A rising in a few weeks
The great English rising of 1381 was one of the largest popular revolts in medieval England, and most of it took place within a few weeks in late May, June and early July. It began in the southeast, spread north into East Anglia and beyond, and briefly put the capital, the royal Tower and the young king himself at the mercy of rebels. It was not a revolt of the destitute alone. Many participants were reasonably well-off villagers, craftsmen and local officeholders, and some clergy joined them.
Our sources are mostly chroniclers who disliked the rebels, along with court records from the trials afterward. Details and numbers therefore vary, and what follows sticks to the outline that most historians accept.
The background
England had been at war with France for decades, and the Hundred Years War was expensive. By the late 1370s the crown was short of money, the war was going badly, and the king, Richard II, was a boy of about fourteen. Government was in the hands of a council, with the king’s uncle John of Gaunt widely seen as the most powerful figure and widely resented.
Behind this lay the long aftermath of the Black Death. After the plague of 1348-49, a labor shortage let many workers demand higher pay and better terms. Parliament and the crown answered with laws trying to hold wages down, and landlords sometimes tried to enforce old labor duties on unfree peasants. Neither side was satisfied, and tension in the villages was high.
The spark in Essex
The immediate trigger was taxation. A new levy in 1380 was set at a flat rate per adult, and many people evaded it. In spring 1381 the crown sent out commissioners to find the missing taxpayers and collect more. In late May, resistance flared in Essex villages around Brentwood and Fobbing. Officials were driven off, and the trouble spread quickly to neighboring areas.
Kent and the march to London
In Kent the rising gathered pace in early June. Rebels took Rochester Castle, then moved to Canterbury, where many townspeople were sympathetic and the archbishop’s property was a target. At Maidstone they freed John Ball, a priest who had been imprisoned for radical preaching, and chose Wat Tyler as a leader. Their targets were mostly officials, lawyers and records, especially documents that recorded legal obligations and debts. Large-scale killing of ordinary people was not their aim, although individual officials were murdered.
By about 12 June the Kentish rebels were at Blackheath, south of London, and the Essex rebels were approaching from the other side. The king, who had been at the Tower, was asked to meet them but the meeting did not happen. On 13 June, the rebels entered London, helped by sympathizers inside the city who let them across the bridge and through the gates.
London in June 1381
Over the next two days the rebels attacked symbols of the government. They broke open prisons and burned John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, destroying its contents. They also targeted lawyers and foreigners, with Flemish residents among the victims. Many rebels were disciplined enough to avoid plunder, and some accounts say looting was punished.
On 14 June Richard rode out to meet the Essex rebels at Mile End. He agreed to their requests, including the end of serfdom, and clerks began drawing up charters. Meanwhile other rebels entered the Tower, which had been left poorly defended, and seized and beheaded Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor, and Robert Hales, the treasurer. Both were blamed for the poll tax and for the way the government was run.
Smithfield
On 15 June the king met the rebels again at Smithfield, just outside the city walls. Tyler spoke with him at close quarters, and an altercation broke out with royal attendants. The Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck Tyler down, and Tyler was killed soon afterward. The rebels were left in a tense standoff. The king reportedly rode forward and told them to follow him, and the crowd was persuaded to move to Clerkenwell Fields while Walworth gathered armed men from the city. The exact words and sequence are known mostly from partisan chronicles. The leaderless crowd then dispersed.
Suppression and aftermath
The government moved fast. The charters promised at Mile End were revoked, and the king is said to have told rebels that they were still villeins and would remain so. Risings in other counties, including Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, were put down, sometimes by armed bishops and nobles. A force of Essex rebels was defeated at Billericay in late June. John Ball was captured and executed in July, and a number of other leaders were tried and hanged.
Parliament met in the fall of 1381 and refused to abolish serfdom by statute, saying that this would need the agreement of the lords. The poll tax was not tried again in that form. Over the following century, serfdom in England continued to fade, but that happened chiefly because of economic pressures, as landlords found it more practical to take rents than to enforce labor service. Historians debate how much the revolt itself contributed.
Why it still matters
The revolt showed that ordinary English people could organize across counties and that they had definite political ideas about taxation, law and lordship. It also left the ruling class wary of new taxes on the population at large. Even so, the rebels did not achieve their stated aims, and the crown’s reprisals were severe. For many people in the villages the practical outcome was a return to the earlier situation, followed by slow change driven by the continued shortage of labor.