The mayor and aldermen were for shutting the City gates, but the mass of the citizens effectually protested against excluding those whom they owned as “friends and neighbors.” The gates were accordingly left open all night, and an immense multitude went in and out, as yet comparatively orderly, and certainly honest. They stole nothing, not even food; everything they took they paid for at a fair price; any robber amongst them they put to death on the spot. As far as in them lay, these rude undisciplined masses wished to make fair war on those whom they regarded as their oppressors.[10] The Duke of Lancaster was the first object of their animosity. His sumptuous palace in the Savoy was ruthlessly destroyed, but the chronicler is careful to relate that the rioters did not appropriate the spoils. His jewels and other valuables he flung into the river, and one man detected in secreting a silver cup was thrown in after it. The records of the kingdom and other State papers were burned, the peasantry in some dim confused way connecting these documents with the oppressions to which they had been subject. Other acts of violence followed, notably the destruction of great part of the Temple, of which Robert Hales was Master. The insurgents, to whom drink had been freely served by many of the citizens, soon became infuriated and uncontrollable. A wild, half-drunken mob raged through the City, and deplorable excesses were committed. [10] “It was said that the insurgents as they went along were killing all the lawyers and jurymen; that every criminal who feared punishment for his offences had joined himself to them; that masters of grammar-schools had been compelled to forswear their profession, and that even the possession of an inkhorn was dangerous to its owner. Most of the rumors were, no doubt, the mere inventions of the excited imaginations of the chroniclers or their informants. The orderly conduct of the army of Tyler when it was first admitted into London, and the definiteness of the demands which formed the basis of the charter granted by Richard, make the atrocities and absurdities of these acts alike improbable.”—C. E. Maurice, p. 164.