READING REBELLIONS
I had always wanted to be a historian. I wanted to read and write history books, trace aspects of modern society back to their ancient roots, and exist in two different time periods. When someone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would answer ‘teacher,’ but what I really wanted was to jump back and forth between the past and the present. Considering time travel isn’t real, the next best thing, in my opinion, was to become the primary authority of some historical era or event. That was a dream that lasted until I was fifteen, standing in Nathaniel Bacon’s house—the Bacon of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 in colonial America—and learning how historians had recently discovered that the house was never actually owned by Bacon after centuries of believing that he had. In fact, it was entirely likely that he had never even stepped foot into the house. The fact that I could spend my entire life studying something only to realize decades later that everything I thought I knew to be true was actually incorrect had me seriously rethinking my life plans. I’ve never been a big fan of things I can’t control, and I didn’t want to face a future riddled with uncertainties. It was definitely a dramatic reaction considering I hadn’t even taken the ACT yet, but that is what happened. I decided then that history might not actually be for me, and I resolved to dedicate my life to something else instead. (That clearly worked out for me.)
College saw me getting way out of my comfort zone by becoming…an English major. You know, a subject that was definitely in no way at all closely related to history. I was really branching out with that one. Not only that, but I found myself especially interested in medieval literature, the study of which is filled with all sorts of holes created by information that we just don’t have, from who the author of a poem was to when it was even written. This lack of information meant that so many of the questions that arise in the study of medieval literature are simply unanswerable. Sure, it isn’t Bacon, but only because it’s honestly kind of worse. Whoops.
As I worked on this project, I grew increasingly anxious about all the claims that I was making. With my modern perspective, there are all sorts of questions I posed. How could the rebels be considered successful if their rebellion was suppressed and their leaders were executed? Were they actually successful if it took decades for any real change to be seen? Was that even what success looked like for them? Or did it look like something else, something just out of reach for us to understand? Is it even fair for me to ask those questions? I wasn’t alive then, so how can I expect myself to answer them?
Historians can be wrong sometimes. Which, I will admit, may seem obvious. Of course historians get things wrong. New evidence crops up all the time that undermines the popular belief surrounding a topic, and suddenly everything we thought we knew is thrown into question, à la Bacon’s house. But historians’ beliefs are often presented as facts, as the definite truth, when in actuality, they are only making their best guesses based on the information they have access to, which often fails to provide a complete picture. They’re always missing some piece of the picture, simply because they live in a different time.
That said, I couldn’t have written this project without making my own set of claims and characterizations. In order to successfully execute it, I had to be assertive about what I thought they were doing. What I found increasingly important, however, was not pretending otherwise. It was important to me that I called attention to the fact that I was making those characterizations and acknowledged the reasons why there was something potentially problematic about that.
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 technically began in Essex, but the conditions that created it had been piling up for decades.
Medieval English society was divided into three estates: clergy, nobility, and everyone else. On paper, it seemed to make sense. Everyone who had a religious vocation was part of one estate, everyone who had a title and owned land was part of another, and laborers composed the third. In reality, it was not that simple. The problem was that ‘everyone else’ was not only laborers. In fact, it was the most varied estate, in terms of profession and personal wealth, and by far the largest. It did include laborers who were tied to the land, but it was also full of merchants and artisans and landowners who had the potential to be wealthier than members of the nobility. Essentially, it was home to what is now recognized as the rising middle class.
The Black Death irrevocably changed life as they knew it for all medieval Englishmen. The plague first swept through in England in 1348 and 1349, and somewhere between one third and one half of the population died because of it. Because of this, the way society functioned began to change before their very eyes.
The three estates were always an ideal, but it was an ideal that was growing increasingly far from reality after the plague. Serfs were people who were tied to the land that they worked on, forbidden to leave without express permission from their lord and unable to make any sort of real wage. Landowners held all the power. However, the drastic drop in population meant that laborers were in much higher demand than they had been before the plague and that there were significantly less people around to enforce whether or not they stayed on their land. Many people were suddenly able to argue for higher wages or leave and go work elsewhere. The London market also led to better opportunities for artisans and merchants, and jobs that had previously been barred to the lowest members of society were becoming available. The potential for upward mobility was enticing, and many took advantage of this opportunity. Unsurprisingly, the nobility were not big fans of this, as they saw their profits decrease.
Parliament passed several laws to address this. First, there was the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349. This intended to return wages to what they had been in 1346, targeting laborers and artisans specifically. When that failed to be effective, Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers in 1351. It attempted to keep control of the labor force by forbidding the request or offer of a wage that was higher than what they were before the plague. It also limited workers’ ability to move in search of better working conditions. Revisions to the Statute ten years after it was first implemented strengthened the legislation, which affected the daily lives of thousands of people. I’m sure it doesn’t come as a shock that this series of events upset quite a few people.
The years leading up to the revolt also featured a growing distrust in leadership. The final years of Edward III’s reign were defined by severe dementia, and his grandson Richard II was only ten years old when he came to power in 1377. No regent was appointed for the young king, and the lack of a strong monarchy affected all levels of English politics.
Furthermore, the Hundred Years’ War was becoming increasingly unpopular in England. Beginning in 1374, the French began to raid the English coastline for the first time since the war began in 1337. Considering that most of the war had been fought on French soil, this greatly troubled inhabitants of coastal towns. They did not trust the monarchy to protect them from French attack.
The most immediate cause for the revolt, however, was a series of poll taxes that were issued in the years leading up to the rising. England’s war with France had been growing increasingly disastrous in the forty years since it began, and the first poll tax came in 1377 as a way to fund the military campaign. When that failed to be enough, the Crown requested another tax from Parliament in 1379, and then a third only a year later in 1380. This final tax was collected on a flat-rate basis with no exceptions, meaning that everyone, regardless of their economic status, had to pay the same amount. It was accompanied by a commission created to ensure that everyone was complying with the tax. Needless to say, it was deeply unpopular. People’s anxiety surrounding the war was quickly turned into anger at the taxes. Many felt that the Crown was asking for far too much from them, especially with rumors about corruption amongst their king’s advisors. Entire counties refused to pay it as tensions continued to rise. It seemed like England was holding her breath, waiting for something to happen.
The tipping point came when John of Bampton, an officer of the Church and a member of Parliament, called representatives from the various towns in Essex county to Brentwood on May 30, 1381. Reports vary on whether he was there investigating why the poll tax of 1380 had not yet been paid or if he was trying to collect the tax for a second time, but regardless, he was there to take money from the people of Essex, who refused to pay. The situation, already tense, quickly escalated, and arrows soon began to rain down upon Bampton. He safely retreated to London, but several of his clerks and jurors were killed.
Word of this incident quickly spread across the region, and people from Essex, Kent, and other towns in southeastern England began advancing towards London. They assembled in Blackheath, just outside the city, on June 12th. There, John Ball, a well-known radical preacher, gave an infamous sermon in which he asked the rebels ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?’ Their answer was ‘With King Richard and the true commons of England.’ They were the true English people, not the unjust nobility or corrupt clergy.
On June 13th, King Richard agreed to meet the rebels at Greenwich in order to convince them to leave London, but he turned away when he saw the size of the rebel crowds. Later that same afternoon, the rebels crossed London Bridge and officially entered the city. Londoners themselves had joined the revolt by now, and they were likely the ones to open the gates and let them in. Once inside, they wreaked havoc, destroying the Savoy Palace, killing Flemish people, lawyers, and clerks, and executing the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Tower of London.
The next day, June 14th, the king met the rebels at Mile End in east London. It was there that they gave him their first set of demands, which were shared by many Englishmen and make sense in the historical context of the decades that led up to the revolt. They wanted to see serfdom abolished, any traitors of the crown punished, the ability to freely negotiate contracts between laborers and their employers, and amnesty for their own actions in London. Stuck between a rock and a hard place given the sheer number of people that he was facing, the king agreed and issued charters that announced the abolition of serfdom. Believing they had accomplished their goals, many of the rebels began to disperse and leave London to head back home.
Not everyone was satisfied with those charters, however, and so the king met with the remaining rebels just outside the city walls the following day. While many of the demands listed there were similar to those from the previous day, there were also a few increasingly radical ones, such as the abolition of lordship and the disendowment of Church wealth. What exactly happened after this second set of demands was presented will likely never be fully known, but what we do know for sure is that it resulted in the execution of Wat Tyler, one of the rebellion’s most prominent leaders.
Everything fell apart after that. Soldiers were dispatched to restore order, rebel leaders were arrested and tried, and more than 1,500 people were executed or killed in battle by November. The charters that the king had issued at Mile End were revoked, and it seemed like the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 had been all for naught.
I first learned about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 when I took an English class about medieval rebels. I loved that class. Doing any work for it gave me the same feeling I felt when I was a kid in elementary school reading Percy Jackson and learning about Greek mythology for the first time, except this time I was twenty and the hyperfixation was with a failed rebellion instead of dead gods. I just found them so fascinating, because in my eyes, there was no way they could have won. They had to know that they were always going to be suppressed, and yet they still tried anyway.
But then again, maybe they weren’t. Maybe they really believed that they were going to win. After all, what do I really know?
Almost all of what we know about the rising today has been gleaned from court records from when the rebels were hunted down and put on trial for treason, and from the chronicles. These chronicles were the primary genre for historical writings in medieval England, recounting the past and recording current events. Most chroniclers were monks, who lived tucked away from society, and so the validity of much of their work can be called into question. If they weren’t actually there, then how true can their version of any event be? Neither of th0se sources were very sympathetic to the rebels, and they only show the perspectives of the rebellion shared by the nobility and the clergy. History is written by the victors, after all.
The rebels themselves really have a voice at all in the chronicles, but interestingly enough, that is where their letters survive. Two of the chroniclers—Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham—have carefully transcribed the letters in their original English, an interesting detail when considering that the chronicles were written in Latin. It’s like they’re gesturing to the letters as if to say, look at these, aren't they ridiculous? What do they think they’re doing, writing silly letters to each other? The fact that the chroniclers didn’t even bother to translate them into Latin suggests that they weren’t taking the rebels seriously.
Scholars believe that the letters were written after John of Bampton came to Essex, and that they were written to incite rebellion in neighboring areas. Walsingham’s chronicle reports that John Ball wrote a coded letter to the people of Essex that urged them to follow through on the work they had already begun. According to the Anonimalle Chronicle, as the rebellious fever spread, rebel leaders in Essex sent letters to Kent, Suffolk, and Norfolk and asked them to rise with them. It is unclear who exactly wrote the letters. In his chronicle, Knighton claims that four different rebels were responsible, while some scholars today attribute all six to John Ball. That said, what’s most important is that they were written by some collection of rebels.
The letters remain elusive to modern readers, and not just because they were written in Middle English, which is half of a foreign language. Their primary audience was other rebels, which means that the letters feature what feels like a series of inside jokes. They only needed to be comprehensible to each other, and no one else. They’re short and cryptic, and at first glance whatever importance they might have seems minimal, but if you do a little more digging, it turns out that the opposite is true. No, what is really happening is that the rebels are having coded conversations through the letters, and they assume that their audience is already familiar with the references that are made in the text.
But still, why write the letters in the first place, especially because the authors have added so much more to them than simply asking others to revolt with them?
Great power came from literacy. Education existed almost exclusively for the nobility and clergy, which meant that most of the third estate was likely illiterate. Because of this, literacy—or the lack thereof—was used by the nobility and the clergy to deliberately disadvantage those who could not read or write and keep the third estate in their place. Not only that, the third estate was generally aware of this tactic. Therefore, the mere existence of the letters is proof that the rebels were trying to claim some of that power for themselves. They were showcasing how they could write, which meant that literacy could no longer be used against them and that they should be able to shape society like the other two estates had been for years and years.
Unlike in the chronicles and court records, the letters enable the rebels to finally represent themselves in the written record, no longer left vulnerable to what the other estates perceive of them. The rebels can speak directly to us, telling us what their motivations were and how they viewed themselves and the world around them. They tell us why they were rebelling at all, and why they thought they could succeed. They tell us a truth that had been hidden or ignored in all other accounts of the rebellion. That’s a pretty cool thing, if you ask me.
In the letters, the rebels claimed royal authority for themselves as a way to amass more power in society. They did this by copying the structure of royal letters patent in their own letters. Letters patent functioned as general announcements addressed to the whole realm. Each was preceded by the name of the person writing the letter in Latin. So, for example, a letter written by King Richard II would begin with something like, “Ricardus, Dei gratia, Rex Anglie,” which translates to “Richard, by the grace of God, king of England.” That would then be followed by the actual announcement that warranted the use of a letter patent.
Therefore, if the rebels wanted to structure their letters like the king’s, then they needed to announce themselves, and so each letter is preceded by the name of the person writing it. “John Ball greets you all well” is the introduction of one, and “Jack Trueman asks you to understand” begins another. One even goes so far as to say “John Shepherd…greets well John Nameless and John Miller and John Carter.”
What makes this so shocking is that they’re replacing their king’s name with their own. This was just not the done thing; you didn’t try to replace the king in any way. The implication of doing so is that they are claiming royal authority for themselves, taking the king’s power, and saying that they have the right to make decisions and send out announcements that will affect the entire country. They shouldn’t have that right. Although there were some rebels from the first two estates, most were from the third estate, and while that served as a catch-all for everyone who wasn’t a member of the nobility or clergy, the haphazard assembly of it didn’t mean that they had any sort of power with which to make these sorts of announcements. And yet, they were asserting that they should have that power.
Furthermore, they weren’t replacing the king’s name with just anybody’s name. They were replacing it with pseudonyms. The exception is John Ball, the priest, because we have enough evidence to believe that he was a real person. However, the rest of the names, from Jack Miller to John Nameless, cannot be traced back to any one person. The reasons for this are twofold. First, it protects the safety of their authors. Second, they’re designed to represent the ‘everyman,’ so to speak. People you see all the time, real people, not just those who claim to have all the power because they happened to be born into a particular family or made the decision to sell their souls to God. These pseudonyms representing the common people don’t just claim royal authority for their authors or for the rebels’ leaders. No, they declare that anybody’s name could replace the king’s and that it was the commons that should hold the royal power.
It wasn’t just the nobility that was keeping the rebels out of power, but the clergy as well. Thus, it’s not surprising that, just like they were claiming royal authority for themselves, they were also claiming clerical power.
John Ball had been a priest. At least three of the letters can be attributed directly to him, although some argue that he did in fact write all of them. However, Ball had been excommunicated and imprisoned prior to the events of 1381 because of how he could often be found speaking out against the nobility and the clergy in his sermons, according to one of the chroniclers. His excommunication meant that he had lost the clerical power that had once been his.
Similar to how they copy the structure of royal announcements, the letters also copy the language of particular psalms. They were intentional about which psalms they chose to reference, as most of the ones they included promise revenge on the rich from the poor.
For example, John Ball encourages the rebels to “seek peace and hold you therein,” a phrase that is borrowed from Psalm 34: “seek peace and pursue it.” The line itself doesn’t raise any eyebrows, but the rest of the psalm does. It begins with, “This poor man called, and the Lord heard him, and saved him from all his tribulations.” It also promises that “The rich will feel need and hunger.” By using the same language, Ball is claiming the power that it promises for the rebels. Essentially, he is declaring that God will support the poor and make the rich suffer just like they have always made the poor suffer.
The Trueman letter does a similar thing when he writes that “no man can come to truth, but he can sing si dedero.” Si dedero refers to Psalm 132, in which David proclaims he will not rest until he has found a place for the Lord. When that place has been found, God tells David that, “I will fill its poor with bread; I will clothe its priests with salvation; and its saints will rejoice.” This psalm promises that God rewards those who work for him, regardless of their standing in life. By referencing it in his letter, Trueman is positioning the rebels as people who are working for God, and thus as people who will receive heavenly rewards for their work.
But what will the rebels do with their newfound power?
Miller’s letter tells of their plans, using a mill as a metaphor. As a profession, millers were an important part of medieval society because they were responsible for grinding grain into flour. That flour would then be used to make bread, which was a staple part of anyone’s diet in medieval England. This could be done by hand, but it was time-consuming labor. Mills powered by wind or water helped speed up the process exponentially and were able to produce flour that had less grit than flour ground by hand. The mills themselves tended to be a point of contention between the lords of the land and the laborers who did all the work. The lords technically owned the mills and had the right to tax those who used them, despite the fact that laborers could not do their work without the use of a mill. Miller, however, claims ownership of a mill when he writes, “Jack Miller asks for help to turn his mill.” The use of ‘his’ is pointed. The mill is his, not his lord’s. In addition to claiming ownership over the mill, the possessive pronoun also claims the lordship that traditionally accompanies owning a mill; the rebels have used their power to claim even more authority, actively subverting the social structure of medieval England.
Miller’s letter continues: “he has ground small small. The king’s son of heaven, he shall pay for all.” This line is echoed in one of the John Ball letters: “John Miller has ground small, small, small. The king’s son of heaven shall pay for all. Beware or you be woeful, know your friend from your foe.” In Miller’s letter, he asks for help in turning his mill to grind something small, small, small. But what is that something? Ball’s letter differentiates the rebels’ friends—presumably other rebels and people sympathetic to their cause—from their foes—likely the nobility that owned the mills. Thus, Miller wants his friends’ help in grinding the largest grains down to their size, and in bringing their foes down to the same level as them. In both letters, that line is followed by the ominous promise that “the king’s son of heaven shall pay for all.” This line proclaims that the rebels will have heavenly support in punishing the lords for the crimes they have committed. And after they punish their foes, Christ will reward the rebels with what he has justly taken from the lords. In short, the rebels have claimed the power that will allow them to Christ’s revenge.
The letters include numerous references to a medieval text now referred to as Piers Plowman, and the lack of context provided implies that the audience was already familiar with the poem. Piers Plowman is a medieval dream vision poem, meaning that the plot occurs within the dreams of Will, the narrator. In his dreams, he meets a series of allegorical characters, from Holy Church to Conscience, that help him try to figure out how to live a good Christian life. The poem was written by William Langland, and we know that the poem was popular because over fifty copies of it survive today. For the sake of comparison, there are 92 copies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most well known medieval texts today, is preserved in just a single manuscript.
The poem itself is not an easy text to read; it took a 400-level English class for me to even try to understand it. The edition I bought had the original middle English on the left and the translation into modern English on the right. Our instructor told us to read the translation, but warned that doing so wouldn't necessarily make the text any easier to understand. I’d read an entire section, spend an entire class period discussing it, and still have barely a clue about what Langland was trying to tell readers.
When I first began this project, this section was the one that I was most excited for, not only because I would argue that the letters can be considered Piers Plowman fanfiction. Unfortunately, that excitement did not counteract the fact that this was definitely the most difficult section to write. I was trying to use a difficult poem to better understand the letters, which are even more confusing, thus backing myself into a corner that I could not get out of. Oops.
One of the most striking elements of Will’s dreams in this poem is the character Piers, who is a plowman. This character was likely not of Langland’s sole creation. Instead, he took an existing figure in folk traditions and incorporated him into his own work.
In Piers Plowman, Piers is much more than what can be gleaned at first glance. Sometimes, he is exactly as he appears: just another agricultural laborer that makes up the often ignored backbone of society. Other times, however, he is Christ-like. What makes the duality of this character so interesting is that Langland has positioned Piers as the ideal Christian, a leader with all the answers. This matters because Langland wasn’t telling Will to look towards a priest or a nun to figure out how to lead a true Christian life, but a plowman, a man who spent his entire life in the fields, which was definitely outside the norm for the time period.
Piers clearly meant a lot to the rebels, and he’s even cited as one of their leaders. Literacy amongst the third estate was not a commonality, so referencing this poem at all is surprising in and of itself. Furthermore, there is no comparable character to Piers in surviving medieval literature, no one who commands the same respect that he does while occupying a similar role in society. The rebels can identify with him: he looks like they do, he does what they do every day, and he, too, has no special clerical education. Not only that, they’re being told that he’s everything they should aspire to be. But haven’t they already become Piers? Many of them were laborers just like he was. Does this mean that they’ve achieved this Christian ideal? And if that’s the case, then who exactly do the people in power think they are? What gives them the right to act so high and mighty and claim all that authority for themselves?
Two of the letters explicitly name Piers himself, although they’re not the easiest quotes to decipher. In his third letter, Ball writes about how John Shepherd “bids Piers Plowman to go to his work.” Similarly, Carter writes, “let Piers the Plowman, my brother, stay at home and harvest us corn.” This seems counterintuitive. If Piers is one of their leaders, why are they relegating him to the sidelines? Is there a kind of power that is derived from doing so? What is that power, and where does it come from? What does it give them that they can’t get elsewhere?
If Piers stays home, Carter wants him to continue his work as a plowman. If I were to analyze this through a modern lens, I would find this even more perplexing. The rebels were subverting the established social order and causing chaos, and today that might be accompanied by workers going on strike. Through that lens, then, this line seems counterproductive. Isn’t continuing their work as normal exactly what the nobility and the clergy want them to be doing? Furthermore, in the poem, staying at home and harvesting corn is the one action Piers outright rejects. Instead, he tries to decide if he should leave home to go on a pilgrimage or stay at home but give up plowing. So why do the rebels want him to choose the option that he refused to consider?
Langland made his own version of an existing folk figure; he took something that already existed and molded it to fit his own purposes. In turn, the rebels took the same folk figure, pulled the traits that they most admired about Langland’s Piers and ignored those that they didn’t. Throughout his poem, Langland clearly displays his anxieties about the existing social system. However, he does not go so far as to say that he wants to reinvent the society he lived in, just that he wants people’s actions within the existing system to change. This is where he loses the rebels a little bit, because they do want to see the system itself changed. So, much like Langland took an existing version of Piers and made it his own, by having Piers choose this third option, the rebels took Langland’s character and made it their own.
The line in Carter’s letter continues: “and I will go with you and help that I may to prepare your meat and your drink, so that none of you fail.” Who’s the ‘I’? Who’s the ‘you’? Why does this ‘I’ need to make the food, and why does the success of ‘you’ seem to depend on it? Can this only be done if Piers stays at home? At first glance, it seems that Piers might be harvesting the corn that will then be used to make food and drink. However, the letter seems to suggest that these are occurring simultaneously, and so I’m unable to come to any clear consensus.
Piers also brings me back to a question I posed earlier: why did the rebels think they could be successful? For a while, I felt that the leaders of the rebellion had to know that it was going to fail, even if the rest of the rebels believed they could win. All the odds were stacked against them. To me, any chance of success seemed impossible.
But here’s the thing: they wrote these letters like they could have won. To them, success was possible, not a foolish dream like I originally imagined. Why?
I think it was Piers that led them to believe that they had even a fighting chance of achieving their goals and rebuilding the foundations of society. Langland’s poem centers around a plowman who was the champion of the poor, a man who was well aware that their society’s stability was built on the backs of laborers, and that they were being mistreated. I believe that the confidence the rebels had in their cause can in part be traced back to one particular scene in the poem.
Piers receives a pardon from God via the character Truth that absolves him and all those who work with him from punishment and guilt: “They that have done good shall go into life everlasting; / And they that have done evil into everlasting fire.” When a priest asks to read the pardon so that he can translate it from Latin and into English for Piers, he denies that it is a pardon at all. Piers reacts by tearing the pardon in half. His reasons for doing so have perplexed scholars for as long as they have been studying this text.
Some believe that by tearing the pardon, Piers is proclaiming that it’s invalid. He could be agreeing with the priest when the priest says it’s not a real pardon or disagreeing with the priest Piers does believe it to be legitimate. He could also be angry with the priest for being critical of Piers not knowing Latin while it is him who has only a superficial understanding of the Bible. A more radical reading is that Piers is criticizing the Church practice of selling indulgences to people, and that by tearing the pardon, he is rejecting those indulgences as worthless. Another interpretation is that Piers recognizes that the pardon is only applicable on certain conditions which are ultimately impossible to meet; no one can ‘do good’ for their entire lives. He could also be upset that the pardon promises salvation only for people who work, meaning that through no fault of their own, many will be excluded from the terms of this pardon.
Piers definitely seems to be rejecting some sort of authority when he tears the pardon, and for the rebels, who seemed to idolize him, this would have contributed to their confidence when it came to revolting. They were claiming royal and clerical power as their own and exerting authority over Piers and the authority that he claimed for himself when he tore the pardon, which led them to having good reason to think that they could be successful in using their newfound power and authority to rebel against cultural forces that had kept them in their place for so long.
Piers is not the only reference that these letters make to the poem.
Ball’s third letter begins with an introduction of the speaker: “John Shepherd who was for some time a priest at Saint Mary’s of York and now of Colchester.” It's possible that this is a reference to the opening lines of Piers Plowman: “In a summer season when the sun was mild / I clad myself in clothes as I’d become a sheep.” Shepherd, a person who tends sheep—get it? John Shepherd wasn’t an actual person, but instead a fake name meant to represent the everyman, and I think Ball’s reasons for using that specific name are twofold: it’s meant to both bring the rebels together and to reference the poem. They seemed to derive many of their personal values from the poem, so the reference could be reminding them of those values in an attempt to keep them in line and place emphasis on larger goals rather than personal vendettas as the revolt escalates.
Next, it’s possible that Ball turns his own name into a pun in his first letter with the line, “he has rung your bell.” In doing so, he might be alluding to the scene in Piers Plowman in which the Parliament of Rats plan to bell the cat. Scholars generally agree that in this scene, the rats and mice represent the houses of Parliament and the cat tormenting them is John of Gaunt, the widely despised king’s uncle. Their plan to ‘bell the cat’ was them trying to curb his power in some way, but it failed when none of them were brave enough to actually attach the bell to the cat. By including this, Ball is reminding the rebels of their common enemy and the fact that no one but themselves is going to save them, as well as emphasizing the importance of following through on their plans.
Two letters include the phrase ‘do well and better.’ Carter encourages the rebels to “do well and always better and better,” while Ball writes, “do well and better and flee from sin.” These specific references call to mind the allegorical characters Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best in Piers Plowman. In the text, each of these characters helps Will in his journey to live a true Christian life. Thus, I think that they are included to tell the rebels how they should act: well-behaved, calculated, and always with the larger goals in mind. I’ve been using the umbrella term of just ‘rebels,’ but they were thousands of people from various towns across England, and the main point of connection between all of them was just that they had been excluded from power. The whole thing could very easily dissolve into chaos, so these lines were possibly their leaders trying to preemptively correct their behavior.
Then there’s all the ‘truth’ stuff, and while I was definitely confused by the previous few references, these are on a whole other level. Two letters mention truth. Trueman writes that “truth has been set under a lock,” and Ball’s second letter includes the line, “mankind stands together in truth, and help truth, and truth shall help you.” In Piers Plowman, Truth is a representation of God. Will is told that in order to live a true Christian life, he must find Truth, and it is Piers that can tell him how to get there. Unfortunately, I barely understand the role that Truth plays in the actual poem, so I don’t even know where to start trying to figure out what purpose it was serving in the letters. My best guess is that it’s included to remind the rebels of their larger goals and that it possibly symbolizes what success looks like for them, but that feels weak. What I do know, however, is that the rebels probably knew exactly how to interpret these lines.
Some scholars argue that the rebels had only a surface-level understanding of the poem and that they were simply twisting it until it served the purpose that they needed it to. I can’t help but get defensive of the rebels. The multitude of references to the poem, beyond just name dropping Piers, shows that the rebels were familiar with it. The authors were trying to incite a rebellion, so clearly they were inspired enough to use it as a tool. Additionally, as I discussed earlier, it seems like the intended audience for the letters would have already been familiar with Ball’s sermons, so why couldn’t they also have been familiar with Piers Plowman? The lack of context given with the references suggests that whoever was meant to read them would have very easily picked up on what they were saying. And, honestly, the chroniclers are determined to trash the rebels’ reputations in their records, and they succeeded for the last several hundred years. Now that we have evidence to suggest otherwise, why are we still trying to enforce centuries-old prejudices against the rebels?
Are these assumptions? Maybe not. I’ve backed each of them up, and it’s not like I’m not confident with what I’m writing. Rather, I’m questioning whether or not I, as a person living in the twenty-first century, have any right to be making these assumptions. Yes, that’s what scholars do all the time, but aren’t we missing something? How can we think that we have any ability to decide for the rebels what their letters meant when we’re so far removed from the cultural context that they were written in?
I found all the Piers Plowman references super interesting, but what I wasn’t expecting was the possible existence of some sort of hit list hidden in the coded language of the letters.
Two letters mention someone by the name of Hobbe the Robber. Ball writes, “chastise well Hobbe the Robber.” Carter uses similar language but adds to Ball’s: “look that Hobbe the Robber be well chastised for losing your grace.” This, too, eludes us today. At first glance, I thought that this referred to a character of a literary work or performance that was popular at the time. This could be correct, as the name is similar to Langland’s Robert the Robber in Piers Plowman. Hobbe was a relatively common nickname for Robert in medieval England, so this would make sense, especially because the two times that Piers is explicitly mentioned in the letters come right before Hobbe. Furthermore, Hobbe is the antithesis of Piers in the letters, and both advise that he be taken care of. We already know that the rebels viewed Piers as one of them, so this leads me to infer that Hobbe was the allegorical representation of the rebels’ enemies, whether that be as broad as the general concept of thievery or as narrow as one particular person that the rebels would have been acquainted with in some way.
If Hobbe the Robber is a code name for somebody, that person could be Sir Robert Hales, who was the Treasurer of England at the time. As we know, the straw that broke the camel’s back and immediately ignited the rebellion was when the tax collector came to Essex to collect the money owed to them for the poll tax of 1380. Because of this event and the widespread resistance to that tax, Hales was likely someone that the rebels identified as one of their biggest enemies. If this was the case, then in advising the rebels to chastise Hobbe, Ball might be encouraging them to exact revenge on Hales for his crimes.
Both of these could be true, as neither cancels out the other, but there is another way to read these references that doesn’t suggest a hit list, as entertaining as that is. In advising the rebels to chastise Hobbe, the writers might be sending a warning to the rebels themselves. According to the chronicles, when the rebels ransacked the Savoy Palace, one amongst them attempted to steal from the building before they burnt it to the ground. He was unsuccessful, however, because his fellow robbers tossed him into the fire to burn, proclaiming that they weren’t robbers or thieves. With that context in mind, Ball and Carter’s letters could be read as them cautioning against any sort of greed that would undermine the greater cause at hand.
There is another name mentioned in one of the letters that is worth puzzling out. In his letter, Trueman writes, “Jon of Bamthon says to spend and spend, and therefore sin as far as a wild flood.” In order to figure out who this Jon of Bamthon is, I had to first decipher what the line is saying, but I’ve had some difficulty with that. I believe that he is reminding the rebels that in telling people to spend and spend, Jon of Bamthon is encouraging people to commit one of the seven deadly sins—gluttony. This line could connect him to the economic instability and financial abuse that are vilified in Piers Plowman, and the rebels would have seen these same practices in the world around them.
Jon of Bamthon might be a code name for John of Gaunt in the same way that Hobbe the Robber is a code name for Robert Hales. John of Gaunt was a deeply unpopular person, and Jon of Bamthon is positioned as a person of great sin, so that can be a connection between the two. The theory is certainly interesting, but I didn’t find it particularly convincing, largely because there is a far more obvious person that Trueman’s Jon of Bamthon might be: you know, the real life John of Bampton, the tax collector that came to Essex county at the end of May to collect the unpaid poll tax of 1380. Bampton escaped Brentwood alive, even though some of the men that he had brought with him were killed. Considering the precision with which the rebels focused their attacks, it is very possible that by including him in the letter, Trueman wanted to help the rebels focus their attacks. And contribute to the hit list.
