THE PEASANT REVOLT.*

THE late Mr. J. R. Green in one of his least inspired moments declared that the ablest of the Plantagenets was King John. If wasted opportunities and the alternation of courage and capacity with fits of wayward and vindictive obstinacy are a criterion of ability, the second Richard may claim a place by the side of his progenitor. The identity of the forlorn figure uncrowning itself before the hostile Peers with the kingly boy who overawed the Kentish rebels is one of the puzzles of history,—a puzzle that is best explained, perhaps, by that wonderful portrait which hangs in the Jerusalem Chamber. Yet it is something to have proved oneself a King, if only for an hour, and the gloom of the Pomfret dungeon may well have been lightened by the memory of that June morning when simple courage and presence of mind turned the Conference of Smithfield into a triumph.

The story of that famous scene has often been told, but never better than by Professor Oman. He draws largely for the whole of the London episodes during the rising on the so-called Anonimal Chronicle of St. Mary's, York, of which the French text had previously been published in the English Historical Review by Mr. George Trevelyan. And he gives us another piece of treasure-trove in an hitherto inaccessible Report of the Sheriffs and jurors, made in reply to a Royal letter bidding them inquire into the opening of London to the insurgents. The revelation of the treachery among a party of the Aldermen is so complete as largely to invalidate all previous narratives of the London rebellion.

The rising of the commons in 1381 is considered by Bishop Stubbs to have struck a vital blow at villeinage. "The land- lords gave up the practice of demanding base services ; they let their land to leasehold tenants and accepted money pay- ments in lieu of labour; they ceased to recall the emancipated labourer into serfdom, or to oppose his assertion of right in the courts of the manor and the county." Professor Oman, fortified by the recent researches of Maitland and Cunningham,

• Th. Great Bruen of 1381. By Charles Oman, M.A.. Chichele Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. With 2 Maps. Oxford : at the Cloxendon Press. DU. 65. net4

of Powell and of the lamented Frenchman, the late M. Andre Reville, holds that such a statement of the consequences of the Great Revolt is too sweeping, and is not founded on a sufficient number of observed facts in manorial records :—

" It is true that serfdom is on the decline during the last years of the fourteenth century, and still more so during the first half of the fifteenth. But the immediate result of the rebellion does not seem to have been any general abandonment by the lords of their disputed rights. Indeed, the years 1382 and 1383 are full of instances which seem to prove that the first consequences of the suppression of the revolt was that many landlords endeavoured to tighten the bonds of serfdom and to reassert rights which were slipping from their grasp. Now in the moment of wrath and repression was the time for them to reclaim all their old privileges."

For long years after the rising the national archives abound in instances of conflict between landlord and tenant precisely similar to those which had been so rife in the period immediately preceding the rebellion, and Professor Oman goes so far as to say that if we had not the chronicles of Tyler's rising, we should never have gathered from the court rolls of the manors that there had been an earth-shaking convulsinn in 1381. "Villeinage died out from natural causes and by slow degrees ; it could still be spoken of as a tiresome anachronistic survival by Fitzherbert in 1529, and Queen Elizabeth found some stray villeins on royal demesnes to emancipate in 1574." The manorial grievances continued much as before, nor was the class warfare between the local oligarchs and the democracy in the towns brought to an end by the carnival of riot which burst over England in the early summer of 1381. "All the incidents of that great rebellion can be paralleled from the century that follows. The only difference is that the troubles are once more scattered and sporadic, instead of simultaneous."

The common grievance which united the malcontents of every class and degree was the Poll-tax, voted by the Parlia- ment of Northampton in November, 1380, or, rather, the efforts made by the Government to discover and punish the authors of the false returns which had been made on a colossal scale over the whole countryside. The tax was not only unpopular, but its incidence was capricious and unjust, and bore most hardly on the poorest places. Every lay person in the realm (the clergy had contributed separately and largely), save the beggars, was assessed at three groats (one shilling), but a scale of graduation provided that in each town- ship the wealthy were to aid the poor. This was all very well in the manors with a great resident landowner, or in the larger towns with wealthy citizens, but in the villages practically every villein and cottager had to pay the full shilling because there was no "sufficient person" to help him out. The expedient of making false returns to the Com- missioners of the Poll-tax seems to have occurred to every villager over the greater part of England. The simplicity of the idea was its ruin: it failed because it was overdone. The adult lay population of the realm, excluding the Palatinates of Durham and Chester, had ostensibly fallen from 1,355,201 persons in 1377 to 896,481 persons in 1381, and that during a period in which the kingdom had been visited neither by pestilence, famine, nor foreign invasion. The numbers defied belief, and drove the Ministers into an inquisitorial research into the details of the returns which supplied the match to the train; it played the part of the greased cartridges in the Indian Mutiny.

Professor Oman finds the "real determining cause" of the rebellion in the fact that the political grievances of England bad come to a bead at a moment when social grievances were also ripe. It was a period of national discontent and humilia- tion. The sun of the victor of Cressy had set in gloom on "Sorrow's faded form and Solitude behind." A succession of incompetent Ministers were unable to keep the South Coast free from the French corsairs, or guarantee the Northumbrian Border from the Scottish raiders; yet the fault lay less in these than in the insensate desire of the nation to persevere in the struggle when all the conditions under which it was waged bad ceased to be favourable. After the too constant fashion of Englishmen, they insisted on a spirited foreign policy, and were indignant at having to pay for it. The King's uncles, his half-brothers, his Chancellor, all who sur- rounded him, were the subjects of popular execration. In almost every town, and not least in the capital, old grudges were ripe between the rulers and the ruled, the employers and the employed. Throughout the countryside there was the standing quarrel betweeü the landowner and the peasant, which had started with the Black Death and the Statute of Labourers of 1351. Professor Oman is insistent that the attempt of the lords of manors to rescind the agreements by which their villeins during the years before the Black Death had commuted their customary days of labour on the demesne for a money payment was only one cause of friction among many. For thirty years wages had been rising, and "the constant service of the antique world" had been falling

into desuetude. The new wine was bursting the bottles, and the townsman had his own grievances no less than the villager, especially where the lord was a Churchman:— "Abbots and bishops were notoriously slow in conceding to their vassals the privileges which kings and lay proptietmrs had been freely granting for the last two centuries ; the towns in the ecclesiastical lands took advantage of the rising in the country- side to press their own grievances ; when anarchy was afoot it was the favourable moment to squeeze charters out of the reluctant monasteries. But there was no logical connexion between such movements and the Peasants' Revolt."

But religious discontent, so far as it may have existed at all, was certainly one of the least conspicuous causes of the revolt ; practical grievances, rather than fanaticism or zeal for a spiritual reformation, inspired the multitudes who followed John Ball, or Jack Straw, or Wraw, the quondam vicar of Ringsfield. Though the celebrated mission of the "Poor Preachers" began several months before the revolt of 1381, Professor Oman finds it impossible to discover that the insurgents showed any signs of Wycliffite tendencies :—

"There were no attacks on the clergy gtul clergy (though plenty of assaults on them in their capacity of landlords), no religious outrages, no setting forth of doctrinal grievances, no icono- clasm, singularly little church breaking. The Duke of Lancaster the reformer's [Wycliffe's] patron, was the person most bitterly inveighed against by the rebels. Indeed, in the midland districts, in which the reformer's influence was strongest in the beginning, e.g. the country between Oxford and Leicester, the rebellion did not come to a head at all. None of the numerous priests who took part in the rising were known followers of Wycliffe : the contemporary chroniclers would have been only too glad to accuse them of it had there been any foundation for such a charge. John Ball had been preaching his peculiar doctrines many years before Wycliffe was known outside Oxford, and never had come into touch with him."

"Short, sudden, and dramatic," for it was all over between May 30th and June 28th, the insurrection of 1381 threatened the whole fabric of society with ruin and disso.

lution. The pitiable weakness of the central Government, the want of armed troops and the pusillanimity of their leaders, the vacillation of the King's advisers, all played directly into the hands of the rebels. The Executive and the person of the Sovereign himself were in their hands, and had the Tyler been able or willing to keep his followers from pillage and arson, the game was his own ; but be thoroughly frightened the citizens of London, and William Walworth was of another stamp than Lord Mayor. Kennett. Throughout the whole of this part of the story we are irresistibly reminded of the Gordon riots, and we seem to be reading a mediaeval version of Barnaby Budge. London owed much the same debt in 1780 to George III. as it did to Richard IL four hundred

years earlier. Happily, the later episode affords no parallel to the fate of Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop and Chancellor, who was made the scapegoat alike of the Ministry and the nation. Foiled in his effort to break from the Tower by boat by a "wicked woman" who "raised a cry against him," the luckless Metropolitan prepared for his doom with the con-

stancy of a martyr :—

" He sang his mass devoutly, and shrived the Prior of the Hospita.11ers and others, and then he heard two masses or three and chanted the Comntendacione, and the Placebo, and the Dirige, and the Seven Psalms, and a Litany, and when he was at the words °runes sancti orate pro nobis ' the commons burst in, and dragged him out of the chapel of the Tower, and struck and hustled him rudely, as they did also the others who were with him, and dragged them to Tower Hill. There they cut off the heads of Master Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, and of Sir Robert Hales, Prior of the Hospital of St. John's, Treasurer of England, and of Sir William Appleton, a great lawyer and surgeon and one who had much, power with the King and the Duke of Lancaster."

So writes the author of the Anonimal Chronicle, a con-

temporary, and probably an eyewitness. The Archbishop's head was carried round the city on a pike, like that of the Princesse de Lamba.11e in the red days of September, 1792. Unless we are mistaken, a portion of his skull is still treasured at Lambeth Palace. Space fails us to follow the course of the insurrection through East Anglia and the Midlands. One episode, that of St. Albans, has been made familiar by Fronde in deathless prose, and we must own to a sneaking fondness for Henry Despenser, the soldier Bishop of Norwich, who scattered the rebels like chaff before the wind, and showed himself the best fighting man in the whole House of Peers. We are irresistibly reminded by him of certain traits in the character of Robert of Shurlaud, the Baron who called for his boots.

Professor Oman has given us a valuable historical study, picturesque and compact, but we trust he will pardon us if we grudge the time which withdraws hint from the completion of his great work on the Peninsular War. The oxen in his plough are anything but " wayke," yet he has, "God wok a large feeld to ere."