Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/427

 and that he demanded a commission for himself and his followers to behead all lawyers, escheators, and every one connected with the law. He is reported on the same authority to have boasted that within four days all the laws in England should proceed from his mouth. The fullest and most impartial account of the whole scene at Smithfield is supplied by the Stowe manuscript (pp. 519–22). Summoned by Walworth, the mayor, to speak to the king, Tyler rode up on a small horse, dismounted holding a dagger, and, half kneeling, shook Richard heartily by the hand, bidding him be of good cheer, for he should shortly be far more popular with the commons than he was at present. ‘We shall be good comrades,’ he added familiarly. Asked why he did not return to his country, he replied with a great oath that none of them would do so until they got a charter redressing their grievances, and it would be the worse for the lords of the realm if they were refused this. At the king's request Tyler rehearsed their demands, which were that there should be no law but the ‘law of Winchester,’ and no outlawry; that no lord should henceforth exercise seigniory; that there should be only one bishop in England, and that the goods of holy church and the monastic foundations should, after suitable provision for the clergy and monks, be divided among the parishioners; and, lastly, that there should be no villenage in England, but all to be free and ‘of one condition.’ Richard promised everything consistent with the ‘regality of his crown,’ and urged him to go home. Tyler, whose oratory had heated him, called for beer, and, drinking a great draught in the king's presence, remounted his horse. But an incautious remark by a ‘valet of Kent’ in the king's suite, that he recognised in the rebel leader the greatest thief and robber in that county, was overheard by Tyler, who ordered one of his followers to come and behead him. The man, who is identified by other chronicles with Sir John Newentone, keeper of Rochester Castle, boldly maintained the truth of what he had said, and Tyler, in his exasperation, was about to kill him with his own dagger when Walworth interfered and arrested him. Tyler thereupon struck at the mayor, who was saved by his armour, and instantly drew his sword and wounded Tyler in the neck and head. A follower of the king's, said by Froissart and the Continuator of Knighton to have been Ralph Standish, who was knighted immediately after, followed up the attack and inflicted a mortal wound (cf. Cal. Rot. Pat. ii. 32, 47;, iii. 504). Tyler spurred his horse, calling upon the commons to avenge him, but after covering about thirty yards fell from his saddle half dead. His followers carried him into the adjoining hospital of St. Bartholomew, where he was laid in the master's chamber; but Walworth, returning to Smithfield after rousing the city for the king's protection, finding his body gone, and learning where he had been taken, had him brought out and beheaded. His head was carried on a pole to intimidate the commons, and afterwards, with that of the other chief ringleader, Jack Straw (? John Rackstraw), replaced those of Archbishop Sudbury and their other victims on London Bridge.

[The most detailed and on the whole, in the present writer's judgment, most trustworthy contemporary account of the insurrection in London, and its antecedents in Kent and Essex, is that contained in an ‘anominalle cronicle’ once belonging to St. Mary's Abbey at York, used by Stow in his Annals of England; a late sixteenth-century transcript of this portion of the Chronicle, the original of which is not known to exist, is the Stowe MS. 1047, formerly in the Marquis of Buckingham's library at Stowe and now in the British Museum; it was first printed (by Mr. G. M. Trevelyan) in the English Historical Review for July 1898. It was written in French, with some admixture of English words, apparently in the north of England; some of the details, which do not occur in any other chronicle, are confirmed by documentary evidence. Stow's extracts do not include some of the most interesting passages. Walsingham's Historia Anglicana (Rolls Ser.) is full but prejudiced, and there is a brief but well-informed account by John Malverne (having some points in common with the Stowe MS.) printed at the end of the Polychronicon in the same series, and a less important one in the Monk of Evesham's Chronicle, edited by Hearne. Froissart (ed. Luce, vol. x.) had good information, but did not use it very well; Riley, in his Memorials of London (p. 450), prints a narrative from the Letter Books of the Corporation; some details may be added from the continuations of Knighton and the Eulogium Historiarum, both in the Rolls Ser.; Rotuli Parliamentorum; Cal. Pat. Rolls, Richard II, vols. i. and ii., 1895–7; Archæologia Cantiana, vol. iii.; Stowe's Chronicle, ed. Howes, 1631. The fullest modern account of the revolt is Le Soulèvement des Travailleurs d'Angleterre en 1381, par André Réville et Ch. Petit-Dutaillis, Paris, 1898, but its authors were unaware of the existence of the Stowe manuscript; other accounts in Stubbs's Constitutional History, vol. ii., and Wallon's Richard II; compare also Powell's Rising in East Anglia in 1381, Cambridge, 1896; Baines's History of Lancashire.] 

TYLER, WILLIAM (d. 1801), sculptor and architect, was a contributor to the exhibition of the Society of Artists during the