Illegal immigration

Do you remember that news item two years ago about a lorry found in an industrial area in south Essex, containing the dead bodies of thirty-nine people? For many of us, the passage of time has dulled the shock, but a new BBC Two documentary has detailed the events of October 2019 and the subsequent police investigation. Despite its rather sensationalist title and occasionally intrusive background music (haunting strings, of course), Hunting the Essex Lorry Killers is a well-made, sensitive account of the events, and compelling viewing.

It’s fascinating to see elements familiar from fictional crime drama appearing in real life: the smashed, charred mobile phone fished out of a drain and the broken SIM card found some distance away, yielding crucial information on who the driver had contacted between discovering the bodies and calling the ambulance; the painstaking analysis of CCTV to trace the movements of the lorry and the trailer; the extraordinary luck of finding an eyewitness in the French countryside.

Above all, though, this is heartbreaking. The film-makers travelled to Vietnam to speak to the families of the victims: a father, a mother, a young widow left to raise her children alone. All those who died in that lorry were fairly young – the youngest two were fifteen ­– and they weren’t refugees fleeing war or persecution, just young people setting out to seek their fortune, to escape relentless rural poverty, and to try to make enough money to improve their own lives and those of their families.

To enable them to take that step, the families had borrowed the huge sums demanded for the journey; one family had paid $22,000, another person paid £13,000 just for the passage from France to the UK. Sacrifices had been made. One father describes how he borrowed money from the banks and from relatives, some of whom had sold their cows and buffaloes to lend the money. Interviews with the family members are interspersed with footage of their everyday lives and their agricultural work, hinting at the hardship those young people were hoping to escape.

One mother talks about how her daughter had resisted pressure to marry young, and had even concocted the story of a fortune teller informing her “she would only be happy if she got married after she turned 30”. Like many of the others, this young woman had hoped to work overseas for a few years and then come home. Her mother had known she was waiting to get from France to the UK, but hadn’t known the details – only that she was travelling “VIP class”.

For $22,000 one would certainly expect VIP treatment, but the reality was long hours sealed in an overcrowded lorry trailer, where the temperatures gradually rose from a chilly 12 degrees to over 38 degrees (all the victims were found stripped to their underwear). At the same time, with more than twice as many people in the trailer than on previous trips, the oxygen level was dropping. In the end, everyone in that lorry died of suffocation shortly before reaching the English coast. Their final phone messages to their families make devastating reading. The mother of the free-spirited young woman mentioned above confesses that she has not yet been able to bring herself to read the last messages her daughter sent.

Thanks to the police investigation, the criminals most directly involved in the deaths were eventually convicted (of thirty-nine counts of manslaughter) and sentenced to long prison terms. The policeman who had led the investigation made a brief statement outside the court, beginning with the words: “Every man, woman and child that died in that trailer was following the false promise of a better life abroad.”

I found myself wondering about this false promise, this hope of a better life, as I watched the programme. How many of those who make the same journey, but are still breathing when the doors are flung open, actually do succeed in the UK? How many earn enough money not just to support themselves, but to repay the horrendous loans taken out for their passage, and to support their wives, children and parents back home? Given that they live in the UK illegally, what leverage do they have to demand even the minimum wage from any future employer? I suspect that for many, the long and difficult journey to the UK does not lead to prosperity, but to poverty and exploitation.

My fleeting research into the topic suggests that this is probably true. Many illegal immigrants from Vietnam to the UK are smuggled rather than trafficked; that is, they consent to being brought here and their relationship with the smugglers ends on their arrival. However, this report from the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner suggests that the difference between trafficking and smuggling is not always clear-cut: many of those who pay smugglers to transport them are exploited en route, or end up in conditions of complete dependence and even captivity, working long hours and in unhealthy conditions in nail salons and cannabis-growing operations. A large proportion of women and girls illegally transported from Vietnam become victims of sexual exploitation. For a good overview of these issues, have a look at this article in the New York Times.

Is there any way we can stop unscrupulous people smugglers from exploiting the hopes of the poor, and extracting huge sums that may condemn their families to worse hardship than before? Is stricter border control the answer? Checking the contents of every single lorry before it boards the ferry? This particular group would have been intercepted if that had happened. But such a level of control is probably not feasible, and even if it were, smugglers might resort to hiding smaller numbers of people, packed into tiny spaces among other, legal imports, or sending them across the Channel in small boats. Either possibility would certainly result in more deaths.

So perhaps tighter controls are not the answer. What about legal migration? What about giving young people from Vietnam (and elsewhere) a chance to come and work in the UK for a couple of years? One suggestion I have seen (though I’ve unfortunately lost track of the source) is to sell visas at a price that compares favourably to the sums paid to smugglers for illegal entry, then pay some or all of the price back to the migrants when they return to their home country. Worth considering, perhaps?

At present the UK does not seem to be contemplating any such scheme. Instead it has intensified efforts to uncover and stop people-smuggling operations, while warning people not to attempt the journey with a hard-hittingadvertising campaign in Vietnam. In some ways this seems a reasonable approach: the more awareness there is of trafficking mechanisms, and of the possible negative outcomes of migration, the less likely it is (one would hope) that people will be sucked into the worst kinds of exploitation. It is unclear how much impact such campaigns can have, however.

Given the irreducible complexity of migration issues, it’s hardly surprising that I can’t produce a conclusion here, let alone a solution. I do recommend Hunting the Essex Lorry Killers, however. At the very least, it reminds us that migrants – legal or illegal – are not just an anonymous mass, but individuals who are ultimately not all that different to us, with hopes and dreams, parents who worry about them, and collections of silly selfies on their phones. Humans, in other words. Perhaps, if enough of us watched it, it might even inspire a useful public debate, informed by compassion rather than hostility and fear.

                                                                                                                     (Photos from bbc.co.uk)

Women and sport

Photo: Aref Karimi/AFP/Getty Images

“It’s not necessary for women to play cricket.”

Up to a point, I have to say I agree with this statement. It’s not necessary for women to play cricket. It’s not necessary for men to play cricket. It’s not necessary for children to play cricket.

And yet, inexplicable though it may seem, there are many women, men and children in various parts of the world who want to play cricket. They enjoy playing cricket. They get a kick out of it. And it does no harm at all to anyone else. Well, perhaps just occasionally a ball slams into an innocent spectator or passer-by (a potentially fatal accident, given the rather hard nature of cricket balls), but fortunately this isn’t an everyday occurrence.

So although I might question the necessity of cricket, and would protest quite vigorously if anyone tried to make me watch a game, it would never occur to me to ban it. Nor would I ban model aeroplane building, cross-stitch, Monopoly or darts. None of these activities serves any useful purpose, but they give people pleasure and do no harm. Each to his own.

This is not an attitude shared by the Taliban, who have recently decreed that women in Afghanistan will no longer be permitted to play cricket, or indeed participate in any other sport. In an interview with the Australian broadcaster SBS, the deputy head of the Taliban's cultural commission, Ahmadullah Wasiq, offered the spurious explanation that women’s faces and bodies might be exposed while engaging in sport – not just to the people present but to the media. The crux of the matter, however, is that “sport is not seen as something that is important for women”.

This is a statement I strongly disagree with. Most of my female friends and relatives engage in some form of sport, or have done so in the past. My mother was a keen skier and tramper (hillwalker or hiker, for those of you who don’t speak New Zild) as a young woman, and has continued to enjoy walking all her life. My aunt was a world champion triathlete in her seventies, and is still a hardy cyclist and swimmer in her eighties. My cousin, always sporty, fought back after cancer and major surgery and now cycles, runs, and swims impressive distances. My partner plays hockey and takes part in increasingly adventurous cycling events. One of my sisters-in-law competes in triathlons, another played football for several years and now runs across London to get to work. My mother-in-law tracks her step count and cycles around the countryside on her e-bike.

Sport means different things to different women. It’s important for physical health: a way to keep fit, prevent weight gain, and stave off the decline brought by menopause and ageing. It’s important for mental health: an opportunity to spend time outdoors in the natural world, to set goals and achieve them, or perhaps just to let off steam. It’s hugely important as a social activity, connecting us with others and fostering a sense of community. For a small minority – the most talented, the most dedicated – it’s a source of public recognition and in some cases financial security.

Take a look at this photo series of women in Afghanistan engaging in various sporting pursuits. The one that affects me most is the last one, showing a woman on a bicycle; it gets to me because I can’t imagine being forbidden from riding my bike. Cycling is my vitamin pill and antidepressant rolled into one: it gets me outdoors, feeling the sun and the wind on my skin, seeing the changing seasons in the fields and hedgerows and woods. It gets my muscles working and my heart pumping. Cycling makes me feel like a kid, not a middle-aged woman.

The other thing that saddens me when contemplating these photos is that all these women are doing their best to cover up as much skin as they can. It’s impossible to tell whether this stems from personal piety or from a fear of punishment, but in either case, it’s not enough to satisfy the Taliban. Imagine how much you would have to love your sport to jump through those hoops. Imagine compromising your comfort, your enjoyment and your performance with all those hot, constricting extra layers, only to be told “Sorry, no sport for you – it’s just not necessary”.  

I know that this is far from the worst thing the Taliban have done or are likely to do. They’ve also been quoted in the last few days as saying that women can’t be government ministers, because their job is to have children. Keeping women out of government, preventing them from working or even leaving their home unaccompanied, and excluding girls from education: all these things are more significant in the big scheme of things. And women are certainly not the Taliban’s only victims; their persecution of religious minorities and their brutal suppression of dissidents is well known.

But there’s something particularly chilling in this prohibition and its almost offhand justification. It highlights the breathtaking arrogance of a regime which seeks to suppress – or indeed deny – the diversity of human personalities, desires and interests, and to impose the same narrow and rigid patterns on every single life.  Or rather, to impose one pattern with a certain amount of variation on every male life (since men are permitted a range of different jobs and some freedom of movement) and another far more restrictive one on every female life.

I don’t have a conclusion or a solution – invading and occupying Afghanistan doesn’t seem to have helped much. All I can say is that I’m extremely grateful to live in a place and time when women have equal rights to education, self-determination and mobility. Where women can decide for themselves what occupation to pursue, who to sleep with and/or live with, and whether or not to have children. And where women can swim, run, climb mountains, ride bicycles and even – if they really feel so inclined – play cricket.

 

 

 

 

  

Six things I like about Chelmsford

It’s exactly six years since I arrived in Chelmsford, on a bank holiday weekend at the end of August 2015. We’d left New Zealand in a nightmarish flurry of last-minute packing in mid-July, and spent a few fairly restful weeks with family in Germany. Then Daniela had flown ahead to the UK with the boys, while I’d stayed on with the girls to visit friends in Berlin. Now, however, the day of reckoning had come. As the taxi from Southend airport carried us and our mountain of suitcases towards our new home, I wondered what awaited us. I’d never set foot in Chelmsford before, in fact a few weeks earlier I would have had trouble locating it on a map, and yet here I was moving in – kids, furniture and all – for at least a year, probably longer. What would it be like?

Well, Chelmsford hasn’t swept me off my feet, but it’s grown on me. It’s a city with many good qualities, some instantly apparent, others less so. Here are a few of my favourites, in no particular order.

1. The rivers

My first walk into town, the day after arrival, took me over the footbridge by the Tesco carpark. Looking down, I saw a slow-flowing river, its clear water revealing a complex landscape of bright green waterweed and numerous small fish. It was a brief glimpse, but rather magical. This river turned out to be the Chelmer, which is joined just south-east of the city centre by the somewhat smaller Can. Both are confined to austere concrete channels as they pass through the urban centre, but further upstream they meander through a nature reserve (the Chelmer) and parkland (the Can), their banks lush with plant life. Some of the most attractive spots have been created by human intervention: a lovely pool below a lock on the Can, just outside Admiral’s Park, and another at the foot of a weir across the Chelmer next to the university. I haven’t been tempted to take a dip personally, but on rare occasions I’ve seen teenagers venturing in. After sustained rain, on the other hand, both rivers offer the thrill of rather dramatic floods, transforming the familiar landscape and making footpaths impassable.

Here and below: the Chelmer in various seasons

2. The parks

One of my walks takes me along busy roads (Parkway and Rainsford Road) to the corner of Admiral’s Park. As soon as I’m in the park, the noise of the traffic is forgotten; I’m on a lovely avenue of copper beeches cutting diagonally across a large green field and – a rare thing in this fairly low-lying city – the land slopes away slightly, giving a broad view of the park and a glimpse of the countryside beyond it. The path takes me past a popular children’s playground and a cricket green to a bridge over the Can. At this point the river is shallow, clear, and attractively overhung with elms and horse chestnuts. If I turn left after the bridge I can walk through parks, along a wide path lined with weeping willows, sycamores, ashes, plane trees and limes, all the way into the town centre. After passing under the railway viaduct, I reach the lake and gardens of Central Park. Much thought and care (and money and manpower) has been put into keeping these both beautiful and interesting. Age groups less interested in flowers have also been catered for: there’s a big new children’s playground, outdoor table tennis tables, tennis and basketball courts, and a skatepark. It’s all well maintained, tidy and clean – a real asset for the people of Chelmsford.

Admiral's Park

Admiral's Park

Central Park

3. The historical structures

Chelmsford doesn’t exactly abound with wonderful old buildings – preserving the architectural heritage evidently hasn’t been a priority of the town’s planners over the years. The oldest, according to Wikipedia, is the cathedral, which incorporates remnants of the parish church rebuilt in the fifteenth century. This might not be a sight you would leave your home town to visit, but it has several attractive features (check out the ceiling of the nave, for example), and looks wonderfully Gothic on a foggy winter’s night.

Another striking building is the Shire Hall, at the top of the High Street. Opened in 1791, it originally housed law courts, a corn exchange, and assembly rooms. All these functions have gradually fallen away and it now stands empty, awaiting a brilliant plan for its resurrection. Its neoclassical façade is rather splendid in the late-afternoon sunshine, and I like to imagine horse-drawn carriages pulling up in front of it and spilling out their cargo of provincial beauties for the county ball.

My favourite Chelmsford landmarks, however, are the railway viaducts. Constructed in the early 1840s, they span Central Park and the Can, then the Chelmer further east. I’m hardly a railway enthusiastic, but I have to confess to a tiny moment of joy every time I pass under them and gaze up at their arches. Not just an impressive feat of engineering (this could also be said of modern motorway bridges), but aesthetically pleasing too.

4. The cycling

Chelmsford’s traffic can be truly diabolical, but the good news is that if you’re willing to get on your bike you can avoid the traffic jams: the city has an excellent network of signposted routes and dedicated cycle lanes.

Better still, if you head out of town in the right direction, you can access miles of quiet lanes through very pleasant countryside. To the northwest are the lovely villages of Good Easter and High Easter, Pleshey and Great Waltham; to the southwest the shady, deer-filled woods of Writtle Forest and the extravagant mansions of Fryerning. Or you can follow the national cycle route 1 eastward to Maldon for a breath of sea air (or at least estuary air). This route includes an off-road stretch with sand, gravel, puddles and winter mud, but if you can cope with that and don’t mind a bit of an ascent (it goes over the only hill for miles around), you’ll be rewarded with a delightful mix of countryside and woodland.

The Chelmer at Sandford Mill

National Cycle Route 1

The Chelmer at Great Waltham

5. The culture

Chelmsford has a well-stocked central library and several welcoming local libraries – despite the threats of Essex County Council to close many of the latter. Its theatres (in normal times) provide a varied programme, including free lunchtime concerts by local artists. And the city’s clubs and societies cater to all sort of cultural interests. When I looked for a choir (a first for me) a few months after arriving, I soon realized that there were several, including the very friendly and undemanding one that I joined. A year or two later a choir member invited me to join her book club (another first). And around the same time I decided to do something about my rusty French, and signed up to the French Circle. I haven’t yet felt moved to join the German Circle, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

6. Our house and garden

When we bought this house in 2016 it was a shabby ex-rental with a poky kitchen, the back door leading to a disused outside toilet and a bare garden edged by a sagging chicken-wire fence. Within months our builders had created a brilliant extension, giving us a bright, airy kitchen-diner, a second (indoor!) loo, and a long, skinny annex for me to work in. And once the builders had departed and the fence had been replaced we set to work on the garden, building a deck, laying out a lawn and flower beds, sowing and planting. Within four years it has been transformed from a wasteland to an inviting, relaxing green space, full of flowers and alive with insects in spring and summer. It’s more than we could ever afford in London, and it’s probably my favourite thing in Chelmsford.

So there you go, a very personal top six features of the city I live in. Other people’s lists might well give higher rankings to shops, restaurants and bars, all of which Chelmsford has in abundance, or to the city’s sports clubs or its recently rebuilt leisure centre. All these have served me and my family well – but for this post I wanted to focus on a few things that have made my life here more pleasant.

It may not be forever, but for now Chelmsford and I are getting on fine. 

John Ball and the Peasants' Revolt

 

Sing, John Ball, and tell it to them all

Long live the day that is dawning

I will crow like a cock, I’ll carol like a lark

In the light that is coming in the morning.

This was part of my introduction to Essex; one of the first songs I sang when I joined a community choir after moving to Chelmsford. It was also the first I’d heard of John Ball. Who was he? And why were we urging him to sing?

A glance at Wikipedia established that John Ball was an English priest who took a prominent part in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The song was written by Sydney Carter in 1981 to mark the 600th anniversary of that event. Sydney Carter, incidentally, was also responsible for a song very familiar from my childhood, “The Lord of the Dance” – possibly the jolliest ever account of the crucifixion. Who would have thought that “They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high,/ And they left me there on the cross to die” could sound so cheery?

“Sing John Ball” doesn’t juxtapose gruesome lyrics with a jaunty tune – both tune and lyrics are pretty upbeat. It’s a song about equality, fraternity, and fellowship. It conjures up a future time, a new dawn, when we’ll all be “ruled by the love of one another”, working harmoniously together.

Labour and spin for fellowship I say

Labour and spin for the love of one another

Labour and spin for fellowship I say

In the light that is coming in the morning.

It’s rather heart-warming. Not a brutal call to arms like the Marseillaise, for example. Something that a community choir can sing without feeling uncomfortable.

And yet when I delved deeper into the history behind it, I found that the events commemorated by this song were far from innocuous. The Peasants’ Revolt was a bloody, brutal uprising, which led to even bloodier and more brutal reprisals by the authorities.

The peasants, artisans and townsfolk undoubtedly had every reason to revolt. The situation of the common people in late-fourteenth-century England was dire. The Black Death had swept through the country in the middle of the century, killing almost half the population. This had made labour more scarce, potentially allowing workers to demand higher pay and choose their employers. Horrified by this development, the ruling classes enacted laws to stop it. In 1349 the Ordinance of Labourers condemned demands for “excessive wages”, and in 1351 the Statute of Labourers set out maximum daily rates for every job, at pre-plague levels, and made it a crime to refuse work: “every person, able in body and under the age of 60 years, not having enough to live upon, being required, shall be bound to serve him that doth require him, or else be committed to gaol […] and […] the old wages shall be given and no more.”[1] This led to massive discontent and efforts to circumvent the new law. In response, employers resorted to prosecutions. By the 1370s, the majority of legal business in the king’s courts involved the labour legislation,[2] fuelling a widespread hatred of the law and its representatives.

Other laws also attempted to stop the lower classes from getting above their station: the sumptuary laws of 1363 restricted what the common people were permitted to eat and wear – for example, no one below the rank of knight or lady was entitled to adorn themselves with fur, and the lower classes were not allowed to wear the extravagantly pointed shoes that were fashionable at the time.

The other crucial feature of the fourteenth century was England’s war in France, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to assert the English claim to sovereignty over that country. Beginning in 1337, this conflict continued for over a century (the name Hundred Years’ War is an understatement) and drained the country’s financial resources. In the late 1370s, the people’s rage at the oppressive labour laws was exacerbated by a series of poll taxes imposed by Parliament to raise funds for the war. The third of these, decreed in November 1380, was particularly onerous, requiring every person over the age of 15, men and women alike, to pay 12 pence, the equivalent of a month’s wages for many. To avoid paying, many did not register on the local rolls. In response, the government sent out commissioners to investigate and enforce the tax.

This was the trigger for the Peasants’ Revolt. On 30 May 1381, royal commissioners attempted to demand payment of the poll tax from representatives of a number of Essex villages who had gathered in Brentwood. Thomas Baker of Fobbing declared that his village would not pay; others followed his example. Violence was threatened, and the commissioners were forced to flee empty-handed. Messengers travelled from village to village, spreading news of the uprising. The first casualties were three jurors who had informed the authorities of the uprising in Brentwood: they were beheaded and their heads were paraded on poles by the rebels.

In the days that followed, the movement gathered momentum across Essex and Kent. Many of the sites of the action are places that I’ve got to know over the last six years. Here in Chelmsford there was a ceremonial burning of royal records, especially financial ones. In the quiet, picturesque little town of Coggeshall, rebels broke into the home of the sheriff of Essex, destroyed documents, and gave the sheriff a beating. He was lucky to escape with his life; another official, the escheator of Essex, was decapitated.

Cressing Temple Barns is a popular spot for craft fairs and other such events, where I’ve performed “John Ball” with my singing group on at least one occasion. At the time of the revolt this estate was in the possession of the Knights Hospitaller, whose grand prior, Sir Robert Hales, was also the Lord High Treasurer and deeply loathed for his role in imposing the poll tax. The rebels sacked the manor, stole valuables, burned books, pulled down the house and set fire to it. The splendid thirteenth-century barns were left undamaged and are still standing today.

In a number of towns the insurgents stormed castles and freed prisoners. The most famous of these was our hero John Ball, who had been incarcerated in Maidstone earlier that year by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury. Ball was a priest who may or may not have been born and raised in the Colchester area,[3] but had certainly worked as a junior priest at St James’ Church, East Hill, Colchester. He had been excommunicated by Sudbury in 1364 for preaching a radical message of equality, which did not sit well with the wealthy and hierarchically organized church. Sudbury, by the way, was not just the most senior figure in the church, he was also the Lord Chancellor, one of the highest ranking members of government, and had been instrumental in introducing the poll tax.

John Ball speaking to the rebels. Unknown artist, in Froissart, Chronicles.

With Ball as their spiritual leader and Wat Tyler, also originally from Essex, as their general, a large army of mainly Kentish rebels made their way to Blackheath on the south bank of the Thames, where they had been promised a meeting with the king. Despite their hatred of the royal advisors, the rebels were unswerving in their devotion to the king himself, the fourteen-year-old Richard II: their rallying cry was “King Richard and the true commons!” Their fervent belief was that if they could put their grievances to the king in person, he would support them and abandon his supposedly traitorous advisors.

On the morning of 13 June 1381, John Ball reportedly preached to the 50,000 or so rebels assembled at Blackheath. His message was that there was no biblical basis for social hierarchies, and that all goods should belong to everyone. The inspiration for Sydney Carter’s lyrics is obvious:

When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman? […]

Why should we be kept thus in servage? We be all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve; whereby can they say or show that they be greater lords than we be […]

They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with poor cloth: they have their wines, spices  and good bread, and we have the drawing out of the chaff and drink water: they dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and travail, rain and wind in the fields.

Ball went on to argue that the corrupt elites were like weeds that had to be eradicated to make way for a new, free society: in short, all the great lords, lawyers, justices and jurors had to be destroyed.[4] If this account by a contemporary chronicler is accurate, then Ball’s sermon was incitement to wholesale slaughter.

Ball’s preaching stirred up the rebels, and the meeting with the king did nothing to calm them. Richard approached the shore in the royal barge, but was too frightened to land. Offered the opportunity to present a petition, the rebels demanded no less than the execution of several royal advisors, including two of those on the barge with Richard, Treasurer Hales and Archbishop Sudbury. Not surprisingly, these demands were not accepted.

Richard on the royal barge, rebels on the shore. Unknown artist, in Froissart, Chronicles.

Furious and disappointed, the rebels headed to London Bridge, which they were allowed to cross with little resistance. Soon after, Aldgate was opened to allow an army of Essex rebels to enter from the east. Their numbers swelled by Londoners, the rebels went on a systematic spree of destruction, attacking the property of particularly unpopular figures and destroying documents associated with the law. They sought out further “traitors” and beheaded eighteen of them that evening, then set up camp around the Tower of London, where Richard and his advisors had taken refuge.

The next critical location was another place very familiar to me – Mile End, where I studied and worked in the 1990s and 2000s. Now a drab urban district dominated by a busy intersection, in the fourteenth century it was an open area a mile from the city of London. On the morning of 14 June Richard summoned the rebels to meet him there, and agreed – no doubt for tactical reasons – to all their demands. These included freedom from serfdom and a rent limit of 4 pence per acre. Many rebels were appeased by the charters offered and returned home to Essex and Kent.

Others, however, had ignored the invitation to Mile End and continued to blockade the Tower. As Archbishop Sudbury was saying mass in the chapel, the rebels managed to enter and began to hunt down their most hated enemies. Sudbury, Hales and two others were dragged out of the fortress and onto Tower Hill, where they were summarily beheaded. The inexpert executioner evidently required several axe blows to finish off the archbishop. The heads of the victims were then carried on poles to Westminster Abbey and back, before being displayed on London Bridge.

Killingof Archbishop Sudbury and others. Froissart, Chronicles.

As the day went on more acts of violence took place, some apparently unrelated to the rebels’ core grievances. The most shocking was the massacre of scores of Flemish residents (estimates range from 40 to 140), a group who had been subject to violence from Londoners in the past. Many were dragged out of churches where they had sought sanctuary, and beheaded in the street.

The next day Richard met the rebels again, this time at Smithfield, where he summoned Wat Tyler to approach him and explain his continued presence in London. Alone and far from his army, Tyler was fatally stabbed by two members of the king’s party – whether this had been the king’s plan is unclear. Before the rebels had realized what was happening, Richard galloped over to them and proclaimed himself their leader and sovereign, leading them further out of the city. In the meantime the London authorities had mustered a respectable military force, beheaded Tyler, and presented his impaled head to the rebel army to demonstrate the end of their hopes. Disheartened, they surrendered to the king and returned home.

Death of Wat Tyler, Richard addresses the rebels. 

Outbreaks of rebellion continued in other parts of the country, but the tide had turned. Richard subsequently revoked all the charters he had issued and ordered severe punishment of the rebels. In the months that followed, thousands were killed for their part in the revolt. In Colchester, a particularly brutal judge appointed ordered so many hangings that new gallows had to be built. On one occasion, nineteen men were reported to have been hanged on a single gibbet.

After the debacle at Smithfield John Ball fled north, but he was captured in Coventry and brought to St Albans for trial. On 15 July 1361 he was hanged, drawn (i.e. disembowelled alive), quartered and beheaded in the presence of the king. Richard had offered to mitigate the punishment by having him hanged to death first (yes, that’s the medieval version of mild sentencing) if he would kneel to the king, but Ball refused.

So a revolt that had started with genuine and legitimate grievances, bringing together a huge number of people with shared hopes and a common purpose, ended in utter disaster. Could there have been any other outcome? The general consensus seems to be that the rebels were condemned to failure by their naïve faith in the king, whom they saw as appointed by God. It was this that allowed Wat Tyler to be lured into the ambush at Smithfield, and prevented his army from taking advantage of their superior numbers after his death. In a fictionalization of the events published in 2015, Melvyn Bragg has John Ball experience a flash of insight when he sees the young king riding to Westminster with his courtiers: “The King was not from God. […] The King was no innocent among the wicked. The King was no different from his traitorous councillors around him on horseback now.”[5]

Had the rebels realized this, they might have acted more decisively at crucial moments – and yet if the movement had been openly anti-monarchist from the start it would probably not have gained the popular support that it did.

In any case the revolt failed to bring about any major changes in English society – if anything it condemned the common people to even harsher servitude than before. This, at least, was Richard’s intention: “Rustics you were, and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher.” And it failed to go down in history as a source of national pride: unlike the 14^th of July in France, the 13^th of June is not a public holiday or a day of celebration here.

There have, however, been attempts to rehabilitate the Peasants’ Revolt and present it as part of a long history of socialism in England. In the 1880s, five hundred years after the revolt, William Morris painted an idealized picture of the camaraderie of the rebels in A Dream of John Ball. This may have supplied some of the inspiration for Sydney Carter’s song. And the song wasn’t the only commemoration of the 600^th anniversary in 1981. A mural painted in Bow Common Lane in East London showed oppressed peasants fighting desperately against fully armed knights on one side and the monarchy, in league with the corrupt church, on the other.[6] And closer to home in Colchester, a plaque was erected and two streets in the Dutch quarter were named after John Ball and Wat Tyler.[7]

Mural by Ray Walker in Bow Common Lane.

The event was also celebrated at the Socialist Workers Party Rally in Skegness, where the journalist and campaigner Paul Foot delivered a stirring speech.[8] He described the revolt as “perhaps the first time the standard of socialism was raised in England”, and emphasized the disciplined, systematic approach of the rebels: “They didn’t burn or loot anywhere at random”; “they acted swiftly and with great restraint”. Foot’s speech makes no mention of the slaughter of the Flemings, and glosses over the other killings carried out during the revolt. Quite reasonably, he notes that the king’s revenge was far more savage than the revolt: “In the rising itself, perhaps a hundred dead, most of them people guilty of the most terrible extortion and exploitation […] In the putting down of the rising, perhaps three thousand dead”.

In 2011, well after the disturbance caused by another unsuccessful poll tax had died down, the Labour-run council of Islington invited residents to vote for the people and places they would like to see commemorated with green “people’s plaques”.  The Peasants’ Revolt was one of the winners, and a plaque was unveiled to mark the site where Highbury Manor, the home of Robert Hales, had been destroyed during the uprising. At the ceremony, veteran socialist campaigner Tony Benn described the Peasants’ Revolt as “the first of a long series of campaigns to secure freedom and democracy in Britain”. Local MP Jeremy Corbyn linked the rising to Islington’s “tradition of dissent”, and made no bones of his approval of the rebels’ actions: “Why did the peasants march here? […] because they were poor and angry at the injustices of the time […] because one of the people who had instituted the poll tax lived here in a big moated house. They thought it was better if he didn’t live in a moated house so they came here and burned it down.”[9]

On 15 July 2015, the anniversary of John Ball’s death, further prominent left-wing or Labour-affiliated figures gathered to unveil a new monument in Smithfield. This time the central role went to film director Ken Loach; former mayor Ken Livingstone was also present. The stone triptych gives the following summary of the events at Smithfield:

At this place on 15th June 1381 Wat Tyler, John Ball and other representatives of the Great Rising met King Richard II to finalise terms for ending the Rebellion.  The King had agreed to all the political reforms aimed at alleviating the plight of the people.  However he and his advisors later reneged on that agreement after killing Tyler in the process near this spot.  John Ball and many others of the Revolt were also later executed.

Between the lines of this description, the following quote from John Ball is inscribed: “Things cannot go on well in England nor ever will until everything shall be in common.  When there shall be neither Vassal nor Lord and all distinctions levelled.”

I don’t believe “Sing John Ball” was performed on this occasion, but it might as well have been. The song is part of a tradition of celebrating John Ball’s message of equality, while downplaying the violence unleashed by his preaching. Perhaps it’s fair to overlook the massacre of the Flemings, which was probably not part of Ball’s and Tyler’s plans.[10] The beheading of the archbishop, the treasurer and many others, however, was clearly integral to their programme.

Were these killings justified? Paul Foot would say yes, and Jeremy Corbyn might agree, but I’m not so sure. It’s partly middle-class squeamishness, I expect;  the same feeling that makes me applaud a well-organized political rally (for a cause I agree with, naturally) but condemn the destruction of property, with two thoughts in mind: What about the effort and resources that have gone into making that? And who’s going to clean up the mess?

I think my choir would probably agree with me. And yet when our current crisis is finally over and we’re allowed to sing together again, I’m sure we’ll all be happy to belt our way through “John Ball”. Regardless of the bloody events behind it, it’s a rousing song - and it's part of our history.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351

[2] Dan Jones, Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Harper, 2009), p. 15.

[3] Brian Bird, a retired clergyman, carried out extensive archival research and concluded that Ball was born in Peldon and came of age in in 1350 before training as a priest in York. See Rebel Before His Time: A Study of John Ball and the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Worthing: Churchman Publishing, 1987). Dan Jones states that Ball came from York; Wikipedia is non-committal on this point.

[4] Walsingham, Chronicon Angliae, quoted in Brian Bird, Rebel Before His Time, p. 66.

[5] Melvyn Bragg, Now Is the Time (London: Sceptre, 2015), pp. 276-277.

[6] https://www.forwallswithtongues.org.uk/projects/ray-walker-peasants-revolt-1981/

[7] Interestingly, this plaque was subsequently “removed from the wall of a house in John Ball Walk at the request of the resident” (I would love to have read the correspondence around this) then put into storage and lost for several years. It was rediscovered, restored, reinstalled, and unveiled for a second time by the Bishop of Colchester and the human rights campaigner and peer Shami Chakrabarti, chancellor of the local university at the time. Given the pointed refusal of the Archbishop of Canterbury to join in the 1981 commemorations, this could be seen as representing a change in church attitudes – but on the other hand the Church of England has always contained a broad spectrum of views.

[8] https://www.marxists.org/archive/foot-paul/1981/06/1381.html

[9] http://camdennewjournal.com/article/left-wing-veteran-tony-benn-unveils-plaque-1381-peasants-revolt-saw-highbury-manor-bu?sp=20&sq=bench

[10] On the other hand, it has been argued that killing Flemings really was central to the rebels’ aims, and that its purpose was to assert and shape their English identity. See Erik Spindler, “Flemings in the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381”, https://www.academia.edu/1865034/Flemings_in_the_Peasants_Revolt

 

Ashes, elms and epidemics

The ash grove, how graceful, how plainly ‘tis speaking/ The harp through it playing has language for me. Growing up in New Zealand, I knew fragments of this song and would sing them on car trips with my family long before I actually ever met an ash tree in real life. When I did so at last, I was underwhelmed. Ashes in full leaf are certainly graceful, but they’ve never really caught my imagination. Not surprisingly, European ash groves evoke no wistful memories of childhood.

The leafless ash, though, is a different story: it’s been my key to a new way of seeing the woods in winter. For years, they were just an indistinguishable mass of bare trunks and branches. Then one day I happened upon a reference in a book to the “jet-black buds” of ash trees. Black buds? I began to look more closely. And lo and behold, walking through my local reserve one day, I found a tree that did indeed have bold, black buds. And then another! A whole grove of them! It wasn’t just the colour that was distinctive, it was the shape, the energetic upward curve of the twigs, the symmetrical cluster of the three buds at the tip, vaguely reminiscent of the club in a pack of cards. Suddenly I was seeing them everywhere, and many of the gnarled old trees I’d taken to be oaks turned out to have been ashes all along.

Since that discovery I’ve seen the winter woodland with different eyes. It’s no longer an undifferentiated and uninspiring background, but a varied cast of characters. I can’t identify them all, but it’s an enjoyable challenge. The clues are not just in the buds, but in the bark, the trunk, the arrangement of branches and twigs, the tell-tale leftovers of previous seasons: catkins and cones, clusters of winged seeds or “keys”. Some ashes – presumably those that bear female flowers, or flowers of both sexes (the sex life of ashes is complicated, to say the least) – are draped with untidy looking keys throughout the winter. It’s not their most attractive feature. Come spring, they put on a curious display of flowers: sprays of green stalks with purplish tips. Not the kind of obvious beauty that will win prizes in flower shows, but rather fascinating.

Ash buds. Crabchick on flickr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

Ash flower. Dean Morley on flickr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode

Old ash in Admiral's Park, Chelmsford

The same tree close-up

Hollow ash on bank of the Wid

Another tree that I’ve discovered fairly late in life is the elm. I didn’t expect to find elm trees when I came to Europe; I assumed they’d all been wiped out by Dutch elm disease. News of that disaster had made it all the way to my science classroom in New Zealand in the 1980s. But then while visiting friends in Wales a few years ago I spotted a majestic tree with round, winged seeds and curious asymmetrical leaves, one side extending further down the stem than the other. I took a leaf home to compare with my tree guide, and was delighted to learn that this was an elm. Since then I’ve found more elms in hedgerows and parks around Chelmsford, though none anywhere near the size of that tree in Llanberis.[1]

These smaller trees are inconspicuous in summer, melting into the background greenery. They’re at their most striking in spring, when abundant clusters of winged seeds appear on bare branches. From a distance an elm in fruit looks as though it’s covered in pale green blossom. It’s a lovely sight, and this spring I’ve seen more and more of it on roadsides near Chelmsford. My latest elm-related discovery, though, is the preceding phase: the flowers. They’re easy to overlook, but unmistakeable once you’ve found them. It was only this spring, in early March, that I noticed a few twigs with small red flowers in my local reserve. What could this be, and why had I never seen it before? A flick through my Collins Gem tree guide quickly brought enlightenment: it was an elm! In the weeks that followed I was able to observe the flowers morphing into fruits, a remarkable transformation.

My elation at discovering elms was short-lived. On Easter Day I was cycling around the countryside excitedly pointing them out to my companions (could this have been a little annoying, I wonder?). Soon after that, I noticed that one of the elms in my local nature reserve was surrounded by dead trees of a similar height and build. Slender young trees, which had clearly not died of old age. As the spring progressed, the difference between the living and the dead became more and more obvious. I gradually realized that for every healthy-looking fruit-laden elm I spotted in a hedgerow, there seemed to be one or more gaunt skeletons nearby.

I take this as sobering evidence that Dutch elm disease is still active and the species hasn’t made a miraculous comeback. So what is this disease, and why is it “Dutch”? It turns out that it didn’t originate in the Netherlands, nor does it particularly affect the species known as the Dutch elm. Somewhat unusually, it got its name from the nationality of the scientists who first identified it in the 1910s. It is caused by two related fungi, spread by elm bark beetles. The first epidemic, from around 1910 to the 1940s, killed up to forty per cent of the elms in some European countries. The second was much more severe, killing an estimated two thirds of mature elms in the UK (some 20 million trees) in the decade following its accidental introduction in the late 1960s. Most of the rest had succumbed by the early 1980s. It must have been a heartbreaking time for European tree lovers, and I’m glad I wasn’t around to witness it. Today new elms keep growing up, mostly in hedgerows, many suckering from the roots of dead giants. But the disease is still lurking, and it seems that once these young trees reach a certain height the bark beetles can see them and come in to feed, bringing the fungus with them. All that hopeful growing for nothing.

Dutch elm disease is an old and well-known enemy, but there’s a much more recent addition to the ranks of villainous tree-killing fungi, and this one is going after the ash tree. Not surprisingly, given the fate of the elm, there’s a considerable amount of anxiety about the resulting disease, ash dieback or Chalara. The Woodland Trust gloomily predicts that it will kill around 80% of ash trees across the UK; other estimates are even higher. The disease was first identified in 2006, by which time it was already widespread in continental Europe. The UK, however, continued to import ash saplings from affected countries until 2012, when the first cases were found here. This led to a sudden panicked response, with a ban on imports, the destruction of 100,000 nursery trees and saplings, and a meeting of the UK’s emergency committee. Too little too late, some have said – does this sound at all familiar?

I only heard about ash dieback a couple of years ago and I’ve so far been fairly unconcerned, since most of the ash trees I see around me look pretty healthy. Just this spring, however, I’ve started to wonder. One striking fact about ash is that it’s one of the last trees to come into leaf in spring, and this being an extraordinarily late spring, they’re not quite there yet. Most trees are now in partial leaf, but some are still almost bare.  And looking at those bare trees, I’m having my doubts. In the young, planted ash grove in my local nature reserve, there are a few trees that are unquestionably dead, bark already peeling off, no signs of life. Others look as though they might still be dormant – yet those black buds have a slightly dry and shrivelled look. And elsewhere in the reserve I’ve noticed that some of the mature ashes have a surprising number of dead branches. Walking through the reserve recently, I started to look at the emerging leaves with a sense of anxiety – is it just a late spring, or are these trees actually unwell? It reminded me somewhat of waiting for a  teenager to come home at night: as the evening wears on you become increasingly anxious and begin to fear the worst – and then at some point the child appears, slightly tipsy but otherwise unharmed, and life goes on. Here’s hoping those ash trees that are starting to worry me will soon be covered in healthy foliage, and I can put away my fears until next spring.

It seems there’s little we can do about these diseases. Human intervention – importing elm logs from North America and ash saplings from continental Europe – has introduced these pests, but human intervention seems more or less powerless to help their victims. In the case of Dutch elm disease, felling affected trees has been the main strategy. Trimming the elms in hedgerows to keep them out of the sight of elm bark beetles also seems somewhat effective, but of course this means they will never develop their full potential as tall and stately trees. As for ash dieback, the Woodland Trust recommends that we clean our shoes or bike tyres after visiting the woods to avoid spreading spores. This will sound painfully familiar to anyone who’s lived in the northern part of New Zealand in recent years, where the efforts to stop kauri dieback have hugely restricted access to the forest. As a keen walker with an aversion to boot cleaning, I find this sensible advice rather hard to swallow, but I suppose it’s a small price to pay if it does help combat the disease. Now where is that scrubbing brush?

Elm flowers, Chelmer Valley LNR, early March 2021

Elm in fruit, Chelmer Valley LNR, mid April 2021

Elm fruit, early May 2021

Elm fruit and leaves, late May 2021

Rare mature elm found in Chelmer Valley LNR, late May 2021

Leaves of above tree

Fallen twig from above tree with fruit

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[1] Which species of elms am I seeing, and are they all the same? The Collins Gem has two main options, English and wych elm (Ulmus procera and Ulmus glabra respectively); the flowers look similar but the fruits and the leaves are slightly different, and appear in a different sequence: leaves first for English elm, fruit first for wych elm. I can’t find mention of this elsewhere. If the Gem is right then most of the elms I’m seeing are probably wych elms. There are other options, though. Many of the small elms I’ve seen have strangely ridged bark, even on quite slender twigs. It seems this “winged” or “corky” bark is particularly typical of the Dutch elm (Ulmus x hollandica) and the small-leaved elm, also known as the field elm (Ulmus minor). If any readers know more, please get in touch!