About the date
No English peasants’ revolt took place in 1328. The well-known English rising came in 1381. The year 1328 does appear in rural history, since it saw the defeat of the Flemish uprising in Flanders, but that is a separate episode.
A better way to treat the title is as a question: how often, and why, did country people in medieval Europe rise in arms? The answer is that it happened repeatedly, in many regions, from the early Middle Ages to the very end. This overview looks at the pattern and a few well-known cases.
Rural risings across the centuries
A short list of episodes, with dates given as accurately as the sources allow:
- The Stellinga, Saxony, 840s. Lower-ranking people in Saxony rose during a civil war among the grandsons of Charlemagne, and were put down.
- The Stedinger, northern Germany, 1230s. Free farmers on the lower Weser resisted the claims of the Archbishop of Bremen. They were declared heretics and a crusade was preached against them. They were defeated in 1234.
- Maritime Flanders, 1323-1328. A rising against the count and his officials, ending with defeat at Cassel.
- The Jacquerie, France, 1358. Discussed below.
- England, 1381. The largest English rising, covering Essex, Kent and other counties.
- The Tuchins, southern France, late fourteenth century. Bands that fought taxes and soldiers in the region of Languedoc and Auvergne.
- Remença peasants, Catalonia, fifteenth century. Unfree farmers fought for release from burdensome obligations, culminating in the abolition of the worst of them near the end of the century.
- Sweden, 1430s. A rebellion led by Engelbrekt, with support from miners and farmers, against the king and his officials.
- Hungary, 1514. A force assembled for a crusade turned against landlords, led by György Dózsa. This falls at the very edge of the medieval period.
The German Peasants’ War of 1524-25 is usually placed in the early Reformation, after the Middle Ages, but it drew on similar grievances.
The Jacquerie of 1358
The French Jacquerie is the best-known rural rising on the continent. Its name comes from “Jacques” or “Jacques Bonhomme,” a mocking name that nobles applied to peasants.
It broke out in late May 1358 in northern France, mainly in the area north of Paris, including the Oise valley and Picardy. The background was grim. In 1356 at the Battle of Poitiers, the French king John II was captured by the English, and many French nobles died or were taken prisoner. The country had to find a large ransom. Meanwhile, defeated and unpaid soldiers roamed the countryside, plundering. Villagers resented being taxed for the war and for fortifications while the nobles who were supposed to protect them had failed, and the crown was in the hands of the king’s young son, the Dauphin, who was dealing with a political crisis in Paris.
The rebels attacked noble houses and castles. Contemporary chroniclers, who were hostile to them, describe horrific violence, and some of those stories may be exaggerated. A leader named Guillaume Karle (or Cale) emerged, and some bands made contact with the Paris leader Étienne Marcel, though the alliance was uneasy. The rising lasted only a few weeks. In June, a force led by nobles, including Charles the Bad of Navarre, defeated the rebels near Mello, and Karle was captured and executed. Reprisals against villages were severe and killed many more people than the rebels had killed, though accurate numbers are unknown.
Shared causes
Most medieval rural risings had a mix of the following causes, with the weight of each differing by case:
- Taxation and war. Governments fighting wars raised taxes, which fell heavily on villages. The Hundred Years War lay behind both the 1358 and 1381 events.
- Lords and unfree status. Where unfree peasants owed labor and dues, as in much of the manorial economy, those duties could become targets, especially if lords tried to tighten them.
- Crisis and change. Harvest failure, famine and later the Black Death changed the balance between lords and tenants. Some lords tried to keep the old system, while villagers saw an opportunity to ask for better terms.
- Soldiers and violence. Where armies and bands of soldiers lived off the land, villagers sometimes took up arms in self-defense, as with the Tuchins.
- Local control. Free farmers, as in Flanders and the Stedinger lands, resisted lords who sought to impose new authority.
What these risings usually achieved
Medieval peasant rebellions rarely reached their stated goals, and they were usually put down by mounted knights and noble armies with brutal reprisals. Yet some had long-term effects. The Remença conflict in Catalonia ended in a legal settlement, and in several regions the memory of rebellion made lords more careful. Fear of a repeat was one reason governments were cautious about taxes.
Another point worth noting is that peasants were not simply poor or ignorant. Many rebels were people with some property, literacy or experience of local government. The picture of an angry, leaderless mob comes largely from chroniclers who were nobles or clergy and who feared what the risings might do to the social order, in which the clergy, nobles and commoners were each supposed to keep to their own place.
A caution on numbers and sources
Most of what we know comes from hostile narrators, and the figures they give for crowds or dead are often very rough. Where this article gives dates, they are well established; where it describes causes, historians continue to debate their relative weight.