For a very long time local people have believed that the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 began here in Essex. The refusal of the men of Fobbing late in May, 1381 to pay the poll tax approved by Parliament in the previous year was, it has often been claimed,  its starting point. The young King Richard II’s commissioner, John Bampton, was driven away from Fobbing  by force and when the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Robert Bealknap, came down to Brentwood to punish the rioters, the men of Fobbing, Mucking, and elsewhere in Essex set upon him and expelled him and his party from the town  with bloodshed. Within a few days, the peasants of Essex and those of Kent with whom they were in touch had risen in revolt, London was partly taken and the King and his advisers threatened with violence. It took far-reaching concessions from the King to the Essex men and the death of the rebels’ most prominent leader, Wat Tyler, at Smithfield before the worst of the rebellion was over and  good order was restored. 

Many of the details, certainly as far as Essex is concerned, come from the Anonimalle Chronicle compiled by a contemporary. Sadly, careful historical research has shown that these were wrong: John Bampton, for example, was not a member of the Commission appointed to enquire into the payment of the poll tax in Essex and Chief Justice Bealknap was not at Brentwood on the date in question. Neither man could have been the victim of the events the Anonimalle Chronicle describes. However, that does not mean that people from this part of the county were not involved in the revolt. 

Two of them definitely were. Thomas Baker of Fobbing appears to have played an important role in co-ordinating local resistance to the poll tax without going to London to participate in the dramatic events that brought it to an end in the middle of June, 1381. A little bit more is known about his ally, Robert Berdon of Orsett. Berdon sent his messengers to other villagers in Essex, mainly in Rochford Hundred, to encourage them to rise in support of the revolt. His orders apparently reached Canewdon, Great Wakering, South Shoebury, Paglesham, Stambridge and, further afield, Witham. This shows quite how wide the area over which a late-fourteenth century figure might have contacts. Unfortunately, what happened to the two men in the revolt’s aftermath is not known but the authorities trod very carefully in an attempt not to provoke further uprisings.

It may be disappointing to relinquish local myths but it is better to understand what the surviving records do, in fact, tell us.

Author  -  Christopher Thompson

The eccentricities of Church of England clergymen have been and are one of the great glories of English history.   Vicars and Rectors over many centuries have advanced arguments and embraced causes, pronounced judgements and pursued projects that their contemporaries regarded as ridiculous.   They have added greatly to the gaiety of national life without doing any serious harm.

One of these clergymen was William Henry Henslowe, a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, who began his career as Curate of West Tilbury and chaplain to the garrison of Tilbury fort.   With remarkable tactlessness, he preached a sermon  in the mid-1830s to the officers and men of the garrison in which he criticised the practice of flogging miscreant soldiers.   Given the reliance of the British Army of the time on its disciplinary code, this was regarded as an outrage by the officers of the garrison who duly complained to the Bishop of London.   Henslowe refused to apologise and was stripped of his curacy.   He compounded his offence by going on to print his sermon. 

This was only the first of a series of  highly controversial episodes in which Henslowe, who  later secured a benefice in Norfolk, attracted the attention of his superiors in Church and State.   He achieved most notoriety, however, for his denunciation in 1847  of the “unnatural, irrational, unmanly, ungodly, and fatal fashion among Christians” of shaving. Citing copious examples of Biblical injunctions against the shaving of beards, he also appealed to the important physical advantages that came to men from growing moustaches, particularly in sheltering the lips and strengthening the teeth:  in the case of soldiers, in what may have been an echo of his experience at West Tilbury, he argued that, by forgoing shaving, “the teeth are rendered more serviceable for the biting of cartridges, and the use of the mustachio is also a great saving in time at the soldiers’ toilet.”

Henslowe’s Victorian contemporaries reacted as we do now – they laughed.   Ridiculous though his sentiments were, they assured him of a place in anthologies of nineteenth-century writing.   How many other former Curates of West Tilbury could claim as much?

Author  -  Christopher Thompson