Draining Ye Olde Swampe

 

 “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” > John Bull.

The parallels between England’s so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and contemporary populist rebellion are rather striking.

These men, in the main from the counties of Kent and Essex, were perhaps our original would-be swamp-drainers.

Their loyalty to the executive, their anointed King, 14-year-old Richard II, was absolute. Indeed, any of their number who refused to proclaim unswerving fealty to the monarch was likely to be done in forthwith.

Their primary enemy was the ‘system’, specifically government ministers and the MPs who sat in the House of Commons, plus anyone adjacent to the process of legislation and taxation, lawyers in particular.

The Commons were in fact a core group chosen from the middle orders, such as the landholding classes i.e. people who did useful things with land as opposed to using it as an excuse to run off across the Channel in order to bash the French, which is what the Lords did. (This was called Chivalry and it was basically a bottomless financial pit.)

As the latter activity became ever more fruitless and costly in the late 14th century, so the Commons started voting for measures like the Poll Tax which went down particularly badly with the lower orders.

When the Kentish mob under Wat Tyler finally got to voice their grievances in person to the young King at Smithfield (“smooth field”), it was clear that the goal was to simplify society, removing all laws and jurisdictions — such as those of Lords and churchmen — between the people and the crown, which the peasants, who saw themselves as the ‘true commons’, understood as a radical leveling of the social order, yet which the young Richard had already intuited as an opportunity to bolster his own direct sovereign power and a route to the kind of authoritarian rule which would later on lead to a coup and his demise.

They also reiterated the key demand of the Essex group, the abolition of serfdom, even though by tradition there was no serfdom in Kent and actually very little in Essex. In this lies one of the most important lessons that History has for us: the people who most clearly yearn for freedom are those who have had more than a whiff of it.

Prior to this meeting the mob had burned down the King's uncle John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace and, on the other side of the Thames, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London crib at Lambeth Palace. As they did this, they had seemingly been at great pains not to be seen to loot, happier to smash things up very demonstrably than help themselves to any loose valuables.

Subsequently they had also managed to storm the Tower of London, and with clear echoes of January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol, they did things like taking turns to lie on the King’s bed.

They even demanded kisses from the King’s mother Jeannette who had a bit of a reputation in the land, which she had never quite shaken off.

Oh, and they also removed the heads of Archbishop Sudbury of Canterbury and Robert Hales, Prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, not by reason of their elite ecclesiastical roles, but because these men were Chancellor and Treasurer in the government respectively, and thus traitorous members of the hated ‘establishment’ (swamp).

The peasants had also been sidetracked into a burst of xenophobic rage, taking the lives of many inhabitants of the capital’s Flemish Quarter “without judgment and without cause” according to a monk at Westminster Abbey, with mutilated bodies piling up around the streets.

Anyway, the revolt ended with the King making promises he believed he could keep and surely wanted to, but in the end could not, because the Lords and the Commons came together to rather brutally re-establish the ‘natural’ order of things.

One reason that left wing ideologues struggle a bit with the medieval period is that this ‘natural’, oppressive order of things lacked the modern protection mechanisms that are usually cited nowadays: a standing army, cops, Fox News, indeed any kind of media or propaganda system beyond the messages pumped out by the Church and these did not really take the form that said ideologues would like to imagine.

They are left with ‘deference’, which does seem a bit wishy-washy, and was rather obviously absent in 1381, except with regard to Royal authority.

To a certain extent, these events were the result of the ‘class struggle’ which Marx (well, early Marx) envisioned as the prime driver of History. He would later shift emphasis to the more impersonal dialectical mechanism, but the truth is that something had happened in England which his theory could not quite accommodate, something tremendously random.

Four decades previously, roughly half the population of England had perished from The Black Death. This ‘great dying off’ had radically adjusted the overall economic situation, setting up opportunities for the now scarcer labour force to improve pay and conditions, even reduce their working hours.

The Commons, the landholding and commercial middle orders, stood most to lose from this sudden social adjustment, precisely at the moment that they were being asked to foot ever larger bills for the failed foreign escapades undertaken by Gaunt and the other Lords.

It would seem that the Commons were becoming genuinely envious of the gains made by the ‘true commons’ and frustrated by the non-domestic focus of the elites, so their representatives at Westminster duly imposed a regressive tax on everyone over the age of 15, three times more onerous than any prior equivalent, and this basically tossed a match into the big box of fireworks.

(Below, Grok's best effort of depicting the scene at Smithfield. Richard is usually shown on horseback. The peasants look like Arsenal fans.)