Summer of Blood | Dan Jones | Review by The Spectator

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a singular event in English history, not merely a food riot, but an organised outbreak of pure class warfare which, leaving aside John Ball’s rabble-rousing, Biblical egalitarianism, was untrammelled by constitutional quarrels or religious disputes. It was fomented by vicious class legislation — the Statute of Labourers of 1351 and three poll taxes levied between 1377 and 1380 — which was intended to prevent the common people from benefiting from increased wages as a result of the Black Death’s depletion of the labour supply. The government presented the poll taxes as a fair way of supplying the revenue needed to sustain a faltering and unpopular war against France. But the game was given away by sumptuary laws designed to keep the people in their place. Those laws forbade the lower orders to eat anything but basic foodstuffs or to clothe themselves above their station: the points added to shoes, for instance, could be up to 24” for noblemen, 12” for gentlemen and 6.5” for merchants. Dan Jones does not say how pointed lesser mortals’ footwear could be. Presumably they were to be pointless.

The third poll tax lit the fuse that, running from Essex to Kent and quickly igniting the non-peasant inhabitants of London, produced what Jones a bit luridly calls the summer of blood. Inspired by dreamy visions of a new social order, the rebels had no programme of political reform. Their anger was directed, not against monarchy, but against the corrupt counsellors who surrounded the throne, the makers of oppressive laws and the agents who enforced them. London’s prisons were emptied. Holders of high office, such as Lord Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, and Robert Hales, the Lord High Treasurer, lawyers and rich merchants were hunted down and sent to their maker. The Savoy Palace, belonging to the hated John of Gaunt, was razed. Amazingly, the instruction of Wat Tyler, the rebels’ leader, that there was to be no looting, only the destruction of ill-gotten goods, was largely obeyed. Gaunt’s gold and silver plate was smashed or thrown into the Thames, his jewels trampled into dust.