Chapter 10

Plague, Pox, Poll Tax, and Ploughing - and Then You Die

In This Chapter

● Understanding religion, religious institutions, and rules for getting to Heaven

● Falling to the Black Death - how to tell if you’ve got it and what not to do about it

● Revolting peasants - and the king strikes back

Kings and nobles weren’t the only people who lived during the Middle Ages, and battles weren’t the only significant events (though Chapter 9 makes it seem that way). Ordinary people lived during this time too, and this chapter examines what their lives were like. Of course, finding out about the ordinary people is tricky, because they didn’t leave behind the sort of things that make learning about them easy. They couldn’t read or write, so no letters or chronicles of them exist; they didn’t live in castles, and for the most part, the places they did live in are long gone.

Still, we get occasional little glimpses of the lives of ordinary folk in pictures or woodcuts from the Middle Ages, in church records and scrolls, or in literature of the time like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Some of the most interesting evidence comes when they burst onto centre stage, as they did in the famous Peasants’ Revolt, and start speaking for themselves - though even then we only hear about it through the people who opposed them. From all these pieces of evidence, we can draw a surprisingly detailed picture of what life for ordinary people was like, and for most it was hard and short.

Benefits of the Cloth

To understand medieval people, you have to start with what they believed. Religion went through all aspects of medieval life - everything. You avoided meat on a Friday because that was the day Jesus died. When people wanted to fix a date, they didn’t use the ordinary calendar - 22 July, 8 November, or

whatever - they used church festivals: St Bartholomew’s, Corpus Christi, Whitsun, and so on. The most important building in any community was the church, and cathedrals were the biggest buildings people had ever seen. Rich and poor alike put money into the church, and not just to restore the roof. They paid for new chancels or transepts, for golden candlesticks or stained glass windows, and for masses to be said for the souls of the dead - and sometimes people who had enough money kept whole chapels going just for that purpose. People put money into almshouses and schools and hospitals - all run by the holy and not-so-holy men and women of the church.

What people believed in

People in Middle Ages saw death regularly. Their average lifespan was a lot shorter than ours - you counted as a senior citizen if you reached your late forties - and they were very aware of their own mortality. What might happen after death wasn’t just for late-night discussions sitting up with friends, it was urgent, everyday business. The essential thing was not to end up going to Hell, because Hell was terrifying. Pictures and plays showed poor souls being dragged down into everlasting torment by hideous fiends armed with long forks. The trouble was, ending up in Hell seemed very easy unless you had some special help. That point was where the Church came in. These people were faithful members of a Catholic Church that spread over all of Europe.

For spiritual leadership, they looked firmly to the Pope.

Oh, you’ll never get to heaven ...

The problem with getting into Heaven began with Adam and Eve in the Bible. Here’s the theory: After Adam and Eve got thrown out of the Garden of Eden (this was known as the Fall of Man or just the Fall), everyone who came after them was born with Original Sin. Unless you got rid of it, the Original Sin would stop you getting into Heaven. Getting rid of Original Sin was quite easy. The Church laid out the rules:

1. First you had to be baptised. And with infant mortality so high, you had to be baptised quickly. If you died still with the Original Sin on your soul, you got sent to a dreadful place floating in the middle of nowhere known as Limbo (think Ipswich on a bad day. Actually, think Ipswich on a good day).

2. After being baptised, you needed to take care not to add new sins of your own to your soul. If you did (and the new sin may mean no more than having lustful thoughts on a Friday), you needed to get along to confession. Here, you told a priest all the sins you’d committed; he’d give you some sort of penance to do (usually saying a prayer or two) and then give you absolution, wiping your soul clean until you started dirtying it again.

You could also do all sorts of other things to build up your credit with the Recording Angel: Helping people, going on pilgrimage or crusade, and above all receiving Holy Communion at least on big feast days like Easter and Christmas. Since the Church taught that Communion meant receiving the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ, you can see that it was pretty important.

If you did all these things - and remembered to confess and take Communion on your death bed (most important) - then you stood a chance when you went to Purgatory.

Heaven's Gate: Purgatory

Purgatory sounds at first a bit like Hell: It was a massive fire that was supposed to purge your soul of the sin still ingrained in it by the time you died - hence the name. The living could help souls in Purgatory by praying for them, especially by asking a favourite saint to put in a good word on their behalf. Saints were your friends in high places (literally) and they could be very useful, which is why places get named after them and they get adopted as patrons of this and that. Assuming you weren’t a mass murderer or addicted to lustful thoughts on Fridays, the hope was that, when Judgement Day came, you’d have enough good things in your ledger to outweigh all the really bad sins Purgatory couldn’t get rid of. Then trumpets would blast, the Pearly Gates would open wide, and in you’d go. Phew.

But you couldn’t reach Heaven without the Church.

The church service

Putting across just how big and important the Church was to people in the Middle Ages is difficult. It was everywhere, like a parallel universe. Even the smallest village had a church, and the towns had hundreds of them. The church was specially designed to give a sense of awe and wonder - unsurprisingly, the modern theatre grew out of the medieval church.

Unless your family was rich and could afford a special pew (within a lockable box, to keep the common people out), you had no benches to sit on - you either brought your own stool or you stood.

The church was usually highly decorated with lots of vivid pictures on the walls or in the windows to show some of the stories in the Bible. In addition were statues of saints or of the Virgin Mary in areas where you could light a candle and say a prayer.

At the end of the church was a special area, separated by a wooden wall called a rood screen (rood is an old word for the cross) and often on top of many rood screens were crucifixion scenes. Behind the rood screen, all the important ceremonies happened.

● There would be sweet-smelling incense, and bells ringing at special moments, and music from the choir, and the priest in his brightly coloured robes, who would lift up the bread and the cup and speak the words that made them into Christ’s body and blood.

People often assume that because the service was in Latin the ordinary folk couldn’t understand any of it, but all the evidence is the other way. People were used to the Latin words - they heard them every week - and the priests explained what all the different parts of the Mass meant. When the Tudors started introducing services in English - see Chapter 12 - big protests occurred.

The whole layout of the church and the form of the services emphasised that the priest had special, almost magical powers, and that the people needed him to get into Heaven.

Monastic orders

Monks and nuns were people who had decided to devote their lives to God in a special way, by joining a monastic order. Monks had been around since the earliest days of the Church, and the Celtic Church had set up great monasteries on Iona and Lindisfarne (have a look in Chapters 5 and 6 for more info on the Celtic Church). But the idea of monasteries and convents as we know them came from St Benedict, who drew up a famous Rule for living as a monk, laying down a regular regime of prayer and work, and the idea caught on. St Augustine was a Benedictine, and so was the Pope who sent him to England (see Chapter 5). Soon different groups of monks began to put down roots in Britain:

Benedictines: First of the ‘Roman-style’ monks on the scene in England. Some of their churches became great cathedrals, including Canterbury, Durham, Norwich, Winchester, and Ely.

Carthusians: Very strict but popular order. Each ‘Charterhouse’ had a set of two-storey little houses known as cells, and each monk lived and worked in his cell. You can still see cells beautifully preserved at Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire. The monks of the London Charterhouse opposed Henry VIII when he broke away from the Church, so he had them all put to death (see Chapter 11 for information about Henry VIII’s reign and Chapter 12 for the details of the religious turmoil during the Reformation).

Cistercians: Fairly strict and austere Benedictine group. The Cistercians liked to set up in remote valleys and anywhere that was hard to get to. Some of the most spectacular monastic ruins (ruins thanks to Henry VIII) are Cistercian, such as Fountains Abbey, Rievaulx, and Tintern Abbey in Wales.

● Dominicans: The intellectual hot-shots - top-notch preachers, specialising in taking on heretics in unarmed debate and wiping the floor with them. Dominicans ran schools and were important in getting the universities going at Oxford and Cambridge.

● Franciscans: Friars founded by St Francis of Assisi. They worked out in the community with the poor and sick. Their big moment came in the Black Death, though they rather fell apart into different groups and factions after that. Head to the section ‘The Black Death’ for details on the plague in Britain.

● Augustinians: Named after St Augustine of Hippo (an African bishop, not the missionary who came to England in Chapter 5), also known as the Austin canons or black canons - because they wore black. A popular order, the Augustinians ran schools and hospitals, and worked with the poor. Their rules were a bit less strict than the others’, so they tended to be rather more independently minded. You won’t be surprised to hear that Martin Luther was an Augustinian. Head to Chapter 12 to find out more about Martin Luther and the Reformation.

Medieval schools

Most children didn’t go to school. Doing so was expensive, for one thing, unless a local charity would pay for you. Those who did go to school were usually boys planning to go into the Church, so the main thing taught was Latin (which is why the schools were called Grammar Schools). Paper and books were expensive, so the children used little plates of horn with a stylus. Any trouble and the schoolmaster used the birch. If you did well at school, you may get accepted by one of the colleges at Oxford or Cambridge.

The universities at Oxford and Cambridge started off as small groups gathered around a particular teacher, and grew into colleges. The idea was to study philosophy, but that didn’t just mean reading Aristotle. Philosophy meant the study of the world, and it could take in things as varied as mathematics, theology, logic, astronomy, and music. All subjects, of course, studied, discussed, and even debated in public, in Latin.

College means a religious group or gathering - the Catholic Church still talks about the College of Cardinals. These colleges were monastic foundations. Like all churchmen, the students wore gowns, and the big elaborate gowns and hoods that graduates wear nowadays developed out of the monks’ habits and hoods of the Middle Ages.

Tending the sick: Medical care in the Middle Ages

Some monks and nuns made a speciality of looking after the sick - good biblical precedents existed for this, after all. Often a monk or nun looked after the monastery’s physic garden, growing the herbs needed to make medicines and poultices. Many monasteries had a small hospital or hospice attached to them, usually for pilgrims who fell ill en route to one of the big shrines like Canterbury or Walsingham, but some more isolated hospitals existed for lepers (very common in the Middle Ages). Later on some of these hospitals grew larger, with a resident physician to look after the sick. By the fourteenth century these physicians and apothecaries were organising themselves into proper guilds and companies.

There’s a famous story about how Rahere, jester at the court of King Henry I, fell ill on a pilgrimage to Rome and dreamed that if he recovered and returned home, he should found a hospital. He did recover, and his hospital was named St Bartholomew’s, after the character he saw in his dream. St Bart’s Hospital in London is still there today.

Medieval doctors got their ideas from the Greeks and Romans. They believed that the body was made up of four fluids, which they called the four humours. These were yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. Each humour was associated with one of the elements that made up the world, had particular characteristics, and tended to predominate at different times of the year. One of the humours, for example, was phlegm (sorry, were you eating?), which tends to make its presence felt in winter when the weather’s cold and wet, but less so in the summer when it’s hot and dry. Table 10-1 lists the four humours.

Table 10-1	The Four Humours: No Laughing Matter
Humour	Type	Characteristics	Element
Yellow bile	Choleric	Dry and hot	Fire
Black bile	Melancholy	Dry and cold	Earth
Phlegm	Phlegmatic	Cold and moist	Water
Blood	Sanguine	Hot and moist	Blood

These four humours existed in each individual, too. When they were in balance, you were well. If you fell ill, it was because one of the humours had become too big for its boots, and your physician would give you something to counteract it. If, for example, you were too hot and choleric, your doctor would give you something cooling to counteract all that yellow bile, maybe some cucumber or cress. If you felt hot and wet - a fever, for example - you had too much blood racing around, so your doctor would bleed you to let some of the excess blood out and put the humours back in balance. Simple!

The advanced thinkers

Some very clever people came out of the English and Scottish churches in the Middle Ages. Here’s a taste:

● Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1170-1253): Pioneering Bishop of Lincoln. He had a big anti-corruption drive and got into trouble with the Pope and with the king along the way. The Pope even threatened to excommunicate him. He didn’t let it put him off.

● Roger Bacon (1214-94): Franciscan friar and experimental scientist. Bacon worked out how to use glass to magnify things and how to mix gunpowder. The Pope reckoned Bacon one of the greatest minds in Christendom, but that didn’t stop the Franciscans taking fright and having Bacon locked up for his dangerously novel ideas.

● Duns Scotus (ca. 1265-1308): Scottish theologian and leading opponent of the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas had used Aristotle to support the Bible. Duns Scotus said Aristotle was all theory, and that faith should be much more practical. The Dominicans didn’t like Scotus’s ideas; Thomas Aquinas was one of their boys.

● Julian of Norwich (1342-ca.1416): Dame Julian (yes, she’s a girl) was a normal Benedictine nun until she received a complex and intense vision. She spent the next 20 years working out what her vision might mean and then wrote it all out in Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, in which she states that love is the basis of faith and that knowing God and knowing yourself are part of the same thing. Interesting note: Julian had no difficulty in talking of God as ‘She’.

A rebel: John Wyclif and the Lollards

One problem with the medieval Church was that it kept preaching poverty while still being fabulously wealthy. Not everyone was prepared to take that inconsistency lying down. John Wyclif was an Oxford theologian who concluded that the Church’s wealth was a symptom of a church that had got things wrong from the start.

An English holocaust

If you go to York, you'll see a rather beautiful castle on a steep mound, or motte. This castle is called Clifford's Tower, and you'll probably want to take a photo of it. But make sure you read the information about it before you move on. Clifford's Tower is the scene of one of the most appalling examples of anti-Semitism in English history. Jews had been in England since the Normans came in 1066 (see Chapter 7). They offered banking and credit services to William the Conqueror and his court. But people in England fell for all those stories about Jews murdering babies, and the anti-Jewish feeling got worse when crusade was in the air. Jews were then 'the people who killed Christ'. When the First Crusade was proclaimed in Germany, people slaughtered so many Jews that the Church had to remind them who the real enemy was.

In London, serious anti-Jewish riots broke out when Richard I was crowned, and in 1190, the people of York went on the rampage. The Jewish people who lived in York took refuge in Clifford's Tower, which was a royal castle, perhaps hoping that would give them some protection. They were wrong. With a mob outside baying for blood unless the Jews agreed to convert to Christianity, most of the Jews decided to kill themselves rather than give in. The ones who gave in to the crowd got killed anyway. This horrible tale is worth bearing in mind when you visit York. In the end, Edward I threw the Jews out of England in 1290, and they weren't allowed back in until Cromwell's time, in 1655.

During this time, as if to prove Wyclif’s point, all the arguing and in-fighting in Rome produced not one Pope but two, each claiming to be the real one and saying the other was an antipope. Wyclif decided to show them what a real antipope was like. He said the Church didn’t pay enough attention to what was written in the Bible and that all the bishops and cardinals and popes (and antipopes) ought to go. He even said that the Church was wrong about the bread and wine at communion becoming the body and blood of Christ.

Wyclif’s ideas were radical stuff, and the Church wasn’t pleased. The Church called Wyclif and his followers Lollards (which meant ‘mumblers’) - which was a lot ruder then than it sounds now. But Wyclif had some powerful friends at court, including the Black Prince (Edward Ill’s son) and John of Gaunt (Richard Il’s uncle who ran the country until Richard was old enough), who were glad of anything that annoyed the Pope. Richard II didn’t agree, though, and he started rounding up the Lollards, who were mainly poor priests, and their followers. Wyclif himself wasn’t arrested, but Oxford threw him out, and 30 years after his death, on orders from Rome, his bones were dug up and scattered just to teach him a lesson. Some Lollards got involved in plots against Henry V, which did their reputation a lot of harm. But in effect Wyclif was only saying the sort of things that would be the ordinary doctrine of the Church of England by Queen Elizabeth’s reign. (Head to Chapter 11 for information about England during Elizabeth’s time.)

The Black Death

One day in 1348, a ship put in to the southern English port of Weymouth. We don’t know exactly what its cargo was but we do know one thing it was carrying: Plague. The Black Death had arrived in Britain.

The plague epidemic probably started in China and had been spreading westward relentlessly. The Black Death (so called because of the black spots it left on its victim’s skin) was a form of bubonic plague that was spread by the fleas you got on rats - and rats were always in ships. In fact, in 1348 the plague came in two forms - bubonic (the basic strain of plague) and pneumonic, a more deadly variety (linked to pneumonia) that spreads from person to person through coughing, sneezing, and speaking. The bubonic strain hit in the summer, when most fleas are evident, and then the pneumonic strain took over through the winter.

Death by plague

Bristol was the first major English town to be hit, but the epidemic soon spread. And one of the most terrifying things about the plague was that it spread so easily. Before long, it reached London, and Parliament had to clear out fast.

So what happens if you get bubonic plague? First, you get chest pains and have trouble breathing. Then you start coughing and vomiting blood, and you develop a fever. Next you start bleeding internally, which causes unsightly blotches on your skin, and buboes begin to appear - large white swellings in the armpits, the groin, and behind your ears. You become restless and delirious and then you sink into a coma. Finally, you die.

And you die, moreover, within a day or so of first feeling unwell. The numbers of dead were staggering. In London, the plague killed between a third and a half of the entire population. Some smaller places were literally wiped out. The epidemic couldn’t have come at a worse time. Not only had Edward III started his wars in France (explained in Chapter 9), but only a few years before, England had gone through a terrible famine, so the people were in a pretty poor state to start with.

Dire diagnoses

No one knew what really caused the plague or allowed it to spread so easily. But various people thought they knew and came up with treatments and pre-ventatives. The treatment, of course, all depended on what you thought had caused the plague in the first place:

● Too much blood: Because people were coughing up blood, the doctors with their tables of humours (refer to the earlier section ‘Tending the sick: Medical care in the Middle Ages’) decided that the problem was too much blood, so they bled their patients. Imagine their surprise when that treatment didn’t work.

● God’s punishment: Those who believed the disease was a punishment from God (and lots of people thought it was) thought the answer clearly lay in prayer and fasting. Even better was to say an extra big ‘Sorry!’ by going round in a big procession whipping yourself. Lots of these flagellants were around until the Pope decided they were just spreading panic and told them to stop.

● Something in the air: If the plague was caused by something in the air, the answer was clearly to get in some pomade and air freshener. Well, it won’t have done any harm.

● Infected bodies: More sensible were new burial regulations to bury people outside the city walls. Over in Dubrovnik, an Italian colony, they introduced a system of keeping visitors in isolation for 40 days. The Italian for 40 is quaranta - hence quarantine. Isn’t that detail interesting?

An enemy among the people: The usual suspects were - surprise, surprise - the poor old Jews (though the Irish said it was the English). People said the Jews had poisoned the wells, so they got their ropes out and went lynching. The attacks in England weren’t as bad as they were in Germany, where thousands of Jews were massacred in revenge for the plague. And guess what? These murders didn’t stop the plague either.

Eventually, people just had to let the epidemic run its course. And even then the plague kept coming back. More big outbreaks occurred, and you could usually count on the plague hitting somewhere or another just about every year until the seventeenth century.

You can see the shock effect of the plague in pictures and writings from the time. Illustrated books and manuscripts from the fourteenth century often have images of death or skeletons, reaping people in the hundreds.

Nowadays, we reckon that the Black Death was the worst disaster of its kind ever. The plague hit the very people you would least expect - the young and fit. It was particularly deadly to children. Old people, on the other hand, seemed to get off relatively lightly. And this pattern of death had a most surprising effect on the labour market.

The Prince and the Paupers: The Peasants’ Revolt

In the Middle Ages, if you were a peasant, you were right at the bottom of the heap. You had no rights, you had to work on the local lord’s manor, and all in all, life was one long round of ploughing. There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment, and if you engaged in what entertainment was available, you ran the risk of getting gonorrhoea (not syphilis though, that was a souvenir Columbus brought back from America). Then the Black Death arrived. Which sort of people fell victim to the Black Death? Poor? Check. Adult? Check.

Strong and healthy? Check.

If you managed to survive the Black Death, you found yourself in a very serious peasant shortage. This shortage had some potential to make your life a bit easier. Well, all those lords with their estates depended on the peasants working their lands. But with so few peasants around, what was to stop the peasants from offering their services to the highest bidder? A little gleam comes into thousands of peasants’ eyes, and you see just the beginnings of a smile.

Laws to keep wages low

The king and Parliament acted fast. They weren’t going to have peasants getting ideas above their station. They drew up a special proclamation called the Ordinance of Labourers saying that no wages would be raised, and if the peasants were thinking of taking advantage of the labour shortage, they could think again. And when the Ordinance of Labourers didn’t work, they backed it up with a new law called the Statute of Labourers saying the same thing. So there.

Did you ever hear the like?!

The Statute of Labourers gives a pretty good idea of what the ordinary people had been doing. It talks about 'the malice of servants which were idle, and not willing to serve after the pestilence without taking excessive wages.' This law was clearly for the rich against the poor. At one point it complains that the peasants were taking no notice of the Ordinance of Labourers, 'they do withdraw themselves (which means "refuse"!) to serve great men and other, unless they have livery and wages to the double or treble of that they were wont (used) to take.' People were even demanding to be paid daily rates! Shocking, isn't it? The Statute said you could go to prison for asking too much in wages. But the Statute still didn't change anything. The peasants had created what we would call a labour market, and the days of the old feudal system were numbered.

A pott tax

The man who’d come up with the idea for the Statute of Labourers was John of Gaunt, Richard II’s uncle. He was worried because it looked as if the kingdom might run out of money: The war in France was still going on (see Chapter 9 to find out what that war was about), and thanks to the great French captain Bernard du Guesclin, it wasn’t going well. The war effort was going to need even more money, and John of Gaunt had an idea for how to get it. A poll tax.

The poll tax didn’t come out of the blue. John of Gaunt had been imposing taxes to pay for the war over the previous four years. But the poll tax was the worst because it simply said everyone over the age of 14 had to pay a shilling. Whether you were rich or poor didn’t matter - it was a flat rate for everyone. The peasants were pretty fed up with the whole feudal system as a whole by now: It wasn’t doing them any good, and if they complained or tried to charge a fair rate for their labour, they got locked up. So this poll tax was the last straw. But what could they do about it? One man seemed to know.

His name was John Ball. Ball was a priest, and like some of his fellow priests and monks, he was angry about how the poor were being kept down by the rich. He went around the country preaching, and he came up with the tag ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ I know it may sound a bit obvious (‘Er, Adam,’ I hear you cry), but what he meant was not ‘Who was the man?’ but ‘Who was the gentleman?’ In other words, did God create people as lords and peasants? Answer: No. He created people as equals. So what, went Ball’s message, were some people doing lording it over others? You can see where Ball was heading - and the poll tax was only the start. John Ball was saying that the whole feudal system was wrong.

Showdown at Smithfield

We don’t know exactly where the trouble started. Outbreaks occurred all over England. But the situation was most serious in Kent and Essex because you can easily march to London from there, and the angry peasants did. One of the Kentish rebels, called Wat Tyler, became a sort of ringleader as the peasants burst into London and went wild. They burnt down the prisons and then made straight for John of Gaunt’s palace at the Savoy and burned it to the ground. John of Gaunt could thank his lucky stars that he wasn’t in, because he’d never have survived. Consider what happened to the Archbishop of Canterbury. They broke into the Tower of London, grabbed the archbishop, hacked him to pieces, and stuck his head on a pole (using pole tacks, no doubt!).

Richard II, who was fourteen at the time, had to do something. So he agreed to meet the rebels outside the city at Smithfield. The meeting was very tense. Wat Tyler was there on a horse, and the king rode out with the Mayor of London beside him. Richard asked what the peasants wanted, and Wat told him:

● No more villeins: Peasants wanted to be agricultural workers, free to sell their services as and where they liked.

● Everyone should be equal under the law: No more special privileges for nobles. A little bit of Marxist analysis here.

● No more wealthy churchmen: Church lands and wealth should be distributed among the people. Wow! This was revolutionary stuff. The Lollards had been saying this, of course (refer to the earlier section ‘A rebel: John Wyclif and the Lollards’), but Richard II was a devout Catholic. He wasn’t going to like that idea one bit.

● One bishop and one bishop only: The peasants reckoned that the elaborate hierarchy of bishops and cardinals in the Church wasn’t necessary. Have one chap in charge and leave the rest to the ordinary priests in the parishes who knew what the people wanted.

● Oh, and a free pardon for having risen in revolt, burnt down the Marshalsea Prison, murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury, rioted the wrong way down a one-way street, and walked on the grass while burning down the Savoy Palace.

Richard listened carefully and then said that all the demands sounded fair enough, while the mayor nearly had apoplexy sitting beside him. And then things turned nasty. According to the chronicle we have of the revolt, Wat Tyler, who was obviously enjoying putting terms to the king, called for a drink ‘and when it was brought he rinsed his mouth in a very rude and disgusting fashion before the King’s face’. Maybe he gargled the Internationale, too. At any rate, someone in the crowd then called out that Wat Tyler was a thief, and Wat Tyler took out his dagger to go and kill him. ‘Just one moment!’ shouts the mayor, but before he could do anything, Wat Tyler had turned his dagger on the mayor who, luckily for him (but unluckily for Tyler) was wearing full armour. So the mayor took out his sword and brought it down on Wat Tyler’s head.

Utter confusion reigns - everyone started shouting, and some of the peasants started firing arrows. Guys existed who could skewer a French knight at four hundred paces (head to Chapter 9 to read about the skill of the English archers), so the mayor had every reason to be very scared. He and the rest of the king’s retinue turned round to leg it for the city.

And then King Richard, all of 14 years old, rides forward - forward, mind - towards the peasants. Pause. Everyone calms down. This isn’t the mayor or the Archbishop of Canterbury. He’s the king. Richard tells them he’ll be their leader, and they all should come to meet him at Clerkenwell fields a little later.

And what happened at Clerkenwell? Well, they dragged Wat Tyler out of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and finished him off. Then Richard told the peasants he was letting them go free and even giving them an escort to see they got home safely. Wasn’t that nice of him? But they didn’t quite all live happily ever after. As the chronicler puts it:

Afterwards the King sent out his messengers into diverse parts, to capture the malefactors and put them to death.

Did they really expect anything else?