The Rest Is History - 414. The Peasants’ Revolt: London’s Burning (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

On the 13th of June 1381, the rebel army of English peasants, led by Wat Tyler, entered London and brought chaos, death and destruction upon some of the city’s most important buildings and figures, among them the Archbishop of Canterbury and his home at Lambeth Palace. Within the Tower of London, the 14 year-old Richard II and his government still cowered, with the rebels demanding that Richard’s treacherous advisors be handed over. Desperate, the charismatic young King was convinced by his advisors to ride out and meet the rebels. A meeting ensued, upon which the whole course of English history depended, as the radicals demanded terms that would mean the abolition of serfdom, and the transformation of the English social order forever.  Join Tom and Dominic as they describe the gory and unprecedented events of the Peasants' Revolt, and discuss the stories of mob violence, murder and vandalism… *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. And when the king arrived and the commoners saw him, they all knelt down before him, saying, Welcome, our lord King Richard. We will have no other king but you. And what Tyler, their captain and leader, prayed on behalf of the commoners that the king would permit them to seize and deal with all the wretches who had betrayed both him and the law. The king gave them permission to seize all those who were traitors and could be proved as such by due process of law. And the commoners required that from that moment onwards no man should be a serf, nor give homage nor any type of service to a lord, but should give four pence as rent for every acre of land.

They demanded also that no one should be forced to serve a lord, but should only ever work as he wished, and by means of such agreements as were mutually agreed. So that was a chronically describing one of the most famous moments in all English history. A mile end outside London, the 14th of June, 1381. On the one hand, the boy king, Richard II, and on the other, the rebels led by Watt Tyler, the great protagonist of the so-called Peasants' Revolt. And Tom, last time you gave us an absolutely masterful, dare I say,

You can if you like. magisterial account of the origins and character of this Peasants' Revolt, which wasn't really a Peasants' Revolt, as you explained. And we ended, I think you chose a very well-judged metaphor. You said that Richard and his ministers were staring down the barrel. I did. That was the one, wasn't it? There was a cliche fest, wasn't it? The last episode.

It was a cliche fest. They were staring down the barrel because the rebels are outside London and the king is inside. Do you want to just remind people what their grievances were and their demands? Well, because it's an unprecedented situation. I mean, that passage, the reason why it's such an iconic moment, the idea of an anointed king going out and negotiating with someone who stands at the head of commoners, mere commoners, it's astounding. And then agreeing to those commoners' terms. But how do we get there? How do we get to the situation where Richard is willing to put himself absolutely in the line of danger to go out and do these negotiations? Because you might think,

particularly if you are a peasant who is perhaps standing on Blackheath next to Tyler, gazing down the Thames towards London, you are staring at, by miles, the largest city in England. A very, very formidable and intimidating sight. Most of the rebels will not have seen London before, so the likelihood is that they will be very overawed by the spectacle. London has about 50,000 people at this time. I mean, so maybe three times as much as the next larger cities, York or Norwich or Bristol. It's pretty much recovered from the plague. The docks are crowded with ships. There are cranes everywhere. The streets are so crowded that people have begun basically building loft conversions.

So they're kind of building upwards. So the streets become kind of even more crowded. And I think that if you are a peasant gazing at this great city, you are noticing some very obvious structures that are going to alarm you. So you are most obviously going to notice the Tower of London, which is by far the most kind of forbidding fortress in the city. And this is where the leading officials of the royal government have taken refuge. So the king himself, his mother, the wife of the Black Prince, Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hales, the treasurer, John Legge, the upskirter. That's not an official title, I should emphasize. The upskirter persuadant. So that's where they are. And no one has ever captured the Tower of London. So it has a reputation for being impregnable. Beyond that, you have the great

spire of St. Paul's and the Bishop of London, which previously had been Sudbury, who's now Archbishop of Canterbury. He exercises ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Essex. So St. Paul's is also an intimidating place. Beyond St. Paul's, you can just about probably make out the Twin Towers of Westminster Abbey, founded by Edward the Confessor, who is Richard II's particular patron. And Westminster, of course, is the great centre of royal power. And Westminster Hall still stands, part now of the Houses of Parliament. This is the great depository of records. So that's also very much on the target list of the assembled rebels. And of course, between Westminster and the City of London, on the Strand, this road which runs next to the Thames, hence its name, you have Savoy Palace, which is the great headquarters of John of Gaunt, the most powerful man in the kingdom, the uncle of the king, by miles the richest person in England, and an object of great hatred among many different strands of people. So he's very much disliked

by the rebels outside London. But as we will find out, there are also people within London who have reason to dislike him. However, John of Gaunt is not in London at this time. He is away in the north, busy negotiating a truce with the Scots. However, his son, his only son, Henry of Derby, as he's called, Henry Bolingbroke, the 14-year-old cousin of Richard II, he is in London and has taken refuge with his cousin Richard in the Tower. Oh, the irony, Tom. The irony. Very nice. So these are ironies that we will tease out later in this series. So the rebels are gathered on Blackheath. They don't immediately advance. By now, it's the 12th of June. And the reason that

they don't is that for them, there is only one crossing point into London, and that is London Bridge. There are no other bridges across the Thames. And London Bridge is held against them on the orders of the mayor, who is a man called William Walworth. Meanwhile, on the northern bank, the rebels from Essex and Suffolk have gathered on Mile End, which is described by a chronicler at the time as a fine open space situated in the middle of a pleasant meadow. Anyone who lives in Mile End now probably won't recognise that description. There's a kind of standoff, except that in the afternoon of the 12th, various bands of rebels from Blackheath start advancing along the South Bank of the Thames, because there are settlements that are along the Bank of the Thames. So the Southwark,

which is on the South side of London Bridge, and you have some very famous prisons there. You have the Marshallsea, which lasts right the way up to the 19th century. Little Dorrit. Yeah. So Dickens' father ends up being in prison there. It's chiefly a place for debtors. And you have the Clink, which is such a famous prison that it's kind of become a name that serves for all prisons. And the rebels descend on them, open them up, release the prisoners. They also target local informers, which suggests that by this point, they are being joined by people who are from Southwark or perhaps from further afield. So in the histories of this period,

you get rebels from notorious trouble spots such as Wandsworth, Tooting, Ballam, all these places that are now kind of, well, they're not hotbeds of rebellion, I think it would be fair to say. These were all villages at the time there, right? They're all little villages south of London. And there is one place, of course, that is a particular object of hatred for the rebels. And that is Lambeth Palace, which stands on the south side of the Thames and is the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sudbury, who the rebels from Kent particularly hate. And so they descend on it and there's a great orgy of sacking. Chancery rolls are burned, legal documents are pulled out and trashed. They find the wine cellar, they crack open the wine.

And in Westminster Abbey, which sits on the other side of the Thames, they look over and a monk reports cries of, a revel, a revel, as they burn all the legal documents and imbibe the wine. So that's that thing that's always there in revolutions and rebellions, which people sometimes miss. Fun. It's fun. Yeah. It's a tremendous laugh when you're in the giddy height of it. Yes. Seized with the ecstasy of destruction.

And particularly if you've got the Archbishop of Canterbury's wine cellar at hand as well. I mean, that kind of fuels it. Absolutely. So meanwhile, the rebels have sent Sir John Newington, who people who heard the previous episode, he was the constable of Rochester Castle who'd been captured and is now being used as their emissary. And they have Sir John Newington's children as hostages, so he has no choice but to do what they say. He goes to the tower and he assures the king that he is in no danger. He says that the rebels hold and will hold you for their king. This is absolutely true. The rebels are very, very royalist. This is absolutely not the French Revolution. The reason that they admire and respect the king so much is that they see owing your lands to the king directly

as being much better than owing it to various feudal intermediaries, so magnates or abbeys or whatever. There's a feeling that if you hold your lands directly from the king, then everything is good, that the king can be trusted. And Tom, there's a couple of things here. So people always sort of have this fantasy of the king as being good, and he's being betrayed by corrupt advisors. That's one thing. But is there also an element of them sentimentalizing and. And for Richard II, who's a 14-year-old boy who has not had control of the government at all, this is actually quite an intoxicating realization, I think. The sense that he has an authority and a charisma that no one else in his government has. And this, I think, will have quite enduring consequences for the rest of the reign. However, for now, he remains very much under the thumb of his advisors.

And they say, okay, this is what we'll do. You get on a royal barge and tomorrow morning we will go down. You have a royal manor at Rotherhithe, which is between Blackheath and London Bridge. And you can sail down there and you can meet the leaders of the rebellion and negotiate with them. So this is what happens. 13th of June, Richard hears mass in the chapel of the tower, gets onto the barge. They head down towards Rotherhithe and they're appalled to discover that there aren't just a few rebels waiting for him, but the whole kind of mass. People say 200,000 men. Don't know if those figures are accurate, but a large, large quantity of people. Richard is perfectly happy to go and negotiate with them still. He's

personally very brave, but his advisors say, no, there's no way we're risking that. And so they steer the barge around and they go back to the tower. And this infuriates the rebels. And so they advance en masse to London Bridge. And despite the orders that the mayor, William Woolworth, has given, no attempt is made to hold it. And this is probably because London Bridge is key to the prosperity of London. So they just don't want to risk it being destroyed. Right.

Yeah. The city fathers. Because as you said, it's the only bridge across the Thames. Yeah. That surprised me. I didn't realise that. It's the great pivot for the whole kingdom, really. And if that goes, then that's terribly bad for the financial prospects of all the merchants in the city who are basically running it. But I think also it suggests that, well, we know from what subsequently happens,

that the rebels have a lot of sympathisers in London. It may be that the gatekeepers themselves are sympathisers. We know that the keeper of one of the gates, Cripplegate, is subsequently arraigned for having opened them. It just suggests that there was no real prospect of holding London, that the bushfires of rebellion, Dominic, are waiting to flare into life within the city as well as without. Right. Okay. So the rebels from Kent cross London Bridge. Meanwhile, the rebels from Mile End have forced their way in through Aldgate, which is the gate in the east, and they very rapidly take control of London. And as had been the case in Kent and Essex. So now in London, the destruction is very, very targeted.

So there are some very predictable objects of the looting and vandalism that now ensues. So listeners from the previous episode, we mentioned Sir John Hales, who is the Lord Treasurer and therefore very hated as the guy who is held responsible for the poll tax. But he's also the prior of the Knights Hospitallers. And the Knights Hospitallers have their headquarters in Clerkenwell at the Priory of St. John of Jerusalem. And this is systematically disassembled. All the charters, all the court rolls, all the writings and everything taken out and

burnt, as happens again and again throughout this rebellion. And then the whole of the priory is torched and it is said that the fires burn for seven days. But of course, Dominic, the obvious, the prime target for the rebels is Savoy Palace. John of Gaunt's palace. John of Gaunt's great headquarters. This is raised so thoroughly to the ground that basically not a brick is left standing and there's no prospect of John of Gaunt putting it back together again.

Again, all the records are destroyed, but so too are Gaunt's possessions. And what's fascinating is that the rebels make a point not of taking them away, of stealing these property, but of destroying them. So, you know, furs and tapestries and so on are burnt. Anything that they can't burn, so gold and silver plate or jewels or whatever, they just go and dump in the Thames. And they make a real point of this to the extent that anyone who is found looting is killed. So for instance, someone steals a silver plate and is thrown into the flames. And there's a very salutary tale that is much repeated that 30 of the rebels had broken into John of Gaunt's wine cellar and had got riotously drunk on it. The

palace then collapsed on top of them and they were trapped underneath. They were stuck there for seven days until they all died of starvation. All that suggests to me that the spirit that is moving them and doing all this is probably quite religious because of course at the time there would be no sense of or very little sense of political commitment that wasn't religious, that wasn't seen in Christian terms. So am I right in thinking what we talked about last time, the proto-Protestant element is probably quite strong there when they're sacking John O'Gorn's palace. Puritanical. I think to a degree.

So they cast themselves as lovers of truth and justice, not robbers and thieves. They feel that they are summoning England to a better future. Right. And therefore they want to present themselves as very much as agents of light. But it is also clear that there are elements within London who sees this as an opportunity to get their own back on their enemies. So many of these are highly wealthy, in fact, some of the wealthiest people in the kingdom. So these are London merchants who like to exercise monopolies over various aspects of trade, but which John of Gaunt,

in his role as the leading figure in the royal government, has been selling to foreign merchants. This has generated enormous resentment among the leading figures in the city. It's generated immense hatred for the foreigners among them, the Italians and the Fleming merchants, but it also means that John of Gaunt himself is particularly hated. And although lots of the places in London that are targeted are kind of obvious, their prisons again, their kind of record offices, you do also get the deliberate targeting of people who wouldn't be known to rebels from Essex or Kent. And the key figure is a guy called Sir Richard Lyons, who is the son of

a Norfolk landowner and a Flemish mother. He is always referred to as a Fleming, even though he's half English. He is a financier, a monopolist. He had the monopoly on the sale of sweet wine. He is repeatedly accused of fraud against the Exchequer. He is hated by his fellow monopolists in London as an ally of John of Gaunt. In fact, his effigy in the church of St. Martin Vintry, which is one of the wards in the city of London, gets destroyed in the Great Fire. But we know from an Elizabethan account of London that he was portrayed holding an enormous wallet, which basically sums him up. He is targeted, he's dragged out from his house, and he is beheaded publicly on cheap side. So you get the sense that leading figures in the city who, under normal circumstances,

would in no way identify with the aims of rebels, of peasants. They see the chaos as an opportunity to get their own back on financial rivals. Right, because the people who are striking at Lyons, let's say, I mean, the people in Essex and Kent couldn't give a damn about it. They don't even know who he is, presumably. Well, Lyons is so notorious that he does have a bad reputation in Essex and Kent because he owns properties out there. But I think that they wouldn't know where his house was in London. The people who are staging this kind of judicial murder are clearly operating with the say-so of his commercial rivals within the city. So it's all chaos. And meanwhile, poor old Rich II is on the White Tower gazing out across London.

And he's basically thinking. Oh, no. Oh, God. And just for a second, Tom, I know we've got to go to a break. But Richard II, just in a couple of sentences, give us some sense of his personality. I mean, he's only 14 years old, but he's a very bright boy. He has an elevated sense of himself, doesn't he? Very elevated, yeah.

Do we know much about his character at this point? We know that he is very conscious of his dignity as king. We know that he is very smart and we know that he is very brave, but we also know that he is untested, that he is only 14. And the question of how much agency he has in what follows is contested because we just don't know. However, I suspect that he probably has more agency than he would have done in a situation where the royal government is still cohering. Because it becomes clear that day that London gets taken by the rebels that actually Richard's advisors have no idea really what to do. So they try and get the rebels to disperse by offering a general pardon. And this doesn't work because the rebels

say they won't until serfdom has been abolished, until the traitors in the tower have been handed over. And since the traitors in the tower have been handed over. And since the traitors in the tower are basically the royal government, they're stuck. They're not quite sure what to do. And so they stand there and they watch as the fires spread and more and more of their manners and their properties are destroyed. And so as dust starts to fall, the mayor, William Woolworth, who is very punchy, he suggests that they should get, you know, all the troops they can and sally out from the tower.

He says that, you know, these people aren't soldiers, we can destroy them. But there are very proficient military figures in the tower with Richard, of whom the most experienced soldier is the Earl of Salisbury, a veteran of the Hundred Years' War. And he says, no, don't do it. We haven't got enough men. And we risk two things. We risk an absolute bloodbath and we risk the possibility that we won't be able to prevail. And so by the next morning, Richard's counsellors have decided that they have no choice but to allow the king to go out and negotiate. The one thing they didn't previously want to do, right?

The one thing they didn't previously want to do. And the question is, are they sending Richard out to negotiate in good faith or not? I think the counsellors almost certainly are not. I mean, of course they're not because they face probably being lynched if the rebels have their way. But I think maybe for Richard, it's different because he is by now very aware that the rebels have a strong personal devotion to him. And if you're a king and you're 14 years old, I mean, this is quite invigorating. So anyway, so he gets on his horse and he rides out with his trusted advisors, people who will not serve as red rags to the bull Dominic, that is the mass of peasants, the mass of rebels. He's staring down the barrel again, isn't he?

Yeah. So Richard rides out to Mile End, and there he meets with what Tyler and several hundred other of the rebels gathered around him. And the rebels complained to the king of their intolerable servitude, the phrases, and the heavy oppressions. And Richard hears them, and he says he understands their unhappiness, and he agrees to startling terms, which if they had been upheld, would have radically, radically altered the social fabric of England. So he agrees that, yes, serfdom shall be abolished, which is clearly a very radically egalitarian move. But at the same time, he also agrees to a kind of bonfire of the regulations, Dominic.

Nice. You know, supply-side reforms. The Daily Telegraph would love it. So all the kind of the monopolies, the tolls, the trading privileges that the various merchants in various towns, including London, the abbeys, the monasteries have habitually exercised, it's agreed that all these will be destroyed, that from this point on, commoners will have the right to trade as and where they please. It's a very, very radical free market maneuver. So it's simultaneously egalitarian and very free

market, these negotiations. What Richard doesn't agree to, as far as we can tell, despite the chronicle that you read saying that he does, is that the traitors, in inverted commas, should be handed over. But I think it's equally clear that in the eyes of the rebels who've been negotiating with him, this is essentially what Richard has agreed to. And so after the meeting, Richard doesn't go back to the tower. We're not quite sure where he goes, but he definitely doesn't go back to the tower. But the great mass of rebels who had been with him, they all head off towards the tower and they get in. And they get in because there's no defences, because Richard has withdrawn the defences conceivably? Well, we don't know how they get in.

It's very strange because it's impregnable. There's no way that they would have been able to force it. So I think the likelihood is, and it's a reflection of the fact that this isn't really, again, a peasant's revolt. You know, there are people at the head of the rebels, probably in London, I mean, probably very, very eminent, distinguished figures who smooth talk their way in.

You know, they're talking to the guards. They say, we've come from the king. He says, you've got to let us in. smooth talk their way in. They're talking to the guards. They say, we've come from the king. He says, you've got to let us in. And so they break in. And again, the violence is very targeted. So in fact, only five people are executed. Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, you'd expect him. It takes eight blows of the axe to chop off his head. Robert Hales, the treasurer. Yeah. John Legge, the upskirter persuadant. Right. He goes. Yeah. A lawyer from Stepney. Right.

Who has clearly been targeted by some other, probably lawyer from Stepney. He's clearly been fingered. Right. Some vendetta, some local vendetta. And then the son of John of Gaunt, Henry, who people remember, we said he was in the tower. He manages to get away. A rebel from Rochester is supposed to have bundled him out, which is very sensible because in due course, the rebel is able to use this as a justification for why he shouldn't be put to death. But instead, the rebels, they vent their hatred for John of Gaunt on his physician, whom they find there.

That's harsh, isn't it? The guy's just doing his job. Yeah. Hippocratic oath, Tom. Yeah. Well, you'd say so. So anyway, so this is the state of play midway through this turbulent day on which the King of England has had negotiations with rebel leaders from Essex and from Kent.

And the question now is, will it work? Will the rebels disperse? What's going to happen? And just as we go into the break, Tom, well, apart from the fact that this revolution, had it happened, would have completely reshaped English society, that thing about Henry Bolingbroke being bundled out by the bloke from Rochester, that is a momentous moment in English history, isn't it? It is. If he had been captured and executed, the fate of Richard and executed the fate of richard the second the fate of the plantagenet dynasty the whole course of english history might well have been very different and on that cliffhanger what a moment so we will be back after the break

and we will find out are the peasant revolutionaries they're neither peasants nor revolutionaries, but that's neither here nor there. But are they going to succeed or will the wheel of fortune turn against them, Tom? Come back after the break and find out. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets,

head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest is History. The wheel of fortune is turning. And Tom, we ended last time with the rebels having got the concessions they wanted from Richard II, the most astounding concessions in English history. Yeah, incredible concessions. That would completely change the shape of England's social and economic order.

Yeah. The abolition of serfdom and so on, the egalitarianism of this new world that they're dreaming of. And they have stormed into the tower. They've executed five people, the Archbishop of Canterbury with eight blows of the axe, John de Gaunt's doctor, very harshly in my view, a man from Stepney because other people in Stepney don't like him. Now, what happens next? Right. Well, this is the key question. And all Richard's negotiations have been predicated on

the fact that it will lead the rebels to disperse. And lots of them do. Lots of them do start heading back to Cairnt or to Essex or to Suffolk, but not all of them. And this is a real problem because it means that Richard still hasn't got London back under control. Emphasizing this is the fact that the severed heads of Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Hales, the treasurer, are being paraded through the streets on spikes. Then they are set up on London Bridge in the place where rebels' heads are always put. What this suggests is that the rebels themselves are now

kind of arrogating the powers of the state. This is all very, very unsettling. What's even more unsettling, particularly if you're a foreign merchant, is that roaming bands of mobs are hunting you down. Over 150 foreign merchants are killed. As we said in the first half, they are particularly associated with John of Gaunt. But in this period, an English mob never really needs an excuse to be xenophobic. And there are 35 Flemings who have taken sanctuary in a church, most notoriously, and they are dragged out and beheaded. And chroniclers write about how the streets are filled with piles of corpses. And so it's pretty obvious by the end of the day that Richard is going to have to go and meet the rebels again. To call them off, basically.

To see what he can do, to see if there's something that can be done to just… Calm them down. Yeah, to calm them down, to kind of pacify the whole situation. So the afternoon of the 15th of June, he goes to Westminster Abbey and he prays at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, who is his particular patron. And he then rides out to another open space, this time on the west side of the city of London, a place called Smithfield. Smithfield is where the Priory and the Hospital of St. Bartholomew stands. And this is one of the absolute key moments. So Richard goes there with Sir William Woolworth, who is the mayor of London. Who's a hard man, you said.

Very robust in his disinclination to listen to rebels. Right. And also a very, very celebrated veteran of the Hundred Years' War, a man called Sir Robert Knowles. And they go to Smithfield and there is Wat Tyler and all the rebels. And Wat Tyler has the hapless Sir John Newington with him, the constable of Rochester Cathedral, who's been the emissary. And Sir John Newington escorts Wat Tyler over to the king. And Richard demands to know from Tyler, why haven't you gone? I've given you these concessions. What's up? And Wat Tyler says, well, we want more. We want all the poaching laws abolished

so that we can go and shoot deer whenever we want. We're fed up with the right of manorial courts, the feudal lords having the right to try us in their courts. We want them abolished as well. And most startling of all, and this is where this idea of kind of proto-Protestantism, I think, really seems evident. Tyler demands that the entire hierarchy of the church be swept away and that there be only one person left in charge of the church. That the clergy should lose all their property, that it should be divided up among their parishioners, and that religious communities should only have enough to live on. They shouldn't own anything more than that. And I think it's hard not to see the influence of John Ball there on those demands. So Tom, just on that, is this what Tyler now sort of rummaging around to try and find excuses for the fact that there's been this violence, this orgy of xenophobic violence?

In other words, he's now falling back on, you know, let's think of something else to say, partly because he thinks, well, we can't really go home because if we go home, they'll probably renege on all their promises and we won't get the order we want. No, but I think because Richard has given his word on oath and a king's word on oath is something that I think the rebels would all trust. And so I think that actually it's probably the opposite. The rebels think Richard is their friend, that he can be trusted, and that if he's given them as much as he already has done, well, why not ask for more? I suspect is what is going on there. But this thing about the abolition of much of the church hierarchy, that would be very shocking to

a lot of people, wouldn't it? Perhaps more shocking than the economic reforms, than the abolition of serfdom or something. Because they have been brought up to believe in the church. There must have been a lot of people who had joined this revolt who would not have gone along with that. Well, but equally, and this is part of the swirl of political loyalties in this period, it's so confusing. There are elements of this program, of the disestablishment of the church, if you want to put it like that, that derive from the teachings of John Wycliffe, who was a very significant, radical Christian teacher at Oxford, who is a very significant, radical Christian teacher at Oxford, who has been particularly patronized by John of Gaunt.

So weirdly, there's a kind of a coincidence of aims with John Ball, this kind of vagabond preacher who has been inspiring the rebels out in the counties, and John Wycliffe, this brilliant academic who is sponsored by John of Gaunt. And so we just don't know what the cross-currents are there. So Richard agrees to all these terms again, but I suspect that by now, he has no intention of upholding those. So we don't know precisely the terms in which he agrees it because what happens almost immediately after he agrees to these terms is that there's a fracas and the events are so confused that the precise outline of action is uncertain. But essentially what seems to have happened is that what Tyler is thirsty, it's hot. He asks for a jug of water and then he downs that and then he

asks for a jug of ale and then he climbs up onto his horse. And at this point, one of the men in the king's retinue cries out that he is a rebel and kind of denounces him as a thief and a robber. And Tyler is mortally offended at this. He kind of rounds on the guy who shouted out at him. Woolworth, the mayor of London at this point, tries to arrest Tyler. Tyler draws his dagger, lunges at Woolworth. Woolworth strikes out in turn, catches Tyler on the shoulder. Tyler is bleeding really, really badly. He's still on his horse, clinging onto his horse, kind of crosses back across Smithfield

towards his men, but then he slumps out of his saddle. And as he does so, all the archers that are there in the ranks of the rebels are kind of drawing their arrows and getting ready to shoot. And this is the moment at which Richard II, this famous, famous moment, he rides forwards and he cries out to the rebels, you shall have no captain but me. Just follow me to the fields without, and then you can have what you want. And he starts to ride off and the rebels follow him. And they head out to Clerkenwell Fields, which is kind of north of the city. And Richard II, he's not riding with the rebels. He is

escorted at this point by Warworth and Knowles and their soldiers, but he goes to Clerkenwell as well. And Knowles by this stage has managed to raise to Clerkenwell as well. Knowles, by this stage, has managed to raise all the city levies. Clearly, this is what's been happening in the background. Knowles and Warworth have been saying, we've got to muster as much armed force as we can. This is what they've done. Getting to Clerkenwell Fields, there are soldiers now that the king can command, and they surround the rebels. The rebels effectively have no choice but to surrender. Richard allows them to leave. The Kentish men are escorted through the city onto London Bridge so that they can take the road back to Kent.

The men from Essex and Suffolk head back to East Anglia. Effectively, with this, the revolt in London is over and it collapses as quickly as it had begun. Two questions, Tom. First of all, the numbers involved. We are talking about some thousands of people. We obviously don't know. Yeah, tens of thousands, probably, maybe 10,000. Tens of thousands, right? Maybe, yeah. And secondly, what Tyler? So what Tyler has had the fracas with the Mayor of London. He's suffered this glancing blow on the shoulder, lots of blood. He falls off his horse and then he is what? He's surrounded by his own men and dragged away or what happens to him? Yeah. And they take him to the hospital. They've got the hospital of St. Bartholomew behind them. They take him to hospital

and while he's in the hospital, he gets arrested by Woolworth's men and they drag him out into Smithfield and they chop his head off. Right away? Yeah. No show trial or anything? No show trial. Just that's the end of him? That's the end of him. Yeah. Right. Okay. And so the rebellion is effectively over. Now, the question is, is this all planned? And I think it must have been. The idea that you take the rebels up to Clerkenwell, you essentially surround them,

you disarm them. I mean, it's done very, very effective. It's kind of like kettling. It's what the police do with rioters now, isn't it? I mean, that's effectively what they do. And the thing with what, Tyler, was that all planned? Was that orchestrated? We don't know. It seems to be such a chaotic thing. I mean, yeah, maybe. We just don't know. But what we also don't know, and I think this is a much more interesting question, is what is the attitude of Richard to all this? So there is a notorious thing that he's meant to have said a couple of weeks after the suppression of the revolt in London, where he has gone out into Essex as part of the commissions that are attempting to pacify the county. And he is addressed by villains, by peasants, by serfs

from Essex who come to him and ask him for the rights that he had promised them at Mile End and at Smithfield. Richard supposedly says to them, rustic-y you were and rustic-y you remain, so rustic-y country dwellers, peasants. You will continue in bondage not as previously, but in conditions incomparably harsher. But this again, he doesn't say this. This is a bit like Walsingham's invention of the sermon that John Ball gives. It's kind of monkish wish fulfillment. And I think the evidence is that Richard is actually pretty reluctant to go back on certainly the promises that he had given at Mile End,

so to abolish serfdom and tolls and so on, and to issue a general pardon. Because it's actually not until the 2nd of July, so that's a good fortnight and more after the suppression of the revolt in London, that he reverses all those promises. And what this does, it kind of gives scope for rebels out in East Anglia to feel that, as they do, they target the great abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. They storm the abbey, they behead the prior, but they're kind of doing the king's will at St Albans, which also has a great abbey that again, all the familiar stuff, they burn all the records. And at Cambridge, I mean, it's amazing. We have no records of the university at Cambridge from before 1381 because they were all destroyed.

And there's a kind of very, very famous account of a woman called Marjorie Starr, who as the records of the university were going up in smoke, danced around the bonfire, picking up the ashes and hurling them on the breeze and shouting, away with the learning of clerks, away with it. Crikey. Sounds like Tony Blair's son, Ewan Blair. He's trying to get people not to go to university and do apprenticeships. He would enjoy that moment. Well, he would. The Marjorie star of our day. And disturbances, it's not just in East Anglia. You get them in Bridgewater and Somerset. You get them in York. You get them in Beverly, north of Humber. So the bushfires are smoking across the country, Dominic, but they are about to be stamped out.

So Tom, there's a lovely comparison here. Things like the Pilgrimage of Grace in the 16th century. There's a pattern in English history that these sort of revolts happen. And the king says, fine, you can have what you want. You're a good man. I will honor your justifiable grievances. And then they all go home and they say, hurrah, hurrah, the king. And then three weeks later, the king's men turn up and kill them all. I mean,

it's even like the Prigozhin revolt in Russia, right? The mutiny there. Except that this is the first. Nothing like this has happened. But Richard II and his men have stumbled on a formula that always works. Tell them they can have what they want and then kill them later. Richard's advisors definitely have. I mean, as I say, Richard's own attitude is more ambivalent. And I think the memory of how the vast mass of the common people had respected his authority and it stays with him and is hugely influential on the estimation that Richard will have of his own charisma and of the degree to which he is loved by the mass of his subjects. This will have an enduring impact on the future course of the reign. But he's still just a boy, and so he is not responsible for the repression that now happens.

So you have John of Gaunt heads south. He does his stuff. You've got Thomas of Woodstock. He goes around pacifying Essex. And the absolute star of the show is a guy called Henry Dispenser, who is a descendant of the Dispensers, who were favourites of Edward II. Not a popular family. And he's the Bishop of Norwich. And he is very much a prince of the church. He suppresses the revolt in Cambridge. He goes around suppressing revolts across Norfolk.

Basically, he's the hero of the hour. It gives him a tremendous taste for fighting, and he gets so carried away that the following year in 1382, he launches a crusade, not against the Saracens, but against the Count of Flanders. The Belgian Crusade, Tom. You don't talk about that enough. So he launched a crusade against the Belgians and he kills lots of Flemings. And then he gets bogged down in an unsuccessful siege of Ypres, comes back in disgrace. But within two years, he's off fighting the Scots again. Crikey. He's a great man of the cloth.

Yeah, he truly is. And by this point, the Great Revolt has been well and truly suppressed. So Wattile has been beheaded. John Ball, he gets captured, tried and executed. Almost 300 of the leading rebels in all get executed. But otherwise, the rebels are confirmed in their pardon. Initially, a pardon is issued, which you have to apply for. So that's kind of acknowledging that you were a rebel. So people are reluctant to do that. Very good.

But then Richard does, to his credit, issue another one. He just says, there will be no repression. So I think that does suggest that Richard perhaps has a slight guilty conscience over it. But there's no question that objectively, it seems that the revolt has completely failed. So serfdom is never formally abolished. I mean, there are still traces of it in the late Tudor period. All the corrupt officials, apart from the ones who've been executed in the Tower of London, remain in place. The city corporations, the abbeys and so on, they retain their monopolies and their trading privileges. And John of Gaunt is still by miles the most powerful person in the kingdom.

So none of the rebels' stated aims are achieved. And so you might be tempted to say the whole thing had been a complete failure. Except that, I mean, one obvious legacy of it, that there's no more poll taxes. And in fact, there will be no more poll taxes in English history for 600 years. Well, you're thinking of the Margaret Thatcher so-called poll tax. I am. And there was a sense, wasn't there, that a poll tax by definition was toxic in British politics because of the association. Even if people didn't consciously make a link with the Peasants' Revolt and they'd forgotten everything they ever learned at school. Oh, but I think the fact that community charge

was so rapidly called the poll tax. Yeah. It suggests that there's a residual memory of poll taxes being associated with overbearing, iniquitous government and corruption and all those kinds of things. Absolutely. Which is why it became so explosive when Mrs. Thatcher tried to introduce it. But I think also, you know, going back to the 14th and then into the 15th and 16th century, there is a kind of institutional memory that you can't push the commons too far, that too many exactions and things, it's dangerous. And so that's why I think the memory of it is preserved. And yet the revolt itself is very, very ambiguous, actually, in its character. Because absolutely, it is, as you said, it's remembered as the origin point of English radicalism, egalitarian, progressive, left-wing, if you like. But at the same time, you could frame it in very

different terms. You could say, well, it's royalist. It's very hostile to tax and spend. It's committed to cutting away red tape and allowing free enterprise to thrive. So you could equally say, well, it's actually a very right-wing movement. And I think that we talked about how the center of the revolt, it's the home counties, it's Kent, it's East Anglia, which is the hotbed of Protestantism in the 16th century. But of course, Dominic, it's also these are the places that people will go to the new world in the 17th century. And there's a sense, I think, in which you can see many of the themes of American history being foregrounded in the Peasants' Revolt. Oh, that's nice. I like that.

I didn't see that coming. I think that's a lovely idea. Do you think? Yeah, the distrust of the apparatus of government, of regulation, a desire to let aspiration thrive, all of that kind of stuff. I thought you were going to say that all these areas that you've talked about, kind of, I don't know, Suffolk, Kent, Essex, East Anglia, these are Thatcherite heartlands. If you look at the map of Britain in 1979, 1983, and 1987, Margaret Thatcher's three election wins, these are great Thatcherite heartlands, particularly Essex, where so much of the Peasants' Revolt action took place. And of course, Essex is the home of Essex Man, which is this sort of social stereotype of an aspirational, perhaps slightly xenophobic, ultra-patriotic, very sentimental about the

monarchy, Thatcherite kind of voter. Right. Well, I thought you'd enjoy this. I thought this is a very Sandbrook maneuver to cast. I don't want to overdo it. The egalitarianism that motivates them is incredibly extraordinary. Had Serfdom been abolished completely, it would have transformed English society. But I think there is definitely a kind of proto-Protestant, proto-American, and if you like, maybe a proto-Thatcherite strain within that as well. Very nice. Very nice. I mean, I think if Ken Loach can open a memorial to what Tyler on Smithfield, perhaps Norman Tebbit could open one. Right.

Exactly. As well. But Tom, can we end by talking about one person in particular? So you've alluded to this several times. This must have been simultaneously a traumatic, but also a foundational moment for the young richard ii because he's 14 years old he's at precisely the age at which events loom so large for you and they they shape your character and the fact that he has come out of this with his sense of his own charisma his own centrality you know which must have already existed but so enhanced by what's happened,

that is going to have enormous consequences for him and for England, isn't it? Yes. And it will lead to the great drama of his reign when he takes control. And so, Dominic, we will be continuing our series of episodes on the reign of Richard II next week, where we'll be looking at the extraordinary story of how Richard II ends up being deposed, one of the subjects of one of Shakespeare's great plays. So that's to come. And then after that, we will be looking at a person I like to think of as the most Sandbrookian figure in 14th century England. Wow, didn't see that coming. Which is the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Oh, that old comparison. For reasons that we will be discussing next Thursday.

Right. But Dominic, is there a way that people could hear these episodes before we get to them? Yeah. Now, I know lots of people say that they wish they would hear a little bit more advertising for the Restless History Club, and we're very, very pleased to be able to oblige you on that. So if you enjoy Restless History Club adverts, this is your moment.

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