The Peasants' Revolt, 1381
Long-Term Causes — The Black Death and Its Aftermath
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 did not begin in 1381. Its causes ran back thirty years to the Black Death of 1348–49. The plague killed roughly 40% of the English population in eighteen months. Whole villages were abandoned. The labour shortage that followed gave surviving peasants real bargaining power for the first time. Lords had to compete for workers; wages climbed; some peasants left their manor without permission, hoping a new lord would not ask awkward questions.
Parliament responded with the Statute of Labourers in 1351. The law tried to freeze wages at pre-plague levels, ban peasants from leaving their manor, and force the unemployed to accept work for whoever offered it first. Enforcement was patchy — lords who needed labour quietly paid higher wages anyway — but the statute symbolised a regime that protected lords from the consequences of a labour market changing in workers’ favour.
The Black Death of 1348–49 killed about 40% of the English population, creating a labour shortage that gave peasants real wage-bargaining power. The 1351 Statute of Labourers tried to suppress this shift by freezing wages at pre-plague levels — a long-term grievance that fed into the 1381 revolt.
Mid-Term Causes — War, Boy Kings and a Hated Regime
The Hundred Years War with France was going badly. English forces had lost the territory that Edward III won at Crécy and Poitiers, and the war was draining the treasury. Edward III died in 1377; his successor was the ten-year-old Richard II. Real power lay with the king’s uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster — widely loathed for his corruption and connections to a war that produced taxes but no victories.
Religion mattered too. The radical preacher John Ball roamed Kent and Essex preaching social equality. His most famous line summed up the mood: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” God had not created lords and peasants — humans had. That argument, repeated in village churches and at market crosses, gave revolt a religious legitimacy.
The Trigger — The 1381 Poll Tax
A poll tax is a flat tax charged per head. England had three of them in four years. The first in 1377 cost 4d per adult; the second in 1379 was graduated by income; the third in 1381 was a flat 12d — three days’ wages for a labourer — on every adult over fifteen. Evasion was rampant; tax collectors used aggressive methods to extract payment, including, according to one chronicler, lifting peasant girls’ skirts to check whether they were old enough to be taxed.
In late May 1381, villagers in Fobbing, Essex, drove off the tax collectors with sticks. The rising spread fast. Within ten days, peasants from Essex and Kent were marching on London under the banner of Wat Tyler, an obscure but charismatic figure who had served as a soldier in France.
The rebels demanded an end to serfdom, the abolition of the poll tax, the death of ‘traitors’ like John of Gaunt, the dissolution of corrupt landlordism, and a new relationship between the king and his people. Their grievances combined economic hardship, religious idealism and political resentment.
The Rising in London, June 1381
On 13 June, Tyler’s men crossed London Bridge into the city. They burned the Savoy Palace, John of Gaunt’s opulent residence on the Strand, smashing its treasures rather than looting them. They opened the prisons and destroyed the property of the king’s ministers.
On 14 June, the fourteen-year-old Richard II rode out to meet the rebels at Mile End. He listened to their grievances and granted charters abolishing serfdom and offering pardons. Many rebels left for home, believing they had won. While the king was at Mile End, other rebels stormed the Tower of London, dragged out the Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury (also Lord Chancellor) and the Treasurer Robert Hales, and beheaded them on Tower Hill. Flemish merchants were killed in the city the same day. Sudbury’s head was set on London Bridge.
Smithfield and the King’s Trick
The next day, 15 June, Richard met Tyler again at Smithfield. The encounter ended in violence — the Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck Tyler with a dagger; Tyler fell from his horse and was killed. The rebels were on the brink of attacking when the boy-king rode forward and shouted, according to chronicler Jean Froissart, “You shall have no captain but me.” The rebels, perhaps stunned, dispersed.
Within weeks Richard had revoked the charters. “Villeins ye are still, and villeins ye shall remain,” he reportedly told a delegation. Ringleaders were hunted down; John Ball was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Albans on 15 July 1381. By November at least 1,500 rebels had been executed or killed in the reprisals. The king’s broken promise echoes the pattern that will recur with the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 and the Peterloo crowds in 1819 — rulers buy time with concessions, then renege when the moment passes.
Impact — What the Revolt Achieved
In the immediate term, the revolt failed: leaders died, charters were revoked, the rebels lost. But the poll tax was abandoned and not levied again for centuries. Serfdom continued to decline organically over the next century, partly because lords feared another rising. And a powerful precedent was set — ordinary people had marched on London, killed the Archbishop of Canterbury and forced the king to negotiate face-to-face. After 1381, no English regime could ignore the political existence of commoners.
Several AQA factors converge. Chance: the Black Death created the labour shortage that empowered peasants. The economy: the poll tax was the immediate trigger. Communication: travelling preachers like John Ball spread ideas through sermons and at market crosses. The role of the individual: Wat Tyler and John Ball gave the rising leadership and ideology. Government: a weak boy-king regime under John of Gaunt’s unpopular guidance was the ultimate target. No single factor ‘caused’ 1381 — the conjunction did.