Longbeard’s campaign began with his discovery of the Court’s plan to increase the burden of taxation on the poor. His followers, at least to begin with, seem to have been drawn from both the poor and the ‘middling people’. They were bound together by the taking of some sort of oath. William of Newburgh records that some 52,000 citizens were organized in Longbeard’s conspiracy, ‘the names of each being, as it afterwards appeared, written down’. Dominic Alexander considers these numbers vastly exaggerated, but Longbeard’s organization does seem to have been on an impressive scale. Certainly this initial phase of revolt was enough to provoke the nobles’ ‘indignation’ against this agitator. This may have been Longbeard’s motivation in crossing the Channel to France to see Richard I, in a bid to gain royal approval for his actions. He seems to have succeeded, since it is reported that on his return to London, Longbeard behaved ‘as if under the countenance of the royal favour’.6
It remained standard practice up to and including the start of the English Revolution for those rebelling against authority to claim that they were doing so in the name of the monarch. But Longbeard’s use of this stratagem may have had specific meaning at this moment. When Richard I came to the throne, he granted London extensive self-government after Henry II had limited it severely. ‘So the London elite, those families providing the Mayor and Aldermen, had only just attained a degree of self-government. The liberties granted by the King to London were new and could have been revoked, so Longbeard may have been trying to play the London elite and the King against each other.’7
Archbishop Hubert Walter had other ideas: he ‘was clearly intent on bringing royal power’ to repress Longbeard. Walter took action to suppress ‘rumours’, and also took hostages from wealthy Londoners to enforce quiescence. It seems this crackdown divided Longbeard’s supporters, silencing some of the better-off, and that Longbeard responded by appealing more directly to popular forces; Roger of Wendover’s account highlights the political organization that the rebellion entailed. Longbeard ‘in contempt of the king’s majesty, convoked assemblies of people, and binding many to him by oath at their meetings’ he at last ‘raised a sedition and disturbance in St Paul’s church’. William of Newburgh records what Longbeard said to his audiences:
I am the saviour of the poor. Oh poor, who have experienced the heaviness of rich men’s hands, drink from my wells the waters of the doctrine of salvation, and you may do this joyfully; for the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters. The people are the waters. I will divide the humble and faithful people from the haughty and treacherous people: I will separate the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness.8
Dominic Alexander comments on this remarkable speech, ‘He, or Newburgh for him, is directly associating the “poor” with the saved and the powerful with the damned. If still in the eleventh century “pauperes” could refer simply to the religious, here economic categories have fully invaded spiritual ones. Newburgh presumably intends his readership to understand the shocking social meaning of the message.’9 Longbeard reacted to Hubert’s intervention by ‘convoking public meetings by his own authority, in which he arrogantly proclaimed himself the king or saviour of the poor’, according to Newburgh.10
Longbeard’s message was popular, and his following substantial. Archbishop Walter’s strategy was to wait until he was apart from his followers and surprise him. Two ‘noble citizens’ thus watched for a time when he was ‘unattended by his mob’, now that ‘the people out of fear for the hostages had become more quiet’. In due course, on the orders of the Archbishop, they seized their opportunity to make an arrest. Longbeard and his party resisted, and in the struggle one of his assailants was killed with his own weapon. After the fight Longbeard’s party took refuge in St Mary-le-Bow, in the heart of the City. The Archbishop now laid siege to the troop and even took the sacrilegious action of breaking the sanctuary of the Church and setting it ablaze.11
The fire forced Longbeard’s group from the Church and, as he emerged, a relative of the assailant who had died in the original attack lunged at Longbeard and ‘cut open his belly with a knife’.12 All of the group were subsequently condemned to death by the king’s court, on the direction of Archbishop Walter. Longbeard was dragged from the Tower by horses to Tyburn, where he and his nine followers were all hanged. ‘In this yere was one William with the long berde taken out of Bowe churche and put to dethe for herysey’, recorded the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London.13 Others of his followers had to give hostages to the Archbishop as guarantors of good behaviour.
The Longbeard rebellion was over. But there is evidence that his reputation and ideas lived on in popular memory. And Longbeard’s rebellion was not the last, nor the greatest, challenge to feudal authority.
JEWS IN MEDIEVAL LONDON
The first sizeable Jewish immigration into Britain came with William the Conqueror in 1066. They were moneylenders from Rouen. As Christians were forbidden to lend money, Jews played this critical role in medieval society, not least for the Crown. In return they were supposed to enjoy royal protection. Both moneylending and the protection of the monarch were likely to make Jews, at particular times, the target of popular hostility. This was stoked by their designation as ‘Christ-killers’, and by the ideology that underpinned the Crusades from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century.
The Jews settled around Jew Street (now Old Jewry) and Cheapside. Until 1177 the only Jewish cemetery was in Cripplegate. From the middle of the twelfth century the rise of Italian banking houses gave the monarchs an alternative – Christian – source of finance. It was Richard I’s coronation that occasioned the first series of pogroms against Jews. Elders who came to pay their respects to the new king at Westminster unwittingly sparked a riot that left thirty Jewish families dead. John Stow records looting of the Jewish community in London during the Barons’ Wars, 1199–1216. In 1215 the Pope enacted a decree that all non-Christians (that is, Muslims and Jews) should have to wear distinguishing clothing to prevent them mingling with Christians. In 1262 a London mob attacked a synagogue at Lothbury in the heart of the City, killing 700 people. In 1282 the Bishop of London was ordered to destroy all synagogues in his diocese.
In 1275 Edward I issued the Statute of Jewry which prohibited Jews from charging interest on loans and ruled, on pain of forfeit, that they must collect all outstanding debts by the following Easter. The new Statute also made it law that all Jews from the age of seven had to wear a yellow felt badge six inches long and three inches wide. A poll tax of 3 pence was imposed on every Jew over the age of 12 years. Finally the Jews were ordered out of England. On 18 July 1290 every Jew was told to leave the country. About 16,000 Jews were forced to flee.
Jews were not the only ‘aliens’ who were the victims of the prejudice generated by the economic contradictions of medieval society. These paradoxes were ultimately rooted in the social structure defended by elites, but they could not help but affect the lives of ordinary Londoners. Consequently there could be a popular dimension to prejudice, although it was rarely universal or uncontested. Besides Jews there were many other trading communities in medieval London. Italian merchants could be found around modern day Lombard Street and excavations at One Poultry found a large tenement let to merchants from Lucca, Tuscany, in 1355. The site of Cannon Street station was once a walled enclave of German traders from the Hanseatic League, who had arrived in London in the mid-1200s. We know of the Flemish community and the peasants who invaded London in 1381 singled them out as a result of the trade wars that had been raging in the preceding period. One account reminds us that they suffered along with the elites as targets of the Revolt: ‘on Corpus Christi day, was the rising of Kent and Essex, and they ware called Jake Strawes men, and came to London, and . . . went to the tower of London, and there toke out sir Simon Beuerle (Sudbury) Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England . . . and divers other, and beheaded them at the Tower Hill, and slew many Flemings and other men.’14
THE CITY AND THE CROWN
Division between City and Crown also gave space to popular revolt in the thirteenth century. In 1245 Henry III’s establishment of two new fairs in Westminster, outside City jurisdiction, directly affecting trade and his repeated meddling with London government angered the City oligarchy.