Thomas: Politics in a Time of Pandemic

Politics in a Time of Pandemic: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the Storming of the Capitol by Trump Supporters in Historical Perspective

 

Alfred Thomas, University of Illinois at Chicago

 

An angry crowd of rebels, fiercely loyal to the head of state but determined to punish his subordinates as traitors, listens to his speech and, enflamed by his words, rushes to the most prominent landmark in the city where the politicians are hiding in fear. The whole thing is, to say the least, a massive security failure: the mob manages to break into the building and proceeds to ransack its interior, including government documents. In the ensuing conflict several people are killed.

 

This is a highly abbreviated account of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 when thousands of disaffected subjects of King Richard II, angry at the imposition of a punitive poll tax that discriminated against them and favored the rich, invaded London and demanded the abolition of feudal serfdom. The rebels, led by Wat Tyler, gathered in Mile End in the east of London where the king and his retinue came to meet and parley with them (figure 1). Encouraged by the king’s concessions, the mob returned to London and stormed the Tower of London where several of the royal ministers had taken refuge. A few of these beleaguered individuals, including Simon Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury, who had just resigned as Lord Chancellor of England, were dragged out of the Tower and beheaded. Sudbury’s head was paraded through the streets of London with his miter nailed into his brains. In the end, the youthful king reneged on his promises, probably under pressure from his council; and many of the rebels were arrested, tried, and executed. But if the revolt had succeeded and the rebels had gained their demands, it would have transformed English society and would have anticipated the French Revolution by four hundred years.  

                                                            Figure 1

 

                                                          Figure 2

 

The casual reader of my synoptic account of the storming of the Tower of London in 1381 may be forgiven for mistaking it for a thumb-nail sketch of the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. And indeed, as I shall propose, the similarity between the two shocking events is not as facile as it may seem.  But how-- the reader might indignantly ask-- can one compare the plight of England’s oppressed and overtaxed peasantry with the ire of bigots intent on overturning the results of a democratic election? To examine this question more closely, we need to demystify some of our basic assumptions about the Peasants’ Revolt and perhaps even reassess what happened in Washington D.C.

 

First of all, the term “Peasants’ Revolt” is a misnomer. The English rebels were not a homogenous group of ignorant peasants but a diverse assortment of village serfs, bailiffs, constables, stewards and even members of the local gentry, all of whom were adversely affected by the punitive poll tax. Secondly, these rebels were far from the innocent victims of popular belief. Enflamed by the violent beheading of Sudbury, they proceeded to roam through the streets of London hunting down and murdering foreign workers whose economic rivalry they feared and resented: thirty-five Flemings who had taken refuge in St Martin Vintry were dragged outside and beheaded in the street; seventeen others claiming sanctuary in another parish church allegedly suffered a similar fate. 

 

While it is possible to excuse the murder of Sudbury, who, as Lord Chancellor of England, had presided over the enforcement of the punitive poll tax, it seems more difficult to justify the indiscriminate murder of foreigner workers who were simply the innocent scapegoats of a war waged against the governing classes of medieval England. As historian Juliet Barker reminds us, “Xenophobia had always been a very English vice and murdering Flemings was a medieval past time.”[1] In addition to hating foreigners, the medieval English were also virulent anti-Semites; it was, after all, a twelfth-century English monk from Norwich Cathedral named Thomas of Monmouth, who had written the first “blood libel” narrative in which he accused the Jews of murdering a local Christian child in a reenactment of the Passion of Jesus Christ.[2] Even though the Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, hatred of the “spectral Jew” lived on in texts such as Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. It is true that the English rebels of 1381 did not actually kill any Jews during their murderous rampage, but that was simply because there were no Jews left to kill. In Prague a few years later, the picture was very different: in Holy Week, 1389, around 500 Jews were slaughtered and burned on the flimsy accusation that some Jewish boys had thrown a stone at the Host as it was being carried through the Jewish Quarter. I think we can safely assume that had there been any Jews living in Ricardian London, they would have suffered the same fate—and perhaps in far greater numbers—than that of the London-based Flemings in 1381 and the Jews of Prague in 1389.

 

Seen in this sobering historical light, the English rebels start to look a little less like the innocent victims of tyranny and more like the Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol, some of whom — we now know—were wearing hateful tee-shirts emblazoned with the words “Camp Auschwitz”. And like the English "peasants," these rioters were not just uneducated rednecks but a diverse crowd including IT experts and even CEOs. What the English rebels and Trump’s supporters have in common was the urge to scapegoat others for their perceived grievances. Both groups were acting in a climate of hysteria compounded—if not created—by a biomedical catastrophe: six hundred years before the outbreak of Covid-19, the Black Death (more accurately known as the bubonic plague) killed about half the population of England (and Europe) in an eighteen-month period between 1348 and 1351. The pandemic returned intermittently for the next three hundred years, creating an atmosphere of terror and fear that inevitably resulted in the need to blame “outsiders.” Typically, Christians accused the Jews of poisoning the wells and deliberately spreading the plague; in fact in some ways, the Jews were seen as the evil embodiment of the plague, detritus to be flushed from the pure corpus mysticum of Christian society. The result was the mass murder of European Jews by hanging and burning. Certain groups, such as the friars and the flagellants, played on these fears of the “Other” just as President Trump and his followers have repeatedly referred to the Coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” with deleterious consequences for this ethnic minority within the United States. The medieval canard that Jews poisoned the wells was still circulating in Nazi Germany and eastern Europe in the twentieth century. The SS commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, informed his subordinates that the Jews had sabotaged the war effort by blowing up bridges and by poisoning the wells. The SS commandant of the Chelmno death camp in Poland, stated in no uncertain terms that “in this camp the plague boils of humanity, the Jews, are exterminated.” “Kill all Jews” has become an all-too-commonly heard refrain on the streets of Vienna, Paris and Los Angeles during the pandemic year of 2020. Hatred of Jews was something that many of the English rebels and at least some of Trump’s supporters have in common, and in both cases the pandemic enflamed their bigotry.

 

Both groups were also reacting to the dire economic effects of pandemic. It is true that the situation in medieval England was somewhat different in so far as the Black Death caused a labor shortage that actually favored the peasantry and allowed them to demand higher wages, whereas in the United States the Covid-induced lockdown has resulted in massive levels of unemployment and financial insecurity. But both factors influenced the events we are describing: the English rebels were doubtless emboldened by the plague conditions to demand the abolition of serfdom while the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol were not only reacting to the President’s baseless claims of voter fraud but were clearly angry at Congress for dragging its feet over the massive relief bill-- a delay compounded, ironically by Trump’s stalling tactics in refusing to sign the bill until the last moment.

 

The conjoined effects of epidemiological and economic catastrophe cannot excuse the violent behavior (and extreme beliefs) of Trump’s supporters any more than it can justify the murderous acts of the English rebels in 1381. What historical contextualization can allow us to do is to comprehend why such groups act in the way that they do. A major impediment to understanding extreme behavior in such times as ours is the tendency now and in the fourteenth century to demonize protesters with labels like “traitors” and “domestic terrorists.” During the protests of 2020 Fox News routinely castigated Black Lives Matter demonstrators in such terms; and CNN has used exactly the same words to describe Trump’s supporters in the wake of January 6.  In fact, such terms are curiously reminiscent of the shocked reaction to the Peasants’ Uprising by chroniclers like Walsingham and the Ricardian writer John Gower who condemned the rebels as lowborn serfs and traitors to the Crown. Conversely, in the minds of the rebels at least, these chroniclers represented the oppressive political elites, which is one reason why they were so determined to burn the monastic documents they discovered during their rampage both in London and in the provinces. Doubtless, Trump’s supporters—rightly or wrongly—perceive today’s mainstream news in the same way as the representatives of the ruling elite who misrepresent them as traitors rather than patriots.

 

We can conclude by arguing that the political and economic crisis created by Covid-19 is both epidemiological and epistemological: truth is hard to find in a world where news reporting has descended into a partisan slanging match between ideological opponents, when the distinction between reporting and editorial has become hopelessly blurred. If we are to get beyond this vicious circle of blame and recrimination and the hysterical atmosphere of fear and anger in which we are currently living, we need to step back in a dispassionate fashion and examine the complex interplay of politics and pandemic in the creation of the current crisis. Revisiting the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt of the fourteenth century might allow us to think through the similarities as well as the dissimilarities between the medieval past and the present.

 

Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author most recently of The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet (Boydell and Brewer, 2020). His current book project is titled Writing Plague: The Politics of Pandemic from Chaucer to Camus.

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[1] Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 265.

[2] Thomas of Monmouth. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, translated and edited by Miri Rubin (London: Penguin Classics, 2014).

Toswell: Today's Medieval University

M. J. Toswell, Today’s Medieval University. Kalamazoo, MI: Arc Humanities Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-942401-9.

 

Reviewed by Jesse G. Swan, University of Northern Iowa

 

A contribution to the Past Imperfect series, a series intended to provide an overview of specific Medieval and European topics for readers new to the topics, the small, easy to handle and easy to read on the go volume illuminates the ways today’s European and especially North American universities retain and reproduce structures and legitimating procedures that are either Medieval or are felt to be Medieval. In the course of the volume, furthermore, M. J. Toswell means to advance the centrality of faculty to the successful university.

 

The first of three chapters that form the body of the book establishes the basic assumptions and method. Toswell presents Medieval practices and behaviors in order to distinguish these from others that do not seem to derive from the Middle Ages, even if they might derive from older traditions. The chief connection to the Medieval is through the experience and effect of certain procedures and manners, notably in final examinations and in commencement. Other social features of the contemporary university, such as the lecture and bureaucracy, are said to derive from other periods, such as classical for the lecture, and modern for the bureaucracy. The sense of having to build up to pass a final exam or set of exams, and that these be either general or specialized, depending upon the credential sought, is attached to the social capital of commencement in that once the masters pass the student and he or she takes the degree, the student is transformed into a master for life. Such essential transformation of the self is much more Medieval than it is classical, modern, or postmodern.

 

After describing two basic models of the university, chapter two details five prominent structural features that today’s university either inherited from the Middle Ages or conjured for itself with its own sensibilities about the premodern. The basic organizations include that of Bologna, in which students ban together and attract masters, and that of Paris, in which masters incorporate and take on students. While both models of governance inform today’s university, the Parisian model dominates. Complementing the basic model of a group of faculty organized into a corporate body that draws students, the contemporary university resembles a Medieval university in its development and maintenance of extensive endowments and provisions for scholarships and in its provision of room and board and other sorts of physical, emotional, psychological, social, and, often, spiritual care. The fourth and fifth features of the structure of the contemporary university detailed as Medieval involve the architecture – Gothic – and the generally insular, backward looking and slow-changing disposition of those in charge. The character of the university is said to come from its structural foundation in faculty authority and control.

 

The Medieval structure and character of today’s university serves the basic activity of the scholars: the maintenance and advancement of learning. Like Medieval universities, contemporary universities are said to be “extremely pragmatic institutions” (84), places in which scholars, be they faculty or students, did not and do “not aspire to think deep thoughts” (88). Rather, faculty prepare students for good jobs. In pre-modern times, these were in the church and the government. Today, they are in the government and in business. The vocational motive shapes the curriculum, so that we have, in Medieval and contemporary universities alike, taking notes in lectures, meditating on knowledge, mastering of writing and living styles, and the division of general studies and specialized studies, the former usually first, followed by the latter. In all, there is a keen connection between learning and teaching. These features complement more ancient curricula, notably that of close reading, oral disputation, and rhetorically effective writing. Corporal punishment is a Medieval feature absent from today’s curriculum.

 

The entertaining, breezy volume concludes with a brief consideration of major features of the university not treated. Notably, the university as an economic engine, the bureaucratic nature of academic leadership, and tenure’s connection to the monastery and its ways of living are mentioned. Each of these features is quite distinct in the two periods compared. It is the similarities between the Medieval and the contemporary that the volume means to highlight.

 

Showing how today’s university draws from a Medieval version of the university or from a post-Medieval desire to seem abidingly Gothic is the primary way the volume supports the motivating contention that governance is the foundational shaping influence of any specific university and that a legitimate university has a governance structure that has faculty at the center of it. In a nicely expressed statement, one that catches the best of the style and spirit of the essay, Toswell declares just so:

 

A university that does not have its faculty at the heart of its governance structure does not have a sufficiently strong structure. It will sway to the winds of change, alter its trajectory from decade to decade, swing to the beat of the current pundit or the current craze, leap to the economic opportunity of the latest fad or enrolment proposal, lose its way among all the competing ideologies, and falter at the hurdles of the modern, the postmodern, and now the posthuman society. (73)

 

Jesse G. Swan

University of Northern Iowa

McKendry: Medieval Crime Fiction

Anne McKendry, Medieval Crime Fiction. A Critical Overview (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2019) i-viii, 267 pp; 978-1-4766-6671-6 (print), 978-1-4766-3625-2 (eBook)

 

'Dial M for Medieval'

 

Jenna Mead (jenna.mead@uwa.edu.au)

 

Anne McKendry's new book, Medieval Crime Fiction. A Critical Overview, came in as one of five nominees shortlisted for this year's Edgar Allan Poe Award (popularly called the Edgars) in the Critical/Biography category. This is two kinds of big deal. Australians have made rare but distinguished appearances at the Edgars. Charlotte Jay [pseud. Geraldine Halls] took out the inaugural Best Novel of the Year, 1954, with Beat Not the Bones; Raymond Chandler reached Jay's benchmark, in the following year, with The Long Goodbye. The Edgar for Best Critical/Biographical Work has been awarded since 1977 and McKendry is the first Australian in the category, so her book is already a stand-out. More critically, though, the Edgars are awarded by crime fiction's learned society, the Mystery Writers of America. These are the people who know what's what and where the bodies are buried. So, a hat-tip from the MWA is a prize in and of itself.

 

McKendry is a medievalist with a PhD and another book behind her, meaning that she has dibs on her subject matter and the experience to produce this first critical overview of the surprisingly popular genre of medieval crime fiction. The genre is now too extensive for a short book like this one and so McKendry's study is strictly limited to crime fiction and medieval western Europe. 'Critical overview' means this isn't just a survey but an analysis of the origin, forms, strengths and limitations of the genre. Medieval crime fiction arrives as a serious object of inquiry.

 

Definition is essential in this kind of book and McKendry clears the ground with a crisp distinction between crime fiction written by medievals (another topic entirely) and crime fiction written through the medieval world and its inhabitants. As a genre, it is unique in combining 'medievalism, the historical novel and crime fiction' (42). The paradigm is Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980 in Italian, 1983 in English) though Edith Parteger, aka 'Ellis Peters,' predates Eco with a series of 20 novels (1974-1995), featuring Brother Cadfael, the Benedictine monk turned sleuth.

 

Prime face, medieval crime fiction just should not work. Crime fiction's traditional drivers are the highly developed ratiocination of Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin and the forensic science typified by autopsy, and they're mobilized by the twin régimes of modernity and secularization. (Witness the egregious failure that is G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown.) Its spaces resonate as accessible and authentic for us. It's the social and political economies of late capitalism that produce the apparatus of the police procedural, the anguished subjectivity of the hard-boiled private investigator, the gutsy smarts of the feminist operator. Though crime fiction is capacious, its language, conventions and emotional registers are immediately recognizable and permanent fixtures on backlists and the next wave of bestsellers.

 

McKendry turns to Umberto Eco to theorize the medievalism that gives these books their edge: the characters, temporality, locations, set-up. We have been dreaming of the Middle Ages, he argues in Travels in Hyperreality, since becoming modern; in postmodernity, we live in a neomedieval age; we need only to decide which version of the Middle Ages we invoke and he gives us ten options, ten medieval imaginaries. The cultural work of medievalism, Eco surmises, is to negotiate a way through our anxieties. It's the ubiquity of medievalism — evidenced wherever we need a medieval past — that substantiates the credibility of Eco's insights.

 

From here, McKendry's overview opens out to map just how medieval crime fiction works, usefully illustrated from numerous of the more than 150 authors currently publishing in the genre. Five of her six chapters are thematic and her method is to identify in medieval crime fiction what is recognizable from traditional crime fiction. The hard-boiled detective epitomised by Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe — operating as a loner, pitted against corrupted systems of law, trawling the mean streets, trusting no-one, for whom failure is normal and justice is piecemeal — is instantly identifiable in the ex-crusaders, ex-Templars, lawyers, surgeons, scribes, bookmakers, peddlers and bailiffs who hunt criminals and solve crimes in the secular world of Eco's 'barbaric' Middle Ages.

 

Institutionalized corruption is often represented by deceitful sheriffs and/or the intricate and fast-paced alliances of medieval politics and/or the operations of ecclesiastical imperium — each with its own kind of decadence — threatening the social order and treating justice as their first casualty. Power, money, greed, the ethics of cruel: we've seen it all before. This is where the medieval crime writer's dedication to research either persuades or, less successfully, overpowers the crime plot. As McKendry convincingly shows, the constant here is the medieval detective, male or female, secular or religious, who is the reader's likeable, empathetic, occasionally infuriating guide through the lived experience of the medieval world. This relationship with the reader works because medievalism is a two-way street between the past and the present. Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma is a proto-feminist detective; Paul C. Doherty's Brother Athelstan may be a reluctant detective but he is innately egalitarian; Caroline Roe's Isaac the Blind, the genre's only major Jewish detective, is a liberal, astutely tracking the fragility of Jewish-Muslim-Christian tolerance under pressure from religious extremism and consequent migration.

 

In its wide-ranging scope, intelligent organization and encouraging accessibility, this book is also an excellent teaching resource. The data is both cogent and thorough. The underlying arguments for medieval crime fiction as a genre are persuasive, not only from the trajectory of McKendry's scrutiny but also from the sheer heft of the data. The methodology is as instructive as the analysis and students, coming to the genre for the first time, or teachers looking, for points of entry into a field they intuit as a creative and expansive version of medievalism, will find their reading fully supported. McKendry's taxonomy gies us the low-down on an emergent field.

 

Medieval Crime Fiction has a lot of smart things to say about this genre but absolutely spot-on is to emphasise the allure of the medieval past, with its intriguing characters, tangible details and persistent cruelties, its traction in picking up on today's cultural anxieties and, above all, the challenge to the triumph of forensic science and technology. Yes, medieval crime shows off its writers' hardcore research into bottomless historical detail; yes, there's an essential anachronism in the whole business of medieval detective work; yes, perhaps authenticity is at risk from postmodern scepticism among other ironies. But the detective, whatever his or her secular or religious garb, operating inside or outside the religious house or royal court, in the world of business, commerce or the landed gentry, on the street or in the back alley, offers readers the satisfying nostalgia of a thinking, feeling, personable sherlock sharing the intimacy of needing, sometimes desperately, to solve the crime, restore order, and offer redemption to fallible characters ranging from the (often) nuanced to the (sometimes) corny. For all its historical apparatus, medieval crime fiction translates the past into a compelling, if usually conservative, emotional logic. Sobering, isn't it? We're drowning in metadata and Goodreads tells us we're reaching for medieval crime fiction that has none of that.  

 

Jenna Mead

 

Jenna Mead is Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and is currently co-editing Geoffrey chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe for Cambridge University Press. Her latest contribution to medievalism studies is an essay on medievalism and Indigenous ceremonial in the Gulf country of northern Australia: ‘Medievalism on Country,’ in The Global South and Literature, ed. Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge University Press, 2018.