The 1381 English Peasant's Rebellion

Join Kelli as she goes over the history of the English Peasant's Rebellion, 1381.

The Black Death had severely impacted England - not just in high mortality rates, but also its ability to function within its strict feudal order. To help compensate for the drop in workers, and to try and get the economy back on track, Edward III passes the Statute of Laborers in 1351. But what this did was set in motion a rage against feudalism, government intervention, and inequality that manifested as the Peasant's Rebellion, led by men like Wat Tyler and John Ball, in 1381.

The Peasant army would meet King Richard II in London, and it was an absolute bloodbath.

Let's go over the historical context that leads us to the Rebellion, then the event itself. It's a fascinating story that shows us how far the common folk are willing to be pushed before they break.

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Intro and Outro music credit: @nedricmusic
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Sources
Books:

• Dan Jones, Summer of Blood (2009)
• Elizabeth Kimball Kendall, Source-book of English History (2015)
• Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death Medieval Sourcebook (1994)

Articles/Online Sources:

• “Ordinance of Laborers, 1349” Fordham University Medieval History Sourcebook https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/seth/ordinance-labourers.asp
• “Tales from Froissart: Beginning of the English Peasant Revolt” Nipissing University https://uts.nipissingu.ca/muhlberger/FROISSART/PEASANTS.HTM

Transcript

The 1381 Peasant’s Rebellion

Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a podcast that makes history more accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.

So I know I do a lot of Medieval stuff, but in all fairness, it’s just so fascinating. And in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about a violent, yet fascinatingly political moment of the late Medieval 14th-century world - the Peasant’s Rebellion in England, 1381. 

England in the 14th century was in transition. By 1381, England was still recovering from the effects of the Black Death and some recurring waves of plague outbreaks. The feudal system was near its end, unable to function without a large peasant base, many of whom had died from disease. The government, as a result, was in shambles. Richard II had only just been crowned 4 years prior and was 9 when he became King! And out of this chaos, and because of some poorly thought-out economic decisions, we see an uprising of the common folk who were tired of their government, tired of corruption, and tired of life in a failing feudal society… so they fought back.

In today’s episode, we’ll go over this event, sometimes relegated to a single sentence in a world history textbook. But as one of my all-time favorite authors and historians Dan Jones notes in his book, Summer of Blood, quote,
The revolt marked the beginnings of a rebellious tradition among the English lower orders which has been repeated ever since… The year 1381 is a signpost on the road from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and Magna Carta in 1215 to Bosworth in 1485, the Armada in 1588, and everything beyond.

End quote.

As usual, I’ll begin with some historical context - what was happening that led to the Peasant’s Rebellion? Once we square away the years leading up to 1381, we’ll talk about the Rebellion itself and its major players. I know it may not sound like a banger of a story, but trust me - it gets *very* juicy in all the best ways.

So let’s get started!

Historical Context
So obviously, for an episode about a Peasant’s Rebellion, we need to know what they were rebelling against - and for that we turn to historical context. What was happening in England that left the common folk so fed up with how things were going that they rallied around a handful of organizers, stormed various cities including London, burned some important places to the ground, executed powerful men… what in the world happened?! 

Well, let’s go back to my favorite topic of all time - the Black Death.

The Black Death swept through Europe between 1347 and 1353, though the peak years were 47 to 51. And in that period of time, an estimated one-third of Europe’s population died. Nobody was safe - it spread to towns and cities so quickly that in some places, like Siena Italy, over two-thirds of population died in a matter of days or weeks. There were few left to bury the dead. I did a whole episode on the Black Death - episode number 50, which was a nice milestone for me - so go check that out if you haven’t already. I also did an APHOUT mini-episode on YouTube about Joan of England, daughter of King Edward III, who died of the plague during the peak years while en route to Castile to marry her betrothed. If you didn’t already know, I put out mini-episodes on YouTube where I do shorter topics.

But anyway, the Black Death was massively detrimental to the feudal status quo in England since roughly ⅓ of the population died, many of them the peasants. So let’s talk about how the feudal system in England worked, why the plague undermined it, and how that led to the Peasant’s Rebellion.

Now certainly, plague wasn’t the only thing that led to the decline of feudalism. In truth, some peasants had already started moving away from feudal lands to the cities, where they could engage in a bustling trade network with other cities across Europe that connected to the broader Silk Roads trade. And in many cities, guilds were going strong, creating new generations of tradesmen. So it wasn’t as if the Black Death was a switch that turned off feudalism and turned on a new way of living. But I can’t think of any historians who would disagree with the argument that the Black Death hastened that process and led to the transition away from feudal, Medieval Europe into the Early Modern Period.

That being said, here’s a brief and simplified explanation of the feudal system. It was brought to England with William the Conqueror, a Norman invader who landed in 1066 and, well, conquered. You probably learned about feudalism in school with the pyramid - the King at the top, nobles underneath, then the knights, and peasants at the bottom. It’s simplistic, but it gets the idea across - feudalism was system of management where the upper classes could control their lands and the people on them. Peasants, in many ways the subjects of today’s episode, made up roughly 90% of medieval society. Though some were free, many were serfs, bound to the land and their lord without the freedom to do much else. By the end of the 14th century, there were fewer serfs and more freed men, but again, this process was hastened by the Black Death.

As I mentioned, we typically estimate that approximately ⅓ of the population died of the plague. And although nobody was safe, a majority of those who died were the peasants living in cramped villages, where the plague could easily spread from one person to another. It was absolute chaos, misery, and despair. But to connect it to today’s story, we need to look at the economic and political aspect of all this peasant death - if 90% of England’s population were laborers, either as serfs in the fields, or free farmers, or workers in the cities… then who was going to keep the economy going? I mean we certainly wouldn’t expect to see, I don’t know, the Duke of Lancaster out tilling his own fields, right? The rapid devastation that came in the wake of the plague meant that something had to be done to try and salvage the economy and workforce. Because if a government doesn’t have a functioning economy, then it’s not a functioning government.

And so King Edward III, still reeling from his own daughter’s death from the plague, issued the 1349 Ordinance of Laborers. Here’s an excerpt from that source. And I’m going with the version from Rosemary Horrox’s Black Death sourcebook because it’s much easier to follow along than the original text, though I have included the more convoluted one in the sources in the description. Quote:
Since a great part of the population, and especially workers and servants, has now died in this pestilence, many people, observing the needs of the masters and the shortage of servants, are refusing to work unless they are paid an excessive salary. Others prefer to beg in idleness rather than work for a living. Mindful of the serious inconvenience likely to arise from this shortage, especially of agricultural laborers, we have discussed and considered the manner with our… nobles and other learned men 

and… we have ordained that every man or woman in our realm of England, whether free or unfree, who is physically fit and below the age of sixty, not living by trade or exercising a particular craft, and not having private means or land of their own upon which they need to work, and not working for someone else, shall, if offered employment, ... [must] be obliged to accept the employment offered, and they should be paid only the [amount] which was usually paid in the part of the country [in the year 1346].

End quote.

A simple summary of that, if the Middle English was a bit hard to get through - if you don’t already have a job and can work, you HAVE to work. The source later goes on to say that you can’t leave your current job to find another one with higher wages, and that there would be punishments for not working, being idle, etc. etc. There are bunch of primary sources detailing legal cases against men accused of not working. And if you didn’t catch it in the text I quoted - the amount of money they would be making would be what it was pre-plague. You know, when there significantly more people around to do the same amount of work.

So here’s another way of thinking about it, and I’ll use myself as an example. Maybe I was a serf working in the barley fields. Before the plague, I maybe had 15-20 other people helping me till the fields and harvest and do all the agricultural chores. But now, let’s say that two-thirds of the workers died of plague. With the King’s Ordinance, I’m essentially forced to stay at this job, working for the same employer, earning the same amount of money I earned before, but there are only 4-5 other people to help me. I’m doing more work for the same amount of pay. 

So if I were to say that the people were super angry about the Ordinance of Laborers, you could probably understand why. I mean think about that - the government forcing you to work if you are able, and you can’t refuse, and you can’t change jobs, and you will be paid a lower salary than you probably need to survive in the economy. And if you’re already making the connection between this and the Peasant’s Rebellion that happens a few decades later in 1381… you’d be right. 

The 1349 Ordinance of Laborers was ratified as the *Statute* of Laborers in 1351, and it was met with “a mixture of hostility, contempt, and point-blank refusal,” to quote Dan Jones. It was a futile government effort to control every aspect of the economy and to support the nobility and other landowners in their mission to maintain power over their people. But it also fueled a growing divide between landowners and workers. The divide was always there, but as is what typically happens with pandemics, those divides were made more obvious with economic uncertainty and political chaos. And as I used to teach to my students in AP World History, when you’ve got economic uncertainty and political chaos, rebellion isn’t far behind - there’s only so much the common people will put up with before they take a stand. And there are examples of that happening in virtually every human civilization in the history of our planet. 

And I’m going to quote Dan Jones here again, because honestly he’s just an incredible history writer and I love how he ties things together. Quote:
For the workers, suddenly feeling the full weight of royal law, the legislation was a gross affront. It attacked not just the wages in their pocket but their dreams of betterment. Society had loosened its strictures on social advancement during previous generations - now all that was under threat, and the spectre of a new serfdom loomed over villages across the English countryside. It was not, perhaps, the old manorial system, but the laws seemed gradually to be reinstating the misery of bondage by any other name.

End quote.

There were more indignities, of course. A poll tax was passed right before King Edward III died in 1977, which demanded a flat 4 pence from everyone over the age of 14 - it was a way to help pay for the ongoing expenses of the Hundred Year’s War, which began in 1337, and it also put the commoners in check. It didn’t help that when Edward died, his nine-year-old grandson Richard II was crowned - having a boy King and his regents run England did not inspire confidence when the political and economic system was already so unstable. And speaking of the Hundred Years’ War, things weren’t going so well on that front either, and there was the legitimate threat of a French invasion weighing on peoples’ minds. And the French did invade England in August 1377 when they landed on the Isle of Wight, looting, pillaging, killing, and setting fires. Things were bad and getting worse. A second poll tax was levied, and peasants paid about the same amount, but it didn’t raise enough money

In 1380, Parliament was called together to find a way to raise the money to keep England going. And to do this, they decided to levy a higher tax, about 3-4 times more than the previous poll taxes. Imagine that - raising your taxes by four times the amount you’re paying now, all at once. It would be crippling, right? And it certainly was for the commoners of England. It was the lastest indignity of being a commoner in an England transitioning out of feudalism, and for some, it was time to revolt.

And in southeast England, in Kent, two men named Wat Tyler and John Ball were gathering people together in protest of the restriction of freedoms, the taxes, and potential regression to serfdom and bondage. And soon enough, Wat Tyler and John Ball would march their angry peasant army to Canterbury, and then to London.

The Beginnings of the Peasant Rebellion
The rebellion began in Kent, and it spread from town to town, rallying commoners who wanted to take up arms against those who would tax them unfairly. And from the beginning, the rebellion used violence to spark fear - as the rebels visited new towns, they brought with them, on pikes, the blackening, decaying heads of decapitated men. We’re not talking about men arguing in the local tavern about unfair government practices - this was a proper rebellion.

14th century French chronicler Jean Froissart’s [fwaa-sahh] wrote that, quote,
There happened in England great commotions among the lower ranks of the people, by which England was near ruined without resource. Never was a country in such jeopardy as was this at that period… It is customary in England… for the nobility to have great privileges over the commonalty, whom they keep in bondage; In the counties of Kent, Essex, Sussex and Bedford, these services are more oppressive than in all the rest of the kingdom.

The evil-disposed in these districts began to rise, saying, they were too severely oppressed; A crazy priest in the county of Kent, called John Ball… was greatly instrumental in inflaming them with those ideas.

End quote

I’ve mentioned Friossart in other episodes. He’s an excellent source for 14th-century France and England. Biased in favor of the elite, sure, but still a great source of information. And in this summary of the Peasant’s Revolt, he mentions John Ball as the instigator.

Ball was a priest who had been arrested several times prior to 1381 for rabble-rousing - speaking out against social and political inequality and corruption within the Catholic Church. He was an advocate for the peasantry and spoke out against those who would take advantage of them - so you can imagine how he felt about the poll taxes. And in fact, in the beginning of the rebellion, he was still imprisoned! It was Wat Tyler who broke him out.

Wat Tyler became the de facto leader of the rebellion because of his organizational and leadership skills. Dan Jones and others speculate that he had some military or combat experience because of how well he was able to raise and command men to fight.

And between the two of them - a man of the cloth inspiring people to rally against corruption and tyranny, and a leader who could properly organize and plan attacks - there was a team capable of fighting back. Many of John Ball’s speeches and letters have been digitized; here’s an excerpt from one called Cast off the Yoke of Bondage, which he supposedly gave when the rebellion marched to London:
From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondsmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who would have had any bond and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may, if ye will, cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

End quote

Perhaps you can see why the establishment hated him so much. 

The men and their followers marched to Canterbury, intent on taking it. And along with taking the city, they were looking for those who were responsible for things like the poll tax - tax collectors, sheriffs, treasurers… anyone in a position of authority over the commoners. But the most hated man of all was John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. 

John of Gaunt was the fourth born, third surviving son of Edward III. He was uncle to the young King, Richard II. And he had tremendous power and control over his nephew - he was widely considered to be the most powerful man in England. He also owned more lands throughout England than anyone else. And in addition to raising money for the war against France, John of Gaunt also wanted to sail for Portugal to take lands there as well. So part of the reason England was so keen on raising money through the poll taxes was because of John of Gaunt’s influence and actions. And as such, many of John of Gaunt’s people were targeted by the Rebellion. 

Back to Canterbury. As Tyler and Ball’s men flooded the city, traitors were brought into the streets and beheaded. This violence went on for about a month; Canterbury’s streets were red with blood. It didn’t take long for London and the young King to hear about what was happening - and in a really interesting twist, the teenage Richard II agreed to come out to Blackheath, on the outskirts of London, south of the River Thames, and meet with the rebels. And so Wat Tyler, John Ball, and the growing chorus of rioters marched towards London in June of 1381 to meet with the King.

The Rebellion in London
Tens of thousands of rebels arrived at Blackheath on June 12th, and they soon received word from a royal messenger that the King would meet them the next morning. But it’s important to note that the group wasn’t planning a regicide - they wanted to, in Dan Jones’ words, correct the iniquities of the kingdom and demonstrate before their young king the tyranny of his advisers. 

As some of the rebels were waiting, they went to the nearby manor of Lambeth, the London home attributed to whoever serves as the Archbishop of Canterbury, which in this period of time was Simon Sudbury. He was high on the target list, as many believed that Sudbury, alongside John of Gaunt, was principally responsible for the poll taxes and general tyranny over the peasants. So the rebels, on the night of June 12th, ransacked his London home, perhaps a foreshadowing of what was going to happen should they come across the man himself.

June 13th was the festival of Corpus Christi - yes, like the coastal city in Texas - and Tyler and Ball were preparing to meet the King. Sudbury was with him, fearing what would happen should he be seen and captured. And Sudbury’s concerns had transferred to the King, who was now wise enough to not land ashore to meet Tyler and his angry mob of tens of thousands of peasants, all egged on by John Ball’s sermons about equality. So instead, Richard stayed on the water and agreed to hear their demands in a written petition. And what did they ask for?

Death. They wanted the heads of all the King’s advisers, the ones they believed were ruining both King and country. And that list included men like John of Gaunt and Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The King’s barge turned around on the river and headed back into the city, toward the safety of the Tower of London, telling the rebels and Wat Tyler that if they wanted to continue these negotiations, they could come to Westminster after the weekend of celebrations.

And how do you suppose this army of angry, revved-up peasants responded to essentially being fobbed off by their King? Not well. Not well at all.

As Dan Jones puts it, quote,
Livid at the snub during what should have been their moment of greatest triumph, the leadership turned their inflamed party around and set off back to Blackheath Hill. Restraint was ebbing away, leaving behind it a raw plane of retributive fury. London Bridge stood a couple of hours’ march away… against the will of the true commons, there could be no escape for traitors to the realm. 

End quote.

And so, Wat Tyler and his men marched on London. They swarmed London Bridge, then flooded into the city, heading right for the homes of those on their list. Though John of Gaunt was away in Scotland, he had a bunch of properties in the city, and the rebels sacked them. The most famous of which was Savoy Palace, home to the Dukes of Lancaster. Outside of sacking and burning down the residences of the rich, they also went for the jails to free whoever was locked away, something they had been doing since the rebellion began in Essex. Not only would this increase their numbers, but it was a statement against the authorities and the rule of law. 

The rebels continued their march down the streets of London, finding and executing anyone they considered to be their enemy. Many, once found, were pulled out into the streets and beheaded. In that first night alone, on Corpus Christi, 18 men were beheaded and their homes set on fire. Apparently the fires burned so hot that they blazed for a week straight. 

Those who had the chance escaped to the Tower of London, a fortress that still stands to this day, though now it’s just a tourist attraction. I was last there in 2019 - I distinctly remember the toilets on the top level of the central Tower that just empty to the outside and onto the grounds below. In the Medieval period, at least. They’re part of the museum… they’re not for public use. Anymore.

But anyway, the King and many of his men were hiding out in the Tower of London, purportedly the safest place to be in the event of an attack. Richard tried a feeble attempt at promising to pardon the men and address their grievances if they disbanded and went home, but they were all bloodthirstiness and momentum by that point, so the suggestion just angered them even more. So now Richard was faced with a conundrum - give over his men and advisers and capitulate to the rebels, or find a harsher way to stop them. The mob was moving ever closer to the Tower, so he had to make up his mind quickly.

The first thing he decided to do, though, was meet the rebels at Mile End early in the morning on Friday, June 14th. The idea was to bring them away from the Tower, which they had surrounded, so those trapped inside - who would certainly have been murdered - could escape. So King Richard and all of his horses and all of his men *look at camera weird* rode through London to try and draw the rebels away. Did it work? No. No it did not. And according to a later source written by one of the sheriffs 18 months later, one man came close enough to about grab the reigns of Richard’s horse! Which is too close for someone in an angry mob to get to the bloody teenage King of England!

And as King Richard trotted down the busy streets, the leaders - Ball, Tyler, and some others - weren’t even there. They were the organizers, the ones who could calm down the crowd if needed. So the King of England is now out there in the rabble, virtually unprotected, just hoping that they didn’t decide to kill him as well.

When Richard asked what they wanted, they gave… really reasonable requests, actually. Not the list of heads they asked for on the river a few days prior. The crowd asked for freedom from servitude, a tax cap, a limit on how much their landlords could charge rent on land, and that no man be forced to work like they had been since the Statute of Laborers was passed by Richard’s grandfather, Edward III. Considering they had spent the past two days looting, setting fire to half of London, and chopping heads off… this was a pretty calm moment. And it goes to show that they had no intention of committing regicide. They just wanted equality and were fed up with those standing in the way of it.

But Richard wasn’t there primarily to negotiate a truce - he was a diversion to get London’s Most Wanted out of the Tower unscathed. Did it work?

No. Because Richard, in his infinite teenage wisdom, said something really daring and, frankly, stupid. He encouraged the rebels to roam free across England and catch traitors, then bring them back to be tried before a court. *facepalm* Well, the rebels knew where the traitors were - locked away in the Tower. So they went straight for it.

Dan Jones believes that had Richard not said that part, perhaps the crowd would have dispersed, happy to have been heard by their King. But in essentially greenlighting the wholesale hunting and slaughtering of those they deemed to be traitors, Richard doomed his men.

It wasn’t long before the rebels took the Tower. They flooded through the rooms, laughing, dancing, jumping, clearly enjoying their victory. They grabbed everyone they deemed a traitor. Sudbury was found in the chapel, reciting prayers. They pulled him outside to Tower Hill along with the others, readying for an execution. It was Friday morning, June 14th. Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was at the mercy of a very inexperienced executioner, and it took eight blows to the back of the neck to finish the job. Eight blows. Which means many of them likely missed and just severed his spine or smashed in his head in several places. His head, like many others before him at the mercy of the peasant rebels, was mounted on a pole and paraded around town. A warning to others, and a show of victory.

Now among those so-called traitors in the Tower, one important person escaped - Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, and cousin of the King. He most definitely would have been killed alongside Sudbury, but a soldier concealed him and helped him escape in the chaos. Henry Bolingbroke later became King Henry IV, who ruled England from 1399 to 1413. It’s a long story for another day, but Henry was exiled, came back and deposed Richard in 1399, and took the throne. It’s thought that Richard II was either murdered or died of starvation in captivity. But like I said - a story for another day.

June 14th, 1381, marks the only time in history that anyone has ever successfully breached the Tower of London. So among other things, the Peasant’s Rebellion carries that distinction - they conquered several towns and cities, like Canterbury and London, and stormed the Tower of London. Quite the feat.

The End of the Peasant’s Rebellion
Things in London were bad. As Dan Jones writes, quote,
In short, Richard may as well have handed a blank charter to the rebels, upon which they could write his approval for any act they chose. Murders became executions. Assaults became punishments. Treachery became justice… With the spectacular failure - both in concept and in execution - of their strategy to defuse the revolt, Richard and his court were now so paralysed by fear that it was all they could do just to watch the bloody heads of [his ministers] bob past on lances.

End quote.

And this is just what was going down in London - elsewhere, English peasants and laborers who had heard the news of what happened were rebelling as well. The country was in chaos. What would happen to the rule of law? To the government? The people, in this moment, had power over the nobility who had ruled and controlled them for generations. 

But we know that the monarchy survives - Richard would rule until he was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s son, in 1399, right? So how did the Peasant’s Rebellion end with the country still intact?

Rumors were running rampant. There was one that Wat Tyler was going to set London completely on fire. Another that the King was going to be taken hostage. Another that John Ball would become England’s one and only Bishop. Another that the Church was going to be abolished. And in addition to these rumors, Wat Tyler was no longer willing to negotiate to stop the rebellion. So Richard did what he had to, based on the advice of whatever council was still alive - he drew as many rebels as he could outside the city walls to Smithfield with the promise of another meeting and compromise, but this time, he was prepared to do more if he had to.

At Smithfield, the King came face to face with the rebel leader, Wat Tyler. But when Tyler approached to give his list of demands, it was significantly less… let’s say, realistic? He spouted ideas about abolishing the lords altogether, destroying the Church hierarchy and just having one bishop for all of England (presumably, John Ball), and essentially the very forward-thinking idea that everyone should be at the same social level and afforded the same amount of land and status. Pretty advanced stuff for 1381.

The King was generally dismissive of these really out-there requests, but was still trying to appease Wat Tyler to get him to disperse. It wasn’t the response Tyler was looking for - the momentum of the last few days had him thinking that *he* could be the one to abolish serfdom and lordship completely. The two purportedly stared at each other, waiting for the other to make a move. Wat Tyler broke first - he drank some water to cool his thirst, spat it out in front of the King, and turned his back on Richard to mount his horse - all very disrespectful actions. Jones explains it well:
The power he had wielded for the last week had totally consumed him, and the way he acted towards Richard suggests that he truly believed that before long the whole realm would bend to his will as king of the commons. Tiring of the negotiations, and having shown his contempt for his opponents with his deliberate show of bad manners, he made as if to leave.

End quote.

Someone in Richard’s retinue yelled out that Wat Tyler was nothing but a thief, and Tyler lost his cool - he grabbed for his dagger and threatened death on whoever spoke. And this was the moment the King’s men were waiting for. William Walworth, the Mayor of London, rode out to Wat Tyler and placed him under arrest for his behavior in front of the King. As Walworth went to grab Tyler, Tyler thrust his dagger at the mayor, but didn't do any damage. Walworth retaliated and stabbed Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasant’s Rebellion, through the neck. He withdrew the dagger and stabbed again in the head as more of the King’s men closed in, their swords drawn, running through the leader of the rebellion. 

And this is where King Richard finally displayed the bravery that a Medieval King needs to have to rule - he rode past a dying Wat Tyler, who had fallen off his horse in a bloody spectacle, and went right up to the rebels across the field. He commanded them, as their King, to leave Smithfield and follow him to Clerkenwell Fields, a more open space. Spellbound, and probably very confused about what just happened to their leader, they followed.

The King’s counselors rode back to London, going ward to ward, amassing an army of loyal London citizens to help break the rebels and save their city. But Walworth returned to find Wat Tyler, to end him once and for all. The rebels wouldn’t stop if their leader was still alive. Walworth didn’t find him in the field where he left him - he was taken to a nearby hospital. So Walworth drags the almost-dead, bleeding Wat Tyler back out to the field, props him up, and beheads him in front of whoever was still around to watch. Very befitting, I suppose, considering how many beheaded men Wat Tyler was ultimately responsible for.

Mayor Walworth joined the King at Clerkenwell Fields, clutching the head of Wat Tyler. This was enough to turn the tides - the rebels fell to their knees, asking for forgiveness and to go home. Richard agreed, and the London siege was over. The King knighted the Mayor of London right then and there, now Sir William Walworth, as the rebels retreated the way they came.

But it wasn’t completely over, as other leaders were still alive - including John Ball, who was now on the run. And I’m simplifying things a lot here, because the story wouldn’t end if I didn’t, but John Ball was eventually captured in Coventry as he tried to escape and run to the north - to York. He was sent to St. Albans, where the King was staying because of a minor plague outbreak in the city. And it was here that John Ball was held accountable for twenty years of inciting the people, then inciting the Peasant’s Rebellion, and for encouraging the common folk to storm the Tower and kill the men inside, including the Archbiship of Canterbury. For his crimes against the Crown and English rule of law, he was hanged, beheaded, disemboweled, and quartered. And like with other infamous English enemies - I’m thinking about the Scottish William Wallace here, who was executed at the *beginning* of the 14th century - John Ball’s now-quartered body was carted off to four different parts of the country as a warning not to cross the Crown.

Now of course there would be more work to be done, a city to be restored, and smaller rebellions and unrest to quell throughout the country. And Richard saw to it, establishing himself as a proper Plantagenet King. He was brutal, authorizing beheadings for those who continued to rebel against him. And many more rebels died in the aftermath.

John of Gaunt survived the whole ordeal, as he was away in Scotland for the worst of it.

The Peasant’s Rebellion, often relegated to a sentence or not taught at all in our American public schools, was an incredible moment in English history where the common people, angered at the unstable political climate and worsening, unfair economic policies of the nobility, rose up, stormed the capitol city, partially burned it to the ground, and almost destroyed the monarchy. Had they wanted to kill the King, they could have - they were physically so close to him that it could have happened. But in the end, their leader, swept up by the madness and momentum of bloodthirstiness and power, lost sight of the goal - to protest the unfairness of Edward III’s disastrous Statute of Laborers and fight for more rights for the common folk of England, all a response to the damage done by the Black Death. And to protest the damaging poll taxes. And because he lost sight of this, he was killed, and the Rebellion was over.

But at least, when Parliament met later that fall, they realized that the poll tax was not a great idea - it was the final straw that led to the rebellion, after all. So they sought funding a different way, and not through increased taxes on the commoners of England. And the next time the English did try to do this again was in the late 15th century under Tudor King Henry VII, who tried to raise money for a war against the Scots… and it was met once again with a rebellion - the 1497 Cornish Rebellion. 

But as Dan Jones summarizes, Wat Tyler, John Ball, and the Peasant’s Rebellion, besides being an excellent story that has survived and been retold in literature for generations, shows that the English common people were a political entity. They cared about bad leadership, about foreign policy and raising money for wars abroad, and about the state of their country. They fought against purported “traitors” to save their King and country, and in the process, fight against the laws that stangled them. It was more than just angry peasants expressing their rage - they represent a political consciousness and a changing population - gone were the days of passive peasantry living in a feudal world ruled by nobility. And as a result of the Peasant’s Rebellion, England was forever changed. And not long after, King Richard II would end up deposed, replaced by the Lancaster branch of the Plantagenet family, who would later go on to lose to the Tudors during the War of the Roses at the Battle of Bosworth Field. 

Like the Black Death, the 1381 Peasant’s Rebellion showcased a changing 14th century, and soon, England would transition into the early modern period. And the beginning of their imperial hegemony.

Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the 1381 English Peasant’s Rebellion. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!

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Sources
Books:

• Dan Jones, Summer of Blood (2009)
• Elizabeth Kimball Kendall, Source-book of English History (2015)
• Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death Medieval Sourcebook (1994)

Articles/Online Sources:

• “Ordinance of Laborers, 1349” Fordham University Medieval History Sourcebook https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/seth/ordinance-labourers.asp
• “Tales from Froissart: Beginning of the English Peasant Revolt” Nipissing University https://uts.nipissingu.ca/muhlberger/FROISSART/PEASANTS.HTM