Free The Last Plantagenets by Thomas B. Costain Page B

loud shouts of “For King Richard and the true Commons” to speed her on her way.

CHAPTER VIII
The Voice of John Ball
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    H ISTORY has been disposed to accept the estimates of the number of peasants in revolt that were fixed in the chronicles of the period. Some place the total as high as 100,000; the more conservative say 30,000.
    In reaching anything in the nature of an accurate figure it is necessary to call up a picture of the roads of the period. They were narrow and rough and inclined to follow the lines of least resistance, skirting hills and avoiding grades and creeping through forests like an adder’s trail. Summer suns baked them to the consistency of hard clay and after a heavy rain they were almost impassable. Conceive, then, of fifty thousand men, say, marching down one of them, sun-browned and dusty of heel, stopping frequently for rests, delaying incessantly to forage for food, sleeping by the wayside, halting to talk excitedly with new recruits and to arrive at agreements on policy. A modern logistics expert could easily arrive at a reasonable solution; and the answer would be in days and weeks and not in hours. Take into consideration also that the country through which they marched had been decimated by the Black Death and that food was scarce enough even for the regular inhabitants. Unless each peasant had slung a bundle over his shoulder before starting out, filling it with the plain food on which he usually subsisted—bread crusts soaked in oil, dried beans and leeks, a few “curds and an oaten cake,” and perhaps a parcel of his favorite dish, the
froise
, a form of pancake filled with bacon—there would have to be continuous halts to beg along the way, to raid orchards for unripe fruit and strip berry patches. That they carried much food is doubtful because of the dramatic suddenness with which it all began and the frenzy which had gripped them.
    The truth, surely, is much closer to the minimum figure, and it isprobable that the peasant body which finally took possession of London did not much exceed ten thousand. London, it should be recalled, was a crowded little town behind its low walls, depending on the supplies of food which came down on the river barges and from the country thereabouts. An invasion of lusty and empty-bellied tillers of the soil would soon strip bare the cupboard of London.
    In point of time it is possible to be completely accurate. The revolt of the peasants, from the day when the groat collector yanked the kirtle from the shoulders of Wat the Tyler’s daughter to the time when the last of them turned their backs on the capital city and began the homeward march, lasted a little over fourteen days, certainly the most grim and fateful fortnight in the history of England.
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    Allowing for such limitations, it was still a mighty throng which reached Blackheath and settled down there as a preliminary step to the occupation of London. It was said they came from both sides of the river but this seems impossible unless the bands from East Anglia commandeered boats to ferry them across the Thames; and again the law of logistics sets a limit to the number that could be accommodated in this way. Most of the expectant multitude which filled to overflowing the broad and bare strip of commons known as Blackheath came, therefore, from Kent and Sussex.
    In those days Blackheath was a chalky stretch of empty land which adjoined the southern edge of the gardens around the royal demesne of Greenwich. In later centuries it would serve a variety of purposes. It would become a popular dueling ground. Highwaymen would lurk among the few scrub trees and hide in the yellow gorse and bracken. John Wesley would preach there to crowds which sometimes exceeded ten thousand. Gradually the tide of expansion would submerge it, first with lordly houses but later with the close-packed homes of poorer citizens. But in the days of the revolt Blackheath was no more than a place of rendezvous, a halting point