2018 read #2: Summer of Blood by Dan Jones.

Summer of Blood: England's First Revolution by Dan Jones
217 pages
Published 2009
Read from January 15 to January 19
Rating: 1.5 out of 5

There is a strain of pop history writing that veers toward the facile: indulging in novelistic scenes of what "must have" been going through its protagonists' heads during pivotal moments, without providing any real insight into their characters or motivations that couldn't be gleaned from a wikipedia article, worded in prose with all the art and subtlety of a USA Today article, granulated with recurring stock phrases like "orgy of destruction" and "blistering fury," like so much cheap sugar sprinkled on a prepackaged confection. I remember liking Dan Jones' later, more exhaustive volume, The Plantagenets (though the four-star rating I gave it seems at odds with the rousing adjectives "serviceable" and "competent"), so Summer of Blood was a surprising disappointment. It is nothing more nor less than a bland, forgettable, and sadly shallow recounting of a pivotal moment of British and working peoples' history, one that (inadvertently or not) twists an underclass uprising against systematic wealth inequality into a quaint Middle Ages Tea Party in order to fit an easy, accessible narrative.

One aspect of Summer of Blood that, in retrospect, could have been presaged by a reading of Plantagenets is Jones' creeping ideological slant. In that review I mentioned Jones' "traditional" historical focus, which emphasizes kings and masculine power while brushing aside "queens and female agency in general." Summer of Blood approaches the Peasants' Rebellion of 1381, a major uprising against wealth inequality, the landed classes, and the legal system that allowed the two to flourish, as a proto-libertarian revolt against nebulous phrases like "government intrusion" -- an askew angle Jones, in a preface to the American edition published in 2016, makes particularly queasy by linking it with the spirit of racist faux-populism that gave us Trump that same year: "Even today, there are many Americans who would cheer the English rebels' aims of rolling back government from their everyday lives, shunning oppressive taxation...." Spare me!

Jones' glib "liberty from big government" narration is particularly malaprop when contrasted with the contemporary sources he quotes: Essex villagers were "delighted," in the words of John Gower, "that the day had come when they could help each other in the face of so urgent a necessity" against the landowning aristocrats. That sounds a whole lot like pure socialism to me -- but reducing a complex set of historical world-views to fit my own ideology would put me in the same category as Jones.

It isn't just in the wording that this proto-libertarian slant shows itself. One of the primary aims of the Peasants' Revolt was to dismantle a system of legal serfdom, debt servitude, and debtors' prisons recently enacted as a weapon against the poorer classes. Time and again, the villagers went straight to the prisons whenever they entered a new town and released the captives there; time and again they sought out and burned legal records and memoranda of debt. Jones manages to get these facts right, then concocts from them a "conservative" motivation: "These were the highest badges of a legal system that in rebel eyes preferred contracts and statutes to trusted community tradition, and the rebels plundered the trove with glee." I'm pretty sure that the rebels were not making coordinated attempts to release prisoners and destroy debt records in order to preserve "tradition." I, for one, suspect the medieval underclasses had more ideological sophistication than Jones credits them with in this book.

I don't claim to know Dan Jones' ideological background. Perhaps the supposed ideological bias I scent is the fault of the newspaper-ready clichés Jones uses to get the gist across. "Freedom" has been corrupted by so many libertarian, right-populist, and neoliberal connotations that using it as a glib, anachronistic shorthand for a rebellion's demands might create a false sense of bias in the concerned reader. Regardless, even if it's merely an artifact of making the text more accessible, the lack of nuance in what should be a fascinating history is inexcusable. Any sense of what might have motivated the rebels of 1381 gets lost, along with their way of seeing the world and their social hierarchy, in the easy, ready-made modern clichés of "freedom."