CHAPTER IX

The Revolt of the Towns 1380—1382

The disturbances in Languedoc in 1379, like the urban tax strikes of 1380, were warnings of a more profound crisis as perhaps only Charles V himself had understood at the time. They occurred against a difficult economic background: disease, depopulation and a deepening recession characterised by falling agricultural prices, industrial stagnation and a severe shortage of gold and silver coin. All contributed to the growing crisis of Europe’s cities. The physical destruction wrought by war in England, France and Italy and later in Flanders, Spain and Portugal, aggravated the effects. In England, rich in statistical evidence, almost every indicator of economic activity in this period shows a marked decline. Anecdotal evidence and sporadic outbreaks of violence confirm the pattern elsewhere. The popular revolt of the ciompi in Florence in 1378 had been a major crisis in the affairs of one of Europe’s principal industrial centres which passed virtually unnoticed outside Italy. Yet over the next four years similar urban revolts, generated by unemployment and crushing burdens of war taxation, would shake the instincts of the governing classes in both France and England. Beyond the walls of the towns, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England and the rebellion of the peasant tuchins of central France proved to be even more disturbing to societies whose wealth was still founded on agricultural production. These rebellions marked the beginning of a period in which popular violence became once again a major factor in the fortunes of European states. The world is old, the times infirm, sang the poet Eustache Deschamps, voicing the joyless pessimism which, however conventional, clearly struck a chord among his aristocratic audience and is matched in the works of his English contemporaries.¹

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In September 1379 the three ‘great towns’ of Flanders, Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, rebelled against the authority of the Count, Louis de Mâle. The great towns were the leading industrial and commercial cities of Flanders and among the largest in Europe. Their wealth and concentrated populations made them a formidable political force, especially when they were united. They had played the leading role in all the civil wars of Flanders in the past eighty years. They had established themselves as an intermediate level of government, carving the county up into ‘quarters’ over which they asserted and intermittently exercised intrusive powers of control. Yet their fortunes had been in precipitate decline for some years. To some extent this was due to the general contraction of the western European economy in the late fourteenth century. But there were other, peculiarly local factors at work. The three great towns and Courtrai, a protégé of Ghent that almost ranked as a fourth, specialised in the manufacture of luxury woollen cloths. Their costs were high, mainly because of their resistance to technological change and dependence on high-quality raw wool imported from England. By the 1370s they were being undercut in their main export markets by luxury woollen cloth made in Italy and by the silks and velvets which were increasingly favoured by fashion-conscious buyers. Lower-quality stuff was also encountering intense competition from the rural villages and smaller towns of Flanders and, increasingly, from the fledgling cloth industries of Brabant and England. These changes undermined the delicate social balance on which the internal peace of the Flemish towns depended. Masters responded to the shrinkage of their trade with tighter restrictions on entry into the craft guilds, as a result of which a growing proportion of those engaged in the textile industry were casually employed artisans and unskilled labourers. Meanwhile inflation ate into the real value of textile workers’ wages. The effect was aggravated by Louis de Mâle’s frequent devaluations of the coinage and by a sharp rise in the level of taxes.

The municipal authorities, especially in Ghent and Ypres, responded to the threat to their position by exercising tighter control over their ‘quarters’ in order to limit competition from smaller cloth-making centres. This tutelage, supported by armed force when necessary, was a source of much of ill feeling and brought the great towns into collision with the officers of the Count. Louis de Mâle had not forgotten the role of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, and of their weavers in particular, in the revolutions of his father’s reign. He deliberately set out to undermine them, supporting the pretensions of the smaller centres with privileges and protecting them in his courts. The rapid development of the county’s administrative and judicial institutions gave Louis far more effective means of intervention than his predecessors had enjoyed. In the long term these trends would reduce the ancient autonomy of the cities to nothing. Their immediate effect was to provoke a final spasm of revolt against the Count’s authority, led by the town which was most directly affected, Ghent.

In Ghent, the largest of the three great towns, the contraction of the textile industry had been more rapid than anywhere else. In the 1370s the population of the town was probably no more than about 30,000, about half what it had been thirty years before. Unemployment and poverty were serious and growing problems. Like other Flemish towns, Ghent was governed by councils dominated by the landowning patriciate and by shifting coalitions of craft and trade guilds. In a contracting economy political power became the means by which rival groups sought to line their pockets and protect their commercial interests at the expense of others. These rivalries quickly spilled out into the streets and workshops. Conspiracies, strikes and street violence between rival interests were aggravated by personal rivalries within the major guilds and by blood-feuds between prominent patrician and mercantile families. These conditions provided ready opportunities for demagogues and mobsters.

The catalyst for the rebellion of 1379 was the construction by the men of Bruges of a navigable canal from the Zwyn to the Lys. The canal, which had been authorised by Louis de Mâle, was regarded by Ghent as a direct assault on their interests, as indeed it was. It would have established a direct link by water between Bruges and the granaries of the northern French plains, bypassing Ghent and diverting business away from the town’s powerful grain wholesalers. In Ghent opposition to the canal was led by Jan Yoens, a grain shipper in straitened circumstances with a gift for oratory, who had recently assumed the leadership of his guild. He was supported by the weavers, some of whom had a broader political agenda, and by the ‘White Hoods’, a semi-autonomous urban militia which had traditionally been used to impose the city’s will on the countryside around. In July 1379 Yoens broke up the canal works with the aid of the White Hoods, killing and mutilating many of the men who were working on it. Faced with the prospect of retaliation by the Count, the city councillors of Ghent rapidly lost control of the situation. Hotheads in the streets broadened the rebels’ support, appealing to a wider range of interests and grievances, some of which were potent echoes of earlier civil wars: taxation, infringements of the city’s juridical privileges and the perennial fear that its charters would be revoked and its inhabitants laid at the mercy of the Count’s officials, judges and tax-gatherers. At the beginning of September 1379 the councillors were swept aside in favour of Yoens and his allies. The Count’s bailiff, who tried to restore order, was lynched and his master’s banner torn in pieces and trampled underfoot. Shortly after this incident Yoens joined to his cause two men who were to be among the guiding spirits of the revolution in the following years: the weaver Francis Ackerman and a violent gang leader called Peter Van den Bossche, probably a baker, who had taken over the leadership of the White Hoods. They put the town in a state of defence. They razed the houses of the Count’s officers and expelled them from the town. Then they led the White Hoods and a large mob of townsmen against the fortified places of the district around, demolishing manor houses, farms and castles in a campaign which had more to do with class hatreds than defence. The Count’s favourite residence, at Wondelgem, just beyond the northern suburbs, was sacked and left gutted by fire.²

Louis de Mâle had already begun to prepare a punitive expedition against the recalcitrant town. But before he was able to gather his forces Yoens had succeeded in spreading the rebellion to the rest of Flanders. The other towns were governed, like Ghent, by conservative oligarchies with close links to the nobility and the Count. But they had important minorities, often associated with the weavers’ guilds, who were desperate enough to believe that they could improve their fortunes by taking control of Flanders out of the Count’s hands in alliance with the men of Ghent. In September 1379 Courtrai, a long-standing ally of Ghent whose government overtly sympathised with the revolution, opened its gates to the White Hoods. Ypres was taken over by its weavers as the men of Ghent stormed the gates. Attacked from front and rear at once, the Count’s garrison fled. Most of the smaller towns along the coastal plain submitted in the wake of Ypres. Only Bruges and its dependent towns in the north now remained.³

Bruges had nothing to gain by falling in with the plans of Ghent. Politically the town was an ally of the Count and it had many bones to pick with Ghent. With its large shipping, brokerage and banking businesses, it was also less dependent on textiles than any other major Flemish town. When the horde of Ghent approached, Louis de Mâle’s captain resolved to fight. He had the support of most of the town and the surrounding franc (as Bruges’s quarter was known). But as he drew up his men in front of the walls the weavers mounted a coup d’état behind his back. They took over the administration, pushed the Count’s officers aside and threw open the gates to the captain of Ghent. Bruges’s outports at Damme and Sluys were occupied without difficulty shortly afterwards. Jan Yoens died, apparently from natural causes, in his moment of triumph on about 1 October 1379. In Ghent they buried him ‘as if he had been Count of Flanders’. But his work was done. In the space of three weeks Louis de Mâle’s authority had been eliminated in most of Flanders. The Duke of Burgundy, who had been summoned to his father-in-law’s assistance, arrived with an advance guard of his army in November in time to broker a humiliating peace in which Louis was compelled to concede almost all of Ghent’s demands. The peace was widely regarded as a sham. Few people believed that Louis de Mâle intended to be bound by it for any longer than it took him to recover his strength. And so it proved.⁴

At the court of France the significance of these events was little understood. Louis de Mâle came to Paris in March 1380, his first visit for many years, to find support for his cause. He was frigidly received. His practical neutrality in the Anglo-French war and his support for John de Montfort had provoked bitterness and rage in the French capital. His recent recognition of the Roman Pope seemed to Charles’s ministers to fall little short of treason. In consequence his difficulties were viewed with indifference by the King’s Council and with discreet satisfaction by many others. In spite of the advocacy of his mother, Margaret of Artois, and his son-in-law, Philip of Burgundy, he appears to gave gained nothing for his trouble apart from vague assurances of future help which were themselves dependent on the state of the war with England.⁵

At the beginning of April 1380 Louis left Paris empty-handed but bent on revenge for the humiliations of the previous autumn. His appeals for help were received more sympathetically in the other principalities of the Low Countries, where the threat of urban revolution was better understood than it was in France. He called to his standard all the embittered tribe of exiles who had lost their homes, wealth and influence at the hands of the revolutionaries. The treaty with Ghent and its allies was torn up. The Count’s supporters were given free rein to launch a savage war against the undefended villages of southern Flanders, in which great numbers of largely innocent peasants were murdered. They laid waste the country around Ghent, cutting off the town’s river trade and destroying the windmills on which it depended for its grain. The men of Ghent responded with attacks on the castles and manors of the nobility throughout Flanders.⁶

Louis resolved to pick off Ghent’s allies first. Bruges, the latest and most reluctant of them, was the first to secede. The town was controlled by a minority regime dominated by weavers and dependent on the armed support of Ghent. In May 1380 it was overthrown by the other guilds. An army sent from Ghent to restore the ousted faction was scattered outside the gates of the town. At the beginning of June Louis de Mâle returned to Bruges in triumph. The Count moved against Ypres two months later in the middle of August. The men of Ghent tried once more to intervene. But they unwisely divided their forces. As a result part of their army was wiped out by the Count’s cavalry while the rest were forced to withdraw. The Count arrived at Ypres to find the leading citizens on their knees in front of the gates, clutching the keys of the town and begging for mercy. Louis, however, was not inclined to be merciful. Over the following days between 300 and 400 supporters of Ghent were identified and rounded up in the streets of Ypres. They were beheaded one after the other on a huge scaffold erected in the market-place. Within days of this demonstration Louis de Mâle’s officers had recovered possession of most of Flanders with the exception of Ghent itself.

On 2 September 1380 the Count of Flanders laid siege to Ghent with a huge army drawn from every part of the region. However, Ghent proved to be a tough antagonist. The townsmen were more united and more committed to their cause than the populations of Bruges and Ypres. And in spite of the size of his army the Count was unable to seal off their supplies. Early in October 1380 he was obliged to concede another dishonest armistice. Penury and the logistical problems of feeding an army through the long winter months were the main factors at work but political calculation was another. There were ‘other means of imposing my will on the land’, as the Count wrote to his cousin shortly after these events. At the time that this letter was written Charles V was dead and the new King’s uncles had taken control of the government of France. Ultimately it was Louis’s son-in-law Philip, Duke of Burgundy, who would furnish Louis with his ‘other means’.⁷

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The English political community did not imagine that the revolt of Flanders held any lessons for them, any more than the court of France had done. When popular rebellion erupted in their own island, the event took them by surprise. But it did not come out of a clear sky. Most of the economic problems of the countryside ultimately sprang from the drastic depopulation which followed the Black Death: falling rents and agricultural prices, accompanied by strong upward pressure on wages. The lords of rural manors responded by systematically enforcing their surviving manorial rights and zealously invoking the Statute of Labourers which had been enacted in the aftermath of the first epidemic in order to limit the wage demands of labourers and restrict their mobility. These measures were only partly effective but they provoked sharp conflicts, sometimes breaking out into physical violence. The shadow of the Jacquerie of 1358 darkened men’s thoughts and fear of revolution became a recurring theme of political discourse. That lugubrious conservative poet John Gower warned that the common people would one day break their bonds, ‘which hath befalle in sondri londes’. France was undoubtedly the chief of the sundry lands that Gower had in mind. He was not alone. After a rash of incidents in the south and west in 1377 the Commons in Richard II’s first Parliament reported that peasants were forming sworn associations to oppose the demands of their lords and were openly resisting the bailiffs of the manors. They voiced their fear of rural revolution ‘as happened some time ago in France’, even as they called for stronger measures of repression.⁸

There had been outbreaks of popular unrest in England before. But they had generally been localised riots, directed against targets which were close at hand. The Peasants’ Revolt was unique in its geographical spread and in its adoption of a broader political and ideological programme. The immediate occasion for it was the poll tax voted by the Northampton Parliament. The tax was profoundly hated. It was hated for its exceptionally high rate and the regressive basis of its assessment. It was hated for the intrusive way in which it was assessed and collected, by officious outside commissioners instead of the local men who had traditionally been employed on this delicate and uncongenial task. But the revolt was more than a protest against taxation or even against the reassertion of manorial control over unfree and partly free men. The impact of the Good Parliament had extended well beyond the classes represented in Parliament and it inaugurated a tradition of popular radicalism surviving long after it was dissolved. The rebels were concentrated in the capital and in the regions around where national politics had their most powerful resonance. They railed against the diversion of the King’s tax revenues into the pockets of his ministers and the treachery and corruption which they believed had undermined the war effort, just as the Commons of 1376 had done. From these specific grievances they moved to a generalised resentment of the whole class from which the King’s servants and soldiers were drawn. When, after the young King’s coronation, Bishop Brinton of Rochester preached against taxes ‘taken from the poor and spent on supporting the pride of the rich’, he filled his sermon with overt references to the disputes of the previous year, and his words achieved a fame extending well beyond Palace Yard where it was probably delivered. The same themes achieved even wider distribution at the hands of popular preachers like John Ball or satirists like the widely read author of Piers Plowman.⁹

It became apparent as early as February 1381 that the poll tax was being evaded on a large scale. When the collectors came to the Exchequer to present their accounts for the first instalment it was found that local communities had been declaring on average about two-thirds and in some places less than half of the number of taxpayers who had been counted at the time of the first poll tax in 1377. On 16 March the Council appointed special commissions in fifteen counties to tour the towns and villages, armed with formidable powers of compulsion, taking sworn evidence from local officers and producing lists of undeclared taxpayers to be passed to the collectors. Their operations were never likely to be popular. But the problem was aggravated by their high-handed behaviour. As Chancellor Pole would later observe in a rare moment of reflection, if the lesser officials of the Crown misbehaved the King and his ministers found themselves forced to back them up, thus drawing the fury of the populace upon themselves.

This is what happened at Brentwood in Essex on 30 May 1381. One of the commissioners for Essex had arrived in the town to review the tax rolls in the hundred of Barstaple. The response of the surrounding villages was carefully planned. Their men appeared en masse, armed with old bows and sticks, determined to resist. The men of Fobbing, a large village on the north shore of the Thames Estuary, were the first to be cited. Their spokesman was one Thomas Baker, who appears to have been one of the chief organisers of the revolt in Essex. He declared that Fobbing had paid under the existing assessment; that they had their receipt; and that they would have nothing to do with the inquiry. The commissioner had come with just two royal sergeants and a handful of clerks for an escort. He ordered the sergeants to arrest Baker. At this the furious peasants fell on him and his staff, beat them up and chased them out of town. Several of his jurors were captured and beheaded. Three of his clerks were lynched and their heads carried around the neighbouring villages on poles. An overtly political direction was given to the rebellion three days later at a large meeting which was held more than twenty miles away in the village of Bocking. Here, according to a hostile source, the rebels of Brentwood and malcontents drawn from across the county swore to act together ‘to destroy certain lieges of the King and his common laws and all lordship and to have no law in England except only those which they had themselves ordained.’¹⁰

The rebellion in Kent began two days later on 2 June 1381. It was Whit Sunday, the time of crowds and summer games. The first incidents were deliberately co-ordinated with the actions of the men of Essex. The rioting began in the north of the county along the Thames, as the men of Essex were gathering at Bocking. On 4 June the Kentishmen, reinforced by about a hundred Essex men, invaded Dartford. They forced their way into Rochester and laid siege to the ancient Norman keep, which was shortly surrendered to them by its terrified constable. During the next few days men flocked to the rebels’ standard from across Kent. On about 7 June they held a great public meeting at Maidstone at which they elected as their leader an obscure adventurer called Wat Tyler. Tyler, who was in fact a tiler, appears to have hailed from Essex. According to reports reaching Froissart he had fought in France, presumably as an archer. He was chosen because he had a ready tongue and a forceful personality, which shortly transformed the formless mob about him into a more or less organised army. Tyler’s ‘programme’, so far as it can be called that, was more ambitious than any thing put forward by the rioters of Brentwood or even the conspirators of Bocking. He wanted to remove the ‘traitors’ about the King and to abolish serfdom together with all the other incidents of the manorial system.

Tyler first led his horde south through Kent towards the coast. The most serious incidents occurred at Canterbury, where some 4,000 rebels entered the town, looking for Archbishop Sudbury. As Chancellor of England he was a convenient scapegoat for the failures of the ministry. Sudbury was away in London. But the crowd sacked his palace and invaded the cathedral, threatening him with a traitor’s death when they found him. ‘Ah, this Chancellor … shall give us an account of the revenues of England and of the great profits that he has gathered since the King’s coronation,’ they cried according to Froissart’s informants when they saw the luxurious decorations of the Archbishop’s palace. Then they went to occupy the castle and break open the town jail. In the streets of the town the sudden collapse of order brought opportunities to settle old grudges. ‘Have you no traitors here?’ the crowd yelled as they passed through the streets. Houses were pointed out and their occupants dragged into the streets and their heads hacked off on the ground.¹¹

Over the following days mobs moved through Essex and Kent, gathering strength as they went. They were armed with sticks, battle axes, rusty swords, half-plumed arrows and bows ‘reddened with age and smoke’. In general their targets were carefully selected. The rebels were interested mainly in the destruction of documents: the county records kept in Canterbury castle, the muniments which the sheriffs of Essex and Kent kept in their homes, judicial and financial records of every description. Documents sealed in green wax, the colour used by the Exchequer, were specially singled out for destruction as they were assumed to relate to tax. They attacked the manors and urban mansions of the sheriffs and other royal officials, the King’s judges and the justices of the peace, lawyers and poll tax commissioners. Anyone connected with the Crown or John of Gaunt was vulnerable. The perpetrators of these acts were not drawn only from the poorest or most desperate sections of the community. Some of them, including many of the ringleaders, were people of substance on a village scale, who had held office in the manor as reeves, bailiffs or constables. Some were free tenants with large holdings of land and beasts. Such men must have found it relatively easy to pay the poll tax. But they came from the very groups of successful rural entrepreneurs who had found the constraints of the manorial courts and the intrusions of the royal officials most irksome. They also represented the most politically informed sections of village society.¹²

On about 10 June 1381 Tyler resolved upon a co-ordinated march on the capital by rebel forces from Essex and Kent. Tyler himself took command of the men of Kent, who approached the city from the south. On his march he was joined by a man of whom rather more is known, John Ball, ‘the mad priest of Kent’. Ball belonged to the pervasive clerical underworld which flourished throughout England in the late middle ages and gave a large number of local leaders to the revolt of 1381. He was an ordained priest and itinerant preacher who had been spreading his heterodox message for some twenty years and was currently languishing in Maidstone jail. The rebels found him there and forcibly released him. Ball was not an organiser. He was an ideologue, a prophet and a seer. His traditional target had been the wealth and corruption of the higher clergy. But under the impulsion of the events of June 1381 he broadened his theme to embrace an intense, messianic utopianism which ultimately rejected all political authority, lay and ecclesiastical. In a series of broadsheets, which were widely distributed across England, he denounced in obscure and allusive rhyming couplets the sinfulness of power. The most famous statement of his views was the sermon that he preached to the rebels of Kent on Blackheath on the text:

Whan Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then a gentilman?

God had made all men free, said Ball, but men had fashioned the bonds which now held them. Once oppressive lords, corrupt judges and dishonest ministers had been removed, all would be free and all would have ‘the same nobility, rank and power’. What Ball seems to have meant by this was that there should be no intermediaries between the King and the mass of peasants, labourers and craftsmen. His programme was summed up in the slogan: ‘With King Richard and the true commons of England.’ It became the watchword of the revolution.¹³

When the rebels began their double march on London the King was at Windsor. On 11 June 1381 he was brought to London and taken to the Tower, which was thought to be the safest refuge in southern England. He was joined there over the next day or two by his mother Joan of Kent, the Chancellor Archbishop Sudbury, the Treasurer Sir Robert Hales, the Earls of Arundel, Salisbury, and Warwick, the young Earl of Oxford, and a small group of attendants and professional soldiers including Sir Robert Knolles, Robert of Namur and the Gascon routier Bertucat d’Albret, who was then staying at the English court. The only organised bodies of troops in the capital were the small garrison of the Tower, the knights with the King and about 150 men-at-arms with an uncertain number of archers. There was also a band of retainers of Robert Knolles whom he had stationed in his London mansion.¹⁴

Much depended on the attitude of the mass of Londoners. This was extremely uncertain. The regressive character of the poll tax had been particularly jarring in the capital, with its stark contrasts of wealth and poverty. The richer merchants, who had previously been assessed on the value of their stock in trade, got away with a few shillings for themselves and their immediate families. These men, who included the dominant figures in the guilds and city government, were the main beneficiaries of the poll tax. They had driven forward the enrolment of taxpayers with energy, organising house-to-house visits which ensured that the scale of evasion was lower there than in most parts of the country. The anger of the undeclared taxpayers who were found out was so strong that the sheriffs of London and Middlesex had refused to collect their names for fear of riots. It is, however, clear that a significant number of Londoners supported the rebel cause for reasons far more diverse than the poll tax. Some, mainly drawn from the poorest classes, sympathised with the grievances of the peasants and may have shared their utopian visions. Serfdom was not a problem in London but relations between the mass of labourers and journeymen were no easier for that. However, most of the peasants’ supporters in the capital appear to have been motivated not by social grievances at all but by the same political animosities which had provoked the disorders in London in 1376 and 1377. This was, for Londoners, unfinished business. The notion of a corrupt court, betraying the country to the French and out for its own enrichment, had never died.¹⁵

The group of ministers gathered round the King in the Tower played for time in the hope that the rebels would run out of supplies and enthusiasm. They sent a messenger to meet the Kentishmen on the road in order to find out their demands. The messenger found the rebels encamped on Blackheath. Their spokesman’s answer was chilling. They had come, they said, to ‘save the King and destroy the traitors to him and his realm’. They asked for a meeting with the King. In spite of the misgivings of Sudbury and Hales the King’s councillors made a serious attempt to satisfy this request. On 13 June the King took a barge from the Tower and sailed downriver to Greenwich. The rebel host came down the slope from Blackheath towards the water’s edge. Richard tried to parley with them from the security of the barge. But the rebels refused to talk unless Richard landed. So the King’s companions ordered the barge about and returned to the Tower.¹⁶

They arrived only just ahead of the first detachments of the Kent army. In the early afternoon of 13 June 1381 the rebels entered Southwark, which was unwalled, and broke open the prison of the King’s Marshalsea. At about the same time an even larger host of men from Essex was making its way along the Mile End Road towards the fields outside Aldgate, north of the Tower. On Mayor Walworth’s orders all the city gates had been secured. London Bridge was defended by a gate-tower in midstream. The drawbridge was up. But as the mob approached it was lowered. The rebels poured across the bridge into the city. The hands of the bridge keepers appear to have been forced by an organised rising within the city. Once inside the walls the mob moved west past St. Paul’s and down Ludgate Hill. They broke open the Flete prison. Their numbers swollen by released criminals, they made for John of Gaunt’s Palace of Savoy. The palace stood on the Strand by the Thames, between London and Westminster, the most magnificent private residence in England, built on the ransoms of war in more fortunate times and only recently refurnished and decorated by the Duke. The rioters prohibited looting. Their object was to make a political point by methodically, almost ritually destroying everything in the palace. The Duke’s plate was cast into the Thames. The costly hangings were torn apart. The furniture was thrown from upper windows to be hacked to pieces below. The artefacts were smashed with hammers and the jewels ground up in mortars. The Duke’s armoured jacket was found and set on a lance to be used for target practice. The whole building was then set on fire and the remnants blown up with gunpowder seized from the Duke’s armoury.

The rest of the army of Kent poured through the city and joined forces with the men of Essex who had by now been let in through Aldgate. They broke open Newgate prison, the third London prison to have its contents discharged into the streets. They wandered through the streets, hunting down unpopular officials and ‘traitors’ and those singled out for death by their enemies within the city. The priory of St. John’s Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the Hospitallers, was sacked because Treasurer Hales was the head of the order in England. Seven Flemings who had taken refuge there were butchered to satisfy the perennial resentment of Londoners for foreign competitors. That evening the leaders of the rebels met at the house of a prominent London citizen. There they drew up lists of people to be beheaded as soon as they could be found: John of Gaunt, Sudbury and Hales, Sir Robert Bellknap, Chief Justice of Common Pleas, Bishop Courtenay and others. These were symbolic victims. Few of them were chosen for what they had done. Indeed Hales had only been Treasurer since February and had no responsibility for either the poll tax or the conduct of the war. They were proscribed because they were leading current ministers of a government which had failed. In the Tower the author of the Anonimalle Chronicle, who was present, watched the young King climb to the top of a turret to gaze over the burning buildings and the glowing embers of the Savoy Palace.¹⁷

The occupation of London by the rebels was the signal for fresh outbreaks of violence across much of eastern and central England. There was a series of risings in Hertfordshire, most of them directed at the great monastic landowners. In Suffolk the leader of the rebellion was a renegade priest called John Wraw. He invaded the town of Sudbury and sacked the manor of Richard Lyons, the corrupt financier at the centre of the protests of the Good Parliament of 1376. Both the Prior of Bury St. Edmunds and Sir John Cavendish, Chief Justice of King’s Bench (who lived in the neighbourhood) were hunted down and butchered. Cambridgeshire was raised a day or two later by two emissaries from the rebels of London. Throughout East Anglia mobs gathered under a variety of local demagogues to hunt down justices of the peace, poll tax commissioners and local officers of John of Gaunt. Further north the arrival of news from London was followed by serious urban risings in Scarborough, Beverley and York.¹⁸

Gaunt himself was at Berwick on the march of Scotland when the first reports of the rebellion reached him. His first instinct was to head south towards the capital. But it quickly became clear that he was a marked man. Wild rumours were heard about armed posses hunting for him. The Earl of Northumberland heard that the King had made common cause with the rebels against his uncle. Fearing to be too closely associated with a man whose days seemed numbered, Northumberland turned the Duke away from the gates of Alnwick castle, urging him to head for the royal castle at Bamburgh and stay there until the crisis was over. Gaunt eventually fled with a handful of retainers and servants into Scotland and threw himself on the charity of the Scottish King Robert Stewart. The Duchess was obliged to flee from Hertford castle, only to find herself refused admission to her husband’s own fortress at Pontefract. She was eventually offered shelter in the decrepit castle of Knaresborough in Yorkshire. Catherine Swynford, the Duke’s mistress, went into hiding.¹⁹

In the Tower counsels were divided. Sir Robert Knolles suggested a night-time attack on the rebels led by the garrison of the Tower and the troops at his mansion. Mayor Walworth thought that he could raise six or seven thousand reliable men from the wealthier households of the city once the fuse had been lit. But the rest of the company, whose voice ultimately prevailed, was appalled at the idea of staking everything on this one throw of the dice. If it failed the Tower would become their prison. They counselled concessions. A first attempt was made to persuade the rebels to disperse voluntarily by inviting them to formulate their demands in writing and offering them a general pardon. But the two knights who were sent out of the Tower to announce this offer were unable to make themselves heard above the barracking of the crowd. A second, more risky strategy was therefore tried. A meeting was proposed between the rebels and the King at Mile End, east of the walls. The idea was to draw the rebels out of the streets and enable the ministers cowering in the Tower to escape. Early on the morning of 14 June the King left the Tower with a tiny armed retinue and rode down the Mile End Road to meet the rebels. Several hundred of them were gathered at Mile End to meet him. Their main demands were the immediate abolition of serfdom; the repeal of all laws ‘except the statute of Winchester’ (which dealt with defence against foreign invasion); the end of the Statute of Labourers; and a universal rent for agricultural land fixed by law at four pence an acre. A number of lesser demands followed. The King conceded all of them one after another. He handed to the rebels the banners that his attendants were holding as token of his good faith and promised charters of freedom to all who asked for them. The only thing that he would not concede was the demand that the rebels should be allowed to deal with ‘traitors’ as they deserved. Richard replied to this that they would have the heads of such men as had been adjudged traitors by due process of law.

Whether Richard was sincere or his concessions were simply a device to buy time is impossible to say. He certainly succeeded in thinning out the ranks of the rebels, many of whom began to drift back to their homes. But he did not satisfy the more extreme of the peasants’ leaders or the more radical Londoners. Nor did he sate the demand for blood. While Richard was at Mile End a mob of some 400 men rushed the gate which guarded the bridge serving as the main point of access to the Tower of London. The drawbridge had been lowered and its portcullis raised in expectation of the King’s return. No attempt was made to stop them, which suggests that the common soldiers in the fortress may themselves have sympathised with the rebels’ cause, just as the defenders of Rochester, Maidstone and other castles had done. Sudbury and Hales were found in the chapel of the White Tower, where they had passed their final hours saying one mass after another. ‘Here I am, your archbishop,’ Sudbury is said to have declared as they broke their way in. They dragged him out of the building, across the courtyards of the Tower and onto Tower Hill and beheaded him on a log of wood. Treasurer Hales suffered the same fate immediately after him. So did the Franciscan William Appleton, who was killed for no other reason than that he was John of Gaunt’s physician; and John Legge, a royal sergeant who was believed, probably wrongly, to have been responsible for the special commissions to find out evaders of the poll tax. Their heads were mounted on poles and set over the gate of London Bridge. Across the capital the streets exploded with violence. Wat Tyler, accompanied by several hundred men, went in search of further traitors. Richard Lyons was pulled out of his home and taken to Cheapside to be beheaded. Richard Imworth, the Marshal of the Marshalsea, was dragged from sanctuary at Westminster Abbey and followed him to the block on the next day. Numbers of lawyers, city jurymen and supposed retainers of the Duke of Lancaster were found out and murdered. The rebels fell on any foreigners that they could find.

The policy of concessions having been discredited, the King’s advisers appear to have gone back to the more aggressive plans previously pressed upon them by Walworth and Knolles. On the night of 14—15 June a plan was laid to trap and kill Wat Tyler. The rebel leader was invited to attend another meeting with the King to discover what further demands his followers might have. The meeting was to take place at Smithfield, a large open space surrounded by buildings outside the city walls where a weekly cattle market was held. Inside the city a large force of Londoners was recruited from the richer households and told to come out when the signal was given. In the early afternoon Richard rode to Smithfield in the intense summer heat, accompanied by about 200 mounted men. They wore armour and weapons concealed beneath their robes. They took up a position beneath the buildings of St. Bartholomew’s Priory. On the other side of the open space the rebels were drawn up in military order. Tyler came forward, riding upon a little hackney and accompanied by a single attendant bearing his banner. Richard asked him why his followers had not dispersed, since he had conceded all their demands at Mile End. Tyler replied that there were other matters that remained to be settled. These included the redistribution of land among the population; the confiscation of the estates of the Church; the abolition of all bishops save one; and that ‘all men should be equally free with no distinctions of status between man and man save in the case of the King.’ There was a pause, followed by an altercation. A scuffle broke out. In the mêlée Walworth struck Tyler with a cutlass and one of the King’s squires ran him through twice with his sword. Tyler, badly wounded, managed to turn his horse around and escape into the open ground between the two groups of armed men, crying ‘Treason!’ He fell from his saddle to the ground. Panic gripped the massed ranks of Tyler’s supporters. Many of them began to bend their bows. But they were stopped by Richard himself, who rode out to them and cried: ‘I will be your chief and only captain and from me you shall have all that you seek.’ He urged them to reassemble in a few minutes in the fields to the north, by the walled enclosure of St. John’s Clerkenwell. But by the time that they regathered there, about half an hour later, Walworth and Knolles had arrived with several thousand loyal citizens at their backs. Overawed by this mass of armed men, the rebels agreed to disperse. The Essex men made their way east across the fields and the Kentishmen were escorted through the city and over London Bridge. Mayor Walworth was knighted by the King on the spot.²⁰

The government quickly re-established control. Wat Tyler was pulled, half-dead, out of St. Bartholomew’s hospital, where his friends had taken him, and beheaded at Smithfield. The ringleaders still in London were arrested. Some of them were summarily put to death. Elsewhere the repression was taken in hand by the Council under the impulsion of William Courtenay, who had succeeded Sudbury as Archbishop and Chancellor. They sent to every corner of England the news of Tyler’s death and the dispersal of the rebels in London. This rapidly chilled enthusiasm in the outlying areas where the revolt was just taking wing. Sir Thomas Trivet was sent into Kent to put out the dying embers of revolt there. The companies of Felton’s army of Brittany, some of whom were still at Dartmouth, were sent to restore order in Hampshire and Wiltshire. Only in Essex was there any serious attempt at organised resistance and that was put down with much brutality under the nominal command of Richard himself. Real control may have been with his captains but there is little doubt that Richard himself had his heart in the business. ‘Wretches!’ he is said to have told a peasant delegation who came before him to ask for the confirmation of the concessions made at Mile End, ‘… peasants you are and peasants you will remain.’ The rebels made a brief last stand with an improvised army on a hilltop by the village of Billericay. The Earl of Buckingham dispersed them with a cavalry charge, killing a large number. Over the following weeks several hundred of the leading figures were found and brought before the King’s justices. John Wraw tried in vain to save his skin by turning King’s evidence. John Ball was discovered in Coventry and brought to St. Albans for trial. He openly avowed his actions and invoked the pardon promised by the King. But he was executed nonetheless.²¹

The revolt had lasted barely a month. Yet it was to have profound consequences for England’s ability to prosecute the war. Sir Richard Waldegrave, the Speaker, delivered the Commons’ diagnosis of the country’s ills when Parliament met the following November. The main factors in the recent revolt had been civil disorders within the country, caused he thought by the higher nobility’s maintenance of the quarrels of its inferiors; by intensive and heavy-handed government; and by excessive taxation for a particularly poor return. Waldegrave’s analysis was neither complete nor in all respects fair but the perception that it was right became one of the orthodoxies of contemporary politics. Perhaps even more significant was the growing recognition of the Parliamentary Commons that England simply lacked the resources to support a long-term war against the richest and most populous European nation. The country, they declared, had become progressively impoverished since the 1360s. The continual export of gold and silver coin (much of it in the pockets of English soldiers) had provoked a serious deflation. The terms of trade had changed against England as exports of wool, tin and lead had declined both in volume and in unit value. These problems were aggravated by war damage by land and sea, by enemy attacks on the coasts and sea-lanes and by the inexorable decay of the English merchant fleet. The Commons’ solution was that the scale of the King’s wars should be ‘carefully but substantially reduced’. They adjourned on 6 December until the new year to consult their constituents about the government’s financial needs. Current tensions within the realm, they said, ruled out another Parliamentary subsidy for the moment.²²

For the first time since the ill-fated Congress of Bruges, the Council seriously contemplated making peace with France. Diplomatic contacts between the English and French courts had never entirely ceased. There had been desultory meetings between English and French diplomats year upon year at the edge of the pale of Calais. But the fragmentary records of these conferences suggest that, although the French were genuinely anxious to achieve a negotiated settlement, the English were not. Their ambassadors had edged their way towards accepting some kind of compromise on the question of sovereignty in south-western France but they had very limited authority and were in no position to pursue these openings. After the Peasants’ Revolt there was a marked change of tone. With the Commons refusing to finance another large continental expedition, the councillors of the young Richard II were hamstrung as completely as those of the King of France. In March 1382 an English embassy was on the march of Picardy trying to agree arrangements with their French opposite numbers for a major diplomatic conference in the summer. A cease-fire was agreed. The two principal belligerents promised to recruit no new armed forces on land or sea until at least 1 June 1382. Terms of peace were put forward on each side together with a fall-back proposal involving a twelve-year truce, the terms of which had evidently been worked out in some detail. For the first time since the mid-1370s the English agreed to send ambassadors of sufficient status and authority to conclude a deal. Shortly afterwards the government announced that it would be represented by the Duke of Lancaster, the Earl of Buckingham and Thomas Holand, Earl of Kent, as grand an embassy as could have been contrived. According to reports picked up by Aragonese agents at Avignon both sides were confident of an imminent end to hostilities.²³

*

The expedition to Portugal was the only continental venture to survive from the grandiose plans of the previous winter. The Earl of Cambridge’s army, 3,000 strong, remained by the shore at Plymouth and Dartmouth throughout the month of June 1381, held up by adverse winds blowing in from the south-west. The whole army finally sailed south at about the end of June crammed into just forty-one exceptionally large ships. It is some sign of the diminished fortunes of the English merchant marine and the growing weight of Portugal in the trade routes of the Atlantic that sixteen of these vessels were Portuguese. The Earl himself was a political figurehead who had shown himself to be a soldier of very mediocre talents on the only previous occasion when he had exercised independent command, in Gascony in 1369 and 1370. He had been appointed because he was the only man who could convincingly represent his brother. But he came with a distinguished company. Sir William Beauchamp, a veteran of Nájera and long-standing military retainer of John of Gaunt, was the constable of the army and commanded the largest retinue after Cambridge’s own. The marshal of the army, Sir Matthew Gournay, then more than seventy years old, had fought at Sluys, Crécy, Poitiers and Nájera according to the brass which once covered his grave in the church of Stoke-sub-Hamdon, Somerset. This old hand at Iberian politics had fought on both sides in the Castilian civil wars and had lived briefly at the Portuguese court in the time of King Fernando’s father. Sir Thomas Symonds was charged by Gaunt with bearing his Castilian standard, which was to be unfurled as the army entered Castile. The Duke’s Castilian secretary, Juan Gutiérrez, was there with the exiled Castilian knights from his court, including Juan Fernández Andeiro himself. To these were added a handful of well-known soldiers of fortune including the Gascon captain the Soudan de Trau and the Hainaulter Thierry Robesart. The Earl travelled with his wife, Isabella of Castile, and their young son Edward, a diplomatic bargaining counter then only eight years old.²⁴

In spite of the elaborate measures of deception by which Fernando had attempted to conceal his alliance with the English, rumours about it had been circulating for several months. The Castilians received reports in February 1381, probably from England, that an expedition was being prepared against them but they had no details of its route. By the following month they had obtained details of the Anglo-Portuguese treaty with its arrangements for a joint invasion of Castile through Portugal. The full strength of Cambridge’s army must have become known at the Castilian court during the summer. John of Trastámara was alarmed. The English enjoyed a formidable military reputation, for all their recent reverses. Cambridge’s army was half as big again as that specified in the treaty. It was substantially larger than the French mercenary corps which his father had deployed in the final stages of the civil war and most of those had by now returned to France. It was more than enough to turn the military balance in the Iberian peninsula even without the phantom English army which the Castilian King persuaded himself was assembling in Gascony in order to open a second front in Galicia or Navarre. John made an urgent appeal for troops to the French government, probably through Ayala, who was in Paris to negotiate the renewal of the Franco-Castilian alliance. Ayala formally sealed the new treaty in the Duke of Berry’s grandiose mansion at Bicêtre, north of Paris, on 22 April. Less than a month later John publicly declared for the French candidate to the papal throne. Unfortunately for John none of this produced the immediate reinforcements that he needed. In Paris the Council was disabled by the continuing tax strike in the French provinces and absorbed by the Duke of Anjou’s efforts to promote his ambitions in Italy. It was as much as they could do to allow a handful of volunteers to recruit their own companies to go to John’s aid.²⁵

Thrown back on his own resources, the Castilian King resolved to repeat the strategy which his father had used in 1373 by knocking Portugal out of the war before the English could arrive. He summoned his army to muster on 20 April 1381 on the banks of the Duero, the traditional invasion route into northern Portugal. The King proposed to take command here in person. Meanwhile another Castilian army was formed further south at Badajoz under the command of the Master of the Castilian Order of Santiago and Fernando’s exiled half-brother the Infante João. These two men began to penetrate into the Alemtejo in May. At sea the Castilian King planned to create one of the largest war fleets that Castile had ever deployed. John told the Cortes, which was summoned to the northern city of Medina del Campo to authorise emergency taxes, that as many as forty galleys were being made ready by an army of shipwrights at Seville and the Biscay ports of the north. This was approximately double the King’s existing strength in galleys. A fleet of 130 sailing ships and barges was being collected to support them. For John’s subjects these plans entailed yet another turn of the fiscal screw. The Cortes granted John a subsidy of no less than four monedas (the conventional unit in whichservicios were expressed). It also authorised a heavy forced loan secured on the future yield of the alcabala (or sales tax).²⁶

If the Castilian strategy failed in 1381 it was partly because there was insufficient time to prepare and partly because the Portuguese King had learned something from the disasters of 1373. The southern arm of the Castilian pincer movement was stopped by a series of vigorous Portuguese counter-attacks along the valley of the Guadiana. The northern arm was delayed for two months when the Portuguese successfully fomented a rebellion in León and the Asturias behind John’s back. Castile was, however, able to strike one effective blow against Portugal before the Earl of Cambridge arrived. On 12 June 1381 the Portuguese war fleet, comprising twenty-two galleys and four sailing ships, sailed south from the Tagus under the command of the Queen’s brother, João Afonso Telo. Their object was to stop the Castilian fleet leaving Seville by blockading the mouth of the River Guadalquivir. The fleet rounded Cape St. Vincent at the south-west tip of Portugal and penetrated into the Gulf of Cadiz on 17 June 1382. Their arrival caught the Castilians at a disadvantage. The vast armada planned by John of Trastámara was still being fitted out. There were only seventeen serviceable galleys at Seville with full complements of soldiers and seamen. These had been brought down to the open sea and anchored off the island of Saltes at the mouth of the Río Tinto. The tips of their masts could be seen by the Portuguese as they approached along the coast of the Algarve from the west. Outnumbered by the enemy, the Castilian Admiral Sánchez de Tovar resorted to guile. He feigned a withdrawal in the hope of drawing the Portuguese on. The Portuguese commander, seeing his prey escaping, fell into the trap. He ordered his ships forward without pausing to draw them up in formation. There was not even time for the crews to drink some water or the troops to finish arming themselves. The result was a disaster for the Portuguese. A large part of their rowing crews was made up of conscripted peasants and beggars pressed into service in the streets of the towns. This hindered the complex business of manoeuvring these large oared ships. Half of the Portuguese galleys, passing too close to the shore, got their oars caught in the nets of some fishermen and had to stop to extricate themselves. The rest closed on Sánchez de Tovar’s tightly arrayed fleet in complete disorder and were boarded and captured one by one. By the time the other galleys had freed themselves from the nets they were heavily outnumbered and suffered the same fate. The entire Portuguese navy had been lost in an afternoon. Twenty galleys were captured and one destroyed. Some 6,000 Portuguese soldiers and seamen were killed or taken. The Portuguese commander was among the prisoners. The damage to the morale of the King, who had devoted much treasure and time to building up his fleet over the past few years, weighed on him for the remainder of the war.

John of Trastámara was exultant. He believed that the victory would prevent the English from landing in Portugal. And so it might have done if it had been followed up straight away. A Castilian blockade of the entrance to the Tagus or the Duero at this stage would have been difficult for the English to force. But Sánchez de Tovar was determined to return to Seville to land his prisoners and spoil and secure the captured galleys. The Portuguese Prince Don João, who was fighting with the Castilian armies, could see that an opportunity was being missed. He rushed to Seville, armed with royal letters of authority, gathered together six of the captured Portuguese galleys and persuaded some of the Portuguese prisoners to join him in an attack on Lisbon. The small squadron entered the Tagus in the middle of July and made for Lisbon. Don João believed that the men of the capital would rise in support when he appeared. But they probably never even discovered who was in command. As soon as Don João’s ships were recognised as enemies they were driven off in a hail of artillery fire and crossbow bolts and forced to withdraw to Seville. Unknown to the Castilians, the Earl of Cambridge’s fleet was already approaching Lisbon. The ships arrived safely in the roads and anchored beneath the city walls on 19 July 1381.²⁷

Things began to go wrong as soon as the English army landed. Several weeks were taken up with processions and feasting and with diplomatic business. Don Fernando had declared his allegiance to the Avignon Pope early in 1380 at a time when he was trying to improve relations with France. The English Council, however, were determined to present the invasion of Castile as an Urbanist crusade. They may well have thought that this would add to their support in Castile. The Portuguese King therefore had to be detached from his allegiance to Avignon. On 29 August he duly abjured Clement VII and declared once more for Urban. Fernando’s declaration cleared the way for the formal betrothal of the Earl’s eight-year-old son Edward to Princess Beatrice, which was to seal the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Edward was acknowledged as the heir presumptive to the Crown of Portugal and received the homage of the leading noblemen and walled towns of the realm. The two small children were then ceremonially installed in a vast bed in a chamber of the royal palace, covered by a magnificent black heraldic tapestry with figures worked in pearls. A crowd of courtiers stood around as prayers were said over them by the Bishop of Lisbon, an ardent partisan of Avignon, and by Juan Gutiérrez, who was even then plotting to supplant him. On 8 September 1381, at a great gathering of Fernando’s councillors and the captains of the English army, a letter from Urban VI was read out in which the Roman Pope authorised his adherents everywhere to seize the property of Clementists for themselves and to make war on them everywhere with the same privileges and indulgences as crusaders in the Holy Land.²⁸

This was mere rhetoric. The Earl of Cambridge’s army was in no position to take the field for they had no horses. They had come expecting that mounts would be ready for them in accordance with the treaty. But Fernando had done nothing about this. The Portuguese Cortes met, probably early in September, to authorise a mass requisition of horses and mules. Finding at least 3,000 animals in a country as small as Portugal without dismounting Don Fernando’s own troops was a major undertaking which took some time. Many of them proved to be of low quality or unbroken. The English won many admirers among the Portuguese for the skill with which they managed these wild and unsuitable beasts. But the whole process cost them another two months of campaigning time. The leaders of the army passed most of this time comfortably installed in the suburban monasteries of Lisbon while their men camped in the fields by the Tagus, north of the city. But as the autumn wore on they grew bored and ran out of money. Discipline broke down. The English and their Gascon and Hainault auxiliaries began to break into suburban houses and rural farms, to sack the outlying villages and pillage along the roads around the capital. The Earl of Cambridge proved quite incapable of restoring order. Stories of appalling atrocities began to circulate, which no doubt grew in the telling. Within a few weeks the English were profoundly hated around Lisbon.²⁹

Meanwhile the Castilian offensive had made a halting start. John of Trastámara entered Portugal with the main body of his army towards the end of July 1381, attacking west of the Castilian city of Ciudad Rodrigo and laying siege to Almeida. In the southern sector the Master of the Castilian Order of Santiago launched a simultaneous offensive from Badajoz and besieged Elvas. These two border fortresses, repeatedly expanded and rebuilt, had been the principal eastern defences of Portugal since the twelfth century and would remain so until the nineteenth. Almeida was poorly defended. The town surrendered to the Castilians on 9 August and the castle some three weeks later. But further progress then came to a halt. King John, whose constitution was never up to the rigours of a campaign, fell ill. Then, when the news of the English landings reached him, he lost his nerve. The southern arm of the Castilian pincer movement was abandoned and the troops around Elvas were brought north to reinforce the army at Almeida. A messenger was sent to the Earl of Cambridge at Lisbon with a challenge to fight an arranged battle somewhere between Lisbon and the frontier. It was an empty gesture. The Earl ignored the challenge and Fernando had the unfortunate Castilian messenger who delivered it flung into prison. Towards the end of September 1381 the Castilian King withdrew to the castle of Coca, north of Segovia. The financial strain was more than the Castilian treasury could bear. The troops at Almeida, the seamen and shipwrights in Seville and the Basque ports and the permanent garrisons on the frontiers of Navarre and Granada, were all clamouring for their pay. The Castilian Cortes sat intermittently for some two months at Avila between October and December before authorising another large increase in taxation.³⁰

John of Trastámara could not believe that his enemies would remain immobile throughout the winter. He made plans to deploy a great army 5,000 strong along the border to contain them. In fact, a winter campaign never seems to have been contemplated. Since English armies were famous for their indifference to the seasons this was presumably Fernando’s decision. A more vigorous proconsul might have shifted the Portuguese King from this position but the Earl of Cambridge simply accepted the situation as he found it. His army remained in its encampments around Lisbon until the end of the year. They were needed there to defend the capital and the English fleet against Sánchez de Tovar’s Castilian galleys cruising offshore. In December 1381 the galleys finally returned to Seville to be laid up for the winter and the English ships were able to leave for home. As soon as they had gone Fernando left to celebrate Christmas at Santarém while the Earl of Cambridge departed with his unruly troops for winter quarters in the valley of the Guadiana, close to Portugal’s eastern frontier. The Earl established his headquarters in an Augustinian monastery outside the walled town of Vila Viçosa, about ten miles behind the frontier, and waited for the spring.³¹

Early in December 1381 a squire arrived in England from Lisbon with a report to the Council and the Duke of Lancaster. It must have made sombre reading. The Earl of Cambridge took the blackest possible view of his situation. He seems to have concluded that nothing could be expected from the Portuguese army and that his own force was at risk of destruction unless it received rapid and powerful reinforcements from England. For an army which had not even taken the field this was an extraordinary statement. John of Gaunt felt that his great adventure ought to be on the verge of triumph. He was determined that the chance should not escape him now. So he resolved to take command in Portugal himself. He would bring another 4,000 men with him. These plans were completely unrealistic. The main problem, as always, was finance. The Earl of Cambridge’s army had been paid a quarter’s wages in advance before leaving England. The next quarter’s wages were supposed to come from the Portuguese King’s treasury. Thereafter the position was somewhat uncertain, no one having anticipated that the army would have to spend so long in Portugal. The men were now pressing for their third quarter’s pay. The cost of meeting the arrears and sending a second army out under Gaunt himself was reckoned at another £60,000 for six months.³²

Parliament returned from its Christmas adjournment on 24 January 1382. The business of the new session was dominated by John of Gaunt’s great project. The Duke’s unpopularity was always at its strongest when he was seen to be controlling the business of government. The mood in London was highly charged. Six hundred members of the London guilds appeared before the young King at Kennington manor to ask that they might have ‘only one King’. The message was too obvious to be missed. In the palace of Westminster John of Gaunt gave the peers the substance of the Earl of Cambridge’s bleak message. He told them that it was essential to ‘rescue’ the army in Portugal. He argued that this was in England’s interests not just his own. A successful war against the Trastámaran dynasty in Castile was the best way of assuring the defence of the seas and coasts around England. Gaunt was realistic enough not to suggest that the Commons should finance his Portuguese venture outright. What he proposed was that the money should be lent to him by the Crown for three years with repayment secured on the income of his English estates. The details of the scheme have not survived, but Gaunt appears to have envisaged that the Crown would raise the £60,000 from taxation and that his repayments would then be used to reduce the need for further Parliamentary taxes in future. But, however ingeniously wrapped up, what John of Gaunt was really asking for was a new Parliamentary subsidy following hard on the disastrous poll tax of the previous year. His demands generated acrimonious discussion at Westminster which continued for more than a fortnight. It divided the Lords, where Gaunt’s natural supporters were to be found. Most of them accepted his arguments. But an important minority was afraid of another popular uprising and unwilling to denude the country of troops. The Commons rejected the proposal on more fundamental grounds. War taxation had continued year on year for too long, they said. They would not authorise a new subsidy, whether by way of loan or grant. All that they would do was extend the modest supplementary export duties originally granted at Gloucester in 1377 for another four and a half years in order to finance the defence of England. If the government wanted to mount offensive operations it would have to find some other way of paying for them. As for Gaunt’s pursuit of the Castilian throne, that they declared to be his own affair and nothing to do with them. On this note the proceedings were brought to a close.³³

*

At almost the same moment the attention of the French government was fixed upon the personal venture of another royal uncle, which had even less to do with French interests than the succession of Castile had to do with English ones. The adoption of the Duke of Anjou as the heir to the kingdom of Naples had been intended to secure Queen Jeanne on her throne. In the event it destroyed her. Urban VI had learned about the Queen’s negotiations with the Duke in March 1380 from a disaffected ally. On 11 May 1380 he had purported to depose her and declare her throne vacant. A year later he patched up a squalid deal with Charles of Durazzo. In return for the grant of the Neapolitan crown Charles promised to conquer it and then to cede large parts of its territory to the Pope’s worthless nephew. Urban for his part raided the treasuries of the Roman churches to raise the money needed to pay Charles’s troops and offered them the indulgences of crusaders. On 2 June 1381 Charles of Durazzo was crowned in the old basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome before an audience consisting largely of Magyar soldiers.

Jeanne despatched a messenger to France with a desperate appeal to Louis of Anjou to rescue her. She invoked the military clauses of their agreement of the previous year. As an additional inducement she offered to share the government of her domains with Louis in her lifetime. But events moved too fast for either Jeanne or Louis. On 8 June 1381 Charles marched out of Rome with about 7,000 Magyars and some 1,000 soldiers of fortune to take possession of his new kingdom. The Queen’s armies, such as they were, tried to halt his advance at the border but they were swept aside. On the evening of 16 July Charles of Durazzo entered Naples. The inhabitants refused to defend the capital. Jeanne fled with her closest supporters to the protection of the Castel Nuovo. The castle was powerfully fortified. But it had not been victualled for a siege. After five weeks it became clear that it could hold out no longer. Jeanne was forced to enter into a conditional surrender. She was given just five days to organise a relief force. Her husband, Otto of Brunswick, made a valiant attempt to relieve her in time. But on 24 August he was routed beneath the walls of the Castel S. Elmo and captured. At the beginning of September 1381 Charles took possession of the Castel Nuovo and the Queen became his prisoner.³⁴

These events were the prelude to a sustained campaign of lobbying by Jeanne’s partisans in France. Her Provençal subjects undertook to support a French expedition to Italy with money and men. From Avignon Clement VII ceaselessly pressed the French court to intervene. He also greatly enlarged his own financial commitment, offering to place substantially the whole revenues of the Apostolic Chamber and the taxes levied on the French Church at Louis’s disposal. Meanwhile Jeanne’s agent in Avignon supplied a steady stream of reassuring (but false) reports that the inhabitants of the Neapolitan kingdom and most of the states of Italy would support an Angevin invasion. These reports, amplified by Clement’s agents in Paris, had a considerable impact on the decision-makers at the French court. On 4 and 5 January 1382 there was a long and difficult session of the French royal Council in the castle of Vincennes. All the royal princes were there apart from the Duke of Berry. So were King’s councillors, the Constable Olivier de Clisson, the lord of Coucy and some of the government’s most experienced soldiers and diplomats. A delegation of five prominent members of the papal court hovered between the council room and the ante-chambers of the palace. By a majority, and with express misgivings about the difficulty of the undertaking, the Council gave it as their opinion that Louis of Anjou was bound to go to the aid of the Queen of Naples. He had already committed himself too far to withdraw with honour now. They advised that an expeditionary force should be prepared as rapidly as possible. Some of Louis’s advisers urged caution. But their reservations were brushed aside. On 7 January 1382 the Duke of Anjou resolved to conquer Naples and rescue its Queen from her prison. The decision was announced to the King and his Council on the following day. In the middle of February 1382 Louis left Paris for Avignon. Three weeks later, in the consistory hall of the papal palace, he swore before the assembled court of Clement VII that he would not leave the papal city until the time came for him to take the road to Italy.³⁵

Louis of Anjou marched to the Alps from the papal city of Carpentras in the middle of June 1382. Initially his army comprised some 12,000 mounted men. The Council, although they had urged the expedition upon the Duke, forbade the King’s subjects to join it for fear of denuding the country in the face of the English. As a result, most of Louis’s army had been recruited in the francophone territories of the Empire east of the Rhône. More were hired by his Italian allies. He was also joined by most of the surviving Gascon and Breton companies in Italy, including the band of Bernard de la Salle and the Italian and German companies operating in the papal state in Jeanne’s name. With these accessions of strength Louis commanded one of the largest armies gathered together in the fourteenth century, about 60,000 mounted men by the time he reached the marches of the papal state according to his own estimation. His numbers, he wrote to the city of Marseille, increased daily as men came into his camp ‘like vultures gathering around a corpse’.³⁶

It was a curious phrase to use and as it turned out a prophetic one. The Angevin invasion was a disaster for all the main protagonists. It was a death sentence for Queen Jeanne. She had been held in the remote castle of Muro in the Apennines ever since the Duke of Anjou’s preparations had become known in Italy. There, at the end of July 1382, she was smothered by her jailers on the orders of Charles of Durazzo. The body was brought back to Naples to be exposed in the ghastly candle-lit gloom of the convent church of Santa Chiara as Louis pressed on towards his southern kingdom. There was little armed resistance. But the Duke encountered growing difficulty in feeding his immense host. He was obliged to divide his forces in order to ease his supply problems. Less than a third of his men followed him into Neapolitan territory at the end of September 1382. Charles of Durazzo fought a skilful rearguard action. He was supported by the English routier  captain Sir John Hawkwood with a company of more than 2,000 mercenaries. Heavily outnumbered, they adopted much the same tactics as the French had in the face of the English invasions of 1373 and 1380. They wasted the earth in front of the enemy, harassed his flanks at every turn and persistently refused battle. At the end of the year most of Louis’s troops had deserted him. The rest were sick, starving and unpaid. Louis decided that his great venture had failed. Writing from Benevento, where he had established his winter quarters, he called on the French Council to send funds urgently. Failing that, let them at least find some excuse to recall him for service in France so that he could withdraw without disgrace. The Council never received his plea. The messenger was intercepted and the letter delivered instead to Urban VI. In the new year Louis approached Charles of Durazzo to ask for terms. According to reports reaching Rome he was ready to abandon his claim to the Neapolitan kingdom in return for Provence and a safe-conduct out of Italy.³⁷

*

The immediate consequence of Anjou’s Italian adventure was to remove the dominant figure on the French Council from the political scene. Power passed into the hands of Anjou’s brothers, the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy. Berry was the older brother. But he was an idle man without Philip’s political acumen and ambition. He was generally content to defer to him provided that he was given a free hand in the provinces of the south. No one doubted that the real seat of government was now the Hôtel d’Artois, the luxurious mansion north of Les Halles, surrounded by gardens and outbuildings, where Philip established his Parisian residence. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that Philip could do as he liked. The administration and the Parlement were still full of Charles V’s old servants who were loyal to his memory. There were military leaders and territorial magnates of considerable stature who were not beholden to him and whose views could not be ignored: the young King’s maternal uncle and guardian, the Duke of Bourbon; the Constable, Olivier de Clisson, a natural contrariant whose office, wealth, and close personal relationship with the young King made him largely independent of other men’s patronage; the Marshal, Louis de Sancerre, and the Admiral, Jean de Vienne, who were closely associated with the victories of the 1370s; courtier-captains like Enguerrand de Coucy and that grizzled veteran of three decades of French and Castilian civil wars, Pierre de Villaines, both of them highly regarded by the military nobility and the population of Paris. The Duke of Burgundy’s decisions were always constrained by a weight of consensus which represented a strong brake on personal government. Over the years, however, the transfer of power from Anjou to Burgundy would have a significant impact on the direction of French policy. Philip of Burgundy did not share Anjou’s personal loyalty to the Avignon papacy. He was much less interested in the Gascon march and the affairs of the Iberian peninsula. His interests were concentrated in the north, where he was intent on restoring Louis de Mâle’s authority in Flanders. Philip had never felt his brother’s animosity against England. In the long term he realised that an accommodation with England would be necessary if he was to take effective control of his wife’s inheritance in the Low Countries.

The Duke’s of Burgundy’s first challenge was the financial condition of the French state, which Louis of Anjou had left unresolved. The partial re-establishment of the tax system by the Estates-General of Languedoil at the beginning of the year had failed. After a halting start the flow of receipts appears to have settled at about a tenth of the sums anticipated.³⁸ The standing army of 6,000 men which the delegates in Paris had envisaged never came into being. Apart from the defence of Nantes in January 1380, which had involved only limited forces, no significant military enterprise had been attempted since the King’s accession. A large part of the problem was the reduced geographical area from which the King’s taxes were now drawn. With the attempt to introduce royal taxation into Brittany abandoned, the revenues of southern and central France reserved to the Duke of Berry, Burgundy supporting the increasingly magnificent train of life of its Duke and the revenues of the Loire provinces assigned to the Italian campaign of the Duke of Anjou, substantially the whole burden of fighting the English had to be borne by the taxpayers of a very limited region: Paris and the Île de France, Normandy, Picardy and Champagne. These provinces comprised perhaps a third of France’s population, its most fertile agricultural areas and most of its richest cities. But they were also the most politically organised regions of France, where opposition to royal taxation after the death of Charles V had been strongest.

On 14 January 1382 the Provost of the Merchants and the representatives of Paris were summoned to Vincennes, where the court was residing. When they arrived they were brought before the King. He was attended by his uncles and the rest of the royal Council. The Parisians were told that the King required them to re-grant all the taxes in force before the death of Charles V. They asked for time to consider this and were given one day. When they returned on 16 January they were admitted to the council chamber one by one and required to give their answer without knowing what the others had said. The cowed Parisians submitted. On the following day the Council published the new taxes. It was a hole and corner affair, for the government needed time to manage public opinion. A crier appeared in the enclosed courtyard of the Châtelet. Another mounted the marble platform in the great hall of the palace on the island during the lunch hour and made the proclamation to the empty chamber. With effect from 1 March 1382 the sales taxes on wine and other goods exposed for sale were to be reinstated at the rates in force under Charles V. The gabelle would be reimposed at an increased rate. Equally high-handed but less well recorded negotiations were conducted with the provinces of Languedoil with the same outcome. The news of what had happened only gradually spread through the capital and then from town to town across northern France. During the next six weeks, as the government looked for tax farmers willing to collect the new revenues, tensions rose in the northern towns, each waiting to see what others would do.³⁹

During the terrible week when London had been under the control of Wat Tyler and his allies, Michel Pintoin, the future chantor of the abbey of Saint-Denis and official historian of Charles VI, was in England on the financial affairs of his house. The murder of Archbishop Sudbury was reported to his little group of Frenchmen on the day it happened. Someone said: ‘I tell you that before long worse things than these will come to pass in France.’ ‘God forbid that France’s ancient loyalty should be defiled by such horrors,’ replied the deeply conventional Pintoin. Yet his interlocutor proved to be the better prophet.

The violence began in Rouen. The largest city of the kingdom after Paris, Rouen lived mainly on shipbuilding and the manufacture of coarse woollen cloth, both labour-intensive industries in decline. The city suffered from many of the same problems as the cloth towns of Flanders: high unemployment, large-scale migration from the countryside, widening social divisions. Tensions were aggravated by the tight control exercised by the rich ecclesiastical corporations which owned most of the city and the small merchant patriciate which dominated the commune, two groups which were much resented by the lowlier inhabitants and notoriously at loggerheads with each other. On 24 February 1381, a week before the new taxes were to come into force, a group of men led by a draper called Jean le Gras sounded one of the great bells of the commune, calling the population to arms. Their confederates closed the gates of the city to stop people leaving and opened up the prisons. A great mob took over the streets. They were drawn from the poorest sections of the city’s population, ‘la merdaille’ as a local chronicler called them. Their main targets were the rich: leading wholesale merchants, Jews, town councillors past and present, the wealthier churches, the farmers of the aides and the collectors of thegabelle. There were few casualties but a great deal of destruction. The cloister of the Franciscan convent was filled with refugees as houses were sacked, furniture smashed and stock carried off. The looting continued all day and throughout the following night until the watch, composed of householders and guild members, finally recovered their nerve and managed to restore order. They then set about turning the chaos to their own advantage, paying off scores of their own and pursuing old rivalries. The cathedral and the abbey of St. Ouen were invaded, their archives and muniments burned, and the canons forced to put their names to acts signing away rents, lawsuits, rights and privileges. On the hill of Bihorel, by the Abbeville road north of the city walls, men hacked down the immense triangular gallows by which the abbot of St. Ouen flaunted his jurisdiction to the townsmen below. The famous charter extracted from King Louis X in the rebellion of 1315, which had achieved a symbolic importance far exceeding its legal effect, was paraded through the cemetery of St. Ouen, one of the largest open spaces of the city, while reluctant officials and ecclesiastics swore to respect it. The Harelle, as the revolt of Rouen came to be called, had lasted for just three days.⁴⁰

The Duke of Burgundy’s first reaction to the news from Rouen was to face down the opposition by force. On 1 March the young King, accompanied by his uncle and the lords of Coucy and Albret, set out from Vincennes with an armed escort to intimidate the Rouennais before their example spread to the capital. They had only got as far as Saint-Denis when it became clear that they were too late. Early that morning, when the collectors of the aides had arrived in the market of Les Halles to begin their work, some 500 furious young men looking for trouble had already gathered there. The first trader to be asked to account for the tax was an old woman selling cress. As they approached her stall the collectors were attacked, covered in blows and left for dead. The mob, now blooded, poured out of the market-place into the Rue Saint-Denis and spread through the narrow streets, yelling abuse, gathering recruits as they went and carrying bystanders along in their path. Within a short period there were several thousand rioters on the streets. They converged on the Place de Grève looking for weapons. Some years before, when Paris was threatened with attack by the English, Hughes Aubriot had stocked in the Maison aux Piliers a large number of maillets, street-fighting weapons consisting of cylindrical lead cudgels fitted with wooden handles. The mob broke down the doors of the building, forced their way into the tower where the maillets were stored and distributed them among the crowd outside: hence the name maillotins, which was subsequently conferred on the rebels. As at Rouen, the violence was begun by the poor. They were drawn mainly from the mass of young journeymen and unemployed, recent migrants from the country, beggars and criminals. Here were the popolo minuto, according to the Florentine merchant Buonaccorso Pitti, who was in Paris at the time and remembered the revolt of the ciompi of Florence, four years earlier.

Armed with their lead cudgels the mob spread through the right-bank quarters of the capital, wrecking houses and breaking into church treasuries. The first victims were the officials charged with collecting the aides. Tax collectors and farmers seen in the streets were cut down where they stood. Others were hunted down in their houses or found clinging to the altars of the city’s churches. They were dragged out to meet the same fate. Their registers were torn in pieces or burned. Then the mob turned its wrath against the rich bourgeois: moneylenders, royal judges and officials. All fled as their houses were broken open and pillaged. The mansion of the Duke of Anjou was taken over and transformed into a meeting place for leaders of the mob. Some of the rioters made for the Jewish quarters, sacking their houses, destroying their records and pledges and killing those who would not declare their conversion to Christianity. The forces of order vanished. The royal Provost, the Bishop of Paris, the Provost of the Merchants and the remaining royal councillors all fled with what possessions they could carry. Only the old Breton routier Maurice de Tréséguidy, now the royal captain of Paris, tried to stem the violence. His men were quickly overwhelmed.

The King’s cavalcade had by now turned back towards Vincennes. The Duke of Burgundy left the main party, accompanied by the Chancellor, the lord of Coucy and a small group of officials. They rode to the Porte Saint-Antoine at the eastern end of the city to find out what was happening. A group of Parisians appeared at the gate to speak to them. These men were prominent members of the Paris guilds. They had nothing to say for the rioters and certainly could not speak for them. But they were just as hostile to the new taxes. They hoped by mediating between the mob and the government to extract concessions. They made three demands of the Duke: the immediate abolition of all taxes introduced since the beginning of the century; the release of four citizens who had been arrested for organising resistance to the taxes in February; and an amnesty for the events of the day. Later that morning the Council met in the castle of Vincennes to consider these demands. They decided that there would be no compromise. The answer was sent back that the King would concede nothing apart from the release of the four citizens. When this was reported to the leaders of the mob there was a fresh explosion of violence. The maillotins headed for the Châtelet, the seat of the Royal Provost and the symbol of royal power in the city. They broke down the gates and opened up the cells as the sergeants fled for their lives. After this it was the turn of the city’s other prisons, most of which belonged to the Bishop and the great abbeys. They were broken open and their prisoners released onto the streets. ⁴¹

Within the walls the householders and guildsmen had already begun to reassert control. The watch was called out, armed, and placed under the control of the guild captains. During the night and the following day they gradually recovered possession of the streets as the violence of the mob burned itself out. But once the municipality had put a stop to the violence, as that shrewd observer Buonaccorso Pitti noted, they simply took over the rebels’ cause as their own. They kept the city gates firmly closed and set about bargaining with the government about the taxes. For its part, the Council at Vincennes maintained its defiance. Royal troops were sent to occupy the bridge of Charenton, upstream of the city, and began to stop river traffic carrying in food. The Duke of Burgundy summoned his Burgundian retainers. Rumours got about that John de Montfort and even Louis of Anjou were on their way with troops to suppress the resistance of the capital. A show of force suited the authoritarian instincts of Philip of Burgundy and he may well have contemplated one. But it was no longer realistic. As the news of the rising in Paris spread through the northern provinces the new taxes were rejected everywhere. At Amiens, where the violent party conflicts of 1358 still lay just below the surface of civic life, men went through the streets shouting out their support for the rioters of Paris. At Dieppe the town gates were closed in the collectors’ faces. At Falaise in Normandy rioters broke up the auction of the tax farm for the district. At Caen the collectors were abused and manhandled. Angry crowds took to the streets at Orléans and Reims. Similar scenes were enacted in countless other towns of the north. The government was forced to compromise. On 4 March 1382 the Council announced the temporary suspension of the taxes and a partial amnesty for the rioters. The Parisians for their part agreed to submit to mediation by the University and to deliver up forty of the ringleaders of 1 March, who had been arrested by the watch and shut in the Châtelet. They were beheaded or hanged at the gates of the city in small groups over the following days until the threat of fresh riots made it necessary to suspend the executions.⁴²

The uneasy stand-off in Paris enabled the government to make an example of less formidable antagonists. On 17 March 1382 the King and the Duke of Burgundy left Vincennes for Rouen for the second time. A fortnight later, on 29 March, the gates of Rouen were thrown down and symbolically trampled underfoot by the royal party as they rode in with helmets on their heads and drawn swords in their hands. Only twelve ringleaders were executed at Rouen. But the bourgeois who had tried to make use of the popular violence were humbled. The municipality was abolished and its powers transferred to the royal bailli. The town bells and coat of arms were confiscated. A vindictive fine of 100,000 francs was imposed, nearly half of which was actually enforced.⁴³

The authority of the Crown had been upheld. But the issue of taxation remained unresolved. No attempt was made to recall the Estates-General, which had shown itself to be largely ineffective in 1380. Instead a series of provincial assemblies was summoned in April 1382, starting with the five baillages of Champagne and Picardy. Their representatives gathered before the King and his ministers at Compiègne. The president of the Parlement, Arnaud de Corbie, like most fourteenth-century lawyers profoundly conservative and authoritarian, harangued the delegates about the desperate state of the government’s finances. But the most that they would agree to do was consult their constituents. In the event four of the five baillages refused a grant outright. The fifth, Sens, conceded a sales tax that proved impossible to collect. The reception of the King’s demands in Amiens, the only city whose deliberations are recorded, suggests that the problem was not necessarily the principle of taxation but its distribution among the population. The King’s need was acknowledged at Amiens. There might have been popular support for a direct tax which would not fall chiefly on the poor but that was unacceptable to the merchant oligarchies who dominated the civic life of the town. So nothing at all was agreed.⁴⁴

The Parisians had not been represented at Compiègne but they were asked to grant their own tax at the rate promised by the province of Sens. The captains of the watch summoned a large assembly to consider this demand. It was rejected by an overwhelming majority. A few voices were raised in support of the government. More would have been if they had not been silenced by the ugly mood of the gathering. At Vincennes the Council refused to take No for an answer. They sent Enguerrand de Coucy to reason with the Parisians. Enguerrand was a popular figure in the capital, one of the few men associated with the court who had been able to circulate freely during the March riots. But even he could only obtain a derisory offer of 12,000 francs. At the end of April 1382 the Council resorted in frustration to more abrasive measures. Once again the river traffic serving the city was cut off at the bridge of Charenton and this time at the downstream bridge of Saint-Cloud as well. The court moved to Melun, south of the city. From there the troops of Philip of Burgundy began a campaign of harassment against the Parisians, stopping road traffic around the city and wasting the suburban farms and orchards of prominent bourgeois. There was even talk of an assault on the walls. There was a long conference in the refectory of the monastery of Saint-Denis at which the spokesmen of the King and the city addressed a panel of mediators as if they were ambassadors of rival nations. The Parisian guild leaders, caught between their fear of the government and their fear of the mob, finally agreed in the middle of May 1382 upon a subsidy of 80,000 francs. But they had no public support for this deal and probably knew it.⁴⁵

When, on 1 June 1382, Charles VI made his formal entry into Paris to mark his reconciliation with the capital, the councillors who were most closely associated with the Crown’s attempt to repair its tax system stayed away for fear that their presence would provoke violence. Normandy, aristocratic, conservative, closely associated by tradition with the monarchy’s fortunes, followed the example of Paris with better grace. The Estates of Normandy granted 30,000 francs at an assembly held at Pontoise at the beginning of June. The murmurings of revolt when this decision was first reported at Rouen suggest that it was no more popular among urban taxpayers than the Parisian grant. Some weeks later, when the tax began to be collected, a mob of journeymen and servants led by a butcher invaded Rouen’s cloth market, overturned the stalls and broke up the market. It is probable, although the evidence is sparse, that similar grants were being made at provincial assemblies across northern France and meeting with similar resentments. Bymidsummer tax revenues had begin to flow again, but tensions were high and the proceeds disappointing.⁴⁶

*

Much of the resistance to emergency taxation in France was inspired by the continued defiance of the Count of Flanders by the city of Ghent. Ghent, the original author of the urban revolutions of 1379, had suffered much since Louis de Mâle had brutally suppressed the rebellion in every other part of Flanders. It had seen its trade ruined by confiscations and boycotts. It had been defeated in battle. In a war of raid and counter-raid characterised by savagery on both sides, the town had suffered heavy casualties. In June 1381 it lost its last ally when Grammont was captured and burned and its inhabitants butchered by Louis de Mâle’s captains. Yet Ghent itself, protected by walls and marshland and by its situation at the confluence of two great rivers, beat off every attempt by the Count’s armies to capture it.

The cities of Flanders, the German Low Countries and northern France belonged in many respects to the same economic community, and the progress of the civil war in Flanders was followed with intense interest among its neighbours. Contemporaries, who rarely understood the dynamics of urban revolt, were profoundly conscious of the contagion of popular revolution. Buonaccorso Pitti was no doubt mistaken when he reported that the risings in Rouen and Paris had been provoked by agents of Ghent. But his opinion probably reflected the conventional wisdom of the political class in Paris and certainly their worst fears. Events seemed to bear their view out. At Amiens the rabble-rousers passed through the streets calling out their supporters with cries of ‘Up with Paris! Up with Ghent!’⁴⁷

In July 1381 the Count of Flanders had begun a systematic blockade of Ghent. With garrisons in Courtrai, Oudenaarde and Dendermonde, Louis was able to cut the river routes to Ghent by the Lys and close the Scheldt on both sides of the city. This left Ghent’s dense population dependent for its food supplies on provisioning raids by mounted parties from the city; and on supplies carted overland from Hainault and Brabant or shipped to the harbours of Holland and Zeeland and smuggled across the low-lying region north of the city known as the Vier Ambachten. Raw materials for the city’s workshops had to get in by the same routes. Gradually, over the next six months, all of these lifelines failed. Louis de Mâle’s garrisons patrolled the territory around Ghent, attacking supply trains and killing or imprisoning the men in charge of them. He pressed the rulers of the neighbouring states to forbid their subjects to trade with Ghent. All of them did so with more or less effect. The grain traffic from Hainault was the first to dry up. Supplies from Brabant and from Holland and Zeeland continued in spite of the decrees of their rulers, but at irregular intervals and on a much reduced scale. As the city’s distress mounted the Count’s attitude became progressively harsher. There were a number of attempts to find a negotiated solution. All of them failed in the face of Louis’s intransigence. He would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender.

By the end of 1381 the tragedy of Ghent had polarised opinion across northern Europe. Louis de Mâle recruited knights and squires to his standard from well beyond his own domains. Many of them were not simply earning their pay but intent on supporting the social order. ‘Noblemen stick together,’ as Froissart observed. On the other side of the divide a wave of solidarity united urban radicals in the self-governing cities. In Brabant the citizens of Louvain and Brussels supported the provisioning efforts of Ghent in defiance of their Duchess. Liège, a city controlled by its guilds with a long tradition of political radicalism and social discord, wrote letters of support and promised 600 cartloads of wheat and flour at the lowest point of the city’s fortunes. Even in places which enforced the blockade and supported the Count with money and troops, the city magistrates grew frightened by the strength of feeling in the streets and tenements.⁴⁸

Louis de Mâle’s refusal to grant terms to the men of Ghent merely drove them to ever more desperate measures. The last serious attempt to find a compromise solution occurred in October 1381. The Flemish towns and the princes of the Low Countries, desperate for a solution to a conflict which was beginning to infect their own domains, convened a fresh peace conference. It was held at Harelbeke, a small village on the banks of the River Lys outside Courtrai. Ghent was represented there by twelve prominent members of the city government led by the two senior aldermen, Simon Bette and Gilbert de Grutere. A conditional agreement was made, subject to confirmation by the general assembly of the town. It provided for the complete submission of the city and for the surrender to the Count of 200 ringleaders to be nominated by him in due course and dealt with as he saw fit. Most of the city government was behind the agreement. They were supported by the grain shippers’ and victuallers’ guilds, whose members had been ruined by the blockade. The mass of inhabitants, says Froissart, were for peace ‘except for the rabble who liked nothing better than a riot’. But it was not only the rabble who were opposed to the terms. The main opponents of the peace were the weavers, who saw nothing in the terms to ameliorate their desperate economic plight and every sign that the Count meant to suppress the autonomy of the city government. They were egged on by prominent politicians who had been heavily implicated in the events of the past two years and suspected that their names would be included in the Count’s list of 200 victims. The municipality did their best to suppress opposition to the treaty. Peter Van den Bossche, the most prominent opponent, was imprisoned. On 2 January 1382 a mob consisting mainly of members of the grain shippers’ guild invaded the town hall to attack the opponents of the peace. They murdered the town clerk, who was believed to be one of them, and threw his body into the street. Two wretches were seized and tortured until they confessed to a conspiracy against the peace, before being killed in their turn. Outside in the streets a pitched battle was fought between the partisans of the weavers and the grain shippers.

On 13 January 1382 a messenger arrived from Louis de Mâle with an ultimatum requiring the city to ratify the terms of the peace and deliver up hostages to secure its observance. On the 24th, the day before the aldermen were due to consider this demand, a general assembly was called in the Friday Market, the largest open space in the city. The opponents of the peace came well prepared. As the citizens stood in formation under the banners of their guilds they read out a declaration to the assembled multitude urging them that if they wanted their city to survive they should place all the powers of government in the hands of one man. They had their candidate ready: Philip Van Artevelde. Philip was a gang leader associated with Peter Van den Bossche and the weavers’ faction, who had recently begun to take part in the councils of the city. His main claim to fame was that he was the son of Jacob, the famous dictator of Ghent who had led the city’s rebellion against the Count’s father forty years before. About half of those present in the Friday Market were opposed to his nomination. But the proposal had the appeal of novelty in a desperate situation and it began to gather momentum among the crowd. Perceiving this, his opponents sought to diminish the authority of the assembly by walking out of it. This was a mistake, as such decisions usually are. The effect was to leave the field clear for Van Artevelde’s partisans.

Philip himself had been waiting for his moment in a public bathhouse nearby. He was fetched and taken in triumph to the town hall. There he was sworn in as captain of Ghent. An emergency government was set up, consisting of the new captain and four councillors of his choice. But real power lay with Van Artevelde himself and with Peter Van den Bossche, who became his constant adviser and colleague. They made short work of the treaty. The terms were formally put to the aldermen on the day after Van Artevelde assumed power and rejected. A reign of terror was inaugurated against its authors. Simon Bette was lynched. His colleague Gilbert de Grutere was accused of being in league with the Count and killed by Artevelde’s own hand. Three men, including the dean of the grain shippers’ guild, were thrown into the city prison and then beheaded. Over the following weeks Van Artevelde claimed a large number of other victims who were either killed or forced to flee: rival politicians whom he wanted out of the way, personal enemies who had crossed him in the past and a large number of others whose main offence was that they or their forbears had participated in the movement which had deposed and murdered his father back in 1345.⁴⁹

Philip Van Artevelde’s methods were in some respects strikingly similar to his father’s, on which they were probably based. He set about creating a new solidarity among the inhabitants. Men wore their allegiance on their sleeves, which were inscribed with the motto ‘God sustain us.’ The councils of the city were thrown open to the poor. There were tough measures to suppress the endemic private feuds and gang wars of fourteenth-century Ghent. A succession of populist measures reinforced his power. For the first time a true siege economy was imposed. The private grain stores of the monasteries and richer citizens, who had farms beyond the walls, were requisitioned and sold off at fixed prices. Steeply progressive taxes were levied, which shifted the burden of financing the war onto the possessors of the great commercial and landed fortunes. Ghent’s procurement methods became even more aggressive than they had been before. A fleet of shallow-draft boats was organised to bring in supplies under heavy guard across the Vier Ambachten. Francis Ackerman led a large armed force across the territories of Brabant and the prince-bishopric of Liège in order to find grain and escort it back to Ghent. Louis de Mâle responded by tightening the blockade. His officers broke the bridges over the River Dender, by which the convoys were getting through from Brabant. They hired their own fleet of boats to stop the traffic from the north. The flow of goods was reduced once more to a trickle.⁵⁰

Froissart thought that ‘in his heart Philip Van Artevelde was an Englishman’ (‘avoit le corage trop plus englois que franchois’). There is no doubt that he was right about this. Philip had been named by his father after Edward III’s Queen, Philippa, who had been his godmother. He had passed his early years in England, where his mother had taken refuge after Jacob’s death. But there was more to Philip’s loyalty to England than sentiment. He had been in the pay of the English government from 1369, if not earlier, at the substantial rate of 100 marks a year. In the longer term he knew that his measures would not save the town unless he could draw England into the Flemish civil war. So, in February 1382, a month after assuming power, he sent three of his associates to Westminster to open negotiations with the English Council. He offered to recognise Richard II as Count of Flanders and King of France if the English would supply weapons to the men of Ghent and bring a fleet and an army to the Low Country in the summer.⁵¹

*

Hitherto the English government had made no attempt to exploit the travails of Flanders. The region was economically important to England, but it was a distraction from the main object of dealing with France. It suited the English ministers better to maintain cordial relations with Louis de Mâle. When Philip Van Artevelde’s emissaries reached England they found Richard II’s ministers occupied with plans for the forthcoming peace conference. The problem with all peace initiatives, as John of Gaunt had learned at Bruges, was that without a credible military threat the ambassadors would have little to bring into the conference chamber. So the Great Council which approved the arrangements for the conference also resolved to raise an army of 6,000 men to invade France under the young King himself in the event that diplomacy failed. Unfortunately the noblemen gathered at Windsor had no power to make a grant of taxation and no other proposals for financing this army. The King’s ministers had no money and no continental allies other than Portugal. In March 1382 they were ruefully contemplating the possibility that they would be unable to make war and unable to make peace either. For those at Westminster who were looking for an escape from this predicament the appearance of Philip Van Artevelde’s emissaries some days after the Great Council had closed was a godsend. It offered the prospect of invading France by the north with Flemish support, in much greater strength than England could have mustered from its own resources. A campaign in the north was also more likely to find support in Parliament and among the financiers of the city of London, where the impact of the Flemish civil war on the wool trade and the Calais staple was already causing concern.⁵²

Richard II’s Council took up Van Artevelde’s initiative. But the Council was a coalition of disparate interests and prejudices. Those who wanted to make a success of the peace conference supported the Flemish proposals for tactical reasons. But over the following weeks they were displaced by others with larger ends in view. Some of them thought that the revolt of Ghent might really supply the means of redressing the strategic balance with France. Some were more interested in spoiling the southern strategy favoured by John of Gaunt. As a result, interest in peacemaking began to recede. An assembly of shipmasters was summoned to advise about the logistical problems of sending a seaborne force to eastern Flanders. Preliminary plans were made to embark the proposed army of 6,000 on eighty large ships and to land them at Antwerp in the mouth of the Scheldt. The expedition was expected, rather optimistically, to cost about £60,000. Another assembly, of merchants and financiers, was convened to consider ways of raising this sum without Parliamentary taxation. They included representatives of all the mercantile cities of England and the Italian banking houses in London. The financiers thought that the money could be borrowed but only if Parliament was willing to underwrite the loan with promises of fresh taxes, later if not sooner. So, on 24 March 1382, Parliament was summoned to meet once more in the hope that they would reconsider their previous decision. The opening was fixed for 7 May. Van Artevelde’s emissaries were told that they would have a firm answer a week after that. The English ambassadors were still in Picardy, putting the final touches on the arrangements for the peace conference, but by the time they returned to Westminster at the end of March the Council had already privately abandoned the policy of settling with France. It was replaced by a policy which was characteristic of the aimlessness and opportunism of English thinking: a programme of diplomatic evasion and temporising extending into the summer, which was designed to gain time while Richard II’s ministers argued about whether to intervene in Flanders or Castile and looked across the Channel to see what could be extracted from the increasingly confused situation in France.⁵³

Philip Van Artevelde’s agents left England on 7 April 1382. About a fortnight later the last hope for peace in Flanders vanished. A conference, at least the third of its kind, had been convened in the cathedral city of Tournai under the auspices of the rulers of Holland, Hainault, Brabant and Liège, all of whom were concerned about the destabilising effect of the civil war. All the major towns of Flanders sent representatives. At Ghent there were high hopes. The streets and gateways of the town were crowded with people praying for its success as Philip Van Artevelde left for Tournai with the town’s delegation. But when it came to the point Louis de Mâle declined to negotiate. He had never wanted the conference. He knew by now about the negotiations of Philip Van Artevelde with the English government, which had been reported to him by spies in London. He was actively recruiting troops for a final trial of strength. He was confident of victory. From the distance of the Château de Mâle Louis announced that his council would declare his wishes in due course. His wishes, when they were eventually made known, were bleak. He would accept the surrender of Ghent, he said, provided that all adult males in the city appeared before him to repent their acts, dressed in their shirtsleeves with bare heads and nooses around their necks. He would decide their fate on the day. The bailli of Hainault tried to persuade the men of Ghent to submit even on these terms. Philip Van Artevelde replied that he and his colleagues had no authority to dispose of the lives of their fellow citizens and then left.⁵⁴

Notes

1 Deschamps, Oeuvres, i, 113, 203; cf. iii, 131—2.

2 Inv. Arch. Bruges, ii, 367—70; ‘Chron. Com. Fland.’, 235; Nicholas (1987), 240—1; ‘Chron. Com. Fland.’, 235—6 (dates unreliable); Froissart, Chron. (SHF), ix, 165—78, 182—6; Rek. Gent, 115; Cron. Tournay, 218—19; Istore, ii, 164, 183, 221—6; Chron. rimée, 12; Memorieboek Ghent, i, 105—8; ‘Chron. Pays-Bas’, 266. Background: Nicholas (1971), 138—41; Nicholas (1987), Ch. 9. On Van den Bossche: see Nicholas (1988), 144—6.

3 Istore, ii, 164, 183—5; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), ix, 192—4, 199; Itin. Ph. le Hardi, 146; Chron. r. St.-Denis, i, 108; Dixmude, Merkw. Geb., 2—3; Cron. Tournay, 219; Chron. rimée, 13—16.

4 Chron. Rimée, 16—23; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), ix, 187—92; Cron. Tournay, 220; Istore, ii, 228; AD Côte-d’Or B11737; BN Coll. Bourgogne 21, fol. 11^vo; *Rek. Gent, 441—5.

5 Froissart, Chron. (SHF), ix, 231—2; Istore, ii, 233; ‘Chron. Pays-Bas’, 268; Itin. Ph. le Hardi, 147.

6 Cron. Tournay, 234—5; Istore, ii, 189, 234; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), ix, 227—8, 230; Chron. rimée, 42—4.

7 Chron. rimée, 42—5, 52—5, 101; Hanserecesse, ii, 234; ‘Chron. Com. Fland.’, 236—8; Istore, ii, 173—4, 192—3, 236—40; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 52—9; Gr. chron., ii, 380, iii, 3; Cron. Tournay, 237; *Rek. Gent, 449—50.

8 Gower, ‘Confessio Amantis’, Prol. ll. 499—528 (Works, ii, 18—19); Parl. Rolls, vi, 36—7 (54), 47—8 (88). Background: R. Faith, ‘The “Great Rumour” and peasant ideology’, The English Rising of 1381, ed. R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston (1984), 43—73.

9 Brinton, Sermons, i, 194—200; Walsingham, Chron. Maj., i, 152—4; Parl. Rolls, vi, 275 (17); C. Petit-Dutaillis, ‘Les prédications populaires. Les Lollards et le soulèvement des travailleurs anglais en 1381’, Études d’histoire du moyen age dédiées à Gabriel Monod (1896), 373—88; G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2^nd ed. (1961), Ch. VI; Langland, Piers Plowman, i, 13—18 (B Text, Prol.).

10 Oman, 27—9, 164—6 (App. II); CFR, ix, 248—50; Parl. Rolls, vi, 324—5 (6); Anonimalle, 134—5; Brooks, 252, 254—5.

11 Anonimalle, 136—7; Walsingham, Chron. Maj., i, 412; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 98, 100—2, 108.

12 Walsingham, Chron. Maj., i, 412—14; Anonimalle, 136—7; R.H. Hilton, Bond men made free (1973), 180—4; Brooks, 256, 260—7. Haselden: Parl. Rolls, vi, 233—58 (54); CPR 1381—5, 76. Trivet: Réville, 185, 187.

13 Anonimalle, 137—9; Walsingham, Chron. Maj., i, 544—8; Knighton, Chron., 222—4; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 95—7. On Ball’s past career: CPR 1361—4, 470; Concilia, iii, 64—5, 152—3.

14 Saul (1997), 469; Anonimalle, 139; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 108—10; Knighton, Chron., 210—12.

15 Cal. Letter Books H, 163; Oman, 165 (App. II); Tout (1920—37), iii, 364; B. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers (1908), 155—6.

16 Anonimalle, 138—9; Walsingham, Chron. Maj., i, 414—16.

17 Anonimalle, 140—3, 144; Walsingham, Chron. Maj., i, 418; Westminster Chron., 4; Knighton, Chron., 214—16; Mems. London, 449—50. Horne: *Réville, 190—8; Bird, 52—61.

18 Oman, 99—128.

19 John of G. Reg. (1379—83), nos. 530—6, 541, 548—51, 559—61, 563—4, 1096—7, 1186—8; Knighton, Chron., 230, 232—6; PRO C49/F12/11; *Walker (1991), 68—9; Anonimalle, 152—3, 155—6.

20 Anonimalle, 143—50; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 109—10, 116—24; Walsingham, Chron. Maj., i, 422—40; Knighton, Chron., 212, 218—20; Westminster Chron., 4—12; Mems. London, 450—1; Eulogium, iii, 353—4.

21 Anonimalle, 149; Walsingham, Chron. Maj., i, 514—16, 544—6; Westminster Chron., 14—18; PRO E101/531/40; E364/21, m. 3 (Veel & Passelew), E364/22, mm. 5d (Roches), 7d (West); E403/484, m. 8 (25 June); CPR 1381—5, 18, 23, 69—71. Wraw: *Réville, 175—82.

22 Parl. Rolls, vi, 217—18, 221—2, 225—6 (17, 25—8, 36—7, 40).

23 1380: Foed., iv, 83—4; PRO E101/318/20, 28; ‘Voyage de N. de Bosc’, 327—8. 1381: Foed., iv, 122; PRO E101/318/36—38, E101/319/3; ‘Voyage de N. de Bosc’, 309—14, 317—27. 1382: Foed., iv, 141; Le Fèvre, Journal, 26; ‘Voyage de N. de Bosc’, 326; Russell, 329—30.

24 PRO E101/39/17, mm. 1—2; E101/39/18, 22; Lopes, Crón. D. Fernando, 452—3. On Gournay: Leland, Itin., i, 159; Cuvelier, Chanson, i, 217—23. On Beauchamp: Chandos Herald, Prince Noir, ll. 2250—2; Walker (1990)[1], 264.

25 ‘Dispacci di C. da Piacenza’, 302—3; Col. doc. Murcia, xi, no. 67; Ayala, Crón., ii, 151—2; Lopes, Crón. D. Fernando, 421; Russell, 315, 318; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 164—5; Choix de pièces, i, 14—20; Ayala, Crón., ii, 140—2; Valois (1896—1902), ii, 206 (but his argument does not convince). Olivier du Guesclin: AN JJ142/189, JJ143/299; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 165. Charles, Infante of Navarre: ACA reg. 1271, fol. 149; ibid., reg. 1276, fol. 96.

26 Col. doc. Murcia, xi, nos. 69—70, 72—3; Lopes, Crón. D. Fernando, 422—4, 475.

27 Lopes, Crón. D. Fernando, 425—50, 453; Col. doc. Murcia, xi, no. 78; Ayala, Crón., ii, 152—3, 204; ACA reg. 1276, fols. 44^vo—46.

28 Lopes, Crón. D. Fernando, 455—6, 459—61; Valois (1896—1902), ii, 207—8; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 157—8; Perroy (1933), 122.

29 Ayala, Crón., ii, 154—5; Lopes, Crón. D. Fernando, 455, 465—7.

30 ACA reg. 1276, fols. 44^vo—46; Ayala, Crón., ii, 152, 153—5; Lopes, Crón. D. Fernando, 449, 463—4; Col. doc. Murcia, xi, nos. 79—81, 83, 86, 112.

31 Col. doc. Murcia, xi, nos. 79, 81, 83; Lopes, Crón. D. Fernando, 467, 471—3.

32 Parl. Rolls, vi, 247—8 (66). Squire: PRO E404/12/82 (10 Dec.); E403/487, m. 14 (18 Dec.). Portuguese financial commitment: Foed., iv, 94.

33 Westminster Chron., 24; Parl. Rolls, vi, 247—9 (65—70).

34 ‘Dispacci di C. da Piacenza’, 293, 303—4; Niem, De Scismate, 42—3; ‘Diario d’anonimo fiorentino’, 425; Cron. siculum, 37—8; Diurnali Monteleone, 25; Bouard, 47; Valois (1896—1902), ii, 8—12; Labande, 122—5; Léonard, 462—5. On events in Naples, see also Diurnali Monteleone, 28—9; Cron. siculum, 38—9; and Gobelinus, Cosm., 89—92.

35 Le Fèvre, Journal, 8—14, 21, 23. Clement VII’s financial contribution: ibid., 24; Valois (1896—1902), II, 24—9; Favier (1966), 614—15.

36 Le Fèvre, Journal, 3, 44; Gobelinus, Cosm., 93; *Valois (1896—1902), ii, 39 and n² (‘60,000 horses’), 444, 445. Companies: Labande, 141—2, 145—7.

37 E.-G. Léonard, ‘La captivité et la mort de Jeanne I^re de Naples’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, xli (1924), 43—77, at *68—9, 75—7; Cron. siculum, 46; Vitae paparum, i, 486—7; ‘Diario d’anonimo fiorentino’, 446; Diurnali D. de Monteleone, 32—3; ‘Dispacci di C. da Piacenza’, 317—20. And see Valois (1896—1902), ii, 41—60; Labande, 148—50. Hawkwood: Caferro, 220—1, 232—6, 237—40; Temple-Leader & Marcotti, 176—82.

38 Mirot (1905)[1], 64—5, 66n¹.

39 Chronographia, iii, 7—8; Gr. chron., iii, 11—12; Chron. r. St.-Denis, i, 134; Choix de pièces, i, 24—6; *Coville (1894), 396—8; Mirot (1905)[1], 90—1.

40 Cochon, Chron., 162—6; Chron. premiers Valois, 298—9; *Chéruel, 544—9; Mirot (1905)[1], 98—103. Pintoin: Chron. r. St.-Denis, i, 134.

41 Chronographia, iii, 22—6; Gr. chron., iii, 12—13; Chron. r. St.-Denis, i, 136—40; Pitti, Cron., 63—4; Mirot (1905), 115—26, 129—34. Hôtel d’Anjou: *ibid., 129n¹.

42 Chronographia, iii, 26—30, 28—9; Chron. r. St.-Denis, i, 140, 146—8; Gr. chron., iii, 13—14; Pitti, Cron., 64—5; Mirot (1905)[1], 95—7, 109—10, 127—9. Musters: *Itin. Ph. le Hardi, 513; Auctarium Chart. Univ. Paris., i, 618. Amiens: Doc. Amiens, i, 225—6.

43 Cochon, Chron., 166—8; Chron. premiers Valois, 299—301; Gr. chron., iii, 14—15; Chron. r. St.-Denis, i, 144; Chronographia, iii, 30—1.

44 Chronographia, iii, 30—1; Chron. r. St.-Denis, i, 148—50; Chron. premiers Valois, 301; Doc. Amiens, i, 225—6.

45 Chronographia, iii, 32—3, 36—7; Chron. r. St.-Denis, i, 152—6; Chron. premiers Valois, 302; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 212; Gr. chron., iii, 17—18; Choix de pièces, i, no. 18.

46 Chron. premiers Valois, 303—4; Cochon, Chron., 168; Mirot (1905)[1], 157n⁵; *Coville (1894), 398—401.

47 Grammont: Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 142; Istore, ii, 244. For the third siege (June—July 1381): Cron. Tournay, 237—8, 239—40; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 141, 145; ‘Chron. Com. Fland.’, 239; Istore, ii, 175, 199—200, 244—5; ‘Chron. Pays-Bas’, 273. Contagion: Pitti, Cron., 63; Doc. Amiens, i, 225—6.

48 Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 145—7, 201—8; Chron. Liégeoise de 1402, 390—1; Quicke, 312—21. Provisioning raids: Rek. Gent, 257, 283, 284—301; Dixmude, Merkw. Geb., 10—11; Rek. Baljuws, 387. Letters of support: F. Vercauteren, Luttes sociales à Liège (1943), 98.

49 Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 80—1, 139—40, 147, 150—1; Rek. Gent, 272—3, *451—2; Rek. Baljuws, 405—6; Vlaamsche kron., 28—33; and see Nicholas (1988), 123—44, 153—9.

50 Vlaamsche kron., 31, 33; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 140, 202—7; Rek. Baljuws, 137—45, 486.

51 Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 84, 260; CPR 1345—8, 9; CPR 1348—50, 568; PRO E403/462, m. 8 (6 May); E403/493, m. 9 (30 Dec.); Palmer (1972), 245—6.

52 Foed., iv, 141; Parl. Rolls, vi, 269—70, 271 (3, 9); Westminster Chron., 24; PRO E364/15, m. 4 (Hereford); E403/487, m. 18 (10 Feb.).

53 *Palmer (1972), 245—6; Parl. Rolls, vi, 269—70, 271 (3, 9); CCR 1381—5, 121—2; Foed., iv, 143; PRO E364/15, m. 7d (Cobham); Westminster Chron., 24.

54 *Palmer (1972), 246; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), x, 207—11, 215—16; Cron. Tournay, 242; ‘Chron. Pays-Bas’, 275; Istore, ii, 177; Quicke, 318—19, 321. Spies: *Palmer (1972), 245—7.