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.
On a stormy August morning in 1944, an American bomber fell out of the sky onto a Lancashire village school. In seconds, Freckleton lost nearly a whole generation of its youngest children — in Britain’s deadliest air accident of the war.
In June 1381 a fourteen-year-old king rode out, twice, to meet an army of rebels who had beheaded his chancellor and held London in their fists. What Richard II did in those two days at Mile End and Smithfield would define — and ultimately undo — the rest of his reign.
The complete story of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt — how plague, poll tax and a preacher’s question brought England’s poor to the gates of London, and why they lost the rebellion but won the argument.
“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” With a single rhyming couplet, a hedge-priest from Kent asked the most dangerous question in medieval England — and thousands of rebels marching on London in June 1381 answered him.
In 1324 the ruler of Mali crossed the Sahara for Mecca with a caravan so laden with gold that the metal he gave away and spent in Cairo stayed cheap for a decade. It is the most extravagant journey in recorded history – and it put West Africa on the map of the world.
For a single fortnight in June 1381, a man of whom history knows almost nothing led England’s poor to the gates of London, faced down a king twice, and came within a heartbeat of overturning the medieval order. Then, at Smithfield, Wat Tyler was cut down in front of his own army.
Paul Greengrass’s ‘The Uprising’ brings the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt to cinemas on 11 September 2026. Behind the film lies a true story of plague, an unjust tax, a preacher’s dream of equality, and a 14-year-old king who lied to a rebel army — and won.
In December 1900, a relief crew reached a remote Scottish lighthouse and found the lamp cold and the three keepers gone. No bodies, no boat, no cry for help — only a stopped clock and an unfinished story the sea has never given back.
