Peasants' Revolt

• 1. Introduction

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  The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 began not in a field or a tavern but at a tax collection hearing in the Essex town of Brentwood on the 30th of May. A royal official named John Bampton summoned villagers from Corringham, Fobbing and Stanford-le-Hope to account for unpaid poll taxes. The representative of Fobbing, a man called Thomas Baker, told Bampton plainly that his village had already paid and would give nothing more. When Bampton tried to arrest Baker, violence erupted. By the time the smoke cleared over London two weeks later, the Archbishop of Canterbury lay dead on Tower Hill, the Savoy Palace was a ruin, and a teenage king had ridden alone into a crowd of thousands to stop a war.

  What drove ordinary farmers, weavers and bakers to march on the capital? Why did the rebels declare themselves zealots for truth and justice rather than thieves? And what became of the promises a king made under duress on a summer morning at Mile End?

• 2. A Century of Grievance

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  In 1348 the Black Death crossed from mainland Europe into England and killed an estimated 50 percent of the population. The shock was not only human. Land that had been scarce suddenly lay empty, and labourers who had once competed for work found themselves in short supply. Wages were driven sharply upwards as employers bid against each other for surviving workers, and the purchasing power of rural labourers rose by around 40 percent between the 1340s and the 1380s.

  The authorities fought back through legislation. The Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and the Statute of Labourers in 1351 attempted to freeze wages at pre-plague levels, making it a crime to refuse work or break a contract. In theory the laws applied equally to employers and workers. In practice they were applied almost entirely to labourers, and with arbitrary severity. By 1361 the penalties had been strengthened to include branding and imprisonment.

  Parliament then piled on a new form of taxation called the poll tax, levied at first at four pence on every person over the age of 14. When that proved insufficient to fund the war with France, a second poll tax followed in 1379, then a third in 1380, this one set at a flat rate of 12 pence per person over 15. The third tax was widely evaded, particularly across the south-east, and by March 1381 royal commissioners were interrogating local officials village by village to find the holdouts. Their heavy-handed interference, arriving on top of decades of labour restrictions and rising manorial courts, pushed a generation that had grown wealthier and more mobile to the edge of open defiance.

• 3. The Men Who Led the March

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  Wat Tyler remains the face of the revolt, though almost nothing certain is known about his life before it. Chroniclers suggest he was originally from Essex, had served in France as an archer, and was chosen as leader at a large gathering in Maidstone on the 7th of June 1381. Several chroniclers credit him with shaping the revolt's political aims, not merely its military direction.

  At Blackheath, south-east of London, the priest John Ball gave the crowd what became perhaps the most famous sermon of the English Middle Ages, asking rhetorically "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?" Ball had been a well-known radical preacher from Kent before the revolt. He promoted the rebel slogan "With King Richard and the true commons of England", a phrase carefully constructed to stress loyalty to the crown while rejecting the nobles and officials who stood between the king and his people.

  In Suffolk, John Wrawe, a former chaplain, led a parallel rebellion that may have involved almost as many rebels as the London uprising. He coordinated attacks on Bury St Edmunds, directed the killing of Sir John Cavendish, the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and exercised considerable influence over events across eastern England. Ball was eventually caught in Coventry and executed on the 15th of July. Wrawe, hoping to buy a pardon, gave evidence against 24 of his colleagues before being sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered on the 6th of May 1382.

• 4. London Burns

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  On the afternoon of the 13th of June, Kentish rebels crossed onto London Bridge after the defences were opened from the inside, possibly by sympathisers among the city's own population. The Essex rebels entered simultaneously through Aldgate on the north side of the city.

  The Savoy Palace, belonging to John of Gaunt and filled with silver plate and furnishings that an official estimate placed at around £10,000, was systematically destroyed rather than looted. The rebels burned the soft furnishings, smashed the metalwork, crushed the gems, and set the building alight. According to the chronicler Henry Knighton, the quantities of silver and gold were so great that five carts would barely have sufficed to carry them. The rebels declared themselves "zealots for truth and justice, not thieves and robbers". Almost nothing was stolen.

  The Temple complex on Fleet Street, headquarters of the Hospitallers' legal buildings, was demolished and its books and paperwork burned in the street. At the Church of St Martin Vintry, 35 Flemish residents were killed by the crowd, and in one city ward the bodies of 40 executed Flemings were piled in the street. Historian Rodney Hilton suggests these attacks may have been coordinated by London's weaving guilds, who competed commercially with Flemish weavers.

  The following morning rebels entered the Tower of London and found Archbishop Simon Sudbury and the Lord High Treasurer Robert Hales in the chapel of the White Tower. Both were taken to Tower Hill and beheaded. Their heads were paraded through the city and fixed to London Bridge. The rebels also found John of Gaunt's son, the future Henry IV, inside the castle; a royal guard named John Ferrour successfully interceded and the boy was spared.

• 5. Smithfield and Its Aftermath

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  On the 15th of June, King Richard II, then 14 years old, rode out to Smithfield to meet Wat Tyler and the remaining rebels who were unsatisfied with the charters issued the day before. Richard had prayed at Westminster Abbey before setting out. His party, at least 200 strong and including men-at-arms, positioned itself outside St Bartholomew's Priory to the east of the open ground.

  Tyler rode forward and greeted Richard as his "brother". An argument broke out between Tyler and royal servants, the Lord Mayor William Walworth stepped in, and Tyler made a move toward the King. Walworth stabbed Tyler, and a royal squire named Ralph Standish repeatedly ran Tyler through with his sword. With thousands of rebel archers readying a volley, Richard rode forward alone into the crowd and persuaded them to follow him to Clerkenwell Fields, buying time for Walworth to bring up a city militia. Richard immediately knighted Walworth and his leading supporters on the field.

  Suppression followed swiftly but was not uniformly brutal. Henry Despenser, the Bishop of Norwich, marched south with eight men-at-arms and a small force of archers, routing rebels as he went and defeating a rebel army under Geoffrey Litster at the Battle of North Walsham on the 25th or the 26th of June. By November, at least 1,500 rebels had been killed or executed. When Richard met a rebel delegation in Essex seeking confirmation of his Mile End grants, he rejected their appeal, telling them that they were rustics and would remain in bondage "incomparably harsher" than before. On the 2nd of July the royal charters signed under duress were formally revoked.

  The broad amnesty that followed was selective. It excluded the men of Bury St Edmunds, anyone involved in killing the King's advisers, and any rebels still at large. The legal proceedings against the revolt's principals continued for years; the last case stemming from damage to the Savoy Palace was resolved in 1387.

• 6. Who Were the Rebels

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  Contemporary chroniclers described the rebels in contemptuous Latin terms like serviles rustici, but the court records compiled after the revolt paint a different picture. Historian Christopher Dyer describes the typical rural rebel as someone "well below the ranks of the gentry, but who mainly held some land and goods", not the very poorest in society. Among the tradespeople named in the records, historian Rodney Hilton lists carpenters, sawyers, masons, cobblers, tailors, weavers, fullers, glovers, hosiers, skinners, bakers, butchers, innkeepers, cooks and at least one lime-burner.

  Many rebels held positions of authority in village governance; they appear to have provided local leadership to the uprising. The rebels came from at least 330 south-eastern villages, and between 5 and 15 percent of England's population could read at the time, suggesting the movement's internal communications relied heavily on oral transmission and public performance.

  Women participated throughout the revolt. Johanna Ferrour is one of several women named in the records, but no evidence has been found of women being executed or punished as harshly as their male counterparts. Some rebels used pseudonyms drawn from popular literature, most notably Piers Plowman, the protagonist of William Langland's poem. Historians Steven Justice and Carter Revard suggest the pseudonym Jack was also widely adopted because it echoed the Jacques of the French Jacquerie uprising several decades earlier.

• 7. Long Shadow

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  The revolt's most immediate legacy was fiscal. Parliament passed no further poll taxes after 1381, and at the end of that year the Commons concluded that the military campaign on the Continent should be "carefully but substantially reduced". The Crown, unable to raise the money for large expeditions, was forced to seek peace options with France. The revolt had changed the direction of the Hundred Years' War not through military action but by making further taxation politically impossible.

  Serfdom did not end overnight. The institution declined through the 15th century primarily for economic reasons: lords sold their serfs' freedom for cash, or converted traditional tenure arrangements to leasehold. During the 15th century serfdom vanished from England, but historians such as May McKisack, Michael Postan and Richard Dobson argued in the 20th century that the revolt's direct political contribution to this process was more limited than earlier generations had assumed.

  The revolt became a living political symbol, deployed across centuries to different ends. A chapbook called The History of Wat Tyler and Jack Strawe circulated during the Jacobite risings and the American War of Independence. Thomas Paine expressed sympathy for the rebels; Edmund Burke condemned the violence. The Romantic poet Robert Southey wrote a play called Wat Tyler in 1794 from a pro-rebel perspective. William Morris published A Dream of John Ball in 1888, and later 20th-century commentators drew direct comparisons between 1381 and the protests against the Community Charge introduced in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

  In Smithfield, where Wat Tyler was stabbed and Richard rode into the crowd, a large slate memorial to "The Great Rising" was unveiled by the film director Ken Loach on the 15th of July 2015, carved by Emily Hoffnung and commissioned by Matthew Bell.