Make sure you vote in the Turtledoves for "To Delve and Spin"
As of writing this, we're third
Chapter 10 – Cruel Necessity
1382 – 1383
"Welcome the cross of Christ, welcome everlasting life!"
– Laurence Saunders
Roger Baker had once been ignored and scorned, but no more. He now held the whole town's gaze at him as he turned to lead them in pursuit of a vicious traitor - or so they believed. He acted with a zeal and force of character which suggested he had something to prove. Indeed, he did. As the second son of a baker, it was always his elder brother who was the apple of his father's eye when Roger entered this world in 1358. Try as he might Roger had never quite been able to earn any more attention than his exhausted father could spare after many long hours in his Chelmsford bakery, teaching his first son with the guild for when he would take over one day. That's why he would take to acting up, he craved that attention. He craved that connection, craved that appreciation, craved respect from his father. Things were different with his mother, she loved him very much and she showed it often. But she died when he was 7 and he'd found familial affection in short supply since.
At 14, he'd entered the Chelmsford baker's guild himself as a junior apprentice. His master - John - was a good man and trained the young Roger well in the basics of the craft. Roger was not paid for this work, though he looked up to John as if he were his true father. After almost six years he became a journeyman and began to receive a salary for his work. Not long after this his old master John would die suddenly. Roger was deeply affected by John's passing. Not only had he lost his only real father figure, without a master to supervise and unable to open his own establishment, Roger would soon find himself idle. As he began to fall through the cracks, his temperament worsened. His long-held sense of insufficiency, which had never truly gone, came back in full force. He became bitter, argumentative and resentful. One day in 1378 he got into an argument with his brother, his eternal source of grief - for he'd received what he believed he was due from their father. During the altercation, he'd struck his brother and sent him flying back into a wall. He was arrested and indicted for battery, for which he would spend a week in the pillory. He was ritually humiliated during that time and the guard assigned to watch over him had to prevent passersby from throwing larger rocks at him, though a blind eye was turned to smaller stones and other projectiles.
Having lost his trade and now his reputation, he became further embittered. After his father disowned him for attacking his brother, he then became a vagrant and roamed the villages and towns of south Essex looking for scraps. At the same time this was happening, tensions in England were beginning to stir. Through each town he passed, Roger would hear stories of a "poll tax" of some kind. He didn't quite understand what it all meant but he could tell people weren't happy about it. He would listen to and overhear the stories people told about the unfairness of it all and he took in their anger along with his own. Village after village, hamlet after hamlet, his heart was filled with rage, and he yearned for a chance to get even. Even with his father, with his scorned family, with the bakers and with whomever was hurting these poor folks with their taxes.
When revolt broke out in summer 1381, Roger was passing through the village of Corringham when he heard of the townsfolk being assembled in Brentwood. Apparently, they hadn't paid their share of the poll tax. When the situation got out of hand, Roger found himself deep within the crowd as it chased the villainous man who had come to their towns away. He was still with the crowd as it marched its way to London, and still when it broke through the city walls and began to bring havoc. When the crowd's leader, a certain Wat Tyler, emerged with a call for men to go and fight in the north, he was all too eager. The shock and shear speed of the past week's events had shaken Roger. He wasn't a vagrant anymore; he was a zealot for justice - justice on those who had wronged him for all these years. He was there at Brompton, where he was wounded. During that time, he'd aquainted himself with many fellow Essexmen - including their ringleader, John Wrawe. Wrawe was impressed by Baker's zeal and the two developed something of a working relationship, something that would become of great use as time progressed.
Following John Ball's death, Baker returned to social affairs. After the revolutionary English government had attainted Gaunt and proclaimed him a traitor, he heeded the calls sent out to the counties to search for the many traitors believed to be hiding among the common subjects of the King. Baker found himself appointed a constable by the new magistrates in Essex. He was tasked with finding these traitors and bringing them to trial. Respect, appreciation, purpose. Roger Baker for the first time in many years finally felt he’d found his calling.
De Proditorum Comburendo
In the summer of 1382, he was tasked with the capture of a traitor from the village of Great Waltham, a man by the name of John Hawkes. He and an assembled posse pursued the poor man for 4 days until he was discovered in the nearby village of Broomfield after sneaking out of St Mary with St Leonard Church, believing the coast to be clear only to be jumped by three men in a hedge. Dragged back to Great Waltham on the back of a horse cart, he was handed to constable Baker who personally delivered the broken Hawkes to the local magistrate for trial. Baker sat as witness to the trial, watching as Hawkes was charged with treason. The local drunken Hawkes had been turned in by a neighbour after having babbled incoherently that “Tyler is the biggest bastard in England” after a night in the town’s tavern. Now that neighbour stood before the courtroom to aid in drawing Hawkes over the coals for his remarks. After a short deliberation, Hawkes was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death by burning – that punishment favoured by the new rulers of England for exacting what they saw as justice.
Hawkes was burned in Chelmsford 5 days later, Baker was there. As the flames rose to Hawkes’s waist, Baker remembered what his father had told him back in 1378:
“You never showed more promise to me than a drunkard or a vagrant.”
As Hawkes prayed for mercy as the flames rose to his head, Baker remembered roaming the Essex woods of Essex as a vagrant and his interactions with the common people. He looked up at the burning wretch tied to the stake and did not pity him – for in the face of a once-drunkard he saw the face of a traitor. And as the flames swelled Hawkes’s tongue and shriveled his gums so he couldn’t speak, extinguishing the cries of “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me”, Baker felt once again assured that he’d found his purpose. This one of Lancaster’s whores could scheme no more in the shadows. As long as there were traitors in the Realm, Baker would have his purpose. In the zealous flames of revolt, he prayed that he may do his duty with firm and honest conviction.
There were more Gauntists to burn.
In March 1382, the new English Parliament - comprised solely of the Commons with the English bishops attending as mere observers - met in Westminster to deal with an issue pressing on the minds of many within the English government, the presence of suspected traitors working under the influence of John of Gaunt attempting to discredit and reserve the achievements of the revolt.
The body gathered to discuss the issue of "Gauntists" (as they were known as) was a substantial reform of the Parliament established in 1215 by Magna Carta. New suffrage rules had been created which allowed for all free male subjects of the King aged 21 and over the ability to vote for a representative of either the county or borough they inhabited. Women, vagrants, criminals, the young and those not born in the kingdom were not given the vote. When the new body assembled, its membership was comprised mostly of members of the gentry and urban middle class who had thrown their lot in with Tyler and the Revolters. The Wonderful Parliament - as future generations would call it - was a radical change from the Parliaments which proceeded it as its membership was chosen by a substantially larger segment of the population that ever before. Whilst its powers in relation to the King remained unchanged, it was a more imposing institution that previously constituted. It was use that power and influence in the spring of 1382 as it began to discuss the so-called "Gauntist" issue.
What emerged was a document titled
De proditorum comburendo, "Regarding the burning of traitors" [1]. In it included the passages "
they do wickedly instruct and inform people, and as such they may excite and stir them to sedition and insurrection, and make great strife and division among the people, and…do perpetrate and commit subversion of the order of the Realm" and instructed that "
this wicked sect...should from henceforth cease and be utterly destroyed" [2] and was passed on the 13th of March 1382. Additionally, Parliament placed a bill of attainder on John of Gaunt, declaring him to be both a bastard and guilty of treason [3]. The first executions under the new treason act took place on the 25th of March in London when three knights captured from Devereux's expedition were convicted and burnt near Smithfield. They were the first victims of the Kentish Purge, they were very far from the last.
The Kentish Purge did not discriminate by class, though in practice those associated with the former magnates of the aristocracy were affected more than other classes. The properties of John of Gaunt were set upon with great ferocity. Long since cleared of any useful valuables to the Revolt, many of his castles would be dismantled entirely including Kenilworth and Bolingbroke.
Other people accused and burnt during the Purge were often those involved with local disputes or neighbourhood scraps. Almost all of these people were innocent of actual treason, the idea of a secret Gauntist sect beyond the local plans of some resentful magnates and gentry were little more than paranoia on the part of Tyler and his colleagues.
Among the most affected groups of the Purge were the Lollards, both for their beliefs and their most well-known patron - the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. In May 1382, 34 Lollards would be executed in Herefordshire. The story of the Lollards in the English Revolt is particularly tragic. Many of the "poor-priests" giving sermons across parts of England had supported the revolt. Though others had condemned it, broadly speaking they were supportive. Now their former allies were turning on them, leaving the Lollard priests to decide whether to hold to their faith or to get in line with the new order. The Revolters surrounding the King and his court would often take elements of the Lollards argument in their relationship with the Church, but Lollardy as a whole suffered terribly during the 1380s and 1390s [4].
News of the Purge spread abroad fairly rapidly. In Southern and Eastern England, a large number of wealthy Englishmen with reservations about the revolt chose to leave for Europe and word spread round the courts of France and Burgundy quickly. They were aghast at the news that men of lowly rank were dragging England into anarchy and chaos, with many secular noble properties belonging to the exiles destroyed and their remaining possessions and estates seized. A smaller number besides in the North, where the Purge was less strongly enforced, left for Gaunt and King Robert in Scotland - adding to the ranks of what would become a second army to finally restore order in England.
The Kentish Purge would go on for several years, coinciding with preparations by the Revolters regime to make moves on their foreign enemies. Gaunt was still at large in Scotland under King Robert's protection. The self-imposed exiles fleeing to France had the affect of increasing the paranoia directed at supposed enemies of the Revolt as well as direct the attention of Tyler and his council around King Richard of the possibility of retaliation from across the Channel, especially as England's territory of Gascony had signed a truce with the French King.
By the start of 1383 nearly 70 "Gauntists" had already been burnt.
The second phase of the English Revolt was already a far bloodier affair than the first. Detachments were raiding into Scotland on a frequent basis with the Scots retaliating in kind, the exiles in France were beginning to influence European couurts and the Kentish Purge was setting England ablaze.
Footnotes
- [1] I don't speak Latin. If this needs correcting, please let me know.
- [2] Both lines made up by me inspired by OTL's
De heretico comburendo.
- [3] Bills of attainder were commonly used at the time to convict those the ruler wished to condemn without a trial. Also, there were rumours towards the end of Gaunt's life in OTL suspecting that he may have been illegitimate (likely untrue) so it's possible the Revolters may use it as propaganda.
- [4] More detail on the Lollards and their role in the Revolt coming in future chapters.
Sources
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Comments?