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In the late 14th century, England was recovering from the Black Death, fighting an expensive war, and struggling with a labor shortage that had upended the traditional social order.
When the government imposed a deeply unpopular tax, anger spread rapidly through villages and towns.
Within days, thousands marched on London, powerful officials were killed, and a teenage king faced the greatest popular uprising medieval England had ever seen.
Learn more about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
England in the second half of the fourteenth century was a society still reeling from catastrophe. The Black Death had first swept across the country in 1348 and 1349, killing perhaps a third to half of the population, and further outbreaks in 1361 and 1369 kept mortality high and the population depressed for decades afterward.
The demographic collapse had an effect that the peasantry understood very well even if the nobility resisted acknowledging it: labor had become scarce, and scarce labor should have commanded higher wages and better terms.
Serfs and free laborers alike found themselves, for the first time in generations, in a position to bargain. Manors that had once been worked by an abundance of tenants now stood short-handed, and landlords who wanted their fields plowed and their harvests brought in had to compete for workers who could simply walk to the next village and ask for better terms.
The ruling class responded not by accepting this new reality but by trying to legislate it away. In 1349, the Crown issued the Ordinance of Laborers, followed in 1351 by the Statute of Laborers, which attempted to freeze wages at pre-plague levels and compel able-bodied men and women to accept work at those fixed rates rather than seek better pay elsewhere.
The law also restricted the movement of laborers, since lords depended on being able to hold their tenants in place. These laws were, in effect, an attempt to use the state to reverse a market reality that had shifted decisively in the peasantry’s favor. Needless to say, the peasants highly resented this.
Enforcement fell to justices of the laborers, and later to justices of the peace, whose fines and prosecutions became a running irritant in rural life for a generation.
The statute did not achieve its economic goal, since wages continued to drift upward in practice, but it did succeed in generating a durable sense of grievance among those who found themselves fined or threatened for seeking wages the market would otherwise have given them freely.
Underlying this immediate friction was the longstanding system of villeinage, which I mentioned in the episode on feudalism. Villeins, who were essentially serfs, were legally subordinated to their lords, owing mandatory labor services as well as fees and fines for marriage or inheritance.
They faced strict restrictions regarding where they could reside and whom they could marry without a license, creating a stark and increasingly galling contrast with the higher wages and greater freedoms enjoyed by free laborers.
As free wage labor became more lucrative and more visible, the burdens of villeinage came to feel less like an ancient and unremarkable fact of life and more like an artificial imposition that benefited only the lord.
On top of this already tense social landscape, the government layered a fiscal crisis. The Hundred Years’ War against France, which England had been fighting on and off since 1337, remained enormously expensive, and by the late 1370s it was going badly.
Military campaigns in France produced little but exacted a heavy toll, and the government of the young King Richard II, who had come to the throne as a boy of ten in 1377 under the regency of his uncle John of Gaunt, needed money it did not have.
Parliament’s answer, in 1377, 1379, and again in 1380, was to authorize a poll tax, a levy charged not according to land or wealth but as a flat sum per head of population above a certain age. The first poll tax was modest and roughly graduated, but the third poll tax, granted by Parliament in November 1380, set a flat rate of one shilling per adult.
While it was later adjusted to allow the wealthy in a community to help cover the poor, in practice it meant that the burden on ordinary villagers was heavier than any previous levy and fell with particular weight on regions that had already contributed to the first two collections.
Tax evasion was widespread, and when the government’s assessors compared the returns against expected population figures in the spring of 1381, the shortfall was so large that commissioners were dispatched into the counties to investigate fraud and collect what was owed.
The revolt began, by most accounts, in the village of Fobbing in Essex, where in late May 1381 a royal commissioner named Thomas Bampton arrived to investigate why the local poll tax returns seemed incomplete.
The villagers refused to pay the additional sums demanded and drove Bampton’s clerks away, and the resistance spread quickly to neighboring villages in Essex.
When a royal justice, Robert Belknap, was sent to punish the offenders and to identify and penalize the ringleaders, he too was confronted by an armed and organized crowd, forced to swear he would never again sit in such a commission, and sent away, with several of his clerks reportedly killed. Essex was in open revolt within days.
Kent rose almost simultaneously, and it was in Kent that the rebellion found its leadership and organization. The town of Dartford and the city of Rochester saw early risings, and Rochester Castle was stormed to free a prisoner held there.
The rebels of Kent gathered at Maidstone, where they are said to have released from the archbishop’s prison the radical priest John Ball, who had been excommunicated and imprisoned for years for preaching against the social order and the wealth of the church.
Ball provided the revolt with its most famous expression. He argued that inherited social distinctions had no foundation in Christianity.
He is traditionally associated with the rhyme:
“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”
“Delved” meant dug, and “span” meant spun thread. The argument was that Adam and Eve had worked without lords ruling over them. Therefore, aristocratic privilege was a human invention rather than part of God’s original order.
From this point the movement acquired its most recognizable leader, Wat Tyler, about whom relatively little reliable biographical detail survives beyond his prominence as the commander who emerged to lead the Kentish mob.
Under Tyler’s direction the rebels marched on Canterbury, entered the cathedral, and demanded assurances from the monks there, before turning north toward London itself.
The rebels’ aims, as they articulated them at this stage, centered on the abolition of villeinage, an end to the hated poll tax and to the Statute of Laborers, and, significantly, a demand to speak directly with the young King Richard II, whom the rebels believed was their natural ally against corrupt officials.
This distinction between loyalty to the king’s person and hatred of his councilors was a recurring and important feature of the revolt. The rebels did not initially present themselves as opponents of monarchy but as subjects seeking the king’s protection against bad advisers.
By the second week of June 1381, the Essex rebels under a leader sometimes named as Jack Straw, and the Kentish rebels under Wat Tyler, were converging on London from the north and the south.
A substantial portion of the London populace, angered by their own economic status and resentful of foreign merchants and the wealthy elite governing the city, sympathized with or actively assisted the rebels’ advance.
On June 12, the mob from Kent reached Blackheath, just outside the city, where John Ball is reported to have preached a famous sermon on the equality of all people.
The following day, June 13, the rebels entered London because sympathetic citizens opened the gates at London Bridge and Aldgate. Once inside, the rebels moved with discipline against specific targets rather than descending into indiscriminate riot.
They went directly to Savoy Palace, the London residence of John of Gaunt, whom they regarded as the chief author of their oppression, and burned it to the ground.
Chroniclers of the rebellion record that the rebels deliberately destroyed the palace’s treasures rather than looting them, throwing gold and silver into the Thames and declaring themselves seekers of justice rather than thieves. They executed at least one of their own who was caught stealing.
Foreign merchants, particularly Flemish traders who were resented as economic competitors by London’s own artisans and workers, were singled out, and a number were killed.
The following day, June 14, the fourteen-year-old King Richard II rode out to meet the rebels, in what was intended as a negotiation to draw the crowd away from further violence in the city.
Richard granted, or appeared to grant, remarkably sweeping concessions. He agreed to abolish villeinage, to fix rents at a modest rate, to grant a general pardon for the events of the uprising, and to permit free trade throughout the kingdom without the restrictions that had bound peasant labor and movement.
Many of the Essex rebels, satisfied with these concessions and trusting in the king’s word, began to disperse and head home. But even as Richard met the crowd at Mile End, a separate contingent of rebels made their way into the Tower of London itself, which had been left under-defended, and there seized and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, who also held the office of Chancellor.
They also executed the Treasurer, Robert Hales, and several other officials whom the rebels held responsible for the poll tax and the general misgovernment of the realm. Their heads were displayed on London Bridge, showing that the rebels considered these men, rather than the king, to be the true objects of their anger.
The climax of the rising came the next day, June 15, at Smithfield, just outside the city walls, where Richard met once more with the remaining rebels, now led principally by Wat Tyler.
Tyler presented a more radical set of demands, which included the abolition of all lordship save that of the king, the redistribution of the church’s wealth among the common people, and the establishment of a single legal status for all Englishmen.
During the meeting, a scuffle broke out in which Tyler was killed by one of the king’s attendants and died of his wounds shortly afterward.
In the tense moment that followed, with the rebel crowd on the verge of violence, the young king rode forward alone toward the rebels and, in an act of considerable courage for a fourteen-year-old, called out that he would be their leader and give them all that they sought, urging them to follow him out of the city.
Once the main mob had dispersed, Richard and his government abandoned their concessions to the rebels.
The charters of freedom were revoked. According to one traditional account, Richard told petitioners that they were villeins and would remain villeins.
Royal commissions traveled through the affected counties to arrest suspected leaders and participants. Trials were often rapid, and executions were used to restore authority.
Wat Tyler was already dead. John Ball was captured near Coventry, brought to St Albans, tried in the king’s presence, and executed on July 15 by hanging, drawing, and quartering. Jack Straw, John Wrawe, Geoffrey Litster, and numerous local leaders were also executed.
In the short term, the revolt appeared to be a complete failure.
However, Parliament and the governing elite were deeply shaken. They recognized that attempting to extract large sums directly from ordinary households could provoke coordinated resistance. No comparable nationwide poll tax was imposed again in medieval England.
While the Peasants’ Revolt failed to secure its immediate demands, the revolt revealed how much England had changed since the Black Death and how difficult it had become to preserve serfdom, wage controls, and feudal obligations. It didn’t end serfdom, but it was the beginning of the end.
It also left behind a powerful example of ordinary people organizing against taxation and political corruption. The uprising was defeated, but the social system it challenged was already beginning to disappear.