SYMHC Classics: Wat Tyler’s Rebellion

This originally came out on June tenth, twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. One of the kind of weird things to come out of the ongoing COVID nineteen pandemic has been a phenomenon that I am liking to

call bad takes about the Black Death. There are various articles and sweets and comments on our Facebook page that are all about how the Black Death was a good thing actually, because sure, while it did kill as much as half of Europe, it also did everything from increasing

wages to literally causing the Renaissance. Medieval and early modern historians have done so much debunking of these ideas through tweets and blog posts and various op eds, and today we have a topic that really illustrates that there is not some kind of a switch that got flipped that magically turned the Black Death into the Renaissance. Like It's not like in a video game where you grind up a certain amount of experience and then you unlock the Renaissance.

It did not work that way. This incident has been known as Watt Tyler's Rebellion and as the Peasant's Revolt of thirteen eighty one. Today it is more often called the Uprising of thirteen eighty one or the Great Rising.

And I just want to take a minute. I can imagine people listening to this episode and thinking that maybe we chose it because of parallels to the current situation, whereas there has been a lot of violence and destruction and property damage and in some cases deaths through this ongoing week of protests and violence that have been happening in the United States. This episode was actually written the week of May eighteenth, so if people see parallels between

this episode and what's currently happening. They are not something we tried to pick as some kind of political statement. Right. I also feel like we could do an entire episode of this wasn't a magic switch, Yes, right, Like there are a lot of the way that history is taught is that way where it's like this happened and it catalyzed this, and that's true to some extent, but it's not as though everything shifts gears suddenly. It's a very

slow progression. Well, in one of the op eds that's really been focused on debunking this whole idea says pretty clearly that a lot of ap world history classes have really framed the idea that the Black Death caused the Renaissance, but it's like a huge oversupplification. Yeah, it will become more clear as we get through this episode today. So we're not going to dwell in the details of the Black Death as an illness, but it is a necessary

part of the context of this uprising. The Black Death was really one piece of a larger pandemic, the Second Plague pandemic, which progressed through Asia, Europe, and Africa in waves from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The term the Black Deaths was coined in the eighteenth century to describe the plague that moved from eastern or Central Asia through Europe, the Mediterranean, and northern Africa between thirteen forty

six and thirteen fifty three. The Black Death was truly catastrophic. At least a third of the population of Europe died, and it was possibly as much as half. In some specific regions that was as much as eighty percent. Today's episode is really focused on England, and england population before the Black Death had been about sixty thousand people. Afterward it was half that, although some of that drop came from people who fled to other parts of Europe to

try to escape the plague. Between twenty and thirty percent of the English nobility died, along with about forty five percent of the clergy and between forty and seventy percent of the peasant class. In some cases those numbers were even higher, And then the disease itself was just horrifying. On top of having a high high mortality rate, its progression once somebody contracted it was really gruesome because the plague recurred in waves over the course of several years.

People also didn't know when it was really over, it would seem as though the danger had passed, only for another wave of illness to strike. And since there were other outbreaks of the plague in the decades after the Black Death ended, it took generations for the population to really start to recover. England was largely agrarian and the land was considered to belong to the monarch. The monarch granted land to the nobility in exchange for service, including

providing soldiers or funding at a time of war. This exchange of land for some kind of service was replicated on the lower rungs of the social and economic ladder, and this went all the way down to freeholders who owned or rented small amounts of land, and then the unfree tenants who were known as villains, bondsmen or serfs, and they were legally obligated to work for their landlord and subsist on a small plot that they kept for themselves. They were not free laborers, they were obligated to do

this in this land for service system. When a household's main tenant died, his son or another heir had to pay a fee to take his place. In England for a baron that might be one hundred pounds for a peasant. It was typically the household's best livestock animal. During the Black Death, so many English tenants died that landlords received more livestock than they could possibly take care of or use, and this was in spite of a livestock plague that

had previously killed many of these animals. Landlords sold off so many surplus animals that the market collapsed because the plague was the worst in the summer. In a lot of areas, there wasn't enough labor alive by the fall to harvest the crops that had been planted in the spring.

This labor shortage led to food shortages as unharvested crops rotted in the fields in the Similarly, not like in a video game analogy, there's just not a one to one correspondence between how many people it takes to harvest the food and how many people that food will feed. In normal times, Medieval manners also tended to be relatively self contained, with their own blacksmith and their own bakeries and their own mills, which tenants were obligated to use.

If an estate's only blacksmith or miller or brewer died, there might not be anybody to replace them, or anybody else who really knew how to do that work. Although the medieval world wasn't exclusively Christian, the Christian Church was colossally power. High placed church officials also held high ranking government positions, and high ranking nobles were often prominent in the church. Aside from that, religion was threaded through virtually

every aspect of everyday life. But the Black Deaths started to undermine the Church's power. Because the disease spread so easily, the most compassionate and most involved clergy the ones who really tried to comfort and care for the sick in their families, They were among the plague's first victims. In general, the clergy who survived were the ones who had not been doing that work. The plague also really devastated monastic communities,

where people lived in very close quarters. This caused such a huge labor shortage within the church that it had to relax its criteria for clergy, and that led to an influx of people who were more interested in the income or living that came with the position than in actually carrying out a clergyman's duties. People became more distrustful of clergymen and of the church and its involvement in everyday life, especially in the face of devastations so immense

that people wondered if God was punishing them. Aside from all of that and the Black Death's immediate aftermath, so many people had died and so much had been disrupted that things turn into a state of near lawlessness. And this brings us to some of the things that have led people to argue that the Black Death was maybe a good thing, although none of them are all that straightforward. Before the Black Death, England was in the middle of

a land crunch in addition to an increasing population. Leading up to the thirteenth century, people had divided their estates among their heirs, which had resulted in people holding smaller and smaller amounts of land. This led to a shift to primogeniture, in which the eldest son was the only one to inherit, but that shift couldn't really undo what

it happened in those earlier generations. After the Black Death, though, a lot of families were able to reconsolidate their holdings among the people who survived, and then in some way cases, to increase those holdings further through intermarriage with other neighboring families. People went from having estates that were just too small

to be profitable to having ones that were actually lucrative. Again, people who had not been able to acquire land at all because there just wasn't any were able to buy or rent these newly available parcels. That said, because of the labor shortage, it wasn't uncommon for people to have trouble finding enough workers for these newly consolidated estates. Also, a landlord whose tenants had died or left was no longer being paid rent, He was no longer collecting fees

for the use of the manor's mills or ovens. If he couldn't find hired labor to replace his previous workers, his crops went to waste and his livestock went untended. With an excess of land and a shortage of workers, many turned their attention from cultivated crops to livestock, which was less labor intensive. The massive labor shortage made it easier for surviving workers to negotiate better terms for themselves.

People who were dissatisfied with their pay or their working or living conditions could find a different job on another manner, or they could move to a city or a town more easily. Tenant farmers were able to negotiate lower rents or to rent larger amounts of land that could, at least in theory, yield a bigger income. In general, wages increased, often by as much as fifty percent, and sometimes more than that. However, in many cases it probably wasn't that

people were being paid more for the same work. People were working more to make up for the shortage of labor. The increase in incomes was also at least partially offset by rising inflation and higher prices on goods that were now in short supply. There's also the part where for the lowest paid people, they sort of went for a making not enough to live on to barely enough to

live on. Two times zero is zero, right. People who moved from the country to the city after the Black Death generally had more opportunities of vail to them, especially because urban employers were dealing with their own labor shortages. Trade guilds started shortening the links of their apprenticeships to try to replenish their numbers, but this really meant that there was also a big loss of knowledge, skill, and

quality among the various trades. And in some cases the number of newcomers to the cities just outstripped the number of available jobs, causing these recent arrivals to just become a drain on resources. As a trend, merchants fared better than rural landlords because their work didn't require the large labor force that agriculture did. This was especially true as increasing wages and ongoing shifts in supply and demand allowed

more people to buy better quality and luxury goods. Of course, England's wealthiest classes saw all of this, the increased freedom for workers, the rising wages, and the luxury goods becoming more available to the masses as a threat. They tried to return things to the way they had been before

the plague. Parliament passed the Ordinance of Laborers in thirteen forty nine and the Statute of Laborers in thirteen fifty one to return wages to their pre pandemic levels, also to require able bodied men and women under the age of sixty to work, and to prevent people from moving

to find different or better work. These statutes were not always enforced very well, but when they were, the focus was most often on the working people who were being paid more money, not on the employers and the landlords who were paying them. In thirteen sixty three, Parliament also passed a sumptuary law to try to keep the trappings of wealth only with the wealthy. This was like the latest in a series of these laws, some of which

had been back before the Black Death. So by the time of the thirteen eighty one uprising things were at least somewhat better for some of England's population, but in general, the people who had gained the most in the wake of the Black Death were the people who already had

some wealth to start with. The working people, it had seemed like they were going to have meaningfully more money and opportunities, but thanks to things like shortages, other illness outbreaks, and the Statute of Laborers, those theoretical gains had largely disappeared or plateaued, and England's poorest people, the serfs, were still not free. We have not even talked about taxes yet, and taxes were really the spark that started this rebellion.

We will get into that after a sponsor break. The Black Death took place during the warfare between England and France that came to be known as the One Hundred Years war, even though it was really a series of intermittent conflicts that played out over a span of one hundred and sixteen years. In England, the primary way to raise money for war was through taxes, and at the time the only acceptable reason to directly tax the population was to deal within a meta threat to the realm.

This meant that warfare and taxation were tightly linked in people's minds, so if the war was going badly for England, public opinion was more likely to blame corruption and ineptitude from parliament and royal advisors who had demanded their tax money, rather than blaming the military. The One hundred Years War is generally noted as starting in thirteen thirty seven, and England saw a series of victories in the thirteen forties

and fifties, but then the tide started to turn. France allied with Scotland and attacked parts of the English coast and started reclaiming territory that it had previously ceded to England. France's Castilian allies also destroyed the English fleet in thirteen seventy two, and English forces on the ground in France suffered various setbacks. After using a variety of taxation strategies. To raise the money to pay for all of this,

Parliament passed a poll tax in thirteen seventy seven. That same year, Richard the Second, who was aged ten at the time, ascended to the throne after the death of his grandfather, Edward the Third. Richard's father, who had been next in line for the throne, had died the year before. Earlier taxes had been fractional taxes, Like their name suggests, they were based on a fraction of how much someone's

movable goods were worth. These were assessed at the community level based on how large and affluent the community was, and they left it up to each community to figure out who should pay what. So, at least in theory, it was based on your ability to pay the tax. But the thirteen seventy seven poll tax was different. It was a flat rate of four pence per person required of everyone over the age of fourteen, with the exception

of beggars. Even though everyone was paying the same amount regardless of how much money they had, this poll tax didn't seem all that egregious to people. Fourpence was about the price of a dozen eggs. It was still more than a day's pay for the lowest paid laborers, though England's ill needed more money though in early thirteen seventy eight, Parliament passed another fractional tax that was due that February.

Many towns were also required to build ships to bolster the English fleet, and since they had to pay for this themselves, this was perceived as yet another tax. Than In thirteen seventy nine, Charles the fifth of France annexed the Duchy of Brittany and there was another poll tax to try to fund efforts to restore its independence. This second poll tax was on a sliding scale based on a person's profession, with thirty three different professions listited different

tax rates. Anybody who wasn't a member of one of those professions was again taxed at four pence. The government had pawned the King's jewels and had secured loans from several towns, but combined with the poll tax, this still wasn't enough, in part because of increasing tax evasion, and then the newly raised English fleet was scattered in a storm and nearly twenty ships were wrecked. Other fractional tax followed, this one framed as a loan that would be repaid

rather than an actual tax. Taxes had to be approved by Parliament, and Parliament was not expected to be in session again for the next eighteen months, so people believe this tax but really alone, would be the last one for a while. Instead, Parliament was summoned again in November of thirteen eighty to once again approve another poll tax to fund the ongoing war. Like the thirteen seventy seven tax,

this poll tax was a flat rate. Every person over the age of fifteen was required to pay twelvepence or one shilling to add insult to injury. This tax was due in two installments, the first at the end of February and the second at the beginning of June. There was not a lot of time to plan for that first payment, and since it was due toward the end of winter, it was also at the hardest time of

year for rural people. It's possible that no tax would have possibly gone well at this point, but this tax was despised. It was three times as large as the previous flat rate tax, and for large households it just added up to enormous amounts of money. People also doubted that the tax was really necessary. The King's uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who was highly placed in the administration, had asked for more tax revenue than the

military budget really seemed to require. People thought he was either lining his own pockets with this money or using it to pay for his own ventures that weren't directly related to the military needs of the kingdom. So England's set up population sick of paying taxes, just didn't. Tax evasion was widespread, with as many as thirty to fifty percent of people simply vanishing from the local tax rolls.

Now people were like my widowed mother, not part of my household, not not going to lay namor on there. When the government realized that the amount of money that had been elected was way less than they expected, they dispatched commissioners to investigate this rampant tax evasion. Investigations started in late May of thirteen eighty one when John Bampton and Sir John Guildsburg arrived in Brentwood in Essex, which is northeast of London and is part of the Greater

London Metropolitan Area today. Bampton was a Justice of the Peace and when delegates from Brentwood and the surrounding communities arrived to meet with him. They may have thought that he was there for the upcoming June court session. When they learned that it was really a tax investigation, the delegates were angry and astonished. Thomas Baker of Fobbing insisted that everyone had paid already and that they had a receipt from Bampton, saying so and that they would not

be paying anymore. When the commissioners ordered their guards to start making arrests, the delegates ran them out of town, armed with things like bows and arrows. Then the delegates returned to the fifteen or so towns and buil villages where they lived, and they started organizing a resistance, including spreading the word into other nearby towns in Essex. Meanwhile, the unrest also spread into Kent. June second was the day that the final tax payment was due. It was

also the holiday of Whitsunday or Pentecost. On that day, people from at least forty Essex communities met in Bocking, which is northeast of Brentwood, and swore an oath to their cause. They also started making plans to break radical priest John Ball out of prison. Ball preached on things like equality in the abolition of England's class structure. His ideas were considered heretical, and he had been excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Ball had been incarcerated at an

ecclesiastical prison. On June seventh, rebels in Kent named former soldier Walter Tyler, known as Watt, as their leader. People from Essex and Kent then marched on London, with the people of Kent first converging on Canterbury and making their

way to London via the Pilgrimage Road. At some point during all of this, John Ball was broken out of prison, and his speeches to the rebels continued to advocate for a classless society, including the widely quoted quote when Adam delved and Eve span who then was a gentleman, as

we said at the top of the show. For a long time this was known as the Peasants Revolt, and the word peasants generally conjures up an image of poor agricultural workers or landless people, and some of the people involved with the revolt definitely do fit that description, but there were also free tenants and small landholders, as well as clergy, apprentices and tradespeople. Thomas Baker and Watt Tyler were as their names suggest, a baker and a Tyler.

That doesn't necessarily mean the uprisings trades people were all free, though there were definitely bakers and Tyler's and other workers who were classified as serfs. At the same time, some of the people involved were also relatively powerful people in their communities, including having previously served as assessors or constables

or bailiffs. Women were also a huge part of the uprising, both as participants and as targets of the taxes and policies that were being protested, and as had been the case with most of the other protests, uprising and strikes that we have talked about on the show, women were generally the ones who were making men's participation possible by

making sure that the demonstrators stayed closed and fed. As the uprising moved toward London, some of the nobility became involved, and some of the city's merchants as well, and we will get into the uprising in London after a sponsor break. That late May incident in Brentwood had ended with John Bampton and the other commissioners being run out of town, and although the commissioners said that the delegates had been pursuing them with the intent to kill them. It seems

as though everyone escaped without injury. But as this uprising progressed in the early June of thirteen eighty one, things became increasingly violent all over Southeast England. People attacked manners, abbeys and the homes of sheriffs, as cheeters and other officials. The as cheater handled various matters related to what we described today as the feudal system that includes collecting of the fee after the death of a tenant, and yes,

that is the etymology of the term cheater. Rebels burned records, including tax records and documentation of people's serfdom. In Cambridge, a woman named Marjorie Starr was described as throwing the ashes of these burned documents into the wind, saying away

with the learning of clerks, away with it. Some of the chroniclers who wrote about this uprising in the fourteenth century framed all of this as the product of the rebels wilful ignorance and illiteracy, but it was really a coordinated effort carried out by the residence of communities all over England, especially in the southeast, to destroy all the written records of a system that they felt was oppressive

and corrupt. If there was no record of their taxation and their bondage, and their rents, or all the other expenses and commitments that were associated with their lives, then they could be free of it. Documents were seized or destroyed in more than one hundred and fifty places around England. This also went beyond property destruction. On June tenth, a mob in Essex killed as cheter John Euell before burning

his records. That same day, the king's ministers started attempting to negotiate with the rebels who were demanding an audience with the king. By June twelfth, as many as thirty thousand people had encamped at Blackheath, which is part of London today, and the King's court had moved from the Palace of Westminster into the Tower of London out of

fear for their own safety. Outside of London, crowds from Essex and Suffolk had ransacked the home of Henry English, which was in Birdbrook, and Richard Lyons, which was in Liston. English was the Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, and Lyons was a widely hated merchant and financier. The assembled forces from Kent to Essex and Suffolk vastly outnumbered the King's available army, so the King agreed to negotiate with the rebels.

He traveled down the Thames by boat to meet them, but once he arrived at the meeting point, it was decided that it was just too dangerous for him to go ashore. This, of course stoked the rebels anger and resentment, and at some point on June thirteenth, somebody it is not clear who, opened the gates of London to the assembled crowd. Once inside, they burned Savoy Palace, which was the home of John of Gaunt. They also looted and burned the homes of other prominent officials, as well as

the buildings that were situated along London Bridge. On June fourteenth, the King met with Watt Tyler and men from Essex at Mile End. Tyler presented the King with a series of demands, including the abolition of serfdom, community self governance, execution of several widely hated public officials who he described as traders, and a general amnesty of the rebels. There

are various interpretations of The king's response. Either his youthful inexperience meant that he wasn't a very good negotiator, or he really did feel some sympathy for the rebels. He also might have felt like there was no other option because these rebels vastly outnumbered his army and had done

all kinds of destruction and killed people. He made some really, really sweeping promises, including that he would abolish serfdom and forced labor, that he would bring the so called traders to justice, which included some people that were high up within his own court, and that he would issue a blanket pardon for anybody who had participated in the uprising. The King gave Tyler signed charters that granted the serfs their freedom. However, as that what was happening, other rebels

broke into the Tower of London. The future King Henry the Fourth was protected by hiding him in the cupboard. The rebels captured and beheaded several prominent people, one with Simon Sudbury, who was both the Archbishop of Canterbury that was the one who had excommunicated John Ball who he mentioned earlier, and the Chancellor of England. Another was Lord High Treasurer of England, Robert Hales, who was also the Admiral of the West and Grand Prior of the Knights

of Malta. Their heads were reportedly put on display and paraded around London, among others. John Legg, a royal sergeant at arms, was also executed. In some of the chronicles of this event, he was described as putting his hands up teenage girl's skirts under the pretense of determining if they were old enough to work. Richard Lyons was killed as well. The targets of this violence also went beyond the officials who were associated with taxes and serfdom and

other issues that were being protested. The mob focused on Flemings, who were a widely hated ethnic group in London. Flemish homes and businesses were targeted, looted and burned, and roughly one hundred and forty Flemings in London were massacred. Wat Tyler and the King met for a second time on June fifteenth. The goal was to persuade Tyler to get

the rebels to disperse from London. Instead, Tyler presented additional demands, including an end to tithing in a redistribution of wealth during a heated argument between Tyler and London Mayor William Walworth. Tyler was stabbed, probably by Walworst, but that is not entirely clear. The King at this point did something which is fascinating to me, which is that he rode out to the assembled bob told them that he was their

leader now, and led them out of town. Tyler was taken to the hospital of Saint Bartholomew, where Walworth later went and killed him. Walworth had also raised his own fighting force, about five thousand men, and he dispatched them to start putting down this rebellion. With Tyler gone, the government moved to put down the rebellion, an aggressive and bloody effort that went on for weeks. Hundreds of people

were killed in fighting all around southeastern England. John Ball was captured on July thirteenth, and he was hanged, drawn and quartered two days later. Although the King had made a series of very broad promises to wat Tyler, most of them were never carried out. He withdrew the charters that had given the serfs their freedom on June twenty third, reportedly saying villains ye are and villains ye shall remain in case you'rekirius, just like escheater is the etymology for cheat.

This is where the word villains come from. So people thought these cheaters were cheaters, and they thought the serfs were villains. He never carried out the other reforms he

had promised in that meeting either. The people who were believed to be ringleaders of this whole rebellion were rounded up, some were hanged, some were drawn and quartered, But after the the executions were done, the king did order a general amnesty, and amnesty records are one of the sources of information for who these rebels actually were and where

they lived. At the same time, a lot of people took this as an opportunity to get a pardon for crimes that they had not committed, either fearing that they might be accused of something later or just thinking that a documented pardon might be a useful thing to have in a time that was clearly so socially and politically chaotic. The only thing that this uprising really concretely achieved was that the government stopped pursuing this whole pull tax issue.

At the same time, though this was England's first large popular uprising, so on a more intangible level, it demonstrated to everyone that such a thing was even possible. This kind of peasant uprising really was not unique to England in the fourteenth century. The same conditions that led people in England to rise up existed in most of the rest of Europe as well. Popular revolts, civil wars, and other social life unrest were widespread all across Europe from

the thirteen hundreds through the fifteen hundreds. A lot of the gains that the lower classes did see during these centuries were not simply because the Black Death had killed so many people. It came out of this widespread unrest and violence. This is always the case with everything in history. This uprising has been interpreted and reinterpreted in the centuries

since then. Even though the rebels destroyed a lot of the records of their own lives and personal histories, the uprising is still pretty heavily documented through court records, medieval chronicles, and works of literature. But all these sources have their own biases. The court records, for example, are from a legal system that was innately biased against the defendants, and then the chroniclers who detailed the day to day occurrences of the uprising often disagree with one another on the

specific details. The chroniclers in general also didn't necessarily understand the people involved or what they're going evences were. There are eight different accounts of the whole uprising, including the Anonymal Chronicle, which was probably written at Byland Abbey, the Chronicles of Henry Knighton, who was an Augustinian canon, the Chronicles of Thomas Walsingham, who was a Benedictine monk, and the Chronicles of Jean Foiscois, who was a medieval poet

and court historian. In general, their lives were fairly removed from the people that they were writing about, and they lumped the rebels together as uneducated peasants motivated by wilful ignorance.

Froisar characterized John Ball as mad. So we kicked off this episode by talking about bad takes about the Black Death, which sort of compressed the whole timeline between the Black Death and the Renaissance, just skipping over centuries of unrest, and also something we didn't really get into in this episode, imagining the Renaissance as a time that was a lot better for working people than the medieval period had been,

which was not necessarily true. At all, But there have also there's been some bad takes about the thirteen eighty one Rebellion, including that it literally inspired the French Revolution. While there is some similarity between the uprisings focus on freedom and equality and the French Revolution ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity, I guess you could also make comparisons between the reign of Terror and the beheading of officials and parading their

heads around London. That idea just leapfrogs over four hundred years of history. Yeah, the cause and effect stuff that sometimes happens when discussing history loses to a little bit of track of timeline and nuance. Yeah yeah, I mean you can make lots of arguments about all kinds of things, where like we see patterns in history when we look back on them, or how one thing set conditions in place that made another thing more likely. But the Black

Death caused the Renaissance really oversimplified. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email

address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at Missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.