Doom Painting begins where almost all accounts of 1381 should begin, with the poll tax collection in Fobbing, Essex. Even in the archival accounts its a violent event, laden with centuries of oppression and exploitation. But the archives don't give you a sense of the culmultative resentment and frustration of ordinary people. Blakemore however gives it us in spades, "A gasp, as an afternoon is confounded: Thomas Baker spits a lug of phlegm at the pointed toes of Sir John de Bampton's cherry-red poulaines."
Baker, she continues "has become familiar" with the "skinned-palm feeling of humiliation" of oppression. He and the others in Fobbing, "are sick of the tax collectors and assessors and serjeants-at-arms, who come at every change of the season, with the teetering and vauely comical officiousness of earthbound magpecks".
Even this cursory quote will give the reader a sense of aspects that are clearly very important to Blakemore's novel. The first is the palpable revulsion at injustice that runs through her book. The second is her frequent references to the smells, tastes, dirt and bodily fluids of feudal England. This is a world of oozing mud, dirty clothing, lice, smells and lack of privacy and disease. It's also a world of sex and violence. Wat Tyler, when he appears (and he surely does appear in this telling), is born of a world of violence, pillage and, tragically, rape. A veteran of what is now known as the Hundred Years War, he's seen his share of collective punishment, war and siege. He knows, for instance, that taking Rochester Castle will be impossible for a peasant army, unless something tips the balance.
And what does tip the balance? Here, and elsewhere? It is the, of course, the masses. In many ways it is Blakemore's ability to give the reader a sense of what the movement on the ground was like that makes this is truely unique work. All too often in novels that deal with mass movements readers are offered a mass of people that are somehow perfigured. Everyone seems to know what they are fighting for, and what they stand for. The leaders are ready cut men (usually men) who are fighitng for an ideal. It's a crude caricature of a movement and Doom Painting doesn't fall into the trap. Instead Tyler is a man whose sense of what is needed develops. Unlike John Ball, the poet and conscience of the rebellion, he has no thought out ideas. Just a grim hatred of injustice and liking of violence. As the rebellion unfolds, Tyler develops a real sense of the potential of the rising, and his own place in it.
In fact there's a remarkable speech that Blakemore puts into Tyler's mouth. It's not one that begins, as polished political rhetoric inevitably does, with lofty ideals and promises of victory. It's one that begins with the reality of war and the cruelty of life, and the promise that everyone will stand by each other and that Tyler will do his best for them. Nothing more, nothing less. The later chants of the crowd, when Tyler's better known and his feats have grown in the telling, are even more earthy, but carry the ring of the working-class movement confident in itself and its leaders, "his name's Wat the Tyler and he shits where he likes".
I presume that Blakemore has her own experience of the joyous nature of protesting crowds. Because the book's depiction of the growing rebellion as it marches on London and executes its enemies, feels true. No one comes into the is rebellion perfect, and certainly no one is made perfect by the movement. After all, the "tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" and we carry with us the muck of ages. But the people are changed - in confidence and vision, and Blakemore shows us how.
At the other end of the scale is the venel, cowardly, violent and lazy ruling class. "But I am King of England" complains Richard II at one point. They are secure in their class strata and castles, confident that nothing can threaten them, protected by their armed bodies of men. Certainly this reader enjoyed reading of the collapse of their self-belief (and the occasional castle) and the rising panic in their ranks. One thing that I think Blakemore shows us well though, is that what distinguishes the rich and powerful from the ordinary masses is not just wealth. It is also the luxury of leisure. The rich and powerful waste time with gossip and intrigue, games and leisure. The poor, when they aren't sharpening swords and marching on the capital, work dawn to dusk and drink to forget. Which means their lives are ones of misery and desperation.
Doom Painting is a remarkable work. It's a retelling of a well known story that doesn't offer the reader a pretend, Hollywood, happy ending like The Uprising does. Nor does it pretend that its heroes are saints. Running through it is a celebration of the potential of ordinary people to change the world, and an instinctive solidarity with those who try. This is 1381 brought to life.
Related Reviews
Oman - The Great Revolt of 1381
Firnhaber-Baker & Schoenaers - The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt
Dunn - The Peasants' Revolt: England's failed revolution of 1381
Lindsay & Groves - The Peasants' Revolt 1381
Hilton - Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381
Barker - England Arise! The People, the King & the Great Revolt of 1381
