Turning Peasants Into Pinions: At a Child’s Grave in Mousehold Heath, Near Norwich

Nature is a smaller thing in England than we’re used to in the US. There are no great, soul-shattering vistas, no real mountains, no mesas or canyonlands, no skies so vast they pour in through your eyes and spill out the back of your skull. Here they love a muddy path through ferny woods, a green patch of meadow on a half-sunny day. The earth has its own vocabulary, compact words that don’t put on airs: moors, gorse, heaths.

My wife is English and her family is in England and somehow it all made sense, moneywise and childcare-wise and otherwise, to spend most of the summer in a Victorian terrace—it sounds fancy but isn’t—in the working-class outskirts of Norwich, about two hours north of London. Parallel lines of long, two-story, brick buildings with steep, tiled roofs snake off to the east and west, curving with the gently sloping hills. They’re divided into homes, each about 12 feet wide and three or four times as long: cramped, cookie-cutter workers’ housing from the turn of the previous century. It’s densely packed but weirdly hushed even on the weekends. They may have been rioting a little farther north, but here the kids don’t shout. No one turns their music up. If people fight, they do it in silence.

Reading historians like EP Thompson and Peter Linebaugh when I first started to spend time in this country helped me to understand the otherwise infuriating English indirectness, politeness, conformity, and alcoholism as remnants of a lengthy trauma: products of the long, brutal disciplining required to turn a proud and unruly peasantry into a class fit for industrial labor. Even when the alternative was hunger, few human beings have ever been eager to exchange their freedom and dignity for an hourly wage. The conflicts have been largely erased by centuries of indoctrination, but thousands died on the gallows before the English poor had been transformed into a class capable of keeping the new machines of capital running at a suitable profit. People learned to keep their heads down, and called it manners.

Just down the street from where we’re staying there’s a park called Mousehold Heath. It’s mainly wooded, a maze of shady trails through oak, birch, and hazel trees, opening at times into swathes of shrubland spotted with gorse, a spiky bush that blooms a showy yellow in the spring. Or so I’m told. In the mornings I go running there in an effort to push back at the sense of doom that accompanies this latest geo-historical turning point. My in-laws chuckle that American politics has been entertaining lately, which I understand to mean that it’s a florid fucking nightmare that the entire world is forced to suffer. I smile and politely agree.

The park is small but big enough to let myself get lost in. On my headphones I blast the most ridiculously raunchy music I can find—you can pick it you can flip it you can taste it—and race down the overgrown trails in no particular direction, hopping tangled roots, brambles and mud, dodging dogwalkers, cutting up and down hills, letting my breath and the fractal patterns of the leaves open some new space in my skull, a vent that light can flow through.

A river runs through the old center of town and on the odd sunny days it reminds me, incongruously, of the canals in Venice Beach, the one in California. I keep thinking back to a conversation I had with the artist Judy Baca at a barbecue there more than 15 years ago. By comparison the moment seems like some golden age of calm, but until the Michael Brown protests blew up in Ferguson, the Obama years felt pretty hope-free, perhaps in direct proportion to the President’s branding of that word. I knew Baca had been fighting censorship and marginalization for decades. I asked her how she kept at it when nothing changed except to get worse. She paused a few seconds and said it sounds stupid and trite, but love. That’s the only way, she said, the only source. Love.

Running in the heath, among the ferns in the shade of an oak, I came across an explanatory placard. I am a sucker for explanatory placards. I paused my music. “The mounds and banks around you are all that remains of St. William’s Chapel,” I read. I wouldn’t have noticed the mounds and I’m not sure what banks means in this context, but the earth there was slightly lumpier than elsewhere. St. William, it turns out, was an 11-year-old boy, an “apprentice skinner of hides,” who disappeared in 1144 and whose body was found nearby. His death would be blamed on Norwich’s Jewish community in what would become the very first instance of the “blood libels” that would haunt European Jews for the next eight centuries.

I hit play again—I’m talking every drip drop don’t you waste it—and kept running. Later I would read that 46 years after William’s death, crusaders on their way to follow Richard the Lionheart to take back Jerusalem from Saladin (they failed at that) paused in Norwich long enough to butcher the town’s Jews. A few years ago, construction workers found the skeletons of 17 people, 11 of them children, at the bottom of an old well. DNA tests later determined that the dead were likely Jews, and had died around the time of the massacre that accompanied Richard’s crusade. There’s now a shopping mall where the well used to be. I didn’t see a placard.

At the beginning of last month, riots broke out in more than a dozen cities and towns here, mostly in a belt running across the north of England from Hull in the east to Liverpool in the west, but also in the south—in Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Bristol—and in Northern Ireland. Crowds of mainly young, white men attacked mosques and beat Black and brown people in the streets. In one Yorkshire town they battled police for hours while trying to burn down a Holiday Inn Express used by the government to house asylum seekers. Some of them waved the red-crossed flag of St. George, the banner that Richard the Lionheart is said to have brought back from the Third Crusade and that has since become a symbol of the British far right.

I ran and ran and thought about a friend in the West Bank whose house was recently demolished by Israeli bulldozers, and another released from Israeli prisons a ghost of himself, looking, to anyone’s eyes not blinded by propaganda, like a survivor of the Nazi camps. About polio in Gaza now and the images I couldn’t help but see online of children’s bodies returned to their parents in pieces, like bags of meat from the butcher’s. About the many times supporters of Israel have responded to my reporting, or to social media posts about Palestinian children killed by Israeli bullets and bombs, by accusing me of blood libel. I wondered how Europe’s countless murdered Jews would respond if they knew how that phrase was being tossed around these days. It’s a big thing to ask of the dead, but I have questions for them.

The racist days of rage went flaccid fast. Anti-fascists turned out by the thousands and a planned rightwing mobilization failed to occur. I fell into a research hole. I was reading about the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, which started in Essex, east of London. Plague had recently wiped out between a third and two-thirds of the population of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Human labor was suddenly far more valuable than it had been. In England, Parliament responded with what Perry Anderson has called “the most glacially explicit programs of exploitation in the whole history of European class struggle.” The first British labor laws, issued just after the arrival of the Black Death, required all unpropertied men and women under 60 to work—the term they used was “serve”—at wages current before the plague or face imprisonment. This throws a useful light on post-Covid labor relations—the waves of strikes and the so-called Great Resignation, and also the various anti-protest laws, and the generally furious global retrenchment of the right.

In 1381, the English poor rose up by the thousands. They marched on London, opening prisons, destroying manorial records, burning the homes of the wealthy, killing royal and church officials. Their demands were simple: serfdom must be abolished, a society based on absolute equality established, and all lawyers killed—the law, they understood, was a weapon that had only ever been used to hurt them. The revolutionary preacher John Ball proclaimed a radically egalitarian vision of the gospel. “From the beginning all men by nature were created alike,” he preached, “and therefore that now the time has come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.”

The revolutionary fervor spread to Norwich, which in those days was England’s second-largest city. It was led by a dyer named Geoffrey Litster. On June 17, 1381, I was surprised to read, the rebels gathered in Mousehold Heath. It was there, just down the street, that they crowned Litster “King of the Commons.” The heath would have been much bigger then, and, because it was used as pastureland, largely treeless. The local uprising ended a week or so later when the nobility defeated the rebels in battle in a nearby village. They captured Litster and had him drawn, hanged, and quartered, a punishment even worse than it sounds: he would have been dragged by a horse to the gallows, hanged, eviscerated while still alive, and finally beheaded and cut in four pieces, which were paraded around the region as a warning.

I had forgotten all about Julian of Norwich, had forgotten even that she was a woman. She was around when plague first hit, and she would have been here for the Peasant’s Revolt too, though by that time she had been moved by visions to seclude herself in a cell attached to a church in the old center of town. She lived for at least another forty years and never left her cell.

The account of those visions—“shewings,” she called them—that she composed while thus confined is the earliest surviving work written in English by a woman. Julian’s descriptions of the maternal nature of divine love ring so intimately true that scholars speculate that she may have been a mother prior to her seclusion and that she had, perhaps, lost her children to plague. She wastes no time on such trivial autobiographical details, but Julian does write, in the work’s final chapter, that it took her more than fifteen years to understand the true meaning of her visions. It was simple: love. “Who showed it to you?” she wrote. “Love. Why did He show it? For love.”

That’s what she concluded anyway, locked up in her little cell, safe from the boiling world.