‘Hola Weg!’ I said to Mathias, getting into the car.
‘Hola veg?’ He replied. We laughed. We have a stupid joke about v’s and w’s.
‘But actually - hola veg, hullet veg? It does mean hole-road, a tunnel-road.’
Again the meaning of a strange Old English term was nestled inside Norwegian. Veg - road - weg - way. Hola weg, Holloway. ‘Det er rart, det. Jo mer jeg snakker norsk, jo bedre forstår jeg engelsk’.*
On the drive home I daydreamed about walking through the holloways 645 years ago to the sound of blackbirds and crows. I wondered if the same routes I had thundered up and down on my bike as a teenager were trodden by people back then, on their way to Blackheath, answering the call of Wat Tyler and John Ball and Johanna Ferrour. I wondered if the ridges and furrows still faintly visible in the landscape of my childhood were tended by the same people who carried their longbows and axes and sticks to London that June.
I dreamed that night about sleeping on Blackheath. Not the Blackheath of recent summers, walking with Tom and Zoë to Greenwich Park, but the Blackheath of 1381. I imagined arriving, nervous and with aching feet, surrounded by hundreds or thousands of strangers, and sitting down in long grass to eat and talk about the new freedoms. The end of subjugation, the end of serfdom, the end of feudalism and the poll tax and the humiliating inspections. No more money and men for endless wars. The tax records have been burned, the inspectors have turned on their heels. We have wrenched open the prison doors. The people of Essex have burned down the manor and torn up the millstones from the Lord’s dining hall floor. The wheat is their own and they’ll grind with their own stones, for this one glorious summer.
It’s the 13th of June and Johanna Ferrour is standing in the waning evening light. She is riling the crowd up for tomorrow. I listen to her, turning over two pine cones in my pocket, collected while beating the bounds with my mother last autumn. We’ll march into the city, where we’ll find comrades in the Londoners. They’ll open the gates to us and join us on our way to the Tower of London. We’ll drag Sudbury and Hales out and Johanna will strike the first blow with her axe. 645 years later the scar from his beheading will still be visible on Sudbury’s sorry skull. That night I will sleep restlessly on damp ground. Maybe my Dad and brothers are there too. Dad and the other farm workers are going to take the cottages and the fields and what they grow in them, and re-do Robert Owens’ Harmony Hall in Tytherley and this time it will work. The boys are going to claim the field where they ride their bikes as a common. I’m going to swim in the trout stream with my friends and sleep outside in the woods. We’ll paint a different Wilton Diptych, in lime and casein straight onto the walls of the Hall: Wat and John and Johanna and Katherine. We’ll write their names everywhere in silver.
There are men with longbows in the crowd on Blackheath. Back from fighting for the boy king Richard, they have a new flag on a long pole. White with a red cross. They say it’s the flag of St. George, and it’s a flag for England. We’re hazy on the details but we think it’s a flag for all of us, the ones carrying longbows and swords and the ones carrying scythes and sticks.
In the next few days Richard will give us his royal banner to carry alongside it. He will trick us, issue charters and agree to all of our demands, while plotting to stab Wat and slaughter the rebels at Smithfield. He will be called a clever and bold King by future historians, and they will paint him with angels, even though he deceived and betrayed us.
My brother told me to get off the bus at Wat Tyler Road (Stop K) and walk towards Blackheath.
In 1981 a mural was painted at Bow Common Lane to commemorate 600 years since the Peasants’ Revolt. It was painted by Ray Walker in just six weeks. In searching for public traces of the Peasants’ Revolt in London, I found that this short-lived mural was the only large scale celebration of the commoners of 1381. A carved stone plaque exists at the site of Wat Tyler’s murder by the King’s men, at St. Barts Hospital, Smithfield. It was made by Emily Hoffnung and erected in 2015. A road in Lewisham is named Wat Tyler Road. The mural, however, is gone.
*English: It’s funny, that. The more I speak Norwegian, the better I understand English.