ABSTRACT
The principal focus of the rising was in East Anglia and the Home Counties, though echoes of discontent were to be found farther away. For example, the Prior of Worcester Cathedral excused himself in a letter of 5 July 1381 from attendance at the Benedictine Chapter (the meeting of representatives of all the English Benedictine monasteries), due to be held in Northampton three days later. The reason given was that his free and unfree tenants with their supporters, on the pretext of certain manumissions (no doubt a reference to the king’s promises at Mile End on 14 June), were refusing the rent and services which constituted ‘the greater part of his and his monastery’s sustenance’. The prior might have expected this, for sporadic refusals of rents and services had been occurring since 1378, leading to the prior’s seizure in 1380 of the goods and chattels of all the serfs on the estate. Similar conspiratorial movements were reported from the estate and the monastery of St Werburgh at Chester, also in July, again a belated echo of the south-eastern rising. And, as is well known, the heated social and political atmosphere, the demonstrable weaknesses of the rulers of the country, triggered off local conflict in various towns well away from the centre of the rising, such as York, Winchester, Beverley, Scarborough and Bridgwater.1
