Revolting Peasants
A dear friend is doing research on late antique / early medieval pastoral writing on the French countryside. She gets to read some beautiful poems on streams and woods. I am reading late medieval / early modern financial and tax records from the unromantic town of Coventry. I get to read things like, “paid 3 pence for carriage of six loads of muck from outside the town gate.” My work isn’t nearly as poetic.
However, it is this historical grunt work which I actually find fascinating. The popular and traditional history books are full of palace intrigues, political maneuverings, and military conquests. That’s all fun and important stuff, but my interest is in the bottom-up history. I look at what the middling people are doing. If I’m lucky I can even get a hint of what the poor and women are doing – those written out of history. So when I read urban records from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries I’m getting glimpses into ordinary day to day issues.
City governments for example, even centuries ago, were investing in infrastructure. Long lists of little accounting entries, like the one I quoted, show repairs to city walls, streets, ditches, water conduits, and bridges. Other ordinances were designed to ensure citizens kept the city clean and safe. Tolls and taxes (the richest paying most, the poorest none) paid for the city’s upkeep. Regulations ensured honest market practices and fair prices (though the regulations favored the guild masters, not the common workers, and women were excluded). It is clear there is a concept and practice of civic-minded society which dates back many centuries. It is a lesson to bring back to mind now in our very uncivic minded, uncivil, society.
Occasionally a king appears in the local record. Kings are expensive. When one visits there must be a grand and lavish welcoming ceremony as the city must show how much it loves the king. Then follows a common refrain in the documents, “he [the king] was given 300 pounds sterling and a gold cup, and he went away.” Give the king his taxes (and “gifts”), send him militia when summoned, keep the peace, and he’ll be happy. He’ll go away. Failure to keep him happy – usually failure to keep the peace – means a stern warning letter from the king, which essentially says, “if I have to come there in person heads will roll, so knock it off.” It’s fun reading the local viewpoint of the king rather than the official one.
Failure to keep the peace occurs from time to time in the civic records. There are of course the regular gaol delivery records of common criminals. Occasionally though we have records of riots and large scale protests. This was a highly unequal society, but the masters, the lords, were expected to follow an obligation of decency and care towards their lessors. When the elites got too greedy or too power hungry it could trigger a protest or even a riot. I’ll repeat, when the elites got too greedy or too power hungry it could trigger a protest or even a riot. Got that hint?
In the records I have read the most common riotous events are food riots during shortages, and breaking down of fences when landowners tried to enclose common lands. One huge riot in Coventry resulted in a temporary take over by the rioters, and the mayor getting locked outside the city walls. The king sent troops, but - a lesson perhaps for modern riot control – camped them outside the city and negotiated. Here we see the voices of ordinary people. Most people worked every day at some craft, but when pressed they would express a political will. It may have been expressed in meetings, or petitions, or perhaps in protests, it may even have been in riot. Whichever, the common people, even centuries before democracy, did have civic awareness and even occasionally a voice. One wonders if the peasants of 500 years ago had more political awareness and activity than many people in our modern, democratic age!
So I love the nuts and bolts of history. I love studying how in different places and times humans strived to live the best lives, and to live in decent communities. Perhaps most of all I love the poor commoners who tear down fences of wealthy land grabbers, or who throw muck at their supposed betters.
