ford,
where a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in vengeance for
a brutal outrage on his daughter. The county at once rose in arms.
Canterbury, where "the whole town was of their mind," threw open its gates
to the insurgents who plundered the Archbishop's palace and dragged John
Ball from his prison. A hundred thousand Kentishmen gathered round Walter
Tyler of Essex and John Hales of Malling to march upon London. Their
grievance was mainly a political one. Villeinage was unknown in Kent. As
the peasants poured towards Blackheath indeed every lawyer who fell into
their hands was put to death; "not till all these were killed would the
land enjoy its old freedom again," the Kentishmen shouted as they fired the
houses of the stewards and flung the rolls of the manor-courts into the
flames. But this action can hardly have been due to anything more than
sympathy with the rest of the realm, the sympathy which induced the same
men when pilgrims from the north brought news that John of Gaunt was
setting free his bondmen to send to the Duke an offer to make him Lord and
King of England. Nor was their grievance a religious one. Lollardry can
have made little way among men whose grudge against the Archbishop of
Canterbury sprang from his discouragement of pilgrimages. Their discontent
was simply political; they demanded the suppression of the poll-tax and
better government; their aim was to slay the nobles and wealthier clergy,
to take the king into their own hands, and pass laws which should seem good
to the Commons of the realm. The whole population joined the Kentishmen as
they marched along, while the nobles were paralyzed with fear. The young
king--he was but a boy of sixteen--addressed them from a boat on the river;
but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of Archbishop Sudbury to
allow him to land kindled the peasants to fury, and with cries of "Treason"
the great mass rushed on London. On the 13th of June its gates were flung
open by the poorer artizans within the city, and the stately palace of John
of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses
of the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze. But the insurgents, as they
proudly boasted, were "seekers of truth and justice, not thieves or
robbers," and a plunderer found carrying off a silver vessel from the sack
of the Savoy was flung with his spoil into the flames. Another body of
insurgents encamped at the same time to th