In the summer of 1381, the men of Kent and Essex did something that English peasants had never done before: they rose in coordinated rebellion against the social order that kept them in servitude, marched on London, occupied the capital, burned the palace of the hated John of Gaunt and murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury. For a few extraordinary days, the lowest class of medieval England held its capital at their mercy and its king in negotiation. The Peasants' Revolt was the first great popular uprising in English history, and its failure to achieve lasting change does not diminish its extraordinary character.
The immediate trigger was the poll tax of 1380 — the third such levy in four years, a flat-rate tax of one shilling per head on every person over fifteen, proportionally far heavier on the poor than on the wealthy. Tax collectors sent to enforce payment in Essex in late May 1381 met resistance that quickly spread. By early June, the men of Essex and Kent were marching under the leadership of Wat Tyler, a veteran soldier of the French wars with the organisational and tactical ability to give their anger a direction and a strategy.
The preacher John Ball gave the revolt its most radical ideological content. Ball had been imprisoned multiple times for his unorthodox preaching that the social hierarchy ordained by God and enforced by law was a human invention that could and should be abolished. His most famous formulation — when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? — stripped the aristocracy of its pretensions to divine sanction with devastating simplicity. The rebels who gathered around him understood exactly what he meant.
The rebels marched to London, opened the gates of which were opened by sympathisers within the city, and occupied it for several days with discipline remarkable for an impromptu popular army. They targeted the property of their enemies — John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace was systematically destroyed — rather than engaging in general looting. The Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury and the Treasurer Robert Hales, two of the most hated figures of the regime, were dragged from the Tower of London and beheaded on Tower Hill.
The resolution came at Smithfield on 15 June 1381, when the fourteen-year-old Richard II met the rebels in negotiation. In the confrontation that followed, Wat Tyler was struck down by the Lord Mayor of London William Walworth — stabbed while still in parley with the king. It was Richard himself, with extraordinary personal courage for an adolescent, who rode forward to the leaderless rebel host and declared himself their new captain, promising to grant their demands. The rebels dispersed. The promises were then revoked. The rebellion was over.
The revolt failed in its immediate objectives. The poll tax was abandoned, but serfdom was not abolished by royal proclamation. The process by which English peasants gained their freedom from villeinage was gradual, economic rather than political — the labour scarcity created by the Black Death giving peasants the practical leverage that the revolt had failed to secure by force. But the revolt's significance in British historical memory has always exceeded its immediate achievements: it demonstrated that the poor could act collectively, that the social order rested on force rather than consent, and that those at the bottom of the hierarchy had not entirely accepted their place in it.
