Although “the Elms” is not actually mentioned, the accounts related of Rice ap Meredith, a rebel, and of Gilbert Middleton, in 1316, lead to the conclusion that they ended their days at “the Elms”; they were drawn “through the streets of the citie to the gallowes.” Middleton, a fourteenth-century “Dick Turpin,” was brought from the north to London, and hanged in the presence of two cardinals whom he had robbed. These Church dignitaries had come to England with the view of making a double peace, namely, between Edward II. and Thomas, Duke of Lancaster, and between England and Scotland. But after Middleton had attacked and robbed them in the north, they were so disgusted they never visited Scotland at all. These were the early days of the self-assertion of the populace—about which we now hear so much under the banner of Socialism. Richard Davey, in his _Pageant of London_, writing of this time, says: “The evolution of slavery into serfdom, and of serfdom into vassalage—one of the greatest efforts towards true progress effected in this age—very rapidly brought about the creation of what we might describe as a lower class, whose voice was soon to be heard clamouring for its share in direct or indirect administration. Hence the increasing influence of universities, guilds, and corporations.” It must not be supposed from this, however, that education took any important turn, for the middle-class man and woman could neither write nor read until the money derived from the destruction of the monasteries was utilised for founding Grammar Schools. That is why it is so difficult to glean far-away facts when information and chronicling were in the hands of so few. By the time Wat Tyler’s rebellion had been put down, and ruthlessly punished, London appears to have possessed a permanent gallows. Victims numbered by hundreds, who had participated in the rising, dangled on trees and gibbets all over the counties of Middlesex, Essex, and Kent, and the excessive use of the hangman’s rope no doubt made some such structure a necessity. “The Elms” drops out of notice. Baker, relating in his _Chronicle_ the arraignment of Roger Mortimer half a century earlier for encompassing the death of Edward II., and his subsequent execution, speaks of him as being “hanged on the common gallows at the Elms, now called Tyburn, where his body remained two days as an opprobrious spectacle for all beholders.” This is but a small detail, but it is in such strokes of the pen that we learn much of the general state of things in past ages, and that word “Common” depicts a gallows in frequent use. It was after this that the place of execution seems to have been moved to Tyburn Road, and perhaps it was the erection of the permanent gallows at this time, that led Fuller to speak of the gibbet having been placed there as “an instrument of torture and punishment for the Lollards” (the followers of John Wyclif), and to quaintly write: