Hannah Skoda explores how late medieval Europe saw an upsurge in misty-eyed yearning for the ‘good old days’
“When Adam dug and Eve span, Who was then a gentleman?” So spoke John Ball, one of the leaders of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, and a fiery, rousing preacher. As reported in the chronicle of Thomas Walsingham, Ball evoked a lost world, in which men were equal, free and dignified. Protesters should, declared Ball, like “a good husbandman… uprooting the tares [weeds] that are accustomed to destroy the grain”, rise up to restore this age of liberty.
Ball drew on a nostalgic image of a rural idyll – where all worked hard, and were justly rewarded – to provide a vision of hope for the future. A letter from one rebel, Jack Trewman, argued that “falseness and deceit have reigned too long, and truth has been set under lock and key, and falseness now reigns everywhere”. The rhetoric was powerful with its vivid alliterations, rhymes and appeal to a nostalgia for a past golden age.
But nostalgia was not the exclusive preserve of the rebels. If the peasants claimed that they wanted a return to “the good old laws” of yesteryear, Walsingham conversely accused them of trying to “wipe out… the memory of ancient customs”. His language appealed to a conservative nostalgia for a rigid social order when peasants knew their place. This rhetoric was mirrored in sermons that lamented the passing of a better age when social hierarchies were apparently stable and people just got on with their work. “The world is transposed upside-down,” cried one 14th-century preacher.
That’s the genius of nostalgia – it can be used to bolster two utterly conflicting arguments. This yearning for an idealised past can rouse radicalism, but it can also sustain reactionary fears.
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