The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The fire of revolution that was now sweeping through the English countryside was not entirely due to misery and oppression. In fact, peasants were better off now than they had ever been. The Black Death had killed off so many that labour was short, and they could demand – and get – higher wages. The Hundred Years War with France, which started ten years before the Black Death and continued for another century, brought a new prosperity as soldiers returned from Normandy with plunder; shipbuilders and military suppliers made a fortune. By 1350, twenty-five million people – a third of the population of Europe – had died, and landlords were forced to sell land – which was useless to them – to the peasants. But the peasants were irritable and dissatisfied; after the Black Death, it all seemed an anticlimax. Besides, some of these new merchant-adventurers – like Richard Lyons of London – used their power to fix prices of some essential goods and created scarcity where there was none. Men began to listen with enthusiasm to the teachings of the ‘Mad Priest of Kent’, John Ball, who told them that ‘things won’t go well in England until everything is held in common, without serfs or lords…’ Ball, who has been greatly admired by modern socialists, was a muddled thinker whose ideas were quite simply a form of ‘magical thinking’, the tendency to allow emotion to distort logic. ‘What right have they to be on top? They wear velvet and rich stuffs, with ermine and other fur; we must dress cheaply. They have wines, spices and good bread; we have rye and husks and only water. Fine manor houses for them, but wind and rain for us toiling in the fields.’ The emotion is that of a child who feels that another child has more toys, and that it would be pleasant to give him a black eye and take them away.

But Kent was ready to listen to such teachings. There the Black Death had been worse than elsewhere; there was a desire for major changes. The war with France was going badly, and the king’s attempt to raise money through a poll tax caused intense ill feeling. Riots broke out in Essex in May 1381 and six jurors were killed. In Kent, the rebels set out to march on London, led by an ex-highwayman named Wat Tyler. John Ball was in Maidstone jail; they rescued him and took him with them. Then they marched to Canterbury and Rochester, burning castles and manor houses on the way.

London was a walled city, but the rioters had friends within; London Bridge was undefended, and the gate at Aldgate was opened to the rebels from Essex. While the fourteen-year-old King Richard II took refuge in the Tower of London, the rioters threw open all the gaols and began beheading the people they felt were responsible for their problems – like the merchant Richard Lyons, the Treasurer and the Archbishop of Canterbury. A whole colony of Flemings were executed merely because they were foreigners. The leaders made lists of people they wanted to execute, and the axe in Cheapside rose and fell. On 14 June 1381, Tyler presented the king with a list of their demands – that serfdom should cease, that their rebellion should be pardoned, and that land should be rented at fourpence an acre. The king agreed. Rebels and courtiers came face to face in Smithfield Market, the peasants holding their bows ready. Wat Tyler rode forward alone to speak to the king. What happened next is uncertain. The usual account is that his manner was so insolent that the outraged mayor of Walworth struck him violently and another of the king’s followers then ran him through. It sounds plausible; it hardly seems likely that the king would plan the betrayal of Wat Tyler in front of all his followers. The French chronicler Froissart tells the rest of the story – how the rebels raised their bows, how the young king walked alone towards them, muttering over his shoulder to his courtiers ‘Let no man follow me.’ Then he called to the rebels: ‘Would you kill your king? I will be your leader.’ And he persuaded them to adjourn to the fields of Clerkenwell. The king’s men now mobilised their forces and restored order. The peasants drifted home, some convinced that Wat Tyler had been knighted – in spite of the evidence of his head on London bridge; in any case, they all trusted their king.

Now that the forces of order had triumphed they had no intention of sticking to their agreement. They immediately revoked their promises, declaring that they had been made under duress. Other rebellions elsewhere were nipped in the bud by experienced soldiers. The king’s authorities went into the countryside, placed rebels on trial and executed them – the number, though, was relatively small, less than two hundred. The authorities, aware what a close thing it had been, sat back with a gasp of relief. As they regained confidence, they proceeded to tighten the screws. But things had changed, and everyone knew it; the execution of John Ball could not put back the clock.

Richard’s success in retaining his kingdom might be expected to have been the prelude to a long and prosperous reign. In fact, success went to his head. Two years later, he asserted his total independence as a ruler and, by way of underlining the point, had one of his uncles, the duke of Gloucester, murdered. He became as despotic as any Roman emperor, had his cousin exiled and, when the father – John of Gaunt – died, seized his inheritance. At this point he made the mistake of setting out on a punitive expedition to Ireland, whose natives were even in those days causing the English endless trouble. His cousin seized the opportunity to return to England and by the time Richard hurried back his power was in ruins. He was imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, where he died – history claims he starved himself to death. And his cousin proclaimed himself King Henry IV. The whole drama was to intrigue William Shakespeare – who, like Arnold Toynbee, was fascinated by the ‘horrifying sense of sin manifest in the conduct of human affairs’ and its root in human weakness, but whose sense of history was insufficiently developed to allow him to respond with anything more than a facile pessimism.

Pessimism was also the response of the greatest poet of his time to the new chaos that was destroying the Middle Ages. Dante Alighieri was unfortunate enough to be born in Florence – in 1265 – a city that was permanently divided by political squabbles. The old quarrel between followers of the pope and of the emperor – Guelphs and Ghibellines – had become endlessly complicated by feuds between families. Four thousand Guelphs – the party to which Dante’s family belonged – were killed at the battle of Montaperto five years before he was born. Ghibellines re-entered the city in triumph six years later, but were almost immediately driven out again when their champion, the Staufer emperor Manfred, was defeated at Benevento.

Dante was in his mid-thirties when the pope – Boniface VIII -sent in a ‘referee’ to investigate the latest outbreak of bloodshed between the factions; one of the results was that Dante, who had changed sides, was sent into exile, blamed for problems with which he was completely unconnected. For the last twenty-one years of his life he wandered from city to city, dreaming of the family from which he was separated, and of Beatrice, a girl with whom he had fallen in love at the age of nine and who had died in her twenty-fifth year. It was during this time that he wrote his long poem, The Divine Comedy.

The poem is the story of a kind of dream voyage, in which Dante is guided through hell and purgatory by Virgil, then through paradise by Beatrice. It is the first – and greatest – epic poem of the Middle Ages, and a revelation of the medieval mind. But the reader who expects it to be a revelation of the religious spirit of St Francis and Cluny will be disappointed. Most of the poem is a piece of savagely satirical journalism, concentrating on personalities and events of the day – rather as if a modern poet had written an epic called the Nixonad about Watergate and modern American politics. And for most of its length, the tone is relentlessly negative, a mixture of spite and self-pity. Dante seems to be completely in the grip of vengeful daydreams about people he hates – precisely the kind of vengefulness we have come to associate with the criminal. The Comedy makes us aware that there was something stuffy and petty about the medieval mentality. The human race was still trapped in a kind of suffocating literal-mindedness.

The irony is that this poem created a new form of literature, and showed a way out of the trap. What appealed to Dante’s contemporaries was not the unhappy politician, spluttering bile about his enemies; it was the unhappy lover, dreaming about the dead woman he had never even kissed. With unerring instinct, Dante had chosen the precise image that would appeal to a sentimental age: the great poet, bowed down with the weight of unjust exile, separated by death from the woman he loved. In the fourteenth century, the image of Dante had much the same kind of appeal as that of Rudolph Valentino in the twentieth. Unintentionally, Dante had created the romantic cult of the individual.