At the church door FitzOsbert was struck down, and his little company quickly overpowered.
Heavily chained, and badly wounded, FitzOsbert was carried off to the Tower, to be tried and sentenced to a traitor's death without delay.
A few days later—it was just before Easter—FitzOsbert was stripped naked, and dragged at the tail of a horse over the rough streets of London to Tyburn. He was dead before the place of execution was reached, but the body, broken and mangled, was hung up in chains under the gallows elm all the same; and nine of his companions were hanged with him.
The very people who had fallen away from their leader in the day of his need now counted FitzOsbert for a saint, and pieces of his gibbet and of the bloodstained earth underneath the tree were carried away and treasured as sacred relics. It was alleged that miracles were performed when these relics were touched—so wide was now the popular reverence for the dead champion of the poor.
Archbishop Hubert put a stop to this devotion by ordering sermons to be preached on FitzOsbert's iniquities; and an alleged death-bed confession, containing an account of many evil deeds, was published. It is likely enough that an old crusader had plenty of sins to answer for, but FitzOsbert's one crime before the law was that he had taught the people of London to stand up and resist by force of arms the payment of taxes—taxes levied with gross unfairness in popular judgment.
The monks of Canterbury, to whom the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside belonged, had long had their own quarrels with Archbishop Hubert, and on this firing of their church, and the violation of sanctuary, they appealed to the King and the Pope—Innocent III.—that Hubert should give up his political work and attend exclusively to his duties as Archbishop. Both the Pope and the great barons were against him, and in 1198 Archbishop Hubert was compelled to resign the judiciarship.
The Peasant Revolt and its Leaders, 1381
The great uprising of the peasants in 1381 was a very different matter from the local insurrection made by FitzOsbert. Two centuries had passed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been admitted in the Great Charter.
The Peasant Revolt was national. It was carefully prepared and skilfully organised, and its leaders were men of power and ability—men of character. It was not only a definite protest against positive evils, but a vigorous attempt to create a new social order—to substitute a social democracy for feudal government.[[34]]
The old feudal order had been widely upset by the Black Death in 1349, and the further ravages of pestilence in 1361 and 1369. The heavy mortality left many country districts bereft of labour, and landowners were compelled to offer higher wages if agriculture was to go on. In vain Parliament passed Statutes of Labourers to prevent the peasant from securing an advance. These Acts of Parliament expressly forbade a rise in wages; the landless man or woman was "to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood two years before the pestilence." The scarcity of labour drove landowners to compete for the services of the labourer, in spite of Parliament.