The Crofter and The Laird by John McPhee

 1969

It is said on Colonsay that if you sneeze in Balnahard people will hear  moments later in Machrins that you have pneumonia, and soon in Oronsay that you are dead.  Nothing electronic has yet been developed that could outmode the gossip circuitry of this small island. People say that twenty years ago, when the population was two hundred and fifty, the gossip was extremely intense, but now that the population is half of that the intensity has doubled, for each person’s turn comes up much more often. A good thing it is, too, for not the least of the results is sanity. There is apparently a point at which gossip can become so intensely commonplace that it is not only beyond hurting anybody but is, in fact, a release.

‘There is no mental illness on the island,’ the doctor said to me yesterday.
‘I think they are all mentally ill,’ said the doctor’s wife.
‘Not from a medical point of view,’ the doctor said. ‘You’ll never kill them with quietness.’

Sometimes eruptions are direct and brief. Two men were drinking side by side last night at the pub.

‘I know you think I’m a bastard,’ said one, touching his cap. The other said, ‘We’ll let that pass. I’ve not come here to discuss that.’
“I think it’s time we buried the hatchet.’
‘Yes, if I had one I’d bury it in your bloody head.’

 

These face-to-face salutes  are merely an intimation of what is said behind people’s backs. In a sense, every house, hill, barn and byre is a center of gossip, but there are several principal ones – The Shop, the post office, the potting shed at Kiloran Farm, and, above all others, the pub, which has no name and is in the rear of the inn in Scalasaig. What is said in these places  will frequently include a high proportion of factual correctness, but truth and fiction often seem to be riding the same sentence is such way that the one would be lonely without the other. A word of two will be said about almost everyone- ‘What Davidson fails to understand is that he is a foreigner here’- but far in excess of all competition the predominant subject of conversation is the laird, owner of people’s houses, owner of the land they work. The laird is a point of focus, a determining presence, the god-head of a small religion. The laird is a young man with a large family, an advanced sense of humor, and a preoccupation with places other than Colonsay, but to the people of the island, where he spends his summers, he is the enigmatic embodiment of god and evil, hope and fear, keeper of the gate of Heaven an Hell, fate’s own fulcrum, overlord, landlord.

It is 10 P.M. and, in the pub, time to drink up. A notice on the wall says, ‘Under the provision of the Licensing Act, 1961, a period of ten minutes is allowed at the end of the morning and evening periods of permitted hours for thee consumption of alcoholic liquors purchased during such hours. It is an offense for customers to consume alcoholic liquors after this ten-minute period. Maximum penalty 100 pounds.

‘Ten minutes, gentlemen.’

‘The laird is an evil man in several senses of the word.’
‘As a boy, he took his sweets off and ate them by himself in the woods.”
‘That, I should say, is characteristic of him today.’

‘His brothers and sisters – they shared sweets with others.’

‘His father had more money than he has, but once you get past the third million, what’s money?
‘His grandmother had seven million.’

‘In her day, the money was still new. The first Baron Strathcona, the laird’s great-grandfather, was nothing more than an Aberdeenshire crofter’s son – a herd laddie in his tartan rags looking over cows. He went to Canada and sold firearms to the Indians – the old match-lock rifles.

 ‘And he got skins for the rifles-and for skins he got Colonsay, the finest island in the whole Hebrides.

‘The finest island in the whole Hebrides to get the bloody hell out of.’

Overhead, nailed on a wall, is a giant lobster claw, at least ten inches long. A sign behind the bar says, ‘Weights and Measures Act, 1963. Gin, rum, vodka, and whiskey are offered in quantities of 1/5 of a gill or multiples thereof.’
‘The laird has no time for islanders. His father’s attitude towards us was one of slight contempt. This one, I think, really hates our guts.’

‘I remember him saying once, ‘’When Daddy dies, things will change drastically.’ I never forgot it.”
‘If the old laird had lived forever, things would have been all right.’
‘The new one says he’s losing money. I have no idea where. He spends none on the island.’
‘He spent forty thousand pounds to restore his house in Bath.’
‘Och, it was a hundred and twenty thousand. That’s why he lets the island go to subsistence sums.’
‘He is the chairman of the Bath festival. He has no time for Colonay.’
’He doesn’t have the money you think he has. There are death duties, you know.’
.‘There are ways to circumvent them’
‘The old laird’s estate was only worth three hundred and sixty thousand pounds.”
“Och, three million six hundred thousand would be more like it.’
‘The laird is a Lloyd’s underwriter, and to be that you have to put down at least five hundred thousand.’

‘The old laird loved the wild geese, the graylag geese. Thousands of them stop here. He hoped they would breed here. No one dared to shoot a wild goose. The old laird would go around at night saying, ‘Did you hear a shot?’

‘The old laird himself was a good shot.’
‘The new laird doesn’t do much in the way of shooting. He’s not a good shot. Before Calum the Gamekeeper became redundant, they were out shooting snipes, and the laird kept missing, and he complained to Calum –‘I’m not hitting anything,’ he said. And Calum said, ‘And I don’t think you will, Milord, until you start using both barrels. The shells only cost eight pence a piece.’

“Mean, parsimonious, close-fisted is the laird.’
‘He’s a great yachtsman.’

‘A very good yachtsman.’
‘Seventy-five percent of the time he’s on the island is spent mucking about in his boat.’
‘When he goes to Kiloran Bay, if there’s three people there he calls in Blackpool.’
“He thinks he’s the cat’s pajamas.’

‘He’s a very vain man.’

’Mind you, he’s a broth of a boy.’

’A blue-eyed boy.’
‘Lady Strathcona is of Norman aristocracy – well diluted, I believe.’
‘Her grandmother was a housemaid.’
‘She’s of penurious stock, blue-blooded but not moneyed.’
‘And what have they done for the island? They have erected a sheep fank, and repaired two fences.’
They’ve let it seep out that the island can bloody well fend for itself.’

‘The factor has spread it around.’
‘Redundancies.’
’People in panic stations.’

’Drink up, please.’
‘People complained about the old laird, too. Let us not forget that. They said he did what he pleased. He was paying for it’
‘This one isn’t paying for it.’
‘His father spoiled the people on this island. He didn’t want industry. He wanted thee island unspoiled. When people were out of work, he took them on at the estate and paid them for doing damn all.’
‘Quite frankly, when this laird took over it was too late.’
‘People have been depending too much on Laird Strathcona. We have lost our sense of independence. There is too much soft living – National Healthy, Unemployment. You get money for sitting on your backside. It adds up to a loss of independence.’
‘Lord Strathcona is a trained economist. The factor is one of the ablest factors in Scotland. We tenants sometimes-‘
‘The estate had two factors for a long time. I feel sorry for the laird who has not got enough sense to have one factor instead of two.’

‘That’s where the money is pouring out. If the laird wants to save money, he should get rid of the other factor as well.’
‘We tenants sometimes have a biased view of it all. The economic problem is people. If you get rid of people- all kinds of people- you are tree-quarters of the way to solving the problem. More money is going out than is coming in. They have got to get rid of the human problem –use professional labor instead of salary labor. Strathcona has done nothing diabolical. He has just got rid of the human problem.’

‘He’s a feudal lord. You must remember that. He has responsibilities.’
“Good night.’
‘Good night.’

‘Sleep well.’

‘Bye-bye just now. .  .  .

A third of all the rental income derived by the laird from the crofts, farms and other properties of Colonsay goes to pay the salary of David Wardhaugh, the present factor. Wardhaugh lives in Forfar, in County Angus, and each month when the time for Rent Day approaches, he drives across the breadth of Scotland, through Strathmore and Strath Earn and on through Argyll, riding the Lochel out to Colonsay, where he collects the rents, listens to complaints, and tends the flame of the feudal system. Inevitably known as Wart Hog, Wardlough does not deserve such facile approbation, for he is apparently an empathetic man, endowed with a strong awareness of the history of his line of work in Scotland and a desire to be as just as he must be realistic. His mission is plain enough. The laird simply has no wish to be the animated exchequer of an insular, private, picayune welfare state – or, to give the situation its full setting, a welfare state within a welfare state. The factor makes recommendations on the revision of rents and the renewal of leases and, particularly, on the creation of redundancies, and sooner or later provokes hostility in almost every part of the island. He has the personal advantage of not being resident on Colonsay, and when he is present he keeps to himself at Colonsay House, the laird’s place, in Kiloran, eating his meals alone and retiring early. He is a heavyset man with thinning hair ansd a manner of rumpled tweed- pleasant, practical, somewhat didactic. He knows an anachronism when he sees one, even in a mirror. Of both the actions and  the responsibilities of the laird, he says, ‘Lord Strathcona is doing what the government should be doing.’

Rent Day approaches now, and this time both the factor and the laird are on the island,. The people, nostalgic for anything having to do with the old laird, are particularly nostalgic for Rent Day as it was when he was alive. The old laird and Findlay the Factor used to sit at a table in the inn, and as each tenant –each crofter, cotter, farmer- came the table with his money, the laird would say, ‘And how are you?’
 “Very well,’ said the tenant. ‘Very well, thank you, Milord.’

‘You are looking fit,’ said the laird.
‘Thank you, Milord.’

’Very fit indeed.’

Then the tenant would in all likelihood proceed to give the laird news of a broken window, a leaking roof, a stovepipe disengaged. The laird never argued. All complaints went into Findlay’s notebook, for attention. After any request at all, the laird would say, “Right, Findlay, you look into that.’ And a month or six later the tenant would say, ‘Milord, about the stovepipe . . .’ And the laird would say, ‘Findlay, why have you not done anything about it? ‘ And Findlay would make another note in his book,.

Why these mimes are remembered with nostalgia is obscure, but in part it is because of the gentile and graceful manner  with which the laird always brought of the scene, and in part because he had on the table a bottle of sherry and a bottle of whiskey. All who came to pay had their choice of drinks when they had done so. ‘Rent Day was a good day, a social day,’ one tenant –the storekeeper, Alistair Allan- said, describing it to me. ‘You took your glass and you rose and said, ‘My respects, Milord,’  and you drank your whiskey – ‘a drop of himself’- as Skye men say.’ When all had paid their rents and had their drams, they left the inn together and went around the island, stopping at each house for a few more drops of himself. Everyone got pretty full, as an islander would put it, and Rent Day, always a Saturday, finally ended at about five o’clock Sunday morning.

There is much less drinking now, in the new era of austerity, and Rent Day is held at the estate office in Colonsay House. I have asked a considerable number of islanders if they intend to be there this time, and almost to a man they have said, ‘och, no, I can’t be bothered, I can’t be bothered, I’ll just mail in the check and be done with it.’ – or some close variation of that theme. The hour has come, however, and in the courtyard at the side of Colonsay House they are all present. To a man, they are impeccably dressed. They wear ties. The hair of some is wett from brushing. Their cheeks shine. In appearance, they are a church congregation, but in number they are more than the minister is accustomed to seeing. Donald Gibbie, Donald Garvard, Andrew Oronsay. There are no absentees. One by one, cap in hand, they go in to see the laird.

 

‘Good morning, Milord.’

The laird is younger than nearly all the men who have come to pay him their money and respects. He is good-looking, tall, athletic, a bit heavy in the cheek, with long swept-back hair, amusement in his eyes, and the accents of Eton and Cambridge in his voice.

‘And how are you? he asks. ‘You’re looking fit.’
“Thank you, Milord.’
‘Fit indeed.’
‘Milord, I thought I might mention that I have a fence down, and . . . ‘
”Wardlaugh, make a note of that.’

This is the Past by Patrick Radden Keefe

 

Pages 298-300

 

Dolours Price’s aspirations for a writing career had not amounted to much. She never did publish her memoir. But for a time, she went back to school, enrolling in a law course at Trinity College, in Dublin. To the young students in the program, Price cut an unusual figure, an older eccentric who wore brightly colored hats and would sit in lectures with her head cocked quizzically to one side. She didn’t raise her hand before offering her own interjections, and she took pleasure in amiably heckling the lecturers . . .


Price clung to her acid wit. She could seem, at times, to marinate in it. But there were signs, also, the she was haunted. She felt as though she spent a great deal of time rummaging around in her own head, coming up with bits and pieces of her own past. She was troubled by her experiences as a young woman – by things she had done to others, and to herself. Many of her old comrades were suffering from PTSD, flashing back to nightmarish encounters from decades earlier, waking with a start in a cold sweat. From time to time, when Price was driving her car with her sons in the back seat, she would glance in the rear view mirror and, instead of Danny or Oscar, see her dead comrade Joe Lynskey staring back at her. One day, during a lecture at Trinity on political prisoners, Price stood up in a fury and began to rattle off names of republican hunger strikers, before storming out of the classroom. She never came back.

To Price, The Good Friday Agreement felt like an especially personal double cross. ‘The settlement betrayed what she had been born into,’ her friend Eamonn McCann recalled” It had a more intense and deep-seated effect on Dolours than it did on many other people.’ She had set bombs and robbed banks and seen friends die and nearly died herself, in the expectation that these exertions would finally achieve the national liberation for which generations of her family fought. ‘For what Sinn Fein has achieved today, I would not have missed a good breakfast,’ she said in an interview with Irish radio. ‘Volunteers didn’t only die,’ she pointed out. ‘Volunteers had to kill as well, you know?’

There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury’, a notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done in wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct. This sense of grievance was exacerbated by the fact  that the man who steered republicanism on the path to peace was her own erstwhile friend and commanding officer, Gerry Adams. Adams had given her orders, orders she had faithfully obeyed, but now he appeared to be disavowing the armed struggle in general, and Dolours in particular. It filled her with a terrible fury.

At a republican commemoration in Country Mayo in 2001, she stood up an announced that it was ‘too much’ for her to listen to people say that they had never been in the IRA. ‘Gerry Adams was my commanding officer,’ she exclaimed. This sort of outspokenness was not welcomed by Sinn Fein, and on more than one occasion, stern men came to tell Price to quiet down.. But I Sein Fein  had a conspicuous devotion to message control, this only intensified Price’s anger. As the IRA moved toward a peaceful strategy during the 1990s, various armed splinter groups had formed, some of which were committed to further violence. Price occasionally attended meetings of these groups, but she was not a joiner. “What are you going to get out of going back to war?’ she would ask them.


pages 376- 379

In some other political party, in some other place, the arrest of a politician in a cold-case investigation involving the notorious murder and secret burial of a widowed mother of ten would more than likely mean the swift end of a political career. But Gerry Adams was a special case. Even as Sein Fein had thrived as a political party, not just in Northern Ireland but in the Republic and achieved stature and influence beyond the most ambitious imaginings of its leaders, the party’s fortunes still seemed tied, inextricably, to those of its charismatic president. Sinn Fein had plenty of young, polished representatives who, having grown up after the worst of the Troubles were over, bore no compromised taint of paramilitary violence. This new cohort did not lack for ambition. But they were unwilling, or unable, to shuffle the old men of the IRA off the stage. When it emerged that Adams  had effectively covered for his pedophile brother, nobody in his party breathed a word, in public, that was less than supportive. Sinn Fein still retain an unmatched capacity to project the appearance of a unified front, and the leadership now argued that the arrest of Gerry Adams was nothing short of an attack on the party itself.

Overnight, a team of artists painted a new mural on the Falls Road, depicting the smiling Adams alongside the words PEACEMAKER, LEADER, VISIONARY. At a rally to unveil the mural Martin McGuinness announced that the arrest was ‘politically biased’ He cited upcoming local government and EU elections in the coming week and suggested that the timing of Adam’s humiliation was designed to hurt Sinn Fein’s electoral prospects. McGuinness blamed ‘an embittered rump of the old RUC’ that still persisted in the police department and now was out to ‘settle old scores at whatever the political cost.’ With Divis Tower visible in the distance, hundreds of supporters milled around, holding placards that read DEFEND THE PEACE PROCESS, RELEASE GERRY ADAMS, above a photo alongside Nelson Mandela.

While McGuinness delivered his remarks, a great bear of a man stood at his elbow. The man had close-cropped gray hair, a high forehead, and a knit brow, and he stood chewing gum, holding the script from which McGuiness was reading. It was Bobby Storey, a long time IRA enforcer who was known affectionately, in republican circles, as Big Bobby. Given all the rhetoric about how Gerry Adams was getting antagonized for being such a peacemaker, Big Bobby  was a discordant presence at the occasion.

Storey had joined the IRA as a teenager, in the early 1970s, and ultimately served twenty years in prison. After the peace process, he became the chair of Sinn Fein in Belfast, but he was often described as the IRA’s top spymaster. In fact, he was reputed to have been the architect of the break-in at the Castlereagh barracks, in 2002. Storey was also widely believed to have been involved in another heist, the Northern Bank robbery, in which thieves made off with twenty-six million pounds. It was the largest bank robbery in the history of the United Kingdom at the time. And it was the timing of the heist that proved most significant: the bank was robbed on December 2004, years after the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA no longer needed money to but weapons. In fact, at the time the robbery happened, the group was giving up its weapons, the decommissioning process overseen by Father Reid was at that point almost complete. For the critics of Sinn Fein, the robbery solidified the impression that the IRA had morphed into a mafia organization. ‘Call me old fashioned if you like, but there used to be standards,’ Dolours Price wrote in the aftermath of the robbery. ‘The War is over, we are told . . . .so what is all this money needed for?’

Big Bobby was a close confident of Adam’s. But he had the mien of a thug. Standing in front of the mural, he took the microphone and bellowed about the arrogance that might prompt authorities to ‘dare touch our party leader.’ His indignation rising, Storey shouted, ’We have a message for the British government, the Irish government, for cabal that’s out there.’ Then he said, ‘We ain’t gone away, you know.’

To anyone in Belfast who heard those words, the echo was unmistakable. Storey was quoting, quite intentionally, one of the most famous sound bites of the Troubles: the moment, nineteen years earlier, when Adams was interrupted during a speech by heckler who shouted, ‘Bring back the IRA!’ and Adams responded, ‘They haven’t gone away, you know.’ Hearing those words from Big Bobby, Michael; McConville felt a chill. The McConville children had been pushing to get access to the Boston College tapes, and had felt gratified by the arrest of Gerry Adams. Yet here was what seemed like an unambiguous threat.


Mackers, too, saw pure menace in the remark. ‘He didn’t mean Sinn Fein hadn’t gone away,’ he said. ‘He meant the IRA.’ To the people who had participated in the Belfast project, the message was clear. “I don’t even care about Sinn Fein and the political process. I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck,’ Ricky O’Rawe said. ‘All I care about is the truth.’ Yet Storey was informing those who might tell their tales that they had crossed not only Gerry Adams, but the IRA. To O’Rawe the city suddenly felt unsafe. The IRA itself itself wouldn’t necessarily need to sanction some actions against him. With rhetoric like Storey’s, it could be some kid, heeding the call to arms, looking to please the leadership, itching to earn his spurs.


Pages 383-385

In the fall of 2015, Theresa Villiers, the secretary of state  for Northern Ireland, released a report about paramilitary activity, which had been by the PSNI and British intelligence. ‘All the main paramilitary groups operating during the period of the Troubles remain in existence,’ the report announced, specifying that this included the Provisional IRA. The Provos continued to function, albeit in ’much reduced form,’ and still had access to weapons. Big Bobby Storey was right: they hadn’t gone away.

Gerry Adams dismissed the report as ‘nonsense’. But in the view of rank and file Provos, the IRA’s Army Council – the seven- member leadership body that for decades directed the armed struggle- continues to control not just the IRA, but also Sinn Fein, ‘with an overarching strategy. Secretly, behind the scenes, the army was still calling the shots. The report was careful to indicate that the organization was no longer engaged in violence, and now had a ‘wholly political focus.’ Even so, as one columnist in The Irish Times suggested, it seemed to reinforce ‘the notion of men and women in balaclavas running the political show.

Nearly two decades had passed since the Good Friday Agreement, and Northern Ireland was now peaceful, apart from the occasional dissident attack. Yet the  society seemed as divided as ever. The borders between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods were still inscribed in the concertina wire and steel of the so-called peace walls that vein the city, like fissures in a block of marble. In fact, there were more peace walls than there had ever been at the height of the Troubles. These towering structures maintained some degree of calm by physically separating the city’s populations, as if they were animals in a zoo. But the walls weres still tagged with rune-like slurs –K. A. T.,  ‘Kill all Taigs,’ a derogatory term for Catholics, on the one side; K. A. H., for ‘Kill All Huns,’ a reference to Protestants, on the other.

The center of Belfast seemed bustling, almost cosmopolitan. It was dominated by the same chain stores – Waterstones, Caffe Nero, Kiehl’s – that you would find in any other small, prosperous European city.  The local film production facility, Titanic Studios, had become famous as the place where the television show Game of Thrones was filmed. There was even a popular tourist attraction, the Troubles Tour, in which ex-combatant cabdrivers guided visitors to flashpoints from the bad years, decoding the ubiquitous murals that conjured famous battles, martyrs, and gunman. The effect was to make the Troubles seem like distant history.

But the truth was that most residents still lived in neighborhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90% of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated elementary schools. Bus stops in some parts of Belfast were informally designated Catholic or Protestant, and people would walk an extra block or two to wait at a stop where they wouldn’t fear being hassled. Hundreds of Union Jacks still fluttered in Protestant neighborhoods, while Catholic areas were often decked out with the tricolor, or with Palestinian flags – a gesture of solidarity but also a signal that, even now, many republicans in the North regarded themselves as an occupied people. For a time, the American diplomat Richard Haas chaired a series of multiparty negotiations about unresolved issues in the peace process. But the talks foundered, in no small measure, over the issue of flags. Tribalism and its trappings remained so potent in Belfast that the various sides could not agree on how to govern the display of regalia. When the Belfast City Council voted, in 2012, to limit the number of days that the Union Jack could be raised above City Hall, protestors tried to storm the building, and riots erupted throughout the city, with unionist demonstrators throwing bricks and petrol bombs.

In light of this ongoing discord, the  Villiers report made one fascinating observation. ‘The existence and cohesion of these paramilitary groups since their cease-fires has played an important role in enabling the transition from extreme violence to political progress,’  it asserted. This was a  counterintuitive finding, and a subtle enough point that it was overlooked in the storm of press coverage that greeted the report. The continued existence of republican and loyalist outfits didn’t hurt the peace process – but helped it. It was because of the ‘authority’ conferred by these persisting hierarchies that such groups were able to ‘influence, restrain and manage’ their members, the report maintained, noting that there had been only ‘limited indication of dissent to date,’ which were quickly dealt with ‘by the leadership.’

To Brendan Hughes or Dolours Price or Marian Price or Anthony McIntyre, Sinn Fein’s tendency to brook no opposition seemed self-interested, illiberal and cruel. But perhaps, as the  Villiers report appeared to suggest, it was only through such ruthless discipline and the insistence that Irish republican must be a monolith, with zero tolerance for outliers –that Adams and the people around him had managed to keep the lid on a combustible situation, and prevent the war from reigniting.

 

The Language of God and the People by Eric Vuillard

After less than a year, Muntzer was forced to leave Zwickau. He then went to Bohemia. The place was in ferment. They were still reeling from the Great Schism. Heresy was rampant. A yearning for purity swept over the land, galvanizing the masses, cut short the tired old chatter. Suddenly, the Spirit entered people’s homes. At night, frogs croaked an unnameable truth: They would name it. The vulture’s beak gnawed on the flesh of corpses. They would make it speak. And so it followed that the Bible should be accessible to human reason. The great leap had first been made in England, two centuries earlier.

It was John Wycliffe who had the idea –just a tiny idea, barely a notion, but one that would make a huge noise –that there exists a direct relationship between man and God. From that initial idea, logically it followed that anyone could guide themselves using the scriptures. And that second idea led to a third: The clergy is no longer  necessary. Ergo: the Bible had to be translated into English. Wycliffe –who evidently was not short on ideas – had two more terrifying thoughts, such as  proposing that popes be chosen by drawing lots. In his fervor, now a hairbreadth from madness, he declared that slavery was a sin.

 Then he averred that the clergy should take a vow of poverty. After that, to really piss people off, he repudiated transubstantiation as a mental aberration. And as the icing on the cake, his most terrifying idea of all, he preached the equality of all human beings.

There followed a rain of papal bulls.. The pope got mad, and when a pope gets mad, it rains papal bulls. Translate the Vulgate into English? How awful! Today, the lowliest user’s guide ins in English; they speak English everywhere; in train stations, business offices, airports; English is the language of merchandise, and these days, merch is God. But back then, Latin was used for public announcements, while English remained the lingo of ragmen and roughnecks. And here was John, translating the Vulgate, the divine Latin of Saint Jerome, into British, the pidgin of lunkheads, not to mention refuting transubstantiation – what is he, crazy?- and sending his disciples, the poor, out to the sticks to spread his doctrine. He’s been reading too much Augustine and Lactantius; his mind is gone. The Lollards propagated his ludicrous ideas about holy poverty, an egalitarian soup lapped up by the little bumpkins of Devon. On their dilapidated farms where their children were dropping like flies, it made sense to them, that direct relationship with God they were being told about, without the mediation of priests or tithes or the grand lifestyles of cardinals. This gospel of poverty was their daily life!

“Leave everything and follow me,” Christ is supposed to have said; the commandment is infinite, it demands a new humanity. Enigmatic and naked. It sweeps away the grandeur of the world. One kind of poverty destroys, another exalts.

There is a great mystery in that:  To love the poor means to love baneful poverty, to stop despising it. It means to love mankind. For man is poor. Irremediably. We are poverty, buffeted between desire and disgust. At that moment in history Wycliffe sets in motion what will become a Reformation. God and the people speak the same language.

Naturally, Rome condemned John Wycliffe, despite  his profound and sincere words, he finished his days alone. More than forty yeas after his death, condemned by the Council of Constance, his body was exhumed and his bones reduced to ashes, Their loathing died hard.

For his words moved the poor and stirred up great disorder. One of Wycliffe’s disciples was a peasant named John Ball. We don’t know when he was born, or anything about his parents, or much of anything about him. His traces are lost in te tide of ordinary fates. Around 1370, he began roving the fields, along verdant valleys, between hills. He went from farm to farm, hamlet to hamlet; he preached against the rich and powerful, talked to the vagabonds, ne’er-do-wells, beggars. He versified and sowed his illicit beliefs along the way: ‘If God would have had any bondman from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free,’ he declared, crisscrossing the countryside. He wandered, and the hinges of old thinking burst off the doors; and heigh ’neath the garlands of holly, and ho in the morning dew, shadow absorbed by shadow, on a rostrum of dung. He preached to jacks-of-all-trades, to poor wetnurses, to urchins, trembling all the while.

His speeches were stitched together from every day proverbs, common morality. But John Ball knew that the equality of souls had always existed in the leafy thickets; he could feel it guiding him, making proclamations. They nicknamed him the ardent prior of the pickets; he was frightening.

In 1380, Parliament passed a new poll tax, and suddenly the peasants revolted. The uprising began in Brentwood: roads were blocked, castles burned. Then it spread to Kent, Norfolk, and Sussex. And John Ball ranted, preached human equality. The inns were full of pilgrims and crackpots. In Colchester, among the bundlers of wool and strings of onions, people were talking; in East Anglia, they were talking; everywhere, the poll; tax was questioned and hierarchies challenged. Noblemen fled. Soldiers deserted. The villager streets were littered with wreckage, overturned carts, sacks of earth. The powers that be were alarmed. The Duke of Lancaster issued his orders: John Ball must be placed under arrest. In May, they managed to lay hands on the ardent prior and imprisoned him in Maidstone.

It was then that another man awoke. Not very far away in Kent, an ex-soldier who had served in France went back to being a peasant. One morning, the tax collector came for the tax. Wat Tyler was out, having gone to the forest to chop wood. His daughter answered the door, and the man came into their home. He demanded their contribution, but the girl couldn’t pay him as they had barely enough to live on. The tax collector tore off her dress, threw her onto the straw mat, and took his payment. She was fifteen. She was pretty. She was virtue itself. But no one made a virtue of poverty and its children. Her lips turned blue; she was cold. She staggered down the little path bordered by blackberry bushes. Her father saw her from a distance. Huge masses of clouds skimmed the tree tops. The deer’s hide quivered. Wat Tyler carried his daughter back home, holding her in his arms like a corpse. He entrusted her to neighbors and ran off, ran cross the hill, hoping to catch up with the tax collector’s carriage by cutting through the wood. He reached the highway and crouched low, out of breath. He wondered if the man had already passed by, but moments later came the pounding of hooves. He heard the call of the lark and felt himself  shed a cold tear. The horseman appeared. Wat burst upon the road, raised his arm, and struck. His mallet  split the man’s skull. The rider fell, the horse whinnied and swerved. Another blow, to the back, in the arid light of the day, fracturing his shoulder. All that remained of him was a dead lump of flesh.

Then the peasants of Kent rose up. Wat Tyler took the lead and the band headed toward Maidstone. There, what happened is not certain. The tory goes that upon the insurgents’ arrival, the Archbishop of Canterbury freed John Ball to  pacify the crowd. But once greed, John Ball led his partisans to the archbishop’s palace, which they sacked. Then they went to Lambeth. On the way they took the archbishop captive, then proceeded to attack the tower of London. Rain drenched their faces. The peasants marched in no particular order, and they were many, more than a hundred thousand. They came from everywhere, the impoverished masses banded together. A dog ran off under the sun, a woman went mad and started kissing everyone, a brute killed his master, holy water burned a child’s face. In London, there was panic. The king didn’t know what to do. Burghers and nobles wandered like shadows through the corridors. Whispers, cries. The paupers knocked down prison doors as they went, freed the captives, and men emerged from dungeons, eyes squeezed shut, unable to see. Old men and wraiths. The embraced them, gave them food and drink. They died. At least that’s how the fable goes.

Furious, the peasants yanked judges from their beds, dragged them into the public square, and cut off their heads. The weather was lovely. A throng had gathered, panting and sweating; never had anybody seem so many people. The Thames was shining, the water sparkling, screams filled the city and passed through the walls. Gulls flew overhead, but no one heard them. And Wat Tyler sent men to talk to the crowd and forbid looting under pain of death; he organized bivouacs. By day’s end, a delegation was in place; the insurgents demanded to speak to the king. To the king? At that moment, he still seemed to be above any equality, a great amorphous countenance, the supreme authority. They appealed to him. He was the last guarantor of justice on earth, or so they believed. Wasn’t it parliament that had voted for the diabolical poll tax? The king didn’t want it, he would listen to the people, he would come to meet them on the shores of truth. But the king didn’t come. And so the insurgents went deeper into London, fraternized with the population, harangued in the public squares, ran through the streets. Now they were demanding the abolition of serfdom. Might as well call for the downfall of society.

Nights abounded in celebration, alcohol, and music; the past seemed to melt away, and authority to crumble. They attacked the Savoy Palace, the most prestigious house in England, home of thee Duke of Lancaster, the king’s uncle, whom they accused of supporting the tax. The duke eluded the mob, but the palace was burned. Furnishings and tapestry were torn down and thrown into the Thames in a state of jubilation. Everything was reduced to ash. The king was fourteen years old; he took refuge in the Tower of London. They didn’t know what to do.

From that point one everything happened quickly. On June 13, the king tried to flee. He crossed the Thames in a boat, but in Greenwich the masses prevented him from landing. The next day he road off on horseback, but the caught up with him at Mile End. There, he finally negotiated, granting them everything: freedom for the serfs, abolition of the tax, general amnesty for the rebels. But it was no longer enough. The Archbishop of Canterbury tried to escape. They immediately dragged him to the hill north of the tower and beheaded him. The houses bordering the square were silent, the windows were open, but no one made a sound. What had been immutable was now broken,.  Robert de Hales, the lord treasurer, was beheaded in turn, along with other high-placed personages. Each head was displayed on London Bridge, above the southern gatehouse, impaled on a pike.

The king resumes negotiations with Wat Tyler, in Smithfield, where he repeats his promises. The rebels aren’t buying it. They doubt the monarch’s sincerity. Hasn’t he twice tried to escape? But the king assures them that all their demands will be met. He is wearing a small blue cap, a gold tunic, and sporting handsome, flowing locks. The is little more than a child. Wat Tyler hesitates. His comrades want guarantees. The barons flanking the king are hostile, the atmosphere is tense, the horses skittish. Suddenly, some troublemakers insult Tyler and try to knock him down. His horse swerves, a soldier pulls a dagger, and all hell breaks loose. A man is wounded, his leg spurts blood. Horses turnaround, foaming, people jostle one another. Rocks fly. Faces are bathed in sunlight. A cloud passes, And suddenly William Walworth, the lord mayor, jabs his sword and injures Wat Tyler. Tyler’s chest is soaked in red, a terrible red. His eyes roll back; time creeps forward in a tortoise shell. He falls from his horse, breaks his hip, his armor clanks. Everything explodes in a great commotion, shouts, bodies trampled, a horseman falls, then another. Then a rider comes up to Tyler, who is prostrate on the ground; they look at each other – all the kings on earth whisper their simian breath into the rider’s ear; eternity tries to close the locks, but the gate is open – and the rider finishes him off,. Wat Tyler lies on the ground, disemboweled. Then everything speeds up some more. The king pushes the rebels back and speaks out: He embraces their cause and assures them of his support. They have nothing to fear – he swears it!- but they must disperse immediately. Fear and disorder do the rest. This huge crowd, come to London to fight, is suddenly overcome by a great, overpowering sadness. They no longer know who to listen to, and they disband. They head away from London in small groups, dreading

One of the king’s captains, Robert Knolles, is lying in wait outside the city. With his men, he swoops down on the rebels and slaughters them. And the reprisals are only the beginning. The king himself leaves for Kent at the head of his regiment. Armed bands crisscross the countryside, tracking  the now dispersed insurgents, hunting them down like  animals; many thousands of peasants are executed on the spot. The king revokes all his concessions. The  repression is cold, intractable and lasts nearly two months. John Bull I finally arrested and immediately hanged and quartered. There is no more talk of repealing the poll tax, and serfdom will not be abolished for another two hundred years.

And yet, it began anew. John Ball and Wat Tyler were reincarnated in Jack Cade. In 1450, he issued a manifesto, ‘The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent,’ and was given a nickname John Amend-all. That July, at the head of a band of five thousand men, peasants, artisans, decommissioned soldiers, and shopkeepers, Jack Cade took the Tower of London. They beheaded the Lord High Treasurer, the beheaded the former sheriff of Kent and several other individuals. The revolutionaries again entered London, and this time they pillaged the city. One evening, Jack Cade took shelter in a garden, a shadow came forward, a knife flashed in the dark, and the rebel was but a corpse. But it wasn’t over yet. It started right up again in Sussex. John and William Merford called for the murder of nobles and priests. That autumn, their men gathered, armed with bludgeons. At Robertsbridge, they prevented the clergy from collecting dues; in Eastbourne, they rebelled against inflated land rents. They challenged the social order. By dint of raids, militias, and hangings, their rebellion was put down.