Middle English Literature

The Revolt
In May 1381 people in Essex gathered together and refused to pay poll
taxes to a local steward, eventually forcing him and other officials who
attempted to support him to leave the area. In the next few weeks villagers
and rural workers in Kent, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk,
and elsewhere, not only in an eastern arc around London, but farther away
in Leicestershire, Northampton, Yorkshire, and Hampshire, collectively re-
sisted local powers and special royal commissions sent to suppress the new
uprisings. Their actions in the countryside and towns included beheading
minor officials and those who tried to enforce legal actions against them as
well as clerks and lawyers who were part of intended proceedings, attacking
the houses of local oligarchs, freeing prisoners from jails, looting and burn-
ing especially records of villeinage and land holdings, and destroying the
property of oppressive secular and religious lords.
On June 11–14 thousands of men and women from these areas met
up with others in London, burning John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace and
St. John’s Hospital, Clerkenwell, and killing most notably Simon Sudbury,
Archbishop of Canterbury, and Sir Robert Hales, master of St. John’s and
Treasurer for the crown. Richard II, still in his minority and 14 years old,
made his first serious foray into national politics when he tried to calm
matters in the city and throughout the realm by agreeing to some of the
rebel demands and finally meeting with one of their leaders, Wat Tyler, at
Smithfeld, about which the Anonimalle Chronicle excerpt tells below.
The causes of the uprisings throughout England that reached a highpoint
in May–July 1381 were many. In several areas free tenants were more
The Revolt
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Labor and Capital
numerous than serfs, yet even the free were made subject to a variety of fees
and were obliged to perform labor for their ecclesiastical and secular land-
lords. Landowners had also recently renewed a variety of measures to put
the relatively better-off laborers and craftspeople back in what was thought
of as their natural places, out of which they had been breaking free at least
since the first outbreak of the pestilence in 1348 (see “Ordinance and Statute
of Laborers,” p. 163, and “Sumptuary,” p. 215). Local and probably corrupt
or at least arrogant officials enforced repeated national taxes, including the
inequitable and much-resisted poll taxes. The rebels demanded an end to
serfdom, the heads of those who tried to enforce the recent discriminatory
taxes, and an end to local corruption by means of greater participation in
local governments.
Accounts of large and small rebellions and their suppression exist in
chronicles, and parliamentary and local records (see the image “Froissart,
Chroniques,” p. 151). Historians credit the “anonimalle” (that is, anonymous)
author’s account in the Anonimalle Chronicle with accuracy, perhaps even
eye-witness reporting in places, impressions which the attention to detail
and less-distinct expressions of opinion reinforce. The chronicle survives in
a unique manuscript from St. Mary’s Abbey in York, the Benedictine abbey
of central importance in Yorkshire. It is over 350 folios long and contains
versions of the French Brut and Latin Lanercost chronicles as well as other
miscellaneous records. The scribes of the manuscript copied from chronicles
and records now lost to continue from where the Brut finishes its narrative
at 1333, the St. Mary’s compilers ending their account with events in 1382.
Further reading
Dobson, R. B. (ed.) (1983) The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. London: Macmillan.
Hilton, R. H. (1973) Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the