England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381 by Juliet Barker

Author:Juliet Barker [Barker, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780748127887
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-10-01T23:00:00+00:00

The official form and language used here tends to obscure what a revolutionary document this is: no less than the complete abolition of villeinage, not just on the king’s own estates but in every lordship throughout the land. As the lords and prelates were quick to point out in the first parliament that met after the revolt, Richard had no authority to free their serfs ‘without the assent of those who had the chief interest in the matter’. In a remarkably emotional outburst, they added that ‘they had never agreed to it, either voluntarily or otherwise, nor would they ever do so, even if it were their dying day’. Though they made their protest respectfully, they made it as robustly as it was possible to do when contradicting their king, adding, for good measure, that on this subject they spoke with one voice with the knights, burgesses and citizens of the House of Commons.49 Richard would be left in no doubt that his abolition of serfdom was not only illegal, it was also actively opposed by all his most important subjects.

Yet this was not all the young king had conceded. Just eighteen days after he made the original grant, and probably under the watchful eye of the new hard-line chief justice, Robert Tresilian, Richard repealed the letters of manumission he had offered at Mile End. In doing so, he recited two extraordinary further concessions he had made which are not mentioned in either of the two extant examples. The first was that he had abolished not just personal villeinage but all villein tenure as well: ‘not an acre of land’ should be held anywhere in bondage or by customary service but only by paying a rent of four pence per acre, with the corollary that if less had been paid in the past, then that lower rate should stand for the future.50 As we have already seen,51 the enforcement of customary dues and services had long been a burning issue, affecting many more people than personal bondage, so the consequences of this act were much more far-reaching than a simple abolition of villeinage by blood. Arbitrary impositions and punitive fines would be a thing of the past and those with the will and capacity to work hard and build up a profitable landholding or business enterprise would be able to do so without hindrance from their landlords. Less than two weeks after the oath at Bocking, the rebels had achieved what their fathers and grandfathers could only have imagined in their wildest dreams.

The second concession revealed in the revocation of the letters Richard had granted to the rebels was, if anything, even more startling. It is not mentioned in any of the chronicles, not even the Anonimalle, and it does not feature in any of the lists of rebel demands reported before, or indeed after, the meeting at Mile End. Yet its consequences would have been even more profound than the abolition of villeinage and villein tenure. Richard agreed that

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