The Bonfires of Paperwork

Beyond Smithfield

The revolt is usually remembered through John Ball, Wat Tyler and Richard II. But across abbey towns and manors, rebels also attacked records: rolls, rentals, charters and other documents that defined obligations and privileges.

To modern eyes, burning paperwork can look symbolic. In a manorial society, it could be intensely practical. Records helped prove labour services, rents, fines, tolls, heriots and claims of unfree status.

St Albans

At St Albans, William Grindecobbe and other townsmen confronted the abbey’s authority. Records and charters became part of that struggle, while Abbot Thomas de la Mare was pressed to concede long-contested liberties.

The importance of the episode lies in the rebels’ understanding that rights and obligations were not sustained by force alone. They were stored, copied and renewed in writing.

Cambridge

Thomas Walsingham preserves one of the revolt’s most memorable documentary scenes: townspeople burning university records while expressing hostility to the “learning of clerks”. Even allowing for the chronicler’s hostility, the episode captures a conflict over written authority itself.

The documents were not neutral objects. They belonged to institutions whose claims affected tolls, privileges, property and jurisdiction.

Bury, Essex and the Savoy

The evidence varies by location. At Bury St Edmunds, violence against officials and monastic authority is much clearer than any systematic programme of record-burning, so claims about destroyed archives should remain cautious.

Elsewhere, including Essex manors, records were destroyed and later reconstructed. In London, the attack on John of Gaunt’s Savoy also destroyed books and household records alongside the palace itself.

Why burn records?

Because records carried claims. A roll could state that a tenant owed labour. A charter could establish a privilege. A rental could make an obligation legible year after year.

Burning such documents did not automatically abolish the underlying legal relationship. Duplicates existed, memories survived and institutions could reconstruct their paperwork. But the act still mattered: it publicly rejected the documentary machinery through which lordship presented itself as permanent.

The limit of the bonfire

The revolt was suppressed and many concessions were revoked. Records were rebuilt. Lordship survived.

Yet the attacks remain revealing. The rebels understood that power lived not only in weapons, courts and officials but also in archives. That insight sits at the heart of The Blank Roll and of the wider Samuel Stephen Chronicles approach to historical institutions.

Further reading

Key works cited in the original article include Rodney Hilton, R.H. Hilton & T.H. Aston, Steven Justice, R.B. Dobson and Thomas Walsingham’s Chronica maiora. The original article also points to the People of 1381 project for local evidence on reconstruction of records after the rising.