Gone Medieval - Peasants' Revolt

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a public rebellion that sent revolutionary ripples across the entire medieval world. In a new video series for History Hit, Matt Lewis has been looking beyond the ancient propaganda to reveal the previously unknown stories of the ordinary folk of the Peasants’ Revolt.Matt has been working closely with investigative historians from the groundbreaking People of 1381 project. which has been uncovering the stories of individuals who were caught up in this revolt, either as rebels or as victims.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt is joined by Professor Andrew Prescott, a key member of the project who made some incredible discoveries .All three episodes of The Peasants’ Revolt are available now on History Hit.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here >.You can take part in our listener survey here > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I've had the huge pleasure of making a three-part documentary for history hit on the Peasants Revolt, the first recorded popular uprising in England. All three episodes are available now if you'd like to catch them. If you're not already a subscriber, maybe this is the excuse you've been looking forward to grab a free trial and find out what incredible documentaries History Hit has to offer. For the The series, we leaned heavily on the work of the People of 1381 project, which has been uncovering the real people, the individuals who were caught up in this revolt, either as rebels or as victims. You can find out more about their work at 1381.on online.

Professor Andrew Prescott is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and a key member of the project who made some incredible discoveries, and I'm delighted that Andrew is joining us now to explore them further with us. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Andrew. Hello, and welcome, Matt. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here. I can't wait to tell people about this stuff that you discovered because it's such an amazing story. But perhaps before we get there, could you just tell us a little bit about

how the People of 1381 project came about? For me, it actually goes back a long time, probably about 40 years ago, when I was a postgraduate student. I was, as one does, when one's a young postgraduate student, snaffling around the archives, looking for things that would be useful to explore,

And we thought at that stage already a great deal of information have been published on the Peasants' Revolt. And since the 19th century, historians had been unearthing legal records of prosecutions of rebels that gave us lots of information about the local character of the revolt or the people who were involved. But to my surprise, I realised that there was still a great deal more to be found out. The revolt was so huge, it was such a large-scale uprising,

that it left traces on almost every aspect of national and local government. And many of those records haven't been explored. And in particular, I was excited to find records that recorded the names of hundreds and hundreds of people accused of participating in the revolt and realized that there was a great deal more yet to be done. And I eventually wrote a thesis that described the sorts of records that were available. But the scale of it was just too much. much to actually contemplate easily presenting in print. When Adrian Bell, who'd worked on developing a large-scale database of medieval soldiers,

asked me about whether we could develop something similar as a database for 1381, for me it was exactly the right time because we'd established the scale and scope of these records, but actually putting them together in an integrated form where anyone could explore them. The database was perfect for that. And that was what really helped give rise to the 1381 project. There was a particular question that Adrian had as well that was very important, which is how far had the people who were named, as in his medieval soldier database, taken part in the revolt?

How far did the rebels include people who had some military experience? And indeed, that's one of the questions that we've been able to answer through developing this database. So the roots of the project go back a long way. but really the impetus came from Adrian's enthusiasm to explore further the lessons they got from the Soldier Project. I've had a good poke around on the People of 1381 website on 1381.on online. It's like a proper rabbit hole where you can just follow various people, see what they were accused of, what happened to them, and it really gets us close to the individual people. We're used to hearing this in grand terms of numbers of thousands of people who went up against named nobleman.

And it's really, really good to have the names of ordinary people and be able to see what they were doing. It was incredible. And when you realise how much information is recorded about the revolt and about those ordinary people who took part in the revolt, you start to realise that actually there's far more information out there about ordinary people and their lives than we commonly imagine. So in particular, I think if you look in some of the biography sections, particularly of some of the Essex rebels, One of my colleagues on the project Herbert Iden, who's a great expert on local records, has gone to local what are called memorial courts and traced the history of individuals who took part in the revolt over the whole of their life and can see how particular people fell out with their local lords,

have disputes about their landholding and how that all feeds in. And likewise, the database enables us to explore. law in the national court records some of the people involved. There's one man I was interested in him because I'm from Battersea in London and he was also from Battersea and he was called Ralph Atcroft. And he had been involved over a period of years in trying to build up land holdings in that area what's now South London when it was still countryside. And it was obviously his impatience with the landholding system that then prevailed that precipitated his involvement in the revolt. You can go back and trace how he was building up lands and coming into conflict with authorities.

They're ordinary people, but they're not obscure. The records are enormously detailed for the medieval period, and you can trace a lot about their lives. I was going to ask how easy or hard it proved to find what you were looking for. It sounds like you were almost overwhelmed with the amount of material. It's been a huge problem for me, because you think if you're a historian, you find enormous amounts of new information about a famous event at the beginning of your career and you're all set. But actually, there's just so much

that I found it very difficult to digest it all. And I've spent the rest of my career, in a sense, trying to come to terms with the quantity of material that I've found. In a way, the database helps that enormously because it means I could start tracing people in ways that I'd not been able to before.

It gives me a quick overview. So in that sense, it's enormously helpful. But in fact, in a way, it's made the situation more problematic because we've got thousands of people named in the database. But once we've got them in the database, that helps us identify other cases connected with the revolt. Even though we've now got the database

and that's now drawing to a conclusion, the availability of the database means I can identify more people connected with the revolt in the records. It continues to be a huge problem. And I think generally for historians, particularly medieval historians, dealing with this sort of large quantities of data, problematic and I think we've still got to develop good techniques for dealing with that. In some ways it's a nice problem to have. At least you don't know nothing about these people

and you're scratching around for things. The great thing about 1381 is not simply that it's the largest popular uprising in England in the Middle Ages, but also it's one of a series of uprisings that take place across Europe during the late 14th, 30, 15th centuries and it's the best recorded. Some of the lessons that we can read from 13801 might shed light on why revolts are also happening in France, in Flanders, to some extent in Scandinavia. So this information has a wider value. Absolutely. Just before we get onto the revolt proper, I really wanted to talk about the particular set of documents that you found that we do see in the film. I'm being a bit cryptic, because I don't want to give away the big secret. But what were with these and where were they found?

because the story of where they were is incredible. Yeah. When we talk about discovering documents, often you'll find that documents that one comes across have actually been recorded elsewhere. It's just that people haven't looked at them or haven't drawn attention to them. There's a copy of the letter that the men of Kent

received at Marlend in 1381, which is in the British Library. And it's never been published. We're drawing attention to it. So in that sense, it's a discovery. But actually, it was cataloged, hundreds of years ago, so you can't really claim it as a discovery. It's rare to find something that really is a completely new discovery, and the files that I worked with represented something

that nobody had ever actually looked at for hundreds of years. So in that sense, that was a genuine discovery. And the types of records that we work with are generally in big role form. They're the formal documents that courts drew up to record their proceedings. But behind these, and masses of files which contained the original working documents of the court. And these had been largely neglected and forgotten. They used to be stored in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. They cleared all the records out of the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. And then the architect, who was looking at Chapter House for a renovation,

noticed that the floor was very spongy. And I thought, this is very odd. and he scrabbled around in the floor, and he realised that it was covered with hundreds and hundreds of bundles of wits, which are these files, which were the working documents of the medieval court. And so these were cleared out into sacks, but were them because they were so dirty and chaotic and nobody really looked at them,

not sorted for a very long time. And it was only thanks to the heroic work of a team of archivists of the National Huffians, of the National Archives in the 1960s and 70s that they were brought out. Nobody was then really quite sure what was in them. And I was very fortunate in that I was offered the opportunity to look at some of these files to see if there was any material in them that related to the revolt. And these files are completely unconcerved.

They're as you were seen on the video. They're still all folded up and very dirty. there all the hundreds of documents in them are mounted on a little leather thong. And if the thong breaks, everything would cascade out, and it would all be reduced to chaos. And so I have to be handled very carefully. And as I went through one of these files, which, as I say, nobody had really properly looked at, probably at least since the 15th century, I realized that they contained original working documents that weren't on the main roles that we've been looking at.

that there were completely new material. Possibly the most exciting thing on there was a complete role of a commission against the rebels in Essex that gave us a lot of information about the early development of revolt in Essex, which was completely new. And that was extremely exciting.

I only had a limited amount of time with the records, and so had to do some very hasty transcriptions, and these have never been made fully publicly available, the information in these records, before, but now for the first time on the websites, they're available for people to use. So they've been published for the first time on the People of 1381 website. Unfortunately, although we can look at them generally, as you've done for your video, you can't easily take photographs of what's actually in there.

So we can't include images in the way that we have for other documents. But they're fascinating records, these files. And as more and more of them are becoming available, there's still work being done on making them available for public researchers. we're finding more information of them in the revolt. But there are still sacks of these files which have not been sorted, which are stored in deep salt mines in Cheshire.

So there's always more to be discovered. It's an absolutely incredible story of these things just being shoved under a chapter house floor in Westminster Abbey for hundreds of years and utterly forgotten and then coming out. And the story of them is incredible, but what they offer as well in terms of the insight into something that happened 500 odd years ago,

giving us fresh insight into all of that is just absolutely incredible to think that 500 plus years later we're still learning more and there is still documents that can tell us new things. And it never ends. The archives are so vast that no single person, a group of people can ever hope to get to the end of it. There's an enormous amount more still to be discovered and will continue to be discovered. As I say, I feel fairly sure that some of that material in the salt mines contains a lot of new information about the revolt, but I doubt that in my lifetime will never get to see that.

somebody later on will have to look into it. Yeah. It's incredibly exciting to believe there's more stuff out there that could tell us something utterly revelatory about it. It is just an exciting thought. So in the case of that Essex record that we found it on the file, that's giving us new information about narrative of the revolt, telling us about, for example, this huge meeting that took place of bocking on June and the 2nd, where they all swore to be one voice in overturning the laws of England and making their own laws. that was completely new information about the course of the revolt.

But of course, the other aspect of discovering of new information about this is tracing information about the individuals involved in the revolt. These will also include information about the people involved in the revolt. So there's different ways we're discovering as well. So if we get to the revolt proper for a moment, when the Peasant's Revolt erupts in 1381, what do you think were the main drivers and motivations? what were these people hoping to achieve?

The first thing to emphasise is it's certainly the largest popular uprising in medieval England and indeed one of the largest in medieval Europe. But there had been a tradition of insurgency and protest before, as recently as 1377, there had been a huge movement to argue the case against increasing feudal demands on land. And there had also been traditions of town protests. So there were earlier protests. So in a sense, the question is more,

why was 1381 so big and why was it such a threat? The immediate trigger for it was, of course, the collection of the third poll tax in four years. It doesn't seem that it was a straightforward protest against the poll tax per se. Initially, the poll tax was collected without too much opposition. What seemed to be the problem

was the way in which various, exemptions from the poll tax were implemented and an attempt to roll that back and that reassessment seems to have caused a particular anxiety of feeling that that was an unjust procedure. But the trigger was the poll tax. The question that one has to look at is how did it then develop into something that was on such a vast scale and involved not just peasants, not just people from rural holdings, actually large contingents from towns, members of the lesser gentry. In fact, the whole raft of society below the level of the aristocracy became involved and how did that happen? And I think that

one of the answers to that is that it reflected an increasing antipathy towards the growing intrusion of government into society and the way in which certain elite groups were taking over the control of local bureaucracy, the control of towns, and that fed into a common anxiety and encouraged the growth of a larger dispute. Modern sociologists who look at the way in which revolts and protests grow, emphasize the way in which initial trigger, like the poll tax, can then encourage people to express their resentment against groups that they regard as other than them antagonistic towards them. And that seems to be the sort of process that occurred in 1381.

But from that initial trigger of the poll tax, people started to move against local officials. Towns started to move against people that they suspected of corrupt dealings and of taking tax money. Then local gentry started to move against officials who were aligned with other members of the gentry. And so the whole thing snowballed to create a revolt that was on a... a vast scale with very intense disturbances over almost the whole of the southern and eastern England, but also even with very significant long-lasting disturbances in places like Yorkshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire. And I think it's probably significant coming in 1381 as well, that this is towards

the end of what we often consider to be one of the worst centuries to be alive. You know, you've had the black death, you've had great famines, all of these kind of problems going on. And there's almost a sense that that third poll tax, which is so much harsher than the second one, which seemed quite progressive with its 33 different levels of payments and everything, that that is the straw that breaks the camel's back. And I think one of the things we talk about a little bit in the film is how much that reflects where we are today sometimes. You're thinking about a post-pandemic world in which there is wage suppression, high taxation, war in Europe, uncertainty around the government. It's frightening how close that could be to

today? Yes. It depends how novel you consider the way in which government developed in the period after the Black Death. Some historians have argued that this is really almost unheard of, that there's an intrusion of government into everyday life in an attempt to control a lot of those changes that have taken place in the wake of the Black Death. And if that's the case, then yes. Others have suggested that those changes are rather exaggerated. But you certainly definitely get the sense of resentment against people who maybe were seen as profiting from a bad situation. And that friction is definitely a factor in 3081. Yeah. And what do we know about the kind of tactics that the rebels used? You mentioned Adrian in particular feeding in the idea that

some of these were from a military background. So should we view them as a peasant rabble or were they better organised than that? You certainly shouldn't be viewing them as a rabble. That's largely a misconception that was fuelled by very romantic depictions of the revolt in the Victorian period. And I think that we'd already set that aside before people even started working on the 1381 project, which is just reinforced the fact that this isn't a rising of a peasant rabble. It's a protest by the whole of the commons. There are a representative of all the social classes. One of the difficulties is then actually deciding how you interpret individual cases that look like personal vengeance in that. And you've got, for example, one rebel in London that said to have beheaded somebody on London Bridge

simply because that person owed them fourpence. Now is that somebody taking advantage of the revolt or is that part of a wider protest? I think is actually part of a wider anxiety about the nature of justice and the way in which people get to see how their rights are making. available. I think that part of what happens is that the whole thing widens out into an anxiety about fairness, justice, what the historian E.P. Thompson called the moral economy of society at that point are concerned to reimpose that in the process of change. You could say that the whole thing seems to dissolve into a lot of personal disputes, but I think there is a kind of wider ideology at work there. But beyond that, if you look at the specific activities of the rebels, I think it's

interesting that we've now, for all the main rebel bands who go to London, trace quite senior people in their area who had served with a military connection in recent years. So, for example, in Kent, there was a man called Thomas At Raven, who was a citizen of Rochester, had property in Rochester and Southwark, had served as a member of Parliament in Rochester in 1378. So he'd been there when they granted one of the poll taxes. So far from being a peasant is one of the leaders of the Kentish band coming in. He had some military know-how. He was a member of the town's wealthier group, and he was leading one of the Kentish groups. Likewise, coming in from Hertfordshire and where, where there was a big town contingent that came in and took part in the destruction of John of Gord-Savoy Palace.

There are two people who are substantial landholders in the area, the Blake family, who have, again, military experience are involved in coming in. I think there is some military know-how there. It's being led by senior people, so it's far from a peasant rebel. The more we go into it, the less it looks like a group of disaffected, rural, impoverished people, and more like a generalised protest by the whole of the lower... classes. I suppose in a sense then that leads to the question, why was there this fusion between town and country protest at that point? I think that's the big question that we've got to really think about. And the historians, they've tended to think of the peasants as being part of the revolt, everybody else's allies, but actually the whole thing is more complex than that. And I think we

have to think about what fused town and country and why were people from, well, of the humble backgrounds, willing to follow people like Thomas Outraven into a life or death protest, really. And we know that the rebels particularly targeted documentation, they burnt an awful lots of documents on their way to London. What does that focus on documentation tell us about the rebels' aims and what they're trying to actually achieve? I think it was accepted that it was a very effective form of protests in terms of bringing the bureaucracy to a halt. Rather like nowadays, you might try and take out the computers in order to stop the computer says no sort of culture. There was an awareness that the whole system ran on vellum and that this was a very effective way

of stopping it. So that, for example, what had happened in Kent, the burning of the poll tax records meant that it was then very difficult to account for what money they had collected from the poll tax and it really threw a spanner in the works of the poll tax collection. So I think the rebels were very well aware that getting hold of the sheriffs and the esthetas records setting fire to them was a very effective way of bringing new bureaucracy to a halt and so it proved. There has been a suggestion that in some way it reflects antipathy towards written culture and I don't think that's the case at all. After all, the rebels at Myelaine and Smithfield were asking for written charters and received them, so they were aware that this is something that was important. And we've got

petitions and deeds and other sorts of written culture associated with individual rebels. I think what they were looking for in that respect was more that some of the traditional forms of, for example, land tenure should disappear and that they should be simple. simplified forms, which would have required new forms of documentation. So they were looking at different types of things. And I think they were also supremely conscious of what they saw as the corrupt nature of the growing bureaucracy and officialdom, so that they were keen to throw a spanner in the works of the way in which lawyers and other officials were. Very interesting, for example, they went to the lawyer's offices at the temple just outside London or Fleet Street, and they

smashed seals, which is quite interesting, because the wax seals at the bottom of the documents were the things that gave the document authenticity. And they showed they have sufficient awareness for how those documents worked to realize that if they smash the seals, this might create problems in using those documents in lawsuits in future. There's a quite sophisticated awareness of documentary culture and a protest against the directions in which it's going. And I think that's the reason documentation gets singled out. Yeah, and I guess if you're interested in bringing down the ways in which land is held, then burning the records of that that would be used in court to hold you to account

and keep you in your place in medieval society, if you destroy those records, they can't be relied on in court. There's a chance you might be able to achieve something there. And there's also an underlying thing that's particularly important in rural contexts, I think, with menorial records, is that a lot of local mineral records were destroyed. I think that the underlying assumption there also, was that there was a consensus as to who should do what on the land and how it should be held at a particular time,

and that they wanted to ensure that consensus was agreed by the community and not simply written down by the Lord. And this is another way of enforcing that. And one of the things we explore in the three parts of the documentary a little bit is that the Peasant Revolt is quite often viewed as this flashpoint, these few days of violence around London and then it all just goes away, you know, after what Tyler is killed, that's kind of the end of it

and it melts away. But it's so much more complex than that, isn't it? It's so much more widespread and so much longer lasting. What do you think is the real significance of the Peasants Revolt in 1381? It casts a huge cultural shadow. I think some of the most interesting work has been done by scholars on 13801

in recent years, has been by literary scholars. And in the past, it was assumed that there were the odd references to the revolt in some literary texts. But I think the literary scholars have shown how in all sorts of texts this memory of the revolt and the terror of the revolt actually cast this huge shadow is important in the growth of vernacular English literature during the late 14th century. In terms of continuing unrest, I think that there's much more research that we could be doing all that. And I hope that one of the effects of having the 1381 database available

will be to pursue this. That in Northern England, there appears to have been a much more persistent unrest and disturbance going right the way through the 1380s that hasn't really been fully investigated or connected to the revolt, but I feel is connected with the sort of issues that you have in the revolt. And I think there's much more work that could be done around that. It got so bad, that in the late 1380s, they have to send special courts up in order to try and get on top of the continuing unrest in places like Yorkshire and Derbyshire. There's work there. One of the things that I'm finding and noticing is that there are many more references after 1381 to possible resurgence of the revolt. They're difficult to work out from the records because there's a

change in the law after 1381 that makes any sort of large-scale gathering treasonable. And so you're not quite sure whether this is just a sort of big event that they've labelled reasonable because they now can do that or whether it really is an attempt at really suscating a rising. But I think there's more to be done there. And the memory of 1381 lingers on. The latest 1410, there's a disturbance in Sussex. and the court record says that the noise was so great that it seemed as if Jack's raw had come again. So the memory really lingers on quite strongly. And I guess it's important to understand the revolt better

that we consider all of that outside London stuff. It feels a little bit like there's been an effort maybe by the government at the time to minimise the threat and the impact of the Peasant's Revolt by making it this flashpoint in London that is then defeated and it melts away because then you don't have to deal with the fact that actually there is so much more going on around it.

Some of the people who are responsible for that are the Londoners themselves. There's this concerted attempt in the chronicle evidence and subsequently to present William Woolworth in killing What Tyler as saving the nation and the hero of the hour.

And that's something that continues right the way through to the 17th century when in the Lord Mayor's shows, which in those days were presented on the River Thames, the fishmongers company of which Warworth is a member, included in their tableau year by year reconstructions of Warworth killing Tyler. There was a reminder that London had saved the nation at this point in crisis.

And to some extent, it appears that the way in which this kind of hagiography of William War was emphasised was because so many Londoners had joined the rising and the London authorities were anxious to distance the city as far as possible from the rising. So I think London's was very important in emphasising that idea that there was a flashpoint. From the point of view, the government is evident that while they took London very seriously, the majority of people excluded from the Parliament were Londoners, that they were also equally concerned with what was going on outside London. And the places like York, Barry St Edmunds and so on, Beverly, Cambridge, received particular attention from the government,

who were very reluctant simply to pardon them in the way that they pardoned other rebels and were much slower in reaching a settlement with them. And I think there was this constant awareness during the years afterwards of the possibility of danger outside London, although London was also in itself a worrying flashpoint. Yeah. And you touched a little bit earlier on some of the cultural legacy of the Peasants' Revolt, particularly in the development of vernacular literature and things like that,

What do you think we understand about the political legacy? Because in 1381, we're talking about a time where we're getting close to the end of what we would recognise as anything called feudalism. Do these disuprising and the similar ones that are happening across Europe? Do they feed into this idea that that old way of doing things is no longer acceptable and has to come to an end? Interesting question. That used to be very much the view.

These series of revolts were part of the transition from feudalism, capitalism. they made that shift. I think we moved a long way away from that. The question is how have we moved from it? Mark Bailey, who's a very prominent economic historian in recent discussions, has argued that feudal impositions weren't a significant factor in the revolt and that you can see the chronology has been slightly different in this decline of feudal forms of land tenure. He places it all much earlier. I think that's still a very powerful hypothesis that's still to be fully examined. But I think then what you're looking at is much more looking at the revolt as a political and a cultural event. And I think that's the way that we've started to think about it before.

Earlier historians tended to view it very much as an expression of economic trends with some social trends. I think now we will view it much more as a cultural and a political event and telling us something about the shifts in popular politics. And within that, I think what it does is mark a change in the engagement of the ordinary person with the state and the way in which they're dealing with the state. And the protest is one asking for a different relationship with the state that maybe develops, but not on the lines that the rebels are asking for. It developed in a form whereby you become much more of a way.

a subject. Again, I think this is all to be looked at, but certainly I think the way in which one looks at the revolt now is much more in a political and cultural way, and in the emergence of modern forms of political structure. I guess my last question might be the toughest. In 1381, would you be joining the rebels or not? I think that one probably would, because I think most people were. I probably would have been somebody who was in quite an oppressed situation and wanting to break out if I was alive in the 14th century. But I think that by and large, reflecting the fact that there was this wide range of support for the revolt, that one wouldn't be surprised to find that oneself swept up in it in that way. Yeah. I think it's telling that so many people

did take part when you consider the fact that things like that just don't succeed. You're taking on such a might in the establishment with so little, even if you have the numbers, that you're almost guaranteed to fail and there is the serious potential that that could cost you your life. So people go into this knowing what they're risking. Yes, this is the point that Camus makes in his book about the rebel. However, I think there's one aspect of this that we haven't really touched on, but that's significant, which is the extent to which violence and protest were parts of everyday political life, particularly in medieval towns.

My colleague at Glasgow, Sam Cohn, has written a book showing the scale and extent of which there was a tradition of violent political protest in towns right throughout the later Middle Ages. And how far you'd see the revolt is different to that, I wonder. In scale, it's certainly different, but there is a kind of wider tradition of protest and it draws on. I found it absolutely fascinating,

making this documentary, working through the stuff that the People of 1381 project has been uncovering. It's been absolutely fascinating to talk to you about it. And I feel like however much you learn about the Peasants Revolt, there's always a little bit more to find out another angle and another shadow that it casts somewhere. Oh, definitely. We're continuing to find new stuff day by day. That makes it very difficult to draw a line under it and to come up with an interpretation.

But we have to keep reinterpreting it because we have these different perspectives that occur. Yeah, fascinating. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with us to work through. Andrew, it's been great to talk to you. Thank you. It's been very enjoyable talking to you. I hope you've enjoyed exploring the Peasantry Vault. You can keep up with the work of the People of 1381 project at 1381.online.

And you can search the database and get lost in there for hours like I have. Don't forget you can also catch all three episodes of our series on History Hit right now. If you're a subscriber, I hope you'll give them a look out and enjoy them. If not, then now's a great time to grab a free trial and make the most of it. There's plenty of medieval goodness on there for you to sink you. teeth into. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all of your friends and family

that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find the show. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone Medieval with history hits.