importance, and in 1320 ‘the nation of Scots’ acknowledged in ‘The
Declaration of Arbroath’ that ‘this same kingdom and people’ had been
delivered from the hands of their enemies by their ‘most valiant prince,
king and lord, the lord Robert [Bruce]’—but went on to vow that, if
Robert I ever admitted the subjection of ‘our kingdom’ to the English,
they would drive him out as ‘a subverter of his own right and ours’.^39
But it was in England in the reign of Richard II (1377–99), that
military failure combined with a king’s high idea of his prerogatives to
fuel the most bitter argument about the relationship of the king to the
other estates in the status regni, an argument that showed to the full
how government was represented and criticized as ‘the state of the
king’. Still only fourteen years of age, Richard was confronted in 1381
by the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, one of a number of popular risings in
fourteenth-century Europe provoked by war, plague, and demographic
crisis, which showed that ideas of political rights were spreading beyond
the aristocracy and the urban patriciates. Ecclesiastical chroniclers of
the revolt attributed some extraordinary demands to Wat Tyler, the
leader of the labourers and artisans who marched on London to show
the king that they were ‘the true commons’, not the people in parliament
who consented to the poll taxes, and to kill the king’s ministers and the
lawyers of the judicial commissions which had attempted to enforce the
taxes. These demands were: that ‘there should be no law except the law
of Winchester’ (the Statute of 1285 which had placed the obligation of
peace-keeping on the local communities themselves); that rank should
be respected throughout society but only the king exercise lordship; that
there should be only one bishop in England, and the property of church-
men, beyond what they needed for their personal sustenance, be
confiscated and shared between their parishioners; and that there should
be no more serfdom in the land but all ‘be free and of one condition’.
Displaying a taste for self-dramatization, King Richard placed himself
before the rebels at Mile End and undertook to do justice on any
traitors they brought to him, thus giving them licence to go away and
behead the chancellor (who was the archbishop of Canterbury), the
treasurer, and other royal servants; and again at Smithfield, where he
promised ‘all he could fairly grant them, saving to himself the regality
of the crown’.^40
Five months after the collapse of the revolt a parliament was called
to Westminster to consider the amendment of the notable defects it had
shown in ‘the state, peace and good government of the realm’. Criticism
264 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^39) The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland,i, ed. T. Thomson and C. Innes (London: Record
Commission, 1844), 119; Memoranda de Parliamento,ed. F. W. Maitland (London: Rolls ser.
1893), 168–232; A. A. M. Duncan, The Nation of the Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath
(1320)(London: Historical Association, 1970).
(^40) The Anonimalle Chronicle, 139, 145–7: tr. EHD iv. 135–7.