Blackheath was a rallying point for
Wat Tyler's
Peasants' Revolt of 1381,
[17] and for
Jack Cade's Kentish rebellion in 1450 (both recalled by road names on the west side of the heath). After camping at Blackheath,
Cornish rebels were defeated at the foot of the west slope in the
Battle of Deptford Bridge (sometimes called the Battle of Blackheath) on 17 June 1497.
In 1400,
Henry IV of England met here with Byzantine Emperor
Manuel II Palaiologos who toured western royalty to seek support to oppose
Bayezid I (Bajazet), Ottoman Sultan. In 1415, the lord mayor and aldermen of London, in their robes of state, attended by 400 of the principal citizens, clothed in scarlet, came hither in procession to meet
Henry V of England on a triumphant return from the
Battle of Agincourt.
[6]
Blackheath was, along with
Hounslow Heath, a common assembly point for army forces, such as in 1673 when the
Blackheath Army was assembled under
Marshal Schomberg to serve in the
Third Anglo-Dutch War. In 1709–10, army tents were set up on Blackheath to house a large part of the 15,000 or so German refugees from the
Palatinate and other regions who fled to England, most of whom subsequently settled in America or Ireland.
[18]
With Watling Street carrying stagecoaches across the heath, en route to north Kent and the
Channel ports, it was also a notorious haunt of
highwaymen during the 17th and 18th centuries. As reported in Edward Walford's
Old and New London (1878), "In past times it was planted with
gibbets, on which the bleaching bones of men who had dared to ask for some extension of liberty, or who doubted the infallibility of kings, were left year after year to dangle in the wi
