At Mile End Green the King came face to face with ‘three-score thousand men of divers villages and of sundry countries in England’. Wisely the King spoke to them ‘sweetly’, addressing them as ‘ye good people’ and asking ‘what lack ye? what will ye say?’ The reply was straightforward: ‘We will that ye make us free for ever, ourselves, our heirs and our lands, and that we be called no more bond nor so reputed.’
In this remarkable, unique confrontation between bondsmen and their overlord, the king replied: ‘Sirs, I am well agreed thereto. Withdraw you home into your own houses and into such villages as ye came from, and leave behind you of every village two or three, and I shall cause writings to be made and seal them with my seal, the which they shall have with them, containing everything that ye demand’. The king also agreed to ‘pardon everything that ye have done hitherto, so that ye follow my banners and return home to your houses.’
Some were satisfied with the undertakings that Richard gave them. But ‘Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball said, for all that these people were thus appeased, yet they would not depart so’; according to Froissart, some 30,000 stayed with them.31
The following day Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball assembled with some 20,000 at Smithfield, then the site of a horse market, and told the crowd that they had done ‘nothing as yet’. According to Froissart the plan was to take control of London. He records the crowd being told: ‘These liberties that the king hath given us is to us but a small profit: therefore let us be all of one accord and let us overrun this rich and puissant city.’ We cannot know how this scheme would have fared for at this moment, seemingly by accident, the king and a party of forty horsemen came into the area in front of the abbey of Saint Bartholomew. In Froissart’s account, when Wat Tyler saw the king he told his supporters, ‘Sirs, yonder is the king: I will go and speak with him. Stir not from hence, without I make you a sign; and when I make you that sign, come on and slay all them except the king; but do the king no hurt, he is young, we shall do with him as we list and shall lead him with us all about England, and so shall we be lords of all the realm without doubt.’ Tyler then rode out and asked the king if he saw his supporters ranged behind him. He told Richard that this mass were sworn to him in ‘faith and truth, to do all that I will have them’.
There then followed an exchange about the letters which the king had promised he would send to the counties freeing the peasants. But as this discussion took place Tyler ‘cast his eye’ on a squire in the king’s party that seems to have been an old enemy. He demanded that the king tell the squire to ‘Give me thy dagger.’ The king instructed him to do so, and Tyler then demanded that he ‘Give me also that sword.’ This was refused, and in the ensuing squabble the king ‘began to chafe and said to the mayor: “Set hands on him.”’ The mayor drew his sword and ‘strake Tyler so great a stroke on the head, that he fell down at the feet of his horse, and as soon as he was fallen, they environed him all about, whereby he was not seen of his company. Then a squire of the king’s alighted, called John Standish, and he drew out his sword and put it into Wat Tyler’s belly, and so he died.’32
Tyler’s supporters, on realizing that their leader had been killed, ‘arranged themselves on the place in manner of battle, and their bows before them’, as their forebears had done at Crécy and Poitiers. Richard rode out to confront them alone. He said: ‘Sirs, what aileth you? Ye shall have no captain but me: I am your king: be all in rest and peace.’ This seems to have been enough to divide the rebellion. Some began to ‘wax peaceable and to depart’, others did not. But now the king’s loyalists from the City began to arrive, and the balance of forces turned against the rebels. The king knighted John Standish, Tyler’s assassin, and two others and sent them to demand that the banners and letters freeing the bondsmen be returned, and that the crowd disperse. The gambit worked, and Richard tore up the letters granting freedom to the peasants. ‘Thus these foolish people departed, some one way and some another’, writes Froissart, ‘and the king and his lords and all his company right ordinately entered into London with great joy.’ John Ball and Jack Straw were caught and beheaded. Their heads, with Wat Tyler’s, were displayed on London Bridge. Richard II told his mother, ‘I have this day recovered mine heritage and the realm of England, the which I had near lost.’33
The Peasants’ Revolt did not end with the defeat in London. Related revolts occurred at St Albans (beginning 14 June), Bury St Edmunds (14 June), Norfolk (14 June), and Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire (15–17 June). On 15 June the townsfolk of Cambridge rioted against the University, particularly attacking Corpus Christi College. By the end, ‘all England south and east of a line drawn from York to Bristol had risen.’34 Not even the eventual defeat of the whole revolt could return Richard’s kingdom to its condition before the Black Death. As the historian Gerald Harriss says, ‘political society had always lived in fear of social revolution, and in 1381 it peered into the abyss and took heed.’35 Although there was retribution by the ruling class, and the attempts to tamp down wages continued, the poll tax passed by Parliament in 1382 was to be levied only on landowners. By 1389, justices of the peace had gained the power to set local pay scales. Wages rose steadily, and by the end of the century they were at a historic high. Increasingly peasants held their land not in return for servile duties but on payment of rent. Landlords who lived from rent, yeoman farmers who paid it, and free wage-labourers (unable to find that rent) were becoming more widespread.
THE MURMURINGS OF THE LOLLARDS
The rise of the Wycliffe heresy coincided with the Peasants’ Revolt. John Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire around 1330 and became a leading theologian at Oxford just as strains within the English church itself, and between that Church and Rome, were becoming more visible. In London in 1312 the mayor and aldermen complained that the monasteries and other religious landlords around the City paid nothing toward the upkeep of the City wall and defences, despite raking in a third of all the City’s rental income and owning, by some estimates, almost two-thirds of the land. The Church hierarchy was seen by many as corrupt, worldly and incapable of giving spiritual guidance, and in defiance barbers, cordwainers and other artisans were opening their shops on Sundays. In 1468 shoemakers defied a Papal Bull which directed them to stop Sunday trading, saying that ‘the pope’s curse was not worth a fly’.36
The Black Death removed a good number of priests, as many high-ranking clergy fled the stricken areas. This meant that in order to bury the dead and perform marriages and baptisms, new untrained clergy emerged. These people often owned no land and lived in poverty. The orthodox Christian view was that man was sinful and all his privations were directed by God, but some of the new clergy – and John Ball is a representative figure in this context – felt the pain of the peasants. Ball’s religious standpoint was evangelical, and he talked to his audience directly.
This new fervour coincided with John Wycliffe’s attack on Rome. The English Church paid too much money to the pope, in Wycliffe’s view. He opposed the Church hierarchy and justified this belief with a ‘true reading’ of the Bible. Even more heretically, he believed the Bible should be printed in English: ‘Englishmen learn Christ’s law best in English. Moses heard God’s law in his own tongue; so did Christ’s apostles.’ This was a revolutionary view, because religion could now be used for the people instead of against them. The Church authorities responded by declaring: ‘By this translation, the Scriptures have become vulgar, and they are more available to lay, and even to women who can read, than they were to learned scholars, who have a high intelligence. So the pearl of the gospel is scattered and trodden underfoot by swine.’37
Wycliffe appealed to a wider public by presenting his views to Parliament and having them printed in a tract, accompanied by additional notes and explanations. In March 1378, after the Parliament had met, he was hauled to the Palace of Lambeth to answer for his views. The proceedings had barely begun before an angry crowd gathered with the aim of protecting him from persecution. Two years later – the year of the Peasants’ Revolt – Wycliffe