They remembered that the great clerics of England lived in luxury funded by the peasants’
sweat and toil. They remembered the pennies they had to pay to the local priests every time they wanted their babies baptised, or their parents buried, and the pennies and taxes they had to pay to ensure their salvation.
And all these pennies went out of England and to the fat, corrupt cow of a Reman Church, the laughing stock of all honest men now that two (or was it three, or even five or six?) popes squabbled among themselves for the right to speak the words of God.
And the right to control the massive wealth the Church plundered from honest country men and women who merely wanted a better life in the next world to the one they endured here.
Well, perhaps it was time to ensure that this world was the better one, instead of listening to the seductive words of lords and priests who told them that it was God’s will they suffer in this life so that they might have a greater chance at salvation in the next.
With these men of the land marched renegade priests and friars, who fed them ideas and visions of a future that inflamed their already raging resentment at the lords and clerics of England. Who needed this great hierarchy of priests when all you needed for salvation was
an understanding of the Bible? It was no wonder that the Roman Church refused to allow the Holy Scriptures to be translated out of Latin and into the words of the common people.’The great Master Wycliffe surely spoke sense when he said that the corrupt Church existed in such a state of sin that it no longer had God’s mandate to control so much wealth and land.
And so much land. The Church of Rome owned fully a third of the land in England. Why did the Church need that if not to feed the corrupt and luxurious lifestyles of the higher clergy?
Perhaps the land and wealth of this foreign, uncaring and dissolute Church could be shared out among the people.
And so, as these groups marched and merged, their anger grew to unprecedented proportions. They had to make a stand—now!—or both the nobles and the higher clergy would grind them back into the dust of slavery forever.
No one stood in their way as they marched. England’s army was in France, or in the north to keep the ever-cursed Scots in their misty hills and fens. Local militias were too small to cope with these murderous bands of peasants … or too willing to join them.
All that the lords could do was send frantic messages to Westminster pleading for aid—and then run for their lives.
Some didn’t make it.
THE ANGER and this willingness to fight for freedom filled Tyler’s soul with joy, but at the same time he feared that the rising mass of commons might seethe out of control. This huge, murmuring beast—still split into groups spread over the southeast of England—had to be kept in check in order to be effective … and Tyler had not thought it would be so difficult, nor that the beast would prove so savage.
Having murdered the two tax collectors, the men from Harming had picked up whatever might best serve them as weapons—pikes and staves, as also bows and quivers full of arrows and swords to supplement the knives that all men carried at their waist—and merged with men from the villages in their immediate vicinity: East and West Farley, Allington, Aylesforde, Ditton and East Mallyng.
Having collected in a field some two miles from Maidstone, the band—numbering some two hundred men—then marched on the town itself.
It “fell” with nary a struggle. Not only was Maidstone unwalled and largely undefended, the band was welcomed by the majority of the townsmen who had suffered under the burden of taxes and personal restrictions almost as much as their rural cousins.
Maidstone’s small prison was attacked, the jailers murdered, and the prisoners set free.
The local court building was burned to the ground, together with all the manorial deeds and documents it held, and the throng shouted with delight as they watched almost five hundred years’ worth of feudal records being destroyed.
Having dealt with the props which upheld their landlords’ claim to lands and labor, the mob turned its attention to those who laid claim to their souls. The Maidstone priest having fled, the mob marched out of the town half a mile southeast to Milgate Abbey where they ravaged and burned deep into the night, murdering the few monks who were too old and lame to run for their lives.
It was here, finally, that Tyler managed to regain some semblance of control. “Do you want to waste your energies on burning down barns’}” Tyler screamed at the mob undulating before him in the torchlight.
“Barns?” called out one man. “This is filth that we destroy here.'” There were murmurs of agreement, but Tyler spoke before they could swell and surge into another wave of destruction.
“We have no time for this!” Tyler said. “Do you think we will be left in peace for months so that we might skip about to every abbey and every hermitage in the land? If we want success then we must move fast, before the lords can move against us!”
“He’s right!” cried Jack Straw, coming to stand by Tyler’s shoulder. “Lads, I know your anger, but we cannot run amok like goose-boys! We need a head to direct our body, so that we might best use its strength. Tyler speaks well, and he speaks with hardened years of soldiery behind him.”
Murmurs again, but agreeing with what Straw said.
“We need a head and a mouth to speak what is in all our hearts,” Straw said. “And I say that Tyler is our man!”
Men shouted, but Tyler’s voice overrode them. “Lads! In short time the lords will rise from their shock and assemble against us—if we don’t achieve our aims before then we will never
do so!”
“Richard!” shouted a man. “Richard will aid us!”
“Aye!” cried several more. “He will surely aid us against our oppressors.” Fools, thought Tyler, but knew that he needed to foster this illusion to mold the mob to his will.
“We need to make ourselves heard,” Tyler said, then paused, his sharp eyes staring about the crowd. “And we will never be heard if we stay mired in the muddy fields of Kent.”
“Where?” said a man.
“Canterbury—” Tyler began.
“Where resides the murderous archbishop!” screamed someone from far back in the crowd.
Tyler almost smiled. The genial and good-hearted Simon Sudbury could never be described as “murderous.” But he needed the mob to go to Canterbury—there lay his second-in-command, rotting in jail—and the thought that they might get their hands on poor Sudbury in doing so was a good enough excuse to get them marching westward.
“Canterbury,” Tyler said. “Then London.”
The mob erupted again, now shouting Tyler’s name, and Tyler relaxed a little.
LATE THE next night, Canterbury lay under the pall of the rebels, many of its buildings on fire, the archbishop’s palace completely destroyed in the mob’s rage that the archbishop himself was, apparently, in London.
For the moment, Tyler did not care that Sudbury had avoided the mob’s anger. He had better things to do than think about the archbishop’s lucky escape, and one of those things consisted of leading a band of some twenty-eight men into the prison that rose outside the walls of the town.
Here lay the one man who could—hopefully—consolidate Tyler’s control over the maddened beast that roiled outside.
John Ball.
Tyler found him, eventually, brushing off his shabby robe in one of the lower cells. He was dirty—but then that was largely Ball’s natural state anyway—and hungry, but otherwise seemed well, and Tyler embraced him with a brief, fierce hug.
“John!”
Ball grinned. “It has begun then?”
“Can you not hear them?”
“Oh, aye, that I can. Well… what now?”
“London,” said Tyler, “and whatever fate awaits us there.”
CHAPTER IV
The Vigil of the Feast of St. Nicomedes
In the second year of the reign of Richard II
(Thursday 31st May 1380)
PRIOR GENERAL THORSEBY finally condescended to send for Neville three days after he’d allowed Courtenay permission to visit his lord.
Neville was not surprised Thorseby had made him wait—had not Prior Bertrand done the same to him at St. Angelo’s?—and thus was not disconcerted by it. He knew that Thorseby had wanted to make him sweat, and he refused to pander to the Prior General’s machinations.
Two friars came for him in the early afternoon. They did not speak, merely opening the door and indicating that Neville should follow them.
As they remained silent, so too did Neville, and he walked forward from his cell without a backward glance.
THE PRIOR General was waiting for him behind an oak table in a chamber in the main building complex of Blackfriars. The stone and brick chamber was lit only from narrow slit windows high in its northern and eastern walls, and its air was cold and merciless. Spring had not yet managed to penetrate into the depths of Blackfriars. Three other Dominicans sat with Thorseby: one Neville recognized as a master at the Oxford colleges, the other two he did not know.