Imagine a tax collector turning up in your village for the third time in four years, demanding a shilling from every man and woman over fifteen, rich or poor. Now imagine that your parents' generation had lived through the Black Death, that the landowners had spent thirty years trying to hold your wages down by law, and that the war with France, which the taxes were meant to pay for, was going badly. It is not hard to see why, in the early summer of 1381, the people of Essex and Kent finally had enough.
The Peasants' Revolt: Quick Facts
- Date: late May to July 1381, with the climax in London on 13-15 June
- Where: Essex, Kent and London, with risings in Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire
- Important figures: King Richard II, Wat Tyler, John Ball, Jack Straw, Archbishop Simon Sudbury, Mayor William Walworth, John of Gaunt
- Main cause: the third poll tax in four years, on top of the labour laws passed after the Black Death
- Outcome: the rebels were dispersed, their leaders executed and the king's promises withdrawn, and the poll tax was abandoned
Why the Peasants Revolted
To understand the revolt, you have to go back to 1348. The Black Death killed somewhere between a third and a half of the people of England, and the survivors suddenly found themselves in demand. There were fields to plough and harvests to bring in, and not enough hands to do it, so labourers asked for higher wages, and many of them got them. The landowners, who sat in Parliament, did not like this at all. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 ordered everyone to work for the wages paid before the plague, and made it an offence to leave your lord or ask for more. The courts enforced it, and it was hated.
Many of the people who rose in 1381 were not the poorest in the land, either. They were villagers, craftsmen and small farmers who had done reasonably well since the plague and resented the old restrictions of serfdom, which tied a villein to his lord's manor and obliged him to work the lord's land for nothing. Having tasted a little freedom, they wanted more.
Then there were the poll taxes. The government of the young King Richard II, who came to the throne in 1377 at the age of ten, was desperate for money to fight the Hundred Years War. Parliament granted a poll tax of fourpence a head in 1377, a graduated one in 1379, and in December 1380 a third, at a shilling a head, three times the first. A shilling was several days' wages for a labourer, and the rich paid the same as the poor. People dodged it on a huge scale; the returns for 1381 showed the adult population of England apparently falling by around a third since 1377, which even the government knew was impossible. So it sent commissioners into the counties to find the missing taxpayers.
The Rising Begins
On 30 May 1381 one of those commissioners, John Bampton, arrived at Brentwood in Essex and summoned the men of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope to explain themselves. They refused to pay a penny more and threw him out of town. When the government sent the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas to punish them, the rebels chased him off and killed several of his clerks. Within days the whole county was up in arms, and messages were passing across the Thames estuary to Kent.
In Kent the rebels found their leader in Wat Tyler, about whom we know frustratingly little. He may have been a tiler from Maidstone or Dartford, and some chroniclers say he had served as a soldier in France. He was clearly a natural leader who could keep a crowd together and make it follow him. In early June the Kentish rebels took Rochester Castle, and a few days later they broke open the archbishop's prison at Maidstone and freed a radical priest named John Ball.
John Ball's Sermon
John Ball had spent twenty years wandering the country preaching that all men were equal in the sight of God, and the Church had locked him up at least three times for it. On 12 June, with tens of thousands of rebels camped on Blackheath outside London, he preached to them on a rhyme that everyone knew:
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
In other words, when God created the first man and woman, one digging and the other spinning, there were no lords and no serfs. According to the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, who hated him, Ball went on to tell the crowd that from the beginning all men had been created equal, and that serfdom had been brought in by the unjust oppression of wicked men. It was dangerous talk in 1381, and he was in no doubt that he would pay for it.
The Rebels in London
On 13 June, the feast of Corpus Christi, the rebels crossed London Bridge into the city. Some Londoners let them in, and many joined them. Their first target was the Savoy Palace on the Strand, the magnificent home of John of Gaunt, the king's uncle, whom they blamed (rather unfairly) for the poll tax. They burned it to the ground. Interestingly, they did not loot it. The chroniclers report that the rebels threw gold and silver plate into the Thames and smashed jewels rather than steal them, and that one man caught stealing a silver cup was thrown into the fire himself. They wanted it understood that they were there for justice, not plunder. They then broke open the prisons, attacked the lawyers' chambers at the Temple, and burned the records they found there.
The king and his council had shut themselves in the Tower of London. On 14 June the fourteen-year-old Richard rode out to meet the Essex rebels at Mile End, where he agreed to their demands: an end to serfdom, land rents of fourpence an acre, and free trade throughout the kingdom. His clerks began writing out charters of freedom for each village. It was a brave thing for a boy to do.
But while the king was at Mile End, a band of rebels got into the Tower. They dragged out Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England, and Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, and beheaded them on Tower Hill. Sudbury's head was stuck on a pole over the gate of London Bridge. The rebels also turned on the Flemish weavers and merchants in the city, murdering perhaps a hundred and fifty of them. The revolt was turning into a massacre.
Showdown at Smithfield
On 15 June Richard met the Kentish rebels at Smithfield, just outside the city walls. Wat Tyler rode up to the king, took his hand, and called him brother. He demanded more than the Essex men had: an end to all lordship except the king's, the division of the Church's lands among the people, and one bishop for the whole of England. What happened next depends on which chronicle you read. Tyler seems to have called for a jug of water, rinsed his mouth "in a very rude and disgusting fashion" in front of the king, and got into an argument with one of Richard's attendants. When the Mayor of London, William Walworth, tried to arrest him, Tyler went for him with a dagger, and Walworth struck him down with his sword. One of the king's squires stabbed him as he fell.
For a moment everything hung in the balance. The rebels drew their bows. And Richard, still only fourteen, spurred his horse towards them and, according to the chroniclers, told them that he would be their captain and that they should follow him. Remarkably, they did. He led them away to the fields at Clerkenwell, where Walworth's hastily raised militia surrounded them, and the rebels, leaderless and confused, went home. Tyler had been carried into St Bartholomew's hospital nearby; Walworth had him dragged out and beheaded, and his head replaced Sudbury's on London Bridge. Walworth's dagger, or one said to be it, is still kept at Fishmongers' Hall in London.
Revenge
Once the danger had passed, Richard's promises went with it. The charters of freedom were cancelled, and royal judges toured the rebel counties, hanging the ringleaders. When a group of Essex villagers came to ask the king to honour his word, Walsingham tells us he replied: "Rustics you were, and rustics you are still. You will remain in bondage." John Ball was captured at Coventry, tried at St Albans before the king, and hanged, drawn and quartered on 15 July 1381. In East Anglia, where the rising had been just as violent, the warlike Bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, crushed the rebels in battle at North Walsham and executed their leader, Geoffrey Litster.
Did the Revolt Achieve Anything?
On the face of it, the Peasants' Revolt failed completely. Its leaders were dead, its charters torn up, and serfdom was still the law of the land. But the government had learned a lesson it did not forget. Parliament never again tried a flat tax like the one of 1380 in the Middle Ages, and when Margaret Thatcher's government brought in the "community charge" in 1990, which everyone called the poll tax, it also ended with riots in London. The labour laws gradually stopped being enforced. And over the next century serfdom quietly died out in England anyway, as lords found it easier to rent out their land for cash than to force unwilling peasants to work it. The rebels of 1381 did not win their freedom that summer, but their grandchildren had it all the same.
You can read more about the lives of the people who took part on our page on peasants and serfs in the Middle Ages.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "The Peasants' Revolt of 1381" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/peasants-revolt/, September 30, 2026