The Peasants' Revolt

In June 1381, fifty thousand ordinary English men, women and children walked off their land, picked up the tools of their trade, and marched on London. They came from Essex. They came from Kent. They came from the eastern counties. They came because a tax commissioner had been driven out of an Essex village called Fobbing, and the king had sent soldiers, and the soldiers had been driven out too. They came because for the first time in their lives, they understood that the way things were was not the way things had to be.

They burned the Savoy Palace. They opened the prisons. They held the capital of England for three days. And then they were betrayed.

The world of 1381

If you were born a serf in 1381, you were not a free man. You could not leave your village without permission. You could not marry without permission. You could not sell your own labour. The land you worked belonged to a lord you had never met. Your father was a serf. His father was a serf. And you had been told your son would be a serf too.

This was the system. It had stood for centuries. It was not going anywhere.

So you were told.

But something had cracked. Thirty years before 1381, the Black Death had come and killed half of England. The fields stood unsown. The harvest stood unbrought. Labour was suddenly scarce, and labour that is scarce gets paid more. For thirty years, ordinary people had been quietly getting richer. Some bought their freedom from serfdom outright. Others simply walked away. The powerful hated it. Every law they made, the people walked around. The Statute of Labourers, nailed to every market cross in England, demanded peasants work for pre-plague wages. The peasants laughed. The powerful were losing their grip.

The spark

The richest man in England in 1381 was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the king's uncle, and he had a war with France to pay for. His answer was a tax on every adult head in England, no matter how rich or poor. The duke and the dairymaid paid the same. They called it the Poll Tax. In four years they tried it three times. The third one was one too many.

Across the country, ordinary people simply refused to register. Tax returns came back showing England had somehow lost a third of its population. So Gaunt sent commissioners to find the missing payers. In May 1381, one of them, a man called Thomas Bampton, arrived in the Essex village of Fobbing.

The men of Fobbing told him they had already paid. Bampton said they would pay again. They drove him out. The king sent soldiers to enforce the tax. The villagers drove the soldiers out too.

And word travelled.

The march

Essex rose first. Then Kent. Then the eastern counties. Villages emptied. Men with scythes and hammers. Women carrying food. Older children walking alongside their parents. In Kent, a man called Wat Tyler took command. A soldier. A tradesman. The kind of man with the bearing of someone who has fought before and worked with his hands.

His first move was to break open Maidstone Prison and free a man called John Ball, the radical priest who had been preaching against the system for years. The army that freed him began to walk to London. Every village they passed sent more.

By the time they reached Blackheath, just south of the river, they were fifty thousand strong. From farms and forges and weaver's cottages. Walking together toward London. To tell the powerful that enough was enough.

From the Tower of London, a fourteen-year-old king watched them gather. His name was Richard II. And in the Savoy Palace, the king's uncle wondered if the people would dare to come for him.

They would. They burned the Savoy Palace to the ground. Gaunt escaped on horseback to Scotland.

The question

That night on Blackheath, John Ball climbed onto a cart in the centre of the gathering. Fifty thousand ordinary people held still and silent around him. And he asked them a question.

"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"

When the first man dug the earth and the first woman spun thread, there were no lords. The world was made of people. Everything else, the titles, the manors, the laws that said you could not move from your village, all of it was made by men. And what men made, men could unmake.

For the first time in many of their lives, the people gathered on that field understood that the way things are is not the way things have to be.

The promise, and the betrayal

The next morning, the king rode out to meet them. Just a boy of fourteen on a horse, in front of fifty thousand armed peasants, with no army between him and the people. At Mile End, just outside the city walls, Wat Tyler stepped forward and gave him the demands. End serfdom. End forced labour. End the Poll Tax. Pardons for everyone there. And the head of John of Gaunt.

The king agreed to all of it. He had clerks write out charters of freedom on the spot. Hundreds of them. Handed out to the rebels to take home to their villages. Sealed by the king himself. Freedom.

The next day at Smithfield, Tyler approached the king with new and bolder demands. He spoke with the easy confidence of a man who had already won. He did not see the trap.

William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, had not slept in two days. He had watched the city burn. He drew his dagger and stabbed Wat Tyler in the throat. Tyler fell. The soldiers dragged him away and cut his head off in front of the king. The crowd raised their bows.

But the king rode forward alone. A fourteen-year-old boy walking his horse into fifty thousand armed peasants. "I am your king. I will be your leader. Follow me."

The crowd, leaderless, in shock, followed him. He led them out of London. And then he revoked every promise.

"Serfs you are. And serfs you shall remain."

The royal army went to work. Over fifteen hundred of them were executed. Hanged. Drawn and quartered. Heads on spikes on London Bridge. John Ball was hanged, drawn and quartered in St Albans. The king was there to see it.

The dream was dead. Or so it looked.

What actually happened

They thought they had lost. They had not.

The Poll Tax was never collected again in their lifetime. Or their children's lifetime. It would be six hundred and nine years before any government in England dared to try it again.

The lords could not hold the people back. Their villeins kept running. To other manors. To the towns. Some bought their freedom outright. Most simply left. Parliament was deterred from raising another war tax. The Hundred Years' War shifted because the powerful no longer dared squeeze the people.

Within a hundred years, serfdom in England had effectively died out. Not because the powerful chose to free their people. Because the powerful had learned what happened when they refused.

In a village in Essex, a peasant who had marched to Blackheath watched his son grow up free. And in turn, his son's son. The land they worked was theirs. No steward watched. No lord's marker stood at the gate. The triumph landed quietly, generationally, in the lives of people who would never appear in a history book.

The echo

The lesson did not die. Centuries passed. Empires rose and fell. But the lesson did not die.

The Putney Debates of 1647. The Levellers. The Chartists of the 1840s. The Tolpuddle Martyrs of 1834. The Suffragettes of the early twentieth century. Every uprising drew on what happened at Smithfield. Every time the powerful pushed too far, the people pushed back.

And in 1990, a Prime Minister tried to bring the Poll Tax back. The people marched on London again. Two hundred thousand of them. Following the same route the peasants took six hundred years earlier. The tax was withdrawn within a year. Within months, the Prime Minister was gone.

The powerful learned the same lesson. They always learn the same lesson.

Every right we have today was taken, not given. By people like the fifty thousand on Blackheath.