Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World

Michael T. Davis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137316516
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World explores the lively and often violent world of the crowd, examining some of the key flashpoints in the history of popular action. From the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to the Paris riots in 2005 and 2006, this volume reveals what happens when people gather together in protest.

Part I

Riots from the Middle Ages to the Age of Revolution

1

Heresy, Rebellion and Utopian Courage: The English Peasant Rising of 1381

Mark O’Brien

The social setting

By the mid to late fourteenth century, most of the population of England lived in small, scattered village communities. These people worked the severalty of small parcels of land divided between themselves. Increasingly, however, the villages clustered together, either near to, or certainly in the economic and social orbit of, one of the great manor houses of a region. Less often they would be located right alongside of a manor house and its land or demesne. The boundaries of the vill might even enclose the manor house if they were large enough.¹ The manor, around which the medieval village revolved, was a highly organized and hierarchical economic unit. This rule-bound and claustrophobic village society pressed heavily down upon the lowest in the social order. These were the peasants, whose lives were dominated by backbreaking, arduous and unremitting labour, and by the constant payment of tribute and tax. They were of two kinds – the free and the unfree, or villeins. The situation of the villeins was truly miserable. The essential primary producers of the feudal system, they were accorded a social status barely above that of the animal world. The Franciscan, Alvarus Pelagius, writing near the beginning of the fourteenth century, made his opinion of the lives of the peasants clear:

For even as they plough and dig the earth all day long, so they become altogether earthy; they lick the earth, they eat the earth, they speak of earth; in the earth they have reposed all their hopes, nor do they care a jot for the heavenly substance that shall remain.²

The lord had legal control and possession of every aspect of the life of the villein. It was said of the villeins that they possessed ‘nothing but their bellies’. In England, the villeins had no right of migration. This contrasted with their French counterparts who had the right to leave the estate on the condition that they relinquished all possessions. By contrast, English villeins were bonded with the land and were treated as being inseparable from it in law. There were no common rights in the sense that we understand today. Under feudalism, the peasant family and the individuals within it were regarded only in their economic aspect, in terms of their productive value.

In this medieval peasant world, the Christian Church reached deep and capillary like into the social body. Through tithes and rents, masses, blessings and sacraments, from the pulpit and through the confessional, it encompassed the life experience of the peasant. Its constant and pervasive presence was felt socially, economically and mentally. In many ways, this is where the peasant might feel their oppression the most. In the realm of religion, exploitation intersected with belief. In the popular imagination of the late middle ages, people understood society in terms of ‘those who work, those who fight and those who pray’. There was a sense of reciprocity. Whereas the lord exploited his peasants, he was also expected to provide protection against thieves and brigands and to administer justice in the village. Similarly the Church was expected to provide a moral authority, a just fear of the Lord, reassurance of the afterlife and an example of Christ’s teachings on earth. By the fourteenth century, the Church was woefully in deficit on its side of the social bargain. This was an age of ostentatious clerical wealth, and the Church of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was, in its own terms, decadent and corrupt.

The slow cumulative changes and improvements in farming technique and animal husbandry had by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries created the conditions for a rapid growth of population. Population growth in turn stimulated productivity and had continued throughout the thirteenth century. In an age when human labour power was still a primary energy source, population growth was an engine of economic expansion. One result of this economic growth was a growth in trade and a resulting growth in town size. Within the towns themselves, social tensions were also apparent. By the fourteenth century, powerful guilds had emerged. These guilds had grown up from the increasing trade specializations within the general urban expansion of the time. The most powerful and wealthy of the masters within the trade guilds were now rivalling the old families which had dominated town and city life for centuries. They began to push increasingly for inclusion within the political structures, and in many cities, tensions between the established authorities and the guilds came to dominate public life. Within the guilds themselves, fragmentation was also evident. Guild members consisted of the masters, the apprentices and the journeymen. The journeymen were those who had finished their apprenticeships but had not yet become masters of the own workshops. Such journeymen were effectively wage labourers, and their interests were for the first time becoming openly antagonistic to those of the masters.³

English society by the fourteenth century was one in which immense forces of economic, social and ideological antagonism had become locked together. The wealth of the merchants as well as the corruption of the Church gave rise to social resentment and moral disgust. What the peasant saw gave the lie more and more to what the priest preached from the pulpit. The contradictions of fourteenth century society were setting the stage for revolution.

Background to the rising

The Bubonic Plague of 1348–49 struck on a scale that people could only explain as being the act of a vengeful God, angry at the sinfulness of the human world. In fact, the increasing trade between the Western regions of Europe and the Orient had provided a new vehicle for the transmission of disease that was carried in the blood of the black rat. The vector for the transmission to humans was the common rat flea, and their hosts had travelled on the boats of the grain trade. The symptoms of the disease itself added to the terror. Within two days of infection, the lymphatic areas of the neck, groin and armpits have swollen. These swellings, or buboes, begin to ooze vile smelling pus. Black carbuncles also appear. The victim dies within a week, tortured by intense points of pain over their body. The plague had immediate effects for those who survived both psychologically and socially. Some reported a mentality of abandon and dissoluteness. More commonly, though, the atmosphere in England seems to have been one of a strange malaise, with an outlook of pessimism and deep despair: ‘In these days was death without sorrow, wedding without friendship, wilful penance, and dearth without scarcity, and fleeing without refuge or succour’.⁴

The longer term consequences of the plague, however, were social and economic. With the dearth of labour it created, harvests could not be brought in despite women and children being put into the fields. The villeins were now in a position to make demands. In particular, they insisted on payment for working the lord’s land. In so doing, they were breaking centuries old customs, obligations and legal attachments to the land. The ruling class response came in 1351 in the form of the Statute of Labourers. The statute laid down the payment that could be asked for every type of work. In every town, ceppes or stocks were to be placed for the punishment of those who attempted to raise their wages beyond these levels or who refused to take an oath of obedience to the statute. The attempts to hold down wages proved ultimately unsuccessful. The repeated attempts to enforce it, however, meant that it became a pivotal focus for a class struggle of a new type. The class antagonisms, which had been unleashed by the plague now intensified into a more generalized unrest.

By the mid-1370s, the reign of Edward III was disintegrating. Edward himself was in his dotage and already senile. The real power behind the throne was a man who dominated the political life of England – John of Gaunt. With his own private armies, John of Gaunt was the most powerful subject in England in the period immediately before the outbreak of the Peasants’ Revolt. He was third son to the king and the brother of the ageing heir to the throne, Edward of Wales – the so-called Black Prince. However, John of Gaunt also faced a challenge to his power in the form of an institution that was beginning to play a more independent and politically critical role. The ‘Good Parliament’, which lasted from April 1376 to July 1376, provided a platform for the growing opposition to Gaunt’s power. The tensions of the time, however, were not only political but also religious. One name above all others stands out as being of key importance in this part of the story – that of John Wycliffe. John Wycliffe was one of a line of Oxford schoolmen who had been dissenters from church orthodoxy on theological matters. He preached against the wealth and ostentation of the official church. He denied the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, which struck directly against the power that the priest and friar held over their congregates. He denied the pope’s authority over men’s souls. In his doctrine of ‘Dominion’, he declared that God dispensed grace to men according to the state of their souls and not according to their preordained station. The overlapping crises represented by political schism and religious heresy reverberated downwards to meet the rising discontent emerging from the base of society. What hastened this rise was the issue of taxation. For most of the fourteenth century, England had been at war. The French expeditions had to be paid for, and by the eve of the revolt, three poll taxes had been imposed upon the population.

The scene was set for revolution when Richard of Bordeaux came to the throne in 1377 at the age of ten. But this historical moment might still have passed were it not for one essential ingredient – the patient work of revolutionaries. Throughout England, there were poor priests who articulated the social injustice of their times. A popular expression of their appeal for a human equality on Earth to match that in heaven drew on the radical image of the Garden of Eden. Often a sermon by a local or a travelling priest would include the couplet: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then a gentleman’. The meaning was that God had not created classes; instead, this was the work of humankind. And what had not been made by God could be unmade by human beings. The most important of these revolutionary priests was John Ball, who had begun his career 20 years previously. He was known to the authorities who repeatedly tried to silence him. He attacked Church and State alike with a militant rhetoric and won the predictable title of the ‘Mad Priest of Kent’ from his enemies. These radical, egalitarian ideas raised the imagination of the villeins beyond their most immediate concerns and fused their social anger with a new and utopian vision. That vision was creating a revolutionary consciousness, and the revolution which this had made possible was about to begin.

The stirrings of revolt

By 1380, the costs of the wars in France were crippling the English state, and the wars themselves had gone badly for the English armies. Meeting in Northampton for fear of the hostility of the London mob, the Parliamentary lords discussed ways by which they might raise more revenues for the further prosecution of the war. A tax was proposed and agreed. The tax was set at three groats – one shilling – for every person of the realm above the age of 15. This meant that even the very poorest peasants would have to pay the same three groats as the richest landowners. The first resistance to the poll tax of 1381 was massive evasion. Its scale suggested a level of organization and coordination that the rich and well-to-do could never have imag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Arc of Violence: Riots, Disturbances of the Peace, Public Protests and Crowd Actions in History
• Part I  Riots from the Middle Ages to the Age of Revolution
• Part II  Riots in the Industrial Era
• Part III  Riots in the Modern World
• Select Bibliography
• Index