43. CHRONICLES OF THE GREAT RISING OF 1381
INTRODUCTION
The Great Rising (also known as the English Peasants’ Revolt) was a revolt of people from a variety of social levels against the hated poll tax of 1380, which was supposed to help fund a war with France. The main counties involved were the most heavily populated and among the richest in the kingdom: Essex, Sussex, and Kent in the southeast and Norfolk and Suffolk in the northeast. These counties were also the most heavily embedded in a system of feudal and manorial tenancies in which the estates were controlled by wealthy and influential monasteries and church officials, who were noted for their efficient exploitation of the local populace.
The group who led the revolt comprised men of different social standing: JOHN BALL, a defrocked priest who was associated with the Lollard movement; and two men whose names were probably aliases: JACK STRAW and WAT TYLER. Indeed, it is difficult to determine who these latter two men were, as they cannot be identified in any sources of the time.
The chronicle sources, most of them written in monastic scriptoria—among them St. Albans, which was attacked by the rebels—vilify the rebels as traitors to the king and to society. Nevertheless, the stated aims of the revolt seem reasonable to modern people: to abolish villeinage, to establish rents at reasonable levels, to allow wages to be market-driven in the postplague era, to gain some kind of parliamentary representation, and to abolish regressive and extraordinary taxation such as the poll tax. Their methods, which included murder, mayhem, and the burning down of the Duke of Lancaster’s Savoy Palace, led, however, to their demise and the collapse of the rebellion.
The chronicle excerpted here is one of the most famous of those written in the reign of Richard II. Penned by the St. Albans chronicler THOMAS WALSINGHAM, this account details of the rebels’ attack on Walsingham’s own monastic house. While the author was too young to experience the attack personally, it had a long-term effect on the monastery.
KEEP IN MIND AS YOU READ
The Great Rising was only one of a number of uprisings of the lower and middle classes that occurred in the fourteenth century, especially after the Black Death. The drastic population decline and attempts on the part of the elites and the church to retain their privileges over the peasantry and the urban poor sparked many of these revolts. Anger at the aristocracy was accompanied by significant levels of anger directed at the clergy, a situation that also sparked the growth of Lollardy in England. Similar expressions of discontent can also be seen in literature of the period, including Langland’s Piers Plowman and John Gower’s Vox Clamantis.
One of the most iconic, but possibly also apocryphal, images of the Great Rising is the speech of John Ball in which he utters the immortal rhyme "When Adam delved [plowed] and Eve span [spun thread], who was then the gentleman?" There is no way to verify whether Ball invented the rhyme or if it was a common sentiment among the disaffected peasantry, but it typifies the spirit of protest that was common in the decades following the Black Death.
Document 1: The Great Rising According to Thomas Walsingham
[The “peasants” in London]
[T]he squads of the peasants had split up into three parts. One of them . . . was intent on destroying the estate at Highbury [the manor of the head of the Knights Hospitaller in London, Sir Robert Hales]. Another was waiting near London, at a place called Mile End. [the Essex rebels, at the eastern gate of the City] A third actually seized Tower Hill. This crowd near the Tower showed itself to be so . . . lacking in respect that it shamelessly seized goods belonging to the king . . . And besides this, it was driven to such a pitch of madness that it forced the king to hand over to them the archbishop [of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury], the Master of the Hospital of St. John [Hales] and others hiding in the Tower itself, all of whom they called traitors. They told the king that if he was unwilling to do this they would deprive even him of his life.
So the king, being in a very tight spot, allowed them to enter the Tower and search its most secret recesses, as their wicked wills dictated, since he himself could not in safety refuse any of their requests. . . .
[W]ho would ever have believed that not just peasants but the lowest of them . . . would have dared with their worthless staves [quarter-staffs, which they used for fighting] to force a way into the bedroom of the king or of his mother, scaring all the nobles with their threats and even touching and stroking with their rough, filthy hands the beards of some of the most eminent of them? . . . And, besides all this, several of them . . . had the effrontery to sit and lie on the bed of the king joking merrily, with one or two even asking the king’s mother [dowager princess of Wales, Joan of Kent] for a kiss.
[The men of St. Albans plot against the Abbey]
[W]hen . . . the townspeople of St Albans and the servants of the abbot arrived at the manor of Highbury . . . and got to London, the townspeople soon separated from the abbot’s servants [who remained loyal to the abbot] and turned to deeds of wickedness. For they . . . began to discuss their enslavement to the monastery and how they might effect the wishes which they long harbored in secret. These were that they should enjoy new boundaries around the town in which they could graze their animals freely, have places assigned to them in which they could fish without blame and similar places assigned for hunting and hawking, and set up their hand-mills wherever they liked at their own wish and whim. They also wanted to suffer no interference from the bailiff of the liberty inside the town boundaries, and to claim back the bonds which their parents had once made to abbot Richard of Wallingford [abbot of St Albans from 1327 to 1355] . . . any other charters which were prejudicial to them, and, in a word, all records in the abbey which were a support to them or involved loss for the monastery.
Source: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham (1376–1422). Translated by David Preest. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005. Pp. 124–125, 131–132.
AFTERMATH
The revolt was brutally suppressed, with the leaders being charged and punished for treason: their heads were affixed to spikes on London Bridge after being paraded through the city. Any reforms that King Richard II had offered in order to quell the mob were quickly retracted and the status quo before the rebellion reinstated. Nevertheless, popular dissent against elite exploitation and anticlericalism continued to appear throughout the fifteenth century, erupting in a series of smaller revolts, as well as one significant one, led by Jack Cade, in 1450 during the reign of King Henry VI.
ASK YOURSELF
What were the “peasants” revolting against?
Why did the rebels attack monasteries and administrative offices?
In what way was the Great Rising a revolt, and in what way was it more of an extended riot?
TOPICS TO CONSIDER
The leaders of the Great Rising were interested in gaining liberties denied them, especially the abolition of villeinage. Consider the reasons why this would have been resisted by the elites and why they might have been willing to respond so violently to such ideas.
Analyze the effects of the pillaging, looting, and burning of law offices and record repositories and how this might affect the maintenance of the social fabric in the countryside after the revolt. For example, if all contracts between landlords and peasants were destroyed in a particular village, how would the relationship between them be re-established, and to whose advantage?
Further Information
Barker, Juliet. 1381: The Year of the English Peasants’ Revolt. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.
Ormrod, W. M. “The Peasants’ Revolt and the Government of England.” Journal of British Studies 29, no. 1 (1990): 1–30.
Prescott, Andrew. “Writing about Rebellion: Using the Records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.” History Workshop Journal no. 45 (1998): 1–27.