IN JOHN OF GAUNT’S lifetime, 60 percent of the population of England were still peasants, that is, agricultural and pastoral workers and their families. Among these peasant families there was a vast variety in legal and economic status. Perhaps 60 percent of the peasants were freemen, or at least claimed to be. The other 40 percent were serfs, unfree peasants bound to the land, although serfdom had been on the decline since the mid-thirteenth century. Before Gaunt’s time, there had never been anything resembling a revolt. Unfortunately for him, the calamitous fourteenth century would witness the first, and he would be a target.
The lords had not always wanted to keep peasants in a condition of serfdom. Serfdom had its own expenses for lords. By 1300, because of the population explosion of the previous hundred years, some lords figured it was cheaper to manumit the serfs, clear them from their ancestral village and strips of land that were legally their own, and turn the whole village into the lord’s private domain worked by cheap day laborers.
Nothing distressed a landlord more than seeing an old, bent serf holding on to his strips of land along with garden plots and rights to public grazing land, while the old serf’s level of productivity on the lord’s land declined.
Lack of clarity as to the legal status of many peasants arose partly from failure on the part of some gentry and many peasants to keep documents of manumission. Even greater confusion arose from a loophole in the common law by which anyone who participated in any royal civil court action was deemed a freeman in the eyes of the law. Copies of the court records showing peasants litigating in the royal courts were expensive and not easy to come by. The legal status of a quarter of the peasantry was therefore under dispute.
Before the Norman Conquest of 1066, the English peasants were freemen living in self-governing village communities. The conquest of England by William the Conqueror and a thousand French soldiers changed all that. The English peasantry was forced down into serfdom, which meant that a peasant family was bound to the land they were cultivating. In that way the French lord was always assured of a labor supply. If your father was a serf, so were you.
When William the Conqueror replaced the English bishops and the abbots of the major monasteries with Frenchmen recruited from all over the northern half of France, the legal status of the serfs was frozen in place. The bishops and abbots, who were lords of the great ecclesiastical estates, kept careful records. They showed the lay nobility that operating a system of French serfdom effectively in England required the careful keeping of records to assure that serf status in a peasant family was perpetuated indefinitely.
When the Cistercian order of monks developed their great sheep and cattle ranges in northern England in the mid-twelfth century, these “white monks” (as they were called from their habits) also enserfed the workers on the ranges. The village communities lost their self-government. A steward of the lord now presided over the village courts, and his word was law.
What severely weakened serfdom in the thirteenth century was the extension of royal law, the common law, over the country. The royal justices sought to create a national system of law. In so doing they reduced the village courts’ jurisdiction to dealing with misdemeanors and petty land disputes, and transferred felonies and important civil action to the royal, common-law courts.
Serfdom was not easily compatible with this ambitious nationalization of the common law presided over by panels of royal judges in the county courts. “King’s Law” replaced “folk law.” The common law worked like a giant vacuum cleaner, drawing the peasants out of the lord’s village courts and thereby giving many peasant families their freedom between 1250 and 1450. The lords resisted, but by Gaunt’s time three-quarters of the peasantry had gained freedom. By 1380 the village courts had lost their power over rural life. They remained as empty judicial shells.
The county courts were steadily becoming the venue for peasants as well as gentry, elevating the peasants’ judicial status to that of freemen. With so many litigants in the county courts, the royal government had to create the office of justice of the peace, by which four times a year, in their quarter sessions, panels of wealthy gentry dealt with misdemeanors, giving the royal justices in the county court more time to deal with felonies (hanging offenses) and substantial lawsuits about ownership of land. This remained the main structure of the English legal system until the late nineteenth century.
Just as the peasants varied in legal status, they varied in wealth. There were entrepreneurial peasant families that bought up land for their progeny. This became a more visible trend when the peasant population in the fourteenth century declined markedly due to famine and disease. Real estate prices declined; peasant families died out and the wealthy peasants—called yeomen in the fifteenth century—could strike deals to get hold of vacant land. On the other hand, a quarter of the peasants were landless cotters, or day laborers, who lived perpetually on the edge of unemployment and starvation.
The desperate condition of the poor and landless peasantry is graphically described in Piers Plowman, a long, meandering religious poem written during Gaunt’s lifetime. Its author called himself William Langland. He is believed to have been a London priest who had previously served in a country parish.
Langland gives us a picture of various classes in peasant society. Even among the more secure and landed peasants there is a constant struggle to fill stomachs. The cottagers, or landless peasants, live a life of boundless misery:
Translated by Terence Tiller in The Vision of Piers Plowman, by permission of BBC Enterprise Limited
The most needy are our neighbours, if we notice right well,
As prisoners in pits and poor folk in cottages,
Charged with their children, and chief lord’s rent,
What by spinning they save, they spend it in house-hire,
Both in milk and in meal to make a mess of porridge,
To cheer up their children who chafe for their food,
And they themselves suffer surely much hunger
And woe in the winter, with waking at nights
And rising to rock an oft restless cradle,
Both to card and to comb, to clout and to wash,
To rub and to reel yarn, rushes to peel,
So ’tis pity to proclaim or in poetry to show
The woe of these women who work in such cottages
And of many other men who much woe suffer,
Crippled with hunger and with thirst, they keep up appearances,
And are abashed for to beg, and will not be blazoned
What they need from their neighbours, at noon and at evensong.
This I know full well, for the world has taught me,
How churls are afflicted who have many children,
And have no coin but their craft to clothe and to keep them,
And full many to feed and few pence to do it.
With bread and penny-ale that is less than a pittance,
Cold flesh and cold fish, instead of roast venison;
And on Fridays and feast days a farthing’s worth of mussels
Would be a feast for such folk, or else a few cockles.
’Twere a charity to help those that bear such charges,
And comfort such cottagers, the crippled and blind.
Langland was a proto-Malthusian. The excessive number of children among the landless peasants contributed to their dire poverty, he stressed. Contraception was not unknown in the Middle Ages; condoms were made out of goatskin. But the poor peasants never heard of mechanical contraception. Its use was rare. Gaunt never used a condom, but he could well afford to have a lot of children.
It was possible to be a free peasant and be poor and to be a serf and be prosperous, but generally speaking, growing wealth was associated with a baseline of legal freedom. That was the view of the peasants themselves.
In the thirty years after the Black Death, there was a rise in class consciousness among the peasantry and the emergence of some semblance of activism among the populace in some parts of rural England, especially toward the east and south. There were several causes for this emergence of peasant class identity.
Growing literacy, mainly in English, among the peasants, due to a proliferation of village elementary schools, produced radical consequences. Itinerant radical Franciscan friars, as well as Lollards such as John Ball, harangued the village populace in English about their grievances and projected a vision of a more just society organized along Christian lines. In addition, the French and Spanish navies conducted guerrilla runs on the south coast of England and there was justifiable resentment among the peasants that the great lords and the royal government did not put a stop to these depredations.
After the Black Death, when supply and demand began to push up the cost of rural labor, Parliament, at the behest of landlords, set a ceiling on wage rates by legislation. In order to raise money for prospective fighting in France, the government also imposed for the first time a poll (head) tax that was onerous and hard to evade. Finally, as a by-product of the infighting among the grand dukes to gain control over the royal council, a general slovenliness prevailed in administration and law, allowing for subversive organization among the peasants.
In June of 1381 peasant rioting broke out in East Anglia and Kent, guided by the peasants’ own class leaders, the Lollard preacher John Ball and a certain Wat Tyler. The rebels began to seize and burn legal and tax records. They then attacked members of the establishment whom they could lay their hands on, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, whom they caught in the countryside and killed. They exhibited discipline and planning by marching on London, and many thousands occupied a field in the London suburbs, where they demanded to see the young King Richard II, whom they naively believed was on their side.
The royal officials cowered for protection in the Tower of London, but Richard II, then thirteen years old, put a crown on his head, mounted his white horse, and with only a small bodyguard went out to meet the rebels. Early on in the discussion, one of the King’s bodyguards killed Wat Tyler. This was the crucial moment when a full-scale revolution could have occurred. But young Richard leaped into the breach and assured the rebels that justice would be done, that freedom would ring out, that he was on their side. If they would only go home, all would be well. It was a remarkable performance for a pubescent king.
The rebels did leave, but a handful crossed the Thames to the Strand. There they encountered the huge Savoy Palace. They burned it to the ground, first looting the fine furniture and emptying the wine cellar.
The Savoy Palace was John of Gaunt’s London residence and was reputed to be the most impressive private house in the city. Its location on the Strand, on the banks of the Thames, made access to it easy at a time when the river was the prime highway through London. Here in the Savoy, Gaunt hosted lords, gentry, and burgesses when Parliament was in session. Here the Duke showed off his artworks and rare jewels to other members of the royal family. Here he received petitions for largesse and support from a wide spectrum of people, including Oxford professors. Gaunt’s other favorite residence was Pontefract Castle in the north, distant and too remote for most petitioners.
The greater part of Gaunt’s estates were in the Duchy of Lancaster in the northwest of the country, far from the brunt of the peasants’ rebellion. But he also had estates in the southern and eastern parts of the country, and there the devastation was severe. Manor rolls were burned by the rebels. For many years, rents could not be collected, nor could lower courts meet.
The most detailed account of the Peasants’ Revolt is to be found in the Anonymous Chronicle put together in a monastery in York, in northern England. Inserted in the Chronicle there is a detailed account of the revolt, probably written by a lower-level government official, perhaps a lawyer or tax collector, or possibly by a cathedral canon or even a merchant. The account is written in French. It reveals both the general ferocity of the uprising and personal animosity of “the commons” (the peasants) toward John of Gaunt and his officials.
Translated by C. Oman and R. B. Dobson in The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, edited by R. B. Dobson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970) Edited and translated by R. B. Dobson in The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
At this time [1381] the commons of southern England suddenly rose in two groups, one in Essex and the other in Kent. They directed their evil actions against the duke of Lancaster and the other lords of the realm because of the exceptionally severe tenths and fifteenths [taxes] and other subsidies lightly conceded in parliaments and extortionately levied from the poor people. These subsidies did nothing for the profit of the kingdom but were spent badly and deceitfully to the great impoverishment of the commons … and it was for this reason … that the commons rose.
At this time the commons had as their counsellor a chaplain of evil disposition named Sir John Balle, who advised them to get rid of all the lords, archbishops, bishops, abbots and priors as well as most of the monks and canons so that there should be no bishop in England except for one archbishop, namely himself; no religious house should hold more than two monks or canons, and their possessions should be divided among the laity. For which advice he was regarded as a prophet by the commons, and laboured with them day by day to strengthen them in their malice. He was well rewarded later by being drawn, disembowelled, hanged and beheaded as a traitor.
After this the commons went to many towns and raised the people there, some willingly and some not, until a good sixty thousand were gathered together. On their journey towards London they met several men of law and twelve of the king’s knights, whom they captured and forced to swear that they would support the commons under threat of execution. They did much damage in Kent, notably to Thomas de Heseldene, servant of the duke of Lancaster, because of their hatred for the said duke. They cast his manors and houses to the ground and sold his live-stock—horses, oxen, cows, sheep and pigs—and all sorts of corn [grain] at a cheap price. Every day the commons were eager to have his head …
Sir Robert Bealknap, Chief Justice of the Common Bench, was sent into the country on a commission of trailbaston [criminal proceeding against gangsterism]. Indictments against various persons were laid before him, and the people of the area were so fearful that they proposed to abandon their holdings. Wherefore the commons rose against him and came before him to tell him that he was a traitor to the king and kingdom and was maliciously proposing to undo them by the use of false inquests taken before him. Accordingly they made him swear on the Bible that never again would he hold such sessions nor act as a justice in such inquests. And they forced him to tell them the names of all the jurors. They captured all of these jurors that they could, beheaded them and threw their houses to the ground. And Sir Robert travelled home as quickly as possible. Afterwards, and before Whitsunday, fifty thousand of the commons gathered, going to the various manors and townships of those who would not rise with them, throwing their buildings to the ground and setting them ablaze … They proposed to kill all the lawyers, jurors and royal servants they could find. Meanwhile all the great lords and other notable people of that country [Kent] fled towards London or to other counties where they might be safe.
Why did the peasants hate John of Gaunt so much? There are three reasons. First, he stood out at the head of the aristocratic class. He was of royal blood and owned estates and houses all over the kingdom. He had the largest and most beautiful house in London, in a prominent location on the Strand where its presence in the city loomed large.
Gaunt entertained lavishly. He rode along the roads bypassing peasant homes with a large bodyguard of horsed soldiers, their armor shining and clacking. It was impossible, even for many peasants, not to be aware of Gaunt, and he symbolized the landlord class that the peasants of 1381 felt oppressed them. They wanted a share of the wealth and comfort that Gaunt so obviously possessed.
Second, Gaunt was a tough landlord. His peasants were constantly under the supervision and scrutiny of the dozens of stewards and fiscal managers the Duke employed. To maintain Gaunt’s lifestyle and his commitments as a warrior, these functionaries kept records and presided over courts that squeezed every possible drop of revenue from the workers and their families.
Third, Gaunt suffered from exposure through the primitive, oral media of his day—the sermons and broadsides of radical spokesmen, like John Ball and Wat Tyler. Radical leaders always need an image of human evil they can raise up to excite the rabble. Gaunt, who never made a public statement against the Peasants’ Revolt and played little or no role in punishing the rebels, was a convenient scapegoat in the conflicts of the times.
Gaunt was not in London in harm’s way when angry peasants burned down the Savoy Palace. But the incident deeply affected him. It caused him to see himself less as a Londoner, more as a northerner. He made no attempt to rebuild the Savoy, nor did he build for himself a new town house. Instead, Gaunt rented a house in the suburbs from a rich ecclesiastic whenever he needed accommodations in London for an extended period, as during a meeting of Parliament.
Gaunt realized that he had become a symbol of the unjust old order for the restless lower classes. He had become an object of hatred and fear in the villages and streets. Recognition of his unpopularity drove him to seek authorization and fiscal support from King and Parliament for his effort to gain the Castilian throne, which would take him out of England. Five years later, in 1386, he departed for his ill-fated campaign in Spain.
King Richard’s promise of freedom and justice for the peasants was not fulfilled. Not even amnesty was granted. Instead, the royal government authorized special panels of judges to try the leaders of the Peasant Revolt and hang them. This was the fate of the Lollard preacher and revolutionary leader John Ball.
The anger and hatred of the peasants and their admiration for the Lollard preacher, however, lay deep in society:
Edited and translated by R. B. Dobson in The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
Pleas [trials in the county court] held, on Thursday 16 July 1381, before Hugh la Zouche and his fellows, assigned to hear, punish and chastise the rebels and disturbers of the peace in the said county [of Cambridge].
John Shirle of the county of Nottingham was taken because it was found that he had been a vagabond [vagabundus] in various counties during the whole time of the disturbance, insurrection and tumult, carrying lies as well as silly and worthless talk from district to district, whereby the peace of the lord the king could rapidly be broken and the people be disquieted and disturbed. Among other damaging words, namely after the proclamation of the peace of the lord the king made on the aforesaid day and year, when the justices assigned by the lord the king were holding sessions in the town, he said in a tavern in Briggestrete [Bridge Street] in Cambridge, where many were assembled to listen to his news and worthless talk, that the stewards of the lord the king as well as the justices and many other officers and ministers of the king were more deserving to be drawn and hanged and to suffer other lawful pains and torments than John Balle, chaplain, a traitor and felon lawfully convicted. For John Shirle said that he [Ball] had been condemned to death falsely, unjustly and for envy by the same ministers with the king’s assent, because he was a true and worthy man, prophesying things useful to the commons of the kingdom and telling of wrongs and oppressions done to the people by the king and the aforesaid ministers; and Ball’s death would not go unpunished but within a short space of time he would well reward both the king and his said ministers and officers. These sayings and threats redound to the prejudice of the crown of the lord the king and to the contempt and manifest disturbance of the people. And thereupon the said John Shirle was immediately brought by the sheriff before the said justices sitting at Cambridge castle; and he was charged about these matters and was diligently examined as regards his conversation, his presence [in Cambridge] and his estate; and when these things had been acknowledged by him before the said justices, his evil behaviour and condition were made plainly manifest and clear. And thereupon trustworthy witnesses in his presence at the time when the abovementioned lies, evil words, threats and worthless talk had been spoken by him, were requested; and they, being sworn to speak the truth about these matters, testified that all the aforesaid words imputed to him had indeed been spoken by him; and he, examined once again, did not deny the charges laid against him. Therefore by the discretion of the said justices he was hanged.
Gaunt did not participate actively in the royal government’s repression of the peasants. Nor did he oppose it. Gaunt was aware that the rebellious peasants had singled him out as a prime enemy. It was best to keep a low profile in this class war.
In the first half of the fifteenth century there were aftershocks to the explosion of 1381. The Lollard insurrection in 1414 led by Sir John Oldcastle had some class and ideological implications. In 1450 there was a localized rebellion in Kent led by an obscure member of the lower gentry, Jack Cade.
The tectonic plates of the old rural society were moving. Serfdom was disappearing and along with it an economy of low yield and little change, to be replaced by the beginnings of rural capitalism. It was not the preachers and their visionary dreams of an egalitarian Christian society that would prevail. It was the market-minded gentry and the yeomen with their building up of estates worked by insecure day laborers that were benefiting by the impact of capitalism on the old rural society that had been in place since the eleventh century.
Gaunt’s capable estate managers must have made him aware of some of this transformation in rural society. For the Duke this meant only more keen attention to the micro and macro movements of the land market. As with today’s billionaires, the context of social change meant for Gaunt the need for more careful management and identification of opportunities. Peasant outrage and Christian idealism were at best novel environmental conditions that had to be considered and whose consequences had to be avoided.
There would be no working-class movement again in England until the early 1650s, as an aftermath of the English Civil Wars and temporary displacement of the monarchy by a Protestant military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell. A group called the Diggers set about digging up the common land in a handful of villages, expropriating the land for the working class and the poor. Another group, the Fifth Monarchy Men, envisioned a messianic socialist republic. The military dictatorship easily suppressed these pockets of radical working-class activism.
Not until the founding of the Labour Party in the last decade of the nineteenth century was there again an organized working-class movement in England. The Labour government of 1945-1951 tried to establish a welfare state in England, offering protection and benefits to the working class. Vestiges of this attempt to create a socialist commonwealth in England still endure, particularly the National Health Service. But in the late 1990s, under another Labour government, there was a massive withdrawal from socialism and an enfeeblement of working-class solidarity.
In the end, the billionaires have triumphed, as they did in 1381. Gaunt would feel at home in today’s London. He would find that the name of his palace on the Strand, the Savoy, has been taken up by one of London’s most exclusive hotels. He would reserve a palatial suite of rooms for himself at the Savoy hotel and give fancy dinner parties. The tabloid press would idolize Gaunt and the royal family give him due deference. Undoubtedly, Oxford would award him an honorary degree.
The important point is not that perhaps a third of the peasantry exploded in rebellion in 1381, but how well members of the ruling class like Gaunt learned their lesson. The poll tax was never collected. The government abandoned trying to set a ceiling on wages.
Gaunt and the aristocracy took a moderate and far-seeing approach to the condition of the peasantry. The market was allowed to function with a high degree of autonomy. The market was allowed to set wages, and by the time of Gaunt’s death in 1399, the market was achieving stability. The great demand for peasant labor and escalation of rural workers’ wages that had followed the Black Death of 1348 and 1361 now abated. The peasants were left to contend with the invisible hand of the market.
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 taught the ruling class a lesson. There was no need to use parliamentary legislation to repress the rural working class. The market would do the job.
In the sixteenth century the English peasantry suffered from the enclosure movement. A quarter of the peasantry were driven off their small holdings, which were now enclosed by hedges to protect capitalist agricultural innovations.
This drastic change, however, was accomplished not through parliamentary legislation but through the common-law courts, sustaining the market economy, as they do today. Once the rural market economy got going in Gaunt’s time, along with eliminating what was left of serfdom, it swept away the vestiges of the early medieval peasant community. Gaunt and the landlords learned from the Peasants’ Revolt that it was risky to use legislation to hurry this capitalist revolution along. It would occur anyway by action of the market, helped by King’s Law.