THE END OF FEUDALISM

The years of the De Baddowes and De Coggeshalls put Great Baddow on the map. Celebrities began to visit, perhaps sensing that Baddow was a bit ripe with twitchy peasants. John Ball, a follower of John Wycliff who had translated the New Testament into Middle English, turned up here preaching that we are all equal before God. He said:

”When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman? 
From the beginning all men
by nature were created alike,
and our bondage or servitude
came in by the unjust
oppression of naughty men. 
For if God would have
had any bondmen
from the beginning,
He would have appointed
who should be bond, and who free. 
And therefore I exhort you
to consider that now the time is come,
appointed to us by God,
in which ye may (if ye will)
cast off the yoke of bondage,
and recover liberty!”

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John Ball

When I say turned up, I mean literally that he stood outside of St Mary’s preaching. We don’t know what reception he had or whether his evocation of some mythical England of free men, and maybe even free women, had any resonance, but he had been stirring up trouble since the 1360’s. He had been excommunicated in 1366 and was thus banned from taking the pulpit. So, he toured Essex gathering crowds however he could. Naturally he was eventually thrown into jail in Maidstone probably proclaiming that the Magna Carta had something to say about this.

In 1381 the government interpreted the “equality before God” bit somewhat differently from those listening so such sermons. They decided that everyone should be equally taxed and so a poll tax was introduced that required everyone over 14 to pay.  Including women! This led to riots in Brentwood that ended with a couple of tax collectors losing their heads right outside where the high street post office is found today.



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Brentwood High Street.

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After that, John Ball was broken out of prison and Wat Tyler and his followers marched on London where they killed the Lord Chancellor and the Lord High Treasurer, and then, Wat Tyler had a rather drunken meeting with the young king Richard II, and managed to get himself stabbed by the Mayor of London, William Walworth who afterwards became "Sir William Walworth” Tyler died, but the King impressively took control of the mob, and promised that he would abolish serfdom, hurrah! And we will all be equal, hurrah! With me as the God appointed king, hurrah!

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Richard the Second addresses the peasants

Needless to say, the King had second thoughts about the serfdom and equality bit and had John Ball hung drawn and quartered. Consequently, Jack Straw came to St Mary’s Church to rally the Galleywood and Baddow men to join others at Northey Woods, near Northey Island, a remote area on the Blackwater estuary near Maldon. There they would train to become an army fit to depose the king! Unfortunately, the King’s men were waiting there, and killed five hundred or so of the would-be rebels.

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Where the peasants gathered in Great Baddow

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Jack Straw might not have existed. It’s a general name conflating all trouble makers and made popular by later plays and propaganda that had him confessing to the terrible crimes he intended to commit. George Peele, a contemporary and reputed occasional collaborator of Shakespeare’s wrote “The Life and Death of Jacke Straw” which probably tells us more about Elizabethan politics than the actual peasant’s revolt but it has lent itself, rightly or wrongly, to our idea of the history. In short, the name is too good not to be fiction. The name John Geffrey on the other hand, is dull but real. He was a bailiff of East Hanningfield. And he sent out his men to tell villagers that their houses would be burnt if they did not swear to rise up against the King and gather in Great Baddow. As is the case with popular uprisings, they are not necessarily that popular.

After the battle of Northey Woods, Local magistrates and no doubt, a certain Thomas De Coggeshall, probably still smarting over the destruction rioters wrought in Coggeshall, then went on a hanging spree, getting rid of people they did not like, confiscating properties and conveniently, since the rioters had burnt down “land registration offices”, redrawing boundaries and reassigning landholdings. The destruction of early records by these peasants makes a search through the Essex Records Office somewhat frustrating.

Despite serfdom not officially abolished until 1574, these reassignments and the various legal sleights of hand that the likes of Thomas enacted, effectively destroyed serfdom, that and the Black Death killing off a third of the population of England, mostly of the serfing class.

England’s estates were thus understaffed and so they outsourced their needs for carpenters, tanners, basket weavers, metal workers, etc. Which encouraged the expansion of Great Baddow into something we would recognise as a village.

Although the England of the Green and Pleasant land variety was quietly emerging, the rest of the 15
th century, as far as the kings of England were concerned, was on a repeat and rinse cycle. Henry the Fourth, despite being a reasonable administrator was as ever embroiled in wars in Wales and the north. If Shakespeare is anything to go by, he found it all very tiresome. His errant son, Henry Vth, tried uniting everyone by having another go at the French.  This ended in the usual way of a victory followed by homespun turmoil brought on by disgruntled soldiers. Thus, making the ineffectual Henry The Sixth not so much a king as a pawn in the conflicts between the Lancaster and York families who thought they could restore order in society by fighting all the time. The battle of Towton in 1461 was the largest battle ever fought on English soil, consisting of a hundred thousand men with twenty-eight thousand deaths, decimating the nobility. It gave Edward IV the throne. Then he lost it. But then he finally defeated the Lancastrians in 1471 and managed twenty years of reasonable calm. On his death, his brother, Richard of Gloucester, had Edward’s children declared illegitimate, locked them in the Tower of London where they disappeared, and declared himself Richard The Third, forever immortalised in the cockney rhyming slang for turd. His brief reign came to an end at the Battle of Bosworth when he was defeated by Henry Tudor, who threw him into a car park in Leicester to be finally dug up on the 15th August 2012. Hurrah!

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King Richard III