A large meeting was convened. There were no minutes, and what was said is lost, but a later legal case would allege that it was here that the assembled villagers rose ‘treacherously against the lord king’. As a mark of the general commitment to what was sure to be a dangerous and perhaps fateful undertaking, all swore oaths to work together with one aim: ‘to destroy divers lieges of the lord king and to have no law in England except only those they themselves moved to be ordained’. With that, the foundations for the county rebellion were laid.
It was very likely agreed at Bocking who constituted legitimate targets of the rebellion, and the methods by which recruits could be gathered. All men present agreed to catch and kill royal ministers and officials, and those whom they held responsible for the dismal governance of the country and the perceived corruption of justice that had repeatedly been visited on the common folk of the country, most recently by the poll tax commissions. First among these targets was Sheriff Sewale. Others included all those who had exercised positions of royal government or onerous private lordship in the county. Woe betide anyone who counted in both categories.
Violent coercion was also approved as a legitimate part of the recruitment drive. One observer wrote that the rebels ‘went to the manors and townships of those who would not rise with them, and cast their houses to the ground or set fire to them’.1 According to Thomas Walsingham, the St Albans chronicler, ‘men of just two villages’-Fobbing, perhaps also Bocking-had
made it their business to send with all haste to every village, however small. Their aim was to get both the old and those men in their prime to join them equipped with such weapons as they could muster, allowing no excuses at all, so that those who refrained from joining them, and those who refused or disdained to do so, would know that they would have their possessions pillaged, their homes burned down or demolished and themselves be executed.
The revolt was cast from the outset as a community rebellion-and there was a ‘with us or against us’ mentality that had dire consequences for those opposed.
Bocking reflected the model of rebel organisation-sworn chapters or companies of men banded together by oath, led by the natural leaders of village society, in close communication with other bands of rebels and working to a common timetable-which revolved around strategic, coordinated strikes on selected targets. And as such the rural revolt can be seen not as a spontaneous, itinerant riot, but a carefully choreographed orgy of violence and retribution.
At the same time as the Whitsunday conventicles in Bocking were starting a month’s rioting across Essex, the spirit of disorder was ghosting across the Thames and into Kent. Whitsun weekend had become a time for banding together, committing to the movement and readying the country community to rise as one. So communication began between the men in and around Barstaple hundred and the inhabitants of Dartford, which was one of the larger towns on the south bank of the estuary.
The prominent figure in this early stage of the Kent rebellion was Abel Ker, an inhabitant of Erith, a small port village just upstream from Dartford, south of Fobbing, with close links to London through the trading traffic of the river. Ker, like Thomas Baker, was a prominent enough member of local society to command the respect and deference of his peers. On Whitsunday, he gathered together a sizeable band of villagers from Erith and from Lesnes, a couple of miles west along the river, and took them to the nearby Augustinian abbey of St Mary and St Thomas the Martyr.
The abbey of Lesnes, like many other abbeys about England, was well endowed with land both in its own county and those surrounding it. Monastic communities tended to find themselves frequently in dispute with their tenants, and there was widespread ill feeling towards their use of their own courts to squeeze as much in the way of convenient labour services and feudal dues from their tenants as they could get away with. Lesnes had been a sloppily run institution throughout most of its recent history, with monastic discipline reaching a low point in the 1340s, when the Crown had had to be enlisted to help arrest vagabond and apostate monks. The abbot in 1381, William de Hethe, was obviously marked by men in the Dartford area as a prime example of bad lordship.
Hethe was at home when Ker’s band bundled their way into the abbey. The rebels stormed in and took him hostage. They forced him to swear an oath in which he promised to be of the rebels’ company, a prospect that no doubt terrified him to the limit of his wits, but which was marginally preferable to death at the hands of an angry mob.
The capture of the abbot was, for Ker’s rebels, an impressive coup-regardless of the fact that his oath (and the mea culpa that it implied) was made under duress. It held enormous propaganda value, and to a degree it legitimised their actions about the county. The policy of forcing their social betters to profess support for the rising soon became a motif of the rebellion at large, which tells us something important about the rebel mindset: they aimed not to overturn or transform society, but to correct it from the top down.
Encouraged by his success at Lesnes, the next day-Whit Monday-Ker gathered together a small group from his conventicle and (presumably in a convoy of fishing boats) crossed the Thames to enter Essex. Assize sessions were due in Dartford under Sir Robert Belknap, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. Belknap was one of the two most senior judges in the country, and the prospect of answering to him for the attack on Lesnes Abbey and thus bringing to an end the successful protest after a single day held no appeal.
So Ker took his band over the river to Rainham, another small village, about ten miles west of Fobbing, to gather new recruits. His men spent the day raising and swearing into Ker’s allegiance more than a hundred men from villages spread across southern Essex. Besides the ordinary villagers, Ker had specific targets for recruitment. He specifically targeted William Berland, a serving justice of the peace who had been an assessor for the 1379 poll tax. Ker’s methods were not subtle: he coerced as his recruiting agent one William Chaundeler of Prittlewell, a seafront village in Rochford hundred, out in the eastern islands of Essex. Chaundeler later claimed to have been forced against his will to instruct Berland and John Prittlewell Senior to rise and meet the rebels at Rainham. Whether they got their men or not is unclear, but by the morning of Tuesday, 4 June, Ker had managed to summon a sizeable force of both Essex and Kent men, all sworn by solemn oath to the rebel cause, one or two of them probably in fear for their lives. They crossed back into Kent and readied themselves for Belknap.
Sir Robert Belknap was not merely a senior judge. He was a career lawyer who had been a favourite with both the royal court and with John of Gaunt from the early 1370s. Belknap was a familiar figure across the whole of the south-east, but not a popular one-those men who knew a little of London’s politics would have been aware of the contempt in which London’s populace held him. During Richard II’s coronation ceremony the citizens had erected a likeness of his head on a water conduit along the route of the parade, so that all who passed would see him spewing wine out of his ridiculous mouth.
On Wednesday, 4 June, he arrived in Dartford on his regular Whitsun assize duty. He had been in Stratford, not far from London, on the day that Bampton and Gildesburgh were chased from Brentwood, and during his subsequent scheduled visits to Barnet, in Hertfordshire, and then down to Southwark, the famous first staging post on the pilgrims’ road to Canterbury, he would have heard the frantic reports coming back from Essex and Kent of the disorder that was spreading through the country. There must have been some advance word of his mood, because when it was learned that he was soon to arrive in Dartford at the scene of Ker’s arm of the rebellion, there was such consternation that people across the countryside were said to have proposed abandoning their homes in fear.
But even with as grand a judge as Belknap at its head, fear of the law was quickly subsumed beneath popular anger against it. When the judicial train arrived at Dartford, the town dissolved into rioting. The chroniclers recall how ‘the commons rose against [Belknap] and came before him to tell him that he was a traitor to the King, and that it was of pure malice that he would put them in default… And they took him, and made him swear on the Bible that never again would he hold such a session, nor act as a judge in such inquests.’2
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