Three taxes in four years
Medieval English taxes were normally based on property. Parliament would grant the king a fraction, often a tenth or fifteenth, of movable goods, collected village by village. The poll tax was different. It was a tax on each person, and it was tried three times in a short period, in 1377, 1379 and 1380, to pay for the Hundred Years War, which was going badly at the time.
The arithmetic matters, because the amounts rose each time. Twelve pence made a shilling, and a groat was four pence.
| Year | Basic rule |
|---|---|
| 1377 | One groat (4 pence) from each lay person over a certain age, commonly given as 14 |
| 1379 | A graded tax, with payments set according to rank and wealth |
| 1380 | Three groats (12 pence, or one shilling) from each person over about 15 |
Those who had little money might have found even the first of these painful. Wages for laborers were a few pence a day at that time, though they varied by region and trade. Under the 1380 rate, a household of two adults would owe two shillings, or 24 pence, which might equal a week or more of a laborer’s earnings. These are rough comparisons, not precise figures.
Why the 1380 tax went badly
The 1380 grant was meant to be fairer, at least on paper. The assessors in each village were told that wealthier households should pay more than the flat rate and the poorest less, so that the average came to three groats. That was a sensible idea, but it left the way open for disputes about who was rich enough to pay more and who could be let off.
The result was widespread evasion. When the returns came in, the number of taxpayers recorded in many places was far lower than the numbers in the 1377 lists, even though the population could not have dropped that much. People hid, were not listed, or were recorded as living elsewhere. Girls and young women often went missing from the lists. The crown received far less than it expected. In early 1381 the government appointed new commissioners to check the returns and collect more, and this renewed pressure was the trigger for the violence at Fobbing in Essex and elsewhere in late May.
Taxes and a wider grievance
It would be a mistake to treat the poll tax as the whole story. The tax landed on top of existing complaints. After the Black Death a persistent labor shortage had pushed up wages, and royal laws had tried to cap pay and force workers to take jobs at old rates. At the same time, landlords were enforcing dues on unfree tenants. And the long reign of Edward III had ended in 1377 with the war unsuccessful and the royal administration widely suspected of corruption, with John of Gaunt as an unpopular figure.
For that reason many historians see the poll tax as the spark rather than the cause. People who joined the rising had specific local complaints about lords, courts and officials as well as the new levy.
The immediate aftermath
When the rising collapsed in June and July, the response was fierce. Special courts toured Essex, Kent and other counties, and a number of leaders were executed. The promises made at Mile End were canceled. In the fall, Parliament, which was made up of nobles and wealthier townspeople and knights of the shire, declined to abolish serfdom and supported the harsh treatment of the rebels. The poll tax did not return in that form for a long time, since the government had learned that it was politically dangerous.
Did it change labor conditions?
Historians continue to disagree about this question. Two broad answers are given.
One is that the revolt itself changed little. The government had defeated it, the lords were still strong, and the law still tried to hold wages down. According to this view, the economic changes that came in the following decades were driven by the underlying shortage of workers, which was a result of repeated plague outbreaks and a smaller population. Landlords who could not find tenants or hired workers on their old terms had to offer money rents and higher pay, or lose them to other estates.
The other answer is that the revolt had some effect on attitudes. Landlords seem to have become more cautious about pressing for labor services, and the crown became more careful about taxes that fell on everyone. Some historians suggest that fear of another rising made it harder for lords to force old conditions on tenants. But it is difficult to separate this from the effects of the economy itself, and direct evidence is limited.
What is clear is that the long-term trend was toward the decline of serfdom. By the later fifteenth century, personal unfreedom had become rare in much of England, though it did not vanish entirely and survived on some manors into the sixteenth century. The shift from labor service to rents, and from rents to leases, had been going on well before 1381 and continued after it.
A fair verdict
Calling 1381 a turning point is partly true and partly an exaggeration. It was a turning point in what it showed about how far taxation could go before provoking resistance, and in the memory it left among both rulers and ordinary people. But the revolt did not end serfdom or raise wages by force. Those changes came more slowly, mainly through shifts in supply and demand for labor. The rebels lost the immediate fight, and the world that followed was changed less by their victory or defeat than by the long effects of plague and population loss.