Abstract Medieval revolts were noisy, disruptive events. Rebels’ noisiness, and the rhetorical usefulness to medieval chroniclers of describing them as such, has been extensively commented upon by scholars. This article suggests new ways of approaching the role of sound in premodern revolts through a careful consideration of one town, St. Albans, the site of several popular uprisings in the fourteenth century. Crucially, St. Albans was a monastic town with a system of lordship that relied heavily upon performative rather than physical displays of might. The abbots and community of St. Albans utilized processions and a network of increasingly intrusive bells to impose their acoustic regime over the town. Sound was a fundamental part of monastic lordship and therefore also a means of rebellion against it. A comparison of revolts in 1327 and 1381 shows how the St. Albans townspeople weaponized their intimate knowledge of their town’s geography and auditory landscape to attack the abbey with carefully placed noisiness, mock rogation ceremonies, and the eventual erection of their own bell tower. Ultimately, the case study of St. Albans reveals the utility of local contextualization not just for accessing the sounds of revolt, but for understanding how and why medieval towns rose against their monastic lords.
Emma W. Olson (Wed,) studied this question.