Knights' Revolt

7 Key excerpts on "Knights' Revolt"

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  The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England

  • Claire Valente(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 Why Study Revolt? My God! this is a strange and fickle land, which has exiled, slain, destroyed, and ruined so many kings, so many rulers, so many great men, and which never ceases to be riven... by dissensions and strife and internecine hatreds. N'ont pas Anglois souvent leurs rois trays? Certes ouyl, tous en ont congnoissance. (Have not the English often betrayed their kings? Of course, we all know that). 1 Medieval Englishmen were treacherous, rebellious, and killed their kings, according to the fourteenth-century English king, Richard II, and a host of fifteenth-century French observers. This opinion, though biased, was not without factual basis. In the period from 1215 to 1415, five out of eight kings fought wars with their subjects; four out of eight were captured and/or deposed, and two were killed. Two others escaped open warfare but encountered vigorous resistance or conspiracy. These dramatic episodes-the imposition of Magna Carta on King John, the murder of Edward II, the 'abdication' of Richard II-have captured the imagination of professional historians, political theorists, poets, dramatists, and artists, as well as the general public, for centuries. Yet the forms which resistance to the king took in medieval England have not been directly examined. This is surprising, given the widespread interest in medieval popular rebellion in the 1970s/, 2 and the revival in the last ten years of the study of violence in medieval society. Recent studies have for the most part focused on violence among the nobility or between kingdoms, with little if any attention to the use of violence against the king. 3 Such violence, however, was a repeated feature of political relations between medieval nobles and their kings, and not just in England. The use of violence reveals noble political ideas; changes in that use reflect developments in government, society, and political culture

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  The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt

  • Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Dirk Schoenaers, Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Dirk Schoenaers(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  That historiography is shaped by the historical context in which it is written does not necessarily mean that its arguments are wrong, even if we sometimes find them infelicitously phrased. We cannot help but see things from our own vantage, and different perspectives reveal different aspects of the past in different lights. But it is worth unpacking those influences to understand how they have worked in relation with other intellectual currents to create particular views of the historical past, which we now build upon, modify, or utterly eschew. For the study of medieval revolt, it is notable that although the past two centuries have seen major shifts in method and interpretation, some central problems have remained surprisingly constant. The relationship between revolt and the state (however conceptualised), attention to social dynamics and non-elite groups (even if sometimes unfavourable), and a profound concern for language, sources, and source criticism are threads that have run through the scholarship since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

  The state and the perimeters of ‘revolt’

  Studies of medieval revolt have almost invariably organised themselves around the concept of the state as the arena within which revolts take place and take on meaning. For nineteenth-century historians, who saw medieval uprisings as disruptive eruptions and deviations from normal politics, revolts were directed against the state by constituencies outside it who opposed its power. Twentieth-century historians, too, understood revolt as an expression of opposition to the state, especially to the growth of royal governments. Mollat and Wolff, for example, argued that fourteenth-century revolts erupted in protest against ‘the invasion of society by the State’, particularly in terms of tax demands.13 Even in 2006, the rise of the late medieval state was portrayed as something that rebels organised themselves to oppose as an encroachment on ‘liberty’, understood in the modern sense as freedom from hierarchic control.14

  As should already be clear, most of the essays in this volume envisage the state in a different and more multi-dimensional way than was the case for earlier historians, and this reassessment of the state necessarily entails the reconceptualisation of late medieval revolt. Nevertheless, the relationship between uprisings and their institutional political context remains central in current writing. Indeed, the political ramifications of revolt are perhaps more important to current historiography than they have ever been before. New historiography on late medieval politics has revised the view that the remarkable growth of government in the later Middle Ages was an inherently antagonistic process imposed upon an unwilling population, which was thus primed for rebellion. Historians have increasingly shown that ‘the rise of the state’ was a dialogic process in which the governed had considerable agency, often clamouring for more government rather than less. People employed the infrastructure and even the ideology of late medieval authorities to their own ends, not just accidentally benefiting from the expansion of government but actively abetting and encouraging it.15

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  A Medieval Life

  Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague

  • Judith M. Bennett, Ruth Mazo Karras(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Jacquerie of 1358 (so called because many peasant men in France were named Jacques). In England, the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 severely frightened the landowning elite, and Jack Cade’s Rebellion in 1450 did much the same. In Germany, peasants sought, in the Peasants’ War of 1524–1525, to ease some of their social and economic difficulties. In all these cases, peasants were cruelly crushed by the forces of the feudal elite. Yet they often won in the long haul, for many of their demands were eventually met, albeit slowly. For example, the English peasants of 1381 sought, among other things, the abolition of serfdom. To this end, rebels burned buildings, murdered several people (including the Archbishop of Canterbury), and marched on London. There, they met on two occasions with the fourteen-year-old Richard II. The rebels revered the king and trusted him; their anger was aimed at the lords and ladies of their own manors—that is, at those who demanded their labor services, collected their rents, and gave, the rebels thought, bad advice to a good king. When the peasant leader Wat Tyler was slain in the second meeting and Richard II asked the crowds to disperse, the rebels left. From that point on, their revolt was doomed; they were hunted down, imprisoned, and hanged. Serfdom was not abolished. But within a hundred years, it had almost withered away in England—thanks in part to peasant resistance, but thanks also to new economic circumstances that changed the ways in which lords and ladies tried to profit from their manors. The rebels of 1381 lost, but their descendants eventually won.

  For the people of Brigstock in the early fourteenth century, tensions over seignorial demands were less intense than elsewhere, if only because seignorial demands were relatively mild. Indeed, in their suit against the abbey, the tenants of Halesowen sought to be treated as privileged villeins of the ancient demesne, the status that Cecilia and others in Brigstock already enjoyed. On a scale that extended from the most oppressed of medieval serfs to those peasants least restricted by manorialism, Cecilia and the other tenants of Brigstock were toward the least restricted end. Yet this does not mean that Cecilia was free of seignorial demands and servile obligations; it means that she lived under a muted form of manorialism. Moreover, manorialism was just one aspect of Cecilia’s subservient place. Like all medieval peasants, Cecilia lived under the ever-present shadow of superior powers, of which the power of the lord or lady of Brigstock was but one.

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  The Life & Legend of a Rebel Leader: Wat Tyler

  • Stephen Basdeo(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword History

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Great Revolt

  A great and unexpected calamity not experienced by previous ages. Thomas Walsingham

  They rose and came towards London, to the number of sixty thousand; and they had a captain called Walter Tyler, and with him in company was Jack Straw and John Ball; these three were chief sovereign captains, but the head of all was Walter Tyler; he was indeed a tiler of houses, a man ungracious to his betters.

  Jean Froissart

  Most of what historians know about the Great Revolt of 1381 comes from chronicles written by men such as Thomas Walsingham, Jean Froissart, Henry Knighton, and an anonymously written source entitled Anonimalle Chronicle . None of them are overly sympathetic towards the rebels. The revolt is described by Walsingham as ‘a great and unexpected calamity not experienced by previous ages’.1 There had of course been rebellions in England before this date. In the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest in 1066, for instance, there had been groups of people particularly in the north of England who had risen up in order to overthrow the Norman oppressors. The so-called Peasants’ Revolt, however, was different. It was not the discontented murmurings of disorganised peasants. They had leaders, they were well-organised and armed. Indeed, it was not simply a peasants’ revolt so much as a people’s revolt. The rebels were drawn from a range of social classes.

  Although Walsingham says that it was ‘a great and unexpected calamity’, the seeds of the rebellion were being sown earlier in the century. One of the long-term factors contributing to the outbreak of the Great Revolt was disease. The Black Death had ravaged Europe between 1348 and 1353. It was a nasty disease with a mortality rate of fifty per cent, in which the victim suffered swellings, known as buboes, on the neck, thighs, groins, and in the armpits, along with high fevers, until the poor patient died after a week. A more severe variant of the plague, known as pneumonic plague, attacked the lungs, with ninety per cent of patients dying within three days. Contemporaries believed that the plague was a punishment from God. Other people assumed that it was caused by bad air. Modern historians and scientists have surmised that it was a form of Yersinia pestis

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  Religion, Politics and Social Protest

  Three Studies on Early Modern Germany

  • Peter Blickle, Hans-Christoph Rublack, Winfried Schulze, Kaspar von Greyerz(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Pennington’s criticism also suggests that the different frequency and the chronology of the revolts in the various European countries deserve further investigation. It might be possible to establish a connection between the frequency of peasant revolts and the level of social and political development of the territories in which they occurred.

  A brief look at the chronological sequence of peasant revolts in western Europe makes it clear that in France and England the revolts came in relatively clearly defined cycles. In the case of France E. Le Roy Ladurie, in agreement with other historians, considers the period from 1548 (Pitauds’ Uprising against the Gabelle in Guyenne) to 1675 (papier timbré uprising in Brittany)40 to be a cycle of classical peasant revolts. Within this cycle, 1548 can be seen as the ‘mother revolt’. It has been described as an anti-fiscal uprising and is summed up in the rebels’ slogan ‘Long live the King, but without the Gabelle’.41 The year 1675 may well not have been the definitive end of this type of revolt. However, Le Roy Ladurie has sufficient evidence to support his thesis that between 1675 and 1685 the absolutist system was consolidated, namely that taxation, in real terms, decreased, that the confessional conflict was forcibly resolved (revocation of the Edict of Nantes) and that the intendants were more effectively able to stand up for the peasants.42

  In England a comparable cycle can be observed extending from the revolts in Cornwall of 1497 to the agrarian revolts between 1628 and 1632.43 Three distinct types of revolt occurred here: anti-fiscal revolts (characteristic of the early sixteenth century), revolts against the Reformation (parallel to the breakthrough of the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries around the middle of the century) and anti-seigneurial revolts, such as occurred in 1549, 1607 and 1628-32. These revolts were obviously reactions to the three fundamental processes of modernisation – the extension of fiscal policy, the Reformation and the ‘agrarian revolution’, that is the commercialisation of agrarian modes of production by, for example, the establishment of enclosures and moorland drainage44

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  Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns

  • Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, Douglas Aiton(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  63 Complaints must have reached the king’s commissioners about their 60 CPR 1408–13, p. 63, 1408.x.8. 61 Rodney Hilton, ‘Resistance to Taxation and to Other State Impositions in Medieval England’, in Gene `se de l’état moderne: préle `vement et redistribution. Actes du colloque de Fontevraud, 1984, ed. J.-Ph.Genet and M. Le Mene ´ (Paris, 1987), pp. 176–7, concludes with some surprise that social classes ‘not involved in negotiations with king, crown or state did not indeed frequently offer violent resistance against tax collection’ and attributes the absence to ‘the embryo state – the monarchy embedded in its feudal- military environment’. Why then did tax revolts flourish on the Continent, where monarchies and other states were less developed than the English Crown? Curiously, two years later, Hilton, ‘Re ´voltes rurales et re ´voltes urbaines’, concluded that ‘fiscality in France as in England appears to have been the origins of most conflicts [in towns]’ (p. 27). 62 King’s Bench, I, p. 27. 63 Ibid., III, pp. 114–15. 172 Tax revolts assessors and collectors of the fifteenth in townships in the East Riding in the late 1330s, and in 1340 an assessor was found guilty of percolation and of assessing communities ‘at his own discretion’, and not according to their wealth. But despite his corruption and unfairness, the records give no signs that collective violence ensued. 64 The only tax protest found on a larger scale in these records comes later. Yet to what extent it may have been popular in character is difficult to gauge. Given the description of the rebels’ weapons and armour, noblemen comprised at least part of its rank-and-file. If it were a popular revolt, however, it was not by townsmen; instead, it was one of the few examples seen in our sources where those of the surrounding countryside turned against a town.

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  A Companion to Crime and Deviance in the Middle Ages

  • Hannah Skoda(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Arc Humanities Press

    (Publisher)

  196 REVOLTS IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL MIDDLE EAST, 1200–1500* Nassima Neggaz In tHe mIddLe East, the late medieval period was characterized by an increasing number of richly documented revolts: Bedouin riots, slave revolts, 1 popular revolts of an economic nature led by commoners, 2 military revolts led by generals and local governors (amīrs), rebellions of a religious or sectarian nature, among others. Whether in late Abbasid Baghdad, or in the large Mamluk cities of Cairo and Damascus, these revolts and the ways in which they are reported in the historical chronicles demonstrate critical trends and patterns, making their examination in a comparative perspective all the more compelling. How were these revolts dealt with by the political and legal authorities of the time? Were rebels always condemned and criminalized, or were they * This chapter benefited from a FIAS fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (France). It has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 945408, and from the French State programme “Investissements d’avenir,” managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+). For transliteration, the chapter uses the IJMES Arabic system, except for terms that are common in English language. For dating, it uses both a Hijri/Islamic (AH) and Common Era (CE) calendar. 1 A good overview of slave revolts and Bedouin bandits is offered in Carl F. Petry, The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives from Cairo and Damascus under the Mamluks (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2016), 37–42, 47–51. See also Jean-Claude Garcin, “La révolte donnée à voir chez les populations civiles de l’Etat militaire Mamluk (XIIIe-XVe s.),” in Autour du Regard: Mélanges Gimaret, ed.

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