On the English Peasant Revolts during the Hundred Years’ War and the War of the Roses
PREFACE AND SELF CRITICISM
Initially, this article was supposed to only focus on the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt of Wat Tyler, the most well known of the four peasants’ revolts that are covered in this article. However, it was impossible to talk about one without talking about the other two, and vice versa, so it was decided to instead write about all four of the major peasants’ revolt. Mao Zedong said in his immortal work On Contradiction, “the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it.” The writer of this article hopes that any Communist reading this finds this a useful historical analysis that we can learn lessons from in our own attempt to develop a revolution in our own countries.
The writer of the article must also make two self-criticisms about my previous articles. The first one is the most serious, that being the articles sometime dipping into unseriousness and humour. While humour is a potent weapon of the proletariat in propaganda, these articles are not the right places to put humour in.
The second is the usage of a mislabelled photo. It was said that the photo was of a EGP guerrilla, but it was actually a Rondero holding a captured PCP flag.
It was a simple mistake to make, and it does not harm the article that much, but it was still an error and promoted an untrue analysis of the world. Therefore this article and any future article will not use the photo and the writer will warn anyone who does use it of the truth of where it came from.
Thank you for reading this article. - Shobha.
INTRODUCTION
In the British education system, all other education systems under Capitalism-Imperialism, we are taught of the history of the Kings, Lords, Generals, Prime Ministers and other “great men” of the ruling classes that exist today and in the past, about their “great visions” that led to the various events of British history.
But we are never taught, or at least not taught until far later in life, about the rebellions of the common people, of the people of the exploited and oppressed classes, against such authority, the authority of the exploiting classes, and the conditions that led to those rebellions. Why? Because such events inspire us to take a look at the exploiting class of our time, the Capitalist class, and rise against it, by comparing it to the experiences of the oppressed of a time before, the Peasantry.
This is our history, the history of the working class. The history we are taught in school (and increasingly through supposedly “historical” content creators) is the history of the exploiter, the history of the Capitalists.
“The masses, and the masses alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.”
— Mao Zedong, On Coalition Government, 1945
1. THE WAT TYLER REVOLT
I. SETTING THE SCENE: FEUDALISM, THE BLACK DEATH, THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR, THE LOLLARD MOVEMENT AND THE WEAKENING OF FUEDAL POWER
The Classes of feudal England
During the time period of the peasant revolts, England was organised societally under a FEUDAL MODE OF PRODUTION. According to 1954 Soviet textbook Political Economy, “The basic economic law of feudalism consisted in the production of surplus product to satisfy the demands of the feudal lords, by means of the exploitation of dependent peasants on the basis of the ownership of the land by the feudal lords and their incomplete ownership of the workers in production-the serfs” or feudal lords (whether aristocratic or clerical) wanted to extract product from the peasants on the land they owned as “payment” for the right to live on the land. These two classes would form the basis of feudal society.
Two other classes that developed during this period was the classes that emerged in the town, the rich townsmen-merchants, usurers, owners of town lands and large house-owners, guild masters, etc, i.e. the proto-Bourgeoisie, the artisans, and the the small craftsmen and journeymen, i.e. the proto-Proletariat. During the Bourgeoise Revolutions later to come, these classes would overthrow the European Feudal Lords and establish Capitalism as the primary mode of production in Europe.
Feudalism had been able to keep the class conflict under control up till now, however a series of changes in the external factors would lead to the internal contradictions sharpening and causing the collapse of Feudalism and the beginning of Capitalism. The two that are most important in the discussion of the English peasant rebellions are the Lollard Movement and the Hundred Years War.
The Black Death
From 1346 to 1352, the Black Death tore through Europe, leaving 40% of the European population dead. While some places had it better than others (Poland, parts of Hungary, the Brabant region, Hainaut and Limbourg (in Belgium and the Netherlands), Santiago de Compostela (Galicia) and Milan (Italy) were left relatively unharmed), England was certainly not one of them.
In fact, England was one of the places hit hardest by the Black Death. In under a decade, the population of England fell from 7 million to around 2 million according to Stéphane Barry and Norbert Gualde, a decrease of almost 75%. This led to a massive crisis in Feudalism. There were far less peasants, so the landlords could not extract their previous high amounts of surplus product, leading to a significant decline in the power of their class. This was a purely external force that led to the internal corrosion of the feudal class system. The Feudal class attempted to save their position through two ways: class bribery and forceful state power.
In terms of class bribery, after the Black Death, the Landlord class, facing the demands of the Peasant Class for better conditions and lower rents, lessened their exploitation slightly. When the Black Death is talked about in schools and education, this is often incorrectly stated to be the “end of Feudalism”. This is untrue. This is not end of Feudalism, it was simply the bettering of treatment.
However, this formed a contradiction with their need to exploit the peasants to get surplus product, the main interest of the landlord class, and in this struggle the need to exploit the peasants won out.
The English Parliament of King Edward III, which at that time represented the interests of the landlord (with representatives of the proto-bourgeoise class, who were a major reason why our transition to Capitalism was not peaceful (won through a civil war) but different to the French transition in that the institutions of feudalism, the Parliament and noble titles, survived (even if transformed massively into institutions of capitalism)) (but still represents the interests of the ruling class), passed the STATUTE OF LABOURERS of 1351, which fixed pay at pre-Black Death levels. While this would take a while to be able to be actually enforced, when it did it led to a massive surge of hatred for the landlord class and it’s enforcers. This was the forceful attempt to save the Landlord class.
This was all made worse by the continuation of the Hundred Years War.
Ideological Revolution through the Lollard Movement
While the Reformation would not yet occur, the Lollard Movement, a precursor to it, which would actually inspire Jan Hus and the Hussites, who would inspire Luther and the Lutheran Reformation that we know of, had occurred and had made it’s presence well known in England, especially in the rural South, an epicentre of rebellion.
The Lollard (Lollard meant “babbler”, an insulting name given by the Catholic nobility to them which they would adopt and use with pride) Movement was started when a certain Priest of the Catholic Church would:
- Translate the Bible to English in order for it to be read by non-Latin speaking literate people (and from there spread by these people to illiterate people).
- Call for the reformation of the Church, that being the Church moving away from politics and economic gain, and ‘back’ (if it ever did want to not influence politics or gain economically) to being “shepherds” of the people. While he would never fully formulate these principles into a coherent manifesto, two would be produced post-mortem by the radicalized movement.
The Lollard Movement emerged from the decay of Feudalism, as the power and influence of the Landlords, and especially the Ecclesiastical Landlord class, which played the dual role of Landlords and as ideological enforcers of the present system hellbent on stopping the arising of class consciousness of the peasantry, and of the classes that would emerge during Capitalism as the main classes, made people, both from the peasant, proto-Proletarian, proto-Bourgeoise and even small Landlords more willing to bring about social change. Not all these people wanted a complete overthrow of the old society, and the movement would split into a middle-class reformer and a peasant-based revolutionary faction, who would be embodied by two figures: Wycliffe and Ball.
Wycliffe was like an English Martin Luther in more ways than just wanting reform. Once can remember from Frederick Engels’ immortal work “The Peasant War in Germany”, (where he actually mentions both Wycliffe and John Ball, a radical Lollard of whom we will talk about soon), his assessment of Luther. As Engels said of Luther and his fraction of the Reformation in Germany who “dropped the popular elements of the movement, and joined the train of the middle-class, the nobility and the princes“ and begun “preaching peaceful progress and passive resistance”, so did Wycliffe. Wycliffe and his group, when the peasant revolt came, opposed it, and instead called for a peaceful change. However, unlike in the German case, the Lollard Movement would drive towards revolution under figures like John Ball, and also unlike the German case, the Lollards would loose.
John Ball would probably be the closest thing to a human incarnation of the radical wing of the Lollard Movement apart from perhaps the Merfold revolt which will be discussed later in this article. The fiery Essex preacher demanded an egalitarian society, and was a true “plebeian revolutionary”, as Engels described his German equivalent Muenzer. As he quite famously said “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”, calling for a return to a supposed egalitarian society as he viewed the society of the Garden of Eden. However, like Wat Tyler, he would still view royalty and that institution as natural, which would lead to his doom. However, he would be a revolutionary figure of light to the rebels, a co-leader of the Wat Tyler Rebellion with it’s other founder, whose name you can probably guess.
However, the Lollard Movement failed to win against the Catholic Church. Indeed, the Reformation would have to wait centuries to take a permanent grip on power in England with the monarchical reformation of the Tudors which I am sure you have all heard of, and while Wycliffe (not Ball or Tyler or anyone of their ilk) would be canonized and have influence extending even to the Levellers of the Civil War, it would still not change the failure of the Lollard Movement to take complete root in England.
This happened for a variety of reasons:
- The social relations of the feudal mode of production in the countryside, while reaching a massive point of damage, had not been fully shattered, and overall, the landlords still had control over the majority of the superstructural aspects of society.
- The Institution of Royalty, who had an extremely important influence in creating false consciousness within the peasantry, and was still in a positions of power socially and in terms of force, and unlike in the HRE was (more) centralized and had more authority and legitimacy in the eyes of the people, strongly supported the old order against the forces of change.
- In terms of force, except for a brief gaining of the force of the noble Oldcastle during a later rebellion which is unimportant to us, the Lollards were never able to mobilize a significant and permanent disciplined revolutionary peasant force. The little force they could get was from the little nobles they could gather, and the peasants, in whom while having zeal lacked discipline, and so with the death of Wat Tyler and John Ball, who provided a peasant Great Leadership to them, scattered, splintered and were defeated.
- While the Reformation of Luther, Calvin, Muenzer and Henry VIII had printing presses to quickly and easily copy their translations of the Bible, Wycliffe and Ball did not, and so had to rely on allied scribes (there were some but only a few for Wycliffe and very few for Ball, as the scribes were mostly adamant supporters of the old order and only wanted moderate change if they did want change). This meant a lot of the literate and active followers of Wycliffe or Ball, the ‘poor Priests’, had to go out and actually publicly preach from either the Bible or from their own memory, to get new followers with patchy knowledge of their ideology, which was both slow, led to poor quality recruits to the revolutionary cause, and left them susceptible for arrest and murder.
However, the revolutionary spirit of the Lollards would serve as a light that lit the powder keg of the anger of the masses time and time again in almost all of these rebellions.
The Hundred Years War
Now, while only a few of the actual events of the Hundred Years’ War was important to this analysis, but the fact that it was ongoing, it’s gravity and it’s cost are.
The Hundred Years’ War was a war between England and France which lasted a little over a hundred years, in which the English nobility lost their continental possessions excluding Calais. While the eventual defeat of the English nobility in the mid 1400s would be a massive shake to English feudalism, and would intensify the next revolts that would be talked about, right now that is not the main consequence.
The main consequence was the intensification of the feudal exploitation and conscription of peasants to the wars. In terms of the principal intensification of the exploitation, since the cost of the war was so high (the fortification of Brest and Calais, two cities which were not yet heavily affected by the main part of the fighting, cost £36,000 a year to maintain, while military expeditions could consume £50,000 in only six months), taxes were raised constantly (which, while officially ‘paid’ by the landlords, would be raised from the peasants, and so the peasantry bared the brunt of the cost).
Eventually, a poll tax (a uniform tax on all people) was imposed by the parliament just before the death of Edward III for all above 14 (with a deduction for married couples) of four pence (a lot of money for a peasant, but little for a noble). This was unpopular but it did raise money. However, two more poll taxes would be instituted, the second with sliding amounts for people of different class backgrounds, and the third a flat highly unpopular flat tax of twelve pence on all above 15 (without deductions for married couples). This third poll tax would be the spark that lit the masses’ anger, anger at all problems in society, the war, the failing feudal system, and a system that despite not treating all the same, taxed them the same and exploited the bottom at the highest level. The masses were ready to make history.
II. A SINGLE SPARK CAN LIGHT A PRARIRE FIRE
The Wat Tyler Revolt would begin after the imposition of the third Poll Tax. MP and Archdeacon John Bampton came to the town of Brentwood in Essex, a place in the region where John Ball had previously preached. He called for representatives from Brentwood, Corringham, Fobbing and Stanford-le-Hope to come to Brentwood in order to explain why the villages hadn’t paid enough in taxes. However, instead of weak and unarmed peasant deputies, they were faced by a group armed with old bows and weapons.
Thomas Baker, a small landlord who took a position similar to the “enlightened gentry” of the Liberated Zone in China during the New Democratic Revolution (that of support for the revolution despite their reactionary class background), declared that his village had paid the tax, despite the dodging, and would not pay anymore. Bampton would attempt to arrest Baker for his refusal to extract more, and would then be attacked by the peasant rebels. He would flee and survive, but many Brentwood townsfolk who collaborated with him were executed by the rebels. Judge Bealkap, the Chief of Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, would begin to attempt to gather a reactionary counter-revolutionary army in Essex. However, Essex would give little soldiers to the counter-revolution. In fact, Essex would be covered in rebellions by the peasantry, which were mostly well organized by the radical Lollard preachers, the radical “Poor Priests” (while Wycliffe himself was not a supporter, many Lollards, lead by John Ball, would be, in fact John Ball would appear to arise a member of the peasant revolutionaries’ ‘Great Leadership’ around then).
Meanwhile in Kent, the home of Wat Tyler, who would emerge as the leader of the revolt, people hearing of the Essex revolts through the Lollard preachers would help rise up against the Landlord class. While the specific reason why peasants personally joined the rebellion was different from in Essex (in Kent one of the main reasons why people would join the rebel armies was to free an imprisoned serf from imprisonment for daring to escape from almost slave-like conditions on his landlord’s farm), the fundamental reason that they felt like they could revolt was the same as in Essex. Feudalism was decaying and they knew, even if they couldn’t fully articulate this in the same way I am, that they could overthrow things and build a new world.
In Kent, at a mass gathering in Maidstone, Wat Tyler was elected one of the leaders of the peasant rebels, but he took a leading role and became the principal leader of the peasant rebels. Another man who had been mentioned as leader of the peasant rebels, a certain Jack Straw, may have been a pseudonym for Wat Tyler, and would suggest then that Wat Tyler had been a leader of the peasants since the beginning of the uprising in Kent.
We must take a bit of time to look Tyler and the others that make up the “Great Leadership” of this Peasant Revolt that have not been looked at yet in the article.
III. THE GREAT LEADERSHIP OF THE PEASANT REVOLT
As Chairman Gonzalo taught us “We believe that the revolution, our class generates leaders, a group of leaders. It has been like this in every revolution.” In the peasant uprising, the peasant class produced a small group of leaders who took the guiding role in the revolution. The most important of these groups were Wat Tyler, the previously mentioned John Ball, William Grindecobbe and Johanna Ferrour.
Wat Tyler was born sometime in 1341 in either Essex or Kent (the author of this article believes that since he was elected at Maidstone in Kent, he must have been most well known in Kent, and therefore must have been Kentish, though this is not confirmed). He was a roof tiler, a member of the proto-Proletarian lass born from the decaying corpse of feudalism, a small craftsman. He was inspired by the teachings of John Ball (another of the great leadership of the uprising, we have already talked about him, his group had freed him from imprisonment during the early days of the revolt). He was a fighter for the end of serfdom and the right of serfs to be freed from the relations of feudalism, wanting to be able to be employed by any employer they chose, and equality of all (under the King, the rebels had not broken fully with royalism yet).
William Grindecobbe (a miller) was the leader of the rebels in Hertfordshire, and a townsman of St Albans. He was a hero of the rebellion. He was eloquent and literate, which suggests he may have at one point been in the clergy, perhaps expelled for Lollard views, and perhaps revolted against papal taxation, the tax on the small priests and clergy for the Church’s benefit. He forced the King to relieve the abbot of St Albans Abbey of his royally given powers, and raised a part of the Abbey to the ground. He would be captured with John Ball and executed in a show trial conducted by Henry le Despenser.
Johanna Ferrour was unique in the fact she was a woman, and she was one of the most efficient and brutal leaders of the peasant revolt. In fact, she was responsible for ordering the execution of High Treasurer Sir Robert Hales and the burning of the Savoy Palace, the grandest palace of John of Gaunt, the King’s regent. Women were very involved in the peasant revolt and the fury of women was unleashed against the patriarchal feudal society that had exploited them far enough. In fact the person who would execute a certain Cavendish who we will talk about later was a woman by the name of Katherine Gamen. To this day the patriarchal oppression of women has not ended, and we must remember Lenin’s call to “unleash the fury of women” to smash oppression. It has been done before, and it has been done again and this time we will create a new world for the working class, for working women, free from the shackles of patriarchy.
IV. THE REBEL ARMY COMES TO LONDON
From Kent and Essex, Wat Tyler and John Ball launch dual attack and enter into the general area of London. On the march, they would capture the Dowager Queen Lady Joan, and make fun of her, but for some reason not kill her, and let her go, so she could go back to London and fortify the Tower of London with her son and other nobles.
They would meet with representatives of the King at Blackheath, historically in Kent but now South London. The representatives tried in futility to give a ‘compromise’ they would break, but the peasant rebels would abandon this. The peasant rebels engaged the representatives with the negotiation but they would ultimately decide to march on London.
John Ball would give a famous sermon to the rebels where he would basically create an unwritten manifesto of the movement. He would famously ask “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?”, decrying the ‘unnatural’ feudal relations and calling for a ‘return’, really a new world, with supposed ‘equality’. This may sound foolish to us Marxists, as we are aware that this ‘return’ was really a revolutionary change and abandonment of the old world, but for the time, this new way of thinking, the thinking of peasant revolutionaries, the enlightened gentry, the foundations of Liberalism, was a revolution in thought. He would, however, also put into words the great mistake of the rebellion, that would be one of the key reasons for the defeat of the rebels.
That would be another slogan “With King Richard and the true commons of England.”, a wretched slogan that would lead to the doom of the rebellion. While they were able to do away with the idea of needing the Lords, they were unable to think of the King as anything but ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’. They were unable to break fully from the chains of the old superstructure, from the role the King who defended the system. Wat Tyler would face his end at the hand of the King, and their belief that they could free the King from his advisors and make him the leader of a ‘free’ new England was proven untrue. The royals would be enemies of progress, and would only allow it through getting a large slice of the pie of capitalist profits. There will be no exploitation under Capitalism, therefore the royals are completely and totally opposed to socialism and revolution today, and they are our enemies, along with the rest of the old state and old society.
After the failure of the negotiations, the peasants would storm London, due to the lack of soldiers and commanders in the area (most had been sent to Ireland fighting the centuries long guerrilla war against British colonialism, France fighting the Hundred Years War, or were on the border with Scotland in case of Scottish invasion).
The King decided to use the desire of the rebels to preserve the monarchy to lay a trap for Wat Tyler. However, due to his fear, he refused to step onto rebel controlled land, meaning that the rebels refused to negotiate, and he had to go home.
The rebels then decided to enter London, where they were met by the people of London. The rebels had a kill list and they set about destroying the old society to construct a new one. They would start this process by destroying the headquarters of the old institutions: they destroyed the Clerkenwell Prior, the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller in England, they burned the Temple (the place with all the legal records) to the ground, and then they burned the Savoy Palace (the rebels would actually not loot very much from the luxurious ), the home of John of Gaunt, and killed those Lords hiding within it.
However, due to the fact that organization within the movement was still quite loose, opportunist elements were able to use the movement to their advantage, one example of this being the attacks on Flemish immigrants and people with Flemish-sounding accents (including one of the King’s advisors, a Richard Lyons) in London, killed by the heads of the large weaving guilds for fear of competition, which was camouflaged by the violence. In revolution, there will always be opportunist elements that seek to use it to their advantages. In the revolution of our class, the proletariat, we must firmly struggle against such counter-revolutionary forces, and smash them through the power of two line struggle and revolutionary violence.
Meanwhile, the King would leave the Tower (which would be taken by the rebels when he came to negotiate, executing Archbishop Sudbury, Robert Hales, William Appleton the physician of John of Gaunt, John Legge a military leader, almost executed the (future) King Henry IV before being convinced not too by a royal guard, and then mocking Richard’s mother (again) and his sister) and came to Mile End, where he would ‘agree’ to an end of serfdom and for allowing some more autonomy to villages to self-rule, however promising to ‘deliver justice’ to the hated officials himself.
Richard would go to the Great Wardrobe in Blackfriars, appointing a new Chancellor and plotting against the rebellion. Most Essex rebels went home satisfied, convinced they had created a new world, but the radical Kentish rebels of Wat Tyler would remain, executing Gauntists, foreigners and those who worked within the legal system. Meanwhile, the King and his advisors would begin the hatching of a counter-revolution.
V. THE DEATH OF WAT TYLER
The Royal Government asked to meet Wat Tyler and his group outside London, in Smithfield (now in London). He also had 200 men hidden behind a priory, St. Bartholomew's Priory, in order to wage a cowardly attack in case he needed too.
Wat Tyler came expecting friendship and peace. Richard asked him why he had not gone home yet. Tyler asked for another charter, and then some refreshment. After Tyler had finished, he attempted to leave, when he was attacked by some royal servants. He fought back, surprised by the royalists when trying to negotiate a peace. William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of the City of London, then attacked Tyler, and then his squire Ralph Standish joined. Wat Tyler would then die, betrayed by those who he thought were there to negotiate.
The rebels would stand ready to fire arrows down on the royal delegation, but Richard would lead them to Clerkenwell to save his skin. Wat Tyler would be beheaded, and the London militia would defeat the Kentish-Londoner Army and drive them out.
The end of the rebellion was near.
VI. JOHN WRAWE, EVENTS IN EAST ANGLIA AND A BETRAYAL OF THE REVOLUTION
John Wrawe was the Elena Iparraguire of the movement. He was a Lollard chaplain from Northern Essex, who would become a foremost military leader of the rebels, in fact he was the man who would march into my Suffolk and raise the Uprising there. He would march from then, gathering an Army as large as the Army that would be lead by Wat Tyler in Kent and London. He would march to Cavendish and Bury St. Edmunds from where he would execute a hated Prior of the Bury St. Edmunds. He would then lead two of his detachments to capture Thetford in Norfolk and Lakenheath in Northwest Suffolk (where a hated Sir John Cavendish from Cavendish, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge). He would then lead rebellions in Cambridgeshire, capturing Cambridge. Then he marched north from Cambridge toward Ely, where the gaol was opened and the local Justice of the Peace executed.
Then Henry Le Despenser, this Bishop of Norfolk, came to Suffolk with exiled Earl of Suffolk, William de Ufford. In Mildenhall, many of the rebels were put to death by his cruel hand, and the revolt in East Anglia ccame to a close.
When the revolt was crushed, he turned traitor to seek pardon and testified against his Comrades, but was executed anyways. It goes to show that betraying revolution will only lead to the betrayer getting betrayed by the Old State of whom they betrayed the revolution to.
VII. GENERAL SUPRESSION OF THE REBELLION
With the death of Tyler, the movement was demoralised. In East Anglia, a centre of the revolt, the movement was soon crushed. The army of the peasants of Kent dissolved with the death of Wat Tyler and Ball’s capture. The Abbot of St Albans’ Monastery lead the capture of Grindecobbe and Ball, both are executed in the sham trial. In that sham trial, John Wrawe turns traitor and gives evidence against his Comrades — however he was still executed.
When Richard II toured Essex, he was approached by a party of former rebels, asking when the reforms he had promised earlier, the ones which they had went home for. He would then openly tells ex-rebels that he is going to make things worse saying “rustics you were and rustics you are still. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher”. The military would suppress entire rebel army, broken and leadership.
Johanna Ferrour seems to have survived somehow, possibly in hiding, disappears off record. Henry le Despenser, the Bishop of Norwich, would execute many after the Battle of North Walsham, which he would win, with the suppression of the Lollard movement intensifying. The victories were short and quickly lost; the dream ended before it even begun.
VIII. WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THIS?
Now, we must analyse what we can learn from these experiences. As Karl Marx said of philosophers, they “have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.” This can also be applied to history. Bourgeoise historians try to explain the past, proletarian historians seek to understand what we can learn from it, so we can change the world with those lessons.
What can we learn now? Well, we must not trust the reactionary ruling class to give us concessions or negotiate with us. Richard II killed Wat Tyler at the negotiations, and refused to carry out the concessions he promised the peasant rebels, in fact promising them only that he would make sure things would get worse. The ruling class will not negotiate unless put onto a heavy backfoot, and they will always plot to retake power, as handing power to the oppressed and exploited masses will lead to the liquidation of the power of exploiter, and of their reactionary class.
We must form a united front of the revolutionary masses, of all whose material interests lie the abolition of the old society and the creation of a new society, of the revolutionary forces in society. The peasant revolution united the peasant class, the early proletariat and peasantry, and the small progressive landowners or the “enlightened gentry”, and that unity brought the feudal society in England to its knees for a period.
We must have a united revolutionary army and not liquidate the armed struggle. The liquidation of the Essex rebel army after the false negotiations of Richard II provided the Royal Army the ability to take back the city, as the rebel forces lacked the power to resist. This was because the different rebel armies were not united around a revolutionary organisation, and therefore the armies could fall to liquidationism and opportunist leadership.
We must build a united revolutionary army around a vanguard party through concentric construction of the “three magic weapons”, as taught to us by the great teachers, Chairman Mao (who taught us of the “three magic weapons”) and Chairman Gonzalo (who taught us of concentric construction). With the correct theory and practice, we can avoid liquidationist tendencies and purge revisionism from the revolutionary army.
We must study history in order to learn lessons to bring about a revolutionary future.
2. THE JACK CADE REVOLT
I. CHANGES IN CONDITIONS CREATE A NEW REBELLION
INTRODUCTION
69 years later, new events had occurs that sprung from and had caused changes within the conditions of feudal English society since the last Peasant Revolt. These were the intensification of and then the defeat of English in the Thirty Years War, the start of the War of the Roses and increasing corruption within the royal institutions. This would reach it’s peak under William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk, whose death and the fears of the Kentish people of retribution for it lead to the rebellion’s occurrence. This came from the collapse of the feudal system as the class contradictions between the different classes under feudalism intensified and lead to the degradation of the power of the then ruling aristocratic class.
ECONOMIC FAILURE AND CORRUPTION AS A RESULT OF THAT
Economically, England was facing collapse at this time. The contradictions and struggles between the peasantry and nobility, nobility and bourgeoise, and other class contradictions had only further intensified as the death knells of feudalism were heard all throughout the country. This is shown by the Great Slump from 1430–1470, which saw the complete destruction of the whole Western European feudal economy, in all countries in Western Europe but especially in England.
This was intensified by the two other factors that I will talk about, the Hundred Years’ Wars’ intensification and the defeat of the English in it, and the War of the Roses, which saw the loss of and/or destruction of much of the land (which was the means of production of which the feudal establishment and the monarchy made the peasants to farm for them to generate wealth for the nobility).
As the feudal society fell apart, landlord class opportunists would take the opportunity to rob the feudal state. In this regard, two prolific robbers would be affiliated with the Lancastrians, William de la Pole and Lord High Treasurer James Fiennes, 1st Baron Saye and Sele, who would both use their equally prolific role in getting the Lancastrians to keep there power, to rob the state and gain more power within the country. They were not alone, however!
In general, the country faced high amounts of corruption, as state power weakened and waned in the face of defeats abroad and civil war at home, and the ability of the feudal state to fight back against the corruption became far harder than previously. This is expected, corruption is a natural part of class society, and it is intensified both openly and behind closed doors as the contradictions inherent in class society intensify.
This corruption would turn English society into a powder keg ready to explode at any moment. And as Chairman Mao said “A single spark can light a prairie fire.”
THE INTENSIFICATION AND THEN THE DEFEAT OF THE ENGLISH IN THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
By 1450, the Hundred Years’ War was coming to an end, ending up as a disastrous defeat for the English nobility. While there were three more years of the final campaign, until the final defeat of the English army in the fall of Bordeaux, the English forces had basically been defeated, and apart from the Pale of Calais and (until 1453) patches of Aquitaine, the English crown and nobility had been completely driven from France.
This occurred principally because of internal contradictions between the different factions of the English nobility as one divided into two (which would be expressed as the War of the Roses, which we shall discuss later), and secondarily because of the intensification of the struggle between the different classes in English society-principally between the landlord class and the bourgeois class, but secondarily between the landlord class and the peasant class and the bourgeois class and the proletarian class.
(In a smaller and more local consequence of the Hundred Years’ War, Norman pirates would also begin French sponsored raids of the coastal areas of Kent and Suffolk, which would aggravate the specific anger of the Kentish peasants that would make up the vanguard of the rebels during this revolt, along with some rebels from other counties such as the also affected county of Sussex and the rural areas of the Inner London. Kent at this time was a hotbed of rage against the system, though this would decline and the next to rebellions that will be talked about after we finish speaking of the Jack Cade Rebellion will be based outside of Kent, though still based in the South East, though in the close country of Sussex and the futher away county of Norfolk instead.)
This led to a massive change, as the English nobility lost their lands and peasants in France. This basically halved or destroyed many English and pro-English France based nobles, as they had gained much land and resources from the France, whose people and soil they had exploited for centuries. This led to a massive shake in the power of the landlord class, which allowed for intensified struggle against the reactionary landlord class to be struggled against by the revolutionary classes of that time.
THE WAR OF THE ROSES
Now, we see proof of the Maoist principle that “one divides into two”. We see the split of the unified Plantagenet Dynasty, which represented the united feudal landlord class, because of the intensified class struggles and struggle between the factions of the feudal nobility, into two, those being the House of Lancaster and the House of York.
Now, these two represented different factions of the feudal aristocracy. The actual difference between the two factions in the war is not necessary for the article, but what is necessary to know, is that the War of the Roses helped weakened the power of the ruling class. The ruling class had divided themselves and were killing each other in the fields of England, which also destroyed the farms and the lives of the peasantry, who were forced to die for a meaningless civil war. This led to the weakening of the power of the ruling class, as the land and labourers who created value from the transformation of nature, the land, had been destroyed or killed, and so a peasant revolt would have to face a divided and weakened nobility
It also destroyed the false class consciousness amongst the peasants and the proletariat that had been an enemy in the ideological liberation of the proletariat. The people watched as the royalty and nobility, supposedly ‘necessary’ to the ‘function of society’, tore themselves apart over meaningless differences, and led to them being killed for basically no reason in their eyes, over what cousin they supported, and lead to the death of many peasants. This was intensified by the promotion of radicalised Lollard propaganda by the remnant of that movement.
II. THE REBELLION BEGINS
So, in a interfactional feudal struggle between different Lancastrian factions whose specifics are irrelevant to this article, William de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk, after his very fast and very quiet downfall, is arrested at sea by anti-Suffolkist forces, killed and thrown overboard. The body then washes up upon the shores of Kent.
This is the spark that sets off the fear and anger of the masses of Kentish peasants. They fear that they will be blamed for this death. Terrifying rumours of the King planning to turn all of Kent into a royal forest in revenge abound because of the death of the Duke of Suffolk. The peasants decide that they must take a stand in order to defend themselves from aggression from the royalty.
Five thousand peasants, led by the eponymous Jack Cade, who has been described as being either from Surrey, Sussex or from Ireland (somehow), would march to London in an initially non-violent manner, and submit a petition, The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent (a modernized version of the text itself for ease of reading). This would serve as a manifesto for the peasant rebels (as well as helping them unite with progressive members of other classes and class traitors from the reactionary classes) and would call for the return of the Duke of York, the removal of Lancastrian members of government (denouncing Lord Saye and Sele and the members of government: Crowmer and his son, Isley, St Leger and Est for extortion and calling for their removal in the full text), the acknowledgment that the people of Kent had been innocent of any wrongdoing in the death of the Duke of Suffolk, and while not necessarily calling for the overthrow of the Lancastrian Dynasty, providing the groundwork of the future alliance that Jack Cade (who would then adopt the alias “Mortimer” after a dead relative of York) would have with the House of York.
The King would refuse to acknowledge anything except that the peasants of Kent were not responsible for the death of the Duke of Suffolk. However, this was not enough and the peasant armed themselves outside London in Kent, and prepared for war against the crown, now fully for the Yorkist dynasty, and the liberation of the peasantry they believed would have came from a Yorkist ascension to power. The peasants of Kent prepared for war once again.
III. A MARCH TO LONDON, ONCE AGAIN
The rebels, mostly peasants, but some progressive landowners and members of the emerging bourgeoise and proletarian classes were also in the army, as well as some soldiers and sailors that were returning home from the near conclusion of the Hundred Years’ War, gathered in Blackheath, then Kent, now London, where the rebels of Wat Tyler had also gathered for a time, and began to march orderly through Kent, re-establishing order under a new peasant government wherever they marched.
They were under the leadership of Jack Cade, who is a leader who while not terrible, he was a pretty good military commander and an efficient organizer who was able to score some impressive victories especially considering his army was mostly untrained peasants, made serious mistakes that lead to the peasants failing to achieve victory, which I will talk about once we get to the peasants in London.
The King would send a detachment of his own Royal Contingent lead by his allies, the Humphrey Cousins, who would be tricked into an ambush at Sevenoaks on the 18th of June, where two of the three would meet there end (Jack Cade would then steal the weaponary and armour of the Sir Humphrey, in something while not necessary to the article, is nice to know).
The rebels would then march and establish order, selectively exterminating members of the former ruling class hated and involved with repression and terrorization of the people. They executed the unpopular Bishop of Salisbury, the personal confessor of the King (a strong position in the feudal government which guaranteed him quite a lot of de jure and de facto power in England). This shocked the King who fled and cowered in Warwickshire to hide from the wrath of the people.
The rebels then entered Southwark, taking control of the White Hart Inn, which would become there base. They would then launch there actual entry into London.
IV. A REBEL ARMY COMES TO LONDON ONCE AGAIN
Jack Cade and his followers would cross the London Bridge into the City of London, and then symbolically claim to have restored the country to the rule of the “legitimate” Mortimers, the Duke of York, on July 3rd.
Jack Cade’s army would initially hold onto their great discipline that they had shown in their campaign in Kent, which would make the people of London at least at this time, sympathetic to the rebels. He would also set up a series of Tribunals, seeking out those accused of corruption. He would try and execute Lord Baron James Fienness of Saye and Sele, at Cheapside, and his son in law, William Crowmer (not to be confused with his dad William Cromer who was also hated and being hunted down). They were paraded around London, and then had their heads staked to pikes on London Bridge, made to touch each other like they were kissing.
Afterwards, Jack Cade’s army, including Jack Cade himself, would isolate themselves from the masses by abandoning their organisation and order that they previously had shown, and drunkenly loot London, which would turn the people of London from friends to foes.
They then would return to Southwark for the night, during the night of the 7th of July, and the London townsfolk would close the Bridge to prevent their return.
The people of London, thoroughly angered by the conduct of Jack Cade’s Army, would then cross the river and defeat the rebel army, forcing them to abandon Southwark.
V. THE DEFEAT OF JOHN CADE AND HIS MOVEMENT
John Kemp, Lord Chancellor, would offer to issue pardons for John Cade and his followers in exchange for the liquidation of the armed rebellion of John Cade. This offer would then be rescinded by the King, on the legal basis of the fact that Lord Chancellor John Kemp had not went through parliament, but in truth because the King saw there was no need to negotiate with a defeated army, the only thing he needed to do was to crush it. He promised 1000 marks for Jack Cade, dead or alive.
Meanwhile, Cade himself would hide in a garden in Lewes’ but would be found and would enter a skirmish with the army. His followers were killed, surrendering or scattered, and he himself would be fatally wounded and capture, dying on the journey back to London to be tried. Not content with this, the royal government would order his dead body to be mock tried, beheaded at Newgate, dragged through the streets of London, quartered, and sent to areas of Kent with high support for rebellion.
The royal governemnt would then order massive repression in the areas where support for the rebellion were strongest in Kent, Blackheath, Canterbury and the coastal areas of Faversham and the Isle of Sheppey, and generally clense Kent of all “subversive elements”. Kentish rebellion had been permanently crushed by this and no widespread large-scale rebellion would emerge from Kent again till the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Capitalism.
Copycat rebels and revolts that would happen at similar times would occur outside Kent however, including the Merfold rebellion in Sussex, the focus of our next section, and while these rebellions would not bring down the House of Lancaster, they would lead to the weakening of it and the defeat of Lancaster by York. The King would also relent in having the Duke of York sent home and he would take many of his reform demands from the Blackheath Complaint.
But the Peasant Rebellion had ended at starting point, as the peasant rebellion had made several mistakes we can learn from.
VI. WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THIS ONE?
The primary lesson we can learn from this is to keep the army disciplined and in service to the people. We can see this both in the successes and the defeats of the army of Jack Cade. When Jack Cade was winning, his army was well disciplined and well liked by the peasantry. However, once Jack Cade and his army began looting and engaging in anti-people activities, the people turned against him and he was destroyed. Chairman Mao recognized that the people would turn against an army that isolated itself from the masses and engaged in anti-people behaviour and so devised the Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Rules of Attention in order to teach the Chinese Red Army/People’s Liberation Army to be a new army, an army that would not steal or loot, but be a force of the transformation of the old society to the new, the smashers of the old state and the creators of a new. We must apply the Three Rules of Discipline and the Eight Rules of Attention to both our organizing, and when we can organize a proper People’s Army fighting in a People’s War, especially in that regard.
Another thing that was proved was to distrust alliances with the ruling class. The alliance with the Yorkists was a progressive temporary alliance a la the Second United Front between the Communist Party and with the Guomindang, but the Yorkists refused to give any proper military support to the Rebels, only providing symbolic support and popular legitamacy. This also links to the continued belief within the peasantry that the nobility, even if both factions within it were not great, still could be used to improve the lives of the peasantry. To “push things left” to borrow a term used by the modern revisionists. This is false, in this case the only thing the York-Cade Alliance could produce was temporary benefits, and in the modern day, Labour and the Democrats, the modern Yorkists, cannot even provide that. To align with them is pointless. In fact, in the modern day, we should instead struggle against them.
These are lessons we can learn from the defeat of the revolt of Jack Cade.
3. MERFOLD REBELLION
I. INTRODUCTION
The Merfold Rebellion represented the ideological summit in the history of peasant revolts in Britain, which would not be surpassed until the proto-Liberal Levelers and the proto-Communist Diggers. Spurned on by the same factors that led to the other revolts and occurring only a year after the rebellion by Jack Cade, the Merfolds would call for the complete destruction of the monarchy, the nobility, clergy and rule by the common people, the broad masses of revolutionary progressive bourgeoise, proletarians and peasants. They had emerged from the most radical fringe of the Lollard movement, which called for the complete liquidation of the nobility and the clergy.
I. THE UPRISING BEGINS
On the 26th July 1450, two weeks after the death of John Cade, two small scale victualler (someone who supplies food and drink to ships) brother from Salehurst went to a public market in East Sussex and said that the King was a “natural fool” who should be deposed.
The next month, rebels under the leadership of William Howell of Sutton led men throughout West Sussex to begin revolt against the feudal class system, after Saint Batholemew’s Day.
Then in October, William Merfold in an alehouse led the people to rise and declared the manifesto of the movement. They declared “wolde leve no gentilman alive but such as thyme list to have”, they seeked the death of all of the upper nobility, and rule by the people of the land.
Sussex rose in rebellion, some because they were class concious and others because they wanted to engage in crime. Some were more advanced than others, the rebels of the Hastings declared they wanted the King dead and chastised the capitulatory Kentish rebels of the Jack Cade Rebellion.
A disorganized yet popular revolt had swept Sussex. But this disorganization would be the doom of the rebellion.
II. THE DEFEAT
During Easter of week of Spring 1451, all throughout East Sussex, the people (most of the rebels were skilled craft workers, the proto-bourgeoise class, with the support of the peasantry which makes this an attempt of bourgeoise rebellion) gathered in revolt and demanded King Henry be deposed, all lords and higher clergy be executed, and that 12 of their rule the country.
King Henry, obviously, did not comply. He attacked them, arrest rebels, killed four Sussex men through execution, and the rebellion disapaited. The brothers, leaders and Lollard clergymen who created the rebellion were executed and the spontaneous uprising quickly dispersed. This was the last rebellion on the coast of English Channel, and the highest point of the struggle against feudalism.
III. WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THIS?
Now, what can we learn from this? Well, this rebellion actually gives us quite profound lessons to learn from. In essence, it proves the Maoist theory that “the masses are the real heroes”. The masses developed there own understanding independently that the feudal system needed to be destroyed and at least somewhat organized themselves to bring that about, reaching an ideological, political and organizational summit in the organization of the broad masses in rebellion against feudalism that would not be surpassed for centuries in all of England until the Civil War.
However, it also shows the danger of spontaneous rebellion and the importance of great leadership. The rebellion, though it had an aspect of organisation, was mostly spontaneous, and could not coalesce around a great leadership, even though candidates for a great leadership of this potential revolution were in abundance. If the rebels were organized around a revolutionary vanguard organisation like the future French bourgeoise revolutionaries under the Montagne during the French Revolution and the English bourgeoise revolutionaries under the Parliamentarian group in the English Civil War, then perhaps they could have turned Sussex into a base area of the revolution and expanded from there to the rest of England, creating the first fully bourgeoise democratic state in England, but the conditions were not right for that, nor was the movement matured enough to develop the revolutionary situation into actual revolution.
This is what we can learn from the Merfold Rebellion.
4. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, what are the lessons we have learned from the peasant revolts?
In short, it is that that the masses are the main drivers of history and are able to produce the path to victory under the leadership of the vanguard party through the mass line, that we cannot trust the ruling class, the imperialist bourgeoise class to grant us concessions or help us, that we must have united, revolutionary, well organized, well disciplined, revolutionary People’s Army following the correct line of Protracted People’s War and Unified People’s War, that we must form a United Front of the broad revolutionary masses and that we must oppose liquidationist and counter-revolutionary tendencies towards the armed struggle. As revolutionaries, we should be well disciplined fighters for the liberation of our class as well. The peasant rebellions when well disciplined achieved the heights of struggle.
If we correctly apply the lessons we have gained from the revolutionary study of history and the lessons of the study of revolutionary theory after the study of the real conditions of the revolutionary movement and it’s struggle against the old state machinery of the oppressive bourgeoise state, then we will achieve victory in our revolutionary practice.
Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!
Long Live People’s War!
People’s War until Communism!
