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The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Sylvia Federico
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Extract

On June 16, in the midst of the disturbances at Cambridge during the Rising of 1381, a woman named Margery Starre was said to have tossed the ashes of burnt documents to the winds, crying as she did so, “away with the learning of clerks! away with it!” The story of this woman's violence against texts is not unknown—it has been noted several times in major studies of the revolt—but its significance as part of the much larger story of women in 1381 has been overlooked.

Instances of women's participation appear in the judicial records, chronicles, and poetry produced in the decade following the revolt. These texts depict women as independent leaders and maintainers of rebel bands, as instigators of others' violence, and as accomplices with their family members in criminal acts. They also “participated” as victims: women were assaulted, abducted, and threatened with death, and their property was frequently stolen or destroyed. Despite the evidence, and despite the recent and widespread interest of medievalists in both social history and feminist studies, women's roles in the revolt have gone largely unexamined. In this initial sense, the women constitute an imaginary component of their society: overlooked and ignored by the scholarship, their presence in 1381 is assumed to be unreal. From the absence of study comes the absence of women in history.

But we should not be so surprised to “discover” women in 1381, since earlier and later medieval collective actions feature women either in active roles or functioning as symbols of insurrection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , April 2001 , pp. 159 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2001

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References

1 British Library, Arundel MS 350, fol. 17v.

2 The range of citations of the incident include Powell, Edgar, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896), p. 52Google Scholar; Justice, Steven, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), p. 72Google Scholar.

3 Hanawalt, Barbara, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)Google Scholar, discusses crime patterns of the early fourteenth century that are similar to those found in 1381: female perpetrators of violent crime usually drew their accomplices from members of their own families; 19 percent of all gangs were composed of identifiable kinship groups, and of these “family gangs” 32 percent were husband and wife duos (pp. 124, 190–94). For later medieval English disturbances that feature women, see Hilton, R. H., The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1975), pp. 63, 106Google Scholar; Adam of Usk, Chronicle, ed. and trans. Given-Wilson, C. (Oxford, 1997), p. 131Google Scholar; Virgoe, R., “Some Ancient Indictments in the King's Bench Referring to Kent, 1450–1452,” in Documents Illustrative of Medieval Kentish Society, ed. Du Boulay, F. R. H. (Ashford, 1964), pp. 214–65Google Scholar; and Houlbrooke, R. A., “Women's Social Life and Common Action in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War,” Continuity and Change 1 (1986): 171–89Google Scholar.

4 Important recent scholarship on women in medieval England has been conducted by Barron, Caroline M., ed., with Sutton, A. F., Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500 (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Bennett, Judith M., Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar, Women in the Medieval English Countryside (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; and Goldberg, P. J. P., Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar. But Crane's, Susan “The Writing Lesson of 1381,” in Chaucer's England, ed. Hanawalt, Barbara (Minneapolis, 1992)Google Scholar, comes closest to suggesting women's involvement in 1381 in the course of her argument that the Wife of Bath's violence against texts is reminiscent of the widespread burning of documents during the rebellion (pp. 214–17).

5 For a case to be classified under the heading “royal litigation,” the king must have had a demonstrable interest in its outcome; in the context of the judicial aftermath of the revolt, private cases frequently were taken up as royal litigation because so many of the crimes had implications beyond what transpired between the individual perpetrators and victims. All the documents mentioned in this article are found at the Public Record Office (PRO), London, unless otherwise noted, and will be cited with reference to the following class lists (“m.” and “mm.” refer to membrane nos.):

C 67: Chancery, supplementary patent rolls

CP 40: Common Bench, plea rolls

JUST 1: Justices Itinerant, assize rolls

KB 9: King's Bench, ancient indictments

KB 27: King's Bench, plea rolls, coram rege rolls

KB 145: King's Bench, recorda files

I have also attempted to cross-reference as thoroughly as possible instances in which a particular case from a manuscript source has appeared in print elsewhere.

6 Poos, L. R., A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Poos's comments refer specifically to the patterns of rebellion in Essex, but they have a general applicability here as well.

7 Prominent discussions of these different facets of the revolt include Butcher, A. F., “English Urban Society and the Revolt of 1381,” in The English Rising of 1381, ed. Hilton, R. H. and Aston, T. H. (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 84–111Google Scholar; Christopher Dyer, “The Social and Economic Background to the Rural Revolt of 1381,” in ibid, pp. 9–42; Alan Harding, “The Revolt against the Justices,” in ibid, pp. 165–93; Hilton, R. H., Bond Men Made Free (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; and Justice, Writing and Rebellion.

8 Poos, , Rural Society, p. 234Google Scholar.

9 Prescott, Andrew, “The Judicial Records of the Rising of 1381” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1984), pp. 350–62Google Scholar.

10 Justice (Writing and Rebellion, p. 38, n. 77) notes the Westminster Chronicle, ed. and trans. Hector, L. C. and Harvey, Barbara F. (Oxford, 1982), p. 17Google Scholar, passage detailing false charges of conspiracy after the revolt: “Many people began to charge with this grave offence all those toward whom some hoary grudge had made them ill disposed, exploiting even this ground for denunciation in order to wreak their long-cherished vengeance upon those they hated.”

11 Eiden, Herbert, “Joint Action against ‘Bad’ Lordship: The Peasants' Revolt in Essex and Norfolk,” History 83 (January 1998): 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Eiden also notes here that the roll even records the names of some of the more prominent victims of the revolt, including John Butterwick, under-sheriff of Middlesex; Andrew de Cavendish, a knight in Suffolk and a relative of the murdered chief justice; and Osbert de Mundford in Norfolk.

12 Some pardons, too, may have been acquired in simple bad faith, as is suggested when Roger Gailer's wife, of Holborn, bragged to her neighbors that her husband had looted the Savoy and then had cynically purchased a pardon after the revolt. She further threatened that they would now gladly spend more of the ill-gained proceeds to be revenged on her audience; see Calendar of Select Pleas and Memoranda of the City of London, 1381–1412, p. 37.

13 Beatrice Pegge and her husband, John, a miller of Bantre, Yorkshire, were pardoned on 6 May 1382 (C 67/29 m. 7); Elena, the wife of John de Wetewang, a mercer of Beverley, was pardoned on 20 April 1382 (C 67/29 m. 8); and Agnes, the widow of John Hunter of Wetyngton (Whittington), Lancashire, was pardoned on 12 May 1382 (C 67/29 m. 12). That half the entries involving women fail to record any marital status prompts the double speculation that those women were single and that they were more vulnerable to accusation (and thus more in need of a pardon) than their married or wid-owed counterparts—but of course this cannot be established with any certainty.

14 C 67/29 m. 18; C 67/29 m. 8.

15 C 67/29 mm. 22, 14; C 67/29 mm. 19, 2.

16 JUST 1/400 m. 23, translated in Flaherty, W. E., “The Great Rebellion in Kent of 1381 Illustrated from the Public Records,” Archaeologia Cantiana 3 (1860): 95Google Scholar.

17 JUST 1/400 m. 13, translated in Flaherty, , “Great Rebellion,” p. 84Google Scholar. Stevenage was pardoned on 12 May 1382, and her husband on 5 February of the same year (C 67/29 mm. 12, 17).

18 JUST 1/400 m. 23, translated in Flaherty, , “Great Rebellion,” p. 94Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., translated in Flaherty, , “Great Rebellion,” p. 95Google Scholar.

20 KB 27/486 m. 69d. Of course, in quantifying the amount of time he had been deprived of his servants' labor and in asserting, moreover, that it was “per magnum tempus,” Furness was trying to recover monetary damages beyond the criminal conviction of Chapman. There is no record as to whether he succeeded in either attempt.

21 CP 40/491 m. 60d.

22 CP 40/490 m. 444.

23 “Intraverunt et rotulos suis et alia munimenta ibidem moventa arderunt” (KB 9/166/1 mm. 3, 130).

24 The case of Agnes Gyle represents another instance of a woman abusing the legal system under cover of the revolt. In 1383, after several years of dispute, she accused Adam Mody of threatening her and her husband John and of burning their house down “at the time of the troubles” (Eiden, , “Joint Action,” p. 15Google Scholar, citing LR3/18/3).

25 KB 27/486 rex m. 5; KB 27/483 m. 40. The men were eventually acquitted (Prescott, , “Judicial Records,” p. 242Google Scholar).

26 KB 9/166/2 m. 2.

27 KB 9/43 m. 15d.

28 KB 9/43 m. 12. This membrane is in especially poor physical condition, and I am grateful to Andrew Prescott for his help with the transcription and to Suzanne Paul, of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, for her assistance with the translation. The Latin reads, “Julia venit … obviandum hominibus Cantuariae et comitatu de Estsex eo habuerunt levato … Alanus Doghere custos gaolae de Maidenstane et Johannes Grage serviens suum ut ipsi inducit ilia de predictis Alano et Johanne per quod habendo predicti manutentores et malefactores prostraverunt gaolam predictam et detractaverunt similiter minando domum ipsius Alani ad prostravere et detractandere …. Et quod eadem Julia fuit consenciens et abbetens.”

29 KB 9/166/1 m. 2. Along with Gamen, Margaret Wryghte and Margaret Drynkenwyv are also listed on this same membrane as participants in Chief Justice Cavendish's murder, although no details are provided about what exactly they did.

30 My translation of KB 27/482 rex m. 39d. The Latin reads, “Johanna … venit in magna societate malefactorum insurgencium de Kent tamquam principalis factor et ductor … apud Sauveye in comitatu Middlesexie et dictum manerium combussit ut inimica regis, et quandam cistam in qua erant mille libre sterlingorum Johannis ducis Lancastrie et plus ibidem cepit et dictam cistam in quadam navicula super Thamisiam posuit et asportavit et usque Suthwerk duxit, et ibidem dictum aurum inter se et alios divisit. Johanna simul cum aliis venit apud Turrim Londoniarum tamquam principalis ductor et manus primo violentas in Simonem, nuper archiepiscopum Cantuariensem, et fratrem Robertum Hales … injecit, et eos extra turrim Londoniarum traxit, et decapitari precepit.” The case is transcribed in full in Réville, Andre, Le Soulèvement des travailleurs d'Angleterre en 1381 (Paris, 1898), pp. 199–200Google Scholar.

31 See KB 27/485 rex m. 30d for the not guilty verdict. The Ferrours turn up later in a property settlement, suggesting that Johanna escaped unscathed from her alleged treasonous participation in the revolt; see Calendar of Close Rolls, 1385–1389, pp. 248–49.

32 KB 27/482 rex mm. 37, 37d; Réville, , Soulèvement des travailleurs, p. 201Google Scholar.

33 Prescott, , “Judicial Records,” p. 34Google Scholar. See Bellamy, J.G., The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 59–176Google Scholar.

34 See Prescott, (“Judicial Records,” pp. 54–57)Google Scholar for a discussion of how the jury system may have prevented thorough due process in the aftermath of the revolt.

35 KB 9/43 m. 6; KB 9/166/1 m. 124.

36 KB 9/166/1 mm. 81, 126.

37 KB 9/43 m. 11.

38 KB 145/3/6/1 (unnumbered mm.).

39 Immoveable property was also at stake during the revolt, as is suggested by the case of Percevallus Symyon, who dispossessed Agnes Holwell, a widow, of a tenement in Hatfield on 23 June (KB 27/485 rex m. 24d). Women were perpetrators of immoveable property theft as well: Alice Horro, with her husband John and other enemies of the victim, violently dispossessed John Lepender of three cottages in Great Dunmowe, Essex, “in the late insurrection.” The entry in the calendar notes an order to the sheriff of Essex to put the Horros out and to tell them to sue according to law if they see fit, as “the king decrees that things so done in time of that disturbance are of none effect”; see Calendar of Close Rolls, 1381–1385, p. 21.

40 JUST 1/400 m. 12, translated in Flaherty, , “Great Rebellion,” p. 83Google Scholar. Of interest in this case as well as others is the type of valuable goods owned by women. Among the items seized from Elizabeth Spigurnell, a widow, were linen and wool garments— (pannos lineos and laneos; KB 27/485 rex m. 18). And when John Teyle broke into Thomas Foge's house in Toneford, he took a dress belonging to Foge's wife, among other valuables: “i equum baye i furram albi ermyn pro i sloppum et i ulnas panni de Skarlete et i camil uxoris dicti Thomae et deinde [illa bona] asportavit” (KB 9/43 m. 12).

41 For Alesia Neville, see CP 40/485 m. 436d; CP 40/488 m. 398; CP 40/490 m. 67. For Joan of Kent, see CP 40/486 m. 105; CP 40/487 mm. 35, 530; CP 40/488 m. 102; CP 40/490 m. 314; CP 40/492 mm. 301, 304d, 310d; CP 40/493 m. 307; C 66/311 mm. 22d, 23d, 24d (Calendar of Patent Rolls 1381–1385, pp. 78–79); Réville, , Soulèvement des travailleurs, p. 220Google Scholar. Similarly, Johanna, countess of Hereford, suffered a number of attacks on her properties: her manor at Debden was destroyed on June 16 (CP 40/486 m. 219); property was stolen and destroyed at Harlow (CP 40/487 m. 434), Ramsden Bellhouse (CP 40/487 m. 465), and Little Wakering (CP 40/487 m. 553); and records of her manor at Hatfield were burnt (CP 40/486 m. 105; CP 40/487 mm. 23, 165; CP 40/488 m. 102; CP 40/490 m. 90d). See Prescott, , “Judicial Records,” pp. 264–65Google Scholar.

42 KB 9/166/1 m. 119; Réville, , Soulèvement des travailleurs, p. 107Google Scholar, n. 1. Smyth was pardoned on 10 February 1382 (C 67/29 m. 31).

43 KB 9/166/1 mm. 20, 45d.

44 JUST 1/400 m. 12, translated by Flaherty, , “Great Rebellion,” pp. 82–83Google Scholar.

45 As with the case of his attack on the Barets, below, Salesbury was pardoned for this assault; see Dobson, R. B., The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (London, 1970), p. 230Google Scholar, translating C 66/311 m. 31; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1381–1385, pp. 30–31; Réville, , Soulèvement des travailleurs, pp. 207–9Google Scholar.

46 Dobson, , Peasants' Revolt, p. 229Google Scholar, translating C 66/311 m. 31; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1381–1385, pp. 30–31; Réville, , Soulèvement des travailleurs, pp. 207–9Google Scholar.

47 KB 27/483 rex m. 23; Réville, , Soulèvement des travailleurs, p. 202Google Scholar n. 1.

48 Powell, , Rising in East Anglia, p. 50Google Scholar. The case of Joanna Hestyng is more ambiguously phrased: she may have been purposely attacked in place of her husband or simply because she was the only one found at home. John Gildene and other malefactors of Heydon assaulted her and forced her to give over her husband's muniments, at Burgh, Innyngford, on Friday 21 June: “Johannam uxorem Willelmo Hestyng insultam fecit et omnia munimenta ipsius Willelmo de prefata Johanna cepit et defecit” (KB 9/166/1 m. 124); Réville, , Soulèvement des travailleurs, p. 114Google Scholar.

49 Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1381–1385, p. 416. Grindecobbe's case stands out in comparison to those treating the situation of other “rebel widows.” Eiden, Herbert, “In der Knechtschqft werdet ihr verharren”: Ursachen und Verlauf des englischen Bauernaufstandes von 1381 (Trier, 1995)Google Scholar, citing Norfolk Record Office, MS 6152 16D2, notes that Margaret Buk, whose husband John had been executed by Bishop Despenser for participating in the rebellion, was granted John's land (consisting of one acre and three rods) on 31 October 1381 (p. 353). Likewise, the widow of John Fillol, a miller of Hanningfield, recovered tenure of his land even after he was hanged as a traitor. He had evidently concealed her from the tax collectors earlier that year; see Dyer, (“Social and Economic Background,” p. 38)Google Scholar, citing PRO, E 179/107/63 and Essex Record Office, D/DP M833. Margaret Flecchere, similarly, was awarded four acres of her husband's farm and meadow in 1383, even though he was a notorious rebel and even though she and her son had a history of lawbreaking themselves. Thomas Flecchere, among other crimes, oversaw the burning of the inheritance deeds of the former M.P. for Suffolk, John de Sutton, on Monday 17 June (KB 9/166/1 mm. 20, 45d). Margaret and her son, John, were often punished in manorial court for breaking the assize on beer; see Eiden, (Ursachen und Verlauf, p. 308)Google Scholar, citing Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich HA6/51/4/4.7.

50 JUST 1/400 m. 21, translated in Flaherty, , “Great Rebellion,” p. 93Google Scholar.

51 As Castoriadis, Cornelius, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Blamey, Kathleen (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar, writes, “history is impossible and inconceivable outside of a productive or creative imagination,” which constitutes and articulates the social world through a system of significations; “it is only relative to these significations that we can understand the ‘choice’ of symbolism made by every society” (p. 146).

52 Ibid., pp. 147, 150.

53 See the Knight's Tale, line 2459. Subsequent references to Chaucer's poetry will be cited in the text according to the line numbers found in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, Larry D. (Boston, 1986)Google Scholar.

54 Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict, notes that anyone discovering a felony was bound by law to raise the hue and cry to “rouse the neighbors in pursuit of the suspect” (p. 33).

55 See Justice (Writing and Rebellion, pp. 207–18) for a discussion of how the Nun's Priest's Tale contains (or even is) an elaborate joke at Gower's expense.

56 Ganim, John, “Chaucer and the Noise of the People,” Exemplaria 2 (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, writes that “even if the story is not politically topical, it does address questions of language and power, even if through a parodic inversion that makes it difficult to say what its politics are” (p. 78).

57 The Major Latin Works of John Gower, ed. and trans. Stockton, Eric W. (Seattle, 1962), p. 62Google Scholar. The Latin text, from The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. Macaulay, G. C. (Oxford, 1901), vol. 4Google Scholar, reads, “Multociensque suum fera Coppa pedisseca gallum / Provocat ad varia que putat esse mala; / Quod nequit in factis ex dictis garrula suplet, / Ad commune nephas milleque sola movet.” (lines 545–48).

58 Davis, Natalie Zemon, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1965)Google Scholar, analyzes the political significance of women's participation in social protests in relation to the popular motif of the “woman on top” from carnival rituals (pp. 124–51). She writes of “the mixed ways in which the female persona authorized resistance” during the preindustrial period and argues that “the woman-on-top was a resource for private and public life” (p. 149). In conclusion, she claims that the license, sexual energy, and unruly power of women made them appropriate figures for rebellion.

59 Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986), p. 5Google Scholar.

60 As Rigby, Stephen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, writes, “It would be wrong to portray medieval views of women as universally or straightforwardly misogynist. Nevertheless, even those authors who were sympathetic towards women took for granted their social inferiority and subservience to men” (p. 251).

61 Scott, Joan, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 48Google Scholar.

62 Knighton's Chronicle, ed. and trans. Martin, G. H. (Oxford, 1995), p. 209Google Scholar.

63 Ibid.

64 Rigby, , English Society, p. 121Google Scholar.

65 Dobson, , Peasants' Revolt, pp. 106, 117Google Scholar.

66 See Barron, Caroline M., “The ‘Golden Age’ of Women in Medieval London,” in Medieval Women in Southern England, ed. Bate, Keith (Reading, 1989), pp. 35–58Google Scholar, for some of the economic implications of the theory of conjugal unity, in which a woman's legal identity ceased to exist on marriage.

67 Poos, (Rural Society, p. 297)Google Scholar notes the underenumeration of single females in the third poll tax returns but concurs with C. C. Fenwick that this “shortfall of females” may simply result from the fact that single women were more likely to be poor than married couples or single men-and thus more likely to be legally exempted from the tax by the local subcollectors. It is possible, then, to speculate that commissioners such as Leg were examining women not to see if they were married (i.e., a virginity test) but to see if they had reached the age of sexual maturity and thus that of liability for taxation; see Fenwick, C.C., “The English Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381: A Critical Examination of the Returns” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1983)Google Scholar, subsequently published as The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381: Part 1, Bedfordshire-Lincolnshire, ed. Fenwick, Carolyn C. (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar.

68 I borrow the phrase from Stallybrass and White (Politics and Poetics); it articulates how social groups “think with” shared images to construct and express political identities (pp. 44–45).

69 Gower, , Major Latin Works, p. 70Google Scholar. For a discussion of the rebels' sexual entry into London, see Federico, Sylvia, “A Fourteenth-Century Erotics of Politics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997): 131Google Scholar.

70 Walsingham, Thomas, Historia Anglicana, ed. Riley, Henry Thomas (London, 1863), 1:459Google Scholar.

71 Mark Ormrod, “In Bed with Joan of Kent: The King's Mother and the Peasants' Revolt.” I am grateful to Professor Ormrod for his permission to quote from this unpublished manuscript.

72 Ibid.

73 Hawkes, Emma, “‘She was ravished against her will, what so ever she say’: Female Consent in Rape and Ravishment in Late-Medieval England,” Limina 1 (1995): 47–54Google Scholar, notes that there was very little distinction made between rape and ravishment in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Rapuit et abduxit was meant to refer to ravishment, according to the 1285 Statute of Westminster II, but other terms continued to be used, such as cepit et abduxit or abstulit. For a discussion of “heiress rape,” see Post, J. B., “Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminster,” in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. Baker, J. H. (London, 1978), pp. 150–64Google Scholar.

74 But, as Cannon, Christopher, “Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a Newly Discovered Document Concerning the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Speculum 68 (January 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cautions, the carefulness with which modern scholars try to distinguish rape from “mere abduction” may be misguided: “such a distinction often loses sight of the fact that abduction in practice may easily shade over into something that is hardly to be distinguished from sexual assault” (p. 88).

75 KB 27/483 m. 2.

76 KB 27/487 m. 19.

77 For Deliberante, see KB 9/166/1 m. 79; for Remay, see KB 27/487 m. 19; for Walsham, see CP 40/491 m. 495d.

78 Lomperis, Linda and Stanbury, Sarah, “Introduction,” Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Lomperis, Linda and Stanbury, Sarah (Philadelphia, 1993), p. ixGoogle Scholar.

79 Scott, , Gender and the Politics of History, p. 9Google Scholar.