ABSTRACT
Walsingham, whose elaborate history has so much influenced subsequent interpretations, strongly emphasizes the peasant component, as one would expect of a monk from a landowning monastery whose rural tenants were as much involved in the rebellion as were the townsmen of St Albans itself. The initial rising in Essex, according to him, was of ‘peasants, whom we call serfs or bondmen, together with their rural neighbours’ (rustici namque quos nativos vel bondis vocamus simul cum ruralibus accolis). He refers to the rebels at the Tower of London as ‘not merely peasants (rusticos) but the most abject of peasants’. A demonstration for charters of freedom at St Albans was attended by ‘peasants and serfs of the abbot and convent, together with the common people of the district and certain of the townspeople’ (rustici et nativi abbatis et conventus simul cum communibus patriae et quibusdam de villanis). Gower occasionally refers to the ‘commons’ as distinct from peasants as, for example, when describing the composition of the Kentish contingent. Otherwise, he uses terms of abuse, such as ‘ribald’, ‘debauchees’, or ‘idle rascals’ (ribaldi, ganeo, nebulo). There is no emphasis on the artisan element, which could have been subsumed under the term ‘commons’ or ‘rural neighbours’.2
