The first we know of St Paul’s Cross, the preaching cross and open-air pulpit in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, is in 1236 when a king’s justice convened a folkmoot, or general assembly of the people, to proclaim Henry III’s desire that London should be well governed. In 1259 a second meeting at St Paul’s Cross was more divisive when Londoners were summoned to swear allegiance to Henry. They did so, but only because the army held the gates of the city. Later they reassembled on the same spot and swore allegiance to Simon de Montfort, whose baronial challenge to Henry became the trigger for popular mobs to take to the London streets, besieging Henry’s Queen Eleanor in the Tower. One alderman was aghast at the intervention of the popular movement:
This mayor . . . has so pampered the City populace, that, styling themselves the ‘Commons of the City’, they had obtained the first voice in the City. For the Mayor, in doing all that he had to do, acted and determined through them, and would say to them, – ‘Is it your will that so it shall be’ and then, if they answered ‘Ya, Ya’, so it was done. And on the other hand, the aldermen, or chief citizens were little or not at all consulted on such a matter.15
The defeat of de Montfort’s revolt ended the popular movement. Henry III’s heir Prince Edward had a hand in the subsequent punishment of the City, and when he succeeded to the throne in 1272 he remodelled City government. Edward I finished the inner wall of the Tower begun by his father, and added an outer wall. This did not prevent a fresh outbreak of disorders in 1284, when a leading member of the Goldsmiths’ Company was killed in St Mary-le-Bow, the site of Longbeard’s last stand the century before. That and the riot at Newgate prison a year later gave Edward the pretext for an even harsher set of penal codes, and, when the mayor and aldermen protested, he replaced them with a royal warden. In 1289 a final humiliation was visited on the City: a royal treasurer was sent into Guildhall to take control of City finances.
This long night of exclusion for the City elite lasted through most of the reign of Edward II; some of its powers were returned in the charters granted in 1319 and in 1327, the year that Edward III came to the throne.
Much of Edward III’s reign was peaceable in the City of London, if bloody on the fields of the Hundred Years War. But in the late 1300s the relationship between the City and the Crown was becoming unstable once again. The debts of the Hundred Years War hung heavily around the neck of the monarchy and the glorious victories of the English archers, at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers a decade later, were fading from memory. But one aspect of the battles of the mid-century did perhaps linger in the minds of the men who fought in France. Those battles had meant that ‘the prestige of the armoured feudal cavalry had received its death blow’, because the longbow ‘placed the trained peasant archer on terms of equality with his lord, robbing the latter of his main claim to special consideration, his position as a specialist in war’.16
For much of his reign Edward III held sway over the City of London, even when unpopular policies like selling licences to Italian merchants raised royal revenues at domestic merchants’ expense. But as the king grew old, the City began to flex its muscles. The ‘good Parliament’ of 1376, as part of a wider purge of those loyal to the Crown, impeached three aldermen who were allies of the king. Power increasingly fell into the hands of the king’s son, the duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. At first he placated powerful London wool merchants by re-establishing the monopoly practice whereby English wool was only to be traded on favourable terms through Calais, then an English possession, the so-called Calais staple.
John of Gaunt also feted the rogue but popular member of the Court of Aldermen, John de Northampton. In doing so he set in train a three-way search for alliances in the City. The mayor and aldermen, fearing John of Gaunt’s alliance with Northampton, did their own deal with him. This required them to accede to Northampton’s demand that the Common Council be elected by the misteries or guilds, the craft organizations, rather than the wards, and that it be consulted by the aldermen twice a quarter. Thus the infighting among the elite paved the way for changes to the way London worked, and to the City constitution, that had radical implications for the future.
The following year, 1377, the tables turned again. Edward III died and Richard II, at barely eleven years old, became king. Meanwhile John of Gaunt remained the de facto ruler of the country, and was no lover of the City’s liberties. When it was rumoured that he intended to bring the City under royal control, a mob attacked his Savoy Palace, sited on the Strand with gardens running down to the Thames and one of the grandest palaces in Europe. It was an ominous foretaste of events during the revolt four years later. But John of Gaunt pressed on: in 1377 the Gloucester Parliament withdrew the concessions of the previous year and enabled Italian merchants to trade directly between Genoa and Southampton, thus revoking the monopoly of the Calais staple. The City was prepared to pay the Crown handsomely for this entitlement to be returned to them, but the Italian merchants’ pockets were deeper. Moreover, French naval strength constituted a threat to English merchant trade with which John of Gaunt seemed incapable of dealing. By the time the Peasants’ Revolt exploded a few years later, there were some among the City elite that looked on it with some sympathy, at least in its opening phases.17 As contemporary chronicler Canon Henry Knighton recorded, ‘During this crisis, the commons held the peaceful duke of Lancaster as their most hated enemy of all mortal men and would certainly have destroyed him immediately if they had found him . . .’.18
THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT
The greatest revolt of the feudal era in England took place in 1381. It was essentially a rural rising but the source of the trouble, as the peasant insurrectionists realized, lay in the capital; and it was to London they came to get redress. Wages had been rising because of the labour shortage created by the Black Death. All figures are estimates in this period, but the plague killed perhaps a third of London’s population of 45,000 when it first struck the city in 1349. There were further outbreaks in 1361 and 1368. However, the authorities attempted to depress wages to pre-Black Death levels by imposing the Statute of Labourers, that sought not only to reduce pay but also to prevent labourers from moving out of their locality and to ban day-labour in favour of a yearly contract. In addition the poll tax of 1380 was the latest of three such taxes raised since 1377; but the 1380 tax was three times higher – one shilling for every man and woman over the age of fifteen. It was, as one unknown poet wrote, a tax that ‘has tenet [harmed] us alle’. And, as with Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax in the 1980s, tens of thousands disappeared from the tax roll to avoid payment long before the revolt flared into the open.
The revolt began in Brentwood, Essex, on 30 May 1381 as a Royal Commission arrived to assess evasion of the third poll tax, and lasted through the first half of June. The uprisings spread rapidly, partly as a result of deliberate organization by the rebels and partly as a result of the use of feast days and other traditional moments of collective celebration, as well as the meetings of manorial courts and the visitation of royal justices, as occasions to spread dissension. The ‘hue and cry’ would be sent out and church bells rung to summon the rebels. John Ball, one of the leaders of the revolt, is said to have written:
John Ball greeteth you all
And doth to understand he hath rung your bell,
Now with might and right, will and skill,
God speed every dell.19
Surviving letters from John Ball to his supporters cryptically encourage the commons while urging them to disciplined, collective action. He urges them to stand ‘together in God’s name’, to ‘chastise well Hob the Robber’ and to observe one leader rather than act individually. Ball uses code to communicate with fellow rebel leaders. He is ‘John Schep’, while others include ‘John Nameles’, ‘John the Miller’, ‘John Carter’, ‘John Trewman’ and ‘Piers Plowman’.
Ball certainly had a previous record of opposition to authority, as noted by Jean Froissart – the remarkable French historian and sometime employee of the queen of England whose chronicle provides one of the greatest, if hostile, accounts of the rising.20 Froissart was deeply committed to the notion of medieval chivalry, and acutely sensitive to any affront to authority. Speaking of the peasants, he tells us:
These unhappy people of these said countries began to