Miriam Müller
On the one hand I am
pleased that the peasantry – or may I say the rebels – of 1381 are being drawn
on for analogy and inspiration to explore and explain the events we recently
observed on our television screens when a Trump-supporting mob entered Capitol
Hill and thereby directly attacked the core of liberal democracy in the
USA. The shock of these events reverberated
across the globe – I was watching events unfold sitting in our living room in
Germany, at the same time as friends were following events in other parts of
Europe and the Americas – and I dare say it will be one of those key events in
history people will see in future as a hook for other memories. It was at the
time when – at least in Germany – we were in our second lockdown in the second
wave of the SARS Covid 19 pandemic. But
I digress. It makes me happy that the rebels of 1381 are discussed again
because I happen to like them as much as I despise the hate-filled speeches and
sentiments emanating from the pro-Trump crowd.
To start with, it is a
common mistake to see the 1381 revolt as an event centred around London. I
blame British historians for this entirely as the London-centric view of
political, cultural and economic events so common to Britain has often not
sufficiently been tempered by the research scope of historians of the fourteenth
century. Indeed, one overriding factor which has always fascinated me about the
rebellion is just how widespread it was. Unrest was not just occurring near and
around London, but in other large sections of England. The whole of East
Anglia, for example was in revolt. Here, historians have reconstructed and
painstakingly tracked rebel movements across villages and towns, who were often
very probably in contact with rebels from further south and west through
mounted messengers who carried word and news quickly through the countryside
and into towns, promoting and maintaining the revolt as it spread to the centre
of England, where unrest was felt in Reading, Worcester and other places and as
far to the southwest as Berkshire and Somerset.[1] Yet in their localised actions they remained
autonomous rebel bands of men and women who left us, in the local indictment
records, many very precious clues as to their aims and aspirations. Theirs was
a communal uprising peaking around Corpus Christi day, when villagers
traditionally danced around bonfires and followed processions through the
centres of towns and villages with their local priests.[2]
This matters of course.
It was a widespread movement of angry people on the move who were tackling
their own local sources of government corruption and exploitation, their target
was therefore not the seat of Government nationally, but very locally. Thomas argues that the rebels were not ‘a
homogeneous group of ignorant peasants’. True, I completely agree that the
rebels were neither a homogeneous group nor ignorant, yet peasants they were
for the most part. Peasants could be well off or dirt poor, they could hold a
lot of land or little from their local lord, some were free, some were unfree
(customary villein peasant tenants) and some were both; that is, they held some
land freely and some in serfdom. There was therefore little that can be called
homogeneity at home in rural communities. Village officials, reeves, haywards,
even in some cases bailiffs also came from peasant families and high-ranking
village officials like reeves were usually drawn only from unfree villein
families. These were therefore not
people separate from peasant society as Thomas suggests, but rather an integral
part of it.
These were not ignorant
people, some could even read and write, and they were very well versed in law,
common law and local manorial law. They enforced law and order locally and had
the duty to speak in the manorial court. Yet they were peasants indeed. That is,
they made the majority or all of their living through agriculture. I therefore
do not think that calling the Peasants’ Revolt a ‘peasants’ revolt’ is a
misnomer. Even when townspeople participated in larger numbers – such as in
London – it is worth remembering that towns had higher death than birth rates.
This means that the existence of towns was only possible because of immigration,
mainly from villages. In other words, most townspeople would still have had
very strong rural roots and came from peasant stock.
The men and women of
1381 had many good reasons to be dissatisfied. The Black Death – we are back at
the pandemic – had ravaged villages with a terrifying death rate, which reached
over 60% to 70% or more in some places, leaving survivors traumatised yet also
in a very powerful bargaining position to better their lives. Yet instead of
being able to benefit from rising wages and cheaper land they encountered lords
who attempted to turn back the clock, put the brakes on economic change and
impose a second serfdom. These rebels were not just thinking of themselves.
They thought of their children and children’s children, they rebelled for the
futures of their offspring. Their violence against property, which Thomas draws
attention to, was moreover very deliberately targeted. They burned legal
records which contained proof of their serfdom, they pulled down manor houses
and requisitioned livestock to sustain their endeavours. They did not do these
things because they wanted to steal and loot, rather their message was political.
When the rebels sacked the Savoy in London they did not carry off John of
Gaunt’s treasure but ceremoniously threw it in the Thames or on a bonfire. They
wanted to destroy lordship and the records of their serfdom. They were not
against law, they wanted a just law. They did not want to steal but stop exploitation.
It is true that some
Flemings are reported to have been killed, in London as well as in King’s Lynn
in Norfolk. There is much uncertainly around why these people were targeted and
I have never found any evidence which helps to explain the actions of the
rebels who killed them. Without such evidence we might make educated guesses or
speculate, but as a historian this seems dissatisfying, as without a single
solid piece of evidence, reasons might range as widely as personal vendetta or
feud to, indeed, a hatred of foreigners. Yet even here we must tread with
caution. Any historian of English villagers will have come across many
villagers who are noted in the local manorial records as ‘the foreigner’, or
‘the Frenchman’ or, especially in the Midlands of England which regularly saw
an influx of Welsh migrants during harvest seasons, ‘The Welshman’. They might
be people who were identified as originating outside the village through such
explanatory suffixes, but I have never in such cases seen any tangible evidence
indicating that these people, if they decided to settle, were not accepted once
they took on local land. In the village it was land that accorded status, not
where one originated from.
Anti-Semitism is
another problematic area. Accusations of Jews poisoning wells were far from
uncommon in continental Europe but not in England, very probably because Jewish
communities had been expelled previously. Yet to assume that that had Jewish
people lived in London the rebels of 1381 would have killed them is an ahistorical
as well as an illogical reading of the Revolt, which had nothing at all to do
with fear of the Black Death, as had the persecution of Jews in Europe. We have
furthermore no evidence at all of what the rebels of 1381 thought about Jews.
Instead, we know that
they hated inequality: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the
gentylman?’, John Ball is famed for proclaiming in 1381: a radical brand of
Christianity which calls for equality and even suggests that no man is lord
over his wife, something which would sit very uneasily indeed with most Trump
supporters on Capitol Hill. Neither could I imagine any of Ball’s other
proclamations attributed to him by contemporary and hostile commentators to fit
into the pro-Trump Proud Boys camp: ‘How can they claim or prove that they are
lords more than us, except by making us produce and grow the wealth which they
spend?’[3]
Instead of fear and
anger, as Thomas suggests, I see in 1381 an immense expression of hope for a
better future. It was a forward-looking movement built on the hard work of
ordinary people who attempted to build a better life after the ruins left by the
first arrival of the plague, Yersinia pestis, in 1348-9. From what we can piece
together, the rebels of 1381 were hoping for some form of representative
government with the king at its head. They
wanted to get rid of lords as the enforcers of inequality and serfdom, whom
they saw as corrupt and ‘traitors’ as they stood against what the rebels saw
was the true commons, the loyal and trustworthy subjects of the king -
themselves. They wanted freedom from the shackles of servitude for their
offspring and to enjoy the fruits of the land which they felt should be held in
common. They were, by definition, not in favour of the destruction of
democratic principles. This might be a more positive message to take from 1381,
and one which is thereby wholly and totally at odds with the scene at Capitol
Hill, and yet still very relevant for our current time dominated by pandemic
fears. 1381 for me is above all about survival and hope for a better future of
greater equality and better standards of living for ordinary people.
Miriam Müller, Solingen,
Germany
Relevant publications:
Miriam Müller, Childhood,
Orphans and Underage Heirs in Medieval Rural England; Growing up in the Village
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Miriam Müller, ‘Conflict and
Revolt: The bishop of Ely and his peasants at the manor of Brandon in Suffolk
ca. 1300-1381’, in Rural History, 23,
1 (2012),
pp. 1-19.
Miriam Müller, 'Arson, Communities and Social Conflict in Later Medieval England',
in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 43, 2 (2012) pp.
193-208.
Miriam Müller, ‘The Aims and
Organisation of a Peasant Revolt in Early Fourteenth-Century Wiltshire’, in Rural History, 14, 1 (2003), pp.
1-20.
[1] Herbert Eiden: „In der
Knechtschaft werdet ihr verharren …“ Ursachen und Verlauf des englischen
Bauernaufstandes von 1381. (THF, Trier 1995); C. Dyer, ‘The Rising of 1381 in
Suffolk: Its Origins and Participants’, in C. Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval
England (Hambledon and London, 2000) pp. 221-239. Miriam Müller, ‘Conflict and Revolt: The bishop of Ely
and his peasants at the manor of Brandon in Suffolk ca. 1300-1381’, in: Rural History, volume 23, issue 01,
(April 2012), pp. 1-19; Miriam Müller, 'Arson, Communities and Social Conflict
in Later Medieval England', in:Viator
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 43, no.2 (2012) pp. 193-208.
[2] M. Aston, ‘Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the
Peasants' Revolt’, in Past
and Present (1994), pp. 3-47.
[3] J. Froissart,
Chronicles, ed. by G. Brereton (Penguin Classics 1978), p. 212.
