Everyday Women as Agents of Change
The story of revolution is never the story of just one person
England - June, 1381
Camouflaged by the plumes of smoke that threatened an everlasting presence if not for the rain, the citizens of London jeered as both property and parchment went up in flames. Bodies—both the personal and political—defiled and disputed, each attesting to the endurance of brutality under an overbearing hierarchical reality. Community laborers from every trade emerged, cosigning as brethren in defiance, uniting under a collective choleric spirit having been forced to endure a demoralizing reality a day too many.
At the center of the commotion one woman stood tall. A solid presence among the billows of sinewy smoke and wind-blown debris about her. With ash filling air and lung alike, courage mingled with anger burst forth akin to a chemical reaction compelling Margery Starre to bend and grab a handful of the burnt parchment at her feet. Hands blistering under the intense heat not unlike the hardships she’d already been forced to endure under the circumstances of serfdom, Margery threw the cremated documents to the wind. Shouting as she did so:
“Away with the learning of clerks! Away with it!”1
Away with the few dictating the reality of the many, Margery demanded.
Away with the dehumanizing hierarchical constructs of human existence, decried the many around her.2
Elsewhere in the densely populated capital city, Matilda Aleyn and accomplices were boldly breaking into the London residence of one Hugh Ware. Promptly seizing and making away with a chest brimming full of incriminating documents—documents destined for the enveloping flames which would erase all evidence attesting to the debilitating debts owed by the everyman—Matilda’s defiance stood to directly upset the dictatorial reality of the imposed landed class system suffered by her community. If a lord was rendered unable to provide evidence of debts owed, the accused commoner could not be made to pay. So brightly burning and abundantly fueled were these flames which sought to cleanse society of the scourge that was the landed lord that they threatened to level the whole of London, that ancient enduring city, as French chronicler Froissart would disparage from across the sea.3
Forty-eight hours prior, northeast of London in West Suffolk, chief justice John Cavendish had floundered. Succumbing to the lurching revolutions of Fortune’s wheel under his well-festooned feet, he had been made forced to flee from a riotous group of rebels hot on his heels. Desperate to escape, he surely—if only momentarily—became awash with relief when he spied a getaway boat that rested on the riverbank just ahead of his person. But just before the gentleman was able to climb aboard, Katherin Gamen—having perceived the chief justice’s intentions clearly—bolted forward and untied the boat, giving it a cheeky little shove as she did so. The vessel becoming a metaphor for Cavendish’s very situation; Afloat and unreachable in the tides of seething serfs. Because of Katherin’s actions, the chief justice’s body was hastily relieved of its weighty crown as the crowd roared in mob-like celebration at his brutal decapitation.4
To the east of London, Alice Wymond trespassed upon two separate manors titularly held by William de Ufford, the Comitis of Suffolk, assuaging him of the abundant documentation which sought to enact devastation within her community.5 In Kent, Agnes Stevenage pushed onto the property of the escheator, John Brode, and took with her “unspecified goods and chattels.”6 While Johanna Ferrour, torch in hand, commanded “a great society of rebellious evildoers from Kent… to the Savoy in the county of Middlesex,” where she deployed a scorched earth tactic and razed the prestigious manor to the ground.7
While all of this unfolded, back in London the rebellious priest John Ball recognized “now is the time,” infamously querying a riotous co-ed community:
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”8
Euro- andro- centric patriarchy has left women bereft of historical agency. This is not to imply some monolithic categorization of woman, as this deprivation is far more egregiously imposed upon women of marginalized groups. White women of America may reach equal pay late March but it’ll be another 124 days until Black women of America experience the same—an imposition made possible by the established historical narrative of the dominant culture. (And that is to say nothing of the steeper inequities of pay experienced by women within other marginalized groups.) But within a political social system predicated upon white-male supremacy achieved through various forms of forced domination, all is actually working as intended. As Blair Imani highlighted, “these inequalities reveal that compensation is not exclusively based on the type of labor, but is also informed by how society values and devalues the person doing that labor.”9 It is too easy to perceive a parallel in terms of subject-matter composition within patriarchal histories and the rigorous reaffirming of consequential events as—almost exclusively—masculine activities.
This inequitable representation within the historical narrative—the gender data gap as Caroline Criado Perez coined it—often appears as a “female-shaped ‘absent presence.’”10 A presence at the margins of the stories which seek to uphold the declared gender-biased virtues of the dominant culture. As women’s labor is inherently inferior—or devalued—in this patriarchal social context, we continue to navigate a misogynistic reality not dissimilar to that of our medieval predecessors. A reality which willfully omits women while obscuring—sometimes wholly excluding—their contributions to public affairs which catalyze cultural change.11 A reality which implies that the very presence of women is delegitimatizing to the idea of development.12 A reality simply unwilling to allow women subjecthood within their own stories.
In 1381, England had been at war with France for forty-some years. A bloody tug-of-war over ancestral continental lands expensive in both coin and spirit which fractured the very core of civility within both nations. In the late 1340s—after having experienced years of devastating famine and a dwindling population of able-bodied agricultural workers lost to the crucibles of war—England was very slowly then all at once struck down by the Great Mortality. A pestilence so vicious that it brought with it a mortality rate, on average, of at least 50%.13 Today we call this pandemic the Black Death due to the dark, pus-filled painful buboes which would appear on some of its victim, though that would not have been a name those experiencing it would have recognized.14 To them, this great mortality was the reckoning of an aggrieved deity, a punishment for sins of the self and of the father.15
As the population quickly diminished in the most horrific way, laborers found themselves in a position to bargain for wages for perhaps the first time since the abolition of Roman enslavement and the institution of medieval serfdom—a social change which threatened to upend the established hierarchy which privileged the few at the cost of the many. A poll-tax imposed by Richard II’s government in 1380 to deter this hierarchical disruption, which “pressed most hardly on the poorest”, acted as kindling to the aforementioned flames that would rage throughout the realm the following year.16
These taxes followed a string of ordinances imposed by the prior government to regulate commerce after the shock of the plague. First Edward III, Richard’s granddad and predecessor, had issued labor ordinances in 1349 that required absolutely everybody over the age of fourteen to work—this included women that were: 1) already working, and 2) bearing the burden of domestic labor.17 In 1351, the Statute of Labourers sought to safeguard the wealth of the nobility by ensuring serfs would be acting illegally should they seek higher wages than those established in pre-plague times.18 These governmental constraints were meant to curtail the growing wealth found in every facet of the medieval caste system as they were observably disrupting the strict binary of serf/lord and the resources available to each, respectively.
Enforced sumptuary laws sought to maintain the oppressive reality of the lowest classes. Should wealth be acquired due to the changing economic opportunities, the revenue was unable to be used to improve livelihood through higher quality fashions, goods, or foods. This ensured continued dependence of the lower classes upon the nobility in terms of needs met, and did so in perpetuity. Depriving future privileges, wholly dispelling the dream of a better tomorrow. This served to handcuff individuals to the status of their birth or marriage, while dispossessing future generations of achieving a higher social position, ultimately reaffirming ‘preordainment’ through strict litigation.19 Though parts of Europe would see an increase in birthrates post-plague years, England would not.20 As John Aberth observed, “collectively, these labor laws represent a conservative reaction on the part of Europe’s ruling elite: a bold attempt to turn back the economic clock to a time before the Black Death.”21
The same histories which exalt individual men as the engineers of a progressive present often frame the experiences of serfdom as the accepted, unquestioned social order of medieval England. An order lived and died by. A framing that not only serves patriarchal objectives, but does so by misrepresenting the masses through the telling of a single story.22 We tend to view the prosperity of a place through the wealth of the vassal, but what of the community’s worth of work which privileged that lord to wealth? What of the communal well-being, the commonweal? The Great Rumour of 1377 that only just predates the Peasants Revolt of 1381—another misnomer—indicates not just deviation from assumed acceptance, but a recognition of irreducible humanity and longed for equality often overlooked when considering early examples of wide-scale class solidarity against a purposefully oppressive system.23
Witnessing these events from across the sea, fourteenth century French chronicler Froissart noted “in England there is a much greater number than elsewhere of such men who are obliged to serve the prelates and the nobles.”24 Though the language is exclusionary of women, they create what Sylvia Federico calls The Imaginary Society, both included but not accounted for historically—as women were, of course, also obliged to serve the patriarchal hierarchy under fear of punishment.25 And as this was a largely literacy-denied population, their experiences were represented by those not just outside of their class, but by the very profiteers of their oppression.
Geoffrey Brereton translating Jean Froissart’s paraphrasing of John Ball—woof—tells us that the “crack-brained priest” stood boldly in front of an assembly preaching loudly:
“Good people, things cannot go right in England and never will, until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same. In what way are those whom we call lords greater masters than ourselves? How have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in bondage? If we all spring from a single father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they claim or prove that they are lords more than us, except by making us produce and grow the wealth which they spend?”26
Often praised by modern historians for his early equanimity, Ball’s ideal future likely maintained the notion of male supremacy characteristic of a patriarchal construct—the very thing responsible for his own oppression! His recognition of women’s labor alongside men’s is nothing more than an observation drawn from lived experience, not a call for a future beyond oppressive patriarchal hierarchies.
On June 14th, 1381, London was awash with noise and nervous energy, a roaring much like the flames that threateningly raged throughout the city. Sources reveal that corresponding proclamations read throughout town encouraged:
“Each person having an action of right to title to recover any debts or inheritances should come to our Lord the King at the Tower of London and show evidences of their right and upon this justice should be done without delay.”27
The city was intentionally chaotic.
An open invitation to cause systemic disruption.
After hearing many such proclamations similar enough in nature to hint at some level of assumed authenticity, Margery Tawny—a widow and executrix of her late husband’s testament—wandered out onto the street and allowed herself to be swept away by the undulating tides of serfs seeking retribution.28 Though not a rebel herself, Margery’s participation placed her dangerously close to Froissart’s “bad people”, and the outcome of these events would end in devastation for Margery. She would lose her eldest son to an act of patriarchal violence via vengeance at the hands of the one she held accused.29
For over six hundred years the women of the 1381 revolt played the supportive role enforced by patriarchal culture. A position rigorously reaffirmed within the historical narrative by historians unwilling to disrupt the “hegemony of the history of the powerful.”30 As Sylvia Federico’s 2001 deep dive into King’s Bench, Chancery, Common Bench, and Justices Itinerant rolls starkly revealed, “from the absence of study comes the absence of women in history.”31 Women were to be found within every role of the revolution: witness, victim, supporter, rebel, leader. “Quite simply, the roll's inclusion of women's names suggests that, in the legal discourse following the revolt, royal officials could imagine women acting as perpetrators in it.”32
Margery Starre, Matilda Aleyn, Katherin Gamen, Alice Wymond, Agnes Stevenage, Johanna Ferrour, Margery Tawny, and the countless women lost to the identity stripping historical qualifier of wife-of attest to a more fluid middle ages than the strict public/private binary of patriarchal histories. And though the women of 1381 were not silent, the chroniclers of the day were, intentionally excluding the contributions of women in favor of the patriarchal narrative. As feminist historian Judith Bennett observed, “it is by now quite obvious that this long history of marginalization decisively affected women’s self-perceptions, attitudes and group actions, even though it only recently has been properly “named.” Denied any knowledge of their history, women were also denied heroines and role models. In the absence of stories of resistance and opposition, women internalized the ideology of patriarchy.”33
It was not the women of the privileged class—who already tend to represent the imagined woman of the middle ages due to their proximity to patriarchal power—fighting for a more equitable England, instead it was those that were forced to endure the intersecting oppressions of both class and gender in a punitive hierarchical reality. The Everywoman.
As the women of 1381 affirm, there is no one way to participate in a revolutionary moment. The story of revolution is never the story of just one person, your very presence is the historical narrative. To borrow from Sylvia Federico one last time: “great rebellions do not occur through the concerted efforts of the few but, rather, when the diverse interests of the many coincide in common, if not strictly related, action.”34
To move beyond these oppressive realities, we must move beyond patriarchy, and to do so we are required to acknowledge the subjugation imposed upon us all. A better tomorrow requires your participation.
This essay would not be possible without the deep research and thought of Sylvia Federico — I am indebted to her and the gift of knowledge she shared with the world.
Federico, Sylvia. “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2001, pp. 159–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070734.
My words here, anachronisms et al., for the drama.
Froissart’s Chronicles as translated by Geoffrey Brereton.
Federico, Sylvia. “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2001, pp. 159–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070734.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. 2014.
Federico, Sylvia. “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2001, pp. 159–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070734.
Imani, Blair. Read this to get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability & more. 2021.
Criado Perez, Caroline. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. 2019.
For better or for worse.
Re - omitting women:
If you want a later example, you can think of the Brooklyn Bridge here.
Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350. A Brief History with Documents. 2005.
Totaro, Rebecca. The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558-1603. Duquesne University Press. 2010.
As Petrarch lamented within Letters on Familiar Matters. May, 1349.
Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350. A Brief History with Documents. 2005.
Myers, A.R. England in the Late Middle Ages (1307-1536). Penguin Books. 1952.
Humphries, Jane, and Weisdorf, Jacob. “The Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 75, no. 2, 2015.
Hanawalt, Barbara A., "The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press. 2007.
Goldberg, P.J.P. Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c.1300-1520. 1992.
I wrote about how these levies impacted women here (a two part piece-please do look for part 2 at the end!):
At least not right away.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. 2014.
Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350. A Brief History with Documents. 2005.
A concept coined by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Faith, R.J., The 'great rumour' of 1377 and peasant ideology. Past and Present Society Conference, Wednesday, 1 July 1981, at the Geological Society of London. 1981.
Froissart’s Chronicles as translated by Geoffrey Brereton.
Federico, Sylvia. “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2001, pp. 159–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070734.
https://data.1381.online/projects_database/pr_sources_ro/?action=view&id=3751
Froissart’s Chronicles as translated by Geoffrey Brereton.
British National Archives: SC 8/76/3794 via The 1381 Project
Note Margery’s already legal/public facing role of executrix.
Froissart’s Chronicles as translated by Geoffrey Brereton.
https://www.1381.online/people_and_places/?story_id=10
Lerner, Gerda. Why History Matters: Life and Thought. 1997.
Federico, Sylvia. “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2001, pp. 159–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070734.
Ibid.
Bennett, Judith M. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. 2006.
Federico, Sylvia. “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2001, pp. 159–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070734.
This was so engrossing! And resonates down the centuries. Have you ever thought of writing a book about the women of 1381? Fiction or nonfiction. I can picture it so easily from the vividness of your writing.
Excellent article. In your discussion of the dislocation caused by the Plague I was reminded of something I ran across in my class on Medieval Europe back in the 70s. In one book I found a source that talked about women administering last rites to dying family members. My professor said it was probably "apocryphal", but I've often wondered about it. Have you run across anything like that?