1381 - THE PEASANT'S REBELLION
You would not want to have been born into the 14th century. A century where The Great Famine was followed by The Black Plague, and it's estimated half the population of Europe died. If you survived through all of that you were either extraordinarily lucky, a wealthy recluse, or both. The consequences of these disasters upon social cohesion, was devastating. The feudal traditions of deference, the economic contract and hierarchy between lord and peasant, neared the point of collapse.
For those who survived there were certainly increased opportunities. The pool of skilled workers was much reduced, this meant those with a trade could name the price for employing them. People found they were able to improve their status in life, through their own efforts. The wool and weaving trade in England was in the middle of a huge boom, and a new bourgeois merchant middle class arose. The beginnings of what was to become The Renaissance started at this time. So on the surface at least, Europe and England were on the way to bouncing back better.
However, the aristocracy, monarchy and religious institutions, behaved as if these social changes were immoral, needing to be halted and reversed. They introduced a cap on wage rises, and brought in sumptuary laws to prevent people from lower classes, however rich they were, from buying certain types of goods. Rural workers began exercising their new found economic power by banding together and refusing to do work at their lords bidding. Riots broke out in Bury St Edmunds and Norwich, over the high handed and exploitative nature of the monasteries in their local economy. Hiking up the price of tithes, and land rents. Strips of land that peasants had once farmed, if the family had died out, were often embezzled by other landowners and enclosed into much larger field systems. Some peasants, now without a means to support themselves, were forced into vagrancy. Vagrancy was then criminalised. If you were poor, you really could not win. The cost of the Hundred Years War with France rattled on, and pressure from increasing taxes made the people resentful. Not to mention the cost of living itself constantly rising. England was a tinderbox primed to explode.
What triggered the revolt was high-handed tax collecting. The king had introduced a poll tax, and one man John Bampton was employed to collect unpaid arrears in Essex. A revolt broke out, quickly spreading throughout the south east of England. They burnt county records and set people free from prisons. Wat Tyler decided to lead a contingent of rebels, that gathered ever more people as they marched towards London. They had a number of clear requests - they wanted the taxes upon them reduced, the end of serfdom, and the removal of the King's senior officials and the law courts.
On reaching Blackheath, they were met by royal officials aiming to persuade them to return home. This failed. The protest progressed through the city, destroying palaces, law books, buildings in the Temple and killing any royal officials they by chance encountered. The next day, the fourteen year old King Richard met the rebels at Mile End agreeing to all their demands. This only momentarily placated the peasants, who continued on their path of wanton destruction, taking the Tower of London. So the kings agreement of the previous day, was definitely off. Two days later a militia captured Wat Tyler and other rebel leaders, killing them all. By then the revolt was spreading into East Anglia, the Midlands and North as far as York. What followed was a swift and brutal suppression across the entire country to extinguish any remaining fires of revolt.
On the surface The Peasant's Revolt, achieved none of its stated aims. But what it did do was exemplify to ordinary people the power of collective protest. Also, it gave them a sense for how near traditional economic and social hierarchies were to collapsing. Social class began to feel it was not so rigidly fixed as previously. Deference towards nobility could no longer be assumed. This was of deep concern to the institutions of the establishment. There were now consequences for taking the compliance of their citizens too much for granted.
As is often the case when those in authority lose public credibility, they never capitulate fully, as this might look weak and set a dangerous precedence. So they do only the absolute minimum to save face. The whole idea of the poll tax was in effect unenforceable, so was quietly dropped. The unpopular expensive foreign war was scaled back momentarily. And whilst serfdom continued, it was actually already in decline, as a knock on consequence of severe famine and plague. By the 15th century serfdom had totally vanished.
For the ordinary folk of England, the Peasant's Revolt, in the future, became the role model for what power, agency and acting collectively in great numbers, looked like. And increasingly over the next century they would return to flexing their right to protest in this way. To actively campaign for things to either cease, be restored or changed. Heads could now roll.
Next Episode - The Cade's and Cornish Rebellions
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