‘Grace for the rebels’: the role of the royal pardon in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381

Abstract

This article focuses on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as a means of examining some of the late medieval assumptions about the nature of royal mercy. Rather than adding to the weight of scholarship on the causes and characteristics of the Revolt, this article discusses the views on mercy ('grace for the rebels') 1 that were reportedly expressed by all parties during the course of the rebellion. The first section analyses the chronicles and their references to discussion of pardon and mercy during the revolt itself. The second section examines the role of the royal pardon in the subsequent judicial proceedings in the Home Counties d who were the first recipients of pardon, and how were they able to secure royal grace? The final section then discusses the formulation of the pardon in the autumn parliament, and the debate surrounding the course of government policy in the wake of revolt on an unprecedented scale. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Crown and commons shared a common language of pardon, and understood that by framing their discussion in terms of royal grace, they were alluding to a particular kind of idealised relationship between the king and his subjects.On 13 December 1381 a schedule of pardon for all those involved in the recent insurrection was put before parliament. Richard II authorised this grant of royal mercy, and in so doing he offered grace to all his subjects, both those accused of rebellion and those who had remained loyal. E-mail address: helen.lacey@mansfield.ox.ac.uk 1 The parliament rolls of medieval England [hereafter PROME], ed. C. Given-Wilson et al. (CD-ROM. Scholarly Digital Editions, Leicester, 2005), 'Richard II: parliament of 1381, text and translation', item 30. I would like to thank the audience of the Oxford Medieval History Seminar for their advice on an early version of this paper, and Mark Ormrod for his helpful comments on this essay in draft form. 0304-4181/$ -see front matter Ó

Review of periodical literature published in 2008

“…Also in terms of local and regional office‐holding, Holford presents information on the office‐holders of the liberty of Durham in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and provides an important listing for those engaged in prosopographical work on Durham and its wider region in the period. Lacey uses the judicial proceedings following the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to consider how the common understanding of mercy and of pardon helped underline a general assumption regarding the relationship between the king and his subjects. Jenks explores a range of potential sources in order to reconstruct the work of the sheriff's court in London for one year in the second half of the fifteenth century, and finds that the search of writs, petitions, and other material flowing from the court, even though its own records are not extant, allows a great deal of information to be gleaned about its activity, personnel, and those who used it as litigants.…”