The great English rebellion of the summer of 1381, a sudden and violent uprising against the country’s richest and most powerful lords known as the Peasants’ Revolt, was one of the most astonishing events of the Middle Ages. Led by the mysterious general Wat Tyler and a visionary preacher called John Ball, the Peasants’ Revolt was organized with military precision, and fired by genuinely revolutionary zeal of the sort that we seldom associate with this far-removed period of history.
As if from nowhere, a huge army of farmers, bakers, brewers and churchmen drawn from all over England rose up and attacked their masters. They nearly brought down the government. Several of the country’s most senior officials and hundreds of other people were murdered before the rising dissolved into chaos and official retribution. Those who survived were deeply scarred by what they witnessed. Thanks to its radical motives, violent methods, unprecedented success and inherent drama, the Peasants’ Revolt was recorded with breathless horror by writers who lived through it and has inspired great writers and artists from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first. It was England’s first great popular rebellion and it remains in many ways its most exciting and important.
The Peasants’ Revolt struck with little warning. Beginning in the late spring of 1381, insurrection swept through virtually the entire country. It was sparked by a series of three socially unjust poll taxes, each more recklessly imposed on the population than the last. These taxes were all the more hateful because they were conceived against the background of oppressive labour laws that had been imposed, broadly speaking, to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Yet this was not simply a tax revolt. It took aim at what many ordinary people in England saw as a long and worsening period of corrupt, incompetent government and a wholesale failure of what we would today call social justice. Like most rebellions, it was the sum of many parts. A radical cabal at the centre proposed a total overhaul of the organization of English government, the Church and feudal lordship. They carried along thousands of honest, discontented working folk who agreed with the sentiment that things ought to be better. At the fringes were many opportunistic plunderers, score-settlers and incorrigible criminals, to whom any opportunity for violence and theft was welcome.
The rebellion’s focal point and moment of high drama came in London on the festival weekend of Thursday the 13th to Sunday the 16th of June. On that weekend a crowd of thousands who had marched to London from Canterbury, in Kent, on a sort of anti-pilgrimage, joined with an excited mob from the capital. They gathered to demonstrate, riot and pass bloody judgment on their rulers. London, which had been riven with anti-government sentiment for nearly five years, collapsed into anarchy within hours of the rebels’ arrival on the south bank of the River Thames. Finding no shortage of allies within its walls, the rebels achieved in an astonishingly short time the total paralysis of government, terrorizing the most important men in the state and destroying famous buildings such as the Savoy Palace. Public order dissolved, and was restored only with great difficulty. Once the rebels were finally driven out of the city, through a combination of appeasement and eventually military action, the Crown was forced to declare what amounted to military rule across London. But this was only partially successful. Outside London, the rebellious spirit had proven infectious, and there were major revolts in Essex, Kent and East Anglia, as well as more isolated riots and episodes of urban disorder in Somerset, Sussex, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire and Yorkshire.
England at large remained convulsed by violence for months.
The rebellion was both a comprehensive damnation of the government and a startling announcement of a new political consciousness among the people of England. The lower orders, who had for generations been treated by the landed and powerful as little more than beasts of burden and battlefield fodder, showed themselves to be surprisingly politically aware, and capable both of independent organization and blistering anger. Many of England’s nobles, merchants, lawyers and wealthy churchmen had long suspected a tendency to violence in the labouring classes – now it appeared that they were confirmed in all their fears.
The revolt of 1381 was unlike any of the great moments of mass, armed resistance to Plantagenet rule that had gone before. The men who had imposed the Magna Carta on King John in 1215 were wealthy barons. The Second Barons’ War was led by Simon de Montfort: an earl and the king’s brother-in-law. Edward II was deposed and killed in 1326 by his estranged queen and her aristocratic lover. The Peasants’ Revolt marks a clean break from all that. Placed in its broadest historical context it marked the beginning of a rebellious tradition among the ordinary English which has been repeated ever since – from Jack Cade’s rebels in 1450 to Robert Ket’s in 1549; from Lord Gordon’s riots in 1780 to the famous British ‘poll tax’ rebellion of the early spring of 1990, raised in protest against the community charge that was levied by the government of Margaret Thatcher.
This English tradition of rebellion would have profound consequences in the United States. Unjust taxation and popular rage at unfair government by isolated elites roused the rebellious spirit of British subjects in the American colonies during the 1770s. The American rebels had much in common with their English forefathers who had gone to war with pitchforks and rusty swords on the other side of the Atlantic four centuries before. In his sermon to the rebels as they approached London, John Ball asked, rhetorically, ‘when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?’ The truth that all men were created equal was as self-evident to him then as it would one day be to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Even today, there are many Americans who would cheer the English rebels’ aims of rolling back government from their everyday lives, shunning oppressive taxation and piercing the cozy relationship between mercantile interests and political elites.
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Summer of Blood was my first book, originally published in the UK in 2009. In an introductory note to that edition I declared the book was ‘the start of a project’ to retell for a new generation the great stories of the Middle Ages. This was bold, but I am happy to reflect that in the years since I have made good on my promise. Summer of Blood set the template for my subsequent works, The Plantagenets, The Wars of the Roses and Magna Carta, and I am delighted that it can now be read and enjoyed alongside them in the United States.
This book was originally edited by Arabella Pike at HarperCollins in the UK, who gently and patiently encouraged me to shape the text as it is largely reproduced here. I remain very grateful to her. Regarding this new edition of the book I wish to thank just two people. The first is my agent Georgina Capel, who has been a rock in my life for the last decade. Summer of Blood was where we started. The second is my editor at Viking, Joy de Menil, whose advice, dedication, trust and friendship I value more with every book we publish together.
Finally, I write with love to my wife, Jo, and our two children, Violet and Ivy, who get me up in the morning in more ways than they know.
Dan Jones
Battersea, London
2016