The Great Revolt of 1381

By Charles Oman

The Great Revolt of 1381 is a great overview of the Peasants' Revolt in England by noted historian Charles Oman. A table of contents is included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781508015154

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THE GREAT REVOLT OF 1381

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Charles Oman

WAXKEEP PUBLISHING

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Copyright © 2015 by Charles Oman

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

THE GREAT REVOLT OF 1381

CHAPTER I.INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER II.The Parliament of Northampton and the Poll-Tax

CHAPTER III.The Outbreak in Kent and Essex

CHAPTER IV.THE REBELS IN LONDON: KING RICHARD AND WAT TYLER

CHAPTER V.The Repression of the Rebellion in London and the adjacent District

CHAPTER VI.The Rebellion in the Home Counties and the South

CHAPTER VII.THE REBELLION IN NORFOLK AND SUFFOLK

CHAPTER VIII.The Rebellion in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire

CHAPTER IX.The Suppression of the Revolt in the Eastern Counties

CHAPTER X.Troubles in the Outlying Counties of the North and West

CHAPTER XI.The Results of Insurrection. The Parliament of November 1381

The Great Revolt of 1381

By Charles Oman

PREFACE

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IF ANDRÉ RÉVILLE HAD SURVIVED to complete his projected history of the Great Revolt of 1381, this book of mine would not have been written. But when he had transcribed at the Record Office all the documents that he could find bearing on the rebellion, and had written three chapters dealing with the troubles in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Hertfordshire, he was cut off by disease at the early age of twenty-seven. All his transcripts of documents, together with the fragment relating to the three shires above named, were published by the Société de l’École des Chartes in 1898, with an excellent preface by M. Petit-Dutaillis. The book is now out of print and almost unattainable. It is with the aid of Réville’s transcripts—a vast collection of records of trials, inquests, petitions, and Escheators’ rolls—that I have endeavoured to rewrite the whole history of the Rebellion. The existing narratives of it, with few exceptions, have been written with the Chroniclers alone, not the official documents as their basis: I must except of course Mr. George Trevelyan’s brilliant sketch of the troubles in his England in the Age of Wycliffe and Mr. Powell’s Rising of 1381 in East Anglia, the fruit of much hard work at the Record Office. By an unfortunate coincidence André Réville had completed his East Anglian section, and that section only, at the moment of his lamented and premature death, so that the detailed story of the revolt in Norfolk and Suffolk has been told twice from the official sources, and that of the rest of England not at all.

Réville’s collection, together with the smaller volumes of documents published by Messrs. Powell and Trevelyan in 1896 and 1899, and certain other isolated transcripts of local records lie at the base of my narrative. I may add that there is also some new and unpublished material in this book, the results of my own inquiries into the Poll-tax documents at the Record Office. I think that I have discovered why that impost met with such universal reprobation, how the poorer classes in England conspired to defeat its operation, and how the counter-stroke made by the Government provoked the rebellion. The records of the Hundred of Hinckford, printed on pages 167-82, as my third Appendix, are intended to illustrate the falsification of the tax-returns by the townships and their constables. The fourth Appendix, the ‘Writ of Inquiry as to the Fraudulent Levying of the Poll-tax’ of March 16, 1381 (never before printed, as I believe), is all-important, as showing the manner in which the Government prepared to attack the innumerable fabricators of false returns. This writ, with its threats of imprisonment and exactions levelled against a large proportion, probably a majority, of the townships of fifteen shires, may be called, with little exaggeration, the provocative cause of the whole revolt. Urban and rural England were alike seething with discontent in 1381, but it required a definite grievance, affecting thousands of individuals at the same moment, to provoke a general explosion, such as that which I have here endeavoured to narrate. Without that writ of March 16 town and county would have gone on indulging in isolated riots, strikes, and disturbances, as they had been doing for the last twenty years, but there would probably have been no single movement worthy of being called a rebellion.

I have ventured to insert as my fifth and sixth Appendices two long documents which have already been published, but which are not very accessible to the student, because the volumes in which they are to be found are out of print. They are of such paramount importance for the detailed history of the rebellion that no student can afford to neglect them. The first is the so-called ‘Anonimal Chronicle of St. Mary’s, York’, of which Mr. George Trevelyan published the French text in the English Historical Review, part 51. I have made an English translation of it, and by his kind permission, and the courtesy of Dr. Poole, the editor, and Messrs. Longmans, the proprietors, of the Review, am allowed to reproduce this most valuable document. This chronicle appeared after Réville’s death, so that his narrative chapters were written without its aid. The second is the long inquest of November 20, 1382, on the doings of the chief London traitors, Aldermen Sibley (or Sybyle), Home and Tonge, and Thomas Farringdon. This document formed part of André Réville’s transcripts: the Société de l’École des Chartes, who possess the copyright of his Collections, granted me leave to republish it. All previous narratives of the London rebellion have to be rewritten, in view of this most interesting revelation of the treachery from within that opened the city to the rebels.

I have to acknowledge kind assistance given me by the following friends, to whom I made application on points of difficulty—Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher of Magdalen College, Oxford, Professor W. P. Ker of All Souls College and London University, Mr. Hubert Hall of the Record Office, Dr. F. G. Kenyon of the British Museum, and Dr. Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary. Last, but not least, must come my testimony to the untiring assistance of the compiler of the Index—the seventh made for me by the same devoted hands.

C. OMAN.

Oxford,

May 3, 1906.

THE GREAT REVOLT OF 1381

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CHAPTER I.INTRODUCTORY

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ENGLAND IN 1381

FEW OF THE REALLY IMPORTANT episodes of English history are so short, sudden, and dramatic as the great insurrection of June 1381, which still bears in most histories its old and not very accurate title of ‘Wat Tyler’s Rebellion’. Only a short month separates the first small riot in Essex, with which the rising started, from the final petty skirmish in East Anglia at which the last surviving band of insurgents was ridden down and scattered to the winds. But within the space that intervened between May 30 and June 28, 1381, half England had been aflame, and for some days it had seemed that the old order of things was about to crash down in red ruin, and that complete anarchy would supervene. To most contemporary writers the whole rising seemed an inexplicable phenomenon—a storm that arose out of a mere nothing, an ignorant riot against a harsh and unpopular tax, such as had often been seen before. But this storm assumed vast dimensions, spread over the whole horizon, swept down on the countryside with the violence of a typhoon, threatened universal destruction, and then suddenly passed away almost as inexplicably as it had arisen. The monastic chroniclers, to whom we owe most of our descriptions of the rebellion—Walsingham and his fellows—were not the men to understand the meaning of such a phenomenon; they were annalists, not political philosophers or students of social statics. They only half comprehended the meaning of what they had seen, and were content to explain the rebellion as the work of Satan, or the result of an outbreak of sheer insanity on the part of the labouring classes. When grudges and discontents have been working for many years above or below the surface, and then suddenly flare up into a wholesale conflagration, the ordinary observer is puzzled as well as terrified. All the causes of the great insurrection, save the Poll-tax which precipitated it, had been operating for a long time. Why was the particular month of June 1381 the moment at which they passed from causes into effects, and effects of such a violent and unexpected kind? What the Poll-tax was, and why it was so unpopular, we shall soon see. But its relation to the rebellion is merely the same as that of the greased cartridges to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. It brought about the explosion, but was only one of its smaller causes. Things had been working up for trouble during many years—only a good cry, a common grievance which united all malcontents, was needed to bring matters to a head. This was what the Poll-tax provided.

The England which in 1381 was ruled by the boy-king Richard II, with Archbishop Sudbury as his chancellor and prime minister, and Sir Robert Hales as his treasurer, was a thoroughly discontented country. In foreign politics alone there was material for grudging enough. The realm was at the fag-end of an inglorious and disastrous war, the evil heritage of the ambitions of Edward III. It would have puzzled a much more capable set of men than those who now served as the ministers and councillors of his grandson to draw England out of the slough into which she had sunk. Her present misfortunes were due to her own fault: as long as her one ruling idea was to brood over the memories of Crecy and Poitiers, Sluys and Espagnols-sur-Mer, and dream of winning back the boundaries of the Treaty of Bretigny, no way out of her troubles was available. The nation was obstinately besotted on the war, and failed to see that all the circumstances which had made the triumphs of Edward III possible had disappeared—that England was now too weak and France too strong to make victory possible. Ten years of constantly unsuccessful expeditions, and ever-shrinking boundaries, had not yet convinced the Commons of England that to make peace with France was the only wise course.

They preferred to impute the disasters of the time to the incapacity of their governors. But it was useless to try general after general, to change the personnel of the King’s Council every few months—it had been done thrice since King Richard’s accession—to accuse every minister of imbecility or corruption. The fault lay not in the leaders, but in the led—in the insensate desire of the nation to persevere in the struggle when all the conditions under which it was waged had ceased to be favourable.

The various ministers of Richard II had, ever since his reign began, been appearing before Parliament at short intervals to report again and again the loss of some new patch of England’s dwindling dominion beyond the seas, to confess that they could not even keep the South Coast safe from piratical descents of French corsairs, or guarantee the Northumbrian border from the raiding Scot, or even maintain law and order in the inward heart of the realm. Yet they were always forced to be asking for heavier and yet heavier taxation to support the losing game. Naturally each one of their financial expedients was criticized with acrimony. The classes who took an intelligent interest in politics demanded efficiency in return for the great sacrifices of money which the nation was making, and failed to get it. The far larger section of Englishmen who were not able to follow the course of war or politics with any real comprehension, were vaguely indignant at demands on their purse, which grew more and more inquisitorial, and penetrated deeper down as the years went on.

All nations labouring under a long series of military disasters are prone to raise the cry of ‘Treason’, and to accuse their governments either of deliberate corruption or of criminal self-seeking and negligence. The English in 1381 were no exception to this rule: they were blindly suspicious of those who were in power at the moment. John of Gaunt, the King’s eldest uncle, the most prominent figure in the politics of the day, had not a clean record. He had, in the last years of his father’s reign, been in close alliance with the peculating clique which had surrounded the old king and battened on his follies. It was natural to suspect the ministers of 1381 of the same sins that had actually been detected in the ministers of 1377: while John of Gaunt continued to take a busy part in affairs this was inevitable. As a matter of fact, however, the suspicion seems to have been groundless. The ministers of 1381 were, so far as we can judge, honest men, though they were destitute of the foresight and the initiative necessary for dealing with the deplorable condition of the realm; Archbishop Sudbury, who had been made chancellor at the Parliament which met in January 1380—‘whether he sought the post of his own free-will or had it thrust upon him by others only God can tell’—was a pious, well-intentioned man—almost a saint. He would probably have been enrolled among the martyrs of the English calendar if only he had been more willing to make martyrs himself. For it is his lenience to heretics which forms the main charge brought against him by the monastic chroniclers. They acknowledge that he possessed every personal virtue, but complain that he was a halfhearted persecutor of Wycliffe and his disciples, and hint that his terrible death in 1381 was a judgement from heaven for his lukewarmness in this respect. Sudbury was sometimes proved destitute of tact, and often of firmness, but he was one of the most innocent persons to whom the name of Traitor was ever applied. Of his colleague, Treasurer Hales, who went with him to the block during the insurrection, we know less—he was, we are told, ‘a magnanimous knight, though the Commons loved him not’; no proof was ever brought that he was corrupt or a self-seeker. None of the minor ministers of state of 1380-1 had any such bad reputation as had clung about their predecessors of 1377. But the nation chafed against their unlucky administration, and vaguely ascribed to them all the ills of the time.

Yet if the political and military problems had been the only ones pressing for solution in 1381 there would have been no outbreak of revolution in that fatal June. All that would have happened would have been the displacing of one incompetent ministry by another—no more capable than its predecessor of dealing with the insoluble puzzle of how to turn the French war into a successful enterprise.

The fact that the political grievances of England had come to a head at a moment when social grievances were also ripe was the real determining cause of the rebellion. Of these social grievances, the famous and oft-described dispute in the countryside between the landowner and the peasant, which had started with the Black Death and the ‘Statute of Labourers’ of 1351 was no doubt the most important, since it affected the largest section of Englishmen. But