The Story of England by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141961156
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Man be ware and be no fool;

Thinke upon the ax, and of the stool!

The revolt had unleashed savage class antagonisms and exposed deep fissures between the rulers and the ruled. Despite the way it was depicted by royal chroniclers, the peasants’ movement was organized and literate; it harnessed real grievances and probably involved a real programme.

Kibworth Beauchamp and Harcourt as well as Smeeton Westerby seem to have escaped the violence. Whether members of the rebel army in Market Harborough talked to the jurymen and other ‘shrewd men’ in Kibworth, we don’t know, but perhaps for the people of these villages there was no advantage in joining the uprising. Their conditions were better, their circumstances not comparable to those of the peasantry in the villages of Essex or on the Winchester or St Albans estates, whose rage had led to the uprising. On the Merton estates up and down the country there was no great outcry to destroy the records of villeinage – the court rolls rentals and account books. For a century now the peasants in Kibworth Harcourt had been used to dealing with agents from the college, their bailiffs coming up to survey and negotiate, and as events unfolded they would take a different path to economic liberation and personal freedom.

As with all great events, the fallout of the Revolt set many changes in motion, some of them unforeseen, and most intriguing of these is the impact of Wycliffe’s ideas among the old families of Kibworth: it is in the years after the revolt that we have our first really detailed evidence of matters of conscience and individual belief among the ordinary people of England, and, remarkably, some of it comes from Kibworth.

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