“Curse you, lords! They are making a mock of us and of our King!”
“Ho! Hallo! Hallo! Give us our King; we have much to say to him.”
Some of them who were naked began to wade into the water. Salisbury glanced at the coward under the crown, spoke to the steersman, and held up a hand for silence.
The crowd suffered him to speak.
“Sirs, you are not fitly clad, nor fitly mannered for the King to speak with you.”
He faced them, nostrils inflated, eyes bidding them back to the soil. The barge was edging away, and for a moment the crowd was silent. Then of a sudden it understood.
The roar that went up was the roar of a multitude that is balked of its desire. Fists shot out; men sprang into the river, felt for mud, and threw it, even as they threw curses. Hoots, yells, whistlings followed the splashing oars.
The King’s barge returned to the Tower, and the peasants to Blackheath, to tell the thousands who had tarried there how the King and his lords had refused to treat with them, but had held aloof as though they were so many lepers. Wat the Tiler, Merlin, and John Ball had no wish to see the mob in a peaceful temper. If these lords and gentlemen were to be trampled out of existence, it behoved them to keep the Great Beast to its fury, and set it to rend and slay.
The whole host poured from Blackheath, and by noon there were sixty thousand peasants in the suburbs, rushing hither and thither, breaking into religious houses, plundering the taverns, breaking down doors, and smashing fences, following any wild whim that served to lead them. They demolished the Marshalsea and set the prisoners free. Hundreds of uncouth figures came crowding to the closed gates, and howled threats at the guards upon the walls.
“Open the gates! Open the gates!”