Books

> Seventy years prior to Jack Cade's Rebellion, during the even bigger 1381 Peasants' Revolt, the rebels focused their ire not only on Alesh-and-blood bureaucrats but also on their documents, destroying numerous archives and burning court rolls, charters, and administrative and legal records. In one incident, they made a bonfire of the archives of the University of Cambridge. An old woman named Margery Starr scattered the ashes to the winds while crying, "Away with the learning of the clerks, away with it!" Thomas Walsingham, a monk in St. Albans Abbey who witnessed the destruction of the abbey's archive firsthand, described how the rebels set fire to all court rolls and muniments, so that after they had got rid of these records of their ancient service their lords would not be able to claim any right at all against them at some future time."48 Killing the documents erased the debts.