ABSTRACT
On the eve of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, John Bromyard, the chancellor of Cambridge University, delivered a sermon in which he warned the wealthy that the Day of Judgment would be a day of retribution for the poor. According to Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium, a groundbreaking study of the development of millenarianism in medieval Western Europe, Bromyard was an anti-Wycliffi te, and his goal in delivering the sermon was far from revolutionary, but his topic was ripe for use by those who wanted wholesale societal change. Cohn’s analysis of the speech is useful in understanding the nexus of millenarianism and reform in later periods: ‘All that was required in order to turn such a prophecy into revolutionary propaganda of the most explosive kind was to bring the day of judgment nearer-to show it not as happening in some remote indefi nite future but as already at hand’ (202). ‘The day of judgment’, ‘the apocalypse’ and ‘the thousand-year reign of Christ and the saints’, as well as the coming of all manner of minor ‘saints’, were concepts frequently deployed throughout the late Middle Ages and early Reformation as the impetus for a number of reform and utopian movements. This rhetoric was ready-made for use by reformers and willingly accepted by large sections of the population, especially the poorest members of society.
