Evil May Day

The Evil May Day riot broke out at about nine o’clock at night on 30 April 1517, the eve of the annual early summer holiday. This was conventionally a night of revelry for artisans and labourers in the City of London. Apprentices and journeymen, rallied by cries that immigrants were stealing their jobs and seducing their women, attacked the property and persons of non-English workers and merchants. They ransacked workshops and assaulted strangers, but no one was killed. Following the riot, King Henry VIII ordered royal troops to occupy London as an unsubtle rebuke of the mayor’s inability to keep order, and officials arrested hundreds of rioters. Over the following weeks, those acting in the name of the king undertook treason prosecutions of more than fifty men and adolescent boys; somewhere between fifteen and forty-three of those prosecuted were executed in spectacular fashion at several different points around the city. 

The 1517 riot was mild in comparison to many other riots against immigrants before or since, but over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was invoked frequently (with exaggerated accounts of the violence) as a high moment of tension between natives and newcomers. Despite its early modern notoriety, modern scholars have written remarkably little on the riot — perhaps with good reason, for it was not in itself a “major event” in English history. It was, in many ways, a relatively ordinary incident – and it is that relative ordinariness that makes it useful as a starting point for exploration of the complex workings of English society and politics in this period. Digging deeply into the riot uncovers entangled thematic strands that scholars often treat in isolation from one another: conflicts over household order and masculine roles; connections between ritual celebrations and political protest; religious ideas and rhetoric about social justice; economic protest against migrant labour; and law, jurisdiction, and the process of state-building. Although premodern popular protests have sometimes been celebrated by historians as progressive precursors of modern workers’ movements, we cannot find heroic exemplars in Evil May Day, either in the xenophobic and nativist rioters or in the buck-passing London civic officials who looked the other way when threats of violence circulated. Nor was the crown’s strong reaction to the riot motivated by protecting immigrants’ rights; for the king and his circle, the sin was the betrayal of authority, and the crackdown at least as much the grasping of an opportunity to demonstrate power as it was a reaction to a real danger to political order.