Episode 376 - The English Peasants' Revolt: Part 3

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Hello and welcome to the Lions That Buy Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom.

Hello, I am slowly getting more and more hot in this room.

We've had to turn off the air conditioning because of sound reasons and I am slowly, slowly melting into sludge.

We have driven our convoy of looted Mercedes into London.

Our banners of crisp white shirts and trainers fly from our steeds.

A chain of veneers attached to strings rattles behind our bumpers.

The drawbridge is lowered, and we get to work liberating our fellow Londoners by getting pissed drunk in the streets and starting fights with strangers, or leaning our tanning beds against the side of buildings until they start fires.

But things are starting to go sideways.

Our nationwide stagdew has run out of booze, and Tom and I have done the last bit of Coke in the revolt-designated cocaine toilet.

Men are stumbling around, lost, unsure of what to do as a bunch of mugs and plate plate armor begin to shepherd us into a field.

They keep saying that it's some kind of festival with Coke and free Jaeger bombs, so we trudge in that direction without complaint.

How are you doing?

I am doing good.

I don't know if I sent it to you.

I saw...

This is how I know the area I live in is cooked, despite the fact there is a minor gang war going on, is that I saw a penny farthing chained up outside the tube station.

I like that it was chained up.

Like, they're worried that someone would steal it.

This is my commuting penny farthing.

You know, anytime a penny farthing is parked in your neighbor, like my fucking rent is about to go up.

Yeah, it's going to be like a billion pounds a month.

See, this is why, uh, if it was in the U.S., you could just stand outside your door and just fire guns into the air.

Yeah, you can't really do that in London or in the UK in general, or in Europe in general, really, unless you're one of those like insane Reichsbergers in Germany who doesn't believe that Germany exists.

Yeah, yeah.

Again, sovereign citizens,

even weirder.

And much like all sovereign citizens, neo-Nazis.

Yes.

Not that that has had any relevance in the past two weeks outside of the fucking series that we just finished.

Yeah.

You know, I know you were saying it in the cold open about the yeol stagdo, but when I was on holiday recently, I read Bill Buford's Among the Thugs again.

And that is just an accurate description of what Manchester United went to Turin in 1985.

Like the scene where they're in the central piazza in Turin and they're just there for hours.

All these like English Manchester United fans who are like blind drunk.

They don't actually have tickets for the game.

So they're just like drinking outside for the fun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like they don't know that they don't have tickets.

I would recommend reading the book.

It's a really, really good bit of like gonzo journalism.

I think it's one of like the three pillars of kind of gonzo journalism, but it's like, that's just what this is.

Okay, okay.

I never understood the concept of the stag do, personally.

It's they're fun, it this seems like it, but also like it's just going on the piss for a weekend, yeah, but like the whole weekend is a lot.

No, it's not, it is for me, I will say.

Oh, poor Mr.

My stomach hurts.

I mean, yeah, also, yes, also, I just kind of get tired, I don't want to do it anymore, yeah, but that's what the cocaine's for.

Yeah, not a huge fan of cocaine,

personally, yeah, but yeah, stag dues are are great.

Once again, it is all about men's mental health in the same way that this series is about, you know, overthrowing the government structure for men's mental health.

Men will do fucking anything other than talk to a therapist to certain government.

Yes, yes.

And even when they do, they lie to their therapist.

Don't lie to your therapist.

Engage honestly and frankly, and you will benefit more from it.

Yeah, unless you're in like one of those places where you don't have to pay for therapy.

You're just wasting everybody's time and money.

Yeah.

So when we left you last time, the peasants of England revolted, stormed London, slaughtered nobles with literally zero resistance, and eventually with the permission of the king.

However, when it became clear that the peasants were, rather than airing their grievances, were kind of radicalizing themselves into an actual revolution, the 14-year-old King Richard decided to act.

So he lured the rebels into a festival turned execution ground to launch a trap.

Now, while this is happening, back in London, the surviving aldermen, knights, the rich merchants, they're putting calls out to their private armies, mustering anyone in London who was still loyal, or at the very least was not willing to be known as disloyal to go to arms and report to their ward alderman for duty.

Thousands of rebels gathered in Smithfield with their military leader, Watt Taylor, who was demanding revolutionary change to the king, who, surprise, surprise, surprise, once again, simply agreed.

I would be so suspicious of all these people who are just like being very amicable to my demands.

Yeah, Yeah, my revolutionary, foundationally changing demands.

A lot had been made of this over the years, but I think the general belief of the king walking in and agreeing to anything Taylor said was putting him on the back foot is almost certainly true because it's the king was never going to do any of this for real.

Think of how different everything would be.

Like, arguably, England still does not fall under the changes that Taylor and Ball had.

But also as well, like, you know, these changes would fundamentally upset the structure of society at this time in England.

Like, this is a radical change that, like, could not, if it was enacted, could not be contained to, you know, Kent and Essex.

Like, if this spreads across the country, this, like, England looks immediately different.

Yeah.

And better.

Yeah.

Because immediately after the king agrees to all this, Taylor's rendered speechless.

The thousands of rebels behind him just kind of stand there, either unable to hear what's being said or frozen in shock.

Taylor and the king, they square off for a few minutes.

According to eyewitness accounts, Taylor spits on the ground in front of the king, which is not exactly a sign of victory.

So maybe he understood what was happening.

Then someone from the king's party began heckling Taylor.

Taylor responds by pulling out his dagger, pointing it wildly all over, and demanding whoever was shit-talking him to come out and fight him like a man.

Engaging in the brilliant British pastime of like chanting at a football match.

It's like, you're not singing, you're not singing.

Or I suppose it's you're not kinging, you're not kinging, you're not kinging anymore.

Walworth, the mayor of London, rides out and meets Tyler and says he's under arrest for brandishing the weapon in front of the king.

Tyler wheels around and stabs Walworth directly in the chest.

However, everyone in the king's party is wearing body armor under their clothing.

And I can imagine how kind of ridiculous that must have looked because this is body armor the 1300s.

Yes.

Walworth is unhurt.

He draws his own knife and shanks the ever-living piss out of Taylor multiple times in the throat and head.

Yeah, you got to aim for the weak points.

Big glowing red square over Taylor's head.

He hates it when he gives knives in it.

You just have a giant boobo scar.

Aim for the boobo scar.

Stabbing a peasant back then, just shooting pus out of the wounds.

Like, why isn't there more blood?

What is happening?

Somehow, Taylor is able to kick and get away from Walworth and ride his horse back towards the rebels far enough away that they had not seen that he had just gotten the shit shanked out of him.

Because this whole thing happens, I guess, in a few seconds, just bam, bam, bam, bam.

So they don't know what's happening as Taylor falls off of his horse onto the ground, spurting blood.

But most importantly, somehow, not dead.

Okay.

None of this is part of the king's plan, but rather just something that Walworth probably really, really wanted to do.

Yeah, sometimes you just want to stab a guy.

Yeah, sometimes you just get a fucking shank a guy in the skull.

Yeah, it's like, you know, what's a good end to like a successful stag do if not shanking someone.

Also, once again, you know, the knife crime has always been a problem in Britain.

Is it a problem or is it cultural tradition?

Yes, you know, I am engaging in a cultural practice of stabbing a guy.

They just didn't have, you know, zombie knives then.

I have a feeling that, like, because like the book Summer of Blood and the book The Hand of God calls it a dagger.

And I'm willing to bet it's quite fucking large.

I would say, well, more than likely, if it was like a dagger, I'd say from pommel to tip, it's probably less than 12 inches.

I mean, that's a lot of tip.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, you got to include the balls.

Yeah.

You got to include the groat of the knife.

Yeah, yeah.

As soon as Walworth is done prison-shanking Taylor on the spot, he turns his horse around and just runs from the field without talking to anyone else in the king's party.

Most of the king's party follow him, leaving the 14-year-old king pretty much alone standing in front of the rebels.

Now, the rebels are kind of shocked at the moment into submission.

So the king takes that opportunity to be like, everybody chill out and follow me over to and well fields

and they do they're just like in total confusion looking at tyler who's just gouting blood into the dirt and just follow after the king but i mean like they have spent the better part of the the past couple of weeks just like on a massive campaign in the name of the king so i mean i think it's pretty reasonable they're like okay let's see where this goes yeah and again remember the last time that they met the king that when you took away ball and taylor like most of of these guys are quite reasonable.

Yeah.

Not that I think that Tyler isn't, but Ball is kind of pushing it when it comes to what would ever work.

Well, I think it's Ball.

I think it would be better to describe him as like pragmatic more than anything.

Yeah.

Like he understands like, oh, we have these like set amount of goals that we want to achieve.

And there is like other things we want, but we want to get the thing.

the core thing first.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Makes sense.

And while they're all following the king down the road, Walworth is riding back to London, hoping that the people of London actually listened to the orders to muster from their aldermen.

And to most people's surprise, thousands had.

The reason for this is pretty numerous.

A lot of people who mustered at the orders of the aldermen probably had taken part in the first bits of the revolt, but quickly went home.

Other parts probably agreed with the revolt, but only to be horrified by the, you know, this public beheading of a lot of people in like down the street from where they live.

And not to mention the burning of churches uh the beheading of the archbishop it was probably a bit too much for a lot of people yeah other people wanted to stay out the entire thing hiding in their homes and hoping to escape unharmed of all of these thousands of people there was maybe 200 professional knights under the command of sir robert knowles everyone else was pretty much as much of an armed rando as the rebels themselves they would have had bow training as well but you know There's swords and spears and whatnot.

Absolutely not.

Yeah.

Knowles eventually got his army of thousands at his back and marched towards Clerkenwell Fields as well, surrounding the rebels who were standing there still very, very confused and in a really weird Mexican standoff with a teenage king who had led them there by himself.

After this, Walworth returned to Smithfield looking for Taylor, but he was gone.

What he thought was his corpse was gone.

Eventually, he discovered that the king had ordered him sent to a nearby hospital, where somehow he was still alive despite being stabbed in the neck and the skull multiple times.

What?

Yeah.

He storms in, orders men to grab the dying man from his hospital bed, drags him outside, and has him beheaded.

I mean, he almost certainly was going to die.

Yeah.

And I am willing to bet that maybe his stab to the neck just managed to dodge anything important.

Yeah, I obviously like executing him and cutting his head off is much more of a symbolic thing than anything.

Certainly.

Because afterwards he picks up Taylor's head and rides over to Clerkenwell Fields, displaying it for the thousands of rebels to see.

Then he hands the head, which had been mounted on a spear, to the king, who holds it up and then just kind of shakes it.

It's like that scene in Tropic Thunder.

See, it's cornstarch.

Yeah, exactly.

It's just spitters pattering little blood onto the teen boy king.

And this is the signal, like, it's fucking over.

The air completely goes out of the rebels.

They drop their weapons, they kneel, and they begin to beg the king for mercy.

As the slap-together army led the rebels away from the field, the king knighted Woolworth and the others on the spot.

I assume he also did it with the head.

You know, like plop plop on the shoulders.

There's something about like decapitated heads that like really freaks me out.

There's a really famous photo of

during the Malaysian emergency,

the Sarawak Rangers in northern Borneo were incorporated into like various different regiments of like the British Army.

And there's like a photo of

one of them with a decapitated head and like there's a British soldier holding one up as well.

And it was like on the front page of the paper.

Christ.

Yeah, it was a big controversy.

And it's like, that's where I think just like really fucking,

I don't know, just the head freaks me out.

Yeah, do the foot.

Yeah.

Nobody likes feet.

Yeah, but you see, you can survive getting your foot cut off.

Yeah, it's true.

Yeah.

All right.

More to be pondered.

Yes.

After this, the rebels were marched out of the city, and London finally stopped the wave of violence that had been going on for only three days.

But in reality, the violence was not over.

The violent shoe was simply on the other foot.

Walworth, Knowles, and the others mustered the London citizen army and were now put in charge of hunting down the rebels and arresting them wherever they could.

This is effectively the second government-approved death squad in a matter of days.

Also, as well, there are thousands of of them.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, the Londoners, at least that's like home turf.

That's in your own backyard.

But a lot of these dudes are just going to run back to the towns and villages and shit.

Which is eventually what they end up doing.

Also, as well, there is kind of a problem with that.

There are very few ways of getting out of London at this time because there's a big wall and one bridge.

Yep.

And rather than beheading or hanging, which would have been common, anyone accused of having a part in the revolt would be hanged, drawn, and quartered.

So, Joe, do you want to explain to people what being hung, drawn, and quartered is?

Oh, boy.

Is it a treat?

It's depending on how they do it, because there's several different ways they can do it.

You can be hanged in a way where you're not dead all the way.

So it's, therefore, drawn out.

And then you have your guts ripped out, burned in front of you.

You have your dick and balls cut off as well.

And then they eventually finish the job before cutting you apart.

And depending on who the person doing it, sometimes the the cutting apart will happen while you're still alive.

Yes.

And then there was also

a version where you would be, your limbs would be attached to four different horses or horse-drawn carriages and you were pulled apart.

Yes.

Yeah.

Different spices to the same recipe.

Yeah.

Very, very different type of being pulled asunder.

You know what?

I have to say, though, when you're getting ripped apart by a horse, you know, there's a split section in there that has to feel so good.

It's like, damn, I haven't stretched my back like this in my entire life.

Yeah, it's like complete decompression followed by just the worst pain on earth.

That's why you should never trust a chiropractor who owns four horses.

Oh, you mean I shouldn't go to my local chiropractice for horse and spine?

The combination chiropractor and vet.

It's like getting run over by like one of those like concrete flatteners would probably feel really good until it doesn't.

Yeah.

Like the back, oh, so good.

Then, oh, God.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

New kink discovered.

I want to decompress my spine so bad.

Look at...

There's definitely someone on the internet who can do that for you.

There always is.

There always is.

There's a club in Berlin where it's probably the entrance policy.

Though just because the rebels had been largely driven out of London did not mean the revolt was over.

Throughout the southeast of England, small localized revolts continued, and now they were reinforced by thousands of men being driven away from London.

And with that by far, the most violent of the rebels now pushed back into these smaller revolts, all rapidly became much more brutal.

But arguably, worse and more violent leaders had been sharpening their skills on a cheap side.

Yeah, yeah.

One of the like in terms of like um popular rebellions, there is like a handful of different tactics in terms of like containing them.

One is like if it is in essentially ends in a like a negotiated state like this, uh, you stop them retreating so you can like round up people and capture them within like a essentially a closed state.

Um, the other one is you capture them on the retreat, retreat.

And then the worst one is if you cannot like contain them within a specific area while you round them up and they escape into like the wider area, it escalates the violence so much more.

Oh god, yeah.

And like there is also these smaller revolts still happening while all this shit in London is going on.

But a lot of people went to go see the party in London.

Yes.

One man named William Grind Cobb.

Which either sounds like the most brutal or the funniest name ever, right?

William Grind Cobb.

He was the first man to invent maize flour.

Exactly.

I wonder what his job was.

Dick Grind Cobb.

He ended up with

actively being in charge of the revolt in St.

Albans.

And before this, he was a man known for casual violence.

He was like the town drunk and assaulter.

Okay.

He had a, quote, history of punching monks.

I mean, look, you know, it's the, it's 1381.

You're going punch a monk eventually.

How many monks do you have to punch before you get known for as the monk puncher?

The monk puncher is a fun name, though.

I'm not going to lie.

That is a fun moniker.

That's going to be our band name, monk puncher.

Yeah, but that also could be like a euphemism for masturbation.

Exactly.

You could punch the monk.

I mean, it's just like when I was on my way over here, I saw a bus that was going to a place called Nunshead.

Oh, yeah.

Monk Punchers opening up for Nunshead.

Though John Ball was still active and on the run.

Unlike most of the rebels, after Tyler's death, he could not go home.

He was already a known guy before the revolt.

Remember, he had been arrested like three times and excommunicated four times.

Who will punch a name?

Now he was arguably the most wanted man in England.

Virtually anywhere he went.

was already up in revolt and joining that would kind of be an issue.

So he went north and ended up what would be like the northern border of the English Revolt, which I think was like York.

Yeah, there was one man that they could have sent to negotiate this, and he hadn't been born for another 600 and something years, and that man was Paul Gascoigne.

That's a joke that you're not going to get, but every English person is laughing right now.

And Ball didn't want to get involved with it anymore since he was pretty sure it was doom.

The government is moving in, the crush is on, and he really wanted to focus on not having his guts burned in front of him while his dickenballs were cut off.

He wanted to contain, you know, his bits and pieces as one does.

Yeah, I mean, he liked me for real.

I want my genitals still attached to my body.

Yep.

Yep.

Big ask in a situation.

So instead of leading his flock from the front with fire and brimstone sermons, demanding equality or death from the nobility like he had been, he started writing letters.

He became a poster.

Okay.

Yeah.

Everything is posting.

Yep.

He sent letters to towns who he knew was in revolt or was close to it encouraging them sometimes he used uh his own name but other times he used pen names and he sent out a fucking ton of them and some of them still survive to this day actually but ball's role in the rest of the revolt is gonna stay on the outside but another insane church guy is about to get into the thick of it oh yes Enter Henry Dispenser, a war veteran, knight, and priest.

Oh, yeah, he is he is doing paladin shit.

Yeah, he is a paladin.

Hell yeah.

He would regularly give sermons with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other.

And most importantly, he was the bishop of Norwich.

Guys like this don't exist anymore.

No, nope.

It's probably for the best.

Yeah, I mean, well, to be fair, there were quite a lot of the

world where there were sermons being delivered with like an AK-47 in the other hand for a long time.

Yeah, I mean, there is just a straight-up AR-15 church in America these days that shot off from the moonies.

Yeah.

He stayed out of the revolt in the beginning, and the revolt stayed away from him, which tells you how scary everyone found this guy.

But eventually it began to ebb closer and closer to Norwich as different bands of rebels with different leaders spread throughout the region.

Yeah, you don't want to anger like medieval Vinnie Jones.

You really don't want to piss off a guy that everybody knows.

in the area for being a psychotic crusader.

Yeah, he's the flat-nosed priest.

Yeah, exactly.

Eventually, Norwich, like every other region in the area, falls to the rebels.

The one nearest to Dispenser was led by a different radical priest, a guy named John Raw,

who Dispenser personally knew and fucking hated.

So there's also like a personal grievance.

Yeah, we're getting ecclesiastical version of SmackDown versus Raw.

God damn it.

It's the Undertaker versus Kane.

You know, Kane's a mayor now?

Yes, and he is also a horrible person, much like Mark Halloway.

Yeah, yeah, that is true.

One of my favorite things ever, I may have talked about this on the show before, but when Kane was talking about like how he hated trans people on Twitter, hangman Adam Page, a wrestler from AEW, just posted a video below this like top 10 hard headshots Kane took with a steel chair.

It was fucking brilliant.

Now, Raw and his gang of rebels raided multiple churches at this point, not only stealing the riches, but also getting hammered on looted wine.

But he was more of a drunken gangster, honestly.

He didn't really have any ideology behind him.

His group was responsible, probably, most likely, for the execution of the king's chief justice,

meeting the head of the entire English judiciary, Sir John Cavendish.

And afterwards, they are rumored to have played, quote, ball sports with his head.

They're balling out.

Ball is life.

Remember, football had been banned.

So even playing severed head football is a sign of revolt.

Look, you know, you can't ban the people's game.

That's right.

And everybody knows that is bowling.

They were bowling with his head.

Yeah.

Facing the growing group of rebels in his own neighborhood, Dispencer grabbed his massive two-handed sword and rallied a whopping army of eight men to his side and marched off for war against thousands.

Yeah.

Seeing a priest pull out a fucking Zweihander is big energy.

He would be a Warhammer 40k Inquisitor for sure.

From there, they rode out to Petersborough, where rebels were besieging an abbey.

And now it is eight against possibly hundreds.

They charge directly into them without even thinking.

The whole time, Dispencer is screaming fucking sermons and slaughtering people with his sword.

They break the rebels in minutes.

Jeez.

He is a 40k character.

Yes, he is.

We did have John of Gaunt, like Gaunt's ghosts.

Now we have an actual no-shit Inquisitor.

Like Henry.

I know it's Dispenser with an E, but if it's just Henry Dispenser,

that is a 40k character.

For sure.

Honestly, he might be a fucking Space Marine looking at these odds.

I mean, this is the first time the rebels are facing any organized resistance.

And

they ran smack dab into England's first games workshop character.

But Dispenser wasn't done.

He gathered more and more men as he continued his march, murdering rebels throughout the countryside.

I should point out that he never took any fucking prisoners.

He would let people say their confession and then he would cut their heads off.

Like, sorry, the heresy is too much.

You must be purged.

Oh, this guy kind of wipes.

He fucking rules.

Honestly, in an entire countryside full of psychotic violence, you gotta kind of root for the guy who's literally only trying to protect his neighborhood.

Yeah.

Because the only reason he's doing this is because Norwich got taken.

And he's marching there.

Yeah, you fuck with Norwich.

You're gonna get Henry Dispenser up your eyes.

That's right.

You're going to get Henry Dispensered.

He was the most effective fighting force that England had mustered the entire rebellion.

Each time the buster sword-wielding priest and his followers smashed into a group of rampaging rebels, the rebels shattered upon impact.

And each time he liberated somewhere, volunteers would flock to his side and declare him a saint.

His band of impromptu crusaders took no prisoners.

They left the countryside decorated with the hacked-up pieces of rebels strewn about on roads and heads stuck on spears and like innards draped on trees.

The rebels heard he was coming and would run at the rumor.

I mean, yeah, I'd be fucking terrified.

Oh, God, I would suddenly become the most religious man on earth.

I haven't did shit, but my neighbor, he went wild.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that was another thing when Dispenser went into a town and people who, you know, were smart enough to like just kind of go home, like their neighbors would be like, he did it.

And Dispenser would immediately dispense with him.

Yeah, getting

cleft in twain by Henry Dispenser.

Yes.

For example, the rebels had torn Cambridge apart, which I think everybody can agree with is what you call a good start.

They're doing their normal burning and looting thing, anything that could be considered administration, the nobility, the elite of society.

However, weirdly, the local leadership of Cambridge was also leading the rebels.

Okay.

Including the town mayor.

Now, his defense was, hey, whoa, whoa, the king gave them a charter.

Yeah.

And, you know, not following a king's charter is tantamount to heresy.

Also, as well, it's 1381.

There is fuck all to do.

It's like, look, it seemed like fun.

Our pastime is watching the sun go down.

And we were just having a goof as I sit on my pile of severed heads.

Yeah.

And, you know, the town mayor is like, it's not treason because the king gave them license to do this.

However, Dispencer decided, fuck that, and killed him anyway.

And then after that, he told everybody, go the fuck home.

This is over.

Do not make me come back.

Yeah, yeah.

And they did.

I should also point out here that Henry Dispencer was not given permission from the king to do any of this.

Yeah.

You know, he's freelancing.

Yeah, he's shown some initiative.

He took the issue into his own hands.

He's doing it for the love of the game.

Elsewhere in England, the king was finally giving orders to men to gather forces and go fight the rebels wherever they popped up.

He sent charters to judges throughout England to sentence anyone thought to be involved in the revolt to death, and a gruesome one, like we talked about.

And John of Gaunt finally began making his way back south from the Scottish border with his army.

However, this led to a rumor that he had sided with the rebels and planned to take the crown for himself with his army.

Again, it would be the only army in England he could have done it.

Well, until he ran into Henry Dispencer anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

This led to other nobles refusing his entry onto their lands and him having to go back to the Scottish border border and ask the Scots for supplies.

And then he sent word to the king, like, hey, I'm still loyal.

I promise what the fuck.

But again, none of this really had anything to do with them believing the rumors.

All of these nobles fucking hated him and they thought if they kept him away from the king as long as possible, they could effectively just usurp his authority

and undermine his reputation with his nephew king.

What followed was a reign of terror that made anything the rebels did look tame in comparison.

Thousands of soldiers loyal to the crown, headed by the king personally in some cases, marched into places that had been in revolt.

Along with them came like a convoy of judges and lawyers to hold trials if possible, but mostly to oversee what amounted to be mass slaughter when the court or the king felt like it.

Many rebels hoped for some kind of peaceable outcome as before, because remember the king had met with them multiple times.

And they thought, well, maybe he'll meet with us a third time.

And maybe that old amnesty thing will still be put in place like a couple of days before.

Because remember, this is all happening in a few days.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It wasn't.

In Essex, the birthplace of the revolt, one of the birthplaces, as the story goes, the king personally met with a elected rebel leader to meet about this amnesty.

He rejected any amnesty, any deal, and any reform.

The king said, quote, you are rustics, and rustics you still are.

You will remain in bondage, but not as before.

Now it will be incomparably harsher.

He's just like, fuck you.

At that point, if you're the rebels, like, we really overplayed our hand.

We really should have taken the first deal.

Now we're all going to die real fucking bad.

Yeah, we're all going to be, you know, either cleft in twain by Henry Dispenser, or we're going to be like hung, drawn, and quartered, or we're just going to be like set on fire.

Hold that thought.

Somehow the best option is to run at Henry Dispenser as fast as you can and let the Imperium Inquisition take you out.

Yeah.

Dispenser and his growing completely unsanctioned army marched into the home of the diocese in Norwich.

There the revolt was largely under the control of a man named Jeffrey Lister,

who was trying his hardest to keep away from the never-ceasing forces of the local terror priests.

The Litzer seems to be an actual leader more than some of the other rebel leaders.

He was quite competent and seemingly very charismatic because he managed to convince multiple members of the the local gentry to join the revolt as his subordinates, which is impressive.

And that was a motivating factor to bring more people to his banner.

It legitimized him.

So he has quite a large force of several thousand men.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Though for Litzer and his men, news of Dispenser and his army making it to Norwich meant that they would have to act.

They needed to put up and have a fight.

They would march out into actual combat.

against an armed and determined enemy for the first time.

So on June 24th, my birthday,

the two forces met in the town of North Walsham.

Virtually nobody in Litzer's army had any kind of military experience to speak of.

They didn't really gain any from the revolt because they were mostly just stabbing unarmed people.

But they marched into an open field.

They arrayed themselves into a combat formation the best that they could.

And depending on who's telling the story, they began building earthworks as well to help defend themselves.

Absolutely none of this would fucking matter.

Out of the woods came Dispenser and his crusading army.

This fucking mental cunt just bursts out of the trees.

Literally no combat tactics are being deployed by Dispencer, despite the fact he's very knowledgeable.

Yeah.

Everything is just a frontal assault as he has his fucking two-handed sword and he's screaming Bible verses.

But I think it probably was a tactical decision in the sense that he knows he's like fighting peasants.

So he's just like, I'm just going to run straight at them and most of them will run away.

That's almost certainly part of it.

I mean, he was a very seasoned knight yeah he knew what war was and he knew what like pointing a large sword at a random guy does to someone unfortunately you know in the context of this story he is on the bad side of history he is but unfortunately he rules ass yeah he is he's cool as hell

he charges directly into them He's probably outnumbered 20 to 1, but again, it doesn't matter.

The rebels collapse immediately.

What is oftentimes known as the Battle of North Walsham was not a battle.

As soon as Dispenser appeared in front of them, the rebels attempted to surrender, and after a couple of minutes of Dispenser and his ad hoc crusaders butchering them,

they decided to take the rest prisoner.

Litzer ran, running into a nearby cornfield where he was captured.

Dispenser immediately sentenced Litzder to death on the spot without a trial, or most importantly, legal authority to do so.

He's powered by Jesus.

Nobody can stop him.

Yes, and this is, you know, 14th century Jesus as well.

Yeah.

But because he was a priest, he asked Litzer, confess.

Litzer fully confesses to everything he's done.

I think assuming this is going to get it, like let him get away with it.

At which point, Dispenser spins around and hacks his head off in one swing.

Cleft in twain.

Elsewhere, the kings actually sanctioned forces continued their march.

Not every rebel band was ready to just sit down.

or submit themselves to trial that they were starting to understand were going to lead to their deaths.

A group of rebels had retreated away from the army of the Duke Buckingham and Lord Thomas Percy, ending up a few miles away from Biller K as the king demanded order to be restored in the heart of the revolt in Kent and Essex.

Because it had spread beyond that.

Yeah.

By some accounts it was as far north as York.

But pretty much the worst of it's happening here.

Yeah, it's like pretty localized.

Yeah.

The rebels thought it'd be a good idea to retreat into the forest and fight there because this worked for them before in the very beginning.

They know these woods like the back of their hands.

Yeah.

And they were ready to fight.

And they seemingly badly misunderstood that they are now fighting an actual army sent to fucking kill them for the first time.

Because the knights had no problem crashing directly through those woods and hacking them to pieces.

Just like North Walsham, this is not a battle.

There are no casualties recorded from the government side.

Any rebels that try to stand and fight were cleft in twain.

Most were slaughtered rather than be taken prisoner.

Like a lot of people seemingly made the conscious decision, I'll just stand here with my weapon until some asshole comes and runs me through.

Yeah, because this is better than what they're going to do to me.

Their bodies were cut to pieces and scattered about like peasant funfetti as a warning to others.

And really, organized resistance to the suppression of the revolt pretty much ended here.

There wasn't really any large battles.

Like, it's one of the weird things about this revolt.

There are no large battles at all.

Yeah.

It's more of like a giant fucking riot.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, kind of, you have like one side, which is like, obviously the peasants, which is like not necessarily under one singular, like, central leadership aside from ball, but like, on the other side, you have like the government forces, which are just like kind of trying to suppress stuff.

And then you have Henry Dispencer, just like running around, hacking people in twain.

Freelance priest, Henry Dispenser, coming to a theater near you.

Cleft in twain.

Yeah, like, there's no major battles.

There's no government forces really to speak of until the very end.

It is like the, it's like riot suppression in a way, because most of it is just like kettling them.

It's more containment in specific regions and like, we're going here, now we have to do it here, now that we have to do it here, rather than having like a cohesive plan that like, oh, we're going to try and contain everything.

Right.

And the rebels were smart enough to never really line up and try to fight anybody except those two times, kind of.

Yeah.

And a lot of people were smart enough to see where everything was going, chuck their shit into a river and run home and pretend like nothing ever happened.

Yeah.

And while the revolt died horribly from swords, ropes, and the occasional burning to death, John Ball was captured, though nobody's exactly sure when.

He was brought back to St.

Albans for trial, which was run by a guy named Sir Robert Treslyan, ancestrally Armenian,

who had been promoted to chief justice of the king's bench after the last guy got murdered.

Treslyan, in the meantime, had been put in charge of the various expanding trials in the aftermath of the revolt.

And ooh, fucking boy.

He pretty much took over before the last guy left off.

Virtually anyone brought in front of him was found guilty with as little evidence as someone saying, I saw him take part in the revolt.

Personal denunciations were more than enough evidence.

He also ordered men to be tortured for more names before he inevitably sentenced them to death.

This is a Khmer Rouge shit again.

So John Ball, as guilty as he was, had his entire trial turned into a roast battle of sorts with it just being like a loud, energetic, and long series of speeches about all of the heresy he'd been committing his entire life.

Because remember, again, excommunicated four times, already in prison three times, and got broken out the third time.

Yeah.

And like, they blamed him for corrupting the English mind with his sermons.

He was, of course, sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.

But the Bishop of London asked for a pause.

So Baal would be given a last chance to repent and confess for his many, many sins and see the light before he saw nothing but darkness.

Of course, the real reason here is it's another bit of anti-revolted defense.

If anyone was still out and hiding or planning anything or thinking that, hey, this thing might cook off again, if you could point about like, look, your dude was full of shit.

He repented, it would be a great thing to calm everyone down.

But like every religious rebel leader we've ever talked about on the show, he refused to repent,

which, again, fucking why?

Like, why would he repent?

He knows he's going to die.

Yeah, they're going to be like, bring out the dispenser, right?

I mean, that'd be the best possible outcome.

And why would a religious rebel in this situation bother to repent?

Because they obviously believe in their shit.

If they believed in yours, no, this would have happened.

And you're gonna kill them anyway.

Like, if it's like, repent and you'll live.

I'd be like, yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Repent and I won't tear your guts out and burn them in front of your eyes.

Now we're talking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was executed on July 15th, 1381.

Afterwards, his body parts were sent to the four corners of the kingdom to be staked up as an example.

And that's how you know you've made it.

Yeah.

Because celebrity didn't really exist back then unless you were the king.

Like, you know, you made it when the kingdom is trucking that shit across all this fucking place on horseback to stake up in some dude's fucking bog in the middle of nowhere.

So you're at the four corners.

It is the worst version of being an influencer.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm an influencer.

I influence the plague by my body parts getting infected.

Yeah, I am influencing terror in people.

Yeah, terror influencer.

I suppose that's just what I suppose.

Or al-Qaeda

or various other terrorist groups.

I mean, I think for influencer, you have to go with Isis because their video production was much easier.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They had that pirated copy of Sony Vegas.

They knew how to do effects.

Yep, yep.

Some rebels, namely John Raw, who had survived the self-appointed crusader Henry Dispenser's campaign, decided this shit is up, but I'm going to get ahead of it.

I'm going to walk over there.

I'm going to turn myself in, and I'm going to be a fucking rat.

Rats out.

John Raw, famous tout.

He goes and tells like the Inquisition, all these motherfuckers helped me.

This guy was the real leader.

That guy helped burn down this other guy's house.

He's dropping dimes on everyone thinking it's going to save his ass.

It does not.

Yeah, I was about to say, is like this, you know,

retribution for the revolt doesn't seem to be that forgiving.

I don't think you being a rat is going to save you.

Not even a little bit of dude.

She just fucking fucked off to a different county.

John Raw, no, my name is John.

Well done.

It's different.

John Medium Rare.

He got the same treatment as Ball, but his bits and pieces weren't sent around the country for England's first warped tour.

However, even with most of its leaders dead, either on the field or by the rope or by the various other ways, the king himself continued the terror of the suppression.

Remember, this is a 14-year-old kid who watched several people get butchered in front of him.

Yeah, most 14-year-olds are like punching drywall.

If they're angry, this guy is just like slaughtering people.

Yeah, King Kyle punching drywall.

God, imagine what he'd been like if they had monster.

See, I think everything would be a lot better if the 14-year-old king was given a white monster for the first time.

Because this whole thing would be over very quickly.

And then he'd have a crash and just go 90-90 because he's tired.

It's like a puppy who plays too much, just falls asleep right where he falls.

It's like me when we record podcasts on Tuesday morning.

Also, yes.

I mean, not only did he see multiple people get slaughtered in front of him, he was discovering that in his first act of actual governance the way to solve his problem at the urging of his advisors was to butcher them back or as the book summer of blood puts it the people had frightened their king so now the king is going to frighten his people

throughout the summer and into the fall the king and his court ruled over england in honestly again a Khmer Rouge style government.

He would deploy mobile courts and commissions to areas with the sole purpose of killing anyone thought to be a traitor.

People were captured, tortured for names, and executed together.

And this went on and on and on until most of some villages were just wiped out.

And these commissions seemingly got bored with how they were killing people.

Beheadings and hangings apparently were boring.

So they started dragging people to death behind horses, tying weights around their ankles and throwing them in water, and in a few cases, burning them alive.

Yeah,

a terrible way to go.

It's a classic death sentence for someone accused of heresy as well.

Like before, all the evidence required was someone's name getting dropped by either a local official deemed honest enough, a neighbor, or someone under torture giving them up.

It's not like there's any fact-finding going on here.

This kind of brutality had a strange trickle-down effect as well.

Others, worried they'd be caught up in it, both commoners and nobles because this terror did not know bounds, began turning on one another, both ratting each other out to the court or straight up murdering someone and being like, see, I'm one of the good ones.

He was a rebel.

Some of the king advisors, especially those only a few months before, had told the king that, you know what, maybe the best way to deal with these people is by giving them some stuff, kept their mouths shut, because even the act of suggesting the king's revenge mission was going a bit too far could be considered a sign of disloyalty.

and put you next in the literal chopping block.

Nobody was safe.

And it's not that the king was coming into his own and finally ruling England by doing this.

He was actually really fucking up his own administration.

Because while he ordered these blood commissions out into the countryside, the regular courts had begun functioning again, also trying to bring people to justice as they always had.

Not saying that's a good thing, but as it had always functioned.

Only to find a lot of the people brought before them to face charges on other crimes just got blackbagged by the king's hit squad before they could render a judgment.

And people knew this.

Everyone knew what was happening.

So during the course of let's say like a lawsuit or a property dispute, a thing a normal court would see on any given day in this era, a defendant would just start accusing the other guy of being a traitor, knowing they'd get fucking murdered and win by default.

Lawyers knew this too and began doing it to one another.

Creating what I imagine to be the most exhausted and annoyed judge in English history.

Could you guys please stop calling each other traitors?

I would like to finish one fucking trial in here without some flat-nosed asshole with an axe coming in here and killing someone.

Yeah.

The carpet cannot be stained anymore.

Our overages on executioners is way too high.

The state overtime pay for executions is really bankrupting us.

We're running out of tooth coin.

When someone was executed for treason, their property was seized by the crown and handed to an office to figure out how it'd be handled or dispersed or otherwise stolen.

However, so many people have been executed now, possibly up to 10,000,

that these offices are now completely swamped in new properties to the point they just collapsed.

They could not function.

This process did absolutely nothing to bring peace or stability to the kingdom as the 14-year-old king of death thought it would.

It turns out, stringing up thousands of corpses across, you know, pretty much every street in the area doesn't make a lot of people think the last guys who said maybe nobility shouldn't exist were wrong.

And none of that was made better by John of Gaunt, arguably one of the guys responsible for this whole fucking thing in the first place.

He makes it back to London, he finds his house was burnt down, and he joins in on the terror, but only to find the people who burnt down his house.

He doesn't care about anything else.

And then he starts launching accusations at other members of the royal court for refusing to allow him to march south fucking days ago.

And there's another small problem.

Remember all the charters the king was signing?

Freedom of the serfs, abolishing nobility, remaking parliament?

Those were royal charters that he actually signed into law.

Yeah.

And that is how law worked back then.

So now the parliament's coming back together and they're like, okay, so what do we do about all these fucking charters?

Burn them, burn them.

All the parliament, interestingly enough, largely fell on the side of like, well, the way the law works, he signs the charter, it's law, therefore it's law.

But the king was like, fuck no, it's not.

And parliament had to, you know, politely tell the 14-year-old king, like, well, your majesty, the way the law works.

So we know before John was doing most of this.

Yeah.

Once it's signed, it's law.

And now we have to overturn it.

We can't just ignore it, but we can't overturn it because it's a king's charter.

And he's just like, fucking overturn it.

So then they overturned it.

It became pretty clear that if they didn't, things would be very, very bad.

Yeah, yeah.

The people in the House of Commons were just as likely to end up being thrown into a river.

as the guys in the revolt.

Yeah, you don't want to be cleft in twain.

Yeah, don't make me go get Henry.

Yeah.

All the charters were revoked.

After this, the king began to realize, okay, maybe killing everyone who disagrees with me isn't working since my own parliament kind of said without actually saying it that the rebels had some points.

There's also the small fact that several nobles, remember, including the mayor of London himself, played a pretty important role in the rebels doing as much damage as they did.

He simply lowered the drawbridge for them.

And there's also someone suggested to the king, like, well, you told them it was okay to kill traitors.

Like, technically, you're at fault for the archbishop of canterbury being murdered yeah yeah and the high chief justice and like a hundred other people

he decided

maybe it's time for another way there's also the small fact he got married to uh someone named anne of bohemia and she was kind of horrified by what she was seeing in england um and her freak boy murderer husband yeah bohemia uh it's like western poland and parts of czechia yeah famously woke areas full of human compassion.

Yeah.

And she kind of convinced him, like, maybe you should show them some empathy, like, give them a reason to like you, which, of course, he never would, but he would try.

So, the king ordered a national pardon in 1382 after almost a full year of running a countrywide terror project.

Ironically, the first pardon was for Henry Dispenser.

Of course, you gotta protect the guy who protected you.

Yeah, he's got shooters in these streets.

I mean, literally everything he did was illegal.

And then the second pardon was for remaining rebels outside of a select group of men they knew to be directly involved with the deaths of the members of court.

How they knew that was probably through shoddy means of torturing people.

And in the aftermath of the revolt, small uprisings continued for years, including one with the sole goal of trying to kill Henry Dispenser, which seems really fucking unwise.

Yeah.

Like...

Norwich should be the safest, most peaceful place in all of England for fear that the fucking psycho-crusader crusader is just going to burst through your shitty waddle and daub wall and kill your whole family.

Yeah, you don't want to go up against the murder cleric.

No.

He's just going to kick open your front door, make eye contact, roll for initiative, you bitch.

This revolt wouldn't even be the last crusade that Dispenser would illegally launch.

Next would be known as Dispenser's Crusade in support of Pope Urban VI being launched in Flanders virtually as soon as he gets his pardon.

He's like, I got my papers, bitch.

It's time to go kill it again.

Then there was a slow decline of English serfdom, but not because of noble fears or another revolt, but rather because economically it just wasn't a great system and it was already showing its cracks prior to the revolt.

Though it is noted in the aftermath, peasants would occasionally bring up the past of violence to their landlords when they thought they were being fucked over because, you know, the implication.

England eventually found their way out of the war with France, at least for the time being, of course, due to the fact that they just couldn't keep raising their taxes on people.

Otherwise, this would happen again.

King Richard II, of course, would remain king, but he grew up an absolutely paranoid psycho and never really learned how to govern or manage a crisis without murdering everyone around him.

Though, my favorite thing about him is that one of his favorite things to do was to apparently just sit on his throne in silence for hours

with his court standing in front of him.

And if he made eye contact with you, you had to immediately kneel.

Otherwise, his guards would beat you up.

He was eventually overthrown and in prison in Pontefract Castle, where he was allowed to starve to death.

Yep.

And with that, that is the end of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Never listen to your court of unks.

Don't pay tax.

And if you are stuck for a job, you can always become a murder cleric.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, say what you about Henry Dispenser, but he was creating a lot of jobs during that week.

Yeah.

Fun fact, I actually planned on doing this series a long time ago.

I thought it was gonna be like a two-parter.

Yeah, yeah.

Nope.

Nope.

It's never a two-parter.

It's never a fucking two-parter.

We have one more thing to do on this podcast.

Yes.

We do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support us on Patreon and you can ask us a question through our Discord, which there's a channel dedicated to that, or on our Patreon,

where I may or may not see your message.

Patreon's really a shitty platform for messages.

What is your least favorite chore, either at home or work?

Work, all of it.

At home,

cleaning the fridge.

I fucking hate clean the fridge.

Cleaning the fridge just sucks.

See, I would have said mowing the lawn, but I don't have one of those anymore.

Cleaning the fridge sucks.

I really hate taking out my recycling because in the Netherlands, my recycling box is like a solid walk away from a house and the recycling slot is only so big so i end up having to do like cardboard surgery to get any box to collapse down to the point it'll fit through that slot like i wish it was just like a cardboard dumpster you just throw everything into yeah yeah nope it's a real big pain in the shit and i hate it but i do it every week i don't really mind most like the kind of household tasks i just kind of like put on a podcast and just do it like yeah the normal household tasks that most people like cleaning the shower cleaning the bathroom cleaning in general i actually find it quite relaxing to like do my dishes because my dishwasher has been broken for three months and my landlord refuses to fix it.

I have never owned a dishwasher.

You know, it's, it's, I, I put on either YouTube background noise or a podcast and I'm good to go.

Yeah.

I would rather do that than take out recycling.

Yes.

But that is the end of this series.

Tom, you host.

a different podcast series.

Plug that shit.

Beneath's getting to show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing.

I also should have some books for sale on beneath the skin shop.com.

This is the only show that I host, but you already know that.

If you like it, consider supporting us on Patreon.

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And we have a live show coming up on the 3rd of October in the flying duck in Glasgow.

Get your tickets.

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No, do not, do not pity us.

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Leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts and tell your friends, share us social media,

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Staple the name of our podcast to his forehead and throw it into the Thames.

Yeah.

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And until next time,

don't listen to your uncles get cleft in twain.

That's right.