Monday 27 January 2020

Book Review - When Adam Delved and Eve Span (2004)

Mark O'Brien, When Adam Delved and Eve Span ( New Clarion Press, 2004)
Written By: Dave Renton
Date: September 2004
Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 22: Autumn 2004  

The events of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt are well known. The state prepared the ground for the insurrection with a series of unjust laws: the Statute of Labourers, which imposed a series of wage reductions, and the Poll Tax, which placed a fourpenny tax on every adult in Britain irrespective of wealth. The revolt began in Kent and Essex before moving to London. A popular army of sixty thousand took control of the city. King Richard was forced to accept a series of demands, which if ever implemented would have led to a dramatic transfer of wealth and power in the direct of the poor. The revolt was only stalled by the murder of its most charismatic leader, Wat Tyler. In the aftermath of this crime, the nobles slaughtered thousands in revenge.

Yet if the events are familiar, the literature remains sparse. We have the texts written by such early chroniclers as Jean Froissart. The three best-known socialist histories of the uprising are all now out of print. Hymie Fagan's Nine Days That Shook England, written for the Left Book Club, is lively but in many key respects inaccurate. Reg Groves and Philip Lindsay's The Peasants' Revolt is much better, but almost completely unavailable, even from second-hand bookshops. Rodney Hilton's more analytical account eschews narrative in favour of analysis and local detail. It is less accessible than either Groves' or Fagan's books.

When Adam Delved and Eve Span is an admirable addition to the field. Short, lively and demotic, it integrates the book literature with a number of literary and nineteenth-century sources. Its account of thirteenth-century English feudalism is persuasive. The book is also right to emphasise the importance of religion, the heterodoxy of Wycliff inspiring rebel priests such as John Ball. In his own words, Mark O'Brien is ‘overwhelmingly sympathetic' to the rebellious peasants, and the sense of class anger and identification comes out clearly on every page.

There are only two points at which I think further research is deserved. First, although we have come to describe 1381 as an uprising of 'peasants', it is clear that the heart of the movement was to be found in the developed areas of fourteenth century England, the cutlery towns, and the districts that were already exporting wool to central Europe. This explains the importance of the geography of the revolt and the importance of the Statute of Labourers in sparking protest. The Act was a move aimed against wage-rises by what we might see as the first hints of an emerging artisan class. The revolters were by no means proletarians, but nor were many of them strictly peasants. Their precise origins would deserve closer study elsewhere.

Second, in two or three places, O'Brien takes over Fagan's designation of the insurgents as a 'Great Society'. For Fagan, the chroniclers' term was proof that even in fourteenth century England, something like his own beloved Communist Party was already growing. O'Brien's designation reminded me far more of the anti-capitalist crowd. But either term, I suspect, drags far too much meaning out of a single phrase in the original texts. When Froissart described a 'magnas societas', he meant only that the rebels were a 'great company', or a great number of people. Later in his narrative, he used the exact same phrase to describe a 'great company' of nobles.
Such points, really, are quibbling. This is an excellent history. I have not come across a better-written or more engaging account of the revolt.

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