BLOODY JACK Chapter Twenty - Six

 

I suppose the greatest problem with the real Jack the Ripper story is that the ending is unsatisfying. A poet of the age predicted, "They've captured Leather Apron now, if guilty you'll agree; he'll have to meet a murderer's doom, and hang upon a tree" But the Aaron Kominski never stood  trial and was never even publicly identified as the Ripper.

But then, that is the horror of real murder.  The victim cannot be recovered, nor can the victim's loved-ones be made whole. The horror of a real murder usually dies only when the killer, and all those who loved the victim and their friends and family, also die.

Not so with Jack the Ripper. His horror has so far survived 130 years after his last victim bled out in a dark and dirty corner of dark and dirty Whitechapel.  Part of the reason for the longevity of his horror is the photo (above) taken in the tiny sad little room at 13 Miller's Court, Dorset Street. 

Part of the reason is that the newspapers sold 1 million additional papers a day during the “Autumn of Terror”: - August through November of 1888. 

And part of the reason is that the fictional Jack the Ripper has proved too profitable to let him die. But the police in 1888 were dealing with a real killer.

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (above, front center), one the smartest officers in Whitechapel,  reminded readers in his memoir what the police knew by middle of October, 1888.. “The perpetrator,” he wrote, “...was in the habit of using a certain public-house, and of remaining there until closing time...all of the victims were all of the same class... and living within a quarter of a mile of each other; all were murdered within half a mile area; all were killed in the same manner...he (the killer) lived in the district.” So the police - well at least those below the management level - were not fools. They knew who they were looking for. But publicly identifying and arresting him was not their top priority.

After the Hanbury Street murder of Annie Chapman on 8 September, Whitechapel and Spitafield were flooded with uniformed Constables and plain clothes Detectives, even employing the Whitechapel Vigilantes. As Commissioner Sir Charles Warren had said in his petulant self defense published in the November Murray’s Magazine, “...the primary object of an efficient police is the prevention of crime...” And that was what the police concentrated on – preventing the killer from killing again. And they did.

For 14 days – Friday, 15 September, to Friday, 28 September – Kosminski found the police foiling his searches for another victim, until he was forced outside his hunting grounds to Aldegate, where the public/police net was thinner.

There, in the early hours of Sunday, 30 September,  he murdered Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square. But even then Warren's plan worked. 

The police were able to focus on Aaron Kosminski, living with his brother just down the block from the Goulston Street entryway (above) where Eddowes' bloody apron was found.  Then, during all of October, the “tails” which Chief Inspector Donald Swanson pinned on Kosminski kept him from claiming another victim - 

...at least until 8 November when Kosminski was able to isolate Mary Kelly in her room  – the only murder to take place indoors - and the only murder to have begun earlier in the evening, before the pubs had closed.  And even then he did not kill until closer to dawn, when Kelly's singing, as reported by a neighbor, finally stopped.

The police never had enough evidence to arrest Aaron Kosminski, in much the same way the police were never able to arrest Arthur Leigh Allen of killing at least five victims between December 1967 and October 1969 in California, under the moniker of "Zodiac".   But if, back in 1888, Aaron Kosminski was still alive and no longer killing, why? First there was Abraham, Aaron's older brother. Living with the first paternal role model Aaron had known since his father's death in 1874 would have been a stabilizing influence. 

And second, whoever the Ripper was, he was insane but he wasn't nuts. He did not want to get caught. He had always retained enough control to avoid witnesses and the police, to delay his gratification until the he was certain of his own safety. Even his method of killing was designed to protect himself.

 

And third, accepting Special Agent Douglas' modern profile, the Ripper was extremely passive until the assault. He needed the prostitute to initiate contact. He needed alcohol to lower his own inhibitions. And he needed the victim to be unconscious or dead before he could show the knife and penetrate her with it. To such an individual, being constantly followed by detectives would have fueled a raging  paranoia, as would have his arrest on a Saturday in December of 1889 for walking an unmuzzled dog in Cheapside. 

Cheapside was not in Whitechapel.  Charles Dickens called Cheapside (above)  “...the busiest thoroughfare in the world..." The Cheapside Street market had been in existence for hundreds of years, but during Victorian times, says Dickens, it was “...almost monopolized by men's shops: hosiers and shirt makers, tailors and tobacconists, and above all by jewelers.” 

In fact, says Dickens, “The stranger will be particularly struck with the absence of women...in Cheapside (above)...there is scarcely a woman to be seen to every hundred men.” It would appear an odd place for a homicidal maniac with a particular hatred for women to be walking his dog, muzzled or unmuzzled. What had he been doing to inspire the police to arrest their prime Ripper suspect for such a petty crime?  We will never know.

Having been arrested, the 23 year old Aaron Kosminski made a competent presentation in court. He argued that since he did not own the dog he was not responsible for muzzling it. Like arguing a parking ticket in court, logic was of course no help  But when the magistrate found him guilty and assessed a 10 shilling fine, Aaron was quick enough to argue that it was the Jewish sabbath, and his faith forbid him from handling money. He presented a normal and passive enough image that he was allowed to go free, returning on Monday to pay the fine. 

So this was the man who convinced Mary Jane Kelly to open her door to him, convinced Annie Chapman to go to the back yard with him, and convinced Martha Tabram to lead him up the unlighted stairs in George Yard. Martha's trip to her own death may have been the longest of all the victims, requiring the greatest confidence that the man who was about to murder her, posed no threat whatsoever.

Seven months later after this arrest, on Saturday, 12 July, 1890,  Aaron Kosminski was meekly led by his brother-in-law to the Mile End Workhouse (above), where he was described as having been “insane for the last two years.”  It must have been hard for a Jew to turn their own blood relative over to the charity of Christians, but Arron was hearing voices, had stopped washing and refused food from any person's hand because he feared being poisoned, preferring to eat discards from the gutter. However 3 days later, either because the doctors suspected he was malingering, or because he fooled them, his brother Abraham had to take him home again.

It was not to last. On 4 February of 1891 the police brought  Aaron Kosminski back to the Workhouse. The same issues were mentioned – not working, not washing and eating from the gutter – but this time the police added he had threatened his sister Martha with a knife. Three days later, on 7 February, 1891 Aaron Kominski  was transferred to the Jewish wing of the infamous long corridors of the Colony Hatch Asylum for the “pauper insane” in Barnet, North London (above). The paperwork justification for transfer has not survived the century, but we do know Aaron Kosminski arrived with both hands tied behind his back.

Colony Hatch adhered to the Victorian belief that all problems are better with regimentation - from morning calisthenics to regimented meals. The 2,000 patients were also expected to work, in the tailor shop, the garden or just washing floors. Since most of the patients came from the East End the asylum had a kosher kitchen and a Yiddish interpreter. The records at Colony Hatch have survived and they detail Aaron's 3 year transgression from “apathetic” to "Incoherent, at times excited and violent." The staff noted, “He declares that... he knows the movements of all mankind, he refuses food from others because he is told to do so, and he eats out of the gutter for the same reason”

Eventually the violence became predominant, and Aaron  Kosminski's last stop was the complex of buildings at the Levesden Asylum For Imbeciles in Abbots Langley, 20 miles northwest of London (above). 

Aaron survived here for a quarter of a century, having spent most of his life institutionalized. Toward the end the staff noted, "Patient does not know his age or how long he has been here." 

Aaron Kosminski died of a gangrene infection at the age of 54 years, on Monday, 24 March, 1919 (above).  At the time of his death he weighed just 96 pounds. But he lived longer than any of  his victims, and even his nemesis.

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (above) retired from the Metropolitan Police in 1896, with over 50 awards and commendations, including being named a Druid of Distinction, Reid moved to Hampton-on-Sea, atop the chalk cliffs of England's east coast. Here he worked at becoming an English eccentric.

He renamed his home “Reid's Ranch”, and painted the outside walls with castle battlements and cannon aimed at the ocean. He opened a stand in his garden shed (above), from which he sold postcards – mostly featuring himself - sold lemon-aide and wrote crank letters to the local newspaper. He died at the age of 61, on 5 December, 1917, the same year he finally married.

Thus I end my version of the story of Jack the Ripper – just another human being,  more unhappy and violent than most, but just another human being.

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TOILET HUMOR Chapter Four

 

I think the best way to describe the graveside ceremony was that it was short and sad. But mostly short. It was held Tuesday noon, 21 July, 1858, in London's park-like Brompton Cemetery. There was not a cloud in the sky. The temperature was in the mid-nineties Fahrenheit, and the formalities for the dearly departed Doctor John Snow, who had died of a stroke the week before, were as brief as decorum would allow. 

Many admired the “austere and painfully shy” man who would one day be called the “greatest physician of all time”, who founded not only anesthesiology but epidemiology as well. But on this day the stench overwhelmed grief and respect.

The stench wafted from the cesspit which snaked through the capital of the British Empire, 300 yards from Brompton Cemetery. In an average year, the Thames River's current was dwarfed by the twice daily 23 foot tides. But in 1858 the last rain in the Thames valley had been in March - over three months ago – and Old Man Thames had become a warm stagnant open air cesspit, it's swelling twice a day merely rearranging the human and animal waste piling up across the 700 foot wide 6 foot deep tidal flats, crossed by the new London Bridge.

Twelve years before, in 1842, the city had outlawed the municipal cesspits that were overflowing into the streets and polluting the 17,000 wells used by the 2 ½ million residents of London for drinking and cooking. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette would report: 'Within a period of about six years, thirty thousand cesspools were abolished, and all home and street refuse was turned into the river'" Now 250,000 tons of sewage was being poured directly into the Thames every day. Then, at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, some 827,000 curious paid a penny each to use a flush toilet for the first time. These proved so popular they were kept open for a year, earning over £1000 at a penny a flush. The public's apatite for indoor plumbing accelerated the transfer of poo from human bottoms to river bottom, which is why Dr. John Snow had opposed closing the cesspits.

Dr. Snow had identified the source of an August, 1854 Cholera outbreak that killed over 600 people, as a cesspit contaminated public pump in the poverty crippled Soho section of London. “I found that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump...that the deceased persons used to drink the pump water from Broad Street, either constantly or occasionally.” But even after identifying water as the means of transmission, Dr. Snow had cautioned against the outlawing of cesspits, because he knew without a sewer, that would merely postpone the problem.  His stand had earned him the enmity of most of the socially progressive scientists of the day, such as Dr William Murdoch and the great chemist Michael Faraday, who still ascribed the source of pestilence to mal-aria, or “ bad air”, and miasmas, disease carrying odors.

In July of 1855, Faraday wrote to the London Times, describing a boat trip down the Thames. “The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid....I tore up some white cards...and then dropped some of these pieces into the water...before they had sunk an inch below the surface they were indistinguishable...Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind.” In June of 1858 “blackish-green” water was reported by Health Officer Dr. Murdoch. “It is quite impossible to calculate the consequences of such a moving mass of decomposition... as the river at present offers to our senses”  Dr. Snow had warned about turning the river into an open sewer, but even in sewers the waster flows. The eight weeks of June-July 1858, when the Thames stopped flowing, came to to be called “The Great Stink”

Solutions to the problem of air or water born disease had been debated for almost two decades, through five Prime Ministers, two of them Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby. Whatever solution was offered, there were always objections to paying for it. In 1848 the conservative editors of “The Economists” turned to the Old Testament:: “Suffering and evil...cannot be gotten rid of: and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation... have always been more productive of evil than good”. No proof was offered for this contention. But the defenders of doing nothing went further. It was claimed new sewers would be an invasion of person freedom, a big government intrusion, a tax and spend liberal fraud. Filthy water was not the problem. And even the revered Dr. Snow was against big government sewer projects, claimed the opponents.

The latter argument was not quite true, but Snow's position was nuanced enough to be obscure  In fact he suggested it would be a good idea to end "that form of liberty to which some communities cling, the sacred power to poison to death not only themselves but their neighbors” Still the opponents confused enough of the public as to muddy the already filthy waters.  In 1855 Charles Dickens had satirized the opponents by describing a mythical pro-stink campaign rally. “Ratepayers... Health is enormously expensive. Be filthy and be fat. Cesspools and Constitutional Government! Gases and Glory! No insipid water!!” Dickens was kidding, but even to him the stench was no joke. He wrote a friend, “I can certify that the offensive smells...have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature” And still the opponents cautioned delay after delay, spreading confusion and misinformation much like modern day climate change deniers or anti-vaxers are still doing – proving again that we have not changed since leaving our Garden of Eden toilet.

Few would ever see the wiggling predators in a drop of Thames water under a microscope. But in the summer of 1858 everyone could smell the stench. It was, in the words of author David Barnes, “catastrophic...a devastating and even incapacitating onslaught. The stench was intolerable.” Wrote a reporter for the Illustrated London News, “The intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings (Westminster) which overlook the river. A few members...ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.”

The absentee tenant representing Leitrim, Ireland, John Brady, asked Lord John Manners, the Commissioner of Works and Public Buildings in Derby's second government, if anything could be done. Lord Manners replied the Thames was not under his “jurisdiction.” . Four days later another minister returned to the topic, and Lord Manners again avoided it, insisting, “Her Majesty's Government have nothing whatever to do with the state of the Thames".

Although Smith-Stanley was the Prime Minister in 1858, he sat in the House of Lords. The leader of the House of Commons was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, the most capable politician of his generation. And Disraeli realized the stench was growing stronger than the opposition. The desperate politicians were spending £1,500 per week to shovel 250 tons of lime across the mud flats at low tide. Under the direction of engineer Goldsworthy Gurney, curtains soaked in chloride were draped over the windows of Westminster to block the stench.  Nothing seemed to help. In mid-June Gurney had to warn the Commons, he could “no longer be responsible for the health of the house.” On 11 June, 1858 even the official diarist of the House of Commons was forced to note, “Gentlemen sitting in the Committee Rooms and in the Library were utterly unable to remain there in consequence of the stench which arose from the river.”

Finally, on 15 June, Disraeli brought the latest version of the “do something about the stench” bill up for debate, recalling the ancient river Styx, the river of death, and referring to the Thames as a “ a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors".  The cost would be a special 3 pence tax on all London households for the next 40 years - £3 million to rebuild the sewers of London.  Noted The Times,  “Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench” .

Wrote the London Globe, “Disgust, alarm, and reasonable precautions induced members” to finally take action. The Times wrote, “Gentility of speech is at an end – it stinks; and who so once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.”

The sewer plan, after almost two decades of design and redesign, was simple, as explained by Joseph Bazalgette, the man who would be responsible for building it. “The existing streams and drains all ran down to the river on both sides”, he wrote.   

First, the Thames -  that “pestiferous and typhus breeding abomination” -  was to be walled off by massive embankment, built atop new intersecting sewers (above, right center)  on either shore  “...so as to intercept those streams:”  Atop the embankments new roads could be built, and parks and open spaces. It promised a better world, a world of light and fresh air and ease of commute. But most of all it promised an end to the stench. 

The waste was not to be treated. It was merely to be dumped somewhere else, farther away, up stream, out to sea.  English humans were still searching for the Garden of Eden, where their poop would remain out of sight, out  of mind, out from under their noses and out of their drinking water.

The massive tax increase passed in just 18 days,  from creation, consideration, amendments, debate and passage. Usually only declarations of war received such quick treatment. It would have been cheaper to have fixed the problem earlier, and Lord knows most people wanted to fix it sooner. Uncounted lives would have been saved. The economy would have been improved, along with the health of the citizens, by following the simple rule of never shitting where you eat.  But it did not pass until the richest who refused to pay for the improvements, could no longer say no while holding their noses. It would take another twenty years to complete the work, but at last it was begun in August of 1858, just before the rains came back and the Great Stench ended.

The London sewers did not return English men and women to the Garden of Eden. None of us ain't ever going to get back there. And yet, we never seem to stop trying.

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BY DIVINE RIGHT - Wat Tyler

 

I started out thinking nobody could be a worse villain than that royal toady, John Bampton, Minister of Parliament and Justice of the Peace. He descended on the little Essex village of Brentwood at the end of May 1381 to collect over due taxes and delivered neither justice nor peace. Within 48 hours Bampton's ministrations had set off a riot, gotten six of his own clerks and several loyal citizens beheaded by a mob and barely escaped himself, back to London. Who could be a bigger villain than that?

The immediate answer was the arrogant royal toady Sir Simon de Burley. On Monday, 3 June, 1381, two sergeants dispatched by the villein de Burley entered the Thameside  village of Gravesend, to arrest escaped Peasant Robert Belling.  Belling must have been more than a mere peasant because he offered to buy his own freedom. But Sir de Burely demanded his rights of lordship, and had Belling thrown into the dungeon of Rochester Castle. Three days later a mob showed up outside Rochester Castle and the warden thought it better to free Belling rather than have his tiny garrison murdered. Was this rebellion really caused by the villain John Bampton, or the villain Sir Simon de Burley?  Take your pick.

Between the Black Death, which had killed over half of all English peasants during 1348-49, and the Hundred Years War with France (they were right in the middle of it) , the long suffering and few remaining peasants of England were, by 1381, fed up with having to feed , clothe and supply weapons and soldiers for their arrogant masters in the nobility  In early June 60,000 peasants from Essex in the northeast, and 40,000 from Kent in the southeast, were marching on London, determined to have their complaints heard by the King himself.

The English nobility were shocked and stunned. Because of the war in France and the never ending Scottish threat, there were few soldiers left in England. And those that were, were not trustworthy, as the warden of Rochester Castle had shown. 

And worse, the King, chosen to rule by divine right , was the 14 year old Plantagenet blue blood Richard II, a tall and gangly youth with a “white, rounded and feminine” face. He was a smart lad, but had a nasty stammer, and his noble “handlers” were not sure he could lead them out of this crises, whoever was to blame for starting it..

The nobility's first nomination for the responsible villain was the “mad priest of Kent” the heretical Father John Ball. He had often challenged the very foundations of feudalism, asking , “When Adam dug and Eve spun, where was then a gentleman?”  Ball dared to argue “all men by nature were created alike.” It was not God who chose Kings, said Ball, but “naughty men.” 

Sir Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England, had locked up Ball in Rochester Castle (above).  As the Kent rebels moved west, they looted the Archbishop's properties in Canterbury, blaming him for the taxes piled upon them.  But this was also where a third villain joined the rebellion, the peasant who would give his name to the entire revolt: Wat Tyler. And once having reached Rochester, he freed both Berling and Father Ball.

Here was the nobility's real villain, then, and a proper villain too, being a free resident of a village. It was said Tyler was a member of the roof tiler's guild, or a blacksmith. It was said he had served in the King's army in France. And it was said a tax collector tried to strip his 13 year old daughter, to prove she was old enough to pay the 1 shilling poll tax, the third such tax in four years, laid on every person over 14. years of age. It was also said that Tyler then beat the tax collector's s brains out. 

Whatever the truth,  it is fact that on 7 June, 1381, Tyler was elected to lead the rebels up the Old Kent Road to London. And from that day the Peasant's Revolt became Wat Tyler's rebellion. Four days later, 11 June, 1381, the crowd reached the high ground at Blackheath, 3 miles southeast of London.

This “bleak site”, named for its dark soil, was a tradition camping spot, and young King Richard II's advisers had anticipated the rebels would pause there. They loaded their royal charge onto a barge, and with four barges of soldiers as escort, and set out down the Thames to overawe the “rebels” and order them to disperse. Seeing 40,000 angry peasants armed with longbows and axes, the courtiers panicked. The King did not get off the boat (above),  and the royal forces did not stop rowing until they were all locked safely behind the walls of the Tower of London. 

Caught on the outside, the Lord Mayor William Walworth ordered the gate houses at both ends of the 900 foot long London Bridge, the only crossing over the Thames River, to be closed and its drawbridge raised. This should keep the peasants on the south bank.

On Wednesday, 12 June, 1381, when Wat Tyler and his 40,000 member “mob” approached London Bridge, Walter Sybyle, a fishmonger and city alderman, ordered the gates at both ends lifted and the drawbridge lowered. Pausing only to post their own men in the gatehouses, Tyler's peasants streamed past the west door of St. Magnus-the-Matyr Cathedral and invaded the capital. 

Fleet and Newgate Prisons were raided and the prisoners were freed. Legal offices were ransacked, lawyers and clerks were butchered, and thousands of contracts, property records and mortgages were burned. The mobs also ransacked the homes of recent Flemish immigrants, and many were killed. And the Savoy Palace (above),  the ostentatious home of the arrogant and incompetent general John of Gaunt, was captured. “What could not be smashed or burned was thrown into the river. Jewelry was pulverized with hammers...” But a disciplined core of Tyler's force marched directly to Aldergate, in the eastern city wall. There the man entrusted with command by Mayor Walworth, Thomas Farington, threw that gate open as well.

Tyler's force advance a mile outside the city walls and camped in the open fields at Mile End. And there, on the following day, Thursday, 13 June, 1381, they were met by the larger force of peasants from Essex. A hundred thousand rebels, equal to London's population, had now occupied the capital, trapped the King and his ministers in the Tower, and accepted Wat Tyler as their sole leader..

The situation was unstable. Tyler must find food and water for his massive “army”. And so must the King's much smaller force in the tower. And with the daily markets disrupted, Mayor William Walworth must do the same for the city. The King's party panicked first, and asked for a meeting the next day, Friday 14 June 1381, at the rebel encampment at Mile End, to hear what Wat Tyler wanted.

Tyler wanted everything – the end to the slavery of serfdom, the right of peasants to buy the the land they worked, and to sell what they made and grew, the right to punish the royal advisers who had oppressed the people, and a general pardon for the peasant army. Grant these humble requests, said Tyler, and the peasant army would return to their villages. The King made a show of offering a few objections before agreeing to everything. It was the strategy Tyler expected, as he had no doubt Richard II meant to betray any promises. So Tyler had not waited for the King's betrayal.

While these “negotiations” were still going on,  400 rebels marched on The Tower.  Again, the guards offered little more than token resistance. It was the first and last time the Tower of London fell to an invading force.

Chanting "Where is the traitor to the kingdom?” the rebels dragged their number one villain, the fat Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Simon Sudbury,  and a dozen of other royal advisers, outside The Tower's Walls, to Tower Hill, where they were all beheaded. 

It took 8 blows to carve through Sudbury's thick neck, as his battered skull still shows (above).. When Richard II saw his adviser's head being paraded on a pike,  the King abandoned The Tower, and hurried instead to his apartments in Blackfriars, south-west London.

That night, while the heads of the murdered royal advisers were bobbing atop the southern gatehouse of London Bridge, Mayor William Walworth came to King Richard with good news. First, a large part of the Peasant army had already started for home, trusting the King to fulfill his promises.  And second, the merchants of London had raised a militia of 5,000 armed men, whose loyalty could be trusted for the time being. In the morning, Saturday 15 June, 1381, Richard sent word he wanted to meet again with Tyler, to seal their agreement. But this time, he asked, the meeting be held at at Smithfields, where he felt safer.

For 800 years Smithfields, north west of the city walls, bordered by the Fleet River and shaded by elm trees, had been the open air livestock market for the city, and occasionally an execution place for rebels like Scotsman William Wallace. But being from out of town, Wat Tyler was probably unaware of this last purpose. Late that afternoon, Wat Tyler and a few followers crossed the Fleet River, leaving what was left of his peasant army on the eastern shore, and rode to meet the King and his 200 supporters..

Was Tyler drunk? Had he gone mad? Or did he sense, with the loss of most of his men, how this story was destined to end?  Richard II asked why the peasants had not all gone home. Tyler responded they were waiting for the promised laws to be signed by the King.  A valet named Ralph Standish then called Tyler a thief. At the insult the Kentish villain drew his only weapon, a knife.  The Mayor drew his sword. Tyler slashed out, but the Mayor was wearing armor, as was the King. Tyler was not. Whereupon Standish ran Tyler through with his sword. 

While the struggled continued the young King spurred his horse across the Fleet River, and addressed the rebels directly, calling them his friends. He invited them to follow guides to Clerkenwell Green, where they would be fed. Trusting their King, and not being able to see what had happened to Wat Tyler, the peasants followed.

It was a trap. The peasants arrived in Clerkenwell to find themselves hemmed in by run down apartment buildings and narrow streets, all escape routes guarded by the Mayor's militia.  As darkness approached, the King appeared, followed by Wat Taylor's head atop a spike.  It had been 9 days since Wat Taylor had been elected leader of the rebellion, and with his death the shrunken army of the poor lost heart.  The peasants fell to their knees and begged forgiveness. The King granted it, but withdrew his promises to end serfdom and grant freedoms. He also knighted Mayor Wentworth and Ralph Standish. He then ordered the peasants to be escorted back across London Bridge, and allowed to return home. And then he unleashed his anger..

John Ball, whose words would inspire Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, was executed at St. Albans. His final words were, addressed not to the the King who was there to witness his agony, but to his “fellow citizens”.  He advised them to “...stand firm while you may, and fear nothing for my punishment since I die in the cause of liberty.”  

He was then hung until almost dead, taken down and his body slowly cut into quarters. Over the next five years around England some 5000 rebels would be hung for their uprising. The increasingly tyrannical Richard would sneered at his subjects, “Rustics you were and rustics you are still. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher” But there would not be another poll tax in England, until the 20^th century.

Sir William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, would die four years later, in December of 1385. In his will he left his wife all the income from his rents, including those of the whore houses he owned on the south shore of the Thames, rebuilt after Way Tyler's rebels had burned them down. 

Seven years after the death of Wat Tyler, the arrogant Sir Simon de Burley was impeached for treason by Parliament, and executed by beheading. 

And in the 22nd year of his reign, Richard II, King of England by divine right, would be betrayed by a cousin, and would die of starvation as a prisoner in February of 1400. His death was barely noted, and he was almost completely forgotten by both the nobles and peasants of his kingdom. So much for Divine Right.

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