One of the most noteworthy objects in the great pageant that passed
through the crowds of London on the 10th of last November was an effigy
of Wat Tyler, upon a lofty platform, lying prostrate, as if slain, at
the feet of Walworth, the Mayor, who stood with drawn sword beside the
seeming corpse. The suggestion was that of hero and miscreant—rebellion
defeated—the City saved! Many there were in the line of procession
who showed, by unexpected hisses and groans, that they did not so
read history; and it seems worth while to ask, especially while the
greatest contemporary of the Mayor and the Tyler is freshly brought to
our remembrance by the Wycliffe quincentenary commemoration, what that
scene in Smithfield really meant and what was its issue.
In reading the old chronicles we have to remember the fable of the
Lion and the Man. Monks like Knighton of Leicester, and Walsingham of
St. Albans, or courtiers like Jean Froissart, with great simplicity
betray their bias, and we must often “read between the lines.” It is
useful also to recollect that the distinction between a rebellion and
a revolution turns very much upon the fact of success. Had Wat Tyler
won the day, and secured the charter which seemed so nearly within the
people’s reach, his name would have come down to us in better company
than that of Jack Cade and other vulgar insurgents and rioters. A
second Magna Charta would have become memorable in English history, and
its chief promoter might have been known to posterity as Sir Walter
Tyler, or perhaps the Earl of Kent.
We all know the story of the poll-tax—that intolerable impost[4] which
followed the “glorious wars” and the sumptuous extravagance of Edward
III., and which awakened such bitter resistance in the early days of
Richard II. The monkish historians themselves tell us how harshly and
brutally the tax was levied, especially by one John Legg, the farmer
of the tax for Essex and Kent; and if this part of the history stood
alone we might pause before we wholly condemned the hasty blow by which
the Dartford bricklayer or “tiler” avenged the insulted modesty of his
child.[5] Why should we give all our admiration to William Tell—with
his _second_ arrow for the heart of Gessler had his first sped too
fatally[6]—and not recognise in this man of Kent also the honorable
indignation of an outraged father? But this may pass, as it is plainly
impossible that the great insurrection could have been wholly due to
such a cause. Sixty thousand men from Kent, Essex, Sussex, Bedford,
would never have been roused to revolt even by the news of this
Dartford tragedy. The deed, no doubt, gave impulse to the movement; but
the causes of disaffection had been at work long before the levy of the
poll-tax; and the “peasant revolt” becomes most deeply interesting, as
well as important, when regarded as the first passionate claim of the
“lower classes” in England for freedom and their rights as men.
[4] A shilling a head from every person above fourteen years old.
[5] Tyler, “being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when
he heard” of the insult offered to his daughter, “caught his lathing
staff in his hand and ran reaking home; when reasoning with the
collector who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout
words and strake at the tylar; whereupon the tylar, avoiding the blow,
smote the collector with the lathing staff that the brains flew out
of his head. Wherethrough great noise arose in the street, and the
poor people being glad, every one prepared to support the said John
Tylar.”—_Stowe’s “Chronicle.”_
[6] Some will say that this is legend; but the illustration
nevertheless may stand.
The courtly Froissart informs us that there was in the county of
Kent[7] “a crazy priest,” one John Ball, who had long been testifying
against the serfdom in which the peasantry were held, “Why,” he asked,
“should we be slaves? Are we not all descended from Adam and Eve? By
what title do our masters hold us in bondage?” Froissart declares that
Ball preached absolute communism, but there is no evidence that he went
beyond the vigorous assertion of the equal right of all to freedom.
“Every Sunday after mass,” writes the chronicler, “as the people came
out of church, he would preach to them in the market-place (he had been
excommunicated), and assemble a crowd round him ... and he was much
beloved by the people.” As a consequence “the evil-disposed in these
districts began to rise, saying they were too severely oppressed, that
at the beginning of the world there were no slaves, and that no one
ought to be treated as such, unless he had committed treason against
his lord, as Lucifer had done against God; but they had done no such
thing, for they were neither angels nor spirits, but men, formed after
the same likeness with their lords, who treated them as beasts. This
they would no longer bear, but had determined to be free, and if they
labored or did any other work for their lords they would be paid for
it.”
[7] Other authorities make _Essex_ the chief scene of Ball’s
ministrations. See “Lives of English Popular Leaders,” 2nd Series, by
C.E. Maurice, 1875.
Such words of the “crazy priest” and his “evil-disposed” hearers seem
to us reasonable enough. Their chief fault, perhaps, is that they
belong to the nineteenth century, rather than to the fourteenth. Never
was a man more emphatically before his time than this same John Ball.
The usual result followed. For these and the like “foolish words” he
was arrested and imprisoned by Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury.
But those words could not die, although the first attempt to realise
them in deed was—like many a first effort for justice, truth and
freedom—premature and a little blind.
At the beginning of 1831, then, John Ball was lying in the archbishop’s
prison at Maidstone. Yet it was not in Kent that the rising actually
began. Five thousand men of Essex, according to Walsingham, took the
first step to revolt. The monkish chronicler makes merry with their
equipment. “Sticks, rusty swords, hatchets, smoke-dried bows the color
of old ivory, some with but an arrow apiece, and many arrows with
but one feather!” “Think of this ragged regiment,” he contemptuously
writes, “aspiring to become masters of the realm!”
Placards and flysheets of a quaint and grotesque rather than of an
inflammatory character, called upon the people to assert their rights.
Knighton of Leicester gives some remarkable specimens, transcribed from
the old black-letter manuscripts, purporting to be issued by “Jack the
Miller,” “Jack the Carter,” “Jack Trueman,” and “Jack Straw.”[8] For
the most part they are written in a kind of doggerel rhyme, as in the
Miller’s appeal: “With right and with might; with skill and with will;
let might help right, and skill before will; and might before right,
then goeth our mill aright.” “In the rude jingle of these lines,”
writes the late Mr. Green, “began for England the literature of
political controversy. They are the first predecessors of the pamphlets
of Milton and Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the
mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants; their longing
for a right rule, for plain and simple justice; the scorn of the
immorality of the nobles, and the infamy of the Court; their resentment
at the perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.”
[8] The contemporary poet, Gower, has described one aspect of the
rebellion in some Latin verses which amusingly indicate the names most
common among the populace:—
_Watte_ vocat, cui _Thome_ venit, neque _Symme_ retardat,
_Bette_ que, _Gibbe_ simul, _Hykke_ venire jubet,
_Colle_ furit, quem _Gibbe_ juvat, nocumenta parantes,
Cum quibus ad damnum _Wille_ coire vovet,
_Grigge_ rapit, dum _Davve_ strepit, comes est quibus _Hobbe_,
_Larkin_ et in medio non minor esse putat,
_Hudde_ ferit, quos _Judde_ terit, dum _Tebbe_ juvatur,
_Jakke_ domos virosque vellit, et ense necat.
Some of the chroniclers represent “Jack Straw” as only an _alias_ of
Wat Tyler, but they were evidently two different persons.
A leader of this motley band was one Baker, of Fobbing, in Essex, of
whom a story is told similar to that of the Dartford Tyler. The Essex
men sent messengers to Kent, and a great company, doubtless of John
Ball’s hearers, speedily assembled. They roamed the country. Broke
open the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone, and liberated the popular
champion. They stopped several companies of Canterbury pilgrims on
their way to the shrine of Becket, not to maltreat or to pillage
them, but to impose an oath “to be loyal to King Richard, to accept
no king of the name of John”—a clause aimed at the deservedly hated
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster—“and, for the rest, to stir up their
fellow-citizens to resist all taxes except the ‘fifteenths,’ which
their fathers and predecessors had acknowledged and paid.” Wat Tyler of
Maidstone—a different person evidently from the man who had slain the
tax-collector at Dartford—was chosen as their leader. Hollinshed, after
Walsingham, describes him as “a verie craftie fellow and indued with
much wit[9] (if he had well applied it).”
[9] “Vir versutus et magno sensu præditus.”—Walsingham, i. 463.
A march upon London was now planned, for the purpose of meeting
King Richard face to face, and demanding a redress of the people’s
grievances. Sir John Newton, one of the king’s knights, was led, by
persuasion or force, to act as envoy for the insurgents. The king
shut himself up in the Tower of his Court, but was invited to meet
the peasant army, now mustered at Blackheath. Perhaps had he done so,
much that followed might have been avoided; but the messengers sent to
reconnoitre dissuaded him. His majesty had taken boat and had descended
the Thames to Rotherhithe, a detachment from Blackheath having come to
the riverside to meet him. At this point Richard was advised by Sudbury
the archbishop, and Robert Hales the treasurer, to hold no parley.
“Have nothing to do,” they said, “with a set of shoeless ribalds.” For
a little time, the royal lad—he was but sixteen—was rowed up and down
the river in his barge, pitiably irresolute; but at last he returned
to the Tower, and an advance upon the City was resolved upon by the
peasant army, after a sermon by Ball, on Blackheath, from the text—
“When Adam dalf and Eve span,
Wo was thanne a gentilman?”
The mayor and aldermen were for shutting the City gates, but the mass
of the citizens effectually protested against excluding those whom
they owned as “friends and neighbors.” The gates were accordingly
left open all night, and an immense multitude went in and out, as yet
comparatively orderly, and certainly honest. They stole nothing, not
even food; everything they took they paid for at a fair price; any
robber amongst them they put to death on the spot. As far as in them
lay, these rude undisciplined masses wished to make fair war on those
whom they regarded as their oppressors.[10] The Duke of Lancaster
was the first object of their animosity. His sumptuous palace in the
Savoy was ruthlessly destroyed, but the chronicler is careful to
relate that the rioters did not appropriate the spoils. His jewels
and other valuables he flung into the river, and one man detected in
secreting a silver cup was thrown in after it. The records of the
kingdom and other State papers were burned, the peasantry in some dim
confused way connecting these documents with the oppressions to which
they had been subject. Other acts of violence followed, notably the
destruction of great part of the Temple, of which Robert Hales was
Master. The insurgents, to whom drink had been freely served by many
of the citizens, soon became infuriated and uncontrollable. A wild,
half-drunken mob raged through the City, and deplorable excesses were
committed.
[10] “It was said that the insurgents as they went along were
killing all the lawyers and jurymen; that every criminal who feared
punishment for his offences had joined himself to them; that masters
of grammar-schools had been compelled to forswear their profession,
and that even the possession of an inkhorn was dangerous to its owner.
Most of the rumors were, no doubt, the mere inventions of the excited
imaginations of the chroniclers or their informants. The orderly
conduct of the army of Tyler when it was first admitted into London,
and the definiteness of the demands which formed the basis of the
charter granted by Richard, make the atrocities and absurdities of
these acts alike improbable.”—C. E. Maurice, p. 164.
In this way the Thursday was passed—Corpus Christi Day, June 13, 1381.
The City was panic stricken. Walworth, the mayor, proposed, according
to Froissart, that an onslaught should be made upon the insurgents
during the night, when many of them, lying in drunken sleep, could
easily be killed “like flies.” But the atrocious counsel was rejected,
and on the Friday morning the king came to parley, chiefly, as it
appears, with the Essex contingent, gathered at Mile End, “in a fair
meadow,” writes Froissart, “where in the summer time people go to amuse
themselves.” The interview was a peaceful one. Nothing could be more
simple and reasonable than the demand of the people: “We wish that thou
wouldst make us free forever, us, our heirs, and our lands, and that we
should no longer be called slaves, nor held in bondage.” Richard II. at
once acceded to the petition, promised four things: first, that they
and their children after them should be free; secondly that they should
not be attached to the soil for service, but should be at liberty to
rent lands of their own at a moderate fixed price; thirdly, that they
should have access, free of toll, to all markets and fairs, cities,
burghs, and mercantile towns, to buy and sell; and, fourthly, that
they should be forgiven for the present insurrection. The king further
prepared to send letters to every town confirming these articles of
agreement. Two persons from each locality were to remain to carry back
these precious documents; “thirty secretaries” were instantly set to
work; and the multitude cheerfully dispersed.
But the men of Kent had meanwhile enacted a terrible scene at the
Tower. Taking forcible possession of the place and frightening the six
hundred yeomen on guard almost out of their wits in a way which the
chroniclers graphically describe, they sought out the archbishop and
treasurer who had called them “shoeless ribalds,” with Richard Lyons
the merchant, chief commissioner for levying the poll-tax, and John
Legg, the man who had taken the most prominent part in the collection
of the impot, also two of Legg’s satellites and an obnoxious friar.
These men they beheaded, carrying their heads on long pikes through the
streets of London. It was a terrible revenge, and must have steeled
the hearts of well-meaning citizens at once against the movement. The
King’s mother (the Princess Joan, widow of the Black Prince) was in the
Tower, half dead with terror. Some of the insurgents had penetrated
into her room and thrust their swords into the mattress of her bed in
search for the “traitors,” but beyond the murder of the archbishop and
his companions they seemed to have committed no outrage. The princess
herself, on being recognised, was treated with honor, and was conveyed
to the Wardrobe, Carter Lane, in the vicinity of Blackfriars, where the
king found her when his business at Mile End was done—a royal day’s
work that might have been one of the best and brightest in the annals
of England!
The next morning Richard heard mass in Westminster Abbey, and, on
his return with sixty knights, encountered Wat Tyler and his men in
Smithfield “before the Abbey of St. Bartholomew.” As it appears, Tyler
had some further demands to make, not being altogether satisfied with
the charter of Mile End.[11] Sir John Newton rode up to invite him to
approach the king. According to some accounts the knight was received
insolently. “I shall come,” said Tyler, “when I please. If you are
in a hurry you can go back to your master now!” Another narrator
tells us that Wat began to abuse Sir John Newton for coming to him on
horseback, being met with the courteous reply, “You are mounted, why
should not I be so likewise?” In a third chronicle we read that Tyler
was approaching Richard covered, and was ordered by Walworth, the
mayor, to remove his cap, but roughly refused. There was, at any rate,
a brief dialogue between Richard II. and the peasant leader, in which
the latter insisted on the immediate issue of letters of manumission
to all, and added his new demand, to the effect that “all warrens,
waters, parks, and woods should be common, so that the poor as well
as the rich might freely fish in all waters, hunt the deer in forests
and parks, and the hare in the field.” This cry for the repeal of the
game and forest laws went to the heart of one of the chief grievances
of the people. What reply the king gave is not recorded, nor is it
easy to disentangle from the conflicting accounts any clear details.
One chronicler says that Tyler came too near the king’s horse, as
if intending some mischief against his majesty; others that he was
simply insolent, tossing his dagger from hand to hand as he parleyed;
others that blows were actually interchanged between Wat and Sir John
Newton. This much at any rate is clear, that the Mayor Walworth—_John_
Walworth, as Knighton calls him; _William_, as in the other
authorities—aimed a sudden blow at the bold demagogue, who fell at once
from his horse, and was dispatched by one of the king’s squires, named
Sandwich or Cavendish.
[11] It is possible that some of the points above mentioned were
among these reserved demands. If so, the king conceded them to
Tyler, verbally, before the catastrophe. But this is uncertain. The
concessions are enumerated in Rymer’s “Fœdera,” vol. vii. p. 317.
With Wat Tyler died also the insurrection, and the hopes of English
liberty for many a dreary year. “As he fell from his horse to the
earth,” writes Walsingham, “he first gave hope to the English soldiery,
who had been half dead, that the Commons could be resisted.” There
was, no doubt, a touch of chivalry in the first words of the young
king, “Follow me!” he cried to the people infuriated by their leader’s
assassination; “I will be your captain!” They were startled, and
obeyed, the king preceding them to Islington, where he was met by a
large body of soldiers. There was no conflict, and the multitude slowly
dispersed, being threatened with death if found in the streets after
nightfall.
As soon as the king was safe it was found that his pledges had meant
nothing. The promises of enfranchisement, the “letters” about which
the “thirty secretaries” had been busy all the night of that memorable
fourteenth of June, were treated as void. “Villeins you are,” said the
king, when asked by the men of Essex to confirm his promises, “and
villeins you shall remain. You shall remain in bondage, not such as
you have hitherto been subjected to, but incomparably viler. For so
long as we live and rule by God’s grace over this kingdom, we shall use
our sense, our strength and our property, so to treat you that your
slavery may be an example to posterity, and that those who live now and
hereafter, who may be like you, may always have before their eyes, and
as it were in a glass, your misery and reasons for cursing you, and the
fear of doing things like those which you have done.” In the spirit of
this royal message, commissions were sent into the country to bring
those who had taken part in the insurrection to condign punishment.
John Ball, the preacher, Jack Straw with the Millers, Truemans, and a
host of others, were mercilessly put to death; and in that terrible
autumn the scaffold and the gallows had no fewer than seven thousand
victims![12] Nothing could more clearly show the panic into which this
wild rough outcry for freedom had thrown the constituted authorities in
Church and State. One good result, however, of the insurrection was in
the vanishing of the poll-tax. Of that impost, at least, we do not hear
again. And more—the people had learned their power, a lesson which in
the darkest times was never forgotten.
[12] Green’s “History of the English People,” vol. 1. p. 475.
We believe in freedom now. Almost all that John Ball and Wat Tyler
demanded is the heritage of every Englishman. They might have sought
it, perhaps, by “constitutional methods.” Yet we must remember their
times. They did but imitate in their rough way during those three days
of terror the course which their masters pursued for more than three
hundred years! The stroke that laid Wat Tyler low—and made Richard II.,
that worthless lad, the master of the situation—whatever it was, was
not a blow for liberty!
Some partisan writers have associated the teachings of John Ball with
the principles maintained by Wycliffe, especially in his treatise “On
Dominion.” The dates, however, are against this. Ball is said to have
been a preacher for more than twenty years before the insurrection.
This carries us back to about 1360, an earlier date than we can assign
to Wycliffe’s treatise, or to his institution of “Poor Preachers.” In
fact, the chronicler Knighton takes a diametrically opposite view, and
regards Ball as a _forerunner_ of Wycliffe—the John the Baptist to
this false Messiah! In his fervid imagination the Leicester canon sees
the apocalyptic visions fulfilled—the catastrophe of the last days!
Such events can mean nothing else than the end of the world! “Much has
happened since then,” and the signs of the times may perhaps be read as
fallaciously by seers of to-day. There can, however, be no doubt that
before the insurrection, Ball had been an adherent of Wycliffe. The
demand for spiritual freedom fell in, at least, with the thoughts and
impulses that had prompted the serfs of their wild irregular cry for
social and political rights.
“In memory of Sir William Walworth’s valor,” writes Thomas Fuller in
his “Church History of Great Britain,” “the arms of London, formerly a
plain cross, were augmented by the addition of a dagger, to make the
coat in all points complete.” This is still a popular mistake. That
dagger, or short sword, has nothing whatever to do with Walworth, or
Tyler, or Richard II., or any of the personages, good or evil, of that
era. In fact, it was a relic or “survival” of the sword in the hand
of the Apostle Paul, formerly engraven on the City seal.[13] St. Paul
anciently figured as patron saint of London, and when in Reformation
times his effigy disappeared from the City arms his sword remained. We
know that in Christian art, from about the tenth century, the sword was
a familiar symbol of St. Paul, the primary intention no doubt being to
denote the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
[13] For this information we are indebted to Mr. Overall, the
courteous Librarian of the Guildhall Library.