war.
The personal prosperity produced by the population decline led to increased self-confidence and social unrest. Since the thirteenth century there had been localized protests against the demands by manorial lords for compulsory services (serfdom), but protests had become more frequent since the Black Death had shifted the balance of power away from manorial lords in favour of labourers and craftsmen. These protests were becoming more sophisticated as peasants hired lawyers to argue that their particular manor had once formed part of the royal estate (where all men were free). As a result, the Commons claimed in the Parliament of 1377 that villeins (serfs) had ‘withdrawn the customs and services due to their lords, holding that they are completely discharged of all manner of service due both from their persons and their holdings’.
All over Europe, in Paris in 1358, in Florence and Ghent in 1378, groups of protesters were making their voices heard in armed clamour. There is no single explanation for this volley of protests, since the pressures of population decline, price fluctuations, the imposition of taxation, the spread of literacy and the consequences of warfare affected different groups in different ways. But what was unique about the 1381 rising in England was that it was the only one that was truly national: it was the most widespread and the most coordinated. Crucially, the small size of England and its centralized government provided the protesters with a single objective: the king and his council.
* * *
In June 1381 thousands of men – and some women – from south-east England converged on London in a mass armed protest. The young king, Richard II, was virtually held hostage in the Tower, some of his leading councillors were murdered in the streets of London, and the news of the rising sparked off other localized protests further afield. This mass protest, popularly known as the Peasants’ Revolt, has achieved iconic status in the English political memory, more recently in the protests organized to resist the proposed new community charge (aka the poll tax) in 1990. The revolt was extremely important but not necessarily for the reasons for which it is remembered.
It was called the Peasants’ Revolt because that is how the hostile monastic chroniclers viewed it: a revolt of the
rustici
who were, in their eyes, scarcely human. But any revolt on a mass scale in late medieval England was bound to be composed of country people since they comprised over 90 per cent of the population. Thus there could be no mass revolt in which they did not participate. Moreover it is clear that many who were not ‘peasants’ also took part: local gentry and knights, townspeople and clergy. These were not the poor and downtrodden but men whose social status did not correspond to their prosperity. People from all social groups, except perhaps the aristocracy, were involved.
It is hard to discern the objectives of the protesters, but there are routes into an understanding of their motives. Two sets of ‘Demands’, apparently presented to the king in mid-June, have been preserved in chronicle accounts. On the first occasion the protesters asked for freedom from serfdom and a standard rent for land of 4d an acre; on the second, the demand for the abolition of serfdom was repeated, along with the demand for an end to lordship and the redistribution of ecclesiastical property among the people of the parish. On neither occasion was there any reference to the poll tax or to the burdens of taxation.
The organizers of the rising chose to focus on the day of the Christian festival of Corpus Christi, which was always marked throughout England by communal activity such as processions. In 1381 the feast fell on Thursday 13 June. The trigger for the risings seems to have been the activities late in May of justices of the peace at Brentwood in Essex who were enquiring into poll tax evasion. The third poll tax (or per capita tax)
The personal prosperity produced by the population decline led to increased self-confidence and social unrest. Since the thirteenth century there had been localized protests against the demands by manorial lords for compulsory services (serfdom), but protests had become more frequent since the Black Death had shifted the balance of power away from manorial lords in favour of labourers and craftsmen. These protests were becoming more sophisticated as peasants hired lawyers to argue that their particular manor had once formed part of the royal estate (where all men were free). As a result, the Commons claimed in the Parliament of 1377 that villeins (serfs) had ‘withdrawn the customs and services due to their lords, holding that they are completely discharged of all manner of service due both from their persons and their holdings’.
All over Europe, in Paris in 1358, in Florence and Ghent in 1378, groups of protesters were making their voices heard in armed clamour. There is no single explanation for this volley of protests, since the pressures of population decline, price fluctuations, the imposition of taxation, the spread of literacy and the consequences of warfare affected different groups in different ways. But what was unique about the 1381 rising in England was that it was the only one that was truly national: it was the most widespread and the most coordinated. Crucially, the small size of England and its centralized government provided the protesters with a single objective: the king and his council.
* * *
In June 1381 thousands of men – and some women – from south-east England converged on London in a mass armed protest. The young king, Richard II, was virtually held hostage in the Tower, some of his leading councillors were murdered in the streets of London, and the news of the rising sparked off other localized protests further afield. This mass protest, popularly known as the Peasants’ Revolt, has achieved iconic status in the English political memory, more recently in the protests organized to resist the proposed new community charge (aka the poll tax) in 1990. The revolt was extremely important but not necessarily for the reasons for which it is remembered.
It was called the Peasants’ Revolt because that is how the hostile monastic chroniclers viewed it: a revolt of the
rustici
who were, in their eyes, scarcely human. But any revolt on a mass scale in late medieval England was bound to be composed of country people since they comprised over 90 per cent of the population. Thus there could be no mass revolt in which they did not participate. Moreover it is clear that many who were not ‘peasants’ also took part: local gentry and knights, townspeople and clergy. These were not the poor and downtrodden but men whose social status did not correspond to their prosperity. People from all social groups, except perhaps the aristocracy, were involved.
It is hard to discern the objectives of the protesters, but there are routes into an understanding of their motives. Two sets of ‘Demands’, apparently presented to the king in mid-June, have been preserved in chronicle accounts. On the first occasion the protesters asked for freedom from serfdom and a standard rent for land of 4d an acre; on the second, the demand for the abolition of serfdom was repeated, along with the demand for an end to lordship and the redistribution of ecclesiastical property among the people of the parish. On neither occasion was there any reference to the poll tax or to the burdens of taxation.
The organizers of the rising chose to focus on the day of the Christian festival of Corpus Christi, which was always marked throughout England by communal activity such as processions. In 1381 the feast fell on Thursday 13 June. The trigger for the risings seems to have been the activities late in May of justices of the peace at Brentwood in Essex who were enquiring into poll tax evasion. The third poll tax (or per capita tax)
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