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

faster than the rebels, the royal barges made it to the Tower before the mob hit the city walls where, as luck would have it, nearly sixty thousand screaming peasants from Essex joined them. When the guards at London Bridge refused to open the gates to Tyler and his followers, they threatened to burn down the surrounding suburbs and take the city by storm. To prove how serious they were, they rampaged through ultra-fashionable Fleet Street, which lay just outside the safety of the city walls, looting and burning the shops and homes of the merchants.
    Whether this incident alone was sufficient cause for the gates of the city to be opened to the howling mob is unknown. What we do know is that thousands of apprentices, day labourers and servants in the city supported the rebels and it may have been their rearguard attack on London Bridge that finally opened the gates and unleashed a wave of discontent that engulfed the city. By the time the swarm from Kent crossed London Bridge, the Essex men had successfully stormed the gate at Aldgate. Simultaneously, nearly one hundred thousand angry, hungry peasants surged through the narrow streets and lanes of London, sacking and burning everything they could not eat or steal in an orgy of looting, murder and destruction.
    Desperate to save their lives, homes and property, terrified Londoners offered them food, beer and wine. But the more the mob drank, the more uncontrollable they became. Froissart wrote that the rebels ‘rush[ed] into the houses that were the best provisioned . . . [where] they fell on the food and drink that they found. In the hope of appeasing them, nothing was refused them . . . and in their going they beat down abbeys and . . . diverse fair houses.’ Any home that suggested a prosperous owner was subjected to the same treatment. In their rampage, the mob attacked and destroyed the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons, setting the prisoners free and inviting them to join in wreaking vengeance on the city.
    In the New Temple, the district housing the law courts and residences of most of the city’s lawyers and judges, they sacked and burned everything they could get their hands on, including the home of the hated Lord Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. Everywhere, books, tapestries and clothes were torn to shreds, tossed from windows and set alight in the streets. When a house was completely vandalised, it too was either pulled down or torched. At Lambeth Palace, London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, several of the buildings were burnt and all the tax records from the Chancery Office were thrown into the fire. Froissart records that a similar fate was meted out to John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace: ‘And when they entered [Gaunt’s house] they slew the keepers thereof and robbed and pill[ag]ed the house, and when they had so done, they set fire on it and clean destroyed and burnt it. And when they had done that outrage, they . . . went straight to the fair hospital of the [Knights of] Rhodes, called St John’s, and there they burnt house, hospital, Minster and all.’
    Their anger spent and the day waning, the mobs converged on the Tower at Tower Hill and St Catherine’s Square. Here, they took up the less strenuous sports of hard drinking and taunting the young king and his ministers who they knew were trapped inside. They screamed alternately for the Chancellor, the Lord Treasurer, or anyone else involved in levying the hated poll tax, all the while insisting that, as Froissart put it ‘. . . they would never depart thence till they had the king at their pleasure’.
    Now prisoners in their own fortress, Richard and his council gathered on the parapets of the Tower more than 100 feet above the seething, drunken mob. From there, in the eerie, orange half-light of more than thirty fires burning out of control across the city, the fourteen-year-old king and his frightened ministers looked down on a scene that could have been snatched straight from the mouth of hell. The