Dan Snow's History Hit - The Peasants' Revolt

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

In 1381 England was rocked by one of the most widespread popular uprisings of the medieval period; the Peasants' Revolt. Beginning in Essex in response to the overreaching demands of a local government official but unrest spread like wildfire across the south of England. Soon the rebels faced down the King, stormed the Tower of London, executed royal advisors, threatened the royal family and destroyed John of Gaunt's Palace. This was an uprising unprecedented in its scale and ferocity in England and its effects were felt for many years afterwards. Today's podcast guests Adrian Bell and Helen Lacey who are part of The People of 1381 Project made up of a group of academics and historians taking a fresh look at the evidence surrounding the Peasants' Revolt. They take Dan through the revolt and the demands of the rebels and what new discoveries they have made about where it was happening and who was involved.  

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. In 1381, England was shaken by one of the most widespread significant popular uprisings of the medieval period. It's known as the Peasants' Revolt. It began in Essex in response to the grasping demands of a government that was out of touch. A clumsy, tyrannical local official lit the spark that ignited into, well, a revolution I guess. It is a subject that has always fascinated me. And there's a new team on the case, a new outfit in town. They're called the People of 1381, a group of academics, historians, who look at as much evidence as they can get their hands on as to who were the people that took part in the Peasants' Revolt?

Where was it happening? And the answer is, it was a lot bigger, a lot more widespread geographically and socially than we knew before. This was a peasant's revolt where they faced down the king in East London. They stormed the Tower of London, the impregnable bastion built inside the Roman fortifications of London by the Norman kings of England to keep their biggest and most valuable city quiet and pacified. It was stormed. The only time it's ever fallen in history was during the Peasants' Revolt. They harassed the royal family, executed a few royal counsellors, and generally tore around the place having a good time. John of Gaunt's palace, the Savoy Palace, was completely demolished. The king's uncle was obviously particularly unpopular.

People have been talking about the mid-14th century a lot recently because of its resonance, the Black Death, which precedes the Peasants' Revolt by a generation. But of course, the effects were still very much being felt. And there's an important contributory factor means that we're now in an era of other pandemics fascinated by what is coming next, what societal change will happen as a result of what we've been through. Well, perhaps this project and this pod and this new research will help us think about that a little bit. So I talked to a couple members of this team, the 1381 team, Adrian Bell from the University of Reading and Helen Lacey of the University of Oxford. It's great to have Adrian and Helen on. Please go to history.tv. It's the world's best history channel. You can get all these pods on there ad-free,

and you can get all sorts of amazing documentaries on there as well, hundreds of hours documentaries. Just go to historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, here is Adrian and Helen. Enjoy. Adrian and Helen, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Hi there. Thank you.

We're all talking about the Black Death again this year, aren't we? The 14th century. I can't tell you. It's like whack-a-mole. Someone says the Black Death led to the Renaissance and then historians explode all over the place. What do you guys think? The Black Death of the mid-14th century.

We do get this giant so-called Peasants' Revolt a generation or so later are the two linked yeah clearly we've been asked about that and the project thought about it and we even wrote an article about it just to get on the bandwagon and get some publicity for the project but clearly the things are a very long way apart but people do argue that the black death is one of the reasons the peasant revolt breaks out it's not the immediate reason for it but perhaps the social and economic developments that happen since the black Death are some of the reasons that have brought people to the point where they're willing to revolt. It's a huge impact

on society. A third to half of people dying across the country would have had a massive impact at that time. Now, nevertheless, armies from England kept going to France. The war with France continues at the same levels of soldiers. They're still active. And leading up to this point is all about finance. How do we finance these wars with France? And because of the problems that we've had since the Black Death, they're having problems raising funds.

And then you go and develop the poll tax. And I don't know, Helen, if you want to take on from there a little bit. The only thing I'd add is that in the aftermath of the Black Death, you see these changes to feudal structures and the slow decline of serfdom. And I think that links to the Peasants' Revolt in the sense that some of the key demands of the rebels are for the abolition of serfdom. And even when they themselves aren't under that manorial system, they sort of speak for their contemporaries by saying that they want to abolish all serfdom. So there does seem to be that link between the changes that had been initiated mid-century by the Black Death that by 1381 were brewing into some of the demands of the rebels. And if we could just quickly pick that

up before we move on and not wishing to cause anyone a major headache, can you just quickly define serfdom and the manorial system there? And is it a case that some of the peasants got a little bit of a taste of freedom and they wanted to push for more there? Yeah, so one of the arguments is that it's this frustrated ambitions of those lower down the social scale after the Black Death that build into this resentment. So Black Death, huge population decline. Then the argument goes people who are left have the ambition then

to buy up vacant land, to farm it for themselves perhaps produce a small surplus for a cash income that kind of thing so that they can see the route towards social progress if you like but that that is frustrated by those in control the lords parliament who are going to enact laws and legislation to keep people in their social place so they pass things like the sumptuary laws, which is aimed at what people wear. So they don't want people to wear clothes that would befit a higher station. And they also pass the labour legislation, which is targeted at the very wage in people's pockets, how much someone will earn for a day's labour, for instance.

And that's really kind of trying to micromanage the economy in a way that had never been seen prior to the Black Death. So it's that kind of glimpse to micromanage the economy in a way that had never been seen prior to the Black Death. So it's that kind of glimpse of a better future, but then frustrated by those in power. Generally, then, let's come on to the Great Uprising. It's funny, so many English and British stories we're sort of encouraged to study and learn about as kids. And then you realise actually they're sort of slightly insignificant, the kind of European and global stage as we get older and older this is the opposite this is a major deal it's almost the most significant popular uprising in europe in this period yeah it follows a similar uprising in france called the jacquerie which has similar peasantry involved in it but this one in england

is hugely significant you're not going to get another rebellion like this at all, you know, since this is the one where the rising is not just London base, as we've been showing. It's right across the country up to as far north as Scarborough, down into Somerset. The rebels are hugely successful to begin with. They're taking the Tower of London, they're executing the treasurer and the chancellor. These sort of things you couldn't imagine in any other aspect of revolt in England. It's hugely significant. And that's why I think lots of people, lots of historians have taken it on in terms of trying to put great significance into it in terms of a proto-Marxist type revolt, because of the things that are demanded. An end to serfdom, which we mentioned earlier, which was like you're tied to the land, you're not allowed to leave, you're not allowed to work somewhere else. And these bonds have already been broken in England. So the idea of serfdom is a bit, people debate whether it is there or isn't there at the time.

And so it's amazing that this thing goes on and it's so many people involved in it. And a lot of these people were shown we know by their name. I'm getting ahead of myself because I want to talk about how it starts. But when you mention it from Scarborough down through Essex and Southeast England famously, how did they organise? Like these people did not have access to, I mean, obviously the internet, but even early modern forms of communication,

reading, printing. How did this become a, well, is it an accurate, is it called a national movement? Yes, I think we could call this national in the sense of how widespread the revolt is. It goes from Somerset, Bridgewater in the southwest right through to the northeast, York, Beverley, Scarborough and I think it fuses national issues such as the

poll tax, how the war is going with local issues that are very particular to localities and in terms of organisation what we're finding with our research is that you see small groups of leaders who are really quite mobile, travelling swiftly by horseback to different settlements and spreading the news of the revolt. And these people might have military experience themselves. We're finding soldiers associated with the revolt. We also see some mysterious notes turning up in the pockets of rebels who'd been hanged for their involvement in the rebellion. And these notes, they're sort of heavily coded English that are then appearing in the pockets of the rebels and then copied into the Chronicle record that we have. So they're

quite mysterious notes. And we can see that this news travels really quite fast to an extent. So to take one example, we see the execution of one of the leaders, John Ball, happening in St Albans. And then the next day, that news of his execution is being relayed to people in a tavern in Cambridge by a man who's then arrested for spreading gossip. Another point is that they choose well-known dates in the calendar to coordinate their move. So the rebels from Kent and Essex moved to London on Corpus Christi Day, which is a day they would have known. It's a feast day where they would usually have had time off work. So they coordinate their move to London in that sort of church festival calendar.

And also in terms of travel, the other thing we know is that river systems, coastal routes are also important. So the rebels in Kent and Essex are using small tributary river systems that are tributaries of the Medway and then spreading news via those routes. But it's true to say that messages in one sense are travelling very fast, but some villages are not hearing or in a sense being isolated from the news as well. So some are very connected, but then others seem immune or isolated from the news as well. It's a sort of patchwork picture. Alan, that's what I wanted to hear. That's my jam.

Coastal trade, riverine trade. I'm thinking, obviously, the great revolutions of the 19th century. Wonderful scholarship has been done on tracing revolutionary outbreaks via railways. And I'm glad to hear that you're doing that in river systems on the coast as well. That makes me very happy. I want to come to more of your amazing case studies, because this whole project you've done is just astonishing. But talk to me about how it started.

Yeah, so that was actually a conversation between myself and Helen. I went and found Helen. I think I knew Helen kind of via email and stuff. Maybe email didn't exist. But anyway, we knew each other. And I had this idea always that things we've been talking about now, it's so well-organized. And my background is looking at military careers of soldiers in the Hundred Years' War. And I was thinking, surely there's

a military aspect to the Peasants' Revolt, because the way they get the tower, the things they do around the tower, the coordination, it's not just some ragbag peasants turning up with pitchforks. That's not what happens. And so I was really interested in looking at this data set that we produced to investigate soldiers and comparing it, what could we look at in terms of the nominal data that was left for the Peasants' Revolt? And that's when I spoke to Helen, we then spoke to other colleagues. So it's a big team we work with, Andrew Prescott, Anne Currie, Herbert Eden and Helen Killick. And also we brought in computer scientists because what we need is that technology to be able to link. We think it's

big data. We talk as historians of big data. It's just a few hundred thousand data points. Other people say that's not big data, but for us it is. And by tracking down these names and locations and other evidence using computer science, that's our colleagues Jason and Ian helping us link all that together is where we're making the real difference. Well, I want to hear about that difference in a second. Just tell me about outbreak firstly. What have you learned about where, when and how it began? And have you shed any new light on it? So it begins in Kent and Essex, we think. You can see localised outbreaks of discontent centred around the poll tax. So essentially in the spring of 3081, what happens is that the government is increasingly desperate to raise money. It's doing not very well in the French wars, and there's even a threat of potential French invasion

on the south coast. We've seen coastal raids, so they're really concerned about that and about raising money. So they innovate in the tax and they bring in this idea of the poll tax, and they've actually tried to levy three poll taxes in four years. They're sending out these tax commissioners into the countryside and they're trying to detect where people are evading the tax. They're hiding relatives, this kind of thing, and trying to evade paying the tax. And then you see in late May, early June of 1381, you see in some of the villages like Bocking in Essex that the first incidents of discontent erupt. You have tax collectors being attacked, people turning up in the town squares with bows and arrows, and you hear rumours. So people are talking about

swearing oaths to destroy legions of the king and his common laws and all lordship. And these rumours are sort of going through the various villages laws and all lordship and these rumors are sort of going through the various villages and small towns of kent and essex was there a culture of riot and revolt was this like really difference or is this building a tradition of occasionally sticking it to the man it's a hot topic amongst historians actually and historians are quite divided on the answer to that so some have argued that this looks like quite an obedient society on the whole that people generally toe the line however others like sam cone for example has written a famous book arguing that there's a lot more sort of localized discontent and passive resistance than we've acknowledged before. And so actually, when you look at the towns in particular,

you do see kind of resistance to kingship and so on. Yeah, it's a hot topic of debate. Adrian, so let's go from these localised outbreaks. Take me now through to the March on London, that next stage of coordinated, quite tactical thinking. Yeah, so what we're seeing is, as Helen said, is the start of the revolt in Essex. And then it quickly crosses the Thames,

which you'll be pleased to hear. And they're going back and forth. So we're finding leaders from Essex crossing to Kent to stir up revolt there as well. And the same, similar sorts of things. And then the march towards London. And it all around this weekend in June, accumulating about the 15th of June,

when Wat Tyler gets struck down. And it's at that point in June, accumulating about the 15th of June when Wat Tyler gets struck down. And at that point in London, I think there's many, many people from Kent and Essex occupying London. The Londoners join them and support them. And there is a kind of an elite versus, who are obviously not with the rebels, but generally everybody else is. And at some point, they're actually wondering who's in charge. Is it Richard II or is it actually this guy, Watt Tyler? We don't really know that much about. Suddenly they're thinking, is he in charge? And he actually gets a one-to-one with Richard II to talk about his demands

when he's actually struck down by the Mayor of London and assassinated. So that's what happened. But as you mentioned, Watt Tyler is killed, but this apparently kind of peasant rabble managed to capture the Tower of London. The only time in the Tower's history it's fallen to an enemy force. Is that luck? Or as you suggested earlier, are there real professionals here? of London, the king and his supporters, and then go into the tower when they're not there. Actually, it's quite complicated what they're doing. You could say they're pulling them out whilst going in. And they're let into the tower. I don't think there's an attack on the tower. I think there's collusion. The people of the tower let them in. And the royal family are there. So we know that the Queen Mother's there, and they sit on the Queen Mother's bed.

And that, we were thinking, is a bit like the attack on Congress in America, where they're sitting on the desk of the Speaker, and they're meant to be there. And they also apparently meet the future Henry IV. And we know this because he pardons one of the men who executes the treasurer and chancellor later on. Pardoned very much, he says, because you saved my life in the Tower of London. And so it's interesting to think, well, the King of England is happy to pardon someone who's actually killed somebody, executed someone in that revolt because they saved their life and they recognised them and remember that day. So it's very much a coordinated event. And we're also looking into how they attack the stores in the Tower. So people will know the Towers where they kept a lot of ornaments, arms and armour, and they go in there and they

raid that. And they don't just take any old thing. There must have been stuff that wasn't working or broken there. They took stuff that was useful to them, especially banners. They like the idea of banners because that's what they'd have seen on the field when they were campaigning in France, is the idea of following and gathering around banners. We're listening to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the Peasants' Revolt.

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And he's very unpopular. So in the years prior to 1381, Londoners have been expressing their hostility towards Gaunt by reversing his coat of arms, which is a real sign of disrespect, turning his banners upside down on the Savoy. respect turning his banners upside down on the Savoy. And so in the revolt one of the things they do is they target the Savoy Palace at a grand townhouse of John of Gaunt, they ransack it, they take supplies and they burn it down and that's one of the activities actually where we see a female rebel, a woman called Joanna Ferrer, who apparently leads a group of the rebels in attacking the Savoy and stealing a chest of gold, which they make away with. And it's also true that outside of London, we can see hostility being expressed towards Gaunt, this anti-Lancasterian feeling, as it's called. So to take an example of a small village in Derbyshire, a village called Morley, where we see a local gentry family called the Stathams.

And when they hear about news of the revolt in London, they take it upon themselves to attack Gaunt's lands in the local area and they occupy his lands and try and hold them for themselves. And again, they are led by another woman, the matriarch of the family, a woman called Godita Statham, who directs her five sons, who all have military experience in their actions against Gaunt and the stealing of his lands. Well I was just going to say Dan it's quite interesting because Gaunt's actually lucky that he's not even in England he's in Scotland he goes and hides in Scotland because I think there is

strength of resistance towards him and even the Earl of Northumberland won't let him get into his castle and I think Gaunt gets very angry about that and perhaps gets some afters later but there is this thing about Gaunt not being very popular this time, even amongst the nobility. And in fact, as you suggest, Henry IV, who you just mentioned, did actually end up becoming king, John of Gaunt's son. What about these case studies? What about the rest of the country?

Because the traditional narrative is that after the Tower, what Tidus killed, Richard II kind of buys them off with promises and they all go home and that's the end of that. What have you guys discovered? Yes, I think our discoveries are really centred around the stories of individuals who were involved with the rebellion, what motivated them to join and what happened to them in the years after 1381. And we found some interesting material in different kinds of sources that haven't been looked at before. So for example, we've got some confession material where people are alleged to have taken part in conspiracies.

And interestingly, these happen later than the revolt in June of 1381 in London. This is a conspiracy that happens in Kent in September of 1381, where two men are accused of fomenting dissent in the local area. And then their confessions are then recorded. One of the men is called John Cote and he has said in his confession that they had alleged to conspire together to kill the king and all the magnates of the kingdom and he alleges that strangers had arrived from the north country spreading rumours that John of Gaunt had freed his serfs. So John Cott and his conspirators were then going to send messengers to see whether these rumours were true and if they were true then they were going to make John of Gaunt king of England which is

interesting given what we've said about the anti-Lancasterian feeling earlier. Then there's another confession by his co-conspirator, a man called William Delton, and he alleges that they gathered together a group of about 30 of them in a place called Linton Heath in Kent in September, and they agreed amongst themselves that they were going to capture and kill members of the local gentry. And this is quite a well organised group, so they said that they've sent messengers and told men to arrive from the local gentry. And this is quite a well-organized group. So they said that they've sent messengers and told men to arrive from the local area with fighting men and archers and equipment, and that they will meet together in a great wood called Depperfield and make plans for a revolt. Interestingly, another detail of his confession is that they were going to send

spies into the courts of various nobles and these spies are meant to listen to the conversation of the nobles and see if they detect any disloyalty from them and if they do then they're going to ferment this dissension between the king and his lords so that they can bring down the royal government. So there's a real radicalism in this confession. Obviously, this confession might be fabricated or elaborated on, but it's interesting that they've given these kinds of texts to the confessions. And then in other kinds of new discoveries, we've been looking at manoral records. And I should say, this is a colleague of mine on the project,

Herbert Aydin, who's been painstakingly working his way through the manoral accounts that we have so many of the manors in England keep their own local court records of what goes on in that manor and so he's been tracing the names of individuals that we know took part in the revolt through these manor court records. One interesting thing is that you can see some of them living for many years after the revolt and the kinds of things that they do in the local area. One of the examples he found was in the manor courts of Great Bromley in Kent, where he sees just little details like a man called Richard Sadler, who apparently took part in the revolt. It says in the record of the manor that all the tenants of the manor were ordered to rebuild a house

lately standing on the heathland within the Lord's Fief which was rented for two pence that year and which was pulled down by Richard Sadler in quote the wicked uproar which is their way of referring to the revolt of 1381 and that they're told to rebuild it before the next court and then we see later in the record that Richard Sadler's death is reported in January 1382 and his land that he holds in the manor which is a small holding a few acres of land is then re-granted to his wife Alice so we see he dies soon after the revolt but she inherits his land but as I said we do see other people in the manor court records being recorded and incidents still relating to the revolt and the lands and the destruction of manor court rollsor Court records being recorded and incidents still relating to the

revolt and the lands and the destruction of Manor Court rolls and so on being recorded well into the 15th century. So the impact of this revolt on individuals seems to go on for a long time. And what have you found? Was there an enduring stigma? Yes, I think there was an enduring stigma for some. Some had their lands confiscated and well, of course, some were executed in the aftermath of the revolt. It really varies between individuals. So other individuals did quite well from the revolt, actually. And they were able to capitalise on the upheaval of the months of 1381 when there's a lot of unrest.

So to take one example, there's a man called John Hend. He starts off as a draper in London and he's got property disputes and land disputes in Essex. And so when the revolt breaks out in Essex in May and June, he uses that as sort of an excuse to send his men in to occupy land that he claims to be his. But he's having a land dispute with someone else and he occupies the land and sort of takes it for himself. And then he finds out that he sort of incurred the king's displeasure in doing this. There's sort of a chance the king might condemn him as a rebel. So he quickly tries to cover his tracks by actually going to parliament and petitioning the king and sort of saying that he didn't know that he incurred the king's displeasure and he's very sorry and so on. And he manages to rehabilitate himself.

and he's very sorry and so on. And he manages to rehabilitate himself. He gets the lands that he'd occupied and more, so much so that he accumulates wealth. And by the reign of the subsequent king, Henry IV, he actually becomes Henry's chief money lender. That's how wealthy he's become. And what about the rest of the country? Was London the decisive turning point across the country or did the revolt continue to have energy elsewhere for some time? So we've been tweeting the revolt and people thought it would finish at the death of Watt Tylem and they're really surprised it's still going on over a week later. So people have been commenting they've been surprised by it. So just the last weekend there was a battle in Norfolk not this last weekend but in 1381 the battle of North Walsham, where the Bishop Dispenser, you think, oh, what's a bishop doing?

But he puts down a revolt and a massacre of rebels there. So, and it's still ongoing today. I think we're getting trouble in St Albans today. But the last week we'd been looking at Yorkshire, down into Somerset, as I said earlier, all sorts of still attempts for people to locally organise. But at the moment, the government's got the upper hand because it has now got commissions out there, led by the king's uncles and other military figures, really crushing dissent as they find it. You mentioned that they had aims, they had very specific aims around poll taxes and serfdom.

Whenever I study revolt, I think, what did they think was going to happen? They were going to depose the king. Are they aiming at total social revolution or do they just think by applying military pressure on the king, they can force the king to change his policies? Yes, they're definitely risking their lives in taking part in the revolt. One explanation is that they were trying to draw things to the attention of the young king and that their march on London and their requests to speak to Richard himself is part of this well-known petitioning process in the Middle Ages, which essentially says that as a subject of the king, you're allowed to bring a complaint or petition before him, usually in Parliament, and sort of point out any local corruption that's going on, particularly the actions of corrupt royal officials

so this explanation says that the rebels think that the young king is being kept isolated from the royal policies that are going on in his name and the corruption of local officials particularly with the poll tax so they're marching on London to bring this to his attention and that's sort of one explanation. Another explanation is that they're motivated by religious beliefs actually so you see preachers like John Ball going around preaching about this radical Christian egalitarian sentiment that all men were created equal, Adam and Eve, when Adam delved and Eve span he was then the gentleman. So it's this sort of radical disendowing the church and it's that kind of ideology that galvanises them and that then leads them to risk their lives in this protest.

But it's true that there's definitely a radical sentiment here or radical element in what's going on. And you see one of the rebels in East Anglia, a man called Geoffrey Lister, he goes around proclaiming that he is the king of the commons in that region, and that they should go back to a system of regional kings, almost sort of harking back to the Anglo-Saxon past. So there is definitely that radical element to what they're doing and what they're risking their lives for. Yes, the old evil counsellors line, you see it in the Roman Odyssey, maybe the Pilgrimage of Grace under Henry VIII. It's like, yeah, look, we don't mind the king, but these advisors are just terrible. Always strikes me as a bit of a get out of jail free card that you always say, no, I'm not a rebelling against the king. I just want

the king to be made aware of what's going on. What is the legacy of the Peasants' Revolt in the immediate sense? And do you think it's a separate legacy from the 17th centuries onwards around popular revolt and uprising and those more progressive agendas, if that's the right way to call it. But what's the legacy in the short term, in the medieval period? Well, in the short term, I think one of the legacies is no more poll tax. So the government don't resort to that again until that's just government. And I think in the longer term, it's more this kind of spectre, this fear of pushing the commons too far and what would result. So it's sort of like a benchmark, if you like, for future governments

and the fear that they've got in the back of their minds now that the Commons could come out in direct action again and you could see this mass unrest and killing in London as a protest for government policies. So it's sort of this fear, really, of what might happen in the future. Isn't that interesting that some of the big transformations in English and British culture, whether it's after the Peasants' Revolt or the Civil Wars, there are actually responses to defeats, but defeats that remind the victors just to go pretty darn carefully in future.

Yeah, I think they were hugely shocked by what happened, those who were in charge. I think they were hugely shocked by the gains that the rebels made, especially in the first few weeks around London. They called the noises, I think that's something we looked at recently, they called the soundscape and the screams of the people as they were being murdered. And they recalled this later in popular poems and music, the idea of this person, you know, would they come back and do it again?

And it did cause, I think, fear, as Helen said. You sleep slightly less soundly if you're a Plantagenet monarch, I'm sure, like the Stewart family afterwards. Adrian and Helen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell us what this project is called and how people can access it. So it's called The People of 1381. We've got a website, 1381.online. Also Twitter, People of 1381, hashtag reliving 1381 so it's all there it's

all there 1381 key date folks thank you so much for coming on well done for everything you're doing thank you thanks i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally,

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