![]() ![]() A horde of drunken men went in search of immigrants and a massacre took place in the neighbourhood of St Martin’s Vintry. Bringing the riot under control proved difficult and the rebellion soon appeared to be out of control. They left a trail of destruction behind them, including the burning of Savoy Palace, home of the hated, the fourth son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault who took his name from his godfather, John, Duke of Brabant, one of Edward’s allies in the Low Countries. On 7 June Wat Tyler joined the uprising in Maidstone and assumed leadership of the Kentish rebels. ![]() Unrest spread quickly through the county and then into Kent. This, the Peasant’s Revolt, began in the Essex village of Fobbing in May 1381 with the arrival of a Royal tax commissioner, John Bampton, enquiring into evasion of the new tax. They murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Treasurer of England, numerous lawyers and royal servants, and laid siege to the Tower of London. Rioters rebelled against the landowning classes and the incompetent government of Richard II. The revolt took place in the dark aftermath of the Black Death epidemic of the late 1340s which had devastating socio-economic consequences both in rural and urban parts of the country. The first manifestation of mob violence in the capital was caused by the imposition of the poll tax in 1381. Londoners were used to disorder in the metropolis. The connotation of ‘party political’ unrest may be a relatively recent one, but rioting had long been a facet of urban life. Justices of the peace did not use the term to refer to riots in their Court of Quarter Sessions records until the first decade of the eighteenth century. The protests of those who like Swift objected to the neologism and insisted on the older word ‘rabble’ were ignored. Many objected to the influx of new ‘slang’ abbreviations but most of such words took root relatively quickly. The term gradually entered the language that Londoners used to describe disorder over the next few decades. Initially the word ‘the mobile’ circulated. Elections for parliament, and other public meetings, resulted inevitably in riots, fights and other disturbances. It had its origin at the period of the Exclusion Crisis when the nation became divided into party and faction, Whig versus Tory. The word ‘mob’ is derived from the Latin phrase mobile vulgus (the fickle crowd). Such examples are as numerous as they are disturbing. Anyone who spoke in an identifiably Tamil manner was hauled out of the car and beaten up. But they could tell by word choice, accent, and intonation. Physically, they could not distinguish between Sinhalese and Tamils. In the late 1970s during riots in Sri Lanka, Sinhalese forces at makeshift roadblocks stopped cars and forced passengers to say a phrase or two. Time and again, during armed ethnic conflicts language is a tool for persecution and brutality. It is a way of ethnic cleansing that has become all too familiar. The Ephraimites, who had no sh sound in their language, pronounced the word with an s. The sentries asked each person who wanted to cross the river to say the word shibboleth. The victorious soldiers set up a blockade across the Jordan River to prevent fleeing enemies to get back to their territory. The book of Judges (chapter xii: 1-15) describes the battle between two Semitic tribes in which the Ephraimites are defeated by the Gileadites. In ancient Hebrew dialects the word meant ear (of grain or corn). A person whose way of speaking violates a shibboleth is identified as an outsider. Its functions as a password and excludes those that do not ‘belong’. It is a phrase (or custom) that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. Thames Street (City of London) 01 A shibboleth is a linguistic identity marker. ![]()
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