Danish peasants destroying paperwork, 1438–1441

The theft and burning of records during popular uprisings<br/>(especially the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381) has attracted<br/>significant attention. However, no devoted study has yet considered<br/>examples from the case of the Danish Peasants’ Revolt of<br/>1438–1441. In this article the extent of violence against paperwork<br/>in the Danish uprising is recovered from a challenging<br/>source situation. Comparisons with England in 1381 are offered<br/>in order to suggest the Danish rebels’ motivations and their<br/>specific practices in destroying documents. The immolation of<br/>papers was sometimes an instrumentalist attempt to disturb<br/>administrative memory. Sometimes it was part of the theatre<br/>of insurrection. An Old Czech source which claims radical Hussite<br/>presence in fifteenth-century Denmark suggests that ideological,<br/>even chiliastic, antipathy towards the written word may have<br/>inspired some. Despite a relative shortage of sources from the<br/>Danish Peasants’ Revolt (at least, in comparison to its English<br/>predecessor), cases from Denmark are shown to have unusual<br/>features which contribute to a broader discussion of the ideologies<br/>and emotions which inspire violence against bureaucracy.