2022: The Peasants’ Revolt

March 17, 2022

By AHNZ

England’s Black Death and New Zealand’s COVID Epidemic have so much in common. What keeps mainstream historians from pointing the following things out is that observing them in the first place goes against the partisan grains that allowed them to pass their exams or achieve their station or be awarded their grants and tenures in the first place. So, once again, you’re stuck with Anarchist History in order to glimpse how both of these 2-year pandemics resemble each other.

King Richard II of England’s pandemic (1348-1350) really killed masses of people whereas Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand’s pandemic (2020-2022) did not. This dissimilarity is not important because in each case the perception was the same. In both kingdoms and time periods masses of people were told and accepted that massive body counts of their countrymen were being tabulated and life would never be the same again. As part of the pandemic response both rulers inflicted radical changes on the people that were downright medieval.

Richard’s pandemic response ‘New Deal’ inflicted harsh new controls over the labour market, a luxury ‘sumptuary’ tax, and a much hated poll tax (universal levy.) Ardern’s similarly presided over rising land rates and consumer prices, real estate market interference, and labour market tampering in the form of a raised minimum wage. Ardern was able to hide her greatest tax behind the disguise of inflation because, unlike Richard’s gold-based economy, her bank was happy to print out more fiat currency.  In each case the yeoman farmer/working-class provincial was being deliberately hit hard for the benefit of the rulers under cover of emergency powers.

Peaceful, non-compliant, rebels emerged in both the Medieval case and our modern situation. Richard II introduced a statuary oath mandating that his subjects’ working conditions and prices be directed by his decree rather than negotiated between free folk. The oath was enforced at the local level by his constables but this led to much civil disobedience. Likewise, Ardern mandated an oath in our post-Medieval technocratic age in the form of QR code contact tracing, jabs, boosters, buying/selling passports, masks, managed isolation, lockdowns, border crossings, quarantines, censorship, nostril tests. Many people refused to take this new oath in some or several of its many and increasing manifestations and were persecuted for it in the form of fines, arrests, trespass orders, employment redundancy. Entire firms and industries were hobbled or even shut down entirely by both regimes as the people struggled with, or against, the contrived oath demanded of them. For some, the smiling elites connected to Richard and Jacinda’s court, it was easy and beneficial to comply. Like a paid holiday, even. For the provincial working class and their utes, or the yeoman villagers, the exploitation took its toll and resistance was brewing.

“When it comes to COVID that means needles (in the arm,) nostrils (test probes up the,) masks, ‘Traffic Light’ systems, QR code tracing, policed border crossings, lockdowns, managed isolation and quarantine, closed borders, censored media, limitless money-printing, medical professionals made redundant,…“vaccine passports,” double-jabs, money-printing etc.” – Anomie and COVID, NZB3 (2021)

“The term ‘rebellis’ was used in 81 indictments in the Peace Rolls during this period. However, the people who were accused in this way were not indicted for violent offences against the political order. Rather the term was used in most cases specifically to describe women and men who refused to comply with the terms of the Statute of Labourers which was introduced in 1351 as a response to the labour shortages created by the Black Death. Their alleged offences included…most frequently, refusing to swear an oath before the village constable of compliance with the Statute. These therefore were ‘rebels’ who were embarking upon non-violent forms of resistance to the Government’s legislation.” – Andy Ford, University of Reading (2019)

“Over the past few days we’ve seen a stream of desperate attempts to argue that the Freedom Convoy has no legitimacy; that the only “proper” protests are those endorsed by the leftist elite. By definition, no other protest can have any validity, least of all one mounted by a loose coalition of mostly working-class, provincial people driving utes and house trucks.” – Why the woke Left is so rattled by Camp Freedom, Karl du Fresne (February 2022)

Auckland Domain and Blackheath

New Zealand’s first inklings of mass revolt happened in places like Auckland Domain in the summer of 2021 featuring religious leader Brian Tamaki. Blackheath was a rallying point for the first wave of Peasants’ Revolt in the summer of 1381 and like Tamaki the keynote speaker was a religious man: John Ball. Both Ball and Tamaki were set upon by the constables of the realm for fermenting the early rebellion and were in and out of prison as a result. Tamaki was bound by law not to involve himself in further ‘revolt’ when it moved to Wellington whereas Ball was liquidated in a more medieval way by being executed that same summer. Ball’s head was displayed stuck on a pike on London Bridge, and the quarters of his body were displayed at four different towns.

“Justice Paul Davison also imposed further restrictions which included banning him from holding gatherings at his house for the purpose of organising, attending or encouraging non-compliance with the Covid-19 Public Health Response Act. Tamaki’s bail conditions already ban him from organising, attending, supporting or speaking at any protest gathering in breach of Covid-19 requirements. He is also prohibited from accessing the internet to incite non-compliance.” – Covid-19: Brian Tamaki declined a bail variation to go on holiday, Stuff (March 2022)

“In what way are are those whom we call lords greater masters than ourselves? How have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in bondage?…Let us go to the king–he is young–and show him how we are oppressed, and tell him that we want things to be changed, or else we will change them ourselves. If we go in good earnest and all together, very many people who are called serfs and are held in subjection will follow us to get their freedom. And when the king sees and hears us, he will remedy the evil, either willingly or otherwise.”. . . – John Ball, Froissart’s Chronicles, California State University

“Watching the live stream of the police vs protesters today I heard lots of comments wishing the politicians would come out. Give an audience. Back down. Change policy. In other words, the protesters are engaged in a form of Slave Culture. They are begging or praying for someone else, someone with power, who is not themselves, to set them free.” –Disruptions in Wellington, NZB3 (February 2022)

“Paradoxically, the rebels remained fervantly loyal to the Crown. Though they had made themselves outlaws they were fired by the certainty that their cause was just. Surely it would be seen that they were not mobilised to threaten the king but to rescure him and through him themselves. The discipline of the march, however, did not survive the big city…” – King Death, A History of Britain, Simon Schama (2000)

The Revolts, in each case, are also alike in that neither sought to overthrow the government. The Lollard Priest, Ball, did not preach sedition any more than the Destiny Priest, Brian Tamaki. “Let us go to the king,” said Ball, and he will put things right. The Freedom Revolt of 2022, likewise, yearned for an audience with rulers who would hear their pleading and plight. Like their Medieval ancestors (in meme and/or gene) they wanted someone else, someone with power (ie not themselves,) to stop mandating the oaths. It broke their hearts that Jacinda Ardern would not hear their deputation and that nor would Christopher Luxon nor any other politician. They also cried out that the mainstream priesthood, which, in our days, is the mainstream news media, would not grant them honest hearing and attention. No Anarchists, the rallying Englishmen and New Zealanders were under the impression that the Crown and the Media were decent and loyal to the people. They were, therefore in for a great revelation.

February Revolt

After Auckland, and after Blackheath, the revolt formed up in a convoy. New Zealand’s Freedom Convoy, inspired by Canada’s, occupied the area at the very edge of parliament buildings. England’s convoy made camp at Smithfield on the edge of London. Both groups sought an audience and an end to the Crown’s mandates. Both were directly under the noses of the sovereign, Richard II and Ardern.

The victors write the history books which is why the revolt against Richard is derogatorily referred to as ‘The Peasants Revolt’. They were in fact not peasants but working-class provincial yeomen of exactly equivalent status as the working-class provincial Kiwis driving utes and house trucks. Mainstream history also records that both groups were unsanitary, violent, vandals, abusive, and disruptive. Primary source accounts show that New Zealand’s un-led February Revolt was nothing of this sort (Ref. Freedom Protest “Unsafe” and “Disorganised”, NZB3 (2022.) The Peasants’ Revolt led by John Ball and Wat Tyler was probably more peaceful than their enemy’s history book lets on, especially if we control for the fact that these were Medieval times not subject to our own modern standards of civilised conduct.

At any rate, the capital cities of London and Wellington were, at this point, host to a revolt. Neither city was under siege. Ardern’s Beehive certainly wasn’t stormed. Rather, the ‘peasants’ had come seeking an audience and if they were forced to wait then wait the would. They settled down to make themselves comfortable while they waited and were prepared for the long haul.

Richard, Ardern, and Luxon climbed high in their tower and looked down. History records the King climbed a turret of the Tower of London and looked down on his nightmare. We have an actual photo of Opposition Leader Christopher Luxon doing the same from his equivalent vantage point. At this point it seemed that the Revolt could not be stopped by all the kings’ horses and all the kings men. After all, they had been trying their hardest to do just that from Day 1 and to no effect.

Matters for England and for New Zealand would have been different had it not been for a death of an older statesman. The Father of the House of Representatives (by aggregation) would have been Winston Peters had he not died an electoral death. Likewise, Richard II need not have taken the throne so young (10yo) if his father, the Black Prince, had not literally died before he could become king. The Revolt would have been handled very differently in each case if The Black Prince/Winston Peters had been in court to put some wisdom and some breaks on the more inexperienced rulers. In the event, Peters did visit Camp Freedom and mingle though his political power was reduced to as much of a ghostly shade as the other Black Prince.

Given all of the above parallelisms you can see why we owe it to history to compare these two highly similar chains of events though they are 600 years apart. One place where the two stories part ways is that King Richard showed the guts and perhaps foresight to meet his rebellion eye to eye. Ardern and Luxon never did any such thing and instead un-personed their detractors in a way that will surely come around to bite back in the future.

“On the evening of Thursday 13th June the teenage King climbed one of the turrets of The Tower. What he saw ought to have broken him in terror…London crumbling into smoking ruins. But hostage to a nightmare Richard doesn’t seem to have panicked. When the counselors asked him to negotiate with the rebels he evidently showed no hesitation. It was the boy who was the man of the hour….he rode through the jostling crowds to meet Wat Tyler and the rest of the revels at Smithfield.” – King Death, A History of Britain, Simon Schama (2000)

“”The protesters have had their say, it is time they go home..” – Jacinda Ardern, Covid 19 protests: ‘The point has been made’: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tells protesters to go home, NZ Herald (February 2022)

“When he got to Smithfield, the king could see the rebels camped on the west side of the field and the royal party on the east. Wat Tyler rode over to Richard, got off his little horse, knelt very briefly, not very convincingly, but then shakes his hand and calls him brother.

“Why will you not go home?” asked the king rather plaintively, to which Tyler responded with a loud curse and a set of demands.

“The most important was for a new Magna Carta – for the ordinary people. It would abolish serfdom, liquidate the property of the Church, it would offer a general pardon to all outlaws. And if all this wasn’t radical enough, it would make every man equal below the level of the king. Now to all this Richard answered, “Yes,” perhaps crossing his fingers behind his back, and maybe Wat Tyler was so amazed by the concession, he didn’t quite know what to do next. So an eerie silence settles over everybody on the field, broken only by Tyler asking for a flagon of ale. He gets it, he downs it, he gets back on to his mount, a big man on a little horse,and at that moment… history changed.”” – Schama, ibid

The cops said they would tow on Friday. They said they would have it done by Monday. They said they’d do it on Tuesday, no Wednesday. Thursday came and went. Today, Friday, they said “Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said threatening to tow the vehicles of anti-mandate protesters in Wellington had escalated tensions in an unsafe way.” – Policeman’s Pirouette, NZB3 (February 2022)

Police convinced the mandate protest will last three months, Radio New Zealand (Feb 2022)

It will be a surprise to no Anarkiwi that The State does not draw the line at denegrating, expelling, controlling, firing, excluding, sabotaging, and threatening New Zealanders as a means of control. Today the Wellington Rebellion was put down by brute force. It was a great mistake.” – February Revolt Put Down Today, NZB3 (March 2022)

The title image at the top of this article shows the Janus-faced King as he simultaneously tells the gathered protest to be calm, all is well, disperse. While, left of frame, the King’s men slay the protest leader with a sword during parlay where the crowd cannot see. So it was that Ardern’s appointed lawman, Andrew Coster, pulled his bait-and-switch. Pulling a Sun Tzu, Coster acted weak when he was strong by not breaking up the protest. His civilian associate, President of the Police Association, Chris Cahill, pitched in too by opining that the protest would last three months to come if not more. King Richard promised Wat Tyler everything but the kitchen sink to the point that the leader let his guard down and called for a flagon of ale.

The next thing that happened in each case, Smithfield¹ and parliament grounds bloc, was a ‘Policeman’s Pirouette’ as the rebellion being sweet-talked was suddenly set upon and cut to bits. Tyler was summarily executed, Ball tried and hanged. Costers forces violently, but systematically, battened and pepper-sprayed their way through peaceful bodies of people. Some were arrested, most were dispersed back into the countryside from whence they came. King Richard himself, fresh from the killing of protesters, led the main body away behind his own horse into obscurity saying as he went “You have no other captain but me.”

Richard led an anti-Freedom Convoy which showed leadership, guts, mercy, and pardons to his revolt. He used his status as their alpha and their status as State-fused petitioners to put them to bed. Ardern and Luxon took another fork in history, leaving their foes to reform and fester in betrayal.

In other ways King Richard is similar to Jacinda Ardern. Both were called by their respective factions to step up at a young age and in doing so were granted absolute power. Both led a reform of manners. Richard introduced courtly manners with handkerchiefs and cutlery, Ardern embodied and normalised the Woke subculture including the non-kaupapa Accademic Macron Maori and Feminist ‘Me Too’ Victimhood Culture. Richard, in his self-regard, set the trend of having the sovereign referred to as “His Royal Majesty” and “Highness.” Jacinda Ardern, for her part, has set the trend of referring to the things that are good for her and that she wants as being the same things that New Zealand wants.

Richard, in success, became an egomaniac. He quickly adopted the voice of his fellow elites who had been saying openly all along that these yeomen were “peasants” and “rustic wretches” and “a river of filth.” Now he told them so to their faces, sewing the seeds of the avengers to come. England, and so perhaps New Zealand, now had a great distrust of their tyrant and what he was willing to do to gain and keep power. The separatism was forged that would lead to civil war for England generations later (War of the Roses) and only forestalled by endless war (The Hundred Years’ War.)

“But underneath all of that, there is a river of filth. There is a river of violence and menace. There is a river of anti-Semitism. There is a river of Islamophobia. There is a river of threats to people who work in this place and our staff….a river of genuine fascism in parts of the event that we see out the front of this Parliament today,..an emergent and dangerous far-right movement” – Minister Michael Wood, Hansard; Newshub (February 2022)

“Just a week after the apparent concessions at Smithfield, another group of rebels met with Richard at Waltham in Essex, but they found a very different king. “You wretches, detestable on land and sea, you who seek equality with lords, are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues. Rustics you were and rustics you are still. You will remain in bondage not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live, we will strive to suppress you and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However we will spare your lives if you remain faithful. Choose now which course you want to follow.” – Richard II quoted by Schama (2000)

“…how dare you not kneel in my presence? If I am not, prove to me that God has dismissed me from my position. No mortal man, after all, can take away my scepter, unless he steals it or usurps it against the will of God. Even if you think that, like you, everyone has put their souls in danger by turning away from me, and that I have no friends, you should know that God, my master, is gathering disease and agony in his clouds on my behalf. They will strike the unborn children of anyone who raises their hands against me and the glory of my crown.” – Richard’s lines from Act 3 Scene 3, Richard II, William Shakespeare (1597)

“Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and National leader Christopher Luxon are among numerous politicians who have expressed their “anger” and “distress” on social media this afternoon as police stormed Parliament’s front lawn to disperse rioting protesters.” – Newshub (March 2022) (having a laugh at us)

“And in the hour of greatest slaughter the great avenger is being born” – Bradman, Paul Kelly (1987)

Ardern, who comes from a show business linage, may be paid back by a venomous portrayal in some future Shakespearean play for her performance in 2022. Likewise Christopher Luxon, who is equally culpable if unequally responsible. Yeoman provincial Kiwis found out where they stand by how they were treated. When they came in peace to talk to Wellington elites they were tricked and slapped. When they tried to respect the Crown they were driven away. The Anarchist response would be to part ways and reject the ‘archy’ or ‘imperium’. As in Lord of the Rings the proper solution is not to seek out power but to cast it back into the flame from whence it came. Unfortunately what history says usually happens is that the out-group becomes iron from being plunged into hard times while the in-group becomes soft and tyrannical until the two clash again and fates are reversed. In that case, Richard and Ardern have set the stage for a bloody and divisive, dynastic and class-based, civil wars in our not too distant future.

—
1 It’s a problem for the received anti-protester narrative that they were found camped on Smithfield still if they were, indeed, rioting and besieging a London in flames. Why wouldn’t they have occupied the houses of those they had displaced and whose heads they are said to have chopped off? Maybe these are made up stories or if they happened it was not the protesters but a wild attachment attracted by it? Agent provocateurs.

Image ref. Jehan Froissart, Chroniques (c.1480); Wiki

Ref. Why the woke Left is so rattled by Camp Freedom, Karl du Fresne (February 2022)

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