Tales From the Tower of London Read Online Free PDF Page A

statute were the following:
All labourers under the age of thirty-six must work for the same wage as they received prior to 1348.
Any worker or servant who leaves his lord’s service without cause or licence would be imprisoned.
Any man who pays his servant more than their pre-1348 wage will be fined twice the amount of that labourer’s wage.
Anyone giving alms to the poor or gifts to beggars will be imprisoned.
    This last clause was to make certain that everyone physically able to work did so. Despite the Statute of Labourers, serfs continued to steal away from their land, prices continued to rise and each new round of taxes became a heavier burden on everyone. By the time the young Richard II came to the throne, England was physically exhausted, nearing bankruptcy, and the people were growing increasingly restive. Only the natural human tendency to grumble rather than fight kept the nation from unravelling.
    But John of Gaunt, Richard’s uncle and regent, was more concerned with making war on the French than bureaucratic details or public welfare. Much that could have been done to redress the problems was ignored or grossly mishandled. What taxes could be collected were promptly funnelled into the military rather than the projects for which they had been earmarked. At Gaunt’s urging, in November 1380 the new Chancellor (Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury) and the king’s sergeant-at-arms (John Legge, a member of the privy council) came up with a new, single-levy poll tax set at 3 groats (the equivalent of 1 shilling) to be paid by every person over the age of fifteen. For skilled tradesmen this was the equivalent of a week’s wages; for serfs who seldom even saw hard currency, it was nothing short of disastrous. Worse still, the 1380 levy was the third such tax to be passed in four years.
    The tax collectors were resisted everywhere they went. Taxmen were run out of towns and villages while thousands of people temporarily disappeared. When the tax boxes returned to London, they contained less than two-thirds of what had been expected. To make up for the loss in revenue, in the spring of 1381 the tax men were sent out to collect the tax again – from everyone, whether they had paid the previous tax or not. Riots broke out wherever the taxman showed his face.
    Anywhere people congregated, in churches, in public squares and at town markets, agitators were there inciting them to resist the extortionate tax. Among the most virulent opponents of government policy was a defrocked priest from Maidstone, Kent, named John Ball. He not only advocated refusing to pay the tax, but called for massive social changes including stripping the nobility of its power to impose such taxes. Ball was repeatedly arrested and thrown into jail. As soon as he was released, he returned to his personal crusade.
    With the economy collapsing at an ever-increasing rate and people simply running away from their homes to escape the taxmen and the ‘enforcers’ who now accompanied them, by late spring thousands of starving, homeless peasants wandered England. In early June 1381, nearly twenty thousand dispossessed men and women from the county of Kent chose an ex-soldier and highwayman named Wat (or Walter) Tyler to be their leader, though it is equally possible that Tyler elected himself. In either case, he seems to have been a mesmerising speaker whose military experience provided him with a basic understanding of organisation and crowd control.
    In a matter of days, Tyler began formulating an agenda. He and his motley band of followers marched along the River Medway. Their first stop was Maidstone, where they ransacked the local jail, freed all the prisoners and invited them to join the crusade. Among those who accepted the invitation was John Ball. Between Ball’s fiery rhetoric and Tyler’s organisational skills, the group quickly became a formidable force. Moving east from Maidstone, their next stop was Canterbury, where they gathered so