#1381

To demonstrate this I will begin by suggesting how the English Rising can be understood as an evolution of previous local protests and how repertoires adjusted. This is followed by how the concept of the “wicked advisors” and serfdom was used to legitimise revolt against the king’s government, and devotion to the king seemingly remained disastrously unquestioned. Finally, I explore the importance of formal language and contracts, religious celebrations, and pre-existing interpersonal relationships to the Rising.

Protestors in the English Rising developed their repertoire by expanding on methods that were previously limited to local targets and issues. Potentially in part due to the intrusion of national legislature and judicial processes into seigneurial and village life, once local issues now operated at a larger scale of magnitude, and protest methods remained proportional. Disputes over mundane issues such as rent and villeinage are continuous throughout England before and after the English Rising and are characterised by some, such as Patrick Lantschner, as a routine aspect of medieval English governance, wherein “revolts were not, in general at least, an antithesis, subversion or pathology of the political order”, but only “intensifications of existing processes of negotiation”.[1] [2] The Statute of Labourers (1351) removed much responsibility from employers to provide acceptable wages and conditions, as national law forbid negotiation.[3] This is not, however, to say that there was not still societal anger directed at the continued wealth of the privileged in England who profited from the abuse of English workers. Justices invariably came from the gentry, with vested interests aligning with that of lords of manors and there is certainly intersectionality between government officials and nobility.[4] The targets of rebel violence are highly suggestive of this shift in aims, as rebels were extremely discriminating in their actions.[5] While destruction and looting of property were by far the most prevalent transgressions, the destruction of seigneurial documents was rare, as were attacks on lords themselves.[6] Only five of the 62 violent incidents in the Cambridgeshire countryside were directed against feudal or manorial targets, which is in stark contrast with the 44 incidents directed at judicial and political targets.[7] This suggests that rebels generally prioritised exerting pressure on key governmental figures, and adapted their repertoire of violence to focus on the destruction of wealth rather than seigneurial documents, which had lost significance due to national policies.[8]

Through legitimising themselves as defenders of the king against wicked advisors, rebels operated within a framework of patriotism and religious morality. Accusing Richard II’s advisors rather than the king himself allowed rebels to express frustration with the governance of England without contradicting the divine basis of England’s monarchy. This both defended the rebels from accusations of being unchristian and immoral but in comparison depicted the advisors as unholy manipulators perverting and corrupting the holy office of the King.[9] Internally, this legitimation may have filled rebels with a sense of righteousness or duty to remove the corrupting influence that had led the king, and by extension the country, astray. Conceptually, the evil counsellors were vague enough to encompass a variety of ideologies, binding together disparate parts that may not have all aligned with programs such as the more radical teachings of John Ball, and were malleable and actionable enough to condone a range of actions, so long as they were performed with crowd approval.[10] However, in their loyalty to Richard II, the rebels appear to have been inhibited in their ability to develop a sufficiently coherent, common ideology or establish an alternate leader.[11] By maintaining the king as their non-cooperative figurehead, disparate groups and their local leaders ultimately left themselves at the monarchy’s mercy, and were severely constrained in their ability to organise when eventually contradicted by Richard II.[12] [13]

A key feature of the rebels' claims, an end to serfdom, represented a desire for a far more drastic change to the social structure of medieval England. The social stratification of the Rising is approximately reflective of total social proportions, and rural workers such as peasants never constituted more than half the protesters.[14] [15] Nevertheless, the issue of serfdom was one of the most persistently presented issues by rebels despite competing with the Poll Tax and malicious influences on the King.[16] The prominence of these demands may be due to it being used as a symbol of a general struggle against seigneurial oppression and a call for a complete end to lordship.  Most notably John Ball, but also Wat Tyler and likely many more considering both wielded demonstrable mass support, envisioned a future beyond the tripartite structure of feudal society, leaving no intermediary beyond a single bishop between the king and the body of his kingdom.[17] Within this radical emptying of social category is expressed a desire for the English political structure to have shielded, rather than beleaguered, the disempowered common people, as well as to preserve the essence of the existing system while removing as much of the offensive privilege and wealth as possible.[18] This is furthered by the fact that sources of existing authority were excluded from any place in rebel ideology and leadership, apart from priests who were already excommunicated by the Church, such as Ball.[19] However, even these most radical rebels notably continued to cling to the feudal system and the king's ultimate necessity, relying on Christianity and the monarchy to legitimise their cause. This further demonstrates how the legitimation of the rebels of the English Rising was self-sabotaging in that it relied upon cues from the same system which it simultaneously tried to diminish.

Rebels of the English Rising frequently employed formalised language and conventions typically reclusive to nobility or the judicial system. Through the utilisation of officious language such as bonum commune (common good) and res publica (republic or ‘public thing’) rebels criticised the hypocrisy of English authorities’ paternalistic stance and essentialist distinctions surrounding the intelligence and moral character of social strata such as peasants, craftsmen, clergy, and nobility.[20] The selection of Latin in particular is especially notable due to its association with religious and administrative purposes. The wielding of this language is itself an act of defiance against the exclusivity of ways of expression and by extension ways of thinking. The distinctions of the social hierarchy were further blurred by the use of formalised contracts between rebels, wherein common folk swore fealty to one another and to their cause.[21] While according to the chronicles many of these bonds were coerced, they in any case attest to the capacity of the rebels to gain, swear in, and mobilise a significant mass following, as well as to their ingenuity in the appropriation of the tools of those elevated in society to fulfil their own agenda.[22]  Additionally, when considered in tandem with Ball’s vision of the destruction of hierarchical ordering, these oaths also further undermine the legitimacy of the feudal system as a whole. For an unfree English peasant, the appropriation of contracts and terminology may be perceived as just as significantly radical in their implications as any armed insurrection, as they represent a disregard for the presumed social order and a kind of intellectual rebellion.[23]

The celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi on June 13th was used by the rebels to embolden and inspire those around London with religious zeal and traditional ritual festivity. Corpus Christi marked the entrance of the rebels of Essex and Kent into London and the unification of “neighbours and friends”, as described in the Continuatio Euogii, within the walls of the city.[24] This congregation of like-minded rebels and the revelry of the holiday gave religious significance and energy to the rebels’ actions that greatly empowered and influenced their actions. This energy may also have been derived from the commandeering of the typically carefully controlled celebration of the Church to fulfil their own desires, simultaneously bringing their spirituality and politics into their control. The Rising's gleeful abandon is expressed through several protest methods, such as a procession of decapitated heads marched through London and the crying of “A revelle! A revelle!” (as in revel, or boisterous enjoyment) during the destruction of the Savoy Palace.[25] Particularly notable is the use of one of John of Gaunt’s vestments to construct an effigy of him outside the Savoy to be used as a target for archery before being taken down and eviscerated in anger by the crowd.[26] This example of the entwinement of carnivalesque activities with symbolic violence suggests the power of the shared identity and knowledge the Feast provided: a collective understanding through which rebellious actions could be not only interpreted but enjoyed by participants.[27] Although the chronicles' descriptions of these methods are intended to evoke the grotesque barbarity and impropriety of the common people, they also suggest underlying and empowering ideas of community and equality within the suspension of social difference bestowed by the festivities, within which rebels refuse to accept customs of polite deference and paternalism.[28]

Another key factor in the proliferation of the English Rising was the utilisation of existing knowledge and experience of political activity and strong relationships between urban and rural people. The judicial and fiscal expansion evident between the late twelfth and the mid-fourteenth centuries brought a greater number of people into direct contact with news of the actions of the royal government, the king, and the nobility.[29] They were aware of its impact on their lives as their objects, agents, and victims, and it is certain that peasants and rural artisans had knowledge and opinions about politics.[30] Furthermore, villages had extensive experience in implementing this knowledge and organising themselves, and in many places were almost completely in control of enforcing bylaws at the time of the Rising.[31] In the medieval period, distinctions between political and personal differed greatly to modern conceptions: an insult to a family member or neighbour was an affront to the entire community, and the collective responded accordingly. [32] By drawing upon this extensive political experience, rural and urban England were interconnected not merely ideologically, but socially. These connections were a vital resource in the growth of the Rising as a mass movement that pervaded much of England. Much of the organisation of the Rising was likely improvised, forming a dense web of communities and institutions, only searching for outside leadership once the Rising had gained momentum as a mass movement, such as in the appeal from the people of St Albans to Wat Tyler.[33] [34] Unity was not necessarily created by a centralised focus on London, but through connections between the villages, towns, counties, and guilds that made up the countryside’s rich social and political landscape.  Although events throughout England were inevitably influenced by the status of its capital, movements in other areas of the country generally operated independently of London, each node of rebellion taking place based on the region’s familiar local political environment.[35]

Thus, the English Rising drew largely traditional feudal and Christian tools to empower themselves strategically and ideologically against those who created them. Through the appropriation of formalised and legal language, holidays, and experience of seigneurial disputes, as well as the commonality of living under these structures, rebels created forms of protest that questioned the existing social order. However, despite its unprecedented size as a mass movement and success in ostensibly seizing the capital, the trust and reliance of the Rising’s actors on these paternalist systems of power ultimately prevented them from achieving significant political change.

[1] Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising Of 1381, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, 2003), 146.

[2] Justine Firnhaber-Baker, “Introduction: Medieval Revolt in Context,” in The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt, ed. Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (London: Routledge, 2017), 4.

[3] Edward III and his council, “The Statute of Labourers, 1351,” in The Peasants Revolt of 1381, trans. and ed. Richard Dobson (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1983), 63-68.

[4] Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 154.

[5] Mingjie Xu, “Analysing the Actions of the Rebels in the English Revolt of 1381: The Case of Cambridgeshire,” Economic History Review, 75 no. 3 (August 2022): 887, doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13122.

[6] Xu, 891.

[7] Xu 891.

[8] Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 139.

[9] Joel Rosenthal, “The King’s “Wicked Advisers” and Medieval Baronial Rebellions,” Political Science Quarterly 82 no. 4 (1967): 597, doi.org/10.2307/2148080.

[10] Rosenthal, 596.

[11] Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 41.

[12] Strohm, 41.

[13] Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 219.

[14] Hilton, 184.

[15] Paul Strohm, “A “Peasants’ Revolt”?,” in Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby (New York: Routledge, 2010), 197.

[16] Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 224.

[17] Hilton, 227.

[18] Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 41.

[19] Strohm, 56.

[20] Firnhaber-Baker, “Introduction: Medieval Revolt in Context,” 4.

[21] Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 39.

[22] Strohm, 40.

[23] Firnhaber-Baker, “Introduction: Medieval Revolt in Context,” 6.

[24] Continuatio Eulogii: The Continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum, 1364-1413, trans. and ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2019), 39.

[25] Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 47.

[26] Thomas Walsingham, “Historia Anglicana” in in The Peasants Revolt of 1381, trans. and ed. Richard Dobson (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1983), 70.

[27] Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 49.

[28] Strohm, 47.

[29] Christopher Fletcher, “News, Noise, and the Nature of Politics in Late Medieval English Provincial Towns,” Journal of British Studies, 56, no. 2 (2017): 250, doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2017.1.

[30] Firnhaber-Baker, “Introduction: Medieval Revolt in Context,” 6.

[31] Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 217.

[32] Sylvia Federico, “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381,” Journal of British Studies, 40, no. 2 (2001): 182, doi.org/10.1086/386239.

[33] Firnhaber-Baker, “Introduction: Medieval Revolt in Context,” 6.

[34] Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 219.