The Last Plantagenets (8 page)

When the prison gates had been broken open and he had come out, a free man again, he consulted with those who had assumed leadership of the brawny peasants and they proceeded at once to arouse the villeins everywhere. Messengers were sent out over the whole arc of west, north, and east, as far away as Cornwall and the Humber in the north. They were sent to all parts of Kent and Sussex, to Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Cambridge, to Hertford, Hants, and Somerset, to York, Lancashire, Lincoln, and Durham. The message was the same to all:

I
N ALL accounts of this amazing outbreak the emphasis is laid on the men of Kent under Wat Tyler and John Ball. But there had been trouble earlier in Essex. Before Whitsuntide, which fell that year on June 2, the men of three communities, Fobbing, Corringham and Brentwood, had been haled into court because they refused to pay the poll tax. Violent scenes resulted and the angry people had rallied under the leadership of a common priest who took the name of Jack Straw. A number of the court officials and the jury had been killed and their heads carried on the ends of pikes in wild scenes of mob hysteria.

Here again taxation had been the main issue. A specific demand had been made to allow the villeins the use of land at a rent of fourpence an acre and to have the
corvée
abolished.

It was quite a different situation in Suffolk and all of East Anglia where the men of the towns as well as the tillers of the soil had been at war with the abbey of St. Edmundsbury for nearly a century. The abbots had been granted charters which gave them a despotic hold on the countryside. They held the gates of Bury St. Edmunds, they owned a large part of the land, they were hard masters of the
corvée
. They had even been given the wardships of all orphans in the district and had not hesitated to collect good fees from the estates. To add the final touch of dissension, the abbey had gone into the lending of money and the archives were stuffed with bills against all the substantial citizens. When the stern overlordship of the monks was called into question, the abbot of the moment could always go back to his papers and produce charters which supported his pretensions.

The archives of St. Edmundsbury had become synonymous with sinister power. Whenever the victims of the monastic maw got together
they would whisper bitterly that “the abbot’s papers have a sharper edge than the headsman’s ax.”

And so in 1327 the abbey had been burned by an infuriated mob. The charters and bills had been seized and torn into shreds, to be tossed about jubilantly like stage snow. Troops had been sent, of course, to put down the uprising and twenty of the rioters had been hanged. The charters had been replaced and the old tyranny had begun again. Hate and discontent had continued to smolder. And so when the word reached Suffolk of the ringing of the bell, the people were ready to respond.

It happened that the post of abbot was vacant and that Prior John of Cambridge was temporarily in charge. This Prior John was a precise and thin-lipped man with the shrewd head of a lawyer on his narrow shoulders. He fluttered his white and well-tended hands most effectively during services, but the townspeople muttered darkly that his thumbs were callused from the tightness with which he applied the screws to all debtors. The sweetness of voice with which he chanted the prayers changed to the habitual whine of the usurer when matters of money were at stake. Prior John was cordially hated.

He happened to be in his manor house at Mildenham. Suddenly an infuriated clamor broke out and the gardens were filled with a mob which had come to settle scores with him.

Prior John tried to escape but it is said that his household servants had small reason to love him and that they betrayed him to the angry people. A mock trial was held and without a whisper of dissent he was sentenced to die. They took him out to the gardens where his head was cut off. His naked body was tossed on a dunghill.

Returning to town, the mob broke open the abbey gates and demanded again that all charters and bonds be turned over to them. The frightened monks produced everything they could find and there was another scene of exuberant demolition.

The madness was now spreading like a forest fire. The townspeople of Cambridge burned the charters of the university. In Norfolk a man named Geoffrey the Litster, or Dyer (the revival of dyeing was a recent development in England) emerged from the reek of his copperas vats and set himself up as leader of the people. He proceeded to introduce some elements of comedy into the tragic scene. Believing himself inspired to command the movement, he selected for himself the title of “King of the Commons.” Riding a horse, and with bay leaves sewn into his greasy hat, he led the hastily assembled mob to the work of destruction. However, he insisted that none of the nobility who fell into his hands were to be killed. Instead he forced them to serve him at meals;
on their knees, no less. One of the barons had to act as official food taster for this self-made master.

Geoffrey the Litster was one of the maddest of the worthless rogues who inevitably rise to the top under such circumstances. More will be told about him later.

At St. Albans, also, the uprising was directed against the abbey. One of the prime grievances of the people was that no one was allowed to grind his own corn or even to take the grain to a miller. The abbey held a monopoly and with an eye perhaps to security had set up the millstones within the sheltering shadow of the cloisters. Breaking their way in, the townspeople smashed the stones into such small pieces that each one was able to carry away a fragment as a memento of the day.

The men of East Kent rose early and laid siege to the tall castle which looked out over the walls of Rochester to the mouth of the Medway. The besiegers had been reinforced by levies from Essex and in some chronicles it is said that they numbered 30,000 men. What happened at Rochester would be duplicated centuries later when the
sansculottes
of Paris attacked the Bastille; sheer mass strength would triumph over high stone walls. The peasants used the trunks of trees to break in the doors and then smothered the garrison in hand-to-hand fighting. The governor capitulated when he found himself and what was left of his men penned in the upper reaches of the Keep.

And so it went in every part of southern and eastern England. Hatreds of long standing caused instantaneous explosions, in the course of which the common people struck, furiously and blindly, at institutions and people associated in their minds with oppression and injustice.

In the meantime the Road of the Pilgrims, running from London to Canterbury, was black with marching men. The doughty Wat, who was showing an unexpected skill in the handling of men, was hurrying with a picked band to the cathedral city to settle a long-standing score with Archbishop Simon. The sons of the soil had three counts against the primate. To vacate the post of chancellor for him, a fine soldier and friend of the people named Richard le Scrope had been removed from office. Simon had always worked hand in glove with John of Gaunt. And, finally, they had never forgiven him that slighting reference to pilgrimages. It was a race against time and only the youngest recruits were included in the fast-stepping band.

When the tatterdemalion horde (only 500 strong by one report)
finished the twenty-five mile tramp, they were hungrier than ever and their beards had grown ragged and long. To their surprise, the gates were thrown open for them. The mayor of Canterbury welcomed them and the townspeople gave every indication of sympathy. And there was food for them, food a-plenty, served in the town square. They visited the cathedral, but Simon was not there. They searched his palace from top to bottom, burning masses of parchment and piles of illuminated books. The head of the church was not there either and they concluded he must be in London where the head officials of the king had gathered in the Tower. They turned immediately and began to retrace their steps.

A clamor for action was rising from the ranks. Nothing could prevent them from destroying a few manor houses on the way, without any consideration as to ownership, and burning all documents they could find. They killed all the Black Robes they encountered, a term applied to lawyers who always traveled in austere black gowns with inkhorns in their belts. They blamed all their misfortunes in the past on the connivance of men of the law.

Their numbers continued to swell. Thirty thousand from the success at Rochester fell into line, according to one chronicle. Word reached them hourly of the nation-wide scope of the uprising. Their confidence climbed and their cries of “By the Bowstring!” now carried a note of triumph. They demanded of everyone they passed adherence to the oath they had coined: “With King Richard and the true Commons.”

Nearing Blackheath they overtook a member of the royal family hurrying to reach shelter after a visit to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, none other than the queen mother. She had always been popular with the people and was still called the Fair Maid, and so she had no reason to fear the ragged yeomen who suddenly swarmed about her. She was making the journey in a carriage, having become too stout to ride a palfrey. It was quite a remarkable contraption for that day and may very well have been invented and built for her special use. Certainly it was more elaborate than the whirlicote, a giglike conveyance which was used rarely, very rarely indeed, by the ladies of the nobility. One historian describes it as a wagon twenty feet long, red and gilt, with a high white hood on which the royal insignia of the white hart was painted. It would seem that in it the queen mother might enjoy comfort as well as security. But the condition of the roads had to be taken into consideration. When the marching peasantry overtook the carriage, the wheels were sunk deep in Kentish mud. Men-at-arms stood on guard while the royal servants struggled and sweated to make the mired wheels turn.

There are two versions of what followed. One is that the peasants helped to extract the wagon and that the queen mother showed her
gratitude, and her desire to win their support, by allowing several of the more bold to kiss her and rub their bristling whiskers against her white cheeks.

The other story is that the marchers cheerfully put their shoulders to the wheel and hauled the coach out of the mud. This much accomplished, they expressed a desire to see the queen mother. One of the soldiers raised a corner of the curtain over the entrance to the hood and conveyed this desire to the royal lady within. Perhaps she had already peered out through some convenient peephole and had been both astonished and frightened by the numbers and the desperate appearance of the rebels. Perhaps with the hauteur of her position she felt it incumbent on her to refuse the request. At any rate the soldier reported that she had said no.

“Her Grace has no wish to speak with you,” he said. Then he added, “For our part, gramercy for your help.”

The story of the friendly bussing of the queen mother is the version most often told and believed; and it must be said that it has about it the colorful quality which wins a permanent acceptance for historical episodes. But there is a ring of authenticity about the second version. It can be more readily believed that the queen mother would maintain an aloof attitude, even though it might involve her in unpleasant consequences.

One way or the other, the royal lady was allowed to drive down the Pilgrimage Road in her creaking, swaying vehicle without any interference and with loud shouts of “For King Richard and the true Commons” to speed her on her way.

H
ISTORY has been disposed to accept the estimates of the number of peasants in revolt that were fixed in the chronicles of the period. Some place the total as high as 100,000; the more conservative say 30,000.

In reaching anything in the nature of an accurate figure it is necessary to call up a picture of the roads of the period. They were narrow and rough and inclined to follow the lines of least resistance, skirting hills and avoiding grades and creeping through forests like an adder’s trail. Summer suns baked them to the consistency of hard clay and after a heavy rain they were almost impassable. Conceive, then, of fifty thousand men, say, marching down one of them, sun-browned and dusty of heel, stopping frequently for rests, delaying incessantly to forage for food, sleeping by the wayside, halting to talk excitedly with new recruits and to arrive at agreements on policy. A modern logistics expert could easily arrive at a reasonable solution; and the answer would be in days and weeks and not in hours. Take into consideration also that the country through which they marched had been decimated by the Black Death and that food was scarce enough even for the regular inhabitants. Unless each peasant had slung a bundle over his shoulder before starting out, filling it with the plain food on which he usually subsisted—bread crusts soaked in oil, dried beans and leeks, a few “curds and an oaten cake,” and perhaps a parcel of his favorite dish, the
froise
, a form of pancake filled with bacon—there would have to be continuous halts to beg along the way, to raid orchards for unripe fruit and strip berry patches. That they carried much food is doubtful because of the dramatic suddenness with which it all began and the frenzy which had gripped them.

The truth, surely, is much closer to the minimum figure, and it is
probable that the peasant body which finally took possession of London did not much exceed ten thousand. London, it should be recalled, was a crowded little town behind its low walls, depending on the supplies of food which came down on the river barges and from the country thereabouts. An invasion of lusty and empty-bellied tillers of the soil would soon strip bare the cupboard of London.