The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt: The Complete Story of England’s Great Rising
In the second week of June 1381, the greatest city in England threw open its gates to an army of farmers, thatchers, tilers and village priests. They carried scythes and rusted longbows, not the banners of any lord. Within three days they had burned a royal duke’s palace to its foundations, dragged the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Tower of London and struck off his head, and forced a fourteen-year-old king to ride out and bargain with them face to face. For one extraordinary week, the poorest people in the realm held the kingdom by the throat — and very nearly changed it forever.
This is the complete story of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381: how it began, who led it, what they demanded, and why — six centuries later — we still argue about whether they lost or won. It is also the true history behind Paul Greengrass’s 2026 film The Uprising. Consider this your map to the whole rising; the linked chapters below follow each thread in depth.
The world that made a revolt: plague, wages, and simmering rage
To understand 1381, you have to begin with the dead. A generation earlier, the Black Death had swept through England, killing perhaps a third to a half of the population in a matter of months. The catastrophe was total — but for the survivors, it quietly rewrote the rules. With so few hands left to work the land, labour suddenly became precious. Peasants who had been bound to a manor for life discovered they could demand higher wages, or simply walk to a village that would pay them better.
The ruling class recoiled. In 1351 Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers, freezing wages at pre-plague levels and making it a crime to ask for more or to leave your lord’s service. For thirty years the law pressed down on a people who could feel their own worth rising. It was a grievance with a long fuse — and it was burning toward something.
The spark: the poll tax of 1381
The match was money. England’s endless, ruinous war with France had drained the treasury, and the king’s council reached for the crudest possible remedy: a poll tax — a flat charge on every head. Levied three times between 1377 and 1381, the tax grew more brutal each time. The third, demanded in the winter of 1380–81, asked a shilling from nearly everyone over fifteen, rich and poor alike. A duke paid the same as a ploughman.
The country simply refused. Tax rolls show whole villages vanishing from the record as people hid from the collectors. When commissioners were sent to hunt down the evaders, they lit the fire they were trying to stamp out. At Fobbing in Essex at the end of May 1381, villagers drove off the king’s official John Bampton; when soldiers came to punish them, Essex rose — and Kent rose with it.
The preacher and the tiler
Every rising needs a voice and a sword. The Revolt found both. From a Kentish prison the rebels freed John Ball, a wandering radical priest who had spent years preaching a message the Church had banned him for: that God had made all people equal, and that lords and serfs were a human invention, not a divine order. His most famous line still rings like a struck bell — “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”
And at the head of the Kentish host rode a man of whom history knows almost nothing before June 1381 and nothing at all after it: Wat Tyler. In a matter of days he welded tens of thousands of furious, frightened villagers into something resembling an army — disciplined enough to march on the capital with a clear set of demands. Who he really was remains one of the great mysteries of English history.
The march on London and the burning of the Savoy
By 12 June the rebels of Kent and Essex were camped outside London. They were not a mindless mob; the chroniclers record that they let no one plunder for themselves, executed thieves among their own ranks, and insisted they were loyal to King Richard — it was his “traitorous” advisers they had come for. On 13 June, with the city’s poor throwing open the gates from within, they poured across London Bridge.
Their fury had a target. They marched on the Savoy Palace, the fabulously rich riverside home of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster — the king’s uncle and, to the commons, the architect of every wrong. They did not loot it; they destroyed it. Tapestries were hacked apart, jewels ground to dust, the whole palace put to the torch. They burned the legal records of the realm wherever they found them, and threw open the prisons. This was not theft. It was a verdict.
Mile End and the king’s promise
On 14 June, the boy king did something astonishing: he rode out to meet them. At Mile End, the fourteen-year-old Richard II faced the rebels in person and granted almost everything they asked — the abolition of serfdom, cheap fixed rents for land, free right to trade, and a pardon for all. Clerks were set to writing charters of freedom on the spot.
But while the king made promises at Mile End, another band of rebels stormed the Tower of London itself. They seized Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, and Robert Hales, the Treasurer — the two men whose names were on the hated tax — dragged them to Tower Hill, and beheaded them before a roaring crowd. The rebels had the king’s word in their hands and the Chancellor’s head on a pike. The rising had reached its knife-edge.
Blood at Smithfield
The story turned on a single afternoon. On 15 June, Richard met the rebels again, this time at Smithfield just outside the walls. Wat Tyler rode forward to speak for them, and his demands had grown radical beyond anything yet spoken aloud in England: an end to lordship altogether, the wealth of the Church divided among the common people, all men equal below the king.
What happened next was chaos. An argument flared; William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, drew his blade and struck Tyler down in front of both armies. For a heartbeat the rebel host bent their bows, and the day balanced on the edge of a massacre. Then the fourteen-year-old king spurred his horse forward, alone, and called out to the crowd that he would be their leader — “I am your captain, follow me.” Astonishingly, they did. He led them away from the body of their fallen commander, and the moment for revolution passed.
The reckoning: broken promises and bloody reprisals
With Tyler dead and the crowds dispersed, the Crown’s fear curdled into vengeance. Every charter of freedom signed at Mile End was revoked. When men of Essex came to hold the king to his word, Richard’s answer became infamous: “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.” Judges rode into the rebel counties, and the gallows did the rest. John Ball was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Albans on 15 July 1381. Across the country perhaps 1,500 rebels were killed or executed. On paper, the Revolt had failed utterly.
Did the Peasants’ Revolt fail?
And yet. The hated poll tax was quietly never levied again in that form for generations. No government dared squeeze the commons so crudely a second time. Serfdom itself — the thing the rebels had marched to destroy — withered away across the next hundred years, undone by the same iron economics of labour scarcity that had lit the spark. And John Ball’s simple, dangerous question, who was then the gentleman?, never quite went silent again. It echoes through every later English movement for fairness and rights.
The men and women of 1381 lost their rebellion and won their argument. That is the paradox at the heart of the Peasants’ Revolt, and the reason it still matters.
The story on screen: The Uprising (2026)
In September 2026, Paul Greengrass brings this week of fire to the screen in The Uprising, with Andrew Garfield and Jamie Bell leading the cast. If the trailer has brought you here to sort fact from film, start there — and then follow the threads below into the real history the movie is built on.
Explore the full story — the complete series
Each chapter of the rising, told in depth. Published chapters are linked; the rest are rolling out through the series.
- Wat Tyler: the rebel leader who nearly toppled a king
- John Ball and “When Adam delved and Eve span”: the priest who preached equality
- The true history behind Greengrass’s The Uprising (2026)
- Richard II at 14: the boy king who faced down the revolt
- The poll tax of 1381: the tax that sparked a rebellion
- How the Black Death set the stage for the revolt
- The Statute of Labourers: the wage caps that fuelled a revolt
- The burning of the Savoy Palace: the rebels’ fury against John of Gaunt
- The march on London: how the rebels seized the capital
- Mile End and the rebels’ demands: the end of serfdom promised
- Smithfield: the confrontation where Wat Tyler was killed
- Jack Straw: the shadowy second leader of the revolt
- Simon Sudbury: the archbishop the rebels beheaded on Tower Hill
- The aftermath: Richard II’s broken promises and the reprisals
- Did the Peasants’ Revolt fail? Its real legacy for England
The summer of 1381 lasted barely a fortnight, and its heroes vanished as suddenly as they came. But for a few days, ordinary people looked at the whole order of their world and decided it did not have to be that way. Six hundred years on, that is still the most dangerous idea of all.
Sources & further reading:
Related Reading
- ‘The Uprising’ (2026): The True History Behind Paul Greengrass’s Peasants’ Revolt Film
- How the Black Death Set the Stage for the Peasants’ Revolt
- Did the Peasants’ Revolt Fail? Its Real Legacy for English History