The Bearded Revolutionary
G.W.S. Barrow tells the story of a twelfth-century London student in revolt.
The starting point of my story is a young Londoner of an upper middle-class family, a law student at the university who had done some military service, and who was supported at least in part by a maintenance grant which he owed to the generosity of an older brother. Although his academic progress was not outstanding, he was a quick-witted young man, a fluent and plausible talker with a notable gift for public speaking. Ambitious, envious of contemporaries who were better off than himself, he was also rather vain, and cultivated a beard of exceptional length and bushiness so that he could be easily spotted in a crowd. He was adept at leading street demonstrations, and he was followed wherever he went by a girl friend who was his inseparable companion. For a few weeks, just before Easter, he succeeded in setting the whole of London in a tumult, putting the King’s chief minister and the government in a state of nervousness and taking up all their attention.
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