Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

Yet for eight days—and eight days only—does history allow us to follow the career of this remarkable man. On June 7th Wat Tyler was chosen by the men of Kent to lead the revolt; on June 15th he was dead. Of his antecedents we know nothing. Parentage, birth-place, age, height, and personal appearance, are all unrecorded. His trade alone we can infer, and we know that his contemporaries trusted him to the full: for no suggestion has been made of any kind of rivalry or jealousy amongst the leaders, or of criticism or grumbling amongst the rank and file.

Wat Tyler emerges from the obscurity of history to become a strong democratic leader. For eight days he commands a vast army of men; he confronts the king as an equal; orders the execution of the chief ministers of the crown; and wrests from the king promises of fundamental social importance. Then, in the very hour of victory, an unexpected blow from an enemy strikes him down, and death follows. Surely to few men is it awarded to achieve an immortal reputation in so brief a public life.

No sooner is Tyler acclaimed as leader at Maidstone than the commons of Kent are flocking to the standard of revolt. The cry is for “King Richard and the Commons,” and it goes hard with any who refuse to take the oath. John of Gaunt is the enemy. John of Gaunt is held to be responsible for all the mischief wrought on the coast towns of Kent by the privateer fleets of the Scots and the French, for the raiding of Rye and Winchelsea. (Only in the previous year these fleets had invaded the Thames as far as Gravesend.) John of Gaunt is the head and front of the misrule that bled the land with poll-taxes. John of Gaunt is the incarnation of the landlord rule that would keep the labourer in bondage for ever. So bitter is the feeling against John of Gaunt, and so acute the fear that he is aiming at the crown, that a vow is taken by the men of Kent that no man named “John” shall be King of England.

John of Gaunt was the common enemy. But John of Gaunt was far away on the Scottish border, and there were enemies near at hand to be dealt with. The manor-houses of Kent were attacked; in a few cases, where their owners were notoriously bad landlords, were burnt. The main thing, however, was to obtain the rent-rolls, the lists of tenants and serfs, and all the documents of the lawyers. These papers were seized and destroyed by the peasants, for no assurance of freedom was possible while such evidence of service could be produced. These documents were the legal instruments of landlord rule; and as the people had risen to end this rule, a beginning had to be made by destroying the machinery. There was no general reign of terror in the country; there was nothing of the ferocity of the Jacquerie in France; no slaughter of landlords; and no common destruction of property.

The nobility seemed to expect judgment at the hands of the people, and those who were at Plymouth making preparation for their invasion of France put to sea as quickly as possible when news came of the rising.[64] But the people had risen not for blind vengeance or for civil war, and the class who suffered badly at the rising were the lawyers rather than the landlords. It was the lawyer’s hand that the peasants saw and felt, and not the mailed fist, for the lawyer was not only the land agent of the lord of the manor, he was also the judge in matters of dispute between landlord and tenant, and it was he who kept the lists of villeins and serfs, and in the service of his lord did not scruple to manipulate those lists.

In those first days of the rising, when yeomen and more than one landholder joined the army of revolt,[65] and all who were willing to cry “King Richard and the Commons” were counted as supporters, the worst that the landlord suffered (except in extreme cases) was the loss of his papers, but the lawyer who clung to his office was often hanged without mercy, as a scourge to the commonwealth.

Tyler was at Canterbury on Monday, June 10th, and here Archbishop Sudbury’s palace was ransacked for papers, and his tenant-rolls burnt. Beyond this, and a rough exhortation to the monks to prepare to elect a new archbishop, no injury was done. The following day Tyler was back at Maidstone, and his men burst open the archbishop’s prison and released John Ball, with all others who had incurred ecclesiastical displeasure. This accomplished, with John Ball, the people’s poor priest, in the midst of them, 30,000 men of Kent—yeomen, craftsmen, villeins and peasants—set out for London under Wat Tyler’s command.

Blackheath was reached at nightfall on Wednesday, June 12th, and a camp fixed; but a few indefatigable rebels hastened on to Southwark that same night to burst open the Marshalsea and King’s Bench prisons. John Wraw was at Blackheath, and after a short conference with Wat Tyler, hastened back to Suffolk to announce that the hour of rising had struck.

Near Eltham Tyler had overtaken the young king’s mother, the widow of the Black Prince, returning from a pilgrimage, and had promised that no harm should befall her or her women from his host. Reassured, the princess and her company went on their way in safety to the Tower of London, where Richard and his council were assembled, and told of the great uprising.

Judges had already been despatched into Kent at the first news of the disorders, but had turned back before reaching Canterbury, not liking the look of things.