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.
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.
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.
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.
