Mile End and the Rebels’ Demands: The End of Serfdom Promised

Raymond on August 25, 2026

Ink-wash painting of a young king on horseback facing a vast crowd of commoners in a field outside a walled city

On the morning of 14 June 1381, a fourteen-year-old boy rode out of the Tower of London to keep the most dangerous appointment of his life. Richard II was going to meet a rebel army in a field — not to fight it, but to give it what it asked for. And in a wide open space east of the walls, at a place called Mile End, he did something no English king had done before or would do again: he abolished serfdom with a word, and set his clerks to writing out the freedom of every bondman in the realm.

It was the extraordinary high point of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt — the moment when the demands of ploughmen and tilers became, briefly, the law of the land. To understand how astonishing that morning was, you have to understand what the men kneeling before the boy king had been born into, and how close they had just come to burning his capital down around him.

The Morning the King Rode Out

By 13 June the rebels held London. Two hosts, one out of Kent under Wat Tyler and one out of Essex, had crossed the bridge and poured through the gates in the march on London. They had thrown open the prisons, sacked the lawyers’ quarters, and burned the Savoy Palace, the great riverside house of the king’s uncle John of Gaunt, to blackened stone. The government had bolted itself inside the Tower and watched the fires spread across the city.

Trapped, frightened, and with almost no soldiers to hand, the young king’s council decided the only way out was to talk. A message went to the rebels: the king would meet them in person, the next morning, at Mile End — a broad field on the road out to the east, deliberately chosen to draw the crowds away from the Tower. At dawn on the Feast of Corpus Christi, Richard mounted and rode out through the streets with a small party of nobles, into the middle of a multitude that could have torn him apart in a moment.

Face to Face at Mile End

The scene that met him was unlike anything in the experience of an English monarch. The chroniclers — above all the Anonimalle Chronicle, our fullest and most reliable account — describe a vast press of commoners filling the field, thousands upon thousands of them, who fell to their knees as the boy king approached and called out that they would have no king but Richard. It was a strange, almost tender loyalty from people in open rebellion. As they had done all along, the rebels insisted they had not risen against the king at all. They had risen against the “traitors” around him — and they wanted him to hand those traitors over.

Richard, to his lasting credit as a piece of nerve, rode in among them and asked what it was they wanted. The answer had been forming in the villages of Essex and Kent for a generation, and now, in a field outside London, it was spoken to a king’s face.

The Four Demands

The rebels’ programme, as the chroniclers record it, came down to a handful of clear and radical points — the plainest statement of what the whole rising had been for.

First and above all, the abolition of serfdom. No man was to be a villein — a bondman tied to a lord’s land, owing unpaid labour, unable to move, marry, or sell his own goods without his lord’s leave. Every Englishman was to be free.

Second, that the land those freed men worked should be held at a fixed, fair rent — fourpence an acre — instead of the tangle of servile dues and week-work that bound them to the manor.

Third, the free right to buy and sell in every market and fair across the kingdom, like any free townsman, without the restrictions that hemmed the unfree countryman in.

And fourth, a general pardon for everyone who had taken part in the revolt — no reprisals, no hangings, once the crowds went home.

Set against the world these men lived in, the demands were breathtaking. They were asking, in effect, for the dismantling of the entire manorial system on which medieval England was built.

The Charters of Freedom

And Richard said yes. To all of it.

The king agreed on the spot to abolish villeinage, to grant the fourpenny rent, to open the markets, and to pardon the rebels. More than that, he ordered it put in writing at once. Royal clerks — the chroniclers speak of some thirty of them — were set down in the open air and made to write, hour after hour, individual charters of manumission: letters of freedom, sealed with the king’s seal, granted county by county to the men of each shire. As each sealed charter was handed out, a body of rebels took it as their warrant and began to peel away from the field and start the long walk home, triumphant. They had come for their freedom, and they were carrying it away in their hands, stamped in royal wax.

For a few hours in a field east of London, the poorest people in England had won.

What the End of Serfdom Would Have Meant

It is hard, at six centuries’ distance, to feel the weight of what was promised at Mile End. Serfdom was not a metaphor. A villein could not leave his village without permission. He owed days of unpaid work on his lord’s land at exactly the times he most needed to work his own. He paid to grind his corn at the lord’s mill, paid a fine when his daughter married, and his best beast was taken when he died. His bondage passed to his children.

That whole order had been shaken to its roots in the previous decades. The Black Death had killed perhaps half the population and left the survivors suddenly precious; labour was scarce, and men who could once be commanded now found they could bargain. The panicked response of the ruling class — the Statute of Labourers, which tried to freeze wages and pin workers to their manors — only sharpened the sense of injustice. Preachers like John Ball gave that resentment a language: When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? The final poll tax of 1381 lit the fuse. At Mile End, the men who had lived under all of it heard a king declare it finished.

While the King Talked, the Tower Fell

But even as Richard was granting freedom in the field, the revolt was slipping past anyone’s control. Mile End had drawn the crowds east — yet a hard core of rebels had stayed behind, and while the king was gone they surged into the half-guarded Tower of London itself. They roamed the royal apartments, and dragged out the men they blamed above all others: Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, and Robert Hales, the Treasurer — the very ministers the rebels had demanded as “traitors.” Both were hauled to Tower Hill and beheaded before a roaring crowd. The general pardon Richard had just promised had not even reached the ink before its terms were being drowned in blood.

The day that began with charters of freedom ended with heads on London Bridge. Mile End had given the rebels everything they asked for on paper, and settled nothing. The reckoning would come the next day, at another field on the city’s edge — Smithfield — where the king and Wat Tyler would meet a final time.

A Promise Written in Wax

The charters of Mile End were never worth the parchment they were sealed on. Within weeks, with the rebels dispersed and royal power restored, Richard II stood before a delegation of Essex men who had come to hold him to his word and gave his answer plainly: “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.” Parliament formally revoked every charter of manumission. The men who had walked home clutching their freedom found it had evaporated in the king’s hand.

And yet Mile End matters far beyond the fortnight it survived. For one astonishing morning, the demand that no Englishman should be a bondman was not a sermon or a dream but a royal grant, written down and sealed. Serfdom in England was not abolished that day — but it was never quite secure again, and over the following century it withered quietly away until villeinage was, in practice, gone. The boy king who met the rebels at Mile End is the same one whose broken word would haunt the story ever after, and whose reign the new Paul Greengrass film ‘The Uprising’ brings back to the screen. What happened in that field was a glimpse — brief, brilliant, and betrayed — of a freedom that England would not fully grant its poorest people for centuries to come.

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