Peasants’ Revolt

After the Black Death labour was scarce and wages rose, but the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the Statute of Labourers (1351) tried to hold them at pre-plague levels, while the costly war with France required ever new taxes. Parliament granted three poll taxes in four years; the third, voted in November 1380, was levied at a flat rate of 12 pence on every person over fifteen and was widely evaded. On 30 May 1381 the attempt of the commissioner John Bampton to collect arrears at Brentwood in Essex ended in violence, and the revolt spread rapidly through Essex and Kent. The Kentish rebels took Rochester Castle on 6 June; the next day, according to the Anonimalle Chronicle, they chose Wat Tyler as their leader at Maidstone, entered Canterbury on 10 June and on 12 June reached Blackheath, where John Ball asked them: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?”

On 13 June the rebels, joined by many Londoners, entered the city, opened the prisons, burned the law records and the Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt and hunted down officials and Flemish immigrants. On 14 June Richard II met them at Mile End and promised to abolish serfdom, while another band entered the Tower and beheaded the chancellor, Archbishop Simon Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales. At Smithfield on 15 June a quarrel broke out during Tyler’s talks with the king: the mayor of London, William Walworth, and, it seems, the royal squire Ralph Standish struck him down, and Richard led the rebels away while Walworth gathered the city militia. Risings in East Anglia — at Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge and Norwich — and as far as York, Scarborough and Bridgwater were put down; Bishop Henry Despenser routed the Norfolk rebels at North Walsham on 25 or 26 June.

On 2 July the king revoked his charters; John Ball was executed at St Albans on 15 July, and by November at least 1,500 rebels had been executed or killed. No further poll tax was attempted, and the Commons resolved that the war effort in France should be substantially reduced. Serfdom declined in England over the following decades, mainly for economic reasons; historians today are less certain than their predecessors that the revolt itself changed the course of English history.