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 the east of the city.  In Essex and the eastern counties the popular discontent was more social than political.  The demands of the peasants were that bondage should be abolished, that tolls and imposts on trade should be done away with, that “no acre of land which is held in bondage or villeinage be held at higher rate than fourpence a year,” in other words for a money commutation of all villein services.  Their rising had been even earlier than that of the Kentishmen.  Before Whitsuntide an attempt to levy the poll-tax gathered crowds of peasants together, armed with clubs, rusty swords, and bows.  The royal commissioners who were sent to repress the tumult were driven from the field, and the Essex men marched upon London on one side of the river as the Kentishmen marched on the other.  The evening of the thirteenth, the day on which Tyler entered the city, saw them encamped without its walls at Mile-end.  At the same moment Highbury and the northern heights were occupied by the men of Hertfordshire and the villeins of St. Albans, where a strife between abbot and town had been going on since the days of Edward the Second.

[Sidenote:  Richard the Second]

The royal Council with the young king had taken refuge in the Tower, and their aim seems to have been to divide the forces of the insurgents.  On the morning of the fourteenth therefore Richard rode from the Tower to Mile-end to meet the Essex men.  “I am your King and Lord, good people,” the boy began with a fearlessness which marked his bearing throughout the crisis, “what will you?” “We will that you free us for ever,” shouted the peasants, “us and our lands; and that we be never named nor held for serfs!” “I grant it,” replied Richard; and he bade them go home, pledging himself at once to issue charters of freedom and amnesty.  A shout of joy welcomed the promise.  Throughout the day more than thirty clerks were busied writing letters of pardon and emancipation, and with these the mass of the Essex men and the men of Hertfordshire withdrew quietly to their homes.  But while the king was successful at Mile-end a terrible doom had fallen on the councillors he left behind him.  Richard had hardly quitted the Tower when the Kentishmen who had spent the night within the city appeared at its gates.  The general terror was shown ludicrously enough when they burst in and taking the panic-stricken knights of the royal household in rough horse-play by the beard promised to be their equals and good comrades in the days to come.  But the horse-play changed into dreadful earnest when they found that Richard had escaped their grasp, and the discovery of Archbishop Sudbury and other ministers in the chapel changed their fury into a cry for blood.  The