaxted in Essex continue to
remember John Ball, entirely as William Morris would have
approved, for his martyrdom 'in the cause of the emancipation
of the people in their fight against the Dragon of Exploitation'.
More interestingly still perhaps, May 1974 saw the appearance at
1
A. Macfarlane, The Origins tifEnglish Individualism (Oxford. 1978). p. 18S.
xxii
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
1381
the Mermaid Theatre, London, of Beverley Cross's The Great
Society, starring Bernard Miles as a medieval prototype of a
modern militant shop-steward. 1 New plays on the theme of the
Peasants' Revolt have always tended to appear on the London
stage at times of political turmoil and social conflict. Thus a
comic opera entitled 'Wat Tyler, or the Armourer' opened at
Covent Garden in 1793 a few months after Edmund Burke and
Tom Paine had been debating the relevance ofWat Tyler to the
revolutionary issues of their own time. Similarly the melodramatic 'Life and Death of King Richard II; or Wat Tyler and Jack
Straw' was produced at Astley's in the Westminster Bridge Road
shortly after the passing of the First Parliamentary Reform Act
in 1832; and in December 1869 George Augustus Sala satirised
the passing of the Second Reform Act with his 'Wat Tyler M.P. :
an Operatic Extravaganza' performed at the Gaiety Theatre. 2
Of much greater significance for the serious study of the
English Revolt of 1381 has been the recent upsurge of interest in
the peasantry as a social category, itself once again largely a
development of the early 1970S and heavily influenced by the
experience of peasant movements in south-east Asia and Latin
America since the Second World War. As early as 1966 Professor
Barrington Moore Jr. had put forward the controversial thesis
that differing relationships between lords and peasants might be
fundamental in determining whether particular states took the
road towards parliamentary democracy, communism or fascism
in our own time. 3 However, the emergence of 'peasant studies'
as a separate branch of academic historical and sociological
enquiry perhaps first became absolutely evident in 1971 with the
publication of Professor Eric Wolf's comparative study of modern
peasant wars and of Professor Teodor Shanin's wide-ranging
1
J. Putterill,}ohn Ball and the Dragotl (Thaxted, n.d.), p. 4; The Times, 22 May
1974·
I A. Nicoll, A History of English Drama, J660-J900 (Cambridge, 1952-9),
IV 551, v 555; King Richard II, ed. J. Dover Wilson (The New Shakespeare;
Cambridge, 1939), p. !xxxv; Dictionary of National Biography, sub Sala.
~ Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins oj Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord
and PelLSIItIt in the Making of the Modern World (London, 19«7).
INTRODUCTION
xxiii
anthology of the then recent literature on the subject. 1 Three
years later the Journal of Peasant Studies, which included a paper
by Professor Hilton on 'Medieval Peasants - Any lessons?' in its
first issue, was founded on the assumption that the general theme
of the peasantry 'unites the historian, the economist, the political
scientist, the anthropologist, the sociologist and the agriculturalist in a common interest'.1 Such new and often multidisciplinary approaches have already begun to make an impact on
our understanding of the late medieval English peasantry itself
At one extreme, the quantitative analysis of manorial court roll
data has enabled Professor J. A. Raftis and his colleagues and
disciples of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto
to attempt a more ambitious and 'total' reconstitution of fourteenth-century peasant society than any of their predecessors;3
at the other, recent emphasis upon the need to discover generalised
explanations of peasant unrest has encouraged Marxist and
non-Marxist historians to reformulate old hypotheses in a more
subtle and sensitive way than ever before.' Not perhaps that the
entry of the Revolting Peasant into the mansion of Sociology
has been without its dangers. According to Professor H. A.
Landsberger, discussing the English Peasants' Revolt within the
context of the most systematic attempt yet made to produce a
general sociology of peasant rebellion, 'Our own interest in it, and
our re-analysis of it, stems from our belief that its characteristics
1 E. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (London, 1971); cf. E. Wolf,
Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, 1966); T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Societies
(London, 1971).
I Journal of Peasant Studies, 1 (1974); and see the related Library o.fPeasant Studies,
ed. T. B. Byres and C. A. Curwen, especially NO.3, The German Peasant War
of 1525, ed. J. Bak (London, 1976).
3 J. A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Medieval
English Village (Toronto, 19(4); and see the other works listed in Z. Razi, 'The
Toronto School's Reconstitution of Medieval Peasant Society: A Critical View',
Past and Present, no. 85 (1979), p. 141, n. I.
• See the debate (highly relevant to any attempt to interpret the Peasants'
Revolt of1381) inaugurated by R. Brenner, 'Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Developments in pre-Industrial Europe', Past and Present, no. 70 (1976), pp.
3D-7S; especially pertinent is R. H. Hilton, 'A Crisis of Feudalism', Past and
Present, no. 80 (1978), pp. 3-19.
XXIV
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
13 8 I
are timeless, and that the lessons it contains are nearly as
applicable to events today as they are to the time in which they
occurred'.1 'Timeless characteristics' should however be a phrase
to alarm any historian at any time. All due credit given to Professor
Landsberger and the many others who have recently attempted
to place the 1381 rising in a general comparative context, in 1981
it has to be admitted that the Peasants' Revolt seems to remain
obstinately unique and still highly resistant to any efforts to make
it conform to a generalised model of economic or social development in late medieval England, let alone western Europe or the
world at large.
New interpretations of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 have accordingly been exceptionally abundant during the decade since the
first appearance of this book. What has been less noticeable, with
a few important exceptions, is much in the way of recent additions to our factual knowledge of the events of I 38 lor ofdetailed
new analysis of existing sources. Despite the very considerable
attention paid to the great revolt in the last few years, there are
undoubtedly still a great many important documentary discoveries
to be made among the voluminous governmental archives
surviving from the late fourteenth century. Thus of the comparatively small amount of relevant original source-material to have
been published in recent years, among the most important and
still insufficiently consulted items are the inquisitions relating to
the property of various rebels which appear in recent volumes of
the Calendars of Inquisitions Miscellaneous. 2 The details provided
in the preambles to these inquisitions not only do a good deal to
strengthen the impression of a complete breakdown in law and
order within East Anglia during the first two weeks ofJune 1381
but help to establish various important dates in the history of the
rising. Accordingly it is now revealed that Thomas Baker of
1
B. H. Landsberger and H. A. Landsberger, 'The English Peasant Revolt of
1381', in Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change, ed. H. A. Landsberger
(London, 1974), p. 95·
2 Calendars of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (P.R.O.), IV (1377-88); v (1387-93); VI
(1392-99); VII (1399-1422).
INTRODUCTION
xxv
Fobbing in Essex, according to Henry Knighton the very firSt
instigator of rebellion, was drawn and hanged at Chelmsford
(on 4July 1381) and not at St Albans as alleged by Jean Froissart. 1
Even more interesting is the account ofthe circumstances surrounding the case of the parson of Potton in Bedfordshire who on the
evening of Thursday 13 June murdered his servant John Hobbe
by stabbing him in the chest with a knife called a 'trenchour';
before the local coroner could take effective action there arrived
a great company of rebels from various counties, confirmation
(if such were needed) that large bands of insurgents roamed
eastern England more or less at will during this tumultuous week. 2
More unexpected still is the allegation that a Cornish knight,
Sir William Botriaux, apparently resident at the manor of
Botelet five miles east of Lostwithiel, not only attacked the
property of a neighbouring knight but led an armed assault of
three hundred men on a weir belonging to the prior of Bodmin:
he was said to have committed these offences on Wednesday 26
June, it having taken twelve days for news of Archbishop
Sudbury's execution to reach southern Cornwall. 3 This episode is
clearly most worth attention as an episode of armed violence at
the furthest possible geographical extreme from the original
outbreak of the Peasants' Revolt in Essex and Kent; but it also
provides yet one more example of the way in which members of
the county gentry as well as others so often seized the opportunity
of the great rising to payoff local scores and to seek violent and
illegal resolution of pre-existing feuds and vendettas. Not surprisingly perhaps, the sources for the rising of 1381 reveal an
England literally riven by innumerable bitter private disputes
about debts, inheritance and the right to property.
Nor can there be much doubt that similar and even more
exciting revelations lie in store for those who currently follow
the footsteps of Andre Reville and consult the massive series of
unpublished records still at the Public Record Office. The poll
tax returns of 1377 to 1381 for example, somewhat surprisingly
1
2
Ibid., v ISO; see below, p. 315.
Ibid., IV 172.
3 Ibid., IV 101-2.
XXVI
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT Of 1381
in view of their fundamental importance for the study of the size
and social structure of the late medieval English population, cry
out for more systematic publication than they have yet received.
Thus it was on the basis of the admittedly fragmentary local
returns arising from the poll tax of 1380-1, especially valuable
because they usually record the occupations as well as the names
of the taxpayers, that Professor Hilton recently concluded 'that
the agricultural element was probably very much a minority'
in and around the Norfolk town of North Walsham: only more
detailed analysis of such returns will confirm, what seems highly
likely to have been the case, that the risings in much of East
Anglia during June 1381 were those of rural and urban textile
workers rather than of peasants in any proper sense of that word. 1
Similarly Professor Hilton's use of the escheators' inquisitions of
property confiscated after the defeat of the rebellion to analyse
the social composition of the rebels (a still extremely difficult
matter) demonstrates the need for a more complete and authoritative edition of these records than is yet available. 2 An even greater
desideratum would be the systematic collection of references to
criminal trials for acts of mob violence in the last three decades of
the fourteenth century. Only when such an arduous task is
properly. under way, no doubt most effectively by a serie, oflocal
studies of riot and affray, will it be possible to set the Peasants'
Revolt fully into its chronoJ~lgical context. At present it is still
impossible to assess whether the incidence of violent disorder was
actually increasing in the years before 1381; nor can we yet be
absolutely certain that the months immediately following the
collapse of the great revolt di~ in fact witness significantly more
disturbance in the English counties than was their usual lot at any
time of the later middle ages. Almost any category of late medieval governmental record may indeed throw important light on
violent activity in 1381 itself. It is, for example, from an undated
aggrieved petition of the prior and community of the Hospital of
St John at Clerkenwell that we receive proof of the complete
1
I
Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, pp. 170-4.
Ibid., pp. 178-84.
INTRODUCTION
XXVll
destruction of two of their forges, located in Fleet Street and originally built by the Templars, at the hands of'les insurrectours en
temps de Richard nadgairs Roy dengleterre'; over twenty years
later the Hospitallers' attempts to rebuild these forges were still
being obstructed by the commons of London. 1
However, it is of course the vast records of governmental
legal proceedings which have the greatest prizes to offer the future
historian. Although several of these records have been used by
previous scholars, many of the most important have still never
been printed in full. Perhaps the most striking instance is an
assize roll of twelve parchment membranes recording detailed
presentments and inquisitions made before Sir Hugh de la Zouche
and his fellow justices in consequence of Richard II's commission
(dated at Waltham on 23 June 1381) empowering them to pass
sentence on rebels guilty of insurrection in Cambridgeshire and
the Isle ofEly.2 Although much consulted and partly transcribed
and translated by historians of the Peasants' Revolt in Cambridge
and Cambridgeshire, this invaluable plea roll undoubtedly
deserves to be published in extenso. Perhaps no other original
source for the history of the great revolt documents quite so
thoroughly the hostility of the rebels towards those members of
the local gentry who had served as poll tax commissioners,
justices of the peace and members of other judicial commissions.
Nor does this Cambridgeshire assize roll leave us in any doubt
that the destruction of manorial court rolls and other documents
could be a regular rather than intermittent objective of the insurgents; and on occasion it even exposes, albeit briefly, the
political ideology of some leading rebels and confirms the
chroniclers' general impression of their readiness to contemplate
1 P. R. 0., Ancient Petitions (S.C. 8), 216/10787, 10788. Presumably the
demolition of these forges occurred on Thursday 13 June when the Temple itself
was destroyed (see below, pp. 156-7, 170, 184, 219).
2 P. R. 0., Just. Itin. 1/103, only partly printed in W. M. Palmer, 'Records of
the Villein Insurrection in Cambridgeshire', The East Anglian (Ipswich), N.S., VI
(1895-6); cf. E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896), pp.
136-8; Victoria County History, Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, IT (1948) 399-402; m
(1959) 10-12.
XXVlll
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
138 I
a radically new social order. Thus Adam Clymme, who ought no
doubt to have figured in the first edition of this volume, was
hanged for wandering around the countryside with arms displayed and 'bearing a standard to assemble insurgents, commanding that no man of whatever condition, whether free or bond
(native), should obey his lord to perform any services or customs,
under penalty of beheading, unless Clymme instructed them
otherwise on behalf of the great company (magna societas)'.l
More interesting still, and the one legal document I now most
regret not including when this selection was originally made, is
the indictment which records the sad story of John Shirle of
Nottinghamshire. Here, belatedly, it is:
pleas held, on Thursday 16 July 1381, before Hugh la Zouche and
his fellows, assigned to hear, punish and chastise the rebels and
disturbers of the peace in the said county (of Cambridge).!
John ShirIe of the county of Nottingham was taken because it
was found that he had been a vagabond [vagabundus] in various
counties during the whole time of the disturbance, insurrection and
tumult, carrying lies as well as silly and worthless talk from district
to district, whereby the peace of the lord the king could rapidly
be broken and the people be disquieted and disturbed. Among other
damaging words, namcly after the proclamation of the peace of the
lord the king made on the aforesaid day and year, when the justices
assigned by the lord the king were holding sessions in the town, he
said in a tavern in Briggestrete lBridge Street] in Cambridge, where
many were assembled to listen to his news and worthless talk, that
the stewards of the lord the king as well as the justices and many
other officers and ministers of the king were more deserving to be
drawn and hanged and to suffer other lawful pains and torments
than John Balle, chaplain, a traitor and felon lawfully convicted.
For John ShirIe said that he [Ball] had been condemned to death
falsely, unjustly and for envy by the said ministers with the king's
assent, because he was a true and worthy man, prophesying things
useful to the commons of the kingdom and telling of wrongs and
P. R. O.Just. Itin. 1/103, memb. 10V; c( Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, p. 215.
Ibid., memb. sr. C( the account of the case in Powell, Rising in East Anglia,
pp. 54-5; and the translation printed in English Economic History: Select Documents,
ed. A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown and R. H. Tawney (London, 1914), pp. 109-10.
1
2
INTRODUCTION
xxix
oppressions done to the people by the king and the aforesaid ministers;
and Ball's death would not go unpunished but within a short space
of time he would well reward both the king and his said ministers
and officers. These sayings and threats redound to the prejudice of
the crown of the lord the king and to the contempt and manifest
disturbance of the people. And thereupon the said John Shirle was
immediately brought by the sheriff before the said justices sitting in
Cambridge castle; and he was charged about these matters and was
diligently examined as regards his conversation, his presence [in
Cambridge] and his estate; and when these things had been acknowledged by him before the said justices, his evil behaviour and condition were made plainly manifest and clear. And thereupon
trustworthy witnesses in his presence at the time when the abovementioned lies, evil words, threats and worthless talk had been
spoken by him, were requested; and they, being sworn to speak the
truth about these matters, testified that all the aforesaid words
imputed to him had indeed been spoken by him; and he, examined
once again, did not deny the charges laid against him. Therefore by
the discretion of the said justices he was hanged; and an order was
made to the escheator to enquire diligently about his lands and
tenements and his goods and chattels, and to make due execution
thereof for the lord the king.
Even when conveyed through the formal phraseology of a
legal process, the episode of John Shirle's summary trial and
hanging at Cambridge a month after the collapse of the Peasants'
Revolt makes vivid if melancholy reading. It is, after all, very
rarely that a historian of the revolt has an opportunity to eavesdrop, however partially, on a conversation in a tavern. But what
exactly should one make of that conversation? The case of John
Shirle seems to present in microcosm, my real reason for citing
it at length, the sort of intractable evidential problems with
which the study of the Peasants' Revolt still abounds. Can one
trust the testimony of the men who sat listening to Shirle in that
Bridge Street tavern? Can one be certain of the impartiality of
the royal justices? It is in any case an interesting comment upon
the speed with which news could circulate through late fourteenth-century England that John Ball's death should be the
subject of impassioned talk in Cambridge on the very day after
XXX
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
138 I
his hanging at St Albans on 15 July.l At the least, the record of
Shirle's trial provides us with our only clear proof, outside the
pages of the inevitably prejudiced chroniclers, that John Ball
could be regarded as a popular martyr figure in areas far removed
from those with which he is known to have been regularly
associated. At the most, there is a strong probability that John
Shirle's bitterness was representative of a very widely diffused
sense of betrayal throughout England as a whole. Moreover
Shirle's speedy demise does something to confirm a general
impression that in 1381, as in late mediaeval England at any time,
seditious words were regarded by the authorities as considerably
more dangerous than violent and even murderous acts. But until
more is known from the legal and other records of the period
about the mainsprings of popular unrest, until cases analogous to
that of John Shirle are unearthed, it is still hard to speculate as to
exactly how many other rebels shared his sense of communal
solidarity and of corruption in high places.!
The all-important chronicle sources for the Peasants' Revolt also
still demand considerably more critical scrutiny than they have
yet received. Admittedly in this sphere the days have passed when
the late medieval historian can hope for miracles. Although the
recent discovery by Dr Ian Doyle ofJohn Benet' s fifteenth~entury
English chronicle now at Trinity College, Dublin, reminds us
that important finds may still be made, 3 the chances of a significant new narrative account of the great revolt coming to light in
the future must certainly be regarded as very slender. There can
See below, p. 381.
For a most illuminating analysis of the detailed grievances of some of the
rebels of June 1381, partly based on important new documentary discoveries
among thejudicial records, now see A. Prescott, 'London in the Peasants' Revolt',
The London Journal, 7 no. 2 (1981), pp. 125-43. No previous study of the great
revolt has ever exposed quite so clearly how the generalised demand for justice
at the heart of the insurrection often reflected, and readily dissolved into, existing
personal vendettas and the quest for purely private revenge; cf. the examples at
pp. 218-19, 228-30, 279-84, 288-9 below.
I 'John Benet's Chronicle for the years 1400 to 1462', ed. G. L. and M. A.
Harriss, Camden Miscellany, XXIV (Camden Fourth Series, 9, 1972), pp. 151-233.
1
2
INTRODUCTION
XXXI
accordingly be no real doubt that the four lengthy accounts of
the insurrection provided by Thomas Walsingham, Henry
Knighton, Jean Froissart and the author of the Anonimalle Chronicle, all translated in this volume, will always remain the indispensable four gospels of the Peasants' Revolt. Indeed the success of
these four very different authors in conveying the dramatic
excitement of events in and around London during June 1381
has sometimes distracted attention from the value of the more
cursory but often partly independent comments made by other
contemporary chroniclers. An ideally comprehensive anthology
of the sources for the Peasants' Revolt would accordingly include
not only the narratives of the so-called 'monk of Westminster'
and the continuator of the Eulogium Historiarum (both presented
in this volume) but the remarks to be found in the English continuations of the popular Brut as well as in monastic annals
compiled at Bury St Edmunds, Bermondsey and the two Cistercian abbeys of Dieulacres in Staffordshire and Kirkstall in Yorkshire. I More detailed still is the account of 'this time of fury and
insanity' at the small Bedfordshire town of Dunstable provided
by an anonymous canon of the Augustinian priory there. 2 Like
the abbot of St Albans a dozen miles to the south, the prior of
Dunstable was reluctantly compelled to concede a charter of
liberties to the rebels. One of the clauses of this charter had the
effect of creating a schism within the ranks of the insurgents,
between the burgesses of the town who wished to prohibit the
sale of meat and fish in Dunstable by anyone but themselves and
the remainder of the mob who clearly advocated a much less
restrictive policy. No other chronicler of the Peasants' Revolt
provides so clear an indication that the alliance between peasants
and townsmen so ubiquitous throughout much of southern and
1 The Brut, or The Chronicles of England, II, ed. F. Brie (Early English Text
Society, O.S., 136, 1908), pp. 336-8; Memorials '?f St. Edmund's Abbey (Rolls
Series, 1890-96), III 125-31; Annales Monastici (Rolls Series, 1864-69), ill 480;
M. V. Clarke and V. H. Galbraith, 'The Deposition of Richard II', Bulletin of
John Rylands Library, XIV (1930), pp. 164-81; The Kirkstall Abbey Chronicles
(Thoresby Society, XIII, 1952), pp. 65-6, lIO-li.
2 Annales Monastici, III 418.
XXXII
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381
eastern England in the summer of I381 may often have been
based on very fragile foundations. l
In time no doubt the chronicles of late fourteenth-century
England will be subjected to the same rigorously critical scrutiny
that has long been applied to Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the
various recensions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 2 When that
day eventually comes, it seems only too likely that Thomas
Walsingham, Henry Knighton and, above all, the inimitably
mendacious Jean Froissart will be revealed as much more dependent on second-hand information, on inaccurate gossip and indeed
on sheer wishful thinking than it is currently comfortable to
admit. In particular it is becoming increasingly evident that many
chroniclers' accounts of crucial episodes in the history of the
rebellion have undergone conscious or unconscious distortion
because of their authors' general political prejudices and assumptions at the time of writing. Although somewhat over-schematic
in its approach to the problems, Louisa Duls's analysis of the
different ways in which the chronicles present the young Richard
II's behaviour during June 1381 has made it very clear that
Thomas Walsingham and his disciples were at deliberate pains
to portray the thirteen-year old king in a much less heroic light
than did the author of the Anonimalle Chronicle. Whereas the
latter asserted that Richard did what he could to save Archbishop
Sudbury and his fellow scapegoats from the fury of the mob on
Friday 14 June, Walsingham gets very close to suggesting that
a pusillanimous young monarch deliberately sacrificed the life of
his archbishop in order to preserve his own. 3
1 As Professor E. B. Pryde has pointed out in his valuable new survey of The
Great Revolt of 1381 (Hist. Association Pamphlet, G 100, 1981, p. 29), any serious
attempt to implement Richard U's promise at Mile End 'that all our subjects
should be free to buy and sell in English cities, boroughs and market towns'
would have ruined the latter's corporate revenues as well {lS their all-important
trading privileges: see Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, II 21.
2 The conclusions of H. M. Hansen's 'The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the
Chronicles', Journal of Medieval History, 6 (1980), pp. 393-415, seem to me however to be seriously impaired by too rigid an application of the canons of modern
literary textual criticism to chronicles which do after all convey genuine news
about real events.
8 L. D. Duls, Richard II in the Early Chronicles (The Hague, 1975), pp. 13-28.
INTRODUCTION
xxxiii
More thought-provoking still are the revelations offered by
the Evesham chronicle known as the Historia Vitae et Regni
Ricardi SeCtlndi. George B. Stow Jr's new edition of this work, the
single most substantial contribution to the chronicle literature
for the great revolt in recent years, does of course confirm the
traditional view that the author (perhaps Nicholas Herford, prior
of Evesham Abbey from 1352 to 1392) was very heavily indebted
to Walsingham. However the Vita is now fully revealed as
providing an account of the Peasants' Revolt which goes much
further than Walsingham and the other chroniclers in two
interesting directions: in presenting the young Richard as a
timorous sheep before the rebellious wolves and in condemning
the commons themselves as bloodthirsty anarchists bent on a
universal Gotterda·mmerung. No late fourteenth-century chronicle
seems to illustrate quite so well the myth-making process whereby
Wat Tyler and John Ball were rapidly converted into archetypal
images of political and social sedition. Considerably more
persuasive, but perhaps all the more dangerous for that reason, is
Froissart's undoubtedly deliberate manipulation of his evidence
for other and more chivalric purposes, above all in order to
transform the young king into an exemplar of the ideally courageous lord. Careful attention to the details of Froissart's famous
narrative of the rebellion included in this volume will reveal
how skilfully, for instance in his account of the delivery of the
royal banners to the rebel companies at Mile End and their
enforced surrender after Smithfield, he converted a confused
series of incidents into an exemplary story of chivalric aventure.
The notoriously difficult but not perhaps absolutely impossible
problem of disentangling truth from fiction in Froissart's voluminous chronicles can hardly be said to have begun. 1
In the case of the Anonimalle Chronicle's celebrated account of
the Peasants' Revolt it has been less the veracity than the author1 See the recent perceptive comments of J. W. Sherborne, 'Charles VI and
Richard II', in Froissart: Historian, ed. J. J. N. Palmer (Boydell Press, 1981). p. 53.
It should be added that an important new edition of another of .he chronicle
authorities for the revolt (translated as no. 29 below) has now appeared as The
Westminster Chronic/e, 1381-94. ed. L. C. Hector and B. Harvey (Oxford, 1981).
XXXIV
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
138 I
ship of the narrative which remains in dispute. Not long before
he died Professor V. H. Galbraith, the editor of the definitive
edition of this chronicle in 1927, suggested a possible solution to
an old mystery. In the early sixteenth century John Leland, the
famous antiquary, claimed to have read an epitome of a now lost
French chronicle written by a certain William de Pakington, a
clerk prominent in the service of the Black Prince, Princess Joan
of Kent and of Richard II himself. By general agreement the
Anonimalle's description of events in London during the turbulent
days of Wednesday 12 to Saturday 15 June is the most accurate
to survive; and it was evidently composed by an author actually
resident in the Tower of London at the time, who was also close
to royal and governmental circles and who observed the activities
of the rebels free from the more melodramatic fantasies and
rhetoric characteristic of the monastic chroniclers. As Pakington
was keeper of the king's wardrobe from 1377 until his death in
1390, he is accordingly a plausible candidate for the authorship
of 'the most valuable of surviving contemporary accounts' of
1381. 1 Such an identification, not absolutely proven of course,
still leaves open the problem of how so detailed an account of
the insurrection came to be inserted in the text of a monastic
chronicle written at the Benedictine abbey of St Mary' s, York;
and future analysis of the Al1011imalle Chrollicle may well suggest
that its narrative of the insurr(""'";tion is not quite as artless a piece of
literary composition as it may seem at first reading. However,
despite the current conflicting opinions on nearly every other
issue relating to the Peasants' Revolt, there seems no reason to
question the general accura~y of the author's narrative nor
his explicit statement that the revolt occurred in 1381 'because of
the exceptionally severe tenths and fifteenths and other subsidies
lightly conceded in parliaments and extortionately levied from
the poor people' (no. 19 below).
Indeed in any review, however brief, of the most recent
interpretations of the great revolt, it is probably true to say that
1 v. H. Galbraith, 'Thoughts about the Peasants' Revolt', in The Reign of
Richard II, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. Barron (London, 1971), pp. 46-57.
INTRODUCTION
xxxv
the three poll taxes of 1377-8 I still deserve to hold pride of place.
Although some historians, understandably enough, have tried to
avoid seeing the insurrection simply as a reaction to inordinately
heavy taxation, the severity of that taxation still seems as noteworthy now as it did to Sir Richard Waldegrave, speaker of the
commons who assembled in parliament at Westminster in November 1381. For Speaker Waldegrave, admittedly a critic rather than
an advocate of the prevail~ng governmental regime, the causes of
the rebellion were four-fold: the burdens of taxation, the extravagance of the royal court, illegal aristocratic maintenance, and the
failure of the crown to protect the homes of its subjects from
French attack. In what Dr Maurice Keen has described as 'the
most doleful words that were ever uttered by a speaker of the
medieval commons', Waldegrave designated these as 'the outrages and other things which was the cause that moved them to
do the riot and the mischief that they did'.l Such complaints
seem even more abundantly justified now that recent research
has done so much to reveal not only the ferocity of national
taxation in the years immediately before 138 I but also the severity
with which governmental exploitation could bear on fourteenthcentury local communities. 2 Nor would it be difficult to reconcile
such emphasis on royal taxation with the broader and more
challenging thesis that the landlords offourteenth-ccntury England
reacted to an alleged 'crisis of feudalism' by relying increasingly
on the coercive powers of the state rather than of themselves as
private individuals. 3 More generally still, if one believes that what
most needs explanation in 1381 is less localised tenant grievances
and protest than the circumstances which brought those emotions
together into an unparalleled mass movement, then it is hard to
avoid invoking the levying and mishandling of the third poll tax
as the all-important deus ex machina. The fact that the insurrection
1 Rotuli Parliamentorutn, III, 100; cf. M. H. Keen, England in the Late Middle Ages
(London, 1973), pp. 272-3.
I See especially J. R. Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the
Crown, 1294-1341 (Past and Present Supplement no. I, 1975).
8 R. H. Hilton, 'A Crisis of Feudalism', Past and Present, no. 80 (1978), pp. 3-19.
XXXVI
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
13 81
brought to the surface a multiplicity of pre-existing local conflicts, feuds and obsessions can hardly disguise the fact that at the
outset it genuinely was the case that 'Tax has tenet us aIle' (no. 66).
Recent research has also done a great deal to confirm Speaker
Waldegrave's belief that many of the rebels of 1381 had been
thoroughly alienated from Richard II's government by its failure
to protect them from the dangers of extremely brutal tip-and-run
raids by French and Castilian fleets. Indeed for those who believe
that unsuccessful and demoralising warfare is one of the more
common precipitants of revolutionary· activity, the Peasants'
Revolt of 1381 - like that of Jack Cade in 1450 - can easily be
made to conform to a general rule. The appearance of Castilian
fleets in the English channel from 1372 onwards seems to have
led to greater devastation along the southern coastline than had
been known for centuries; and to some extent at least 'the Peasants'
Revolt was the fruit of the Hundred Years' War'.l Professor
Hilton has admittedly pointed out that the ravages of war seem
to have been much more serious along the coasts of Hampshire
anti Sussex, where there was comparatively little rebellion in
1381, than in Kent and Essex. 2 Nevertheless it may not be altogether a coincidence that villages and towns immediately to the
north and south of the Thames estuary were among the very first
to rise at the time of the outbreak of the great revolt: the inhabitants of southern Essex an~ northern Kent, like the Londoners
themselves, were undoubtedly nervous about the dangers of a
naval attack up the Thames in the years immediately before 1381.
Moreover, some of the insurgents of that year clearly did discriminate in their attacks on those members of the landed aristocracy who had most conspicuously failed to protect them
against the external enemy; and that the Peasants' Revolt comprised some elements of popular indignation at the failure of the
English nobility to play their expected protective role in medieval
society few would now wish to deny. There is now abundant
1 E. Searle and R. Burghart, 'The Defense of England and the Peasants'
Revolt', Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, m (1972), p. 366.
I Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, p. 158.
INTRODUCTION
XXXVll
evidence to suggest that many of the rebels of 1381, however
prone to false rumour, were highly self-conscious subjects of the
crown who followed the progress of the French wars with
genuine interest and commitment: they were no doubt only too
ready to articulate their disappointment when the conduct of war
was being so badly mishandled and proving so expensive as it
was in the late 13 70S and early 13 80S. A considerable number of
the insurgents must have at some time been involved in the war
effort themselves; and it is one of the ironies of the revolt that the
hundredal organisation which lay at the basis of national defence
was apparently used to ensure cohesiveness among the rebel
companies during their march to London. 1
Failure to prosecute successful war was not however the only
failure of the government in the twenty years before the Peasants'
Revolt. More generally, ifinevitably more speculatively, much of
the recent spate of research devoted to late fourteenth-century
English history has strengthened the old suspicion that many of
the traditional institutions and even principles of church and
state were then undergoing what would now be termed a profound crisis of credibility. Nothing of course is more difficult
than to generalise with confidence about the popular mentality of
any age; but it seems increasingly hard to deny that the revolt of
1381 occurred at a time of exceptional disaffection on the part of
many different English social groups. In their understandable
reaction from the deliberately propagated legend that John Ball
was John Wycliffe's disciple, historians (myself included) have
sometimes unduly discounted a not unimportant connection
between those two ideologues - that the audience for their
respective messages must certainly ha.ve sometimes overlapped.
Wycliffe himself was one of the several contemporary observers
of the English social scene who predicted a popular rebellion in
the months and years immediately before 1381; and although he
later condemned the revolt for its extremism he also claimed that
I Searle and Burghart, 'Defense of England', pp. 387-8. For an especially
striking use of paid archers from the hundred of Hoxne in Suffolk (by James
Bedyngfield on IS June 1381) see Powell, Rising in East Anglia, pp. 21, 130-1.
xxxviii
THE PEASANTS ' REVOLT OF 1381
the majority of the rebels had been justified in many of their aims
('lieet maiores bonos instinetus habuerint').l Similarly Wat Tyler's
famous demand at Smithfield that 'the goods of Holy Church
should not remain in the hands of the religious' (no. 25) needs to
be placed in the context of the many cries for clerical disendowment, apparently raised more vociferously in the decades around
1400 than at any other time in medieval English history.2 Thanks
to Mr K. B. McFarlane's last researches on the subject as well as
to recent investigation of vernacular Wycliffite treatises, Lollardy
itself has now been interpreted as a more influential and intellectually appealing movement than it appeared only a few years ago.
'The chief characteristic of English religious life in the fourteenth
century is the growth of moral fervour among the laity.'3 If so,
the highly orthodox figures of William Langland and John
Gower can hardly be presented as isolated Jeremiahs crying in the
wilderness of late fourteenth-century England; and even Geoffrey
Chaucer should be increasingly seen as the Voltaire of his age.
These and many other possible examples now strengthen the
temptation to set the events of 1381 against the background of
a medieval critical 'Enlightenment', a partial and perhaps abortive
but nevertheless thoroughly pervasive Aufkliirung.
Nor may it be too optimistic to conclude the introduction to
the second edition of this book with the suggestion that in recent
years a little progress has also been made in the case of the most
notoriously intractable of all problems raised by the Peasants'
Revolt. How can that revolt be related, if at all, to what we now
know of the short and long-term developments of the late
fourteenth-century English economy? To what extent was the
insurrection the consequence of genuinely novel social and economic tensions in the English countryside? It is even clearer now
1 M. Wilks, 'Reformatio Regni: Wyclif and Hus as Leaders of Religious Protest
Movements', Studies in Church History, IX (1972), ed. D. Baker, pp. 125-7.
1M. D. Lambert, Medieval Heresy; Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus
(London, 1977), p. 218.
B K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), pp.
224~; cf. Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. A. Hudson (Cambridge,
1978), p. 10.
INTRODUCTION
XXXIX
than it was ten years ago that no uniform or simple answer to
that all-important question will ever be forthcoming. Indeed
some of the latest attempts to formulate an answer have had the
paradoxical effect of making one even more aware of the complexities of the issues. Several praiseworthy attempts to elucidate
the Peasants' Revolt by comparing it with other popular movements in late medieval Europe leave one with the impression
that the English rising of I3 8 I seems a more rather than less
distinctive and extraordinary episode when set within the context
of rebellions across the Channel. The fact that so many popular
insurrections occurred in western Europe during the five years
between 1378 and 1382 is hardly likely to be a coincidence; but
'if there was a symphony, it was not at all played to time'.1
Moreover, now that so much recent research has by its very
nature been at pains to stress the intense localism of the 'regional
economies' of late medieval England the same remark has come
to seem increasingly applicable to the so-called Peasants' Revolt
itself But however different the grievances of the Kentish rebels
from those of the London suburbs or the villages around Norwich,
it does seem increasingly clear that they had all either been
exacerbated or given a different dimension by the demographic
disasters of 1348-9 and later. .
Recent studies have done nothing to make the Black Death
seem a less catastrophic disaster than was previously believed and
have indeed done a good deal to confirm that serious population
decline was protracted well into the fifteenth century.2 The
consequences of so profound and so sustained a demographic
decline obviously could, and undoubtedly did, take many
different forms. But whatever those forms, there does seem to be
increasing evidence that in most parts of England only in the
mid 1370S rather than earlier 'did plague really begin to bite hard
into the traditional manorial economy'.3 The extent to which this
1 M. MoUat and P. Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages
(London, 1973), p. 138.
2 See J. Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348-1530
(London, 1977).
3 J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150-1500 (London, 1980), p. 214.
xl
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
1381
thirty-year delay was the effect of an often alleged feudal or
seigniorial reaction in the generation immediately after the first
onslaught of the Black Death still seems, at least to this author,
a highly open issue. But unless the price and wage statistics laboriously collected by historians over many years lead us seriously
astray, it was only in the half-dozen years before the Peasants'
Revolt that agricultural prices fell markedly at about the time
when wage-levels began moving sharply upwards. l A sluggish
market for their cash crops may of course have made the poll
taxes of 1377-8 I all the more painful a burden to many of the
English peasantry; but it is even more important to stress that the
great revolt occurred at exactly that time when the mass of the
English commons could at last look forward to an improved
standard of life. Could the poll taxes themselves have been
resisted so strenuously precisely because there had never been so
many Englishmen in a position to pay taxation at all? To the
extent that there were genuine economic reasons why the rebellion of 1381 was born of temporarily frustrated hope rather than
of deep despair, Froissart's famous attribution of the revolt to
'the ease and riches that the common people were of' may have
been truer than he knew. Less speculatively perhaps and possibly
even more significantly, the plagues of the late fourteenth century
had disrupted the tenurial stability of many English villages. At
Thaxted in Essex, for example, less than a quarter of the holdings
in the community were in the same family's hands in 1393 as they
had been in the year before the Black Death. 2 Such extreme lack
of personal continuity, above all perhaps in those villages and
towns (like Thaxted itself) which were increasingly devoted to
textile and other industries, provided hot-house conditions for
resentment at royal taxation, the enforcement oflabour legislation
1 For his advice on these issues, and especially on the significance of the fact
that barley prices in particular were consistently lower between 1376 and 1396
than at any time since the first outbreak of the Black Death, I am grateful to
Dr Bruce Campbell. See also Bolton, Medieval English Economy, pp. 68-81;
J. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 1 (1866), p. 234.
2 Bolton, Medieval English Economy, p. 237; K. Newton, Thaxted in the Fourteenth Century, Essex Record Office Publications, no. 33 (1960).
INTRODUCTION
xli
and seigniorial intervention of any kind. By 1381 indeed, if
Dr Barbara Harvey's magisterial survey of the far-flung Westminster Abbey estates is at all representative, we may have to
imagine large numbers of village communities whose inhabitants
comprised an explosive mixture of peasants holding by new
contractual tenancies and others by much more burdensome
pre-Black Death tenurial arrangements. 1
Such new and at times gross inequalities at the village level
undoubtedly also help to explain why the 'abolition of serfdom
was the keynote of the rising'. 2 Here again recent research has
tended to confirm the view that a demand for freedom was the
single most commonly held of the rebels' objectives. Nor is it
difficult to understand why resentment against villein status, by no
means a novel feature of the English rural scene, should have
escalated so dramatically during the generation after the Black
Death of 1348-49. The ability of many English peasants to take
the fullest advantage of the new opportunities afforded by the
availability of land in the years before the great revolt must often
have been blocked by their liability to servile dues. Nor could
the English tenantry of the 1370S be as certain as ourselves that
villeinage would eventually 'wither away'. For many of them
too the single most important advantage of the remission of
villeinage would have been the right of access to the royal law
courts in order to protect the terms on which they held their land
from arbitrary change on the part of their landlords. The severity
of the English law of villeinage showed few signs of abating in
the years immediately after the Black Death;3 and in this as well
as other spheres the slowness of English legal practices to adjust
to new social pressures does a good deal to account for the
apparently universal unpopularity of lawyers themselves in 1381.
It is at least symbolically appropriate that the Anonimalle Chronicle
1 B. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1977),
PP·244-67.
I Fryde, Great Revolt, p. 28.
a P. R. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants in Medieval England: The Common Law
of Villeinage in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1980), p. 207.
xlii
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF
138 I
should ascribe the outbreak of the rebellion in Kent to popular
support at Gravesend for a villein from whom the agents of Sir
Simon Burley attempted to extract an extortionate sum (no. 19).
Here perhaps more than in any other way the English landlords
were dangerously insensitive to peasant feeling. By resisting the
enfranchisement of many individual villeins on principle they
probably presented the rebels of 1381 with their single most
cohesive and positive ideal. l Nor has that ideal lost its force: it is
in their quest for what William Grindcobbe called 'a little liberty'
that the rebels of 1381 arc always ensured most sympathy from
posterity.
Exactly when, how and for what reasons the great revolt of
1381 has been remembered during the course of the last six
hundred years is of course another and still insufficiently explored
story. However it seems safe to assume that popular memories of
the turbulent days of June 1381 remained potent ones for a
generation or so before fading into a somewhat muddled oblivion
during the course of the early fifteenth century. Indeed it would
be by no means difficult to advance the case that there was more
widespread co-operative revolt on the part of the English commons in the fifteen years after 1381 than there had been in the
fifteen years before the great rising. It is well known, for example,
that on several occasions in the 1380s and 1390S the parliamentary
commons expressed their f.ars of another general rebellion
(no. 61); and attention has recently been drawn to a previously
neglected petition which seems to provide evidence of extensive
peasant risings in southern England during the spring of 1388. 2
In retrospeCt the first edition of this book probably underestimated the extent to which the Peasants' Revolt was an event
which in the short term did more to open than to close the
possibility of forceful action on the part of the English commons.
1 See J. H. Tillotson, 'Peasant Unrest in the England of Richard II: some
evidence from royal records', Historical Studies, XVI (1974-5), pp. 1-16.
I J. J. N. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1377-99 (London, 1972), pp.
237-8; cf. Reville, Le Soulevement des Travail/eurs d'Angleterre en 1381, pp.
CXXIX-CXXXV.
INTRODUCTION
xliii
Nevertheless it seems hard to deny that during the course of the
fifteenth century popular revolt in both English village and
English town became more localised and probably more muted,
by no means easy to discern within the context of the political and
religious movements of the later middle ages. In most ways the
now orthodox view that the violent deeds and words of Wat
Tyler and John Ball no longer seemed so necessary or appropriate
in the more relaxed and variegated conditions of the fifteenthcentury English rural and urban scene seems justifiable enough.
How far the ideals of the rebels of 1381 continued to lead an
'underground existence' in the popular mentality of the following
centuries is inevitably always likely to be a highly debatable
matter.1 What the available evidence does make clear is that
memories of Wat Tyler were always liable to be invoked by
supporters of the English political status quo whenever the existing
order was confronted with the threat of a rebellion with clear
populist overtones. Only after the publication of the second part
of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man in 1792 did the great revolt
of 1381 gradually cease to be regarded as primarily 'A Warnyng
to Be Ware', to such an extent that it could even be assimilated
into the so-called Whig interpretation of history. 2
From this somewhat uncomfortable position the Peasants'
Revolt was to be liberated once again more or less exactly a
hundred years ago. It was in 1881 indeed that Henry George
first crossed the Atlantic to preach in England his gospel of landreform and the iniquities of 'unearned income'; and it was in
1881 too that H. M. Hyndman published England for All and
founded the Democratic, soon to be Social Democratic, Federation.
Above all perhaps 1881 is worth remembering as a year in which
William Morris was already well embarked upon the path which
led to his visionary - in all senses of the word - Dream ofJohn
1 For an interesting preliminary attempt 'to trace continuities of underground
ideas', see C. Hill, 'From Lollards to Levellers', in Rebels and Their Causes; Essays
in Honour of A. L. Morton, ed. M. Cornforth (London, 1978), pp. 49-67.
I For J. R. Green, John Ball's words at Blackheath 'began for England the literature of political controversy: they are the first predecessors of the pamphlets of
Milton and of Burke' (History of the English People, 1881, I 457).
xliv
THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381
Ball seven years later. After the 18805, in other words, the great
revolt of 1381 could never seem quite the same again; whether
one was a Marxist socialist, a non-Marxist socialist or neither,
the events of that year had acquired a 'relevance' and 'significance' which still seem certain to prove enduring. Small wonder
then that the correct interpretation of the Peasants' Revolt
remains, as perhaps it should always remain, a highly personal
and debatable matter. Even the most deliberately dispassionate
assessment of what is in any case the largely imponderable original
evidence for the revolt is bound to be conditioned by our own
political and social predispositions. On the one hand, as Sir
Richard Waldegrave's speech in the parliament of November
1381 has already reminded us, it would always be unwise to
underestimate the fmancial and administrative ineptitude of
Richard II's government as an essential catalyst of the rebellion.
On the other hand, it seems equally fair to state that any interpretation of the Peasants' Revolt, whether that of Speaker
Waldegrave or of Professor Guy Fourquin a few years ago, l
which neglects or unduly minimises the extent to which the lot
of many Englishmen of the late fourteenth century was based on
seigniorial exploitation none too willingly accepted can never be
completely adequate. But how far such exploitation and such
resentments actually caused the revolt or even made it inevitable
is of course another matter entirely. For this author at least the
linear patterns in the historical story, the operations of the
dialectic, still remain highly obscure. Several readers of the introduction to the first edition of this volume were unconvinced, and
perhaps rightly so, by my suggestion that 'the results of the great
revolt appear to have been negative where they were not negligible'. About the consequences of the great revolt, like nearly
everything else, it is admittedly dangerous to be certain. But, all
in all, the Peasants' Revolt still seems to me of most enduring
1 Professor Fourquin's us Soulevements Populaires au Moyen Age (Paris, 1972)
is nevertheless essential reading for those who would wish to see Professor Roland
Mousnier's famous concepts of la totalite du travail social and a societe des ordres
systematically applied to medieval popular revolts.
INTRODUCTION
xlv
importance less for what it achieved than for what it reveals primarily of course about the vanished social world of England
six hundred years ago but not a little about the political and other
preconceptions of the many who have since fallen under its
endlessly fascinating spell. l
Corpus Christi Day 1981
1 This sentence was written in June 1981 at a time when the six hundredth
anniversary of the Peasants' Revolt was indeed being vigorously celebrated
throughout the country, and especially in Kent, Essex and London, by a series of
publications, lectures, academic conferences and other more public events.
Despite, or because of, the enthusiasm of those who assembled in the rain at
Blackheath on 4 May wearing lapel badges which read '1381 to 1981: Let's
finish the job', it need hardly b:: said that contemporary attitude~ towards the
great revolt proved to be as interestingly diverse and ambiguous as ever. Whether
Tom Paine himself would have approved the Peasants' Revolt commemorative
mural, heavily influenced by Picasso's Guemica, which temporarily adorns the
urbanised wastes of the modern Mile End Road is impossible to know; but he
would no doubt have been surprised as well as sorry to learn that as late as 1981
the City of London showed no inclination to follow his advice and erect a more
permanent memorial to Wat Tyler at Smithfield (see no. 76 below).
For the historian of the Peasants' Revolt, 1981 was not however at all a disappointing year. In addition to the various new studies already in print and
listed in the Additional Bibliography to the second edition of this collection (pp.
413-19 below), those interested in the events of six hundred years ago can look
forward to the results of much important new work currently in progress. Of
the latter it might not be invidious to mention Professor A. L. Brown's extensive
researches into the unpublished documents at the Public Record Office, Mr
Andrew Prescott's projected edition of the judicial records relating to the revolt,
and future publication of the proceedings of the Past and Present Society's
conference on 'The English Rising of 1381' held in London on I July 1981.