Away with the learning of clerks, away with it!

"Away with the learning of clerks, away with it!" was a rallying cry of rebellious townspeople during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in Cambridge when they sacked the university and official buildings and burnt legal documents and charters en masse. The call is usually ascribed to one Margery (sometimes Margaret)[1] Starre (fl. 1381). She is generally described as an "old woman",[2] although she has also been characterised as a beldam.[1][3]

The story of this woman's violence against texts is not unknown—it has been noted several times in major studies of the revolt—but its significance as part of the much larger story of women in 1381 has been overlooked.[4][note 1]

Sylvia Federico

The Peasants' Revolt in Cambridge
Main article: Peasants' Revolt

On 15 June 1381, revolt broke out in Cambridgeshire, led by a gang from Suffolk and local men who had been involved in the London riots who had returned to spread unrest.[5] The University of Cambridge was staffed by priests and enjoyed special royal privileges; this attracted the ire of the lay inhabitants of the town. The Mayor of Cambridge led the rebellion and one of the first major incidents was against the university.[5] The university's library and archives were burnt in the centre of the town.[6]

The historian Barrie Dobson has noted the popularity of burning charters, "records and writings in the house of justice" and other legal records during the Peasants' Revolt.[7] Corpus Christi College[8]—which had close links with the unpopular John of Gaunt[5][note 2]— was sacked on 15 June[10] and a number of chests containing the college's muniments were removed.[1] The university was particularly unpopular in Cambridge as, on the one hand, it took a heavy-handed role in the town's policing, but on the other, its scholars received benefit of clergy which effectively exempted them from lay courts.[10]

On 16 June,[4] the mob destroyed university documents[note 3] on a bonfire in Market Square.[12][note 4] In what Juliet Barker has described as one of the more picaresque moments of the revolt,[2] Starre scattered the ashes to the four winds,[14] crying out "away with the learning of clerks, away with it!" as she did so,[13] dancing triumphantly with the mob.[15][16]

Starre may not have been averse to literacy itself, suggests the Chaucerian Susanne Sara Thomas, as much as the oppressive bonds charters represented,[17] and they may have been more generally a symbol of "the establishment";[18] The historian Edmund King has suggested that the episode illustrates that Starre and her cohorts did not realise "how little learning is to be found in most official university documents",[19] while the medievalist Alastair Dunn has questioned whether the tale of Margery Starre's may, in fact, be the stuff of legend.[20] In any case, although part of what Barker has called a "summer of blood" and "a general riot of destruction and death", Starre destroyed property but did not kill anyone,[16] although a later attempt was made on the life of the University bedel.[21] Starre achieved, said Dan Jones, a "brief notoriety"[22] even at a time of general notoriety, and that her "spirit of jubilant vandalism" pervaded the entire city.[22]

In medieval culture

Thomas has suggested that Starre was something of a precursor to Geoffrey Chaucer's character The Wife of Bath of The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), who rips pages out of her husband's book and then later makes him burn it,[23] while Dorothy Colmer has suggested that she reflects the "political dissatisfactions of the age" as represented by Starre in 1381.[24][25] Thomas Shippey has drawn comparisons with Shakespeare's followers of Jack Cade, in Henry VI, Part 3, and their exhortation to "kill all the lawyers".[26]

Notes
  1. Federico notes that there are many subsequent legal appearances of women, "in the judicial records, chronicles, and poetry produced in the decade following the revolt. These texts depict women as independent leaders and maintainers of rebel bands, as instigators of others' violence, and as accomplices with their family members in criminal acts".[4]
  2. Gaunt's London home, the Savoy Palace, had been one of the London rebels' first targets a few days previously; it had been ransacked and razed to the ground.[9]
  3. described in accounts of the time as the "statutes and ordinances" of the university, although many such documents from prior to this event survive[11]
  4. Firth-Green gives other examples of the rebels' interest in seeking out official documents for destruction, such as at St Albans Abbey, where they particularly sought what was described as "a certain ancient charter...on which there were capital letters, one gold, the other blue".[13]

References
  1. Powell 1896, p. 52.
  2. Barker 2004, p. 324.
  3. Rowse 1966, p. 13.
  4. Federico 2001, p. 159.
  5. Dunn 2004, p. 127.
  6. Dunn 2004, pp. 128–129.
  7. Dobson 1983, p. 208.
  8. Harrison 1985, p. 96.
  9. Dunn 2004, pp. 85, 87.
  10. Hilton 2003, pp. 202–203.
  11. Hackett 1970, p. 3.
  12. McKisack 1991, p. 493.
  13. Firth-Green 2002, p. 200.
  14. Justice 1994, p. 72.
  15. Oman 1906, p. 72.
  16. Barker 2004, p. x.
  17. Thomas 1997, p. 265.
  18. Rosenblum 1995, p. 13.
  19. King 1979, p. 173.
  20. Dunn 2004, p. 159.
  21. Dunn 2004, p. 128.
  22. Jones 2010, p. 180.
  23. Thomas 1997, p. 268.
  24. Colmer 1973, p. 338.
  25. Laskaya 1995, p. 177 n.19.
  26. Shippey 1999.

Bibliography
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  • Colmer, D. (1973). "Character and Class in The Wife of Bath's Tale". The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 72: 329–339. OCLC 315792363.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Dobson, R. B. (1983). The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-59740-548-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Dunn, A. (2004). The Peasants' Revolt: England's Failed Revolution of 1381. London: Tempus. ISBN 978-0-75242-965-6.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Federico, S. (2001). "The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381". Journal of British Studies. 40 (2): 159–183. doi:10.1086/386239. OCLC 931172994.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Firth-Green (May 2002). A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-81221-809-1.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Hackett, M. B. (1970). The Original Statutes of Cambridge University. Cambridge.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
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