Peasants' Revolt

In the summer of 1381 a wave of popular rebellion swept across south-eastern England and beyond. Sparked by a hated poll tax, rebels from Kent and Essex marched on London, burned palaces and prisons, and killed the Archbishop of Canterbury, before their leader Wat Tyler was cut down in front of the fourteen-year-old King Richard II. Known as the Peasants' Revolt, though many rebels were craftsmen and townspeople rather than peasants, it was put down within months, but it frightened the ruling classes and ended the poll tax experiment.

The Black Death reached England in 1348 and may have killed about half the population. Labour became scarce and wages rose sharply. The government tried to hold pay at old levels through the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and the Statute of Labourers in 1351, enforced mainly against workers, with harsher penalties added in 1361. Many villagers also resented serfdom and the manorial courts, run by the same landowners who enforced the labour laws.

The Hundred Years' War with France was going badly and costing huge sums. Edward III died in 1377, leaving the throne to his ten-year-old grandson Richard II. Parliament introduced a poll tax shortly before Edward's death, a second in 1379, and in 1380 a third, set at twelve pence for every person over fifteen. Evasion was widespread, and in March 1381 commissioners were sent out to track down those who had not paid.

Trouble began at Brentwood in Essex on 30 May 1381, when the villagers of Fobbing refused to pay more and drove off the tax commissioner John Bampton; several of his clerks were killed. The revolt spread quickly. In Kent, crowds freed an alleged runaway serf from Rochester Castle, and by 7 June they were led by Wat Tyler, a man about whom little is known. The rebels took Canterbury on 10 June and then marched on London. At Blackheath the radical priest John Ball preached to them, asking "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?"

With only a small force available, the king sheltered in the Tower of London. On 13 June the rebels entered the city, joined by many Londoners. They wrecked prisons, burned the lawyers' buildings at the Temple and destroyed the Savoy Palace of the king's uncle, John of Gaunt. Flemish immigrants were hunted down and killed. On 14 June Richard met rebels at Mile End and granted charters abolishing serfdom, but meanwhile a crowd broke into the Tower and beheaded Archbishop Simon Sudbury, the chancellor, and Robert Hales, the treasurer.

On 15 June the king met Tyler at Smithfield. Accounts differ, but after a quarrel the mayor of London, William Walworth, stabbed Tyler, and a royal squire wounded him fatally. Richard rode towards the rebels and led them away, while Walworth raised the city militia, and the rising in London fell apart.

The revolt reached far beyond London. Rebels in Suffolk killed the Chief Justice and the prior of Bury St Edmunds, townspeople at St Albans turned on the abbey, and in Cambridge the university's records were burned. There was also unrest in Norfolk, York, Beverley, Scarborough and Bridgwater. Bishop Henry Despenser defeated the Norfolk rebels at North Walsham on 25 or 26 June. Richard revoked his charters, and royal commissioners held trials across the country. Ball was executed on 15 July, and by November the death toll among the rebels, in battle or on the gallows, had reached at least 1,500.

Parliament never again tried a poll tax and agreed to scale down the war in France. Serfdom faded in England over the following century, though historians now link this mainly to economic change rather than to the revolt. Long condemned by chroniclers, the rising was later embraced by radicals and socialists such as William Morris as a symbol of resistance to oppression.

Our 1400 map shows the Kingdom of England under Richard II's successor. For the country today, see the United Kingdom.