heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

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178 THE HERALDRY OF YORK MINSTER.
" five shillings and eightpence on all religious persons," and " every person,
" man or woman, fourpence to the King."
The great disturbance arose from his accepting " from divers courtiers,
" desirous to enrich themselves with other men's goods, a great summe of
" money for the farme of that which they gather," and which they proceeded
to collect by " handling the people very sore and uncourteously."
This was resented by the people of Essex ;
and Sir Thomas Bampton
being sent down to enquire into the matter, they took all the " clerks of
" the said Thomas Bampton, and chopped off their heads, which they carried
" before them on poles."
At the same time, a certain
Sir Simon Burley excited the wrath of the
people at Gravesend by an act of cruel extortion on one of their number,
whom he carried off and shut up in Rochester Castle, which the populace
at once assaulted, and released the man of Gravesend.
And having then elected as their leaders Jacques or Jack Straw, a
second priest, and a certain Wat Tyler, of Maidstone (a man described by
Walsingham " Vir versutus et
magno seusu preditus "}, they marched to
Canterbury, forced the mayor, bailiffs, and commons of the town to swear
that they would "be true to King Richard and the lawful commons of
" England," and proceeded towards London.
The spark of rebellion, thus kindled, was fanned into a conflagration
by an event which happened almost at the same time, at Dartford, where
one of the tax-collectors grossly insulted the daughter of one John Tyler
(a kinsman, I conclude, of Wat), who being hastily summoned by the
neighbours from a house in the town which he was tiling, rushed home
with his " lathing-staffe in his hand," and when the collector answered him
with " stoute words and strake at him, he smote him with his lathing-staffe
" that the brains flew out of his head."
Then the tumult burst all bounds, and the excited people surged on
towards London, joining their brethren from Canterbury on Blackheath.
The contagion spread throughout the country like wildfire in Sussex,
Hertford, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, &c. marked with those
unreasonable excesses inseparable from such spasmodic movements.
"They took in hand," says Stowe, "to behead all men of law, as well
" apprentices as utter barristers and old justices, with all the jurors of the
" country whom they could get into their hands. They spared none whom
" they thought to be learned ;
especially if they found any to have pen and
" ink, they pulled off his hood, and all with one voice of '
crying Hale
'
" '
him out and cut off his head !
" Pinched, ground, and starved, as they had been in the name of the
" law, they
fell at once on the instruments of their oppression." Froude.
The destruction of all records and the confiscation of all property,
ecclesiastical and lay, completed their programme. And so from all parts