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.
Before dawn on 21 February 1917, a troopship carrying more than 800 Black South African labourers was rammed and sunk in the icy English Channel. As she went under, a chaplain told the doomed men to meet death as brothers — and they are said to have danced. Then their country spent seventy years pretending it never happened.
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 Whit Monday in 1828 a strange teenage boy stumbled into a Nuremberg square, barely able to speak, clutching a letter and a story of a lifetime spent alone in a dark cell. Was he a lost prince, a clever fraud, or something no one has ever explained? Five years later he was dead, and the riddle only deepened.
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.
On a cold January morning in 1848, a carpenter saw a few bright flakes glinting in a millrace and unwittingly triggered the largest gold rush in history. It made a state rich and a nation restless. It left the man who found it, and the man who owned the land, to die with nothing.
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.
In four years the English Crown demanded three poll taxes to pay for a failing war. The third — a flat shilling a head — was the spark that lit the greatest popular rising in medieval England. This is how a tax broke a kingdom’s patience.
