1381.7

INSURRECTION OF THE PEASANTRY.

5

the serfs and tenants in villanage. In the same parliament a statute was passed against "liveries; " by which we learn that "divers people of small revenue of land, rent, or other possessions, do make great retinue of people as well of esquires as of other, in many parts of the realm, giving to them hats and other liveries, of one suit by year, taking of them the value of the same livery, or perchance the double value, by such covenant and assurance that every one of them shall maintain the other in all quarrels." The “divers people of small revenue "were banding themselves together against the oppressions of the great proprietors. Serfs, petty tenants in villanage, freemen of small revenue, were all discovering that as the country grew in wealth, as comforts were more diffused, as the citizens and burghers were for the most part free from feudal exactions, as even the serf who had lived a certain time in an incorporated town became free,-the cultivators, whether yeomen, or tenants, or labourers, had rights to maintain, and those who in rank and possessions were greatly above them had duties to discharge. We must especially notice the circumstance that those who claimed manumission relied upon their interpretation of the Domesday Record-which, to a great extent, had reference to the times of Edward the Confessor. They would go back to the Anglo-Saxon days to set aside the more extensive and more burdensome feudalities of the days since the Conquest. It was a demonstration of that national principle which has ever sought to build civil rights upon ancient foundations.

The insurrection of 1381, like most other attempts to obtain political justice by a tumultuous appeal to arms, was set on foot for the assertion of moderate demands, and became an occasion for havoc and bloodshed. The insurrection, however prepared by the confederacies for manumission, broke out in Kent through that manslaughter of the royal tax-collector by Wat the Tyler, which was the consequence of an outrageous insult, by the collector, on Tyler's daughter. The whole rural population of that district, in which the Saxon principle of personal independence had been cherished from generation to generation, flew to arms. The statistics, upon which the amount of taxes to be collected were founded, had always gone upon false estimates of the population. It could not be otherwise at a period when there was no system of registration. The collection of the poll-tax fell short of the required supply; and commissions were appointed to overlook the collectors, and rigidly enforce the levy. Men of Essex refused to answer the inquiries of the commissioners, and murdered officers of the commission. The same spirit of revolt existed in Suffolk and Norfolk. At Gravesend, a burgher had been claimed by his lord as a bondman, and was sent as a prisoner to Rochester Castle. The insurgents took the castle and liberated the burgher. But the great resistance to authority was under the leadership of Wat the Tyler, who associated with himself an itinerant preacher, John Ball, who, fourteen years before, had been excommunicated for preaching " errors, and schisms, and scandals against the pope, the archbishops, bishops, and clergy." To him is attributed the famous couplet

"When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?"

Another priest, who assumed the name of Jack Straw, was connected with

6

THE INSURGENTS IN LONDON.

[1381.

the insurgents of Essex. Gathering large numbers of adherents from various parts, a vast body at length reached Blackheath. Some of the band had compelled the mayor and aldermen of Canterbury to swear fidelity to their cause, and many of the citizens had joined them in their march towards London. This was no sudden tumult of an isolated body of men, for the revolt extended from the coast of Kent to the Humber, and was organised in a remarkable manner by correspondence in letters which bore the signatures of Jack Milner, Jack Carter, Jack Trueman, and John Ball. The course of the insurgents was marked by the accustomed atrocities of ignorant men with weapons in their hands. It was not very likely, in an age when regular warfare was conducted without the slightest regard to the rights of humanity, that these rustics would exhibit the virtue of mercy which the lords of chivalry never cultivated. But in their destruction of property they would allow of no plunder for individual gain. As this rude army of a hundred thousand men approached London, there was, necessarily, universal consternation. The king, with members of his council, were in the Tower. The conduct of the royal youth was bold and energetic. He had left Windsor to meet the danger. On the 12th of June he descended the river in his barge. He was met with shouts and cries by the insurgents on the Rotherhithe bank, and his attendants would not permit him to land. That night, Southwark and Lambeth witnessed the demolition of the houses of the Marshalsea and of the King's Bench, and the sack of the palace of the archbishop of Canterbury. Out of Southwark they passed over London Bridge into the city on the following morning. They demolished Newgate, and burnt the duke of Lancaster's palace of the Savoy, and also the Temple. With the usual prejudice against foreigners, they butchered the Flemish artisans, wherever they were found. During this fearful day the king remained in the Tower. On the 14th of June, when Tower-hill was filled with this multitude, a herald made proclamation that the king would meet them at Mile-end. They moved off; and young Richard rode out of the Tower gates with a few followers, who were unarmed. He received the petition which the insurgents had drawn up. They demanded the abolition of slavery; the reduction of the rent of land to fourpence an acre; free liberty to buy and sell in all markets and fairs; and a general pardon for offences. Looking at the moderation of these demands. it is difficult to believe that the objects of the insurrection were the destruction of all distinctions of rank, and the division of all property. Slavery was an unnatural condition, the more onerous where it existed at a time when it was gradually passing away, and which could not be long upheld by force. To limit the rent of land to fourpence an acre-a rate not much, if anything, below the average rental-was not more absurd than laws to limit the rate of wages and fix the price of provisions. To claim a liberty to buy and sell in all markets and fairs, was to assert a freedom of commercial intercourse which was greatly impeded by the charters of towns, and by the tolls which the lay and ecclesiastical lords exacted in every city and borough. These demands were agreed to by the king. The remaining hours of the day and the succeeding night were employed by many clerks in drawing up charters to the effect of the petition, for every parish and township. They were sealed the next morning; and the great body, chiefly the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, retired, bearing the king's banner. But the Kentish Tyler remained

1381.]

SUPPRESSION OF THE INSURRECTION.

7

in arms, with a body of the insurgents. He led his men into the Tower. They murdered the archbishop and other dignified persons, and drove the king's mother out of her lodgings. On the 17th, the king rode into Smithfield. The leader of the Kentish men, who had become insolent and ferocious in the hour of success, refused the charters which were offered to him. When he saw the king coming he halted his followers, and rode up to meet the youth, whose noble bearing would unquestionably have commanded the respect of Englishmen, and turned the tide of favour against the rebel. During their parley, Tyler put his hand upon his dagger, and touched the king's bridle. Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, immediately stabbed him. The insurgents, when they saw their leader fall, bent their bows; but Richard, with the heroism of his race, galloped up to the astonished band, and exclaimed, "Tyler was a traitor-I will be your leader." They followed him to the fields of Islington, where a considerable force of citizens and others hastened to protect their king. There, the insurgents fell on their knees and implored his mercy. Richard commanded them to return to their homes; but would allow no attack to be made upon them by the forces which were gathering around him. In the eastern counties the insurrection was put down by Henry Spenser, known as the fighting bishop of Norwich. In a fortnight the charters were revoked by the king, and then followed, in every county, trials and executions to an enormous extent.

That the insurrection of 1381 was, in many districts, put down by means as violent and illegal as the outbreak, may be judged by the fact of a statute of indemnity being passed in parliament, for those who "made divers punishments upon the said villans and other traitors without due process of the law, and otherwise than the laws and usages of the realm required, although they did it of no malice prepensed, but only to appease and cease the apparent mischief." In the same statute all compulsory manumissions and releases were declared void. The parliament had been informed by the king that he had revoked all the charters of emancipation which he had been compelled to grant; but he submitted whether it would not be expedient to abolish the state of slavery altogether. That Richard was in this honestly advised, by counsellors who were far-seeing statesmen, we may well believe. With one accord the interested lords of the soil replied that they never would consent to be deprived of the services of their bondmen. But they complained of grievances less inherent in the structure of society-of purveyance; of the rapacity of law officers; of maintainers of suits, who violated right and law as if they were kings in the country; of excessive and useless taxation. These were evils which touched themselves. Slavery was an evil which to them was profitable, as they believed. We need not think too harshly of men to whom injustice had been familiarised by long ancestral usage.

In all the insurrectionary proceedings which so clearly indicated a condition of society in which those lowest in the social scale met with little consideration and no immediate redress, we cannot perceive, what has been maintained with a confidence very disproportioned to the evidence-that the "theory of property" expounded by Wycliffe, was a main cause of this anarchy-that "the new teaching received a practical comment in 1381, in the invasion of London by Wat, the Tyler of Dartford, and a hundred thousand men, who were to level all ranks, put down the church, and establish universal

8

WYCLIFFE'S OPINIONS COINCIDENT WITH THE INSURRECTION. [1381.

liberty." This unqualified statement is founded upon the very doubtful narrative of the chronicler Walsingham, as interpreted by Dr. Lingard. That historian says, "They (the villans) were encouraged by the diffusion of the doctrines of Wycliffe, that the right of property was founded in grace, and that no man, who was by sin a traitor to his God, could be entitled to the services of others." Mr. Froude holds that "the theory, as an abstraction, applied equally to the laity as the clergy." Men like the rustics of Kent and Essex are not prone to act upon abstractions. Wycliffe taught, as others have taught after him, that "the clergy had no right to their tithes and temporal endowments except so far as they discharged faithfully their spiritual duties." The reformer considered the clergy as holding property as a direct recompense for service, the property being forfeit if the service were unperformed. A richly endowed church would necessarily take another view of the question, and denounce such doctrine as heretical. The experience of modern times has shown that it was not politic. Wycliffe's paramount grievance was the arrogance and the unchristian character of many who called themselves Vicars of Christ. To denationalise the clergy, by making them stipendiaries, was at that period to throw them completely under the influence of the papacy. Their landed possessions offered the best security for their patriotism and their civil obedience. But that Wycliffe's theory, so distinctly limited to ecclesiastical affairs, should have suggested the notion,-if the insurgents of 1381 ever did entertain such a notion, that all property should be in common, appears to us irreconcileable with the ordinary course of human action. It is irreconcileable with their demand of a maximum for rent. The assumed connexion of "the new doctrine" with the insurrection may be attributed to the hostility with which the Lollard opinions were assailed by the misrepresentations of the apprehensive ecclesiastics and their historians. The agitation of Wycliffe and his followers was coincident with the insurrection of the villans, but it was not of necessity a cause. Agitation of any kind begets other agitation. But this was not the direct effect which some impute to the dissemination of Wycliffe's tenets.

Within a few months after the accession of Richard II., the rector of Lutterworth, in consequence of letters from the pope, was summoned before the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, to answer for his opinions. He defended his doctrines, and was dismissed, with a direction to be cautious for the future. After the insurrection of 1381 had been quelled, a synod of divines was called, in which many of Wycliffe's opinions were censured as heretical, erroneous, and of dangerous tendency. To follow up their triumph, the prelates procured an Act to be passed by the Lords to the following effect:-That divers evil persons, under the dissimulation of great holiness, go about from county to county, and from town to town, "without the license of our holy father, the pope, or of the ordinaries of the places, or other sufficient authority, preaching daily, not only in churches and churchyards, but also in markets, fairs, and other open places." The sermons so preached, it is alleged, have been proved before the archbishop of Canterbury

"History of England, by James Anthony Froude, M.A.," vol. ii. p. 19. Lingard, vol. iv. p. 236.

See "Apology for Lollard Doctrines, attributed to Wycliffe." Todd, D.D. Introduction, p. xxiv.

Edited by J. H.

인

3

1381.]

PREACHERS OF HERESIES.

9

and the bishops and prelates, and a great part of the clergy, to contain heresies and notorious errors. Further it is said, "which persons do also preach divers matters of slander, to engender discord and dissension betwixt divers estates of the said realm, as well spiritual as temporal, in exciting of the people, to the great peril of all the realm." The Act then directs the sheriff's to hold such preachers and their abettors "in arrest and strong prison, till they will justify themselves according to the law and reason of holy church." This victory over the "poor preachers" was very short-lived. Wycliffe petitioned against the Act. The Commons represented that it had been passed without their consent. It was immediately repealed; and we hear nothing more in the legislative records about preachers of heresies, till, eighteen years afterwards, a law was passed to burn them. To us it appears manifest that, in repealing this Act, the parliament asserted its conviction that the heresies, the notorious errors, the matters of slander, which were preached in open places, had solely reference to the alleged corruptions of the Church, and that to subject the kingdom to the jurisdiction of the prelates, as the Act proposed,

pe bugiming weas pe word r ye word was at god t god mes pe mod yis was mye bigg nyng at god alle pings wenu maad hibÿm: and damonten him was maad noping pat mg pat was maad m him bashof and pelyt was pelat of men and bst schynen in derkuellis and derkuellis complendidem notit

Specimen from a Copy of Wycliffe's Bible, in the British Museum. Royal MS. I. C. viii.)

was to surrender the civil freedom which their ancestors had maintained. The men who refused to assent to the proposal of the king that slavery should be abolished, would have been ready enough to sanction the imprisonment of the preachers of universal equality, if such had been their doctrine. Undoubtedly Wycliffe himself did not hesitate to maintain that the revenues of the Church, applied, not to the service of the altar by its diligent ministers, but to the