A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



character of a sacred crusade. When the abbot appealed to Rome, the 

 parish clergy sent a counter embassy which asked for and claimed to have 

 obtained a grant which rendered the two chief churches of the town inde- 

 pendent of the abbey. After the rising was suppressed, the friars sheltered 

 the outlaws at Babwell, and assisted their escape." A number of local gentry 

 lent important military aid to the townsmen. Some of their names appear 

 as those of witnesses to the charter, and one of them took a leading part in 

 kidnapping the abbot." But most significant of all, perhaps, was the share 

 of the neighbouring peasantry in this short-lived revolution. According to 

 the monk who chronicles these events, more than twenty thousand men from 

 the countrv round about thronged into the town to lend their aid in a con- 

 test which they conceived to be waged as much on their behalf as on behalf 

 of the liberties of Bury. 'The townsmen promised,' says the chronicler, 

 ' that all those from the country whether villeins or freemen who were willing 

 to support their cause should be free of all toll and of all service throughout 

 all England by virtue of charters which they had in their possession.'*" No 

 doubt there is some exaggeration in these numbers, but the fact that a score 

 of the manors belonging to the abbey were plundered sufficiently proves 

 that town and country were alike imbued with the revolutionary spirit. 



To the student of social history the rising of 138 1 is apt to seem an 

 extraordinary event, which must have been produced by extraordinary 

 causes. To a certain extent this view is justified. The disturbance of the 

 labour market by the Black Death, the struggle between economic forces 

 and legal rights in the matter of land tenure, the evil effects of the Hundred 

 Years' War, culminating in the repetition of the hateful poll-tax, are no 

 doubt the larger and more general causes to which we must look for the 

 explanation of so widespread an insurrection of the people. But these 

 causes are not to be pressed to the same extent as they must be if the 

 troubles of 1381 were phenomena of an entirely new kind suddenly emerg- 

 ing in a time of profound social peace and universal respect for law and 

 order. The truth is, as we have already seen, that during the twenty or 

 thirty years preceding the Black Death, England was already very largely in 

 a state of social anarchy, and if we examine in detail the local events which 

 determine the substance of social history, we find the seeds of 1381 being 

 sown half a century before. The trouble did not spring solely, perhaps not 

 even mainly, from class dissensions of one particular kind — the struggle 

 between peasant and landlord. Fierce family feuds, the faction fights of local 

 parties, the unbridled jealousies of neighbouring ports, the violence and 

 rapacity of swashbucklers and freebooters home from the wars, combined to 

 render law and order the exception rather than the rule. Gorleston and 

 Yarmouth are in a constant state of civil war." A fleet of privateers from 

 Harwich lays siege to Ipswich for ten weeks, sinking, burning, and pillag- 

 ing.'* Walberswick, aided by a convulsion of nature, captures the river and 

 port of Dunwich, and puts to the sword its protesting customs officerSi** 

 The Inquest Rolls of Ipswich between 1330 and 1340 reveal seventeen cases 



" Mem. of St. Edmunds (Rolls Ser.), ii, 335-6, 349. 



" Ibid, iii, App. A ; ii, 351. ^ Ibid, ii, 334. 



^ Suckling, Hist, of Suff. i, 364 ; Cal. Pat. 1343-5, p. 323 ; F.C.H. Stiff, ii, 204. 

 " Cal. Pat. 1334-8, pp. 213, 218. 



^ T. Gardiner, Hist. Account of Dunwich, 39-40 ; Pari. R. ii, 44 ; F.C.H. Suff. ii, 203-4. 



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