There were some fascinating characters, not least of whom was John Ball, an itinerant priest who was preaching something that sounded very much like the modern tenets of socialism. His most famous rebuttal of the class system was "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" The video above is an hour long, but it features Paul Foot, a famous activist of the mid-to-late 20th century who also happened to belong to the English upper class. He presents the story in an easily understood context. It's well worth listening to.
Setting The Scene
In the 1340's, the plague raced through Europe and England. In the first wave of plague about 15% of the population was wiped out within days. The papal court had removed from Rome to Avignon, and the bodies piled up so fast that they couldn't bury them. The pope consecrated the Rhóne so that the bodies could be dumped into the river instead.
At this time in history, the world operated according to feudalism. People belonged to their lord. The people worked the land and the lords worked the people. People couldn't leave the lands of their feudal lord. If they tried, they'd be hunted down and brought back. When they got back they'd get branded on their bodies to mark them as a flight risk. Even if you were somewhat better off than the other peasants, for example as a baker or a reeve, you were still bound to the lord. You couldn't go work for someone else or move house across the country, and what you were paid was determined by the lord. On top of that, the church owned lands and was authorized to extract a tenth of whatever the peasants made. If someone died young, as happened fairly often then, the lord would take one cow to compensate himself for what he would have gotten from the peasant in terms of labor over a lifetime, and the church would take the other cow to compensate themselves for the lifetime of tithes they would have had. Most peasant families only had two cows.
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| So that's one for me....and none for you |
So anyway, the plague came and suddenly there were a lot fewer peasants. Crops were threatening to rot in the fields and land owners were dealing with a labor shortage. The peasants were suddenly in a much better bargaining position, but the feudal lords weren't having it. On top of it, there were fewer peasants to generate their incomes. On top of that, the king at the time really liked waging war and he was having trouble raising the money. There were laws passed saying that everyone had to pay a poll tax, nobles and peasants alike paying the same amount across the board. Tax collectors would go into villages and examine children to see if they'd reached puberty and thus become eligible to pay the poll tax. This was especially galling to the peasants when the tax collectors would take the girls into the house to check their level of maturity. Sometimes they wouldn't even take them into the house, instead having them lift their skirts in public. It was a crime not to work.
There were laws passed saying that peasants could not be paid more than they had been paid before the plague, and that they couldn't go to work for whoever offered them more pay. Peasants were running away from their estates in droves and the authorities were trying to crack down on that too. The problem was, a lot of the employers were pragmatic people and they were going to hire whoever was available to work for them and offer them higher wages simply to get the work done. They didn't care if the person had run away from their village. They needed the fields plowed. Labor had changed, and it was no longer a buyer's market. The higher pay and ability to pick and choose their employer led to peasants having money. Laws were passed forbidding peasants from wearing clothes that were too good for them, belonging to a higher class, according to the nobility. God forbid that the peasants find out that the only thing that made it possible to tell the classes apart was nice clothing. It was confusing to the social hierarchy.
Rumblings
There weren't things like the internet or television or even newspapers in that time. Most people were illiterate. This didn't mean that they were stupid, just uneducated. They were still capable of understanding what was going on, and they were remarkably well-informed in spite of their enforced ignorance. At the time, there was a class of priest who wanted to reform the Catholic church. As mentioned above, the pope resided in Avignon and another pope resided in Rome. It was the time of the Great Schism. One of the movements that sprang up shortly prior to this time were the Franciscans and their sister movement, the Poor Clares. They looked at the wealth of the church and compared it to how Jesus had lived in poverty, and how St. Francis had emulated this. They formed their own religious order of itinerant monks and priests who went from village to village passing on the news and agitating for reform. The monks could read and were keeping the peasantry informed of events on a national level.
One of these priests was John Ball. He preached in the common tongue, not Latin. He was defrocked and excommunicated by the church for the things he was saying because he challenged the social hierarchy. He was accused of using the bible against the church. He was imprisoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury. At the time of the peasant's revolt in 1381 he was in prison. When the peasants began to move from Kent and Essex, one of the first things they did was go to Canterbury to release John Ball, who gave a speech before the march on London on the field in Blackheath. This was the famous, "When Adam delved and Eve span" speech.
The March
The tax collectors were violent in their attempts to extract taxes from the peasants. They'd take everything of value and then haul it off to huge barns. If anyone resisted they were arrested and sometimes they would be killed outright. On May 30th, 1381 one of the tax collectors assaulted a man named John Tyler's daughter in the county of Kent. The people looking on decided that they'd had enough and they surrounded the tax collectors. Of course, with the king being warlike there had also been laws passed saying that all peasants should be trained in archery and arms just in case he needed them to go die for him in France, where he was starting the Hundred Years' War to press his case to become king of France. So what they had was a group of disgruntled peasants who all knew how to handle themselves with weapons. On the same day a tax collector by the name of John Bampton was trying to collect taxes in Essex. A man by the name of Thomas Baker confronted him in the square and told him that everyone in the village had paid their taxes and that they wouldn't be getting paid again. Bampton arrested Baker and tried to get a jury together to try him on the spot. Bampton could only find two people willing to be jurors. The villagers put him on his horse back to front and sent him out of the village. He had made it a little way from the village before another horse caught up to him carrying a parcel. It was the heads of his two jurors.
By the next day people were gathering. By June 4th they were holding a meeting to decide their next moves. Mobs of people with flails and hedge bills fixed to poles and bows and arrows were on the march. They stopped at jails and released prisoners. They cleaned out the barns where the tax revenues were stored and burned the tax records and the houses of the tax collectors. Good luck collecting taxes from them. They continued their march through Canterbury and Rochester and Maidstone on to Blackheath before marching on London. King Edward III had died in 1377 and his ten year old son Richard II was on the throne. The mob actually met the young king's mother on the road and let her go. Young Richard was hiding in the tower because all of his soldiers were off fighting in a war, and there were no police at that time to protect him. He was only 14 when the uprising took place. He met with his advisers, for example John of Gaunt, and asked them what to do. They told him to sit tight. The peasants, on the other hand, were calling for the king to come out and talk to them face to face.
The Boy King
The mob, strange to believe, trusted the king. Their grievance was with John of Gaunt and the advisers who they believed were misleading an impressionable boy. They believed that if they could see him and talk to him, surely he would see their plight and understand how they had been treated. On the 13th of June the rebels made it to London and started setting houses of hated officials on fire after dragging the officials themselves out of their homes and into the streets to execute them. The royal court was hiding out in the Tower of London trying to figure out what to do.
On June 14th the young king made his way to Mile End to meet with the peasant mob. He listened to their grievances and said that he would not hand over his ministers but that he would personally deal with the situation. That night he met with his advisers about how to proceed. On June 15th he met with Wat Tyler in Smithfields, an area outside of the London city walls. Things appeared to be going well enough except that Wat Tyler was being very familiar with the king, referring to him as his brother and pledging friendship. The king asked him why the rebels hadn't disbanded after he'd met with them the day before. Wat Tyler said that the charter proposed was not good enough and that it would have to be negotiated further. As the talk concluded, Tyler asked for a mug of ale to wet his throat. He took a swig, washed out his mouth and then spit it on the ground. One of the attendants of the King took offense at this and the mayor went to have Tyler arrested. Tyler didn't take this quietly and moved to attack the mayor. The mayor stabbed him and then one of the men with the king stabbed Tyler several times leaving him mortally wounded. He was removed to a church to recover or die, whichever, and the king announced to the crowd that they would have no king but him. The crowd took this to mean that the king was on their side and wanted to lead them. They trusted the king and started to wander off back home to their villages believing that they had gotten what they wanted. The king even sent signed charters out to the villages saying that he was giving them what they wanted. Later that day, Wat Tyler was dragged out of the church he was recovering in and cut off his head. They paraded it around on a stake and then put it up on the city wall.
Aftermath
Once the main uprising was put down and the element of surprise had been lost by the peasants, the nobility and the king organized their forces. Every leader of the revolt was imprisoned or executed. They were made examples of. The king decided that instead of making life easier for the peasants, he would make it harder to teach them a lesson. He wanted to make later generations hate their forebears who had had the temerity to stand up to the nobility and the established social order. John Ball was hung, drawn and burned. The thing was, regardless of the claims of the ruling class to the contrary, they had witnessed the power of the people when they were organized and they were terrified. They never saw it coming. Less than 300 years later they wouldn't see it coming when the peasants beheaded the king.
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| William Morris - A Dream of John Ball |
600 years after the Peasant's Revolt in 1981, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen both declined to take part in any commemorative events celebrating the revolt. Understandable, considering that this was an event which had shown their predecessors exactly how vulnerable their power really was.
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