The Peasants' Revolt was a major peasant uprising in South East England which occurred from 30 May to November 1381 amid the Hundred Years' War. The rebellion broke out in response to the passage of a highly-unpopular flat tax which a third of Englishmen evaded; when royal commissioners were sent out to hunt down tax evaders, the agitated peasantry rose in revolt against the Royal government. The rebellion was suppressed by year's end, with its leader Wat Tyler being killed in a scuffle with King Richard II's retainers during a meeting at Smithfield. By November 1381, 1,500 rebels had been killed during the suppression of the Great Rising.
Background[]
The economic and social consequences of the Black Death continued to cause grave difficulties for the English crown decades after the main outbreak had ended. In the immediate aftermath of the plague of 1348, peasants demanded higher wages and improved conditions of land tenure, including fixed tenancy and employment terms. The nobility and Parliament moved to counter this with the Ordinance of Laborers in June 1349 decreeing that all physically fit men and women under 60 be available for work. Some landowners began to enclose strips of land, which could then be farmed more easily and with fewer laborers. The last years of Edward III's reign were marred by his dementia, and the dominance of the court by a cabal of corrupt favorites, including his mistrice Alice Perrers. The war against France was also proving costly, with little gain, and in 1376 there was a real fear of invasion.
Revolt[]
Edward III's death in 1377 was followed by the succession of the 10-year-old Richard II. As a result, England was ruled for the next three years by a series of regency councils, which lacked the firm will to divert the country from its ruinously expensive war with France. One expedition alone, in December 1379, under Sir John Arundel, cost £15,000 and was dispersed by a storm in the English Channel without achieving anything at all. In rural areas resentment simmered at the land enclosures, extortion by landlords, and the successive royal attempts to drive down wages, which had taken place over the 30 years since the Black Death. The Crown's need for extra funding for the French campaign was the spark that set this anger ablaze.
A tax for all[]
Traditionally the King relied on "lay subsidies" for funding, assessed at around 6% of a household's moveable property, which raised correspondingly more money from the rich. In 1377, however, Parliament voted a poll tax of 4 pence from every male and female over the age of 14, irrespective of income. This raised £22,000 and there was no widespread resistance to it. In 1379, a second poll tax was approved by Parliament, levied according to an elaborate set of rules that included 50 gradations, with dukes at the top paying £6, and barons 50 shillings, down to the poorest at the bottom, who were assessed at 4 pence. This more progressive tax raised only £18,600 and with tension simmering on the Scottish border and little sign of success in the war against France, Chancellor Simon Sudbury (who was also the Archbishop of Canterbury) returned to the House of Commons with a demand for a poll tax that would raise an astonishing £160,000. The Commons finally assented and the new tax was levied at a flate rate of 12 pence per head on all over the age of 15- three times the level of the 1377 tax. Evasion was instant and widespread. The poll tax rolls compiled to show who had paid the imposition show that 450,000 fewer people paid in 1380-81 than in 1377, meaning one-third of taxpayers had vanished. The royal council ordered enquiries into the massive evasion in January 1381, and in March, new commissions were sent into the counties to track down those who had refused to pay.
Growing resentment[]
The heavy-handed actions of the commissioners fuelled the resentment of the peasantry, which was already reaching dangerous levels. Within three days of the arrival of John Bampton's commission in Essex on 30 May, some 50,000 peasants (probably an exaggerated figure) are said to have risen under a certain Thomas Baker of Fobbing. In Kent, the arrest of a man claimed as a serf by Sir Simon Burley proved the immediate spark for revolt, and on 5 June, the Kentishmen gathered at Dartford and then marched on Maidstone, which fell to them the next day. It is at this point that Wat Tyler emerged as leader of the revolt. Little is known of him - other than he seems actually to have been a tiler - but for the n ext 10 days he acted as the figurehead for the rebels, together with a radical preacher named John Ball, who espoused a radical (for medieval times) form of egalitarianism, and an even more shadowy figure named Jack Straw, whom some sources claim was no more than an alias of Wat Tyler.
Targets of the rebellion[]
The rebels next marched on Canterbury, the seat of the hated Archbishop-Chancellor, where they burnt the poll tax rolls. They then moved on London. At an early stage the rebel tactics were clear. They directed their attacks at the King's ministers and sought to extract concessions from Richard himself. On 13 June, with the rebels at Greenwich, the King came in person to meet them. Tyler demanded the surrender of John of Gaunt, the King's uncle, Chancellor Sudbury, Treasurer Robert Hales, and a clutch of other especially despised notables. The King refused and tried to trap the rebels into a meeting at Windsor where royal forces might more easily hunt them down. Wat Tyler was not fooled and the rebels, up to 60,000-strong according to some sources, marched on Southwark where they opened the Marshalsea Prison, burned Sudbury's palace, and razed John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace.
Rebel manifesto[]
On 14 June, the rebels, who had trapped the King and his ministers in the Tower of London, issued a manifesto. It demanded the punishment of traitors to the Crown, the abolition of serfdom, the establishment of a mandatory rent of 4 pence per acre, and the legalization of negotiations between masters and servants on contracts. On the same day, Richard met once more with the rebels at Mile End. He issued a charter proclaiming the end of serfdom, and many of the rebels the rebel bands, with one of their key demands satisfied, started to break up and return home. The men of Kent were more stubborn and refused to disperse, breaking into the Tower and murdering Sudbury and Hales, whose severed heads were displayed on poles to the assembled mob.
Royal fracas[]
Wat Tyler's death
Richard met again with the remaining rebels on 15 June at Smithfield. Historical sources are hostile to the Kentishmen, but it seems that Tyler was insolent in the royal presence and some kind of scuffle broke out with Richard's retainers. In the scuffle, Tyler was fatally wounded. It was a moment of profound danger that might have descended into a massacre, but Richard kept his head. He persuaded the rebels to move on to Clerkenwell.
The rebellion collapses[]
The momentum of the rebellion was lost and Jack Straw, who seems to have replaced Wat Tyler as leader, failed to keep the remaining rebels together. Straw was executed the same day and the Great Rebellion collapsed. It was time rather than violent action that ultimately gave the peasantry what they demanded. The reprisals in the aftermath of the peasants' poll tax rebellion were relatively slight, while over the next century the vestiges of the legal servitude Wat Tyler's men had so dramatically rebelled against gradually withered away.
Aftermath[]
The Peasants' Revolt was not the last major rural uprising in late medieval England. Economic and political grievances continued to provoke rebellions well into the 15th century. The Parliament of November 1381 passed a general pardon for the rebels, except those who had been involved in the killing of ministers (and the men of Bury St Edmunds who were singled out for special punishment). Those who survived the end of the Great Rebellion were hunted down, such as John Wrawe of East Anglia, who was executed in May 1382. The next major rising was that of Jack Cade in 1450-52, when again the men of Kent marched on London (though their expressed objectives were political rather than economic). In 1489, opposition to Henry VII's tax raising led to violence in Yorkshire and a major revolt by Cornishmen in 1497 again reached Blackheath in London. After this, the rural uprisings of the 16th century had a more religious and political component.