11. Rebels and Heretics

After the huge disruption of the Black Death it would be easy to focus on the material life of the villagers, to look at the economy and labour relations in order to explain the dramatic transformations that now took place in English society. But there was a deeper reaction to famine and plague which became apparent in the next few decades: in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, we can see the first signs of the spiritual, religious and psychological changes that would play their part in changing England from a Catholic to a Protestant state, and from a feudal communal order to a capitalist secular society – the first country in the world to be so.

These are the deeper undercurrents of English medieval history, the long-term changes that underlie the spectacular ephemera of events – the Hundred Years War, the brief but savage flare-up of violence in the Peasants’ Revolt. Such events are often only symptoms of what is happening below the surface, and on the heels of the famines and plagues of the time now came profound social, economic and religious changes. As always, the villagers of Kibworth were involved in these transformations. Heretic preachers from the village wandered the roads of the Midlands preaching a revolutionary creed, and ultimately a dozen local men marched down to join a rebel army attempting to overthrow the king in London, where some of their number suffered a cruel death at the executioner’s hands.

A new vicar

The remarkable tale of Kibworth’s involvement in the spread of heresy and dissent begins, at least as far as it is discernible in the records, almost twenty-five years before, at the end of February 1380 on the eve of the Peasants’ Revolt, with the arrival of a new vicar in the village.

Riding up from Oxford to Kibworth that February, Thomas Hulman had much to reflect upon. The mood in the countryside was dangerous, and recent rumours warned of vagabond robbers on the roads and of armed gangs – lordless and landless men – preying on villages with frightening violence and random killings. The journey to Leicestershire was relatively short though, easily managed in two days, and the road was far less fraught with danger than the route to the college’s northern estates. In the fourteenth century it took seven or eight days to the Merton manor at Ponteland, north of the Tyne, and the traveller was advised to ride in a large party and take weapons with him. The Merton accounts show that when their fellows headed into Northumberland they stocked up on crossbow bolts. But even though it was only seventy miles to Leicestershire it was not entirely safe and Hulman probably thought it best to ensure he had some spare bowstrings before he left Oxford, with a bow and a short dagger in the hands of his ‘garcon’.

Thomas Hulman – MA and bachelor in theology to give him his full due – was a Merton man. Appointed vicar of Kibworth by his fellows, he was a West Midlander, and had already enjoyed a solid university career, matriculating fourteen years earlier in 1366, the year after another Merton man whom he knew, and who was later famously accused of heresy, John Aston. By now Hulman was probably in his mid-thirties and had been a fellow of Merton College for fourteen years, having been made a junior proctor of the university in 1370, the college bursar in 1373–4 and sub-warden in 1377. His career had gone well and he could look forward to a secure living as a bachelor of theology and a lawyer, perhaps even rising to enjoy royal favour.

Across the country the national mood was edgy, a sense that the pressure was growing, the political barometer rising. The old king, Edward III, the first English ruler to demonstrate real senility while in office, was dead and the young Richard II, a callow juvenile, had made a disastrous start. The government’s unpopularity was reflected in a flood of popular ballads, songs and pamphlets, and there were reports of widespread discontent among the peasantry, especially in the richest parts of the country, the south-east, Essex and the wool villages of East Anglia. The fourteenth century was the first golden age of English political poetry, especially in the vernacular. ‘In this wicked age England is perished …’ wrote one balladeer, ‘the world is turned upside down.’ There were songs lambasting the friars and their lives of ‘riote and ribaudry’, and the attitudes of ordinary people to the medieval Church and the papacy were shaded by talk of privilege and corruption: ‘covetousse bishops and proude prelates of the Churche’, as one said, ‘who only longed for possessions and temporal goods’. Such songs and conversations one might have heard in any of the coaching inns from Brackley to Daventry, complaints about the clergy and their expenses, their corruption and even (a peculiarly modern preoccupation) their sexual misconduct. ‘If I had a house and a faire daughter or a wife,’ it was joked, ‘I would never let a smooth-talking friar in to shrive them’ … ‘er he a childe put hir with-inne – and perchaunce two at ones!’

Anti-clerical grumblings could be heard in any town in England in 1380. What was even more prevalent and striking was the seething discontent among the workforce, expressed in the exponential rise in labour disputes and peasant agitation. This kind of class conflict had been common for the last century or so. But now it was becoming organized. In 1377 the courts were inundated with cases in which peasants were taking their landlords to court. Those hostile to the peasants’ movements grumbled that their actions were so widespread that they must have been centrally coordinated, specifically designed to clog up the system, making it impossible for the law courts to thwart individual actions and to contain the grievances. From that year cases contesting the rights of landlords became so widespread that talk now spread of far greater conflict, of massive social disruption and even of revolution. That year, the time of the first introduction of the hated poll tax, one Londoner who was no friend of the peasants was full of dark forebodings: ‘Slothfulness has put the lords to sleep so they are not on their guard against the madness of the commons: they will allow that nettle to grow which is too violent in its nature.’

To experienced observers the crisis was coming fast:

He who observes the present time will fear that soon this impatient nettle will very suddenly sting us before it can be contained by justice or the law. There are three things that will produce merciless destruction if they get out of control: one is a surging flood; another is a raging fire; but the third is the common multitude: for they will not be stopped by either reason or restraint.

Such were the views too at high table in Oxford, where the new colleges derived much of their income as landlords; in the ecclesiastical courts, for along with the king the Church was the greatest landlord in England; and in the law courts in London, where Hulman had travelled on business as Merton’s junior bursar. So there was much to chew over on the road as he travelled towards Kibworth. The journey was usually made by the college agents three or four times a year, when making the annual audit, so he was setting out on a familiar road – ‘going out of town’, as they said, rather as today’s students and dons might say ‘up’ to Oxford and ‘down’ to the country. The countryside he passed through was dotted with new spires, signs of the upsurge in popular religion after the Black Death. It was dotted too with gallows, for the lord of the manor in every place had the right to erect a gallows and try peasants, rebels, thieves and bandits. No one journeyed far in the fourteenth century without seeing a hanged man twisting in the wind, his eyes pecked by crows.

The journey involved one overnight stop, unless there was a reason to dawdle, and this stop was usually at Daventry, where the Merton accounts rolls note the customary expenses of a traveller on horseback: fodder for the horses, bed and candles, bread, beer, eggs, salted herring, codlings, nuts and salt; and if you were lucky, ‘little fish’ fresh from the local fishponds, served at the inns along the road.

The second day’s ride took Hulman and his servant across Watling Street into the old Danelaw country at Gibbet Hill above the River Swift, then north-east through rolling countryside that since the Black Death had become the backdrop to many deserted villages – Bittesby, Stormsworth, Westrill, Knaptoft Misterton and Pulteney (the last a pleasant watering place for the fellows earlier in the century, on their long northern journeys). With an early start, they could be in Lutterworth (a few miles south-east of Kibworth) by mid-morning, its popular market on the River Swift much frequented by Leicestershire folk, and where the timber yards were stocked with wood from the Warwickshire Arden. Riding into Church Gate he saw a well-built town with good timber houses, the homes of prosperous local merchants. In the centre stood the fine church of St Mary, and on that chill February morning had Hulman walked inside and gazed up above the chancel arch he would have seen a great painted ‘Doom’, a vision of the Last Judgement, small white figures rising out of their tombs against a deep crimson background the colour of the stomach lining of hell, the ghostlike figures of the damned falling screaming into the abyss. And then even higher, separated by a dark black-blue wavy strip, the figure of Christ sitting on his rainbow throne surrounded by angels. The whole represented a stark warning of the ever-present threat of damnation, the promise of bliss and the fruit of sin. As Hulman would have said: ‘Forgif us ure gyltas.’

The vicar here at St Mary’s in 1380 was one of the most remarkable and controversial figures in England, indeed a man known across Europe: John Wycliffe. A former fellow of Merton, and no doubt already well-known to Hulman, Wycliffe was then living under government supervision. Prematurely aged now, thin and frail, John Wycliffe was an unlikely figure to have convulsed the English state and Church, arousing such hatred that the Pope had recently been moved to condemn him (and eventually after his death, in posthumous revenge, would command that his remains be dug up and burned, and his ashes cast into the River Swift).

Wycliffe – his family originated in the north Yorkshire village of Wycliffe on Tees – had enjoyed a glittering academic career: master of Balliol, fellow of Merton. He was still perhaps only in his fifties (though in the Middle Ages fifty of course was old), but his health was now deteriorating and he was soon to be partially paralysed by a stroke. As if he knew he didn’t have long to live (for such strokes often announce themselves in minor attacks over the preceding months or even years) he was working ceaselessly, arguing against the main intellectual and theological currents of his time. A pool of pupils like John Aston in Leicester and the mysterious John Purvey, who lived with him in Lutterworth (‘the fourth hieresiarch’ as a hostile Leicester chronicler called him), were engaged alongside him in translating, copying and disseminating his works.

Among his pupils Wycliffe’s ‘unblemished walk in life’ aroused great loyalty and affection. ‘I indeed clove to no one closer than to him,’ said one, William Thorpe: ‘he was the wisest and most blessed of men whom I have ever met. From him I learned in truth what the Church of Christ is and how it should be ruled and led.’ For Hulman then, that February, it was an opportunity perhaps to pay his respects to a much-loved old teacher.

Like most Oxbridge dons, Wycliffe liked a good meal and a good conversation, and there was much to discuss. Over a long and eventful career based on acute analysis of the biblical texts, Wycliffe had grown increasingly disillusioned with the Roman Catholic Church of his day and the vast edifice of scholastic theology that sustained the medieval ideologies of power, both spiritual and temporal. All these he felt had become both real and invisible chains on the minds of the people. Wycliffe believed simply that the scriptures were the only source of belief and doctrine, that the claims of the papacy in Rome were unhistorical (‘there is no pope in the Bible,’ he would say) and that the monastic orders, with their vast wealth and property, had become huge centres of privilege which were now irredeemably corrupt. He asserted that at the local level the widespread corruption of the priesthood invalidated the office, their actions and even the sacrament itself. In short, he said the Church must return to its roots, and the institution and its priests should be as poor as they were in the days of the apostles. In his person then, what had started out as an academic controversy, adjudicated in scholar’s Latin, had become a national issue, whose implications for the ordinary people were very great indeed.

Wycliffe was not alone in his reflections, for there were parallel movements in Europe at this time, but in the Middle Ages these were dangerous paths to walk. Wycliffe himself was protected by wealthy and influential patrons like John of Gaunt, the Earl of Lancaster, but since 1374 a suspicious government had banished him to what amounted to a supervised internal exile in Lutterworth. There, convinced of his own rectitude, he had continued to preach against the whole religious establishment, his words imbued with the quality of his quietly spoken but scintillating lectures in Oxford and the sparkling sermons that had packed them into city churches in London, where people of all classes had gathered to hear ‘the wonderful things that streamed forth from his mouth’. Such eloquence and intellectual rigour had convinced a generation of educated scholars, learned ‘clerks’, to challenge the attitudes and behaviour of the Church. The new ideas had percolated into the consciousness of the mercantile and artisanal classes – goldsmiths, drapers, parchment makers, scriveners – who had every reason to resist seeing their wealth go into the hands of a bloated Church while taking instruction on personal morality from a venal priesthood. In 1377 Wycliffe had been condemned by the Pope himself for ‘ideas erroneous and dangerous to Church and state’, and at home the orthodox decried his ‘blasphemy, arrogance and heresy’. During this period Wycliffe’s Book on the End of Time contained some of his boldest flights of imagination, sacred predictions for the time after the flawed old order had passed, that even distantly seem to foreshadow a secular democracy as the predestined fruition of Christ’s mission on earth. What Wycliffe envisaged was a new kind of commonwealth, and in very different hands that idea was soon to be voiced too in violent revolution.

These were heavy debates that wore heavily on him now. Sitting across the dining table in the old medieval rectory at Lutterworth towards the end he was ‘emaciated in body, and well-nigh devoid of bodily strength’, but still ‘in temper quick, in mind clear, and in moral character unblemished’. Unremittingly sharp towards his enemies, like many a brilliant don he was cuttingly sure of his own views, but never offensive: ‘in demeanour and conduct he was very innocent,’ said one who knew him. Such qualities had inspired wide devotion. ‘Many important people conferred with him’, it was said. ‘They loved him dearly, wrote down his sayings, and followed his way of life.’

That February in Lutterworth, Wycliffe was still writing and preaching. In fact he had never been on such a creative roll. His current project, tilting at the Pope’s ban on vernacular translations of the sacred books, was his English translation of the Bible, which would be revised by his loyal pupil John Purvey. Thinking and writing ceaselessly, he had produced an incredible amount of material (thirty volumes so far in the modern printed edition of his collected works). And although he himself could not easily travel, his ideas were spread (as he had envisaged) by a network of loyal friends and pupils, and once out there in the world, of course, his ideas were beyond his control.

Wycliffism was not just a dry scholastic argument. It was about the Christian way of life, and that is why his teachings appealed not only to intellectuals who followed the bold and challenging flights of his logic, but also to the artisanal and commercial classes in the cities, and the better-off free peasants in the Midlands who were moved by a vision of the Church purified and simplified, in which there was room for individual thought and expression – in effect, freedom of conscience. In his last years Wycliffe attacked the whole Church and the social hierarchy of the land, while growing more and more sure that the Pope and the Antichrist were virtually one and the same. ‘The Church’, he said, ‘with Christ at its head offers one path to salvation. The Pope cannot say that he is its head, he cannot even say he is a member unless he follows the life of Jesus and the apostles.’

Although Wycliffe himself was not a social revolutionary, others at the time were in no doubt about the radical potential of his teaching. John Ball, the voice of the Peasants’ Revolt (who made the famous sermon ‘When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?’), was said by the Leicester historian Henry Knighton to have been a disciple of Wycliffe. Directly or indirectly Ball took the social implications of Wycliffe’s theories to their natural conclusion, a link that was understood in some quarters, where Wycliffe was virulently hated. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham unleashed a tirade of anger against the old man, calling him ‘an instrument of the devil, an enemy of the Church, a sower of confusion in the common people, the very image of a hypocrite, the idol of heretics, author of schism, spreader of lies … a malicious spirit destined for the abode of darkness’.

So these were dangerous times for the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. Men like Thomas Hulman shared a sense of impending crisis. Perhaps he felt uneasy as he said his goodbyes and set out from Lutterworth on the two-hour ride on a cross-country track through Peatling Parva and Bruntingthorpe, then through open fields across to Kibworth past the great post mill at Arnesby. From Smeeton Hill he got his first sight of the new spire of Kibworth, a great landmark for any traveller, soaring 160 feet above the peasants’ houses, one of the finest smaller parish churches in England and long a source of pride to Kibworth people, the familiar landmark during their travels to the markets in the south of the shire, and a proud symbol of recovery by villagers who had poured their own resources into the rebuilding of their church – Christ’s one true Catholic Church.

Kibworth in 1380

The village where Thomas Hulman arrived at the end of February 1380 had seen many changes since the first great outbreak of the Black Death in 1349–50. The catastrophic fall in population had been arrested, despite further heavy losses from the plague in 1361, and again only the previous year in 1379. The village birth rate had shot up in the last few years, and the streets were full of children as he rode through Smeeton. The open fields were coming out of winter now, their furlongs still dusted with snow, the ploughmen preparing their gear as the first ploughing of spring corn was about to begin. The other side of Smeeton, Hulman passed through the village of dependent serfs and villeins owned by the Beauchamp family, their huge demesne yards on the right-hand side of the track, where the noise of a hundred plough oxen echoed in the barns; then down a little valley, across the stream and up to Kibworth church.

The village church stood, as it still stands, on open rising ground, on ‘a considerable eminence’ with a big graveyard and a clump of old yew trees; the medieval rectory was then on slightly higher land to the south. Surrounded today by housing estates, the church has lost some of its aspect now, the ridge between the villages straddled by the A6, though the land still shelves away to the south where the railway line now runs, its track formerly the bed of a little stream which was dammed to create the medieval fishponds that fed the peasants of Beauchamp. The main structure of the church is much as it was in Hulman’s day except that it is missing its late-fourteenth-century tower and steeple, which collapsed in the nineteenth century, today’s imposing tower rebuilt in 1832. But the nave of the church survives with its wide aisles, flowing tracery and fourteenth-century octagonal font, giving a sense of the wealth of the parish at the height of the Middle Ages when Hulman was vicar and wandering Lollard priests from the village, such as the notorious Walter Gilbert, ‘Walter of Kibworth’, spread Wycliffe’s seditious message through the villages of Leicestershire and the East Midlands.

The church is still entered by two fourteenth-century porches with their original iron-studded oak doors. According to village tradition, the south door is for Beauchamp and the north for Harcourt, and old Kibworth folk still tell of those who even in the recent past would not use the other door ‘even for a wedding or a funeral’. At the east end the chancel is still essentially as Hulman knew it: the chancel from the early thirteenth century, green-tinged, local ironstone, the inside whitewashed as it has been since the Reformation, with a small, worn, thirteenth-century priest’s doorway with simple dogtooth moulding through which Hulman would have left the church to make his way across the graveyard to his rectory. Today’s church is thus essentially the same structure where Hulman and his predecessors spoke their sermons, donned their chasubles and prepared the Eucharist, wine and wafer for the Mass. A social as well as spiritual centre (in whose porches for example leases and contracts were made and charters drawn up by the village scribe), the church was the focus of life for the old village families we have met in the story since the 1280s, the setting for the rituals of their births, deaths and marriages, and the festivals of their agricultural calendar.

The interior of the church was richly ornamented, as befitted a village with a large and (by 1380) wealthy population. At festival time when the harvest had been gathered the nave was decorated with sheaves of corn, its columns were twisted with branches and flowers and the whole church wreathed with incense; for the peasants after weeks of backbreaking toil, going inside was to enter into a magical space. That colourful, glittering, almost garish world of medieval piety was swept away in the Tudor Reformation, but some of its structural features help us conjure up the world of the medieval village community. The nave, of course, like that in all English churches was originally open. The people, Nick Polle, Emma Gilbert, Adam Brown and the other characters in the village story, stood, knelt or prostrated themselves on the cold flagged floor. Surviving fragments hint at the elaboration and opulence of the decoration around them: the rich pigments of the murals, the painted panels of the saints, glowing in the lamp light during the evening Mass in winter. In the fourteenth century there was a two-stage rood loft above the chancel arch with stairs running up from the south aisle to a gallery for musicians and participants in the Easter pageants; above them hung a large painted wooden crucifix showing the suffering Christ with gruesome realism. This ‘holy rood’ above the chancel arch was perhaps made by a local carpenter, and the painting of heaven and hell on the wall above could also have been done locally, perhaps by the Kibworth man who turns up in the Merton documents as John le Peyntour.

Below the rood Hulman stood to speak his sermons, to sing and speak the Mass and administer the sacrament, helped by his chaplains and churchwardens. On big festivals when all the lights were lit he would raise his arms to chant the Gloria, one of the familiar comforting rituals sung in Latin but known to all the villagers, even to the unlettered. Behind him, dividing chancel and nave, was a delicate screen of polished oak; though repaired and restored by the Victorians this is still in part the original from the late fourteenth century, its traceried tops deep red with the wear, and the polish, of the centuries. In Hulman’s day the open frames in the screen were filled with painted panels depicting the saints in bright colours with gilded haloes. These might have been paid for by local benefactors, well-off farmers like the Polles, Heyneses and Chapmans, who in the last few years had all gifted plots of land for the local chantry chapel. On the screen the congregation were reminded of the old stories that went back before the Conquest to the conversion of the English by St Augustine, to St Wilfrid, the father of the church, and local saints like St Wistan of Wistow. The cult of the Virgin Mary was strong in the village as everywhere in medieval England and here she had her own shrine as ‘Our Lady of Kibworth’, who was remembered by parishioners in their wills: perhaps she had a ‘miraculous image’ with its own local story. Pewter pilgrim badges have been picked up recently by metal detectorists in Kibworth, showing the faint image of Mary with her lilies, which perhaps had been brought back by villagers who had made the pilgrimage to the shrine at Walsingham where Mary was shown seated on the throne of wisdom, cradling the baby Jesus in her left arm, and holding a sceptre of lilies in her right hand. These ‘toyes’ were now condemned as idolatry by Wycliffe and his followers but the traditional Christian story was ingrained in the lives of most of the village community. Their cultural and spiritual references were the tales of English Christianity: Thomas of Canterbury, George and the Dragon, St Helena and the True Cross, stories whose calendrical commemoration marked their year, and whose exemplary heroes and heroines inhabited their lives.

Traditions and controversies

Such things – images, statues, icons, paintings, the great wooden cross above the chancel arch, the painting of naked souls emerging blinking from the mouth of hell – were all viewed with hostility by Wycliffe’s followers, who attacked the ludicrousness, indeed blasphemy, of worshipping a wooden statue or a relic: ‘If the cross of Christ, the nails, spear, and crown of thorns are to be honoured,’ they said, ‘then why not honour Judas’s lips, if only they could be found?’ Indulgences, confessions, penances and chantries too were seen as latter-day corruption, as was the practice of money changing hands for prayers and forgiveness. These were merely ‘false mawmentaryes’ to extort money from simple people ‘to sustain their idlness and luxury’.

After the Black Death such speculations were all part of the mood of the time. There was much meditation on the system of church patronage and on those rituals which people could use to approach God. Nearly thirty years before, some of the villagers had founded a prayer guild in Kibworth Harcourt and set up a trust to pay a chantry priest to say prayers for the dead. There was generally a strong devotional current in the hearts and minds of villagers as witnessed by the free chapels – run by chaplains, capellani, drawn from the village families – that were found in both Kibworths and in Smeeton. Local concerns were echoed in the broader literature, and at this time there was a surge of poetry about the crucifixion itself along with devout prayers, songs and jingles of heartrending directness, Jesus singing a lullaby to calm his grief-stricken mother, or telling the tale of his own crucifixion in vigorous dialect to his own loyal English people:

My folk now answer me and say what is my guilt.

What more might I more have done for thee

That I ne have fulffilth?

In the late fourteenth century an outpouring of books of devotion, manuals for anchorites and anchoresses, religious handbooks and guides, popular songs and a spiritual popular poetry ran alongside the political agitation with deep antecedents in Old and Middle English devotional poetry. In all this the crucifixion was the core image:

Jesus my sweet love my lemmon swete

That diyedest on the Rode Tree

With all my might I thee beseche

For thy woundes two and three.

This devotional fervour with its intense psychological identification burst out in great popular pilgrimages and festivals, and was reflected in the main liturgy of the Church. The period between the Great Famine and the Reformation saw the heyday of traditional English Christianity as great festivals like Candelmas and Corpus Christi, along with pilgrimage and Pentecost processions, grew in popularity. This was the village world that Hulman entered, a world of popular piety, a rich imaginal world, but one also bounded by a plethora of concrete rules and regulations – tithes, fines and the payment of money from poor villagers to the wealthy mother church in Lincoln. There are gift books still in Lincoln Cathedral’s wooden library listing donations from all over the vast diocese from villages like Kibworth. Up to the Reformation the old families of the village like the Polles, the Carters and the Colemans can be seen leaving donations in their wills of a few pence to Mary of Lincoln – the mother Church – and to their own church of St Wilfrid, ‘in the name of the blessed Virgin Mary and the whole blessed company of heaven’.

But a new current discernible after the Black Death questioned all this, compounded by a growing literature of complaint reflecting ordinary people’s increasing awareness of the law and their ability to use it. Vernacular poets of the period spoke of ‘the evil times of King Edward II’, the corruption of the friars and the ostentation of the rich. The world was changing. These were themes that Wycliffe sharpened, sensitized and formalized, and to which he gave intellectual fibre. But Wycliffe also championed the use of the vernacular in religion too, a split between the use of English and the use of French or Latin. A century before, clerics of Leicester Abbey had mocked the peasants of Stoughton near Kibworth as ‘the most stupid people in the world’, listing their uncouth names, mocking their women, using colloquial English to sneer at the vernacular speech of ‘senseless rustics’ in a Latin poem which ended on a resounding French tag, asserting that the status quo should go on for ever. But now English was on the rise and despite the great affection the mass of the English had for the traditions of the Church, its stories and the customs and the beauty of its liturgy, as with all working people, it still came down in the end to their hard-earned money, to tithes, dues, labour and power, and to the empowerment offered by the rapid spread of literacy. It was quite a time then for a Merton man to take up this living in the heart of open-field England, in a village where all these political, religious and psychological conflicts would come to the surface in the next forty years.

The Peasants’ Revolt

Hulman took up his duties as vicar in the rectory at Kibworth in spring 1380. He immediately found the villagers up in arms about the conduct of the government. The previous year an unpopular poll tax had been levied on the village; in 1380 another one was raised at a flat rate for rich and poor of 5d. Soon a third one was announced for 1381. In an atmosphere of vocal complaint, letters from peasant organizations were circulated calling for concerted action, and only a year after Hulman took up his new job the protests culminated in a full-scale rebellion – the Peasants’ Revolt.

The wider background to the uprising is to be found in the social and economic conditions after the Black Death. The huge drop in the population left labour at a premium. Landowners like Merton and the Beauchamps at Kibworth faced the choice of increasing wages and competing for workers or letting plots and tenements go unused. Inevitably in the aftermath of the plague wages for labourers rose and inflation grew across the economy as goods became more expensive to produce. The landlords suddenly found themselves struggling in the labour market. Widespread anger and class-hatred among the elites comes out in the poet John Gower’s very modern-sounding comments on labourers and their attitudes: ‘they are sluggish, they are scarce, and they are grasping. For the very little they do they demand the highest pay.’ The government had first attempted to prevent this in the first year of the outbreak with the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers, which effectively marks the start of English labour laws (and an ordinance, it is worth remembering, only repealed in 1863). Then in 1351, King Edward III summoned Parliament to pass the Statute of Labourers, which attempted to curb the peasants’ demands for better terms of employment by pegging wages to pre-plague levels and restricting the mobility of labour. The statute also required all able-bodied men and women to work and introduced penalties for those who remained idle. The poll taxes of 1377–81 were thus imposed amidst a growing and nationwide sense of injustice in labour relations.

The revolt itself began in Essex at the village of Fobbing on 31 May 1381, when local gentry and free peasants refused to pay the tax. From then events moved with extraordinary speed, with different areas of revolt apparently in touch with each other. The Kentish rebels reached Blackheath outside London on 12 June. Two days later they met the young king and his councillors and demanded the sacking of unpopular councillors, the abolition of serfdom and, most enigmatically, ‘that there should be no law within the realm save the Law of Winchester’ – possibly meaning the Statute of Winchester in 1285, but more likely a golden-age reference by the peasant leaders to the days of Alfred the Great and his successors, who were viewed nostalgically by English people in the fourteenth century. For Chaucer’s friend John Gower, however, the peasants’ aspirations were the work of the anti-Christ: ‘according to their foolish notions in the future there would be no lords but only kings and peasants.’

While the south-east was in uproar and the government tottering, up in Leicester Henry Knighton vividly conveys the near hysteria that gripped his town, probably as it did in most of England after the astonishing news of the rebels’ entry into London. With the Essex rebels gathered at Mile End, the Kentish forces crossed London Bridge and stormed the Tower, beheading the archbishop and the king’s chancellor. With the fate of the king himself in the balance, it must have seemed as if the whole order, ‘justified and planked by God’ according to the sermon makers, was about to collapse.

While things hung in the balance in London a messenger rode north through Kibworth towards Leicester, racing to tell the mayor that the Midland rebels were approaching and that their forces had reached Market Harborough. ‘A detachment of the impious mob from London,’ Knighton reports, ‘would arrive in Leicester the next morning at the first hour of day. The mayor reportedly was most agitated and alarmed, and in a quandary as to what action to take in such a difficult situation. If he decided to resist them he might fail and be killed with his retinue, if he tried to receive them peacefully he might later be judged their accomplice.’ That night inside the city walls, he called a meeting of ‘neighbours, jurors, and other shrewd men’, and eventually they decided to make efforts to defend the town. Knighton describes how the heavily armed force of 1,200 citizens massed outside the city, where for two days they waited fearfully to see what would happen, drilling as they awaited the rebels’ approach, sending out mounted scouts down through Kibworth to the Welland to try to gather intelligence on the rebels’ movements.

But the rebels never reached Leicester. Somewhere in the area between Harborough and Kibworth they stopped, and it was there perhaps that they got wind of the shattering news from London: the great meeting at Smithfield, the parley of ‘the peasants’ darling’ Wat Tyler with the king, and his killing by the mayor of London. Losing their leader, and faced by a hastily raised levy of 7,000 troops, the peasant army backed off and eventually dispersed. The different local groups were then picked off by the vengeful government. The East Anglian rebels suffered a final bloody defeat at North Walsham in Norfolk on 23 June and soon the purges began, with a horrible fate handed out to the ringleaders. The priest John Ball (whom Knighton saw as Wycliffe’s disciple) was executed in Coventry, hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of the king.

The bitter fallout was chronicled in songs and new rhymes were found for ‘the stool’ – the executioner’s block:

Man be ware and be no fool;

Thinke upon the ax, and of the stool!

The revolt had unleashed savage class antagonisms and exposed deep fissures between the rulers and the ruled. Despite the way it was depicted by royal chroniclers, the peasants’ movement was organized and literate; it harnessed real grievances and probably involved a real programme.

Kibworth Beauchamp and Harcourt as well as Smeeton Westerby seem to have escaped the violence. Whether members of the rebel army in Market Harborough talked to the jurymen and other ‘shrewd men’ in Kibworth, we don’t know, but perhaps for the people of these villages there was no advantage in joining the uprising. Their conditions were better, their circumstances not comparable to those of the peasantry in the villages of Essex or on the Winchester or St Albans estates, whose rage had led to the uprising. On the Merton estates up and down the country there was no great outcry to destroy the records of villeinage – the court rolls rentals and account books. For a century now the peasants in Kibworth Harcourt had been used to dealing with agents from the college, their bailiffs coming up to survey and negotiate, and as events unfolded they would take a different path to economic liberation and personal freedom.

As with all great events, the fallout of the Revolt set many changes in motion, some of them unforeseen, and most intriguing of these is the impact of Wycliffe’s ideas among the old families of Kibworth: it is in the years after the revolt that we have our first really detailed evidence of matters of conscience and individual belief among the ordinary people of England, and, remarkably, some of it comes from Kibworth.

‘I smelle a Lollere in the wynd’

Apparently untouched by the brief violent convulsion of the Peasants’ Revolt, Kibworth’s village court met that June to deal with the usual business, awarding new tenancies, imposing fines for field infringements and bad brewing, updating the list of runaways. But over the next thirty years other kinds of protest and acts of resistance made themselves felt in the village. Indeed, within months of the revolt a new name appears to describe those who spread heretical ideas, tarred by the brush of rebellion, and they will create a new current in English history which will overwhelm some of the people of Kibworth. They were called Lollards.

The name first appears in 1382 in Oxford. The first person to use it seems to have been an Anglo-Irish cleric called Henry Crumpe, who was duly suspended for committing a breach of the peace. ‘Lollard’ almost immediately had the force of a dirty word, but it stuck and in the minds of those in power came to cover all English heretics. In 1387 the Bishop of Worcester even used it for heretics in general, ‘the disciples of anti-Christ and followers of Mohamet’. About the same time Henry Knighton used it specifically to describe the followers of Wycliffe. Whether the word was new then or had already spent some time unrecorded in the underground is not known. Its meaning has never been determined for certain, but in medieval Flemish or Dutch the word means ‘to mumble’, which suggests some of the connotations of the seventeenth-century radicals called Ranters. The Lollards would cause a crisis in the English Church and state that was never forgotten; fearing the whole edifice of their power would be shaken, the government would put huge energies into the detection of heresy, employing its agents and informants to ‘I smelle a Lollere in the wynd’ as Chaucer put it (the poet himself has been suspected of harbouring some sympathy towards the sect).

In the immediate aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt strange rumours spread in the Midlands and East Anglia of itinerant preachers, wearing red wool cloaks, carrying wooden staffs, some even going barefoot as they imagined the early apostles and missionaries of Christ had travelled. Their sermons in taverns and private houses preached Wycliffe’s ‘pestilential doctrines’, which (so it was reported by the authorities) soon led to ‘outbreaks and complaints of the commons’, and what the medieval scholars called ‘insurrectio et schismata in villis’. In London soldiers were brought out into the streets and in May 1382 the new Archbishop of Canterbury initiated a council to look into the increasingly worrying ‘divisio et dissensio in Anglia’. In the immediate aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt the heresy was taken very seriously indeed. The teachings of Wycliffe were publicly condemned as seditious, and three leaders of ‘the sect of Wycliffe’ were detained, one of them a Merton scholar called John Aston who had preached up in Leicestershire. In Canterbury that summer in ‘an inquiry against heretics’ the new archbishop, William Courtney, ‘head of all England, legate of the apostolic seat’, set about investigating the spread among a minority of the English priesthood of these ‘doctrines of eternal damnation, product of an insane mind … doctrines taught both in the schools and outside … pulling the wool over the people’s eyes with sneering sophistry’. Several pupils of Wycliffe who had been active around Leicester, among them the canons Philip Repyngdon and Nicholas Hereford, and the Merton scholars John Aston and Laurence Bedeman were ‘strongly suspected of heresy’. At Lambeth in June there was talk of ‘conspiracy and confederacy’, of a Lollard web all over England.

Unlicensed preachers were said to be spreading Wycliffe’s doctrines all over England, and moves against them included a prohibition on teaching and discussing Wycliffite ideas within Oxford University, which had emerged as a centre of Lollard sympathies. A list of twenty-four condemned doctrines was compiled as the suspected or imagined ideological underpinnings of the revolt were examined. And among those summoned was, of all people, Thomas Hulman, the vicar of Kibworth.

Inquisition at Canterbury

It was in this heated atmosphere that Hulman rode south from Kibworth to Canterbury to be questioned as an associate of Aston, and presumably as a witness to testify against him. Significantly the interrogators were aware that the two men knew each other and that Hulman himself had come into contact with heretical doctrines. On 27 June in the chapel at the archbishop’s Kentish manor at Otford, Aston’s hearing was held in front of ten theologians and six ‘civil doctors’, or, as we would say, lawyers. Crucial to the charges was Aston’s denial of the presence of Christ’s body during the Mass. (It was reported of Aston that he had pointed to a beautiful woman next to him and said that he was more able to see the beauty and presence of God in her face than in the host, the symbol of the Mass.) This was the topic on which in 1379 Wycliffe had written the work which had defined his split with the papacy. The manuscript of the hearing records Aston’s disarming evasions on the question:

When I was required specially to say what I felt of this proposition, namely: ‘material bread leaves [remains] in the sacrament after the consecration’, I make this protestation that I never put nor taught nor preached that proposition, for I wot wil [I know well] that the matter and the speculation thereof passes in height my understanding.

Hulman was then questioned on Aston’s views, and in the course of the discussion he appeared to approve of Aston’s Wycliffite opinions, and was therefore placed under the necessity of clearing himself before the council. For the Kibworth vicar there was then a long and difficult session in the Chapter House in Canterbury Cathedral on 1 July. In front of nine masters of theology and two secular judges ‘from nine in the morning till the second hour after dinner … the said master Hulman was questioned …’ In the dossier of heresies produced for the archbishop, Hulman’s final recantation is preserved:

Guided by my Lord of Canterbury and of one opinion with the advice of his clergy, I now pronounce all these conclusions, together and singly, damnable and heretical and erroneous. And furthermore as my Lord of Canterbury and the other doctors of theology and experts in canonical and civil law with one council of clergy consider these heresies and errors to be damnable, so far as it is in me to do so, I condemn them, protesting myself that I hold and affirm the contrary to their conclusions, and in that faith promise to live and die.

In the face of the archbishop and committee of theologians, Hulman had backed down. It was not perhaps a point on which to risk one’s life. Repyngdon and Hereford, on the other hand, regular canons of St Mary’s, Leicester, refused to give way and sign the recantation. They were pronounced ‘contumacious’ and remanded to a fifth congregation at Canterbury, where Hulman himself was made to publicly condemn the twenty-four conclusions. With that he was allowed to go back to the village in time for Lammas and the August harvest.

Back in Kibworth

How far had the villagers already imbibed these revolutionary ideas? And why did the Lollard heresy find fertile ground among the free peasantry of south Leicestershire? Hulman’s role in all this will probably never be recovered, but can be guessed by the extraordinary number of villagers who supported the heresy in the next thirty years. He resumed his duties in the village but his card had been marked in the eyes of his archbishop and his bishop in Lincoln, John Buckingham, who would become an energetic hunter of Lollards. Hulman stayed on in Kibworth till he resigned in December 1385, when an anti-Wycliffite priest was put into the village by Merton, perhaps under pressure from above. But Hulman returned to the village in November 1387 and spent two more years there before apparently leaving – or perhaps dying – at Christmas 1389.

Wycliffe himself was dead by then, struck down by a stroke in the middle of hearing Mass in Lutterworth church on 28 December 1384: a turn of events his enemies not surprisingly read as a sign from God. He died on the last day of the year aged around sixty. The government no doubt breathed a sigh of relief in Westminster and Canterbury. To many it must have seemed that Wycliffe’s death would lead to the end of the movement, but the remarkable thing was its transformation after his demise. From the late 1380s through the 1390s and during the first decades of the fifteenth century the spread of his ideas was now no longer chiefly through Merton men and scholars, but through ordinary people, and in this story the Kibworth villagers played a dramatic part. Members of farming families in Kibworth – the Browns, Gilberts, Polles, Carters, Dexters and Valentines – all appear in government inquiries as active disseminators or supporters of the heresy. It is on any reading of the evidence a remarkable haul from one village.

The Lollards’ ideas were now increasingly anti-clerical and anti-Rome. In their sermons some said the Pope was an anti-Christ who had performed the remarkable feat of turning Christ himself into a heretic. And there were many who thought these theological disputations had a direct bearing on what we would call the political order, the ‘community of the realm’. One John Corringham (another Merton man), preaching unlicensed in Huntingdonshire in 1384, along with the usual Lollard doctrines on the true body of Christ in the Mass, articulated pacifist ideas, arguing that even killing in self-defence was unlawful for Christians. He also disapproved of taxation to fund warfare outside the kingdom. These were radical ideas which have a powerful resonance even today.

That the religious crisis coincided with the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt was no coincidence. Lollardy is often described as the direct outcome of learned controversy. No doubt this is true, but heresy was also part of the English people’s revolt against the power structures which ruled their lives. It is easy to forget that this was a current in English life: eight medieval English kings after all were overthrown by revolt. For over a century there had been constant agitation at the grass roots. Peasants had contested their lords’ demands before the law for 150 years, often with the support of the artisanal classes. Lollard rebels in East Anglia in the 1420s included millers, parchment makers, glovers, skinners, tailors, carpenters and of course a minority of priests. The appeal of the Lollards then was to literate people of some status in English society.

Whether older English popular religious traditions and beliefs also came into play is an interesting question. There is no question that Wycliffe shaped the debate but some of the Lollards’ beliefs were ideas that could have been expressed if Wycliffe had never lived: they were part of an older popular vernacular current in English culture. The Bible, for example, was everything to Wycliffe and his followers, so they thought it should be available to all in the English language. All the peasants in Kibworth knew some Latin: they could speak the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed in Latin. But in their daily speech they knew the wise saws and sayings of the Gospels in their own tongue. Rendering the Gospels into the vernacular after all was an old tradition in England. The first translations had been done in the Anglo-Saxon period and surviving manuscripts (from as late as the twelfth century) show that the text continued to be taught in English in church. Famous biblical proverbs known to the Kibworth peasants in English in the fourteenth century had a much more ancient pedigree: ‘seek and ye shall find’ – ‘seceath and ye hit findath’; ‘strait is the gate’ – ‘that geat is swythe wid’; ‘you are the salt of the earth’ – ‘ye sind eorthan sealt’. The Old English version of the Lord’s Prayer had already been part of the English language for centuries: ‘Faeder ure thu the eart on heofonum, si thin nama gehalgod …’ Behind the Wycliffe Bible, which was copied by hand in private houses near Kibworth, there lay an older current still of popular Christianity, emphatically English – and vernacular.

Among the issues that were contentious to the Lollards, however, use of the vernacular was not thought a make or break one. (Though Henry Knighton in Leicester, for example, strongly disapproved of translation: the ‘language of Angli is not language of angels’, he said, inverting Bede’s famous story of Gregory the Great.) More important as we have seen was the corruption of the Church, its worldliness and wealth, its involvement in secular power. Some central theological doctrines also went against older custom. Transubstantiation was particularly contentious. The idea of the real presence of the blood and body of Christ in the Mass (still a central Catholic belief today) was only developed in the twelfth century by the papacy in Europe; prior to that it seems that the mystery of the Mass was capable of being understood metaphorically (and had been so by the Anglo-Saxons). So the Church orthodoxy was not a longstanding continuous doctrinal tradition and the fourteenth-century radicals’ beliefs had not come out of the blue. Peasants after the sixteenth-century Reformation might look back fondly on the time ‘when it was better when man ate his Maker at the Mass’, but in the fourteenth century these were relatively new doctrines and in teaching them the Church encountered a wide variety of older custom and belief.

It all boiled down to the authority of the priest: who was a priest? Why should one have to be licensed by the Church in order to preach? Some Lollards asserted that ‘any good man could be a priest – or any good woman.’ A Lollard blacksmith in Lincolnshire memorably declared that he could make ‘as good a sacrament between ii yrons as the prest doth upon his altar’. In a sense then the doctrinal crises of the time seem to have come out of a still little-known but deep current in popular spirituality: to some the heresy appealed to English vernacular roots.

William Swinderby

In the years after the Peasants’ Revolt these ideas spread across the East Midlands through local preachers who had been radicalized in the local community. In the early 1380s the people of Kibworth and neighbouring villages first became aware of a new kind of itinerant preacher. Wycliffe had aimed to do away with the existing hierarchy and replace it with the ‘poor priests’ who lived in poverty, were bound by no vows, had received no formal consecration and preached the Gospel to the people. After his death this happened. These itinerant preachers spread the teachings of Wycliffe. Two by two they went, wearing long dark-red robes and carrying a staff in the hand, the latter having symbolic reference to their pastoral calling, and passed from place to place preaching ‘the sovereignty of God’.

They included formally educated scholars such as the Merton fellow John Aston. But the key people were local men like the self-taught blacksmith William Smith or, somewhat later, the itinerant Kibworth preachers William Brown and Walter Gilbert, who was known across Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire as ‘Walter of Kibworth’. There were women supporters, too, including the anchoresses Anna and Maud (who was perhaps the holy woman Maud Polle who died around 1407, leaving land in Kibworth). Even the famous eccentric anchoress Margery Kempe on her travels through the area was interrogated by the town authorities in Leicester on suspicion of Lollardy.

The first key local figure seems to have been a charismatic preacher called William Swinderby. Known as William the Hermit, he had lived in a wood on the western edge of Leicester (where a cave is still known as ‘Lollard’s Cave’). Swinderby was a typical renouncer: he preached against the seductions of women, pride, adornments and loose living, and gained a reputation for holiness. He was visited by rich burghers, who provided him with food, and eventually, with the backing of the powerful John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (who had a penchant for strange holy men), he moved into the town, setting himself up in a small cell adjoining Leicester Abbey.

From Leicester, Swinderby went out into the countryside on preaching tours, to Loughborough and Melton Mowbray to the north, and down the Market Harborough road south through Kibworth to Hallaton. Receptive audiences were easy to come by. In 1382 on Palm Sunday and on Good Friday he preached to large crowds at the chapel of St John the Baptist near the leper hospital outside the city wall. There conventicles were held and ‘heretical ideas expounded’: possibly the first reference to Lollard ‘schools’. Swinderby attacked the whole edifice of the Church. In his reported words we can hear the kind of ideas that radicalized two generations of villagers in Kibworth over the next thirty years. To him image worship was idolatry; collective prayer was just ‘blabbering with the lips’. It was worthless to pay money for the recitals of psalms or to pay for Masses. Only a person leading a good life has any value: ‘such good living is prayer enough.’ Alms for confession are accursed: ‘No one should give alms to anyone they know to be wicked or corrupt; no cleric should have more than the bare necessities of food and clothes.’ The Church should have no right to control (and charge for) marriage, as ‘a union of two hearts’ was all that was required. As for preaching, ‘every good man or good woman’ is a priest. As he grew in self-assurance, Swinderby promised that he would reform the people by his own teaching and asserted that he could preach at any church in Leicester without the licence of the Bishop of Lincoln.

These were dangerous ideas for they questioned not only the edifice of the Catholic Church, but the power structure of fourteenth-century England. This was precisely where heresy and dissent approached sedition: Swinderby attacked not only a corrupt and hypocritical clergy but announced that ‘If lay lords are evil and do not mend their ways it is permissible for ordinary folk to correct them.’ Coming in the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt the idea of righteous peasants ‘correcting’ corrupt lay lords, as preached to villagers in Harborough, Hallaton and Kibworth, was to say the least concerning to the authorities. Swinderby refers several times to the ‘law of the land’ in the way the Peatling peasants had spoken of the welfare of the community of the realm: times had changed since the clerics of Leicester had sneered at the aspirations of the peasants of Stoughton and characterized them as ‘pure villeins’ who should know their place.

Soon we hear of Lollard schools in private houses. It seems hard to believe that there wasn’t one, however informal and small-scale, in Kibworth. Here discussion groups were held, readings spoken, manuscripts pored over. The account of one gives a vivid sense of the grass-roots organization in this area of Leicestershire. This conventicle or school was founded by the self-taught Leicestershire blacksmith William Smith. Smith and his like were painted in black terms by their enemies. Just as Swinderby had been dismissed as volatile and shifty, Smith was portrayed as unstable and even mad, as well as ‘deformed and ugly’. Henry Knighton, who remembered him, claims Smith took to his odd religious life as a result of being turned down by a young woman with whom he had fallen in love. Smith, it was said, renounced love and became a barefoot vegetarian, giving up both meat and alcohol (sure signs of mental instability to a fourteenth-century friar!). But Smith also taught himself to read and write and was later found to have been copying and gathering books in the vernacular. In a famous tale that would haunt Smith, on one occasion when he was cooking cabbages in his cell he broke up a wooden image of St Catherine and used it for his fire: ‘a new martyrdom for St Catherine’.

Such people anticipate the strange fringe sects of the seventeenth-century English Revolution: Adamites, Seekers and Familists of Love. Of course, extreme religious renouncers often have a precarious sanity: finding their centre in rigid certainties. But peering through Knighton’s sneering denunciation, we can see Smith as typical of a new kind of layman after the Black Death. Despite the hostile and sensational portrait devised by those who hated him, he was an interesting Englishman from the labouring classes of a kind we find in Kibworth too: critical, censorious, but eager through self-education and literacy to lead his own spiritual life – and to help others find theirs. Reading English texts, debating, rejecting outward shows of devotion, seeking what he saw as the true core of the Christian faith in a return to the simplicity of the primeval church, he was to many an attractive model to set against the rich and worldly clergy.

The penance of Roger and Alice Dexter

Through the likes of Swinderby and Smith, by 1384 the heresy had spread through the huge diocese of Lincoln, into East Anglia, and to cities like Coventry and London. In the bishop’s records in the medieval library in Lincoln Cathedral the voluminous hearings show that through the 1390s to the 1410s, the heresy swirled around the villages between Leicester and Northampton: Market Harborough, Kibworth and Smeeton all becoming centres of Lollardy. The Church reacted with growing concern. In 1401 there was a blanket condemnation of Lollard ideas; in 1408 a statute reaffirmed that to translate the Gospels into English was to commit heresy; in 1415 the Pope finally condemned the long dead Wycliffe as ‘a stiff-necked heretic’, banned his books and condemned all who followed him.

But it was all too late: the genie of heresy was out of the bottle. Swinderby by now had disappeared from the scene after multiple interrogations (he is last heard of in the Welsh Marches). But others continued. Thomas Hulman was back in Kibworth; and soon we meet ordinary people in the area who are strong supporters of Wycliffe’s ideas. On 13 October 1389 the Bishop of Lincoln came up with a new series of suspects, among whom were close associates of William Smith: William Harry (John Harry was a reeve in Kibworth Harcourt at this time) and a married couple, Roger and Alice Dexter. The Dexters were then living in Leicester, but their name is found in Kibworth and that’s where they went to live after the events which follow. With them were Smith and a chaplain, Richard Waystathe, who had been associates of Swinderby together with a number of people drawn from the middling sort: a scrivener, a parchmener, a goldsmith and a tailor (the parchmener was one of many Lollards associated with the book trade). They were accused of preaching against indulgences, confession, the worship of images and the payment of tithes, and were told to appear before the archbishop on All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1389, at Leicester Abbey. But they hid, ‘preferring to talk in darkness rather than in light’. After celebrating High Mass, Bishop Courteney excommunicated all who believed in such things, then, prompted by some orthodox citizens, named the eight individuals.

As the eight had not yet been apprehended by the mayor, the bishop now ordered their arrest. Ten days later Smith and two of his Lollard flock were detained and taken before him. The story was then told against Smith that he had burned the wooden statue of St Catherine as firewood. It was also reported that he had referred to two famous images of the Virgin Mary – the most popular pilgrimage destinations for the people of the villages round Leicester – as ‘the witch of Lincoln and the witch of Walsingham’. Smith’s fellow prisoners were the married couple, Roger and Alice Dexter – Roger had been reported by the faithful as having refused to venerate the crucified Christ, a common Lollard protest against what they saw as ‘idolatry’.

Smith and the Dexters were under uncomfortable pressure now and agreed to abjure their errors. They were sentenced by the bishop to do appropriate penance: to attend in procession at the city church of St Mary Newark, William and Roger wearing shirt and breeches, Alice wrapped only in a sheet, all barefoot and bareheaded. In atonement William was to carry an image of St Catherine; Roger and Alice were to hold crucifixes in their right hands and lighted penitential tapers in the left. Three times in procession they were to ‘stop and kiss the images in honour of the Crucified Christ, and in memory of his passion, and in honour of St Catherine’, falling down on their knees on each occasion. Then they were to attend Mass in church. The following Saturday they were to repeat the whole ritual in the marketplace in Leicester and on Sunday for a third time in their own parish churches. Smith was also to recite an antiphon and collect to St Catherine, whom he had particularly ‘insulted, defamed and desecrated’. Roger and Alice, who may have been illiterate, were simply to recite in Latin the Pater Noster and an Ave Maria. The weather was particularly cold, and for the services inside church the archbishop showed a touch of charity, allowing them not to strip to their thin undershifts, though they were still to go barefoot (a little hint of how chilly it could be going to church in the Middle Ages).

With the public confession of their error and stripped half naked in front of their many orthodox accusers among the citizenry, the humiliation of Smith and the Dexters was complete. But in addition Smith was accused of ‘compiling and copying manuscripts in English’, including ‘books of the epistles and the gospels done into English and other works by the Church Fathers that he had spent eight years in compiling’. These he was now compelled to surrender so they could be burned. It was quite a collection for a blacksmith. Had such books survived, we would gain a fascinating insight into the learning of a self-educated blacksmith in the late fourteenth century – and for that matter the reading of the wandering preachers from Kibworth whom we will soon meet.

Survival: 1389–1414

So it is in this period that we have our first really detailed account of matters of conscience and individual belief among the ordinary people of England. Something of Roger and Alice Dexter’s later life can be restored from the Merton archive and from the bishop’s records. After their 1389 penance the couple moved from Leicester to live in Kibworth: conceivably they had a family connection there (the name is found in the village). There is some indication that subsequently they had money troubles. The bailiff’s accounts for 1394 drawn up by William Polle show an entry fine on a tenement due from Roger which was held over, suggesting perhaps that he couldn’t pay. Then in 1409 the butcher John Pychard senior summonsed Roger for payment of a 40s debt. Most interesting, in 1403 Adam Brown of Kibworth Harcourt made a gift to Roger Dexter, of ‘a housing plot with buildings, a curtilege lying in Kibworth Harcourt which he Adam holds from one John Wilcokson of Stretton Parva, and a plot 28 feet by 16 feet between that house and William Mann’s house’. Adam Brown, as we shall see in the next chapter, came from an old Kibworth family; by 1403 he was a well-off draper living and working partly in Coventry. Some members of Brown’s family had Lollard sympathies (one of them indeed became a wandering preacher), and it may be significant that a Coventry draper with Kibworth roots made a ‘gift’ of a house to Dexter. In his last appearance in the records, fourteen years later, Roger Dexter leases to Thomas and his wife, Joan Carter (the Carters were another Kibworth family with Lollard sympathies), the house and buildings he had got from Adam Brown. So in 1417 Dexter still held property in Kibworth; and it is touching to hear from one informer that Roger kept faith with Lollard beliefs ‘until his dying day’.

The Dexters’ story is direct evidence of the legacy of wandering preachers like Swinderby and Smith. Scholars such as the Merton man Aston and surely (though there is only circumstantial evidence from Kibworth) the vicar Hulman too had also played their part in the spread of Lollard ideas. By 1390 these ideas had spread through the villages between Leicester and Northampton. In 1392 the new Mayor of Northampton himself was a supporter and for some months the town was virtually a no-go area for orthodoxy. There among the seven reported ringleaders the anchoress Anne Palmer declared the Bishop of Lincoln himself ‘an anti-Christ’.

How far all this was now being generated from the bottom has been a matter of debate among scholars. Close to Kibworth the Lollards found middle-class supporters among the gentry in Smeeton and Illston on the Hill. Nor did sympathizers at Merton lose contact. When the warden of Merton and some of the fellows stayed in the village to celebrate Easter in 1395, it would be strange if they did not preach in church, dine with the bailiffs, reeves and other ‘swearing men’ and their wives, and discuss not only the running of the manor but the meaning of Easter. In any case this meeting is an extraordinary example of exchanges between Oxford scholars and peasants. Did they talk at that time of what the Lollards called the ‘True Law of Christ’? What would one give for a note of their private conversations.

Oldcastle’s revolt

Though the sect grew in influence in the thirty years after Wycliffe’s death, spreading to the houses of the gentry in the East Midlands, to artisanal workshops in Coventry, to the wool towns of East Anglia and to book copiers in London, it was never a mass movement. But in 1413–14 it finally came to the national stage and swept up people in Kibworth. These events, culminating in the Oldcastle Rising of January 1414, were preceded by on-the-ground agitation in the area of Kibworth which, thanks to the government’s apparatus of heresy detection, can be followed in some detail.

In spring 1413 a further round of inquisitions around Leicester picked up more unlicensed preachers, and more stories of banned ‘books in English’. One man who was reported preaching between Thurcaston and Barrow on Soar down to Wigston and Kibworth was the capellanus William Brown, a native of Kibworth who perhaps had been chaplain of the little chantry chapel on Main Street. According to the government’s inquisitors, William, who was presumably literate, had preached heretical sermons in the little church down by the River Sence at Wistow and in Kibworth Harcourt itself – possibly at the free chapel, perhaps at the parish church. His sermons do not survive but no doubt they were typical Lollard complaints: decrying idolatry, spurning pilgrimages to the ‘witch of Walsingham and the cursed Thomas Becket’, attacking the familiar corruptions of the priesthood. As Swinderby had preached, ‘there will be no peace until the Church has been deprived of all its temporal goods … and know without doubt that God’s vengeance will shortly come.’

Brown came from an old Kibworth family which goes back into the middle of the thirteenth century in the documents at Merton; one branch had risen in the 1380s and 1390s to be drapers and guild members in Coventry. Brown himself had been a pledge at the Kibworth manor court in 1412–13: a ‘trustworthy swearing man’ accustomed to serving on juries and speaking for the villagers. His preaching around Kibworth takes us to the villages south of Leicester at the end of winter 1412 and the early spring of 1413. Brown was perhaps the same unnamed Lollard preacher who arrived at Wigston, south of Leicester, on Sunday, 5 February 1413, after the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin. The tale unfolds in detail from the inquisitions of the Church made in the clampdown afterwards. The weather was bad – we may imagine swirling snowflakes and a freezing wind. After the church service Brown asked the vicar at Wigston whether he could preach to the people. But it was immediately apparent that the stranger was unlicensed. The village headman, the caput parochiae (the vicar, or the parochial chaplain), then protested but Brown spoke to the congregation inside the church: ‘The village chaplain does not want me to preach here in the church; and therefore I am going out to the cross to preach there.’ The parishioners though, in one of the most rich and populous villages in Leicestershire, wanted to hear him inside, claiming it was too cold to stand outside.

After his sermon the mysterious preacher had a surprise up his sleeve. He distributed ten marks to the poor – the equivalent of 1,600 pennies, nearly £7 of English money, and worth more than £3,000 today on the RPI, nearly £40,000 on average earnings. This was the kind of money that could only have come from a wealthy sympathizer among the gentry, someone like Thomas Latimer, the lord of Smeeton, whose house at Braybroke over the border in Northamptonshire was a refuge for Lollards and perhaps a place where ‘English books’ were copied. If so, it would be typical of the middling gentry’s support for the movement. The tale too suggests what is also suggested by our evidence from interrogations in eastern England a few years later, that heresy was much more developed than has been thought: that there was some kind of organization in existence with schools, houses – and money.

Walter of Kibworth

By various channels these revolutionary ideas thus percolated down to the villagers in Kibworth, Smeeton, Wigston and their neighbours. And this increasingly vociferous radicalism took Lollardy into deep water in the second decade of the fifteenth century. For a new and dangerous edge had crept into the rhetoric of the wandering preachers. Along with the anti-clerical attacks, there was now a growing opposition to the government itself. This would lead to a catastrophic confrontation with the Crown, and the death of Kibworth men on the scaffold in London.

In the spring of 1413 another itinerant preacher from Kibworth made his way from village to village on foot from Leicester to the Trent valley and into Derbyshire, where he was reported to the government as ‘Walter of Kibworth’. His real name was Walter Gilbert, and he came from another old Kibworth villein family (his ancestor Emma had been a customary tenant of Merton back in 1280). In the summer of that year wearing the familiar rust-red cloak of heretical priests, Walter travelled through the villages of Derbyshire preaching Lollard ideas – and perhaps revolution. For now the heresy had moved into politics, and had become a source of increasingly acute anxiety to the government as threats were made to the king himself and to his office. They were right about the rebels’ intent, though not about the real nature of the threat, nor its chances of success.

In July, Walter reached the village of Littleover (now a suburb of Derby), where he was given shelter by Henry Bothe or Booth, a lawyer and member of the local gentry, who would himself be accused of disseminating heresy. Gilbert was the kind of committed heretic who frequented the ‘scoles of heresie yn privie chambres and privie plases of oures’. By now there was a new political dimension to his sermons. For in 1413 the idea was hatched of overthrowing the king to create a new Christian commonweath guided by Lollard ideals.

Kibworth and the Oldcastle Rising

The old king, Henry IV, died in March 1413 while Gilbert was following his route between safe houses in Derbyshire. The king’s son was crowned on 9 April at Westminster Abbey as Henry V. He was tall and ruddy-faced, ‘with a look that flashed like a lion’s’, his long thin face scarred by an arrow wound sustained at the battle of Shrewsbury when he was sixteen. The coronation was accompanied by an unseasonable flurry of snow, which was interpreted by some as a bad omen. The first weeks were a nervous time for the new king: his father had been seen by many as a usurper so dissent within the royal house was a given; and the renewal of the war in France was in the air. Within weeks a rising was being planned against him by his old associate and friend Sir John Oldcastle, who had already been accused of heresy and become a focus of Lollard aspirations. Their quixotic hope was to depose Henry and make Oldcastle regent. Other rulers would be appointed at the will of the rebels, as a kind of commonwealth, ‘a people without a head’. The plan was to coordinate the rebellion with men marching from various parts of England ‘to the number of twenty thousand men’; to meet at St Giles’ Fields in London on 10 January 1414.

In Kibworth, as we have seen, Lollard ideas had a long pedigree: vicar Hulman and the preachings of Swinderby, Aston and Smith had radicalized villagers like the Dexters and their friends; and Brown and Gilbert, the wandering preachers, had been active in the area too. The ringleader, Walter Gilbert, was able to elicit not only sympathy and money, but support. A dozen peasants from Kibworth, Smeeton and Saddington declared themselves for Oldcastle and resolved to travel to London to join the rebel army at St Giles’ Fields. Messages must have been spread on some kind of underground system, possibly organized in cells like modern resistance movements, and in the village by now there clearly must have been something like the ‘scoles of heresie’ mentioned elsewhere. Behind the dozen men from Kibworth and its neighbours was the support of a substantial number of villagers, and not just family members, who provided money for food and accommodation. Among the local gentry some like Thomas Noveray, of Illston on the Hill next to Kibworth, sold their goods and made their wills before taking arms.

Among the rebels six Kibworth Harcourt men made the perilous journey south. Their names are preserved in the government’s records, sometimes for obvious reasons using aliases. First is Simon Polle alias Carter, perhaps his mother’s name – the two Kibworth families had long connections. Polle’s family we have come to know in this story; he was a long-time tenant of the college. Henry Valentine came from another old family; tenants in the Merton rolls from the 1280s, they provided village scribes in the fourteenth century. John Blakwell’s alias strangely was ‘John Taylor of Lancashire’, but the Taylors were another Kibworth family. John Barun ‘alias Toogood, alias Scrivener’ – a hint of his job perhaps – gave a Shangton address but from his name also belonged to the old Kibworth Harcourt family who had been free tenants from the thirteenth century. The sixth man, John Upton, described himself as a labourer of Smeeton.

The group thus included members of four old village families, all well-known in this story. Most prominent though was the chaplain Walter Gilbert, who was said to have induced the labourers to join them by bribing them with 20s, though perhaps this was not a bribe but expenses. Did the money come from well-wishers at the college? From rich family members like Adam Brown? Or from local landowners like Latimer or Noveray? The government’s investigators were unable to discover.

With Walter was his brother Nicholas. The Gilberts were a longstanding village family, descendants of the customary tenant Emma in the 1280s. Their grandfather Nicholas is recorded in the Merton rolls making provisions for his mother Agnes, who remarried after the Black Death; her other son, Robert, appears in the poll tax of 1381 with his wife Emma as a ‘merchant’. Their children William and Alice that year are taxed as servants; Walter and Nicholas may have been their younger sons.

The younger Nicholas had interesting connections with Merton College. He had been a tenant since the 1380s, and in 1394–5 his son John had carried letters from Kibworth to Oxford, at the behest of Warden Whelpingham, who visited Kibworth both years. By 1396 a minor official at Kibworth, Nicholas was a constant link between the village and the college. He was one of six upstanding men of the manor, an ‘overseer of lands and tenements’ entrusted with recording land transfers, encroachments and dilapidations of tenancies at the manorial court. Among the other rebels, Polle’s and Valentine’s families were old friends. There were those in the village of course who disagreed with them – Robert Gilbert was opposed to his brothers; the heresy seems to have split the Polles too. So maybe there were heated arguments behind closed doors in houses on Main Street. But no doubt too there were many sympathizers who gave support even though they were not prepared to take the momentous step of heading down to London to confront the king.

The journey to London could be made at a moderate pace on horseback in three days through Northamptonshire down to St Albans, reaching the northern edge of the city at Smithfield where the Peasants’ Army under Wat Tyler had gathered thirty years before. (Tudor maps give a good idea of what they saw: though the city was slightly smaller in the middle of the sixteenth century than at its 1300 peak, when it had maybe 80,000 people.) As in a modern anti-war demonstration, parties moved on London from all directions: forty weavers and craftsmen on the road from Bristol, parties from Worcester, an Oxfordshire party led by a Woodstock glover with men from Handbrough, Baldon, Kidlington and Upper Heyford; a fuller, a tailor, a capper, carpenters, millers and masons singing songs. The urban sprawl of the city had spread outside the walls in the fifteenth century as far as the open fields beyond Clerkenwell, where wide drove roads brought in cattle from the ‘champain’ lands of Leicestershire and the Midlands to feed the insatiable appetite of the capital for meat and animal products.

The rendezvous for the Kibworth rebels was just beyond the northern edge of the built-up city, where over the rooftops at the end of the country lane that is now Turnmill Street rose the vast bulk of the Gothic cathedral of St Paul’s with its giant spire, the tallest in Europe. In the fields of Clerkenwell was a huge inn called The Wrestlers on the Hoop, its yards and stables frequented by long-distance carriers and merchants; they could stable their horses and goods in the great cart yard opposite the stinking Fleet stream: it stood close to the Clerkenwell itself, whose stone wellhead still survives behind a modern shop front. There along Turnmill Street and Cow Cross were the inns used by drovers and merchants, including the Cock Inn, one of the longest-lived London inns on record: another Lollard safe house linked by a path across fields and allotments to St John’s Gate. In this neighbourhood was a secret base for Lollard book copiers. From there the plan was that the peasant army would march round the suburb through open fields towards St Giles’ Fields.

The government though had been warned by informers and was waiting for them with a heavily armed force. The young king was not yet the veteran of Agincourt but he had been bloodied ten years previously on the field at Shrewsbury. Brave and decisive, he knew how to manoeuvre troops, especially against disorganized and ill-armed peasants. Hopelessly quixotic, its aims confused, the revolt proved to be a damp squib. Where the Lollard leaders had called for 20,000 men, in the event nothing like that number gathered. They came in hundreds not thousands, the revolt was betrayed and the peasants who had risked all to come to London fled or were captured. The ringleaders, including the Kibworth brothers, were consigned to Newgate Prison to await King Henry’s mercy.

In the event the young king was not keen to inflict brutal punishments on the rank and file, any more than he had been keen to kill his old friend Oldcastle. He wanted to make an example but not to take swingeing revenge. Pardons were issued for most of the prisoners. From Kibworth, John Barun was pardoned in May; Valentine and Polle had to wait in custody till the summer. Anxious to appear merciful, Henry and his councillors gave pardons on condition of acts of public penitence. But forty or so were hanged the following week, including some who recanted their heresy. A more terrible fate was reserved for heretics – they were hanged and burned alive. Among the dead were Walter and Nicholas Gilbert.

Oldcastle himself escaped from the safe house at the Cock in Turnmill Street and fled west to the Welsh Marches, where he spent two years on the run while Henry made his name in the French campaign which climaxed at Agincourt. Eventually Oldcastle was hunted down and captured on the Welsh borders. He was tried and burned at St Giles’ Fields in December 1417, at the same place where the Gilberts had died. The site today lies just at the end of Denmark Street near today’s Dominion Theatre. At St Giles’ church Oldcastle’s name is still commemorated; he has also given his name to a pub on the old Fleet by Smithfield Market. In Tudor times he came to be viewed as a Protestant martyr and enjoyed a strange afterlife in Shakespeare’s Henry IV as Sir John Falstaff, who was originally called Oldcastle in the play until a furore by Protestant hardliners brought an official reprimand, after which Shakespeare was nervous enough to issue an author’s disclaimer. Even then Lollardy still carried a whiff of danger. For the Gilberts and friends there is no memorial.

But the Lollard heresy did not go quietly away. There were more risings, trials and executions in the 1420s and 1430s. The rising at Coventry in 1431 was the last major conflagration, but the beliefs survived across the Midlands and East Anglia and in the major cities. When Essex men marched on London in protest in the 1520s, they were persuaded to exchange their dog-eared handwritten Wycliffite texts for the new Tyndale testament. By then the Protestant Reformation was on the horizon.

From Lollards to Nonconformists?

So yet again Kibworth found itself touched by the national story in a direct way. In the village, as in many places in southern England, the heresy split families, some of whom in the aftermath were barred from public office. In general though the impression one gets from the court documents is that such communities rubbed along together with a fair degree of tolerance, their lives always driven by the pressure of running the fields, of producing food.

But the Lollard protest had deep cultural and psychological roots. For orthodox Christian worshippers the images of the saints were justified as the books of the unlettered, their tales a source of deep affection and solace. But when literacy spread in a peasant society like Kibworth, as it did in the fourteenth century, the questioning of basic religious custom and practice was inevitable, especially when academic ideas like Wycliffe’s percolated down through disciples, followers and even vicars. For the Lollards there was only one book: the Bible. ‘There is no Pope in the Bible: Jesus consecrated no priest.’ What mattered was the individual conscience and the individual reaching out to God through the Bible and his or her own prayers. For the Lollards this was worth all the masses, all the images and all the pilgrimages in creation.

The radical project of the Lollards failed miserably. But at a personal level the purely religious side survived, settling down to become part of the deeply ingrained down-to-earth religious sensibility of many English men and women. It continued at grass-roots level in villages like Kibworth for the most part unnoticed by government until later outbursts of persecution in the sixteenth century. In isolated close-knit communities there was always much mutual understanding, forbearance and tolerance, and a spirit of live and let live which helps account for the absence of persecution in the intervening years. And the same spirit kept persecution down to a minimum when it did raise its ugly head. That picture is inevitably conjectural: the historian cannot eavesdrop on the Polles, Peks and Browns through the fifteenth century behind their closed doors. But without such an assumption it is hard to understand how rapidly in parts of the country – especially in East Anglia and the East Midlands – the fundamental changes later imposed from above in the Protestant Reformation were accepted so swiftly.

In the tale of the Kibworth Lollards we have one of the earliest insights into the involvement of ordinary peasants in religious debate. But it should not be a surprise that such ideas were imbibed at the very grass roots of English society to produce preachers like Brown and Gilbert and supporters like Roger and Alice Dexter. The community to which these people belonged with its alternative literacy was not the one that had come into being by permission of, or even by contained reaction to, those in power. It had grown first out of the necessity to cooperate in order to survive, expanding its ambitions as its horizons expanded, till the possibilities of different futures opened up. The ideas of the Lollards suggest the possibility of long-lasting continuities with the sixteenth-century religious radicals, with the seventeenth-century Quakers and Congregationalists and other dissenters who formed an academy in the village, and the Methodists and Nonconformists of modern times. Can it be a coincidence that the areas of strong Lollard support in Leicestershire, around Mountsorrel and Kibworth, would be great centres of Nonconformity after the English Revolution and in the eighteenth century? George Fox, the Quaker founder, was a weaver who came from Fenny Drayton, a village not far from Kibworth, and belonged to the same class as the Browns and the Gilberts. In Kibworth parish itself, Smeeton in particular in the late seventeenth century was an important Quaker centre against which armed force was used in the 1660s. At the same time Congregationalists were influential in Kibworth Harcourt, where a dissenting academy was founded in 1721. When the ebullient Edmund Knox, another Merton man, arrived as vicar in Kibworth in the 1880s he became well aware of the fascinating and complex religious history of the village, and with rueful humour relates the tale of one of his new flock who greeted him with a lecture on history and told him curtly that if he had his way he would ‘blow the church up’.

In a nation which only recently declared itself the least religious society on earth, it is salutary to remember the conflicts that lie behind the secular democracy of today, which was largely won by the ordinary people of England – but, unlike us, they were God-driven.