ABSTRACT
A commission issued in the name of the young King Richard II to the Mayor of London and others on 15 June 1381 described how unprecedented events had convulsed England.1 Groups of persons ‘largely of middling and lesser status’ such as labourers, servants, and craftsmen had gathered in armed multitudes in Essex, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Middlesex, and, prompted by the devil, used threats of beheading and of the burning of houses and goods to compel knights or other free men to join them. Many faithful subjects of the king had been killed and beheaded and their houses demolished or burnt. These disturbances had spread to London and its suburbs, and the palace of John of Gaunt, the king’s uncle, known as the Savoy Palace, and the Priory of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell had been inhumanly burnt and devastated. Regardless of the fear of God or the reverence owed to the king’s personal presence, Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England, and Robert Hales, the Prior of the Hospitallers and Treasurer of England, together with others found within the city had been beheaded and killed. The king denounced these treasonable actions and declared that they would not go unpunished. This is the earliest account of what is now known as the English Peasants’ Revolt. At this time, perhaps within hours of the death of the rebel leader Wat Tyler at Smithfield, the king and his councillors were probably not yet fully aware of the scale of the disturbances in East Anglia and elsewhere. Nevertheless, this commission established at the outset one of the chief features of narrative descriptions of 1381, namely the prominence given to the disturbances in London and the assumption that the city was the chief target of the rebels. This is epitomised by John Gower’s description of the rising in his poem Vox Clamantis which portrays London, the New Troy, ‘powerless as a widow’, with
a thousand wolves and bears approaching with the wolves determined to go out of the woods to the homes of the city . . . And so the savage throngs approached the city like the waves of the sea and entered it by violence.2
