April 12, 2022 • 46 mins
London of the 1500s was a bustling center of commerce, finance and industry -- and it attracted a fair number of foreign-born professionals, who sought their fortune in the metropolis. However, as epidemics and economic downturns made life worse and worse for the average person, the native-born working class began to blame foreigners, whom they called 'strangers,' for their woes. In today's episode, the guys follow the escalating, xenophobic tensions that led to citywide riots -- and how the Crown leveraged this to further solidify state power.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. We are recording this on a
lovely April Monday here in the fair metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia.
Let's give it up for our super producer, the one
and only Mr Max Williams. They call me Ben No No.
Do you have a good weekend? Did I have a
(00:48):
good weekend? Um? Yes, I think so. So we were
just talking about the golf, right, uh, honestly so, Like
I'm from a Gusta, Georgia, which is where the Augusta
National Golf Course takes place, the most exclusive and whitest
place on the planet, the Augusta National, And every year
(01:09):
they hold the Master's Tournament and is a real um
ship show there. And I happened to be visiting my
mom um and she lives really close to the National
Golf Course. And it's funny because a good friend of
ours and friend of the show, Frank Well Herron, his
family has these you know, Master's tickets at the enam
(01:31):
of the tournament, and we were talking about how you
just can't get them. They're so exclusive that they're passed
down generationally, and it's sort of a closed system and
you can like buy other people's tickets, but if you
buy someone's ticket and then you act a fool at
the master's, that will come back on the people who
you bought tickets from. So it's very uh, high society,
(01:51):
high falutin situation. And then I ended up back in
Atlanta as the winner. Um, some white dude was announced
and it became it. It was on the TV at
this place called the brew House and little five points
here in Atlanta, and it went from the uh, you know,
the slowest sports Alive broadcasts, you know, to the white
people hugging channel, and that's a lot of that three
(02:13):
under par Interesting, I love the color commentary because even
the color commentary is subdued, you know, where they say uh.
And interesting fact about this athlete. He has two different dogs,
they're both names. One of his legs is slightly shorter
(02:34):
than the other, and he's he's made it work. He's
made it work, and he prefers right, and he prefers
to say one leg is in fact longer than the other.
So a bit of a real glass has glass half full,
half empty, kind of guy. You know, he's a glass
glass half full guy. But I'm going e somewhere with
the last thing I say, I joke the white people
(02:56):
hugging channel I I kid you not. Once the win
or is announced, it is just like I gotta fill
out the broadcast day, I guess. So it just becomes
like every imaginable type of frame shot of white people hugging.
And then finally at the end when they before they
go to commercial and like where they're done with the
broadcast day. It's just a one shot kind of or
two shot rather of the winner whose name eludes me
(03:18):
and is irrelevant, uh and his wife slow motion hugging
said against the beautiful backdrop of the augustache, which, to
be fair, it is a feat of modern gardening engineering.
They literally freeze the flowers with liquid nitrogen in advance
of the event so that they bloom magically just right
(03:39):
on time. And it was it was Scotty Schleft. So
we are, yeah, we are going somewhere with this because
one thing that the spritual cultural, the culture of the
of the Masters has in common, I would say with
today's episode is there's very much a sense of exclusivity.
(04:04):
There's very much them versus us. An in crowd and
an outcrowd. And what we're seeing in today's story is
a story about how people can react on mass when
they feel their insider status is threatened or when they
feel the their hierarchy is being challenged somehow. And this
(04:26):
story takes place in London in May, the first day
of May, which is, you know, in averse creativity, home
to a celebration called May Day, you know, dance around
the may pole, marching around for various causes. But today's
stories also about a time May Day went very wrong
(04:49):
in London. In that's right, we're talking about London under
Henry the eighth. Um. It was a back a milion time.
Lots of carousing and drinking and cavorting. I don't know
it was what it wasn't between carousing and cavorting, I
don't we'll sort that outlier, um. But yeah, in the
sixteenth century folks in London, Um, it was kind of
(05:12):
it was high times. The Feast of Saint Joseph the
Laborer was another big events of the season. The start
of summer. There would be lots of boozing and schmoozing
and all that good stuff. The city would be decorated
with these beautiful kind of green bows, and folks would be,
you know, dressed in costume playing the hero of of
(05:35):
the working man, rob from the rich and gave the
poor and all that robin hood. But this particular may Day,
the festivities took a bit of a turn. They sure did.
Uh We're gonna learn how over one thousand people ran
uh muck through the city, wreaking havoc. Within days, hundreds
of folks got arrested, more than a baker's dozen were
(05:57):
executed in very messed up ways. This is the story
of evil may Day, and it's a story of xenophobia.
It's a story of social dynamics. It's a story of
panic and looking back, it is also a ridiculous story.
A lot of our research here, by the way, is
coming from an excellent Smithsonian article by Lorraine Bosigo, who
(06:19):
quotes an awesome professor named Paul Griffith's. The title is
on Evil made a Londoner's rioted. Not gonna read the
whole headline yet, because we're we're gonna ask some questions
for you at the end of this. So if you,
if you look back in the fifteen hundreds in London.
We we talked about this time period of a few
episodes ago. If you look back, London is a booming
(06:42):
city at this time in the early sixteenth century, and
because it was a hub of commerce and industry, it
also became a hub for immigration. A lot of people
from the European continent. We're coming to London for opportunities.
You know, when we talk about um, we're talking about journeyman, right,
(07:02):
the journeyman system. A while back, we learned journeyman would,
on their way to becoming a master their craft, they
would go where the work was. So if you were
in Italy, you probably wanted to go to Rome, that's
where all the jobs were, or you know, you wanted
to go to Prague. You wanted to find the big cities,
basically because the big cities held the jobs. So Dutch folks,
(07:24):
Italian folks, Russian merchants, lots of bankers as well. They
all came to London, which was fine. It was okay
with most people so long as the economy was doing
well and so long as they weren't in the grips
of a terrible epidemic or plague. Unfortunately, around this time period,
(07:45):
fifteen seventeen early fifteen hundreds, London did have an economic downturn.
They did have an epidemic something called sweating sickness. Have
you guys heard a sweating sickness? Yeah, it sounds pretty, uh,
pretty unpleasant. Is it a matter of like getting like
a like a bad fever. What's that? What's it caused by?
It's weird because from what I understand, I was looking
(08:07):
into this a little bit earlier. What I understand is
that it was a mysterious disease. We know it was contagious,
but since about the late four hundreds fourteen eighty five
or so, it was regularly infecting large parts of various countries.
We know that there are some things, some diseases we
(08:30):
recognize in modern medical parlance today that can cause sweating,
like tuberculosis or indocarditis, which is just affection of heart valve.
It's weird because we we could almost do an episode
of it. Honestly, the last epidemic was in fifteen fifty one,
(08:50):
and it hasn't it hasn't occurred in a long time since.
No one's exactly sure. They think maybe it's a sitting
numbre hand of virus. Just kind of group of virus
that usually caused kidney failure syndrome. But yeah, there was
a mystery disease. Let's for our purposes today. That's the
(09:11):
scary part. Not only was the economy in the crapper,
but also people were getting sick and no one knew why.
This was not a problem that John Snow could solve
like Colt like he did with cholera. I don't know, man,
Maybe we talked a little bit about the economics because
this kind of yeah, almost always goes hand in hand
(09:31):
with economic problems. Yeah, so there was a certain boom
time element at play, with wheat prices being pretty low
um in the early part of the sixteenth century. The
harvest from fifteen sixteen saw a tiny little increase but
nothing super significant, but that paired with a decrease in
wages and something that was referred to as a droughty
(09:54):
and frosty winter, along with the introduction of the disease
in question, caused some of the lower to mid class
Londoners uh to become very very anxious about the future.
There was a simmering kind of tension and resentment from
the lower class against the upper class that had the
(10:17):
potential to be sort of a powder keg situation. Um
they're always was kind of a bit of xenophobia m
as remains the case and in many parts of Europe
with a lot of immigrants and foreigners being seen as
kind of others that referred to as strangers in their
midst in the history of Vault dot co dot uk article,
(10:40):
but we looked at for this episode and there was
a lag with legislation that kind of would help, you know,
sort of mediate these these tensions a bit because nothing
was put in place to limit the economic activities of immigrants,
So I do not necessarily was a good thing, but
it was something that I think the the you know,
(11:01):
indigenous Lendoners would have preferred to have some sort of
protection against um, you know, people coming from other countries
to take their jobs. So it wasn't until the fifteen
twenties that this kind of like listen was put in place,
but that was largely because of the riotous events of
Evil may Day, Yeah yeah, or Ill may Day as
(11:23):
it was also known. There was this palpable sense of
tension in Old London town at this time. The kind
of stuff you could cut with a butter knife through
the air. This was also on the rump end of
the War of the League of Cambra, a war against France.
England had fought this on and off for years and years,
(11:47):
and it had an enormous cost, both in terms of
blood and in terms of treasure. And religious authorities were
super anxious about all kinds of heretics and lasphemer's who
were waging a war for the hearts and minds of
the faithful. Fund side note, Just a few months later
(12:09):
this same year, in October, Martin Luther would dale his
famous n theses to the door. So these issues all
inner mix in this gumbo of this gumbo of bad vibes,
and uh, they have gumbo at the time. I'm just
editorializing a lot of the cosmics. Right right, It moves
(12:31):
to the beat of jazz. We used to joke about
that and how it moves to jazz. Londoners started to
question the legitimacy and the wisdom of their government, and
Shannon McSheffrey, who is a professor of history at Concordia
University in Montreal, said, quote, artisans and English merchants were
united in a sense against these foreigners who are coming
(12:53):
in and had unfair advantages, allowing them to prosper while
the English board had economic problems. By the way, we're
talking about these foreigners, which Londoners of the time called
them strangers, not foreigners. They just said these strangers and
our shows. But there weren't a whole bunch of them.
(13:18):
Most estimates say they were about fifty thou people in
London at this time. Two percent of those were born
somewhere else. At the most extreme estimate, maybe six percent
were born somewhere else, but it was by no means
a huge minority the population. Still, there was a lot
(13:39):
of widespread poverty. People's lives were terrible. Folks were getting sweating, sickness,
you name it. And that's something that Paul Griffith's, who
is a professor at Iowa State University, mentions he's a
history professor. He noted that there was this sense among
the working class, especially that these strangers were taking work
(14:03):
away from honest london Ers and that they would they
would control various industries, particularly the wool trade. So the
idea was that there was an insidious conspiracy on the
part of some of these foreigners, which obviously is not true.
(14:26):
But when people are in desperate times, they often want
to have an enemy well, and they're vying for limited
resources and real estates and um supremacy in these particular industries.
And frankly, I mean a lot of times, you know,
folks that are litill come in from other countries or
they have it way worse, are gonna have a better
work ethic and they're gonna come in and like set
up shop and absolutely kick ass. Let's take a big claim.
(14:50):
And if there aren't either laws in place or oversight
or some way of keeping things, you know, quote unquote fair,
then you're all is going to have people who want
to see themselves as better than another group that's quote
unquote coming in to take what's theirs. Uh. And without
some form of of mediation or at least oversight, this
(15:12):
can blow up because you know, especially when you're dealing
with folks who are living on the edge of poverty,
you're going to have these tensions potentially erupt. Uh. And
and they did. And this is a big part of it,
like I said, was because of finite kind of infrastructure,
things like the geography of the city. Griffiths goes on
to say that some of the foreign merchants UM lived
(15:32):
in what we're referred to as liberties, which were essentially,
you know, racially divided enclaves like St Martin Legrand, which
were outside of the city UM and had their own
sort of self sufficient government, which was perceived as an
advantage for the foreigners, who, you know, we're able to
kind of band together and get this special treatment. And
(15:55):
they looked at it as as as an excuse for
them to not have to learn the language that I
have to proper league, you know, integrate into London life. Yeah,
I want to. I want to further set up something. Uh,
fellow ridiculous historians. This is not me defending the xenophobic crowd,
but there is. There are a couple of things in
addition to the Liberties that really ticked off native london Ers,
(16:21):
and it's this Henry the eighth and the crown. They
had an iron grip on what guilds and city governments
could and could not do. They could set up rules
regarding trade and production, but the king could veto those rules.
They wouldn't apply to foreign artist. So Professor McSheffrey points
(16:45):
out something that seems silly now, but we have to understand,
this made a lot of cobblers livid. If you were
a four and shoemaker, the King would let you make
shoes and styles that native London shoemakers were permitted to make.
And this meant that the aristocracy was gonna buy the
hot new sneakers, you know what I mean, for lack
(17:08):
of a better word. But because of this, they were
given advantages, they were given distinct advantages. So this wasn't
these objections weren't coming out of nowhere. But John Lincoln
and the priest Dr Bell absolutely capitalized on this. In
the weeks before May Day, John Lincoln started going around
(17:30):
to priest and saying, look, the big Easter sermon is
coming up. You need to talk about the problem with
these strangers taking over London. To be clear, Lincoln himself
was not a priest. He was a merchant, He was
a broker, and he had a lot of ties in
government and in trade, and he managed to convince one guy,
(17:51):
one priest, Dr Bell, to talk about this. In his
address at the St Mary's Spittal, he told his idiots
foreigners eat the bread from poor fatherless children, and told
the English to cherish and defend themselves and two hood
and grieve aliens. Not very christ like I would say, yeah,
(18:12):
just gross uh christ like at all. Um. But this
nationalistic you know, taking advantage of these tensions and you know,
of poor people who are concerned for their livelihood and
for being able to you know, provide for their children.
The idea of the evil foreigners stealing bread of the
mouth of the elderly and the in the week, and
and you know, the the youth and all that stuff.
(18:35):
We see this all the time. We see this like
with you know, like World War two and then Hitler
and him taking over after the crushing defeat that Germany
saw during World War One and all of the um,
you know, the hardships of that brought. And we've seen
it in the United States of America. The idea of
you know, highlighting the otherness of groups that quote unquote
(18:58):
don't belong here, you know, using these dog whistle kind
of terms. This goes well beyond dog whistle terms. And
it's very straight to the point basically saying, yeah, we're
gonna demonize the hell out of these people and cause uh,
you know Native Londoners to rise up, right, Isn't that
essentially what he's asking people to do. Oh yeah, man,
he's it. Also if you want to more recent historical example,
(19:22):
unfortunately dot to look far at all. But you see
this in the US today, whatever the economy is not
doing well. You also see it in films like Gangs
of New York, which is almost a beat by beast
example of rilling up the lower socio economic strata against immigrants,
even though they're both working class and have much more
(19:43):
in common with each other than they do with the
ruling powers with the brass. That's true. I actually recently
just watched the Steven Spielberg remake of West Side Story,
and if you're in the musical theater at all or
just good film, I highly recommend it. I thought it
was fantastic. I loved every second of it. But it
is about, you know, these native kind of New Yorkers
(20:04):
um and then this their gang in the jets versus
these immigrants from Puerto Rico, which was newly declared I
believe been correctly if I'm wrong, in that era a
territory of the United States, so they were able to
immigrate much more easily. And then they you know, built
all these shops and did what I was describing earlier
and kind of like bootstrapping and all that stuff. And
(20:25):
there was a lot of instant resentment which was fed
and almost encouraged by the higher ups in the police force.
You know, you've got your officer crub Key, who's on
the street just trying to keep law in order. But
then you've got the detective character who is secretly when
the Puerto Rican gang leaves, is basically encouraging the jets
to keep doing what they're doing. And this, and in
(20:47):
all many of these cases, what you see is a
call to arms or a call to action on behalf
of a local authority. So it might be a business person,
it might be a religious figure. That's what was happening
here in London. This got a lot of attention. We
have a quote from a Venetian ambassador who was writing
(21:11):
about this on the fifth of May in fifteen seventeen.
This is a little bit long, but it's important. It's explicit.
So I suggest that we divide and conquer here and
old all right, So he says, after Easter, a certain preacher,
at the instigation of a citizen of London, preached as
usual in the fields where the whole city was in
(21:32):
the habit of assembling with the magistrates. He abused the
strangers in town and their manner and customs. And pause
here because the next part is important. The next part
is just not him having a problem, it's him telling
them to do stuff. M Yeah, so it goes on
to say, in addition to uh abusing the strangers in
town and their manner and customs, he also allowed that
(21:53):
they not only deprived the English of their industry and
of the profits arising therefrom but this on their dwellings
by taking their wives and daughters. Oh. Really gross fearmongering
and that othering um with this exasperating language and much more. Besides,
he's so irritated the populace, that's putting it lightly that
(22:15):
they threatened to cut the strangers to pieces and sack
their houses on the first of May. And that's quoted
as Venetian ambassador who is literally just kind of standing
aghast watching this on fifth of May seventeen. Yeah. So
this is this is far beyond just free speech about
(22:35):
having a problem. This is and they didn't have the
same free speech laws obviously, but it is directly telling
people in the crowd to attack these folks and Mick
Scheffrey says, you got a bunch of young men together. Yeah,
alcohol and grievances and righteous calls for patriotism, then their
combustible situations. So in the final days of April, We've
(22:58):
got a great recount of this from an author named C.
Bloom in their book Violent London, two thousand Years of Riots,
Rebels and revolts. Foreigners start getting man handled in the street,
you know what I mean. Like, let's say you're a
Dutch shoemaker. You're walking by, and then somebody like spits
on you. Someone just shoulder checks you, and he gets
(23:21):
worse and worse, and the word is out. There's something
fell in the wind. By April, the rumor is that
Londoners are going to attack foreigners. And a guide named
Cardinal Thomas Woolsey. Here's about this. Now, he is King
Henry's right hand boy. They hang out, you know what
(23:43):
I mean, They trust each other. And then then this
means that Wolsey can do a lot of things for
King Henry that maybe the Crown wouldn't necessarily do officially,
so we can exercise soft power. And he says, Okay,
I'm going to get the mayor and the Alderman of
London to my house and they meet up at his
house and Woolsy and the crew said, we're gonna nip
(24:05):
this in the bud. We're gonna have a curfew. And
so the institute a curfew or they want to, but
they were already too late. In retrospect, it looks like
maybe the city government wasn't super keen to help stop this, uh,
this violence that was coming up on May Day because
(24:27):
a lot of those guys agreed that the crown was
overly favoring foreign merchants and craftsmen. And uh, one guy
did try to I don't know, this kind of ridiculous.
One guy did try to to enforce the curfew by himself,
like just him as the alderman. Uh. He found these
(24:48):
two guys that were out drinking and celebrating April, and
then he uh and then he was he said, okay,
you two, you young ruffians, there's a curfew, get indoors.
Get indoors for the curfew. And then the and then
a crowd swarmed him man and they whipped him six
(25:09):
ways to sundown. Yeah, it really escalated with rallying cries
of apprentices and clubs echoing through the streets within just
a few hours of that inciting event, and then you
had a thousand or more roughly young men all gathering
around in an area called Cheapside. And this is from
(25:29):
Steve Rappaport in Worlds within World, Structures of Life in
the sixteenth century London, UM. And of course we know
Thomas Moore from his treatise Utopia. UM. He was actually
something called an under sheriff at the time, that deputy.
This is definitely not the sheriff. Yeah, it's you sheriff.
(25:52):
I think of this dude like the alderman, the under sheriff.
It's it's one of those titles that doesn't sound for stigious,
does it, No, not particularly, But he's that he's that
saying uh. And you know, we know, you know, he
becomes a very important political figure in terms of just
like modern political theory, you know, with Utopia. By the
(26:12):
time he was he was installed in this kind of
like bureaucratic role and um, he was an observer of
all of this and and and under his leadership, the
authorities were almost nearly able to get a handle on things.
But the mob proved to be a little too expansive
(26:33):
and hardheaded and potentially super drunk. That's the thing too.
You mentioned alcohol and uh, you know, righteous grievances. That
is a hell of a drug combo right there. And
so people started uh looting shops along St. Martin Legrand, which,
as we said, was that um enclave, this one um
(26:54):
the shoemakers in this region would have largely been Dutch.
So then we have the Lieutenant of the Tower of London,
Sir Richard Charmley, it was a very British name, and
he ordered his men to go down there and start
opening fire like yeah. In this article in Smithsonian, the
(27:14):
quote is firing ordinance, But I mean that's basically just bullets, right, ordinances,
just like big bullets. They were firing into the crowd. Yeah,
and this this is not you know, this is something
that's frowned upon by world governments today. But even firing
at civilians didn't stop their pillaging. They went beyond St
(27:39):
Martin Legrand. They were sacking and pillaging any neighborhood that
have foreign apprentices living in it and traders. And you
know also there were actual native born Londoners living there.
But if they were in the wrong neighborhood, their shop
will be up for grabs. Two. Finally, the Lord's Marchant
(28:00):
with some minute arms. In the early hours of May one,
they put down multiple riots across London. Eventually there were
an estimated twenty five thousand troops inside and around central London.
This this went on for about four or five hours,
(28:21):
I guess. Also, it's interesting the way it's described. If
we go back to the Venetian ambassador we mentioned the
gang of roaming ne'er do wells and rioters, they're described
as wearing themselves out, which in my mind means maybe
they got exhausted because they were drinking a lot and also,
you know, rioting is an energy intensive activity. Uh yeah,
(28:46):
but they're covering a lot of ground. I mean, they're
getting a lot of steps in, not to mention that
they're you know, potentially doing beat downs along the way
and smashing shop windows and yelling a lot presumably, So yeah,
I can see how they get a little bit tuckered
out after a while, especially if there's booze involved, which,
as we know in this time likely would have been beer,
(29:06):
which is very filling and can make you a little
bit sleepy. Yeah, and they might have run out of
beer by the point, and there was into it early on,
but then like at this point there's like as an
old suthers like full entire and wanted to take a
nap now yeah, and then okay, So this Venetian ambassador
says that he feels Cardinal Woolsey and his crew had
(29:30):
done the right thing and that activating these troops, even
if you're firing into a crowd, did prevent further violence.
And here's here's the weirdest part. This is not necessarily
the crux of the story in terms of the human
toll taken. There were multiple neighborhoods with a lot of
damage done, but no one had been killed, which is
(29:52):
amazing because what happens after the riots is the really
interesting part. It is I just want to double back
really clearly that they must be using the term ordinance
here to refer to some sort of suppressive, non lethal
alternative to bullets, like nowadays we think of firing into
(30:14):
a crowd for crowd control. It would be something like
rubber bullets, you know, which is painful and if you
catch one in the eye and get blinded, but it's
not going to kill you. But if there were no
deaths and they're firing into a crowd, it must have
been something like bird shot or like you know, rock
salt or something like that that would have like mellowed
people down and caused them to disperse, but not like
(30:37):
executed them. Yeah. Yeah, the ordinance didn't kill anybody either
that we know of for sure. The weird thing is
that the Crown used this acting out, use this riot
as a way to or they used as an opportunity
(30:57):
to give themselves more power. First, to understand this, we
need to go to Joan Paul, writing for the History
Vault with the article Immigrants and Propaganda, which is about
the fifteen seventeen Evil May Day riots, and Paul explains
it this way, saying that you have to understand the
(31:18):
essence of tudor international affairs and the importance of political performance.
The rioters who got apprehended weren't just charged with rioting
and disturbing the peace. They were charged with treason because
their attack on foreigners could be interpreted as an act
of war against those foreigners home countries, meaning it could
(31:39):
be a breach of the piece that Henry the eighth
had worked hard to establish with all other Christian princes,
so they in their mind, in Henry's mind at this time,
that violence is not violence against foreign dignitaries and shoemakers.
It is an act of via lens against the crown
(32:01):
and against the state itself. So it's seditious, it's treasonous.
Three hundred people get arrested, one of whom is our
boy Lincoln from earlier, and uh, he gets, along with
I think thirteen other people, he gets the absolute worst punishment,
which we were talking about a little bit off air. Yeah, yeah,
(32:26):
William William Wallace type treatments. Max, you wanta you want
to fact us up with that one? Do I have
to what Hung, John and Quarter is. It's a it's
a oh god, it's about as bad as it comes. Well,
I mean, how much of this should I leave out? Guys? Well, no,
I think we want the people to to understand the
full weight of this punishment. I mean, I brought up
(32:49):
and we were talking about it off air. It's like,
you really gotta do all three? Is one of them
just to start with a humiliation, because I mean you
could any of these acts would kill you. But Hung
is where they start you off, and you're hung by
your neck, right, but you don't die yet, and then
they tie you to a horse right after. So how
they would do I mean, this is one of these
punishments where they got kind of like I guess, lazier
(33:11):
over time, and they brought it over to the colonies
if I remember correctly. But they would hang you till
your basically dead and then chop you off of their
emasculate you, disembowel you. Then the head you pick your head,
put it on a spike, yeah, and then quarter you
chop your body into four parts. Wasn't there a version
(33:32):
of this that involved being tied to two horses that
were slapped and pulled in different directions. That's when they, like,
you know, I didn't have all the stuff where they
would hang you to your death and then die you
tie you up by a horse and then have the
horses just running. Yes, yeah, typically you would be Typically
the horse part would take place like in their early days.
The horse part would be when they fasten you to
(33:55):
a wooden panel and then tie that to a horse
and then the horse just runs and drays you in
a very ignoble way to the site of your non
lethal hanging. But I heard there was a version of
that where it eveloped two horses that would like be
one horse would be tied to one leg one or
the other and then they get slapped on the button,
go in opposite directions and rip you in half. Well,
(34:16):
this is interesting. So being pulled apart by wild horses,
you'd usually have four horses, and that was typically execution,
a kind of execution that was reserved for regicide, the
murder of a monarch. I see some of these are
I'm sort of I'm sort of mixing my my brutal
(34:37):
um death sentences here. But this is the thing this
Uh I was talking about this off air. You know,
I understand wanting to set an example by an execution,
but after a certain threshold, it feels like someone's doing
it for fun. You know, that's so extra like after
a certain point, they're just desecrating a body, right, and
there's no mind there too counter the punishment for its actions.
(35:01):
But yeah, there were brutal You know what we could
we could do, Uh, we could do an episode on
the weirdest, strangest execution methods. But I think we need
to pop a disclaimer on that because they for everybody um,
I just realized the guys just just while while you
were describing this, Ben, I was just doing a little googling.
(35:22):
The drawn part literally refers to being drawn behind a horse,
like in the street, and oftentimes they wouldn't disembowel you
while you were alive. You would hang until you were dead,
and then they would just like you said, Ben, just
desecrate the hell out of your corpse, you know, to
further humiliate you and uh and tarnish your chances of
going to the afterlife, I guess. And look, you know,
(35:43):
it's really like make other people like like, oh, so
you should not consider doing anything like that, because look
at what we're doing to this first spot. And they
distribute the bits to to the various parts of the
realm exactly. Don't forge about the spike and this this
is the you know, one thing note about inequality that
haunts me with this is that for a lot of
(36:04):
people executed in this fashion, being drawn, like I was
saying earlier, being tied to that panel and drugged behind
a horse, it's kind of the closest they would ever
get to riding a horse. It's a real munch's pause
situation for anyone who's like, one day I want to
ride a horse monkeys finger curls. Uh, yeah, it's just
leaving only the middle, finger, only the middle. And so
(36:27):
fourteen people, including Lincoln, meet their death in this tremendously
gruesome way. And then on May four the government of
London and the you know, the legal apparatus charge almost
three other people, not just dudes, men, women, and children
with high treason. How are you going to charge a
(36:49):
child with high treason? What eight year old is? Like?
The revolution begins today. Here's the thing, though, if that
sounds weird to anybody else, there's a pretty good indication.
I think that this charging of all these people, men, women,
and children was a set up for a little bit
of political theater, that's right. I mean, it really was
(37:11):
kind of a way to maybe prevent further revolution or
to kind of quell any kind of discontent, or to
make people feel like justice, justice had been served, but
it maybe hadn't exactly. Um, there were another four hundred
riders that were condemned to that same you know, horrible
(37:32):
end of of of being hanged, drawn and quartered. But
the Queen Catherine of Aragon, the Queen of England, supposedly,
you know, in a in a moving show of of emotion,
a real display is described as on her bended kneed
obtained their pardon, all four hundred of these, uh, to
(37:55):
show mercy, to show this, this this magnanimity, you know,
coming from the highest possible office in the land. Um like,
look at me in my mercy. Yeah, that was absolutely
And then it was like a what do you call it?
We have to remember foreign courtiers would have been there too,
so it would be like, look, how merciful and good
(38:16):
the queen and therefore the government is. And so that
got that appealed to the aristocrats. But then they wanted
to look even better to the common people. Right, what's
that song? Is a pulp common people? So they wanted
to pull pull one of those be like common people do?
What common people do? And what do common people do?
(38:37):
They thought they forgive. So there's this other huge thing
at Westminster Hall on May twenty two, and the cardinal
that we mentioned earlier, Wolsey and Henry our boy the
King make these long speeches about you know, justice and
the nature of punishment for rebellion. They bring these almost
(38:58):
three prisoners in and they've got ropes tied around their
neck like they're just about to be killed, and then
they all fall down on their knees at once. This
is clearly choreographed, and they're going mercy, mercy, please. And
then the cardinal and the other like nobles joined in,
and I think this is super fake by the way.
(39:19):
I don't know if you can tell by the way
I'm talking about it, but they joined and they're like, oh, King, please,
and you're infinite majesty and mercy forgive these these prisoners.
And they act like they're literally begging him. But backstage
they all knew how this show was supposed to go.
It's like a wrestling match. This is the wild man.
I mean that, you're right, then, this was totally political
(39:40):
theater because they essentially um the way history of all
dot co dot uk points it out, and I completely agree.
They refrained what was clearly a xenophobic riot between Londoners
and you know who they saw as these foreign you know,
invaders taking their job, their livelihood, their whole way of life,
and they reframed it into a rebellion against the state
(40:03):
because again, and there was some truth to that, because
you know, it's one of these things where if you're
in the game of of politics, the game of thrones here, um,
you do a lot of things to make sure that
you are seen in a certain light by your allies
and even your enemies. And when the common people took
this into their own hands by you know absolutely um,
(40:27):
beating in the streets and defacing the property of these
immigrants wasn't a good look for the Crown to those
allies and could potentially exacerbated things with some of those enemies.
So they flipped it and made that really the focus
by saying, no, these are traitors to the crown. And
then they were able to flip the script once again
(40:50):
by showing this just absolutely you know, christ like mercy, uh,
and essentially through all of this having a win by
in the end having everyone even more loyal to the
crown because they saw, oh, they spared the lives of
these men you know who I identify with, whomever you were. Yeah,
(41:11):
it was it was incredibly clever, you know. And then
the next thing we have to ask about really is
the legacy here. What changed? Everybody got a shot of
propaganda and state loyalty. Fourteen people were killed in gruesome way.
Everybody else got off due to the apparent the apparently
(41:31):
spontaneous mercy of the king, but not much really changed
for the strangers. For the foreign born residents of London.
The issues with immigration persisted after Evil may Day, and
there were more and more regular tussles regarding immigration and
(41:51):
migration in the late sixteenth century early seventeenth century, especially
when Protestants began a having after the Reformation, you know,
after England broke with the Roman Catholic Church, and these
folks were religious refugees, that's what they were seen as.
So they were at first welcomed, but then they also
(42:14):
set themselves up in economic niches. They started to really
represent in different specific industries, and so again the problem occurred,
and you had English born folks saying, well, I don't
care if they're Protestant, they're taking over the wool game,
and we're the woman here, uh and yeah. And people
(42:36):
talked about constantly. It's in plays, it's in ballads. Even
Shakespeare gets involved talking about it. It It left a
lasting impression. There's a really cool wood cut um image
on the Smithsonian MAGA article on Evil may Day. Londoner's
rioted over foreigners stealing their jobs. By Lorraine I believe
it's bossa no might be bosan no bo I S
(42:57):
s O N E A U L T. Lovely article
call from seventeen. At the very top, you can see
a depiction of kind of like the early seeds of
this riot, you know, with people kind of looking like
we're a little bit grumpy and malcontented, and you can
kind of see the sides um, you know, starting to
form um in this image. It really isn't that persistent
kind of in the zeitgeist and in in the and
(43:20):
it led to it's sort of that set a precedent
in some ways where it's like, okay, we can't let
these things at the out of hand. But it just
meant that a lot of these resentments and um biases
and bigoted behavior just we're a little bit more underhanded.
Maybe not quite as like large scale riots in the streets,
but I mean, we know this kind of behavior exists
(43:41):
to this day. It has a couple of different meanings
depending upon one's perspective. On one side, you know, as
Professor Paul Griffith said, it can remind those in authority
about the danger of working class rebellion. But then from
(44:03):
another perspective. It kind of gives you this this romanticized
sense of the valiant apprentice, the hero of the working
class who was standing up to the corruption in the
halls of power. And this again, both of those perspectives,
in their own way are valid, and they both come
(44:24):
in handy time and time again. You're never too far
away from a riot or revolution, no matter where you live.
It reminds me of that excellent quote that no society
is more than three meals away from revolution. It's often
attributed to Lenen, but a lot of a lot of
people have said it, and they've said it because it's true. Yeah,
(44:45):
it sure is. And these are the types of disputes
that really can only take place between folks who are
living on the edge of survival. Um, you know, the
the disagreements and and wars and struggles of the upper
class take on a completely different tone and oftentimes these
uh as we've seen here, these types of struggles are
(45:06):
capitalized on by the upper class in order to further
their own agenda as opposed to like, the question remains
like do they actually do the crown actually care about
either of these parties. I think the answer is probably no.
I think it was more used as a political bargaining
chip or a way to kind of stage that excellent
bit of political theater. Agreed, Agreed, and that's that's a
(45:27):
lesson that I think we can all take away from this.
Even in two fellow ridiculous historians. This was a little
bit of a long win, but we really wanted to
explore it together, and we hope you enjoyed this exploration
as much as our own super producer, Mr Max Williams
will surely enjoy editing it. Thanks Max, You're an unsung
(45:48):
hero indeed. Uh. In addition to Max, we also thank
his brother, the composer of our theme song here, Mr
Alex Williams, wherever he may wrong, God bless you, Sir
Christopher hacionas Eve Jeff Coates here in spirit. Yes, and
of course thanks to our own one man riot, Mr
Jonathan Strickland, a k a. The Quister h. He has
(46:13):
not been drawn and quartered at this time. Just just
a shot him a note for confirmation and he said,
why would you ask me that? So I think he's fine,
and uh, happy may day, I guess yeah. In advanced
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for
(46:39):
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. We are recording this on a
lovely April Monday here in the fair metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia.
Let's give it up for our super producer, the one
and only Mr Max Williams. They call me Ben No No.
Do you have a good weekend? Did I have a
(00:48):
good weekend? Um? Yes, I think so. So we were
just talking about the golf, right, uh, honestly so, Like
I'm from a Gusta, Georgia, which is where the Augusta
National Golf Course takes place, the most exclusive and whitest
place on the planet, the Augusta National, And every year
(01:09):
they hold the Master's Tournament and is a real um
ship show there. And I happened to be visiting my
mom um and she lives really close to the National
Golf Course. And it's funny because a good friend of
ours and friend of the show, Frank Well Herron, his
family has these you know, Master's tickets at the enam
(01:31):
of the tournament, and we were talking about how you
just can't get them. They're so exclusive that they're passed
down generationally, and it's sort of a closed system and
you can like buy other people's tickets, but if you
buy someone's ticket and then you act a fool at
the master's, that will come back on the people who
you bought tickets from. So it's very uh, high society,
(01:51):
high falutin situation. And then I ended up back in
Atlanta as the winner. Um, some white dude was announced
and it became it. It was on the TV at
this place called the brew House and little five points
here in Atlanta, and it went from the uh, you know,
the slowest sports Alive broadcasts, you know, to the white
people hugging channel, and that's a lot of that three
(02:13):
under par Interesting, I love the color commentary because even
the color commentary is subdued, you know, where they say uh.
And interesting fact about this athlete. He has two different dogs,
they're both names. One of his legs is slightly shorter
(02:34):
than the other, and he's he's made it work. He's
made it work, and he prefers right, and he prefers
to say one leg is in fact longer than the other.
So a bit of a real glass has glass half full,
half empty, kind of guy. You know, he's a glass
glass half full guy. But I'm going e somewhere with
the last thing I say, I joke the white people
(02:56):
hugging channel I I kid you not. Once the win
or is announced, it is just like I gotta fill
out the broadcast day, I guess. So it just becomes
like every imaginable type of frame shot of white people hugging.
And then finally at the end when they before they
go to commercial and like where they're done with the
broadcast day. It's just a one shot kind of or
two shot rather of the winner whose name eludes me
(03:18):
and is irrelevant, uh and his wife slow motion hugging
said against the beautiful backdrop of the augustache, which, to
be fair, it is a feat of modern gardening engineering.
They literally freeze the flowers with liquid nitrogen in advance
of the event so that they bloom magically just right
(03:39):
on time. And it was it was Scotty Schleft. So
we are, yeah, we are going somewhere with this because
one thing that the spritual cultural, the culture of the
of the Masters has in common, I would say with
today's episode is there's very much a sense of exclusivity.
(04:04):
There's very much them versus us. An in crowd and
an outcrowd. And what we're seeing in today's story is
a story about how people can react on mass when
they feel their insider status is threatened or when they
feel the their hierarchy is being challenged somehow. And this
(04:26):
story takes place in London in May, the first day
of May, which is, you know, in averse creativity, home
to a celebration called May Day, you know, dance around
the may pole, marching around for various causes. But today's
stories also about a time May Day went very wrong
(04:49):
in London. In that's right, we're talking about London under
Henry the eighth. Um. It was a back a milion time.
Lots of carousing and drinking and cavorting. I don't know
it was what it wasn't between carousing and cavorting, I
don't we'll sort that outlier, um. But yeah, in the
sixteenth century folks in London, Um, it was kind of
(05:12):
it was high times. The Feast of Saint Joseph the
Laborer was another big events of the season. The start
of summer. There would be lots of boozing and schmoozing
and all that good stuff. The city would be decorated
with these beautiful kind of green bows, and folks would be,
you know, dressed in costume playing the hero of of
(05:35):
the working man, rob from the rich and gave the
poor and all that robin hood. But this particular may Day,
the festivities took a bit of a turn. They sure did.
Uh We're gonna learn how over one thousand people ran
uh muck through the city, wreaking havoc. Within days, hundreds
of folks got arrested, more than a baker's dozen were
(05:57):
executed in very messed up ways. This is the story
of evil may Day, and it's a story of xenophobia.
It's a story of social dynamics. It's a story of
panic and looking back, it is also a ridiculous story.
A lot of our research here, by the way, is
coming from an excellent Smithsonian article by Lorraine Bosigo, who
(06:19):
quotes an awesome professor named Paul Griffith's. The title is
on Evil made a Londoner's rioted. Not gonna read the
whole headline yet, because we're we're gonna ask some questions
for you at the end of this. So if you,
if you look back in the fifteen hundreds in London.
We we talked about this time period of a few
episodes ago. If you look back, London is a booming
(06:42):
city at this time in the early sixteenth century, and
because it was a hub of commerce and industry, it
also became a hub for immigration. A lot of people
from the European continent. We're coming to London for opportunities.
You know, when we talk about um, we're talking about journeyman, right,
(07:02):
the journeyman system. A while back, we learned journeyman would,
on their way to becoming a master their craft, they
would go where the work was. So if you were
in Italy, you probably wanted to go to Rome, that's
where all the jobs were, or you know, you wanted
to go to Prague. You wanted to find the big cities,
basically because the big cities held the jobs. So Dutch folks,
(07:24):
Italian folks, Russian merchants, lots of bankers as well. They
all came to London, which was fine. It was okay
with most people so long as the economy was doing
well and so long as they weren't in the grips
of a terrible epidemic or plague. Unfortunately, around this time period,
(07:45):
fifteen seventeen early fifteen hundreds, London did have an economic downturn.
They did have an epidemic something called sweating sickness. Have
you guys heard a sweating sickness? Yeah, it sounds pretty, uh,
pretty unpleasant. Is it a matter of like getting like
a like a bad fever. What's that? What's it caused by?
It's weird because from what I understand, I was looking
(08:07):
into this a little bit earlier. What I understand is
that it was a mysterious disease. We know it was contagious,
but since about the late four hundreds fourteen eighty five
or so, it was regularly infecting large parts of various countries.
We know that there are some things, some diseases we
(08:30):
recognize in modern medical parlance today that can cause sweating,
like tuberculosis or indocarditis, which is just affection of heart valve.
It's weird because we we could almost do an episode
of it. Honestly, the last epidemic was in fifteen fifty one,
(08:50):
and it hasn't it hasn't occurred in a long time since.
No one's exactly sure. They think maybe it's a sitting
numbre hand of virus. Just kind of group of virus
that usually caused kidney failure syndrome. But yeah, there was
a mystery disease. Let's for our purposes today. That's the
(09:11):
scary part. Not only was the economy in the crapper,
but also people were getting sick and no one knew why.
This was not a problem that John Snow could solve
like Colt like he did with cholera. I don't know, man,
Maybe we talked a little bit about the economics because
this kind of yeah, almost always goes hand in hand
(09:31):
with economic problems. Yeah, so there was a certain boom
time element at play, with wheat prices being pretty low
um in the early part of the sixteenth century. The
harvest from fifteen sixteen saw a tiny little increase but
nothing super significant, but that paired with a decrease in
wages and something that was referred to as a droughty
(09:54):
and frosty winter, along with the introduction of the disease
in question, caused some of the lower to mid class
Londoners uh to become very very anxious about the future.
There was a simmering kind of tension and resentment from
the lower class against the upper class that had the
(10:17):
potential to be sort of a powder keg situation. Um
they're always was kind of a bit of xenophobia m
as remains the case and in many parts of Europe
with a lot of immigrants and foreigners being seen as
kind of others that referred to as strangers in their
midst in the history of Vault dot co dot uk article,
(10:40):
but we looked at for this episode and there was
a lag with legislation that kind of would help, you know,
sort of mediate these these tensions a bit because nothing
was put in place to limit the economic activities of immigrants,
So I do not necessarily was a good thing, but
it was something that I think the the you know,
(11:01):
indigenous Lendoners would have preferred to have some sort of
protection against um, you know, people coming from other countries
to take their jobs. So it wasn't until the fifteen
twenties that this kind of like listen was put in place,
but that was largely because of the riotous events of
Evil may Day, Yeah yeah, or Ill may Day as
(11:23):
it was also known. There was this palpable sense of
tension in Old London town at this time. The kind
of stuff you could cut with a butter knife through
the air. This was also on the rump end of
the War of the League of Cambra, a war against France.
England had fought this on and off for years and years,
(11:47):
and it had an enormous cost, both in terms of
blood and in terms of treasure. And religious authorities were
super anxious about all kinds of heretics and lasphemer's who
were waging a war for the hearts and minds of
the faithful. Fund side note, Just a few months later
(12:09):
this same year, in October, Martin Luther would dale his
famous n theses to the door. So these issues all
inner mix in this gumbo of this gumbo of bad vibes,
and uh, they have gumbo at the time. I'm just
editorializing a lot of the cosmics. Right right, It moves
(12:31):
to the beat of jazz. We used to joke about
that and how it moves to jazz. Londoners started to
question the legitimacy and the wisdom of their government, and
Shannon McSheffrey, who is a professor of history at Concordia
University in Montreal, said, quote, artisans and English merchants were
united in a sense against these foreigners who are coming
(12:53):
in and had unfair advantages, allowing them to prosper while
the English board had economic problems. By the way, we're
talking about these foreigners, which Londoners of the time called
them strangers, not foreigners. They just said these strangers and
our shows. But there weren't a whole bunch of them.
(13:18):
Most estimates say they were about fifty thou people in
London at this time. Two percent of those were born
somewhere else. At the most extreme estimate, maybe six percent
were born somewhere else, but it was by no means
a huge minority the population. Still, there was a lot
(13:39):
of widespread poverty. People's lives were terrible. Folks were getting sweating, sickness,
you name it. And that's something that Paul Griffith's, who
is a professor at Iowa State University, mentions he's a
history professor. He noted that there was this sense among
the working class, especially that these strangers were taking work
(14:03):
away from honest london Ers and that they would they
would control various industries, particularly the wool trade. So the
idea was that there was an insidious conspiracy on the
part of some of these foreigners, which obviously is not true.
(14:26):
But when people are in desperate times, they often want
to have an enemy well, and they're vying for limited
resources and real estates and um supremacy in these particular industries.
And frankly, I mean a lot of times, you know,
folks that are litill come in from other countries or
they have it way worse, are gonna have a better
work ethic and they're gonna come in and like set
up shop and absolutely kick ass. Let's take a big claim.
(14:50):
And if there aren't either laws in place or oversight
or some way of keeping things, you know, quote unquote fair,
then you're all is going to have people who want
to see themselves as better than another group that's quote
unquote coming in to take what's theirs. Uh. And without
some form of of mediation or at least oversight, this
(15:12):
can blow up because you know, especially when you're dealing
with folks who are living on the edge of poverty,
you're going to have these tensions potentially erupt. Uh. And
and they did. And this is a big part of it,
like I said, was because of finite kind of infrastructure,
things like the geography of the city. Griffiths goes on
to say that some of the foreign merchants UM lived
(15:32):
in what we're referred to as liberties, which were essentially,
you know, racially divided enclaves like St Martin Legrand, which
were outside of the city UM and had their own
sort of self sufficient government, which was perceived as an
advantage for the foreigners, who, you know, we're able to
kind of band together and get this special treatment. And
(15:55):
they looked at it as as as an excuse for
them to not have to learn the language that I
have to proper league, you know, integrate into London life. Yeah,
I want to. I want to further set up something. Uh,
fellow ridiculous historians. This is not me defending the xenophobic crowd,
but there is. There are a couple of things in
addition to the Liberties that really ticked off native london Ers,
(16:21):
and it's this Henry the eighth and the crown. They
had an iron grip on what guilds and city governments
could and could not do. They could set up rules
regarding trade and production, but the king could veto those rules.
They wouldn't apply to foreign artist. So Professor McSheffrey points
(16:45):
out something that seems silly now, but we have to understand,
this made a lot of cobblers livid. If you were
a four and shoemaker, the King would let you make
shoes and styles that native London shoemakers were permitted to make.
And this meant that the aristocracy was gonna buy the
hot new sneakers, you know what I mean, for lack
(17:08):
of a better word. But because of this, they were
given advantages, they were given distinct advantages. So this wasn't
these objections weren't coming out of nowhere. But John Lincoln
and the priest Dr Bell absolutely capitalized on this. In
the weeks before May Day, John Lincoln started going around
(17:30):
to priest and saying, look, the big Easter sermon is
coming up. You need to talk about the problem with
these strangers taking over London. To be clear, Lincoln himself
was not a priest. He was a merchant, He was
a broker, and he had a lot of ties in
government and in trade, and he managed to convince one guy,
(17:51):
one priest, Dr Bell, to talk about this. In his
address at the St Mary's Spittal, he told his idiots
foreigners eat the bread from poor fatherless children, and told
the English to cherish and defend themselves and two hood
and grieve aliens. Not very christ like I would say, yeah,
(18:12):
just gross uh christ like at all. Um. But this
nationalistic you know, taking advantage of these tensions and you know,
of poor people who are concerned for their livelihood and
for being able to you know, provide for their children.
The idea of the evil foreigners stealing bread of the
mouth of the elderly and the in the week, and
and you know, the the youth and all that stuff.
(18:35):
We see this all the time. We see this like
with you know, like World War two and then Hitler
and him taking over after the crushing defeat that Germany
saw during World War One and all of the um,
you know, the hardships of that brought. And we've seen
it in the United States of America. The idea of
you know, highlighting the otherness of groups that quote unquote
(18:58):
don't belong here, you know, using these dog whistle kind
of terms. This goes well beyond dog whistle terms. And
it's very straight to the point basically saying, yeah, we're
gonna demonize the hell out of these people and cause uh,
you know Native Londoners to rise up, right, Isn't that
essentially what he's asking people to do. Oh yeah, man,
he's it. Also if you want to more recent historical example,
(19:22):
unfortunately dot to look far at all. But you see
this in the US today, whatever the economy is not
doing well. You also see it in films like Gangs
of New York, which is almost a beat by beast
example of rilling up the lower socio economic strata against immigrants,
even though they're both working class and have much more
(19:43):
in common with each other than they do with the
ruling powers with the brass. That's true. I actually recently
just watched the Steven Spielberg remake of West Side Story,
and if you're in the musical theater at all or
just good film, I highly recommend it. I thought it
was fantastic. I loved every second of it. But it
is about, you know, these native kind of New Yorkers
(20:04):
um and then this their gang in the jets versus
these immigrants from Puerto Rico, which was newly declared I
believe been correctly if I'm wrong, in that era a
territory of the United States, so they were able to
immigrate much more easily. And then they you know, built
all these shops and did what I was describing earlier
and kind of like bootstrapping and all that stuff. And
(20:25):
there was a lot of instant resentment which was fed
and almost encouraged by the higher ups in the police force.
You know, you've got your officer crub Key, who's on
the street just trying to keep law in order. But
then you've got the detective character who is secretly when
the Puerto Rican gang leaves, is basically encouraging the jets
to keep doing what they're doing. And this, and in
(20:47):
all many of these cases, what you see is a
call to arms or a call to action on behalf
of a local authority. So it might be a business person,
it might be a religious figure. That's what was happening
here in London. This got a lot of attention. We
have a quote from a Venetian ambassador who was writing
(21:11):
about this on the fifth of May in fifteen seventeen.
This is a little bit long, but it's important. It's explicit.
So I suggest that we divide and conquer here and
old all right, So he says, after Easter, a certain preacher,
at the instigation of a citizen of London, preached as
usual in the fields where the whole city was in
(21:32):
the habit of assembling with the magistrates. He abused the
strangers in town and their manner and customs. And pause
here because the next part is important. The next part
is just not him having a problem, it's him telling
them to do stuff. M Yeah, so it goes on
to say, in addition to uh abusing the strangers in
town and their manner and customs, he also allowed that
(21:53):
they not only deprived the English of their industry and
of the profits arising therefrom but this on their dwellings
by taking their wives and daughters. Oh. Really gross fearmongering
and that othering um with this exasperating language and much more. Besides,
he's so irritated the populace, that's putting it lightly that
(22:15):
they threatened to cut the strangers to pieces and sack
their houses on the first of May. And that's quoted
as Venetian ambassador who is literally just kind of standing
aghast watching this on fifth of May seventeen. Yeah. So
this is this is far beyond just free speech about
(22:35):
having a problem. This is and they didn't have the
same free speech laws obviously, but it is directly telling
people in the crowd to attack these folks and Mick
Scheffrey says, you got a bunch of young men together. Yeah,
alcohol and grievances and righteous calls for patriotism, then their
combustible situations. So in the final days of April, We've
(22:58):
got a great recount of this from an author named C.
Bloom in their book Violent London, two thousand Years of Riots,
Rebels and revolts. Foreigners start getting man handled in the street,
you know what I mean. Like, let's say you're a
Dutch shoemaker. You're walking by, and then somebody like spits
on you. Someone just shoulder checks you, and he gets
(23:21):
worse and worse, and the word is out. There's something
fell in the wind. By April, the rumor is that
Londoners are going to attack foreigners. And a guide named
Cardinal Thomas Woolsey. Here's about this. Now, he is King
Henry's right hand boy. They hang out, you know what
(23:43):
I mean, They trust each other. And then then this
means that Wolsey can do a lot of things for
King Henry that maybe the Crown wouldn't necessarily do officially,
so we can exercise soft power. And he says, Okay,
I'm going to get the mayor and the Alderman of
London to my house and they meet up at his
house and Woolsy and the crew said, we're gonna nip
(24:05):
this in the bud. We're gonna have a curfew. And
so the institute a curfew or they want to, but
they were already too late. In retrospect, it looks like
maybe the city government wasn't super keen to help stop this, uh,
this violence that was coming up on May Day because
(24:27):
a lot of those guys agreed that the crown was
overly favoring foreign merchants and craftsmen. And uh, one guy
did try to I don't know, this kind of ridiculous.
One guy did try to to enforce the curfew by himself,
like just him as the alderman. Uh. He found these
(24:48):
two guys that were out drinking and celebrating April, and
then he uh and then he was he said, okay,
you two, you young ruffians, there's a curfew, get indoors.
Get indoors for the curfew. And then the and then
a crowd swarmed him man and they whipped him six
(25:09):
ways to sundown. Yeah, it really escalated with rallying cries
of apprentices and clubs echoing through the streets within just
a few hours of that inciting event, and then you
had a thousand or more roughly young men all gathering
around in an area called Cheapside. And this is from
(25:29):
Steve Rappaport in Worlds within World, Structures of Life in
the sixteenth century London, UM. And of course we know
Thomas Moore from his treatise Utopia. UM. He was actually
something called an under sheriff at the time, that deputy.
This is definitely not the sheriff. Yeah, it's you sheriff.
(25:52):
I think of this dude like the alderman, the under sheriff.
It's it's one of those titles that doesn't sound for stigious,
does it, No, not particularly, But he's that he's that
saying uh. And you know, we know, you know, he
becomes a very important political figure in terms of just
like modern political theory, you know, with Utopia. By the
(26:12):
time he was he was installed in this kind of
like bureaucratic role and um, he was an observer of
all of this and and and under his leadership, the
authorities were almost nearly able to get a handle on things.
But the mob proved to be a little too expansive
(26:33):
and hardheaded and potentially super drunk. That's the thing too.
You mentioned alcohol and uh, you know, righteous grievances. That
is a hell of a drug combo right there. And
so people started uh looting shops along St. Martin Legrand, which,
as we said, was that um enclave, this one um
(26:54):
the shoemakers in this region would have largely been Dutch.
So then we have the Lieutenant of the Tower of London,
Sir Richard Charmley, it was a very British name, and
he ordered his men to go down there and start
opening fire like yeah. In this article in Smithsonian, the
(27:14):
quote is firing ordinance, But I mean that's basically just bullets, right, ordinances,
just like big bullets. They were firing into the crowd. Yeah,
and this this is not you know, this is something
that's frowned upon by world governments today. But even firing
at civilians didn't stop their pillaging. They went beyond St
(27:39):
Martin Legrand. They were sacking and pillaging any neighborhood that
have foreign apprentices living in it and traders. And you
know also there were actual native born Londoners living there.
But if they were in the wrong neighborhood, their shop
will be up for grabs. Two. Finally, the Lord's Marchant
(28:00):
with some minute arms. In the early hours of May one,
they put down multiple riots across London. Eventually there were
an estimated twenty five thousand troops inside and around central London.
This this went on for about four or five hours,
(28:21):
I guess. Also, it's interesting the way it's described. If
we go back to the Venetian ambassador we mentioned the
gang of roaming ne'er do wells and rioters, they're described
as wearing themselves out, which in my mind means maybe
they got exhausted because they were drinking a lot and also,
you know, rioting is an energy intensive activity. Uh yeah,
(28:46):
but they're covering a lot of ground. I mean, they're
getting a lot of steps in, not to mention that
they're you know, potentially doing beat downs along the way
and smashing shop windows and yelling a lot presumably, So yeah,
I can see how they get a little bit tuckered
out after a while, especially if there's booze involved, which,
as we know in this time likely would have been beer,
(29:06):
which is very filling and can make you a little
bit sleepy. Yeah, and they might have run out of
beer by the point, and there was into it early on,
but then like at this point there's like as an
old suthers like full entire and wanted to take a
nap now yeah, and then okay, So this Venetian ambassador
says that he feels Cardinal Woolsey and his crew had
(29:30):
done the right thing and that activating these troops, even
if you're firing into a crowd, did prevent further violence.
And here's here's the weirdest part. This is not necessarily
the crux of the story in terms of the human
toll taken. There were multiple neighborhoods with a lot of
damage done, but no one had been killed, which is
(29:52):
amazing because what happens after the riots is the really
interesting part. It is I just want to double back
really clearly that they must be using the term ordinance
here to refer to some sort of suppressive, non lethal
alternative to bullets, like nowadays we think of firing into
(30:14):
a crowd for crowd control. It would be something like
rubber bullets, you know, which is painful and if you
catch one in the eye and get blinded, but it's
not going to kill you. But if there were no
deaths and they're firing into a crowd, it must have
been something like bird shot or like you know, rock
salt or something like that that would have like mellowed
people down and caused them to disperse, but not like
(30:37):
executed them. Yeah. Yeah, the ordinance didn't kill anybody either
that we know of for sure. The weird thing is
that the Crown used this acting out, use this riot
as a way to or they used as an opportunity
(30:57):
to give themselves more power. First, to understand this, we
need to go to Joan Paul, writing for the History
Vault with the article Immigrants and Propaganda, which is about
the fifteen seventeen Evil May Day riots, and Paul explains
it this way, saying that you have to understand the
(31:18):
essence of tudor international affairs and the importance of political performance.
The rioters who got apprehended weren't just charged with rioting
and disturbing the peace. They were charged with treason because
their attack on foreigners could be interpreted as an act
of war against those foreigners home countries, meaning it could
(31:39):
be a breach of the piece that Henry the eighth
had worked hard to establish with all other Christian princes,
so they in their mind, in Henry's mind at this time,
that violence is not violence against foreign dignitaries and shoemakers.
It is an act of via lens against the crown
(32:01):
and against the state itself. So it's seditious, it's treasonous.
Three hundred people get arrested, one of whom is our
boy Lincoln from earlier, and uh, he gets, along with
I think thirteen other people, he gets the absolute worst punishment,
which we were talking about a little bit off air. Yeah, yeah,
(32:26):
William William Wallace type treatments. Max, you wanta you want
to fact us up with that one? Do I have
to what Hung, John and Quarter is. It's a it's
a oh god, it's about as bad as it comes. Well,
I mean, how much of this should I leave out? Guys? Well, no,
I think we want the people to to understand the
full weight of this punishment. I mean, I brought up
(32:49):
and we were talking about it off air. It's like,
you really gotta do all three? Is one of them
just to start with a humiliation, because I mean you
could any of these acts would kill you. But Hung
is where they start you off, and you're hung by
your neck, right, but you don't die yet, and then
they tie you to a horse right after. So how
they would do I mean, this is one of these
punishments where they got kind of like I guess, lazier
(33:11):
over time, and they brought it over to the colonies
if I remember correctly. But they would hang you till
your basically dead and then chop you off of their
emasculate you, disembowel you. Then the head you pick your head,
put it on a spike, yeah, and then quarter you
chop your body into four parts. Wasn't there a version
(33:32):
of this that involved being tied to two horses that
were slapped and pulled in different directions. That's when they, like,
you know, I didn't have all the stuff where they
would hang you to your death and then die you
tie you up by a horse and then have the
horses just running. Yes, yeah, typically you would be Typically
the horse part would take place like in their early days.
The horse part would be when they fasten you to
(33:55):
a wooden panel and then tie that to a horse
and then the horse just runs and drays you in
a very ignoble way to the site of your non
lethal hanging. But I heard there was a version of
that where it eveloped two horses that would like be
one horse would be tied to one leg one or
the other and then they get slapped on the button,
go in opposite directions and rip you in half. Well,
(34:16):
this is interesting. So being pulled apart by wild horses,
you'd usually have four horses, and that was typically execution,
a kind of execution that was reserved for regicide, the
murder of a monarch. I see some of these are
I'm sort of I'm sort of mixing my my brutal
(34:37):
um death sentences here. But this is the thing this
Uh I was talking about this off air. You know,
I understand wanting to set an example by an execution,
but after a certain threshold, it feels like someone's doing
it for fun. You know, that's so extra like after
a certain point, they're just desecrating a body, right, and
there's no mind there too counter the punishment for its actions.
(35:01):
But yeah, there were brutal You know what we could
we could do, Uh, we could do an episode on
the weirdest, strangest execution methods. But I think we need
to pop a disclaimer on that because they for everybody um,
I just realized the guys just just while while you
were describing this, Ben, I was just doing a little googling.
(35:22):
The drawn part literally refers to being drawn behind a horse,
like in the street, and oftentimes they wouldn't disembowel you
while you were alive. You would hang until you were dead,
and then they would just like you said, Ben, just
desecrate the hell out of your corpse, you know, to
further humiliate you and uh and tarnish your chances of
going to the afterlife, I guess. And look, you know,
(35:43):
it's really like make other people like like, oh, so
you should not consider doing anything like that, because look
at what we're doing to this first spot. And they
distribute the bits to to the various parts of the
realm exactly. Don't forge about the spike and this this
is the you know, one thing note about inequality that
haunts me with this is that for a lot of
(36:04):
people executed in this fashion, being drawn, like I was
saying earlier, being tied to that panel and drugged behind
a horse, it's kind of the closest they would ever
get to riding a horse. It's a real munch's pause
situation for anyone who's like, one day I want to
ride a horse monkeys finger curls. Uh, yeah, it's just
leaving only the middle, finger, only the middle. And so
(36:27):
fourteen people, including Lincoln, meet their death in this tremendously
gruesome way. And then on May four the government of
London and the you know, the legal apparatus charge almost
three other people, not just dudes, men, women, and children
with high treason. How are you going to charge a
(36:49):
child with high treason? What eight year old is? Like?
The revolution begins today. Here's the thing, though, if that
sounds weird to anybody else, there's a pretty good indication.
I think that this charging of all these people, men, women,
and children was a set up for a little bit
of political theater, that's right. I mean, it really was
(37:11):
kind of a way to maybe prevent further revolution or
to kind of quell any kind of discontent, or to
make people feel like justice, justice had been served, but
it maybe hadn't exactly. Um, there were another four hundred
riders that were condemned to that same you know, horrible
(37:32):
end of of of being hanged, drawn and quartered. But
the Queen Catherine of Aragon, the Queen of England, supposedly,
you know, in a in a moving show of of emotion,
a real display is described as on her bended kneed
obtained their pardon, all four hundred of these, uh, to
(37:55):
show mercy, to show this, this this magnanimity, you know,
coming from the highest possible office in the land. Um like,
look at me in my mercy. Yeah, that was absolutely
And then it was like a what do you call it?
We have to remember foreign courtiers would have been there too,
so it would be like, look, how merciful and good
(38:16):
the queen and therefore the government is. And so that
got that appealed to the aristocrats. But then they wanted
to look even better to the common people. Right, what's
that song? Is a pulp common people? So they wanted
to pull pull one of those be like common people do?
What common people do? And what do common people do?
(38:37):
They thought they forgive. So there's this other huge thing
at Westminster Hall on May twenty two, and the cardinal
that we mentioned earlier, Wolsey and Henry our boy the
King make these long speeches about you know, justice and
the nature of punishment for rebellion. They bring these almost
(38:58):
three prisoners in and they've got ropes tied around their
neck like they're just about to be killed, and then
they all fall down on their knees at once. This
is clearly choreographed, and they're going mercy, mercy, please. And
then the cardinal and the other like nobles joined in,
and I think this is super fake by the way.
(39:19):
I don't know if you can tell by the way
I'm talking about it, but they joined and they're like, oh, King, please,
and you're infinite majesty and mercy forgive these these prisoners.
And they act like they're literally begging him. But backstage
they all knew how this show was supposed to go.
It's like a wrestling match. This is the wild man.
I mean that, you're right, then, this was totally political
(39:40):
theater because they essentially um the way history of all
dot co dot uk points it out, and I completely agree.
They refrained what was clearly a xenophobic riot between Londoners
and you know who they saw as these foreign you know,
invaders taking their job, their livelihood, their whole way of life,
and they reframed it into a rebellion against the state
(40:03):
because again, and there was some truth to that, because
you know, it's one of these things where if you're
in the game of of politics, the game of thrones here, um,
you do a lot of things to make sure that
you are seen in a certain light by your allies
and even your enemies. And when the common people took
this into their own hands by you know absolutely um,
(40:27):
beating in the streets and defacing the property of these
immigrants wasn't a good look for the Crown to those
allies and could potentially exacerbated things with some of those enemies.
So they flipped it and made that really the focus
by saying, no, these are traitors to the crown. And
then they were able to flip the script once again
(40:50):
by showing this just absolutely you know, christ like mercy, uh,
and essentially through all of this having a win by
in the end having everyone even more loyal to the
crown because they saw, oh, they spared the lives of
these men you know who I identify with, whomever you were. Yeah,
(41:11):
it was it was incredibly clever, you know. And then
the next thing we have to ask about really is
the legacy here. What changed? Everybody got a shot of
propaganda and state loyalty. Fourteen people were killed in gruesome way.
Everybody else got off due to the apparent the apparently
(41:31):
spontaneous mercy of the king, but not much really changed
for the strangers. For the foreign born residents of London.
The issues with immigration persisted after Evil may Day, and
there were more and more regular tussles regarding immigration and
(41:51):
migration in the late sixteenth century early seventeenth century, especially
when Protestants began a having after the Reformation, you know,
after England broke with the Roman Catholic Church, and these
folks were religious refugees, that's what they were seen as.
So they were at first welcomed, but then they also
(42:14):
set themselves up in economic niches. They started to really
represent in different specific industries, and so again the problem occurred,
and you had English born folks saying, well, I don't
care if they're Protestant, they're taking over the wool game,
and we're the woman here, uh and yeah. And people
(42:36):
talked about constantly. It's in plays, it's in ballads. Even
Shakespeare gets involved talking about it. It It left a
lasting impression. There's a really cool wood cut um image
on the Smithsonian MAGA article on Evil may Day. Londoner's
rioted over foreigners stealing their jobs. By Lorraine I believe
it's bossa no might be bosan no bo I S
(42:57):
s O N E A U L T. Lovely article
call from seventeen. At the very top, you can see
a depiction of kind of like the early seeds of
this riot, you know, with people kind of looking like
we're a little bit grumpy and malcontented, and you can
kind of see the sides um, you know, starting to
form um in this image. It really isn't that persistent
kind of in the zeitgeist and in in the and
(43:20):
it led to it's sort of that set a precedent
in some ways where it's like, okay, we can't let
these things at the out of hand. But it just
meant that a lot of these resentments and um biases
and bigoted behavior just we're a little bit more underhanded.
Maybe not quite as like large scale riots in the streets,
but I mean, we know this kind of behavior exists
(43:41):
to this day. It has a couple of different meanings
depending upon one's perspective. On one side, you know, as
Professor Paul Griffith said, it can remind those in authority
about the danger of working class rebellion. But then from
(44:03):
another perspective. It kind of gives you this this romanticized
sense of the valiant apprentice, the hero of the working
class who was standing up to the corruption in the
halls of power. And this again, both of those perspectives,
in their own way are valid, and they both come
(44:24):
in handy time and time again. You're never too far
away from a riot or revolution, no matter where you live.
It reminds me of that excellent quote that no society
is more than three meals away from revolution. It's often
attributed to Lenen, but a lot of a lot of
people have said it, and they've said it because it's true. Yeah,
(44:45):
it sure is. And these are the types of disputes
that really can only take place between folks who are
living on the edge of survival. Um, you know, the
the disagreements and and wars and struggles of the upper
class take on a completely different tone and oftentimes these
uh as we've seen here, these types of struggles are
(45:06):
capitalized on by the upper class in order to further
their own agenda as opposed to like, the question remains
like do they actually do the crown actually care about
either of these parties. I think the answer is probably no.
I think it was more used as a political bargaining
chip or a way to kind of stage that excellent
bit of political theater. Agreed, Agreed, and that's that's a
(45:27):
lesson that I think we can all take away from this.
Even in two fellow ridiculous historians. This was a little
bit of a long win, but we really wanted to
explore it together, and we hope you enjoyed this exploration
as much as our own super producer, Mr Max Williams
will surely enjoy editing it. Thanks Max, You're an unsung
(45:48):
hero indeed. Uh. In addition to Max, we also thank
his brother, the composer of our theme song here, Mr
Alex Williams, wherever he may wrong, God bless you, Sir
Christopher hacionas Eve Jeff Coates here in spirit. Yes, and
of course thanks to our own one man riot, Mr
Jonathan Strickland, a k a. The Quister h. He has
(46:13):
not been drawn and quartered at this time. Just just
a shot him a note for confirmation and he said,
why would you ask me that? So I think he's fine,
and uh, happy may day, I guess yeah. In advanced
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for
(46:39):
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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