Status Updates From England in the Age of Chiva...

“To overthrow a monarch [Richard II] was a great and heinous act, and one that men dreaded to act upon…this was the prelude to decades of conflict in which Edward III’s descendants tore one another to pieces; by the time the war between the Houses of Lancaster and York was finished, three more kings had suffered violent deaths and countless noblemen were dead with them. The War of the Roses had begun.”

“Wycliffe died peacefully in 1384. However, the Lollards were damned as heretics and, in 1401, burning at the stake was introduced for the first time for anyone who denied transubstantiation, heralding two centuries of increasing religious intolerance and fanaticism.”

“Arguing that the common people should be able to read the Bible for themselves, and not take their priests’ word for it, Wycliffe became at first a nuisance and then dangerous. His followers became known as Lollards, from loller, a Dutch word for itinerant preachers; it also meant ‘mumbler,’ as they were known to mutter memorized passages of the Bible.”

“With the world shook up, more uncertain, and violent, the Plague had led to an ugly anticlerical mood across Europe. In Germany in 1372, papal tax collectors were ‘seized, mutilated, imprisoned, some even strangled’ after Pope Gregory XI demanded a new tithe, something many clerics refused to pay.”

“Serfdom fell out of use anyway for economic reasons, although personal bondage didn’t entirely end in the fourteenth century. The merchet, heriot, and chevage remained for much longer, and the last legal reference to a bondsman was made in 1586 in a legal dispute, while ‘manorial incidents lingered to irritate tenants sometimes even in the nineteenth century.’ Such feudal dues were only formally abolished in 1922.”

“Now, with the rebels on the back foot, the counterterror began. Now, with the rebels on the back foot, the counterterror began….Richard called on loyal yeomen around the southeast to help him, raising as many as forty thousand volunteers for the brutal crackdown; hundreds of the rebels were massacred as they made their way back to the Home Counties. John Ball was arrested in Coventry and executed before the king…”

End of Peasant Revolt 1381: “Now surrounded by armed men, the rebels lost their nerve and suddenly weren’t in the mood to make radical demands, instead begging for mercy and asking to go home. The king placated the mob and offered safe passage and an end to the poll tax; the rebels, for some reason, were still convinced the king was on their side.”

“This Sumptuary Law of 1363 divided the population into seven social classes, and stated that no one below the level of gentleman could wear velvet, while no serving woman could have a veil costing more than twelve pence.”

“To pay for the war, a new levy was imposed called a ‘poll tax.’ There had never been a universal tax before, and they soon learned why, for, in 1381, rural anger erupted into the biggest popular uprising in English history. The peasants were revolting.”

“Edward was regarded as the pinnacle of military virtue, but he also left his country in a perilous state. The elderly, drunk king may   .not have noticed, but it was bubbling with tension… England was about to erupt.”

“The strangest consequence of the Black Death was the rise of the Flagellant movement, in which groups of hundreds of people moved from town to town dressed in sackcloth and whipped themselves. The Brotherhood of the Cross…seemed to emerge spontaneously and involved large groups of men stripped to the waist, ‘scourging themselves with leather whips tipped with iron spikes until they bled.’”

“The Plague led to ghost villages…although many were killed off not just by the actual disease but by peasants fleeing…while in others there were clearances afterward as unprofitable humans were replaced by sheep. With churchyards unable to cope, huge plague pits were built;⁵ sometimes the living were thrown in with the dead, and the piles of corpses were seen to squirm from the movements of the dying.”

“Bubonic plague was transmitted by flea bites; the second type, pneumonic, spread through the air and contracted by breathing, was much more contagious and killed within forty-eight hours… Then there was the septicaemic version, which took place when bubonic and pneumonic plague infected the blood and led to internal hemorrhaging….[this]killed even more quickly, often within hours, although it was much less common.”