The methods of Legge and his assistants provoked hostility, and when the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham, and Stanford-le-Hope, in Essex, were summoned to meet the commissioner at Brentwood, their reply was to kill the collectors.

The Government answered this by sending down Chief Justice Belknap to punish the offenders, but the people drove the chief justice out of the place, and Belknap was glad to escape with his life.

This was on Whit-Sunday, June 2nd, and two days later the revolt had spread to Kent; Gravesend and Dartford were in tumult. In one place Sir Simon Burley, a friend of Richard II., seized a workman, claiming him as a bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of £300; while at Dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife and daughter of one John Tyler.[[36]]

Thereupon this John Tyler, "being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand, and ran reaking home; where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words, and strake at the tyler; whereupon the tyler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with his lathing staff, so that the brains flew out of his head. Wherethrough great noise arose in the streets, and the poor people being glad, everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler."

Now, with the fire of revolt in swift blaze, it was for the men of Kent to see that it burned under some direction. Authority and discipline were essential if the rising was not to become mob rule or mere anarchy, and if positive and intolerable wrongs were to find remedies.

At Maidstone, on June 7th—after Rochester Castle had been stormed, its prisoners set free and Sir John Newton its governor placed in safe custody—Wat Tyler was chosen captain of the rebel hosts.

History tells us nothing of the antecedents of this remarkable man. For eight days, and eight days only, he plays his part on the stage of national events: commands with authority a vast concourse of men; meets the King face to face, and wrests from sovereignty great promises of reform; orders the execution of the chief ministers of the Crown, and then, in what seems to be the hour of triumph, is struck to the ground, and goes to his death.

Under the accredited leadership of Wat Tyler the revolt at once took form. Five days were spent in Kent before the peasant army marched on London. The manor houses were attacked, and all rent rolls, legal documents, lists of tenants and serfs destroyed. The rising was not a ferocious massacre like the rising of the Jacquerie in France; there was no general massacre of landlords, or reign of terror. The lawyers who managed the landowners' estates were the enemy, and against them—against the instruments of landlord tyranny—was the anger of the peasants directed. In the same way John of Gaunt, and not the youthful King, was recognised as the evil influence in government; and while a vow was taken by the men of Kent that no man named "John" should be King of England, the popular cry was "King Richard and the Commons," and all who joined in this were accounted friends of the insurgent populace.

Blackheath was reached on the evening of June 12th, and early the following morning, which was Corpus Christi Day, John Ball—released by a thousand hands from his prison at Maidstone—preached to the multitude on the work before them:

"Now is the opportunity given to Englishmen, if they do but choose to take it, of casting off the yoke they have borne so long, of winning the freedom they have always desired. Wherefore, let us take good courage and behave like the wise husbandman of scripture, who gathered the wheat into his barn, but uprooted and burned the tares that had half-choked the good grain. The tares of England are her oppressive rulers, and the time of harvest has come. Ours it is to pluck up these tares and make away with them all—the wicked lords, the unjust judges, the lawyers—every man, indeed, who is dangerous to the common good. Then shall we all have peace in our time and security for the future. For when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will enjoy equal freedom and nobility, rank and power shall we have in common."