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.
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.
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.
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.
