ck, but when
Richard, riding out into the middle of the square, claimed that he and not
Tyler was their King, and bade them follow him into the fields towards
Islington, the great mass, convinced that Richard was honestly their
friend, obeyed. At nightfall they were scattered.

Wat Tyler's body was taken into the Priory, and his head placed on London
Bridge.

Walworth hastily gathered troops together, and the leader of the rebels
being dead, the nobles recovered their courage.

The rising was over; the people without leaders were as sheep for the
slaughter. Jack Straw was taken in London and hanged without the formality
of a trial; and on June 22nd Tresilian, the new chief justice, went on a
special assize to try the rebels, and "showed mercy to none and made great
havock." The King's charters and promises were declared null and void when
Parliament met, and some hundreds of peasants were hanged in various parts
of the country.

John Ball and Grindcobbe were hanged at St. Albans on July 15th, John Wraw
and Geoffrey Litster suffered the same fate.

All that Wat Tyler and the peasants had striven for was lost; but the
rising was not quite in vain. For one thing, the poll-tax was stopped, and
the end of villeinage was hastened.

The great uprising was the first serious demonstration of the English
people for personal liberty. "It taught the King's officers and gentle
folks that they must treat the peasants like men if they wished them to
behave quietly, and it led most landlords to set free their bondsmen, and
to take fixed money payments instead of uncertain services from their
customary tenants, so that in a hundred years' time there were very few
bondsmen left in England."[40]

JACK CADE, CAPTAIN OF KENT, 1450

To understand the character and importance of the rising of the men of Kent
under Jack Cade in 1450, the first thing to be done is to clear the mind of
Shakespeare's travesty in _King Henry VI._, Part 2. In the play the name of
Cade has been handed down in obloquy, and all that he and his followers
aimed at caricatured out of recognition. The part that Jack Cade really
played in national affairs has no likeness to the low comedy performance
imagined by Shakespeare.

It was a popular rising in 1450, but it was not a peasant revolt. Men of
substance in the county rallied to Cade's banner, and in many parishes in
Kent the village constable was employed to enrol willing recruits in the
army of disaffection