By every obvious measure the 1381 rising was crushed. Yet its poll tax was never levied again, serfdom quietly died within a century, and its slogans echoed down to the riots that helped topple Margaret Thatcher. Did the Peasants’ Revolt really fail?
At Smithfield the boy-king promised the rebels everything — freedom, pardons, an end to serfdom, all set down in royal charters. Within weeks he tore the charters up, rode into Essex with an army, and told the survivors to their faces: ‘Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.’ This is what happened after the Peasants’ Revolt collapsed.
As Archbishop of Canterbury and the King’s Chancellor, Simon Sudbury put his name to the tax that lit the fuse of 1381. On the morning the rebels stormed the Tower, they dragged him out to Tower Hill — and it took eight blows of the axe to kill him. His skull still survives in Suffolk today.
He is named in the same breath as Wat Tyler and John Ball, yet no one is certain Jack Straw ever existed. The strange story of the Peasants’ Revolt’s most elusive leader — a man who may be a rebel captain, an alias, or a monk’s invention.
On 15 June 1381 the boy king Richard II met the rebel captain Wat Tyler for the last time, in the open ground at Smithfield outside London’s walls. Within minutes Tyler lay dying on the cobbles, cut down by the Lord Mayor before thousands of armed rebels — and a fourteen-year-old king rode alone into the crowd to save the day. It is the most astonishing scene of the whole Peasants’ Revolt.
On 14 June 1381 the boy king Richard II rode out from the Tower to meet the rebels at Mile End, and there — in a field east of the city walls — he granted the unthinkable: the abolition of serfdom across England. Thirty clerks sat writing charters of freedom while the crowd cheered. It was the high-water mark of the Peasants’ Revolt, and it lasted barely a fortnight.
In the second week of June 1381, two rebel armies out of Kent and Essex converged on London — tens of thousands of ploughmen, tilers and village priests. Within two days they had crossed London Bridge, thrown open the gates, and taken the greatest city in England almost without a fight. This is how they did it.
On 13 June 1381 the rebels of Kent and Essex reached the Strand and set fire to the Savoy, the grandest private house in England and the home of the most hated man in the realm — John of Gaunt. What they did there, and how carefully they refused to steal a single thing, tells you everything about what the Peasants’ Revolt really was.
After the Black Death made workers scarce and wages soar, England’s rulers tried to freeze the economy by law. The Statute of Labourers capped pay at pre-plague levels, criminalised the poor for asking for more, and spent thirty years grinding down a peasantry that never forgot it — until 1381.
A generation before the peasants marched on London, a plague killed nearly half of England — and in the empty fields it left behind, the survivors discovered a terrible new kind of power. This is how the Black Death made the Peasants’ Revolt possible.
