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 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.
