They killed the man before sundown. They could not unwrite the words.

This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.

Wat Tyler needs to be remembered.

❖ ❖ ❖

He dismounted before the king and did not bow.

He half-bent his knee. He took the boy’s hand. He shook it forcibly, the way one tradesman shakes another’s hand in a tavern, and he called him brother.

That was Smithfield, June 15, 1381. The king was Richard II, fourteen years old, the crown still a little large for him. The man on the ground was Wat Tyler. The chronicle that recorded the scene called him a roof-tiler from Maidstone. It did not record his face.

History gave him eight days. He was chosen captain of the Kentish rebels on June 7 and dead before sundown on June 15. Before, the records do not name him. After, they name him only to spell his death.

But the meeting at Smithfield is preserved. In fourteenth-century England, commoners did not address kings on the record, in their own names, before witnesses. The preservation is the whole of the story.

❖ ❖ ❖

The Black Death had hollowed the country thirty-three years earlier. A third of England had died. The peasants who survived found their labor scarce, and scarce labor commanded a price. Parliament refused the new economics. In 1351 it passed the Statute of Labourers, which froze wages at pre-plague levels and bound peasants to lords who demanded them. The law tried to overrule the demography. The demography did not yield.

The Hundred Years’ War made it worse. Edward III’s wars in France did not fight themselves. They were paid for in coin pulled from the poor. By 1380 the government had imposed three poll taxes in four years — flat sums, the same shilling from a field laborer as from a baron, paid by every soul above the age of fifteen. In May 1381 a royal official named John Bampton tried to collect in Essex what villages had hidden. He was thrown out of Brentwood. Soldiers came to restore him. They were thrown out too. Within a week, Kent and Essex were in arms.

A hedge priest named John Ball gave the rising its theology. He had been preaching radical equality for fifteen years and had been jailed for it three times. The rebels freed him from Maidstone prison on June 11. He preached to them at Blackheath: When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? If the first parents had worked the earth with their hands, then the distinction between gentleman and laborer was a human invention. Four days later, his ideas were being spoken to the king of England.

❖ ❖ ❖

Tyler led the Kent column into London on June 13. The Essex men came in from the north. The numbers ran into the tens of thousands. The Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt, the king’s uncle, was burned to the ground. Records of debt and bondage were dragged from legal chambers and fed to fires in the street. The Tower of London was breached. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Treasurer of England were taken from the chapel and beheaded on Tower Hill. The boy king watched from a window.

He rode out the next morning to Mile End and granted everything the rebels asked. Serfdom abolished. Free trade allowed. Pardons promised. Charters drawn up and sealed in his name. Most of the Essex men, having got what they came for, turned for home.
Tyler and the Kentish hard core did not turn for home.

The second meeting was at Smithfield, the horse market just beyond the city wall. The king stood his train in front of St. Bartholomew’s Priory. The commons arrayed themselves opposite in disciplined formation. Mayor William Walworth rode across and summoned Tyler by name.

Tyler came on a small pony, with one attendant carrying the rebel banner. He held in his hand a dagger he had taken from someone else’s belt. He dismounted before the king. He half-bent his knee. He took the king by the hand and shook the king’s arm — forcibly, the chronicle says, and roughly — and he addressed him as a fellow tradesman.
Brother, be of good comfort and joyful, for you shall have, in the fortnight that is to come, praise from the commons even more than you have yet had, and we shall be good companions.

He called the king brother. He shook the arm of an anointed sovereign as if he were greeting a man at a market stall. He did not remove his hood. Every gesture was an act of social insubordination. Every gesture was deliberate.

Then he stated his terms. No law in the realm but the law of Winchester. Equality among all men except the king. The lands of the Church seized and divided among the commons, leaving the clergy a modest sustenance and no more. One bishop only in all of England. No more villeins, no serfdom, all men free and of one condition.

It was a program for the abolition of feudal England, stated aloud by a roof-tiler to a fourteen-year-old king, with the king’s clerks taking it down.

Richard answered carefully. He said Tyler should have all that he could fairly grant, reserving only the regality of the crown. It was a sovereign’s non-answer, designed to defuse without conceding.

Then a valet from Kent in the royal retinue pointed at Tyler and called him aloud the greatest thief and robber in all Kent. Tyler drew the dagger and moved on him. Walworth rode between them to arrest him. Tyler struck Walworth in the stomach. Walworth had armor beneath his cloak. The blade did not find skin. He drew his cutlass and cut Tyler on the neck, then again on the head. A squire of the king’s household ran Tyler through with a sword two or three times.

Tyler spurred his horse and rode eighty paces, calling on the commons to avenge him. Then he fell from the horse into the wheat.

His men began to bend their bows. The king, fourteen years old, spurred his horse out alone toward the bowmen and rode to where they could see his face. He told them they should have no captain but him. He turned and led them toward Clerkenwell Fields, and they followed him. Walworth galloped back to the city and called out the London militia. By the time the rebels reached the field, they were surrounded.

Tyler had been carried, dying, to the hospital for the poor at St. Bartholomew’s. Walworth found him there. He had him carried back to the middle of Smithfield. He had him beheaded in full sight of the army Tyler had brought to London. He set the head on a pole and carried it before him to the king.

❖ ❖ ❖

The promises died with Tyler. Richard revoked the Mile End charters within weeks. The chronicles record his answer to a delegation that came to remind him of his sealed word: villeins they were, and villeins they would remain. Commissions of oyer and terminer rode through Essex and Kent. The rebel leaders were hunted and hanged. John Ball was taken at Coventry, tried, and hanged, drawn, and quartered at St Albans on July 15, in the king’s presence. His head went on a spike on London Bridge beside Tyler’s. The rising was finished within the month.

Almost everything the rebels demanded was refused. But three things were given that no one announced.

• The poll tax was abandoned, and was not imposed again in England for six hundred and eight years.
• Parliament concluded, quietly, that the war in France must be substantially reduced because the country could not be squeezed any harder.
• And serfdom, which the Mile End charters had abolished and which Richard restored with a stroke of the pen, began to decay anyway — not by royal grant but by the same economics that had produced the rising.

Within a century, villein tenure across England had largely dissolved into copyhold. The institution was gone a hundred years before it ended on the Continent.

❖ ❖ ❖

Nothing in the chronicles softens what Tyler did at Smithfield. He was not gentle. He was not deferential. The Anonimalle clerk, writing from the royal side, calls his behavior rude, disgusting, threatening. He spat in the king’s presence. He drank beer in the king’s presence. He shook the king’s arm. He did not believe the rules of the encounter applied to him, and with every gesture he insisted that they did not.

He could not have known that the words his clerks copied would survive.

He could not have known that the tax he died over would not be levied again in England for six centuries.

He could only know what was in front of him: that he was a roof-tiler from Maidstone, that the king of England had agreed to hear his terms, and that the terms had to be said.

They were said. They were written down.

The man who said them was killed before the sun set and his head was raised on a pole over the city he had walked into a week before.

But the words remained, in a fourteenth-century chronicle, in his own name.

That is rare.

That is why he is here.

❖ ❖ ❖

Sources: Translation of the Anonimalle Chronicle account of the Smithfield meeting, in Charles Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906); Juliet Barker, England Arise: The People, the King, and the Great Revolt of 1381 (Little, Brown, 2014); R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970); contemporary chronicles of Jean Froissart and Thomas Walsingham; the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.
❖ ❖ ❖

Next in this series: Joan of Arc — A Teenager’s Answers Under Cross-Examination Shaped a Nation.