Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Peasants' Revolt of 1381

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the late 14th century, England was recovering from the black death, fighting an expensive war, and struggling with a labor shortage that had upended the traditional social order. When the government imposed a deeply unpopular tax, anger spread rapidly throughout villages and towns. Within a matter of days, thousands of people marched on London, powerful officials were killed, and a teenage king faced the greatest popular uprising medieval England had ever seen. Learn more about the peasants' riot of 1381 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season.

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Starting point is 00:01:22 England in the second half of the 14th century was a society still reeling from catastrophe. The Black Death had first swept across the country in 1348 and 1349, killing perhaps a third to a half of the population. And further outbreaks in 1361 and 1369 kept mortality high in the population. depressed for decades afterward. The demographic collapse had an effect that the peasantry understood very well, even if the nobility resisted acknowledging it. Labor had become scarce, and scarce labor should have commanded higher wages and better terms. Serfs and free laborers alike found themselves for the first time in generations in a position to bargain. Manners that

Starting point is 00:02:09 had once been worked by an abundance of tenants now stood short-handed, and landings, and landings, landlords who wanted their fuels plowed and their harvests brought in, had to compete for workers who could simply walk to the next village and ask for better terms. The ruling class responded not by accepting this new reality, but by trying to legislate it away. In 1349, the Crown issued the Ordinance of Laborers, followed in 1351, by the Statute of Laborers, which attempted to freeze wages at pre-plag levels and compel able-bodied men and women to accept work at those fixed rates rather than seek better pay elsewhere. The law also restricted the movement of laborers, since lords depended on being able to hold

Starting point is 00:02:52 tenants in their place. These laws were, in effect, an attempt to use the state to reverse a market reality that had shifted decisively in the peasants' favor. Needless to say, the peasants were highly resentful of these new laws. Enforcement of these laws fell to justices of the laborers and later two justices of the peace, whose fines and prosecutions became a running irritant in rural life for an entire generation. The statute did not achieve its economic goal since wages continued to drift upwards in practice, but it did succeed in generating a durable sense of grievance among those who found themselves fined or threatened for seeking wages that the market would otherwise have freely given. Underlying this immediate friction was the

Starting point is 00:03:41 long-standing system of villainage, which I mentioned in the episode on feudalism. Villains, which is spelled V-I-L-L-E-I-N-S, not villains like a Disney villain, were essentially serfs and were legally subordinated to their lords, owing mandatory labor services, as well as fees and fines for marriage or inheritance. They face strict restrictions regarding where they could reside in whom they could marry without a license, creating a stark and increasingly galling contrast with the higher wages and greater freedoms enjoyed by free laborers. As free wage labor became more lucrative and more visible, the burdens of villainage came to feel less like an ancient and unremarkable fact of life

Starting point is 00:04:26 and more like an artificial imposition that benefited only the Lord of the Manor. On top of this already tense social landscape, the government had a financial crisis. The hundred years war against France, which England had been fighting on and off since 1337, remained enormously expensive, and by the late 1370s it was going badly. The military campaigns in France produced very little in terms of money, but exacted a heavy financial toll, and the government of the young King Richard II, who had come to the throne as a boy of 10 years old in 1377, under the Regency of his uncle John of Gaunt, needed money that it didn't have.

Starting point is 00:05:11 Parliament's answer in 1377, 1379, and again in 1380, was to authorize a poll tax, a levy charged not according to land or wealth, but as a flat sum per head of population above a certain age. The first poll tax was modest and roughly graduated, but the third poll tax, granted by Parliament in November of 1380, set a flat rate. of one shilling per adult. While it was later adjusted to allow the wealthy in a community to help cover the poor, in practice it meant that the burden on ordinary villagers was heavier than any previous tax

Starting point is 00:05:52 and fell with particular weight on regions that had already contributed to the first two collections. Tax evasion was widespread, and when the government's assessors compared the returns against expected population figures in the spring of 1381, the shabh. shortfall was so large that commissioners were dispatched into the counties to investigate fraud and collect what was owed. The revolt began, by most accounts, in the village of fobbing in Essex, where in late May of 1381, a royal commissioner named Thomas Bampton arrived to investigate why the local poll tax return seemed incomplete. The villagers refused to pay the additional sums and demanded and drove Bampum's clerks away, and the resistance spread quickly to neighboring

Starting point is 00:06:40 villages in Essex. When a royal justice named Robert Belknap was sent to punish the offenders and identify and penalize the ringleaders, he too was confronted by an armed and organized crowd, forced to swear that he would never again sit in such a commission, and sent away with several of his clerks reportedly killed. Essex was an open revolt within days. Kent rose almost simultaneously, and it was in Kent that the rebellion found its leadership and organization. The town of Dartford and the city of Rochester saw early risings, and Rochester Castle was stormed to free a prisoner that was held there. The rebels of Kent had went to Maidstone, where they're said to have released from the Archbishop's prison, the radical priest John Ball, who had been excommunicated and in prison for years for preaching against the social order and the wealth of the

Starting point is 00:07:34 church. Ball had provided the revolt with its most famous expression. He argued that inherited social distinctions had no foundation in Christianity. He is traditionally associated with the following rhyme. Quote, when Adam delved and Eve Span, who was then the gentleman? Delved meant Doug and Span meant Spun, and Gentleman in this context was referring to a manor lord. The argument was that Adam and Eve had worked without Lord drooling over them. Therefore, aristocratic privilege was a human invention rather than part of God's original order. From this point, the movement acquired its most recognizable leader, Watt Tyler, about whom relatively little reliable biographical details survives beyond his prominence as the commander who emerged to lead the Kentish mob.

Starting point is 00:08:29 Under Tyler's direction, the rebels marched on Canterbury, enter the cathedral, and demanded assurances from the monks there before turning north towards London. The rebels' goals, as they articulated them at this stage, centered on the abolition of villainage, an end to the hated poll tax and the statute of laborers, and more significantly, a demand to speak directly with the young King Richard II, whom the rebels believed was their natural ally against corrupt officials. This distinction between loyalty to the king's person and hatred of his counselors, was a reoccurring and important feature of the entire revolt.

Starting point is 00:09:08 The rebels did not initially present themselves as opponents of the monarchy, but as subjects seeking the king's protection against bad advisors. By the second week of June 1381, the Essex rebels under a leader sometimes called Jack Straw, and the Kentish rebels under Watt Tyler were converging on London from the north and the south. A substantial portion of the London populace, angered by their own economic status and resentful of foreign merchants and the wealthy elite governing the city, sympathized with or actively assisted the rebels' advance.

Starting point is 00:09:43 On June 12th, the mob from Kent reached Blackheath just outside the city, where John Ball is reported to have preached a famous sermon on the equality of all people. The following day, June 13th, the rebels entered London because sympathetic citizens opened the gates at London Bridge and Aldgate. Once inside, the rebels moved. with discipline against specific targets rather than descending into an indiscriminate riot. They went directly to the Savoy Palace, the London residents of the Regent, John of Gaunt, whom they regarded as the chief author of their oppression and burned it to the ground.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Chronicles of the rebellion record that the rebels deliberately destroyed the palace's treasures rather than looting them, throwing gold and silver into the Thames, and declaring themselves seekers of justice rather than thieves. They executed at least one of their own who was caught stealing. Foreign merchants, particularly Flemish traders, who were resented as economic competitors by London's own artisans and workers, were singled out and a number of them were killed. The following day, June 14th,

Starting point is 00:10:50 the 14-year-old King Richard II, rode out to meet the rebels in what was intended as a negotiation to draw the crowd away from further violence in the city. Richard granted, or at least appeared to grant, remarkably sweeping concessions. He agreed to abolish villainage, to fix rents at a modest rate, to grant a general pardon for the events of the uprising, and to permit free trade throughout the kingdom without the restrictions that had bound peasant labor and movements. Many of the Essex rebels, satisfied with these concessions and trusting in the king's word, began to disperse and head home. But even as Richard met the crowd at Mile End, a separate contingent of rebels made their way into the Tower of London itself, which had been left under-defended.

Starting point is 00:11:37 And there they seized and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, who also held the office of Chancellor. They also executed the treasurer, Robert Hales, and several other officials whom the rebels held responsible for the poll tax and the general misgovernment of the realm. Their heads were displayed on London Bridge, showing that the rebels considered these men, rather than the king, to be the true objects of their anger. The climax of the uprising came the next day on June 15th at Smithfield, just outside the city walls, where Richard met once more with the remaining rebels, now principally led by Watt Tyler. Tyler presented an even more radical set of demands, which included the abolition of all lordships, save that of the king, the redistributed. of the church's wealth amongst the common people and the establishment of a single legal status for all Englishmen. During the meeting, a scuffle broke out in which Tyler was killed by one of the king's attendants and died of his wounds shortly afterwards. In the tense moments that followed,

Starting point is 00:12:41 with the rebel crowd on the verge of violence, the young king rode forward alone towards the rebels, and in a considerable act of courage for a 14-year-old, called out that he would be their leader and give them all that they sought, urging them to follow him out of the city. Once the main mob had dispersed, Richard and his government abandoned all of their concessions to the rebels. The charters of freedom were revoked. According to one traditional account, Richard told petitioners that they were villains and would remain villains. Royal commissioners traveled throughout the effective counties to arrest suspected leaders and participants. Trials were often rapid and executions were used to restore authority.

Starting point is 00:13:24 Watt Tyler was already dead. John Ball was captured near Coventry and brought to St. Albans, where he was tried in the King's presence and executed on July 15th, by being hung, drawn, and quartered. Jack Straw and numerous other local leaders were also executed. In the short term, the revolt appeared to be a complete failure. However, Parliament and the governing elite were deeply shaken. They recognized that attempting to extract large sum,

Starting point is 00:13:54 directly from ordinary households could provoke coordinated resistance. No comparable nationwide poll tax was imposed in medieval England ever again. While the Peasants' Revolt failed to secure its immediate demands, the revolt revealed just how much England had changed since the Black Death and how difficult it had become to preserve serfdom, wage controls, and futile obligations. It didn't end serfdom, but it was the beginning of the end. It also left behind a powerful example of ordinary people organizing against taxation and political corruption. The uprising was defeated, but the social system it challenged was already beginning to disappear. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

Starting point is 00:14:44 The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Peasants' Revolt of 1381

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