Wycliffe died in 1384, leaving the first English-language Bible to be completed by his associate, John Purvey. Such was the impact of Wycliffe’s teachings that thirty years later they were condemned by the Council of Constance as heretical; his body was exhumed from its resting place in his parish of Lutterworth, and burnt. The ashes were eventually scattered into the river Swift, but, as Thomas Fuller recorded: ‘This brook conveyed them to the Avon, the Avon to the Severn; the Severn to the narrow seas; they into the main Ocean; and thus the ashes of Wycliffe were the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed the whole world over.’39 Yet it was less the current of the tides and more the activity of Wycliffe’s followers, armed with the unique weapon of the Wycliffe Bible, that spread his message.
Wycliffe’s followers were known as Lollards and were strongest in the counties around London, Kent, Sussex and Essex. The origin of the term is disputed, but its most likely root is the Dutch word for ‘mummer’, related to the word ‘lullaby’: it refers to the Lollards’ habit of talking or singing in a low voice to, as their persecutors said, ‘conceal heretical principles or vicious conduct under a mask of piety.’40 In May 1394 the Lollards presented a petition to Parliament which struck at the roots of corruption in the Church, blaming ‘conformity with the precedents of Rome’ for ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ leaving the national Church. It lambasted the ‘English priesthood derived from Rome’ for ‘pretending a power superior to angels’. It attacked idolatry in terms that would become part of mainstream Puritanism and echo in the debates of the English Revolution. And it insisted on the separation of Church and state: ‘the joining of the offices of prince and bishop, prelate and secular judge, in the same person, is plain mismanagement and puts the kingdom out of the right way.’ It also offered the view that ‘the taking away of any man’s life, either in war or in courts of justice, is expressly contrary to the New Testament.’41
By the early fifteenth century the state was engaged in severe repression of Lollardy, including, for the first time, burning lay-heretics at the stake. In 1414 there was an attempted Lollard rising in London in response to the arrest on Twelfth Night of ‘certain persons called Lollards, at the sign of the Axe, without Bishop’s Gate’. Sir John Oldcastle, friend of King Henry V and a model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, was already being held in the Tower for Lollardy. He escaped and tried to raise an insurrection which involved the kidnap of the king. The plan failed, and Oldcastle was executed alongside some thirty-eight others on the so-called ‘Lollard gallows’ besides St Giles.
‘JACK CADE THE CLOTHIER MEANS TO DRESS THE COMMONWEALTH’
In 1450 the counties of Kent, Sussex and Essex were once again the forcing ground for a rebellion which found its way to London, just as they had in 1381 and during the Lollard unrest. Jack Cade’s revolt followed the pattern of the earlier risings in that it benefited from some elite support, in this case from the House of York – soon to be conducting the larger struggle of the Wars of the Roses. Indeed some of Cade’s supporters claimed that he was a cousin of Richard, duke of York. In addition he had the support of some knights and squires, but it was nevertheless an overwhelmingly popular movement. However, the popular forces involved were no longer peasants as they had been in 1381: now they were composed of agricultural labourers, yeomen farmers, artisans, traders and merchants. They rose because Henry VI had extorted tax from them at home and engaged them in the Hundred Years War in France, from where raiding parties threatened the coast.
The rebellion began in Kent and Cade marched his supporters to Blackheath, just as Wat Tyler had done seventy years before. They numbered 46,000 according to the account of William Gregory, mayor of London in the year following the rebellion.42 The demands they made in ‘A Proclamation Made by Jack Cade, Captain of Ye Rebels in Kent’ were more directly political than those of previous revolts: it observed the formality of recognizing the authority of the king and blaming ‘certain persons’ for daily informing him that ‘good is evil and evil is good’. But the proclamation immediately went on to refute those who ‘say that our sovereign lord is above his laws to his pleasure and he may make it and break it as him list’ by insisting that ‘the contrary is true, and else he should not have sworn to keep it’. Moreover, the proclamation also contradicted those who ‘say that the king should live upon his commons, and that their bodies and goods be the king’s’. Again, for Cade’s followers ‘the contrary is true, for then needeth he never Parliament to sit to ask good of his commons . . .’. The proclamation also raised directly economic grievances about lordly extortion and the use of political power by the aristocracy to get and keep property.43
To start with, Henry raised an army to confront the rebels and they dispersed. But the cause was popular even among Henry’s soldiers and fear at the dissolution of his own forces made the king quit the capital and retire to Kenilworth in Warwickshire. On the first day of July 1450 the rebellion moved its forces to Southwark, Cade setting up at the White Hart. The ‘Proclamation’ had won the approval of many in London already discontented with Henry’s rule and Cade’s forces, perhaps now numbering 25,000, crossed London Bridge and entered the City. There was some looting but the main work of the insurrection was the execution of the king’s henchmen. William Crowemere, sheriff of Kent, was beheaded in a field at Aldgate, while the detested lord treasurer, Lord Saye and Sele, was ‘beheaded in Cheap before the Standard’, according to Gregory.
As the rebel occupation of London wore on, however, support from the elite drained away – especially when Cade proposed levying rich Londoners to sustain his supporters. The Common Council raised a force of Londoners to confront the rebels on the night of 5–6 July, and from 10pm to 8am there was fierce fighting on London Bridge. The drawbridge was set alight and the Marshalsea prison was broken open; ‘many a man was slain and cast into the Thames’, records Gregory. The rebellion was defeated and the price of 1,000 marks put on Cade’s head. He was eventually killed by the sheriff of Kent while retreating through the Weald of Sussex. His naked body was brought to London where he was beheaded and quartered. His head was set on London Bridge where only days before those of the rebellion’s enemies had been. There was widespread repression, especially in Kent, where beheadings were so numerous that ‘men call it in Kent the harvest of the heads’.
Cade was immortalized by Shakespeare in The Second Part of King Henry VI, although the Bard mocks Cade’s lowly origins, his supposed claims of noble origin and his promises of relieving the economic distress of the poor. Yet Shakespeare surely catches an authentic note when he has the rebel leader say: ‘For our enemies shall fall before us, inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes’. This levelling tone was submerged beneath the dynastic squabbles of the Wars of the Roses which followed five years after the end of the rebellion.
The division of the country in that conflict, with the South and East in support of the House of York and the West and North in support of Lancaster, prefigured the geographical division of the country in the English Civil War. As A. L. Morton observed, ‘Supporting the Lancastrians were the wild nobles of the . . . most backward and feudal elements surviving in the country. The Yorkists drew their support from the progressive South, from East Anglia and from London, even if this support was not usually very active.’44 The victory of the House of York therefore was also the victory of the areas in which feudalism had been most eroded by emerging market relations, and for this reason it secured the support of the nascent market-oriented classes for the Tudor monarchy over the next century.
THE REFORMATION OF LONDON
One final revolution helped to complete London’s transformation from a feudal to an early modern capital: the dissolution of the monasteries. The experience of the Lollards foreshadowed what now became English Protestantism, but Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the final establishment of an English Protestant Church was also a moment of economic transformation as well as a political and ideological milestone in the establishment of the early modern nation state. It could scarcely