Welcome to the London History Podcast, where we explore the
stories, people and places that have shaped this incredible
city. I am Hazel Baker from
londonguidedwalks.co.uk. In this episode, we're
travelling back to one of the most dramatic moments in
medieval London, the Peasants Revolt of 1381.
What began as a protest against taxis in rural Essex and Kent
erupted into a full scale uprising that brought thousands
of rebels into the heart of the city, demanding justice, freedom
and reform. London suddenly became the stage
for a violent confrontation between commoners and the Crown.
Joining me to unpack this turbulent chapter in two
episodes is Ian Mcdermid, a City of London guide and lecturer who
specialises in medieval and early modern London.
Ian also runs walking tours that trace footsteps of medieval
Londoners, from merchants, monks to, well, yes, you've guessed
it, rebellious peasants. Today we'll explore what drove
ordinary people to rise up and how Londoners responded.
And in Part 2, we'll see how the revolt really spread through
London and what the legacies of the revolt left on the city.
Hello, Ian. Welcome.
Hello, Hazel. It's your first episode of 2026.
How about that? Oh.
Very exciting. I was looking at what we've done
in the past, and we have done a Black Death episode, which is
number 38, which might be useful for anybody wanting even more
context of what we're talking about today.
But it's worth really challenging the actual naming of
this revolt. It's called The Peasants Revolt,
but that that's a bit misleading, isn't it?
Yes, it is, and we've run with that in our title for fear of
confusing people if we don't use it.
But it's actually a term that the professional historians
abandoned about 40 years ago. So we keep it convenience, but
it's doesn't really describe very well the people who
participate in it. And the problem goes back to the
people who were writing bats at the time.
One of our main sources for, well, the main source for the
events that we're going to be talking about are various
chroniclers. And these chroniclers are for
the most part attached to monasteries.
They're all clerics. And partly as a result of that,
they have a very jaundiced view of the people participating in
the rebellion, and it suits their polemical purposes in
writing their chronicles to treat the people who are
involved in this uprising as the lowest of the low.
And so a lot of them refer to the people involved as rustiki,
which we would translate as peasants.
But actually this isn't accurate and the chroniclers are a main
source. The other principle source
really is the indictments that occurred after the rebellion is
over. And historians analysing these
quite a long time ago now, particularly Rodney Hilton,
pointed out the fact that quite a few of them were actually
rather well off. And Hilton said that several of
the people who were put on prison could actually be
regarded as petty Gentry. So these are people who are
actually farming several 100 acres and commanding incomes as
high as 50 lbs. And on the chronicler's side,
one of them, just to give an example of how this works, one
of them is Thomas Walsingham, who's at Saint Albans, and he's
continuing on the Chronicle of Matthew Paris.
And St. Albans Abbey has a very troubled
relationship with the town and the townsman.
And the events of 1381 in Saint Albans, so our peasants revolt,
are in many ways a kind of repeat of violence that broke
out in the 1320s. In both cases, one of the things
that annoys the townsman is the Abbey demanding that they mill
their grain in the Abbey using the abbot's mill.
And this is it flows into a wider dispute about the status
of the people living in Saint Albans.
The townspeople claim that they are part of a borough, that they
are burgesses, that the Abbot doesn't have jurisdiction over
them. And it's these kind of conflicts
that really the Chronicles are a kind of edge really, that
they're really directly affected by it.
They're directly opposed to it. And we might also add that they
are perhaps also naturally conservative with a small C.
So it suits them to describe this rebellion as absolutely
outrageous, an affront to the established order, an affront to
God. And by depicting the people in
it as peasants, it helps their argument.
But it's a lot more complicated than that.
And the people involved represent not the highest ranks
of society, but they go they're not the poorest of the poor.
Can you outline the background to the rising?
Yeah. The revolt is principally caused
by three things, I think. And of these, the most important
and most immediate is taxation. And the taxation in this period
is heavy and persistent. And then when we come to 1381,
it becomes absolutely overbearing and also something
I'm sure we'll come on to. They innovate in taxation and
they introduce the poll taxes. There are three poll taxes and
they've, as we'll probably see the way the poll taxes actually
work, there is, but they are highly regressive, particularly
the last one, which is is a flat rate.
So these hit the poor the hardest.
And one reaction to this is massive evasion.
And the response of the administration is to send out
commissioners to investigate. And these commissioners are
deeply resented. It's very intrusive.
The second reason for the rising is that this taxation doesn't
lead anywhere. The reason that they are
constantly raising taxes is because of warfare.
And in this period, the warfare is spectacularly unsuccessful
for the English. And it's an interesting question
to to raise hypothetically, that if the English had actually won
any notable victories, whether the peasants revolt would have
occurred. But they don't.
So the the people are being overburdened with this taxation
and it's leading nowhere. And the administration appears
incompetent. And this, this feeling of
incompetence on the behalf as a description of the
administration is heightened by also fears, beliefs that the
administration is corrupt. The people who are serving the
king are the people. And some of this money is being
diverted into their own pockets. And then the third sort of main
reason for the rising is long term economic change.
And it's not so much the economic change themselves.
It's rather the response of the landowning classes to this.
And we're talking here about the Black Death.
And hence you mentioning that earlier podcast on that subject
will be useful. And what happens in the Black
Death is that the population of England and Wales is reduced by
something approaching 1/2. That's the kind of consensus now
amongst historians. And one effect of this is that
if you've survived and if you are engaged in labouring in some
shape or form, your labour is suddenly much, much more
valuable. And this creates big stress
because the landowning classes, they lose out because the labour
they have to employ is suddenly much more expensive.
And the land owners react and they try to turn the clock back.
And it's their attempt to do this that causes huge
resentment. Could you tell us a little bit
more about how the fall in population after the Black Death
changed English society? One way that this decline in the
population effects English society is that it loosens up
serfdom and if you are a serf you are unfree.
And some estimates have about 60% of the peasantry in England
and Wales being serfs. And the way that you lacked
freedom works in various ways. So firstly you are subject to
the Menorial Court and the Memorial Court will have
jurisdiction over you in the case of minor offences, but it
also deals with disputes about your land, owning your land
holding and the obligations that arise from that.
And the Memorial Court is staffed by officials of the
Lord. So this is a system that's very
much works against you as a serf.
Secondly, you are unfree because you are tied to the land.
And thirdly, there are various obligations upon you to give
your labour for free. So you have to work on the
Lord's demean land so many days. Often this is 4 days every other
week, something like that. But there are also other labour
services which are deeply resented.
The one that's perhaps most resented is the demand that you
provide transport for the Lord's produce in a cart to market, but
you also have to help maintain roads and ditches.
After the Black Death, the peasants are in a much stronger
bargaining position. And although you're not supposed
to run away, one thing that could do is they could run away
and find better conditions elsewhere.
But they don't have to go to that extreme because a lot of
the land owners will try and prevent that by softening the
terms of land holding. And in particular, what often
happens is that the serfs who run away then take land on a
different tenure basis. Instead of it being customary
tenure, they become copy holders.
And some Lords will voluntarily convert their customary tenants
into copy holders to forestall them running away.
And the key thing about a copy hold is that it is a rental
agreement. It's about cash.
You pay for the land and essentially that's it.
And it's called copy hold because it's a written
agreement. This isn't customary law.
That's decided by the memorial court.
You have a written agreement with the landowner.
And in addition to that, also often although the serfs carry
on being customary tenants, the terms of that customary tenancy
are changed and softened so that the distinction between copy
hold and customary holdings becomes blurred.
And I'm talking about the way this work to serfs advantages,
but a lot of land owners aren't keen to make the concessions
that I've been talking about. And in particular, this thing
that you are legally tied to the land is something that a lot of
land owners try to use to put the clock back and they go after
peasants, serfs who have run away and they use the legal
system to try and bring them back.
And this causes huge resentment. However, it one of the
interesting things about the Peasants Revolt is as we're
going to come to, the main events of it are played out in
Kent, Essex and London. So there there are risings
elsewhere, but essentially what happens is you have these two
big risings in these two southeastern counties and they
March on London and then Londoners join in.
One of the interesting things is obviously there's no serfdom in
London, but there's very little of it in Essex and there's
hardly any at all in Kent. And yet when they make their
demands and the rebels gain access to London and they have a
total of three meetings with the King.
What? We'll go into these a bit later
on, I'm sure. One's on the river at around
Deptford. The two big meetings are at Mile
End and then the famous climactic one at Smithfield.
And in those two latter meetings, the rebels demand the
abolition of serfdom. So it's obviously an issue
that's extremely important to them.
And it might be that this is sympathy on behalf of other
people who are having a hard time.
But I think that the serfdom issue becomes wrapped up in, in
general, resentment against the privileges of land owners, the
kind of people who are running memorial courts.
And it's all the kinds of privileges that these land
owners have. And key in this is the church,
because the Church of all the land owners, they are the really
professional ones. They have the kind of skilled,
literate people working for them.
And of course they have institutional continuity.
And one of the key things about the big ecclesiastical land
owners that the priories and the monasteries is that they have
documents, they have rooms where they keep records and charters,
and they can assert things they can say to people.
Actually, what you're saying is completely wrong.
We have the right to do this because we've got charters to
prove it. And you'll never know until it
goes to court. You won't know what the
monastery has got. And indeed, when they get to
court, their charters could be legally ambiguous, but they have
all the skills for arguing them. A lot of the resentment in the
rising is directed towards the church.
And it's not just about serfdom, I think it's about other
memorial rights. And one other effect of the
Black Death is that by reducing the population, by making labour
much more expensive, but by also reducing the demand for bread,
it encourages a shift from wheat production to pastoral farming.
And with that, you've got a lot of problems because a monastery,
for example, may say this bit of land that you say is common land
is actually our land. We've got a chance of proving it
and we're going to graze our sheep on it.
And one of the targets of the rebels in a lot of places are
monastic ditches and dikes that they've used to boundaries
around what in to other people is disputed land.
People have been using those to pick up firewood and other
things as well, aren't they? Yeah, useful spaces.
So they also went past the Statute of Labourers after the
Black Death. Can you say what that was and
what role they played in the Rising?
Yeah, I think in a way the statute of labour is, is more
directly involved than the question of serfdom.
So we were saying that the advantage to the services that
in essence their labour becomes much more valuable and serfdom,
which was making them give labour services for free, they
can replace that by being demand, demanding A monetary
payment for that. And in parallel, what happens is
that the cost of labour for anything goes up.
So whether you're getting talking about labour that you're
paying money for to work on your farm or labour for artisans,
Craftsman, it goes up. And the Nigel Sowell who's
written perhaps the main biography of Rich the second, he
says that he cites the that a skilled labourer or plowman who
had worked for 10 shillings a year could now command 20 to 30
shillings. And again the land owners and
the administration are not happy with this.
And in June 3049 they passed the Ordinance of Labourers and this
is then replaced by the Statute of Labourers in 1351.
And what these acts do is they fix rates of pay at pre epidemic
levels. Now the general consensus of
historians are in response to what's all sites about the fact
that the wages have risen believe that this attempt to put
the clock back is completely ineffective.
Wages do rise because there is much less labour around.
However, the attempt to try and put the clock back causes huge
resentment. And I've mentioned Nigel Saul's
book on Rich the second, another very good book on the, on this
period is Alistair Dunn's book The Great Rising.
And he's very good on the kind of tensions between the, the
artisans, the peasants and the land owning classes, the the
land owners, I should say. And what happens with this
statute of laborers is that initially they appoint special
commissioners to go out and investigate things.
But later on Dunn says that this work of commissioners is
subsumed by the justices of the peace.
So the justices of the peace are all land owners, they're the
people who are sitting in judgement in a lot of the
courts. And they're also relying on the
collusion of local land owners officials and royal officials
such as Bay leaves Reeves stewards to gather their
evidence. And so this really creates a lot
of tension. Wasn't the war you mentioned as
the backdrop to the rising the 100 Years War, which began in
1337 and was fought primarily over England's possession of
Aquitaine? Yes, so Aquitaine, this huge
Dutchie in southwest of France had become into English hands
through Eleanor of Aquitaine who marries Henry the Second and it
becomes a possession of the English crown.
Then in the 12th century. And given it's sort of size,
it's an obvious target for the French monarchy, which is always
trying to expand it's control within France.
But it and in 1337, the crucial thing here is that the French
sees most of it. So this is the kind of the main
thing that provokes the war. But in addition to the question
of the physical control of this Dutchie, there's the question of
whether the English kings should pay homage for it.
When Eleanor brings it as part of her, when she marries Henry
the Second, it is held as a kind of sovereign holding by her.
She does not pay homage to the king of France for Aquitaine.
And this becomes a vital question for them because if the
English king has to pay homage for Aquitaine, it has 2
applicant, 2 important implications. 1 is the perverse
one that the king of France could ask the English king for
military aid against the English king.
So that's a rather strange implication of the English kings
paying homage. But also it means that in law,
any disputes can be taken on appeal to a higher court in
France. And this would give the French
kings endless reasons, excuses for intervening, in addition to
the cause of Aquitaine. In addition, the English kings
claim that they are the kings of France.
And most historians, I think, now think that this is more of
something that the English kings use.
They're not particularly interested in this period in
becoming kings of France, and one bit of evidence for that is
that Edward the Third only stakes his claim to the throne
of France in 1340, when actually the year in which he should have
claimed it if he was really being interested in it was a lot
earlier. The key event in terms of the
succession is in 1328, when the last of the completion kings
dies out and Edward the Third had a better claim.
To the throne and pretty much any anyone else through his
mother Isabel, who was a daughter of the king of France.
But the French give it to a cadet line, the Valois.
So the French clearly do not want to have an English king.
But it's probably also true that Edward the Third realizes that
actually it would be a bit impractical because his English
subjects probably don't want him to become king of France, and
although England in total is a much smaller Kingdom than
France, less prestigious. The great thing about England is
that it's centralized, whereas the poor kings of France, they
only control a little bit of their territory, and English
subjects would not want their king.
They would not want to pay taxes to a king who might be using the
revenue to fight wars for his dynasty which have absolutely no
relation to English interests whatsoever.
But anyway, that's an extensible reason for the war.
And this war begins, breaks out in 1337, obviously from its
title, the 100 Years War, it goes on for a long time.
In fact, it it ends in the 1450s, but the beginning goes
pretty well for the English. And in particular in 1356 at the
Battle of Poitier, they win this tremendous victory.
And the victory includes capturing the French king, which
enriches the English because they can demand a ransom, but
also obviously gives them huge leverage.
And the culmination of the 100 Years War from the high point of
the war from an English point of view is in 1360 when the French
signed the Treaty of Bretonier. And this gives Edward the Third
essentially all he wants. It gives him an enlarged
Aquitaine. It's recognised that he does not
have to pay homage to the King of France for it.
So those are the key things. And in return he generously
gives up his claims to the throne of France.
So that's the high point of the war.
The problem is that from then onwards things begin to go
downhill and the English and the French begin to fight things
out. The French are constantly
nibbling away at English holdings in Aquitaine, and they
fight a kind of proxy war in Castile, the most important
Kingdom in in Spain in the 1360s, whereby they each side
supports rival claimants to the throne.
The English in the end lose out on this, and this is important
partly because the Castilians have a very powerful fleet and
that fleet can be used to threaten the English.
In the 1370s, warfare again breaks out between the English
and the French directly, and there are lots of English
expeditions to France. They achieve very little.
They cause a lot of devastation, but they don't cause anything.
So the English are fighting the French in Spain and then they're
launching all of these raids into France.
And then in 1380, they launch another expedition that goes
through France, and this time they're trying to prop up the
Duke of Brittany. But there's two big problems.
One, as per normal, this big raid doesn't achieve anything.
And the second problem is that the Duke of Brittany changes
sight. He comes to terms with the
French and the army. Or Thomas of Woodstock, who is
rich, the second's youngest uncle, is left stranded.
And it's the payment for this expedition that causes the
problems. First of all, they raise
taxation before going, and then he's left stranded and they need
to raise more taxation to pay the wages.
And it's this need that leads to the third and final poll tax,
which is then the thing that causes the revolt to to break
out. Does this lead to the
introduction of the infamous poll taxis, like the three of
them during the reign of Edward the Third?
Yes. So what what happens is that the
main form of taxation in the mediaeval period, before and
after the great rising we as we might call it, is the subsidy.
And the subsidy is a tax on movable wealth, and it's
assessed at 110th of movable wealth in towns and 115th in the
countryside. And in the 1330s, this becomes a
fixed sum. So they're not going to go
around trying to work out who owes what each time they want to
raise tax, but instead it's fixed and each community has to
pay a fixed amount. And there are a couple of
problems with this as a form of taxation.
The first is the Black Death again.
And not only does the Black Death diminish the population,
but also, partly because of what we were talking about earlier
on, it changes it's physical distribution.
A lot. People move around and some
communities flourish after the Black Death, but an awful lot
are left depopulated. And yet with these these tax
assessments that go back to the 1330s, and as a result of this
kind of shift of the productive wealth, the tax becomes much
less efficient. The second problem with it is
that the people who are voting for it, the members of the House
of Commons who are Gentry, they are land owners, they are also
merchants. They are the people who are
paying this tax, but they're also the ones who are voting for
it. And they're getting a bit fed up
with this heavy taxation. So they come up in the 1370s
with the idea of a new tax which won't affect them the kind of
property classes that and the merchants so much as all the
other ordinary people in the country.
And in 1377 they the first of the poll taxes.
They demand fourpence. There are just to remind
everybody, there are 12 pence in the shilling and fourpence is a
groat. They demand fourpence from every
male and female over 14, accepting only beggars.
And the administration are quite pleased with this, because it
yields 22,000 lbs quite easily. There doesn't appear to be any
opposition. And in 1379 again this kind of
repetitive demands and money. They decide to repeat the
exercise, but this time with sliding scales.
So it begins at 4 pence. But the population is divided
into 7 broad groups and there are lots of categories within
these groups. And there is a sliding scale.
And again, they seem to think this is very good, though
actually the yield on this time declines to 18,600 lbs.
So maybe there's a sort of beginnings of a clue there which
nobody sees, that perhaps the taxation is running into
problems. And then for this Thomas, the
Woodstock expedition, which goes off to France and tries to help
the Duke of Brittany. In January 1380, Parliament
votes a subsidy. They vote 1 1/2 fifteenths and
tenths to help the expedition. But then, as we just mentioned,
the expedition gets into terrible trouble.
He needs more money and the third poll tax falls.
This is when the third poll tax is resorted to.
And in November 1380, Parliament meets at Northampton under a new
Chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury. One of the roles of the
Chancellor. He is the most important royal
official at this time. He's in charge of the Chancery,
which is the kind of secretarial department of government.
And he makes the case and he demands the enormous sum of
160,000 lbs. And we can put that in context
quite easy because if you remember, I just said that the
first poll tax yielded 22,000. So 160 is an absolutely enormous
sum and the fiscal crisis of the crown is exacerbated because not
only do they have to pay for this English army, but also at
this time there is a revolt of the Flemish towns against the
counter Flanders. And this leads to a crash in
demand for English wall because the English wall is largely
exported to Flanders where it's it's turned into sort of
manufactured goods. And it leads to a fall in the
revenue from the wool subsidy. So they vote the third poll tax
through, and this time it's going to be a flat rate again,
but the flat rate is 12 pence, so three times the amount
demanded in the first poll tax. And everyone over the age of 15
is subject to paying it. And one nice little detail is
that if you're a married couple for the first time, you are
assessed separately. You both have to pay it.
Now, the better off are enjoined to help the poor, but there's no
system in place to put that in. So it's just a kind of pious
hope. And this leads to wide scale
evasion. And in March 1381, commissioners
are sent out with powers to investigate the evasion.
And specifically, what they're looking for is to identify
individuals who are missing from the tax returns.
And it is this kind of intrusive investigation, the resentment of
the demands of the taxation, that leads to the outbreak of
the revolt. And when the revolt breaks out,
Richard the Second is only 14 years old.
How important do you think that was for the rebellion?
It's important in the sense that the government is still not in
the hands of a strong, determined monarch like Edward
the Third had been in his younger days, and this is a
continuation of a lack of a central, authoritative figure in
English government from around 1370 onwards.
Richard the Second comes to the throne in 1377.
The problem before his accessions to the throne is that
in the 1370s, Edward the Third, his grandfather, has become
senile. The other problem is that from
about 1370, Edward the Black Prince, Edward the Third's
eldest son, is the victim of some kind of debilitating
illness and he dies in 1376. But the one of the key things is
that in this period of the 1370s, he is not capable of
imposing himself. He spends a lot of the time
bedridden. And as a result of this, as a
result of the problems at the end of Edward the Third Strain
and the fact that you have this young boy who comes to the
throne in 1377, he's aged 10 in 1377.
And the government is, it lacks an authoritative figure.
And this is important perceptions as much as anything
else, because people believe that the government is being
manipulated by favourites who are out to feather their own
nests. And certainly under Edward the
Third that is the case. Edward the Third, he has a
mistress, Alice Perez, who is deeply resented and she
basically controls access to the king.
And there is a favorite of Perry's who becomes the
Chamberlain. This is William Latimer.
And he, as the chamberlain's in charge of a lot of cash, which
isn't subject to the kind of checks and audits that are
carried out on the Exchequer when it spends money.
And there's a lot of worries about what's happening to the
money. And then there's also a third
figure involved in this, Sir Richard Lyons, who is, in spite
of his English sounding name, is Flemish, and he is very much
involved with Latimer. And they are believed to be
acting fraudulently in in particular with regard to the
loans that the Crown raises. They're lining their own
pockets. And in 1376 Parliament meets,
this is known as the Good Parliament and they go after the
King's favourites and the the administration is forced into
making concessions. So Alice Perez gets banned from
court. Latimer and Lyons are sentenced
to forfeiture and imprisonment. And the man who is at this stage
seen as being the most powerful man in the administration and
was is John of Gaunt, who is Edward the Third's becomes
Edward the Third's eldest surviving son.
And Gaunt is a very controversial figure.
He is suspected after Edward the Third's death by a lot of people
of having designs on the throne for himself.
But he's also seen as being behind these concessions to the
good Parliament, which are then revoked by him.
And he then becomes vindictive and goes after the people,
particularly in Parliament, who he saw as being behind these
moves to constrain what he sees as the royal prerogative.
And so Perez is allowed to return to the bedside of the
Edward the Third. Lions and Latimer are freed, and
Gaunt also goes after the people who he thinks have been who who
have been behind this. I mentioned that the King's
uncle, John of Gaunt was particularly hated and
especially by Londoners. Why was that?
Well, Gaunt goes after the good Parliament and he's forced to
concede to them. He goes after the what he
regards as the perpetrators of the opposition to the Crown.
And the opposition is partly from Londoners, but it's also,
in his eyes, partly the result of a lot of clerics.
And the two come become combined in the figure of Wickliffe, who
is the leader of the Lollards. And as I say, Gaunt blames a lot
of the bishops for what what's gone on.
And Lollard Deep, headed by Wickliffe, is a useful tool for
him in this because Wickliffe argues that the church should
give up its wealth. And this is music to Gaunt's
ears. And one of the things that Gaunt
does is that Witcliffe is put on trial by Courtney, the Bishop of
London in Saint Paul's. And Gaunt very ostentatiously
breaks into Saint Paul's and whisks Cliff away.
And in addition to roniming up against the church, Gaunt also
moves against other people. So he moves against the speaker
of the Parliament called De la Mer, who is held without charge
at Nottingham Castle. But as already mentioned, he
also dislikes the what he sees as the London merchants.
And he immediately after Wickliffe is did they have this,
this altercation between him and the Bishop of London over
Wickliffe. Gaunt immediately after that
threatens the liberties of London.
And in particular he proposes that the Marshall and the
Marshall is an official of the court, His jurisdiction as a
judicial authority should be extended over the city.
And he also wants there to be a royal governor appointed in
place of the mayor. This provokes a minor riot, a
mob attack the Savoyed Palace and they're going after Gaunt
and they hear that Gaunt is away dining elsewhere in London at
the home of one of his servants, Sir John Deepra.
And Deepra's house is then attacked and Gaunt is forced to
flee and he flees. He rose across the Thames and on
to his sister in And one of the interesting little detail for
London is this, that one of the Black Prince's main residents
was at Kennington, the other one was instead.
So this there's this big problem with between Gaunt and the
Londoners. Eventually the alien King Edward
the Third summons the Londoners and Gaunt to his palace at Sheen
to effect and a reconciliation between them and Gaunt demands
as the price of his pardon the erection in Cheapside.
So this is the main thoroughfare in the western part of the city
that leads up to Saint Paul's Cathedral.
He demands the erection of a marble pillar which will be
surmounted by his coat of arms, and this is probably a reaction
to the fact that his coat of arms has been defaced throughout
the city. He also demands that the mayor
and Alderman make a penitential procession to Saint Paul's and
that those of their number who had colluded in the disturbances
should be dismissed. Now he gets his apology and a
few officers of the corporation are dismissed, but the
corporation refuses. The corporation is the word for
the council, headed by the Mayor and the Alderman refuses to
abase itself publicly in the manner that Gaunt demands.
So there's a kind of stand off. But the importance is that this
leaves a legacy of bitterness between Gaunt and the Londoners
in particular. And as we shall see, the
Londoners will return to the Savoy Palace.
It's all happening, isn't it? Now, you mentioned that the
insurrection begins in Kent and Essex.
Can you outline a bit more about what happened exactly?
Yes. So ahead of the imposition of
the new poll tax, 2 new figures are brought into the
administration. So there's a lot of opposition
to the administration's new faces have brought in.
And as mentioned previously, what the key figure here is
Chancellor Sudbury, who is the Archbishop of Canterbury and
he's appointed in January 13 eighties chancellor.
And then there is a new Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales, who
is appointed in February 1381. And he has again a very
important London connection because he is the prior of the
Order of Saint John in Clarkenwell.
And as mentioned earlier, one of the problems for the government
is that there is massive tax evasion and the number of those
registered to pay the poll tax, the third poll tax, had fallen
by 450,000 since the poll tax, the first poll tax in 1377.
And what is going on is that a lot of females, so in particular
unmarried females and widows are being concealed.
They're just disappearing. And young women people are
saying, no, she's not over 15. And the people doing the evasion
would need the collusion of the sub collectors.
So you can sense that the opposition is very widespread.
And in March to repeat commissioners are sent out to
search for those who are liable to pay the tax and they inspect
the returns of the tax collectors.
And you can imagine that the the tax is resented, but this
process is resented because it's very intrusive.
It's people collecting evidence on you and in the second week of
June trouble breaks out. What happens is that at the end
of May a Commission to assess the evasion of the poll tax in
Essex, led by John Brampton MP, and who is also a Justice of the
peace, goes to Brentford in Essex.
And he summons the inhabitants of three villages.
And he summons them to appear and to account for the deficits
in their accounts. And they refuse.
And his Sergeant at Arms attempt to arrest them.
And all of them, that is Brampton and the Sergeant at
arms, are driven from Brentwood forcibly and Brampton flees to
London. The Chief Justice of Common
Pleas, Sir Robert Belknap is then empowered by the Council to
tried. The insurgency sparked the
revolt and he sends out a Commission.
It's called a Commission of Trail Baston, an itinerant court
to tackle the serious offences and he attempts to open a
hearing at Brentford. But he is set upon and sent
away. And within days of this attack,
Brentwood disobedience breaks out all over Essex.
Trouble also breaks out in Kent on the 2nd of June and one of
the things that provokes in Kent is an interesting example
because it's to do with serfdom. So I'm saying there are hardly
any serfs in Kent, but there is a man called Robert Belling who
is claimed as a serf by Sir Simon Burley.
And Sir Simon Burley is one of Richard the Second's close
confidence. He had been the young Princess
Tutor, and Burley sends sergeants his arms to arrest
this man Belling. And he is arrested and sent to
Rochester Castle. And the rebels, first of all,
they set out for Maidstone, They get into the castle there and
then they get into Rochester. And this is one of the patterns
of them that you have these peasants rising.
So they're able to get into these castles seemingly easily.
And this must be collusion on the parts of people inside those
castles. And one of the interesting
figures in the whole revolt is rather ambiguous figure who is
Sir John Newton, who is the constable of Rochester who
surrenders the castle. Now according to Fossar, who is
not a cleric but is a chronicler, this man Newton was
spared on condition that he joins the rebels ranks and that
this accounts for his presence on the March the rebels towards
London. It could well be, but that might
well be a sort of convenient justification after the events
have occurred on the part of Newton's.
And it's after the fall of Rochester Castle that we get the
first mention of Watch Tyler. And he appears in something
called the Anonymal Chronicle. And it's under his leadership
that the men March on Canterbury.
And the coordination of the rebels in Essex and Kent is
probably down to Tyler. And then one interesting event
that occurs in Kent is that there's a man called Abel Kerr.
And he leads a band from Erith to Lessness Abbey and he forces
the Abbot there to swear to be of their company.
And Kerr then moves off to Essex for reinforcements.
And from this point on was the movement of these Kent rebels.
And the Essex rebels mirror each other very closely.
And we're obviously doing our London history podcast.
Lesnar's Abbey is one of the sites of the rebellions that you
can go and see. Also interesting for lot for
lots of other reasons as well. On June 11th, these groups set
out for London. Yeah, so they, so they came via
Blackheath, didn't they? Yes, they reach Blackheath the
following day. We're talking about the Kentish
rebels, the party advancing on the South side of the Thames.
And Blackheath is a large open space now in southeast London.
And the city centre delegation, this delegation is aimed at
getting them to disperse. It doesn't succeed.
It's headed up by Alderman plus Bishop of Rochester and the
following day, 13th of June, which is Corpus Christi Day.
I mentioned that because obviously when they
contemporaries are talking about dates, they don't say, don't
tend to say the 13th of June, that they would say Corpus
Christi Day. So the 13th of June, Corpus
Christi Day. Richard the Second sets out for
his first meetings from the rebels and he sets out on a
barge and he meets them probably at Deptford.
And the idea, I think originally is that the king will get off
his barge and he'll meet with the rebels and he'll talk to
them. But the people on the barge with
him are nervous that the crowd on the shore is just so large
that they fear for his safety. And so the rebels send the king
a list of their demands, and their demands are a list of the
royal councillors who they would like to be executed.
And the negotiations come to an end without conclusion and
Richard returns to the tower. Now, this business about the
advisors that they want to be executed is important because at
no stage throughout the Rising do the rebels target the king.
This is often when historians write about this or talk about
this, they will draw up the parallel with the Russian
Revolution in 1905 when the peasants revolt and they they
can't believe that the tsar would do anything wrong.
And similarly with Rich the Second, it's not him, he's the
king, it's the people around him who the rebels are targeting.
And throughout they maintain loyalty to the king that they
articulate their loyalty to Richard the Second.
So Richard returns to the Tower and then the rebels get to
London. The rebels have just entered
London and the revolt is truly on its way and we are going to
do a Part 2. Aren't we in about all the
London activity that happens during the summer of 1381?
So while you're waiting for the next episode after this one, you
can read a number of blog posts that are related to what we've
been talking about. First off is about Marshall C,
the history of the Marshall C and how that became Marshall C
Prison with links with Dickens. Also, there's a blog post about
the five Alderman. There is also a blog post about
John of Gaunt, Savoy Palace and also if you're a bit more
interested in the human aspect then Alice Ferris the mistress
of Edward the 1st and the Power and the scandal of the city in
1376. So plenty for you to be getting
on with. Thank you, Ian.
My pleasure, Hazel.