The role of news and rumour during the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381

Abstract

This article uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the role of news and rumour during the Peasants’ Revolt, an aspect of the rising that has not been the subject of a detailed study. It considers the circulation of news in written and oral form and its importance in driving the rebellion. Sources suggest that the news of the revolt traversed the country quickly, moving at up to sixty-five miles a day, and its transmission is shown through an isopleth map to radiate outwards across the country from its point of origin in south-east England. Rumour is considered by means of a thought experiment using three examples drawn from rebel activities in London in June 1381. It thrived in the absence of news, particularly in a highly stressed environment. It is possible that rumour was used as a tactic by rebel commanders, who were able to generate and manipulate rumours to their own advantage.

The rebellion in the summer of 1381, known as the Peasants’ Revolt, was more than a punctuation mark in the story of British history: it was an event of profound significance, the memory of which still resonates today.¹ The events of that summer require little introduction: an uprising that started in Essex spread like a wildfire first to Kent and then London, before radiating outwards across the country, reaching as far as East Anglia, Yorkshire and Somerset, and with incidents directly affecting at least twenty-six counties.² Four of the most senior government office holders, including the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord chief justice were summarily executed by the rebels in separate incidents and the flames of rebellion burned for over a month before the authorities began to restore order.³ No matter how deep the sense of personal injustices, it is difficult to imagine an event of such magnitude, occurring over large distances and long time periods, being sustained by anything other than co-ordinated activity on the part of the rebels. Work by Herbert Eiden examined the tactics employed during the rebellion, and while there was no definitive documentary proof available, he argued that the duration and direction of the uprising suggested rebel knowledge of military logistics and tactics.⁴ Recent work by Mingjie Xu, in a study of the actions of rebels in Cambridgeshire through a systematic examination of judicial records, found evidence of the local co-ordination of activities, as attacks were discriminating and focused ‘overwhelmingly against local and national legal and political figures’.⁵ This national rising, in its scale, reach and character did not happen by accident.⁶

The historiography examining the causes of the rising remain a subject of debate, and is now moving away from a binary focus on either the socio-economic causes of the revolt, particularly the notion of class conflict and the introduction of labour laws, or alternatively, political and legal causes such as taxation, corruption and war, in favour of a model in which there was a complex interplay between law, justice, economic change and social conflict, though ‘sifting and weighing them’ to fashion a coherent explanation is a challenge.⁷ There were certainly a number of initiators for the rising, pithily described by James Bolton as the ‘kindling for a general peasant revolt’.⁸ The longer-term causes, that ultimately created the volatile environment in which rebellion could take hold, had been decades in the making and the following represents only a summary of the major causes by way of illustration. The Black Death of 1348–9 killed up to half of the population, resulting in a severe shortage of labourers and it effectively signalled the decline of the medieval system of villeinage.⁹ Vacant landholdings started to be filled by the previously landless, shifting the delicate balance between the population and the land. This upward social mobility was closely associated with the growing prosperity of the commons, as household and disposable incomes rose and prices dropped.¹⁰

While the lot of a commoner might have shown some improvement, that of the ruling elite was marked by a period of turbulence. When Edward III died in 1377 after a fifty-year reign, he was succeeded by his ten-year-old grandson, Richard II, who inherited problems (not of his own making). The government established by Richard did little to alleviate public concerns, since they maintained the arrangements established by Edward and were deemed unsatisfactory by parliament. John of Gaunt, the eldest surviving son of Edward and the uncle of Richard, held a significant degree of influence that raised concerns among the political classes and the commons. Gaunt led the resistance to parliament’s demands for a formal regency, which would have done much to curtail his power, and he was responsible for imprisoning the Commons’ speaker and the bishop of Winchester, key members of the council established to advise the king.¹¹ The widespread conviction of the rebels during the revolt that there ‘were more kings than one’ was a reference to Gaunt and the belief that he had usurped power from Richard and his government.¹² Gaunt, together with other key advisors to the king, became a focus for rebel activities, serving to draw the rebels towards London.¹³

These internal power struggles were intertwined to varying degrees with grievances relating to the extension of state power and its perceived misuse in the aftermath of the Black Death. The intervention of royal authority in local matters was widespread, but in the aftermath of the epidemic it expanded into new areas, including the labour and commodity markets, thereby increasing the influence of those holding judicial office. While a royal ordinance of 1346 prevented judges accepting gifts from anyone but the king, it was widely ignored – leading to concerns about corruption, bribery and perverting the course of justice.¹⁴ The perceived abuse of authority also lay behind many local incidents of disorder, with urban risings in Cambridge and Ely partly the resurrection of pre-existing friction between townspeople and the institutional landlords, who sought to restrict their urban privileges.¹⁵ In York the fragile relationship between the commons and the civic elite came under strain with accusations of the misappropriation of public funds by city officials and questions about their suitability for office prompting demands for greater levels of public accountability.¹⁶

We know little of the rebels before the outbreak of the revolt, particularly whether they had already devised a plan and were waiting for the right time to rise, or whether their actions were initially spontaneous. The initiator for unrest was the collection of the punitive third round of the infamous poll tax in the spring of 1381. The tax, designed to fund the ongoing war with France, culminated in a levy of three groats per head and resulted in widespread tax avoidance and local unrest due to a combination of factors, not least of which were the heavy-handed methods employed in its collection, and a belief that the taxes were being misused.¹⁷

Unravelling the nature of the relationship between events in Essex, Kent and London and local disturbances across the country is complicated. Were local outbreaks the ‘squalid and obscure municipal quarrels’ described by Charles Oman, which, as argued by Rodney Hilton, were ‘definitely not part of the Peasants’ Revolt’? Was the relationship more nuanced, as suggested by Mark Bailey, with proof of ‘copycat behaviour’, though without persuasive evidence to link regional violence to events in London? Or does the co-ordinated activity of rebels suggest a role for rumour and news in either initiating or sustaining the momentum of the rebellion as the fuel that fed the fire of rebellion?¹⁸ This article does not aim to arrive at a definitive answer: the extant documentary material simply will not allow that. However, the primary sources will be examined from a new perspective that will attempt to ‘squeeze [the rebels] until they talk’.¹⁹ This article uses a triangulated approach based upon the documentary material now available in The People of 1381 database, the surviving chronicles and the use of an interdisciplinary methodology, looking primarily at the sociological elements of news and rumour transmission. It aims to demonstrate the probability that there exist similarities between outbreaks, which support the hypothesis that the rebels were organized and made use of an information network that allowed news to travel quickly about the country, so that actions could be either co-ordinated or used as inspiration for further related uprisings. Rumour was generally a more localized phenomenon, and it is possible that it was employed largely as a military tactic to support the achievement of the rebels’ strategic intentions.

‘News’ and ‘rumour’ are themes studied by psychologists, sociologists and mathematicians, and each field uses a different definition, thereby presenting some difficulties in arriving at a definition suitable for use in a historical context.²⁰ While both terms relate to communication mechanisms designed to inform people about events that are of mutual interest to the collective, there is a considerable difference between receiving information from an acquaintance or traveller and hearing the same information from a representative of the commons, or in a letter from a captain in an ongoing rebellion. The latter situation removes the agency from the consumers of information, who are not able to recast it according to their wishes.²¹ Rumour and news can therefore be differentiated by the degree of authenticity of the information being transmitted.²² However, for the historian, the complicating factor is that not all news is true and not all rumour is false, with Christopher Fletcher showing that according to the semantic structure of the fourteenth century a rumour could refer to news that was deemed reliable, though might not necessarily be so, with Luke Giraudet arguing that they ‘occupy and ambivalent place in relation to the truth’.²³ For the purposes of this article, the term news is defined in its fourteenth-century form, as a report of an occurrence or event.²⁴ Implicit in this definition is the concept that news is generally considered to be true. Rumour, by contrast, is defined as a specific or topical proposition for belief, passed along from person to person, usually by word of mouth, without secure standards of evidence being present.²⁵

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In the late fourteenth century information that was transmitted in written form was deemed no more trustworthy than a report that earned its credibility based upon the reputation of the person who delivered it.²⁶ The preference for oral communication is not, however, persuasive evidence of a largely illiterate society and by the beginning of the fourteenth century even some smallholders possessed their own seal and had a rudimentary understanding of the written word.²⁷ Manorial custom required that the lord had to give his consent before the child of a villein could receive formal schooling, but the very fact that this custom existed suggested that this was a realistic ambition for some.²⁸ The sons of smallholders accounted for 45 per cent of all admissions to New College, Oxford, between 1380 and 1450, suggesting that literacy was relatively common among the rural population.²⁹ It is unknown whether the leaders of the uprising attended university – there is some debate as to whether they used pseudonyms, leaving any surviving records unrecognized; however it can be shown with some confidence that news in written form played a key role in setting the strategy for the rising.

The letters purportedly written by John Ball, a leader of the revolt, are critical to understanding the mindset of the rebels. Six surviving examples are preserved in the Walsingham and Knighton chronicles, the latter of which was compiled fifteen years after the events on which they reported, suggesting that the letters had been widely diffused and were visible and available to an audience of literate commoners.³⁰ If they were written by Ball, it is likely that they were composed while he was imprisoned in Maidstone jail.³¹ Ball had been an itinerant preacher of articles contrary to the faith of the church and over a period of fourteen years he had been excommunicated and arrested repeatedly. By late April 1381 he had been excommunicated for a final time by Archbishop Sudbury, arrested and committed to jail for life, not to be released until the prison was stormed by rebels on 11 June.³² Steven Justice disputes the notion that the letters had a single author, citing linguistic differences between the documents, suggesting that if Ball wrote them for circulation among the commons of Kent, Suffolk and Norfolk, as claimed by the Anonimalle Chronicle, they could have been copied to allow their wide distribution.³³ The authorship is not crucial: either John Ball wrote them, in which case it is reasonable to assume that there were literate commoners to read them, or multiple authors either wrote or copied them, suggesting that written news was relatively widespread. The letters themselves are complex documents full of allegorical meanings and mnemonic rhymes and, for the uninitiated, quite incomprehensible, such that, when one letter was found in the pocket of a rebel about to be hanged it was thought to be a coded communication.³⁴ Margaret Aston has argued that the medieval world was familiar with this form of writing, and it is difficult to interpret because modern ears struggle with the rhythm of medieval speech patterns.³⁵ What seems incontrovertible is that the letters are a call to arms, which mask a seditious intent, telling the readers ‘now is the time’.³⁶ Ball’s overt reference to Langland’s famous poem Piers Plowman masks a critique of the institutions and administrations of law, which can be reformed only through the crown and central government.³⁷ It is possible to derive other messages within his letters. The route taken by the rebels to London matched that taken by the characters Conscience and Reason in Piers Plowman.³⁸ The language of his letters makes particular use of the nouns ‘truth’ and ‘robber’ and are tracts on the theme of justice, which are reflected in the words shouted by the commons during the destruction of the Savoy Palace on 13 June. When one of the rebels was seen to be stealing silver, counter to instructions, he was thrown into the fire and killed by his companions, with the rebels saying that they were ‘zealots for truth and justice, not thieves or robbers’.³⁹ It is therefore possible that Ball’s letter contained coded instructions of the route to be taken, the objectives to be achieved and the standards to be applied to rebels. The Anonimalle Chronicle reports that at the time of the assault on the Savoy Palace the commons numbered 50,000 from Essex and 60,000 from Kent. While the numbers may have been exaggerated by the chroniclers, it is reasonable to assume that there were large numbers of the commons present, drawn from numerous villages and that through the reading of original letters, or through the medium of copied letters, whether distributed through the crowd or posted in places of public business, John Ball’s words and instructions reached the assembled crowd.⁴⁰

Further local evidence of the use of the written word can be found in indictments within The People of 1381 database, of which two examples are cited here, both from East Anglia in the week after the rising had started in the area. On 18 June 1381 Thomas Skynnere from the village of Hempton near Fakenham extorted a fine from John Stevene on the threat of tearing down the victim’s house. Five days later Skynnere returned with a letter of quitclaim, which Stevene was made to sign at the point of a sword.⁴¹ It seems reasonable to assume that both the offender and the victim understood the nature of the quitclaim and that, at the very least, there was an expectation that Stevene was capable of signing his name to the document. In a separate example, on 20 June 1381 Martin Mannyngh of Sudbury in Suffolk sent letters some fifty-one miles to East Dereham in Norfolk, apparently with the approval of local rebel leader John Wrawe. He sought to recover some tenements, presumably in East Dereham, that had been seized by a local rebel group. That he was able to write the documents, confident in the knowledge that the recipients would be able to read them suggests that the use of written communication was not a rare event.⁴²

While it is necessary to search for evidence of news transmission using the written word, there is no such difficulty with the spoken word. That news was passed in oral form is indisputable, but here it was possible for the boundary between news and rumour to become blurred, as the messenger of the news had the potential to distort the message, particularly when there was a public appetite for up-to-date information. It was well known that an enquiry after news was always the first question of an English person and that this was often the initiator of conversation between strangers, enfranchising those in the lower social orders who were outside the formal political processes, and those on the margins of literacy.⁴³ In medieval England there were a heterogenous group of public spaces, which included churches, streets, alehouses, shops and markets, that brought people together on a regular and predictable basis and which transcended social boundaries, with markets particularly having the ability to draw people from up to ten miles away.⁴⁴ While the king made use of markets to issue proclamations, during the Peasants’ Revolt they were used by the commons as mechanisms for transmitting news. Walsingham’s detailed account of the St. Albans rising lists three occasions when the rebels used the market to manifest the reconfiguration of local power that they sought to achieve. In the initial stages of the uprising mass meetings were held in the marketplace, where men swore oaths of mutual support, formulated specific demands to be presented to the monastic overlord, and dispatched messengers to other villages instructing them to join the rebels or risk execution. Later, the rebels were successful in obtaining town charters, which they took to the marketplace for burning. Finally, the rebels forced the abbot to release prisoners held in his jail, who for the most part were allowed to go free; however, one unfortunate whom the rebels believed deserving of death was immediately beheaded in front of the abbey accompanied by ‘diabolical shouting’, which Walsingham claimed they had learned in London at the time of Archbishop Sudbury’s murder, the implication being that first-hand news had travelled from London to St. Albans. The severed head was carried to the market and placed on top of the pillory so that, according to Walsingham, ‘it should be clear to all that they were able to enjoy the new laws, and that they were protected by new privileges’.⁴⁵

St. Albans was by no means the only location where the market was used to receive or transmit news. On 17 June 1381 Richard de Leycestre, a rebel commander operating in the area around the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire ordered the beheading of Edmund de Walsyngham, a justice of the peace, with the head to be placed on the pillory at Ely.⁴⁶ That same day, some fifty-seven miles to the north-east in Norwich, Thomas Aslak, a cordwainer from the city, abducted another justice of the peace, Reginald de Eccles, who was brought to the local pillory and before the assembled crowd was stabbed in the stomach and beheaded.⁴⁷ Late in the rising, on 28 June 1381, when many of the outbreaks of violence had been suppressed, Robert Capon went to the market in Hickling, Norfolk, where he attempted to recruit men to join him in burning the charters, court rolls and accounts from the manor of Ingham. Capon clearly met with some success, since indicted with him were six men who carried out the orders.⁴⁸ These examples demonstrate that the news did not have to be in written form to be powerful and effective. Across the country, the act of using the marketplace to proclaim the new order by burning charters and displaying the heads of enemies became a symbolic method of communication.

It is now well established that the rebels were a diverse group containing many who were among the local village elite and held positions as constables, tax assessors or manorial administrators, or were affluent landholders, which would have afforded them extensive social networks.⁴⁹ Far from being the illiterate rustics and bondsmen described by Walsingham, these men had the confidence, authority and leadership skills to give the revolt its coherence. Recent work by Andy Ford adds additional weight to the corpus of knowledge on the participants in the rebellion. He examined judicial records from the Sessions of the Peace recorded between 1377 and 1379, identifying eleven insurgents who were jurors in Essex, including Thomas Baker, the man charged by the chronicler Henry Knighton as being the initiator of the uprising.⁵⁰ Among them were two constables, three men responsible for the collection of the 1377 Poll Tax, a merchant and two wealthy tenants. These were men of similar social standing, who lived in proximity and knew each other. If they did not share their views in the alehouse or the marketplace, their regular attendance as jurors would have allowed them to meet and share common grievances. They had an extensive network of contacts, which provided mutual support, and which facilitated the spread of news rapidly across the hundreds of Essex. It is this rapidity that will be examined next.

News was a valuable commodity, and it is therefore surprising that little research has been carried out to calculate the speed at which it travelled across the country. Charles Armstrong examined thirty incidents of national importance between 1437 and 1502 and identified that news was largely spread through a system of mounted royal messengers. His work suggests that the average speed of news transmission under this arrangement was forty-five miles per day, though occasionally faster speeds were achieved; for example, when Catherine of Aragon landed at Plymouth on 2 October 1501, the news travelled the 216 miles to London in three days at an average speed of seventy-two miles per day.⁵¹ Mary Hill’s extensive examination of the king’s messenger service in the fourteenth century sheds some light on the speed at which news could travel on foot. She showed that the team responsible for delivering writs from chancery to every county had an establishment of ten men, either mounted or on foot. From the routes they were allotted she estimated that foot messengers could travel up to thirty miles per day.⁵²

In both cases research has tended to focus on the transmission of news between the king and his agents and representatives, with little work undertaken on the speed of news transmission outside of these narrow parameters. Work on local communities has tended to focus on news in the Tudor and Stuart period, with Ethan Shagan arguing that across the country people had access to similar information, which spread at ‘astonishing speed’, though he does not quantify how quickly.⁵³ Evidence contained within the primary sources may allow some quantification of the speed of news transmission during the Peasants’ Revolt, which given that the population size and road network of the sixteenth century were similar, may provide some insight into later periods as well.⁵⁴

The case of Thomas Engilby is a typical example, recorded in an indictment from 1383, which, when cross-referenced with Thomas Walsingham’s chronicle, throws light on the spread of news.⁵⁵ Engilby was a member of a minor gentry family in Somerset, who had, until 1381, lived an unremarkable life, attending to his business interests in Bridgwater during the week and attending church on a Sunday, where he would have learned of the quarrel between the parish priest, Nicholas Frompton, and the Augustinian Hospital of St. John, relating to the denial of a benefice. On 14 June 1381 Frompton, as a participant in the revolt, was a witness to the murder of Archbishop Sudbury in London. The violence he observed seemed to provide the solution to his ongoing battle with the Augustinians. He returned to Somerset, quickly recruiting allies from among the local gentry families, one of whom was Thomas Engilby, who saw the invitation as the opportunity for settling personal grudges. On 19 June, as part of a crowd, he broke down the doors of the Augustinian hospital, and destroyed records of the debts owed to the Augustinians. Engilby moved quickly to Sydenham, a small village two miles to the east of Bridgwater, where he destroyed houses, stole property and burned documents. Later that day he travelled the short distance to East Chilton, where he burned goods, destroyed another house and beheaded its owner. On 21 June he ranged further afield, towards Ilchester, twenty miles to the south-east. On the way he broke into the local jail; seized one of the inmates, an ex-burgess and enemy of Nicholas Frompton; and caused one of the assembled crowd to behead the prisoner. He carried the head on a lance and when he returned to Bridgwater, he positioned it over the bridge for all to see. Despite his actions, Engilby was issued a pardon by the king and his brief interactions with the historical record thereafter are mundane by comparison. In 1384 Engilby appears to have undertaken a year’s military service in Ireland under the king’s protection, presumably as part of his rehabilitation. A patent roll records that he did not plan to return to Ireland after serving his time and had, instead, returned to Somerset, after which the king’s writ of protection was revoked.⁵⁶ His last appearance in the historical record in 1387 shows him being fined a penny for allowing a waste heap to accumulate opposite his property to the annoyance of passers-by.⁵⁷

There are several pieces of evidence to suggest the events in London and Bridgwater were linked and that Engilby’s actions were not spontaneous. First, that Frompton was pardoned for his role in the uprising suggests that the account provided in Engilby’s indictment has a basis in fact.⁵⁸ The specific caveat to Frompton’s pardon – that it was conditional upon him not having killed Simon Sudbury, Robert Hales or John Cavendish – seems immaterial, unless he had been present and witnessed those acts. Second, the actions of rebels in Bridgwater so clearly imitated the actions of rebels in London that they could not have occurred without detailed knowledge of the events that had taken place in the capital. The burning of documents, the removal of someone from a place of safety, their summary beheading and the display of the head above the bridge mirror the actions of rebels in London and share many parallels with the murder of Archbishop Sudbury. It is likely that Frompton left London after Sudbury’s murder, probably on the following morning, 15 June, and arrived home in Bridgwater four days later, having travelled 154 miles at an average of thirty-nine miles per day. The daily mileage is more than the distance covered by experienced foot messengers, suggesting that Frompton’s news from London travelled to Somerset on horseback.

The events in Somerset were not unique and nor is this the only place where the primary sources can provide some insight into the speed of transmission of news. John Wrawe, a chaplain from Sudbury, is widely recognized as a leader of the rebels in Suffolk, though whether he was just one of many leaders, as argued by Joe Chick, is a subject of debate.⁵⁹ The matter is complicated by the existence of a second man called John Wrau, described as a parson from Ringsfield in north-east Suffolk, who was responsible for attacking Mettingham Castle on 18 June and being involved in the beheading of Geoffrey de Southgate on 19 June.⁶⁰ Despite Joe Chick’s insistence on there being two individuals bearing the same name the evidence is not compelling either way. Juliet Barker argues that it is possible that Wrawe was a parson in Ringsfield and had been demoted to chaplain in Sudbury, with the circumstances surrounding his loss of position providing the motivation for settling old grievances.⁶¹ If there were two men named John Wrawe the sources agree on the movements and activities of the Sudbury cleric between 12 and 15 June. He is first described near the town of Sudbury attacking local manor houses on 12 June.⁶² Two days later he journeyed from Bury to Lakenheath, where he was involved in the detention and beheading of the king’s chief justice and three other men before returning to Bury, via Mildenhall, with the severed head, which was placed on public display at the pillory in Bury market.⁶³ The journey from Bury to Mildenhall of twenty-one miles could feasibly have been completed on foot within a day, though this is unlikely when time is allowed for his activities en route. It is more likely that Wrawe and his company were on horseback since depositions taken in the Lackford Hundred after Wrawe’s arrest record that on 14 June he was in Mildenhall with ‘400 unknown men’, though by the following day the size of his party had reduced by half.⁶⁴ While the accounts can be criticized for the lack of consistency in the estimates of the strength of Wrawe’s company, it seems incontrovertible that he travelled with a band large enough to intimidate the local population so as to be able to act without opposition. The most obvious method of moving large groups across the country quickly would have been on horseback, but where did all the horses come from? Given the rich social mix of the rebels identified by numerous commentators – including individuals that might be considered of the better sort, that is, those in positions of local authority, landholders and the otherwise wealthy – it is likely that there would have been a pool of horses readily available to the rebels. Where there were shortfalls, horses could be stolen to order. A simple keyword search for ‘horse’ in The People of 1381 database returns ninety matches, of which fifty-five relate to their theft.

If the two men identified as John Wrawe were one and the same, there are also the incidents on 18 and 19 June to consider. The date of Wrawe’s departure from Bury is not recorded but would have been around 16 June, and he would have arrived in the Beccles area on 17 June, raising a force before attacking Mettingham Castle on 18 June. That Wrawe had access to a horse is further reinforced by his thirty-seven-mile journey from Bury to Bungay. Andrew Prescott has argued that since his journey did not spark off any incidents on the road he probably travelled quickly, at night, and did not reveal his identity to anyone.⁶⁵ Once more, when the methods of John Wrawe or the two John Wrawes are compared to those employed in London, St. Albans and Somerset, it is suggestive of a common source: a preoccupation with bonds and charters, the beheading of those deemed corrupt, and the use of a public space as a method of distributing news to the wider area. The movements of Wrawe, including the disputed events on 18–19 June, have been reconstructed and are shown in Figure 1.

Examining isolated outbreaks provides detailed information for specific areas but gives no sense of how quickly or how far the news of the uprising spread across the country. While the Anonimalle Chronicle, Knighton, Froissart and Walsingham broadly agree on the sequencing of events, none is specific about the date on which the initial uprising in Essex commenced, though the Anonimalle Chronicle suggests that the king’s commissioners were attacked in Brentwood on the day before Whitsuntide, which would have been 1 June 1381.⁶⁶ Certainly, by 2 June rebel groups had begun to form, with a jury indictment for the hundred of Hinckford in Essex recording that eighteen named men from six villages drawn from within a twenty-five mile radius of Bocking, swore an agreement ‘to destroy divers lieges of the lord king and his common laws’.⁶⁷ That the home locations of rebels and the timing and locations of incidents can be determined with accuracy raises the intriguing possibility of using the People of 1381 database to trace the date of each new outbreak across the country both geographically and temporally. Rather than relying upon information contained within the chronicles, this article has made use of the judicial and manorial documents and the records of central and local government to trace the diffusion of the wavefront of rebellion from a putative starting point of 1 June 1381 using an isopleth map. Table 1 summarizes the extant records for each of the counties where documents relating to the Peasants’ Revolt are known to survive.

Twenty-six counties have a record of at least one incident occurring in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the revolt, albeit in some areas such as York, tensions had been simmering for some months and the outbreak of violence in June 1381 was but one act in a long-running drama that started in November 1380 and would not conclude until at least November 1382.⁶⁸ It is doubtful whether the list of counties directly affected is complete, for in the immediate aftermath of the uprising the government sent a mandate to the mayors of York, Kingston upon Hull, Beverley, Scarborough and Newcastle upon Tyne forbidding unlawful assemblies and authorizing the punishment of insurgents.⁶⁹ Extant records provide evidence of uprisings in four of the boroughs – Newcastle upon Tyne being the exception – suggesting that their specific singling out by the government was not a random choice but was rooted in the belief that uprisings had occurred, or had the potential to occur in these urban centres. Nevertheless, utilizing those records that have been identified to date, 2,426 incidents have been examined and from them the spread of rebellion has been estimated.

The methodology for developing the isopleth map is relatively simple. The dates of initial outbreak provide point locations and have been used as a proxy to map the spatial variation in the speed of news transmission. Examining changes in these rates across a large area therefore relies upon the generation of isopleths to interpret the movement of news spatially between two known control points. Linear interpolation was used to determine the form of the isopleths based upon the triangulated irregular network method. This requires each known data point to be connected to two other known points to form a triangle. Each line between two known control points is interpolated so that points on the line can be connected to other interpolated points of the same value. Interpolating values across areas where there are no data available does allow for a qualitative assessment of the spatial variation of the spread of news but has some inherent limitations, not least of which is the assumption that news travels in a linear manner. Interpolation relies upon the number and distribution of control points as well as the skill and experience of the interpolator. Despite this, it allows for a graphical representation of gradually changing values and spatial patterns across the country and is particularly useful in illustrating these changes over time. Figure 2 shows an isopleth map, which depicts the time taken for the initial outbreak of violence in Essex to be replicated in other areas.

Four conclusions can be drawn. First, the wavefront of rebellion radiates consistently in all directions. The absence of distorted wave patterns or frequent outliers is indicative of a rebellion that spread from a point of origin and not of spontaneous outbreaks across the country. Second, each of the outbreaks lies on or near a major road and these were the principal conduits over which news passed to its destination.⁷⁰ There appear to be four main networks over which news travelled outwards from London: it radiated south through Surrey and Sussex; west into Somerset and the west country; north-east, through Cambridgeshire and then into Suffolk and Norfolk and finally northwards, through the East Midlands and into Yorkshire. Third, the news travelled quickly, though there are problems with this calculation on a more general basis. It is possible that the initial outbreak of violence had more of a local flavour until the rebels reached London. It was in London, for example, that John Wrawe is reputed to have met the rebels; that William Grindcobbe from St. Albans joined the bands before returning to his home town to start his own rebellion using the tactics he had acquired; and, on 14 June, that Nicholas Frompton was a witness to the murder of Archbishop Sudbury. It would be reasonable to redraw Figure 2 based on a much later point of origin, in London on 14 June. The isopleth pattern would remain largely the same but the speed at which the news travelled across the country would be correspondingly quicker. Consider the case of York, where outbreaks of ‘devilish insurrection’ were recorded on 17 June.⁷¹ If the initiator of nationwide violence was the disorder in London on 14 June, some 197 miles distant, then the news spread sixty-five miles a day, double the distance a horse can safely travel, suggesting that messengers, swapping horses regularly, or a relay of messengers passing the news between them allowed information to move quickly.⁷² Lastly, it is worth considering two outliers. The first is around Northampton, where John Seymper was indicted for inciting a rebellion on 9 June 1381, seemingly inspired by events in Essex and Kent. His arrival in Northampton a full three days before the rebels reached Blackheath is worth considering. It is unlikely that Seymper’s arrival in Northampton was coincidental: his claim to be a wool merchant from London raises the possibility that he learned of the rising at the same time as a ‘certain great and fearful rumour reached the ears of the then mayor, William Walworth, and almost all the citizens of London’.⁷³ Before the rebels arrived in the city, he had left for Northampton to try and incite a rising there. It does not seem unreasonable to assume that there was a steady flow of information into the city from the heart of the rebellion and that the movement of the rebels towards the city was an open secret, frightening most but inspiring others. The second outlier can be found near Bodmin, Cornwall and can be dated to 8 June 1381, when an inquisition accused Richard Eyr, his brother William and a third man, Roger Trenwynnard, of having learned of the risings in Essex and Kent, before assembling a force of three hundred with the intention of killing several unnamed men.⁷⁴ Their rising, if the date is recorded accurately, took place in Cornwall before the main group of Essex and Kent rebels had reached London. It is interesting that the indictment is consistent in referring to the Essex and Kent risings, which were taking place at the time, and not the main rebellion in London, which was still four days in the future. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine how the news travelled the 276 miles from Bocking to Bodmin in a maximum of a week without a messenger riding forty miles a day and not passing on the news to any person on the route, unless it mirrored John Wrawe’s night time journey from Bury to Beccles.

There is no doubt that trying to visualize the transmission of news is both challenging and, to a degree, subjective, despite some strong hints in the documentary record. These are, however, less significant than the difficulties inherent in the examination of rumour transmission and this will be the theme of the remainder of this article.

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Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses described the House of Rumour as located in a haunted no-man’s land between earth, sky and heaven, where ‘the halls are filled with presences that shift and wander, rumour in thousands; lie and lies together; confusing, confusing’.⁷⁵ To historians interested in accurate and plausible interpretations of the past, the lack of reliability inherent in the study of rumour can be frustrating. Rumours, by their very nature, are vague, often unreliable or completely untrue and have been dismissed as the ‘annoying background chatter’ of real history.⁷⁶ Their ephemeral nature rarely renders them worthy of being committed to a written record; nevertheless, despite their shortcomings, they offer a window into the minds of authentic common people, whose voices have been filtered and sanitized by the traditional political elite.⁷⁷ It is often in these rumours that the words of the rebel are first heard and they can provide a disguised transcript of rebel thinking.⁷⁸

The study of rumour formation and circulation has largely involved experiments conducted in artificially constructed environments under controlled conditions, the results of which are difficult to translate into an artificial theoretical or interpretative framework that reflects a real-world environment.⁷⁹ Where agreement can be found, it is that rumours can exist only in situations of group interest where it benefits the collective for the rumour to survive and spread.⁸⁰ These rumours arise spontaneously and can be considered as a collective effort to interpret a problematic situation when authoritative information is lacking.⁸¹ The main driver for the spontaneity of rumour creation relates to the emotional need of the individual or group when there is a failure to employ exclusively impartial or objective evidence to interpret the immediate environment.⁸² The foundational work of Jamuna Prasad has demonstrated that anxiety is the dominant emotional state that induces the formation of rumours.⁸³ The interpretation of rumour from the perspective of the anxiety paradigm allows an insight into the emotional state of those involved in the uprising, throwing new light on its role in both causing and spreading disorder. While there are many examples that could have been chosen, this section examines three specific events, which are assessed by considering the rumours that they generated, drawn from the chronicles and judicial documents recorded in The People of 1381 database: the outbreak of disorder in Essex; the admission of rebels into the city; and the threat to burn London by Wat Tyler. In many ways the examples chosen are not of critical importance, since they are used as the basis for a historical thought experiment. Relying solely upon extant evidence will not allow historians to understand the mindset of the rebels and a thought experiment represents a methodological attempt to reconcile the historical record with contemporary observations and experiments.⁸⁴

The cause of the initial outbreak of the revolt is a good example of the difficulties inherent in analysing rumour. Of the four main chronicles covering events in Essex on 1 June 1381, each provides a distinctly different cause. The Anonimalle Chronicle attributes the rising to the reluctance of townships to pay the new subsidies; Walsingham cites a clamour for liberty as the ‘rustics’ sought to better themselves; and Froissart states that the London burgesses incited the peasants to rebel. Only Knighton attributes the outbreak to a rumour that in one village a poll tax commissioner had ‘shamelessly lifted the young girls to test whether they had enjoyed intercourse with men’ and were therefore liable for the tax charge. Parents of the girls felt compelled to pay the additional money rather than see their children molested.⁸⁵ Dan Jones raises the possibility that one of the parents involved was Thomas Baker and that this may have provided the motive for his involvement as one of the leaders.⁸⁶ The evidence from the Essex Sessions of the Peace suggesting that he was responsible for collecting the poll tax from the village of Fobbing in 1381 is consistent with Christopher Dyer’s findings that 76 per cent of the cases he examined involved rebels who were prominent in the government of their manor, village or hundred.⁸⁷ Knighton’s description of the revolt, written in Leicester, was probably based on a pre-existing account that he edited and augmented, so is not first-hand testimony; however, the description of the actions of the commissioners is specific, rich in detail and provides a direct cause, rather than the contradictory and superficial accounts provided in other chronicles.⁸⁸ Ralph Rosnow examined the relationship between participant anxiety, the degree of credibility they attached to a piece of information and the potential of a rumour to travel through a population, with the optimum conditions experienced when participants were under moderate anxiety.⁸⁹ The conditions faced by the parents of the girls involved, and, by association, their community, would qualify as a moderate anxiety state: their lives were not threatened, but they did face the stressors of assaults on their daughters and an unjust financial burden and it is not unreasonable to identify this event as a credible initiator for the revolt, with the circumstances proving a fertile medium for the rumour to cascade outwards, influencing those with whom it came into contact.

The second example concerns the entry of the rebels into London. Two inquisitions held in November 1382 provide some detail of their movement into the city from Southwark over London Bridge, in which blame was directed at several aldermen, accusing them of acting in concert with the rebels. There are inconsistencies between the two accounts, which suggest that the second inquisition was an edited version of the first, designed to make the actions of the aldermen involved more traitorous than was the case.⁹⁰ While the motivations ascribed to the alderman can be treated with some scepticism, the inquisitions, particularly when combined with a reading of the chronicles, has the potential to reveal a more realistic account of the breaching of London Bridge than the simple apportionment of blame on a number of hapless individuals. The bridge was of critical strategic significance and was the only entry point into the city from the south: the simple act of raising the drawbridge would have isolated the Kent rebels and split the forces of the rioters. On the mayor’s instructions, this appears to have been done.⁹¹ The reasons why it came to be lowered has remained a subject of debate. The inquisition sought to scapegoat Walter Sybyle, an alderman, who had stationed himself on London Bridge, presumably at the request of the mayor. Sybyle is alleged to have known of the ‘evil deeds’ perpetrated by the rebels on the way to London, and of criminal acts that they were carrying out in Southwark while waiting to gain access to the city; yet, knowing his pivotal role in protecting London, he had refused all offers of help, declaring, ‘These Kentishmen are good men and our friends; God forbid that the gates should be closed or any resistance offered to them’.⁹² Both the Walsingham and the Anonimalle Chronicle account appear more credible in describing the mayor ordering the bridge closed but the guards responsible for this, being harangued and threatened with death by the rebels, failed to do so, instead lowering the drawbridge and letting the assembled mob cross into the city.⁹³ The Westminster Chronicle described the Kent rebels as ‘the maddest of mad dogs’ who moved through the countryside, ‘razing to the ground the manors and houses of many landowners, beheading some people, and forcing everybody they met who was not of their fellowship into sworn association with themselves’.⁹⁴ The violent picture that is painted would have added credibility to the rumours that London was close to lost. The rumours abounding, recorded in both the chronicles and the inquisitions, paint a chaotic and frightening picture and for the guards on London Bridge, keeping the drawbridge raised would have been an act of futility, serving only to engineer their own deaths, if not from the rebels to the front, then by the hand of the sympathetic commons to their rear. Their actions were not that of fifth columnists, as posited by John Stow, but a rational act of self-preservation.⁹⁵ James Scott has argued that rumour is closely associated with a form of aggression that is not necessarily directed at a specific person and instead acts as a powerful form of anonymous communication that serves particular interests. This form of rumour thrives in situations in which events are of vital importance to people’s interests and where there is no reliable information available.⁹⁶ Here the forces of the rebels were split and were unable to communicate with each other, causing them to operate in ignorance and isolation. The Essex group could gain access to the city from Aldgate in the east but required the Kent rebels to complete the pincer movement by entering the city from the south. Crossing the Thames was essential to the success of the rebel plan and the bridge had to remain open at all costs. The rumour that London was in the hands of the rebels, that resistance was futile and would lead to death created a high anxiety state in the guards, which may have generated a ‘diversion in attitude’ such that the guards and the rebels subconsciously produced a common definition of the situation, albeit temporarily, but long enough for the rebels to stream across the bridge and spread the rebellion into the city.⁹⁷

It is now necessary to turn to the Walsingham and Anonimalle chronicles, which, when read in conjunction, remain the sole sources of evidence for an incident of some interest in the study of rumour. Walsingham reports that following the destruction of the Savoy Palace, the murder of Archbishop Sudbury and the orgy of violence across the city on 14 June 1381, the king sent messengers to meet with the Kent rebels asking them to leave. It is possible that Wat Tyler saw the king’s weakness as an opportunity to issue his own demand: he sought nothing less than the elimination of the legal classes as a precursor to regulation through decrees of the common people. Accompanying the demand was the veiled threat that if the king did not acquiesce, he would be killed, together with his supporters; fires would be set, and the city razed to the ground.⁹⁸ Walsingham is frustratingly ambiguous about the source of the threats, merely asserting that Tyler had planned them, confident in the support of the poor commons of London. The lack of provenance for the ‘threats’ suggest that it is possible that what is reported by Walsingham falls more easily within the field of rumour. This therefore raises two key questions to consider: first, did Walsingham provide an accurate summary of events? Second, if the events were accurate, what was the rationale behind Tyler’s actions and the setting of the rumour? While Walsingham sometimes disagrees on the finer points of some dates with his fellow chroniclers, and his use of historical set pieces to illustrate his argument can lend his narrative a degree of imbalance, he has been described as a ‘conscientious historian close to events’ who probably obtained first-hand testimony from witnesses.⁹⁹ There appears to be little reason to doubt the general veracity of Walsingham’s account; therefore, to answer the second question it is necessary to move forward several hours to the meeting of Wat Tyler with the king and his entourage at Smithfield on the afternoon of 15 June 1381 and the account provided in the Anonimalle Chronicle. Here we need to apply an identical test: how accurately are the events reported? The Anonimalle Chronicle provides a highly detailed account of events in London and much of it can be corroborated by evidence found in later inquisitions and indictments, though of course there is a possibility that it drew upon these sources to fill in the inevitable gaps in the narrative. It is peppered with description born of personal knowledge, by an author who appears familiar with the city’s topography, politics and ‘social blemishes’ and was in all likelihood a witness to some of the events, perhaps as a member of the king’s retinue.¹⁰⁰ However, a note of caution must be injected into the discussion, since the sequence of events recording the meeting of the king and the rebels at Mile End is not wholly consistent with that recorded in the Walsingham chronicle, leading some commentators such as Andrew Prescott to highlight the difficulty of interpreting the rebel demands. Did they exist? If they did, were they coherent? Was there a single set of demands or did they change fundamentally?¹⁰¹The People of 1381 database makes no mention of the demands made of the king, so in the absence of new documents the version provided by the chronicles cannot be corroborated, corrected or refuted. We might tentatively suggest that the rebel leadership reframed demands in much the same manner as Jack Cade’s petitions to King Henry VI during an uprising some seventy years later.¹⁰²

At Smithfield Tyler appears to have issued a different set of demands that bore no relation to his previously stated desire to kill any member of the legal profession, and which included, among other things, a return to the law of Winchester, a ban on outlawry, the division of church goods among the people and an end to villeinage and serfdom.¹⁰³ The radical rewriting of demands within a single day could suggest that Tyler was playing a psychological game and that the demands placed before the king at Smithfield were always what the rebels had sought. Threats to eliminate the legal profession were possibly an initial negotiating position, designed to make the final demands more palatable. The threats to burn London and kill the king, if indeed they were ever issued as threats, had a valuable role to play, being incendiary in more ways than one. These were rumours designed to spread like an epidemic, infecting the mind of every recipient, and no doubt filling them with a sense of dread.¹⁰⁴ Their purpose was less to frighten the public and more to shape opinion, perhaps even inducing a state of panic around the king, so that any negotiated settlement would seem a better alternative.¹⁰⁵

Tyler’s emotional state at this point is difficult to fathom. To Walsingham he was ‘shrewd’ and might have achieved something of himself had he applied his intelligence for more lawful purposes, Froissart describes him as ‘iniquitous’, while in the Anonimalle Chronicle he is recorded as displaying a ‘great confidence’.¹⁰⁶ Further objective contemporary descriptions of his character do not exist and so it is left to the historian to form a view based upon the extant evidence. To Dan Jones he was charismatic and to Juliet Barker he demonstrated leadership and organizational skills, all qualities he may have acquired serving as a soldier.¹⁰⁷ It is possible that Tyler, despite the outlandish threats, was confident and had a clear and intelligent strategy. This moment was the peak of the crisis: in the absence of official information Tyler may have been attempting to create a new reality by spreading rumours of destroying the city, thereby piling additional pressure on the king. In doing so, he was engaged in an act of problem solving by generating the environment in which his demands could be met.¹⁰⁸ The rumour was extreme, but given the tumultuous events of the previous day, there is no reason to suppose that the London elite did not believe him willing and capable of carrying out the threat. In this chaotic atmosphere Tyler may have been attempting to challenge the practices of power and to destabilize the king, opening a social space for participation in political discussions that would not previously have been possible between the king and the commons.¹⁰⁹

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The Peasants’ Revolt has been described as an explosion of anger that for a brief period united a diverse group of people, yet, over six centuries later, it shows little sign of weakening its grip on popular and scholarly interest.¹¹⁰ There is much we now understand about the rising, but equally there is much that remains hidden, awaiting the discovery of new sources or the application of new techniques to existing evidence. This article is an attempt to look at a familiar problem in a different way. Using an interdisciplinary approach informed by findings from sociological research into news and rumour, and, applying these retrospectively to evidence contained within the well-known chronicles of the event and the judicial, manorial and other documentation now publicly available in The People of 1381 database, an attempt has been made to shine a new light on the outbreaks of rebellion in the summer of 1381. This has not been without its challenges. Dobson observed that historians are constrained to view the rebels through the eyes of their opponents: the chronicles are universally in favour of the king and the established hierarchy, and the observations of the so-called peasants tend to be unsympathetic.¹¹¹ Similarly, the legal documentation that survives, by its nature, treats the rebels as criminal lower orders, and there is little that gives either expression or agency to those involved in the rebellion, other than a few surviving letters attributed to some of the leaders. This article has sought to focus on those directly involved in the uprising and, by examining the key role of news and rumour, to understand how the Peasants’ Revolt started and why it spread. The news and the rumour generated by the rebels expressed distress, fear and anger but it also expressed a hope for change and in doing so provides a potential insight into the behaviours and motivations of people that have hitherto been remote and inaccessible.¹¹²

This article has shown that news and its transmission was an essential element in the revolt. Far from being an illiterate and exclusively oral culture, some of the rebels were highly literate and made use of their skills in distributing information. Letters were exchanged between groups and commanders, and it is likely that these were copied and received a wider distribution, suggesting that some of the rebels were capable of reading and interpreting the messages before passing on that information to their comrades. This supplemented the oral news culture that already existed. Using extant documentary evidence to trace the progression of the rebellion has demonstrated that news could traverse the country quickly, reaching Somerset and York within four days, and, quite possibly, even more quickly to Cornwall, indicating that it must have travelled on horseback, carried by individuals or by messengers. The tactical similarities between outbreaks are suggestive of significant organizational planning, and the pattern of spread of the rebellion to Somerset, Yorkshire and other areas support Andrew Prescott’s view that they were an integral part of the rising and not merely isolated outliers.¹¹³ Rumour also played a key role but in a different way. The complex relationship between rumour and news means it is not feasible to track its speed of transmission, though it is likely that they were both conveyed by similar means and at similar speeds. What is certain is that rumour thrived in the absence of news and was more prevalent in the chaos of the rising, particularly in London, where it was probably linked with an emotional need to express ‘the anxieties of the day’.¹¹⁴ A thought experiment suggests that rumour was possibly used as an effective tactic by rebel leaders as they attempted to exploit the natural anxieties of the king, his advisors and the general populace of London. Rumour was important in sustaining the rebellion in its formative stages, and in opening the route into London over London Bridge. Wat Tyler’s attempt to cajole the king into agreeing to rebel demands was less successful. This initial foray into potentially new insights of the rising generated using all available material has focused upon establishing if news and rumour played a role in the Peasants’ Revolt. By necessity it has been broad-brush and general in nature but there is now scope for further research on the phenomenon, particularly if a more granular approach is adopted to determine the precise nature of the relationship between news and rumour, and different kinds of revolt activity. This rising was multiphase and involved planning, communication, mobilization and action, and it may be that news and rumour had differing roles at different stages. There is much that we know about the Peasants’ Revolt, but equally there is much that remains hidden. This article has aimed to demonstrate the potential of applying new methodologies, drawn from a range of disciplines, to address the silences and tensions evident in the extant record, thereby enhancing our understanding of this pivotal event in British history.

Footnotes