Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess by Weir Alison

Author:Weir, Alison [Weir, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

7

‘Turning Away the Wrath of God’

At the beginning of June 1381, as John of Gaunt lay at Knaresborough, an army of yeomen and peasants was amassing in Kent and Essex, bent on the overthrow of a government that had imposed the cruelly oppressive poll tax and forced restrictive wage and price controls on labouring men whose services were in high demand after the depredations of the Black Death. The rebels had chosen for their leader – their ‘idol’, it was said – a man called Wat Tyler, and for their spokesmen one Jack Straw and an excommunicate priest, John Ball, who was going about the country preaching inflammatory and subversive sermons calling for the abolition of serfdom1 and posing the question:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

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