(Roughly) Daily

Your correspondent is headed into a melange of meetings (and their attendant travel), so (Roughly) Daily will be on pause for a few days. Regular service should resume on or around June 19. I’ll leave you with a (timely?) tale from the past…

“Steve” publishes a wonderful weekly newsletter, Dates With History. In a recent post he shares the story of Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt…

If you walked into Smithfield in the City of London in the small hours of the morning, you’d find the great Victorian iron-and-glass halls of the old meat market, traders hard at work while dazed club-goers spill out of nearby Fabric nightclub, uncertain for a moment what century they’re in.

A few steps away stands St Bartholomew’s Hospital—Barts—the oldest hospital in London still on its original site, patching people up since 1123.

On one of the blocked window bays of the hospital’s north wall, a memorial marks where the Scottish hero William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305, alongside remembrances of the Protestant martyrs burned here under Queen Mary between 1555 and 1558.

A third plaque, on another blocked window bay, recalls an event 645 years ago next Monday—15 June 1381.

That day, a man rode into Smithfield at the head of a rebel army and tilted the course of English history. The fact that he was dead before the day was out is beside the point.

His name was Wat Tyler…

[Steve explains the origins and workings of the feudal system in England, the (extraordinary) impact of the Black Death, the Poll Tax, the subsequent rise of peasant resistance, the Revolt itself, Wat’s demise, and the immediate aftermath. He concludes…]

… Wat Tyler enters the historical record on 7 June 1381 and exits eight days later, 15 June 1381, when he was executed. That’s his lot.

The revolt failed.

But the idea it carried—that labour had value, that taxation required some semblance of fairness, that the common man had rights—survived.

The Peasants’ Revolt echoed what the barons had done at Runnymede in 1215—confront a king and extract written concessions from him. Tyler’s rebels knew their history. Had they succeeded, those sealed charters would have amounted to a Magna Carta for the poor.

Over the three centuries that followed, the power of English rulers to do as they pleased eroded steadily. By 1689, the Bill of Rights made explicit what three hundred years had been quietly establishing—that rulers governed within limits they did not set themselves.

Wat Tyler hadn’t written that principle. But he had fomented one of its earliest and most violent proofs of concept.

There wouldn’t be another poll tax in England for six hundred years—until Margaret Thatcher introduced one in 1990 and was promptly removed from office.

History, it turns out, has a long memory for bad ideas…

(Trying to) hold power to account: “It’s 1381 and the peasants are revolting.”

* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch) in Paddy Chayefsky‘s and Sidney Lumet‘s Network

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As we ponder power, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939, at Hyde Park, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted a luncheon for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England. Despite his mother’s horror, FDR wanted to show the King and Queen an old-fashioned, American style picnic– featuring that most proletariat of dishes, the hot dog. In the U.S. to raise support U.S. for Britain’s cause in World War II, the royal couple at least appeared to enjoy the meal.

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