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636 years ago today on June 13th 1381, during the reign of King Richard the Second, a mob of rebels
entered London. They burned several royal buildings and murdered several
representatives of the Crown. Wat Tyler's Rebellion was well recorded at the time,
and it has been studied many times throughout history, and the interpretation of the events
has often been skewed by the politics of the time that the history was written. But regardless of
those interpretations, everyone can agree that the rebellion in 1381 represented the politics
and economics of a singular time in European history, and it deserves to be remembered.
The rebellion, which is sometimes called The Peasants Revolt, although that is not an apt
term since England didn't use the term peasants for about another hundred years, and many of the
people involved in the revolt came from wealthier classes, was impacted by two great events that
were driving history in Europe at the time. The Great Pestilence and the Hundred Years War.
The pneumonic plague pandemic, originally called The Great Pestilence or The Great Mortality,
likely started in China and followed trade routes back to Europe. The first known case
in England was in June of 1348, from a sailor that had traveled from France. The disease is a
bacterial infection and it is acquired from fleas that come on rats, but also from infected people,
and it quickly spread throughout the island. And the estimates are that the first wave, the first
pandemic of the Pneumonic Plague in England, killed between 1/4 and 2/3 of the population
of the entire island. And there was a second Pneumonic Plague pandemic in 1361. But as terrible
as the death toll was, the depopulation that was caused by the plague actually ended up being an
economic boom for people who worked the land. Prior to the plague, Europe was overpopulated.
Land was scarce and workers were abundant, and so a worker could not command much value for
their labor. And workers were essentially held as a form of slavery that was called serfdom,
where they were tied to land that was owned by a local Lord. But the depopulation caused by the
plague completely changed that equation, and as labor became scarce, Labor's could demand
more in return for their work and this caused a massive redistribution in wealth. But this
threatened the existing power structures, and the land holders obviously didn't like it, and
so in 1351 under the reign of Richard the Seconds grandfather, Edward the Third, parliament passed
an act called The Statute of Labourers. And in short, what the act did was set a maximum pay that
a worker could receive, and prohibited workers from leaving their home area in search of better
working conditions. The act generally failed in what it was trying to do, but what it really did
was make the workers angry, and the often brutal enforcement of the Act enraged the working class.
The conflict that would eventually be called the Hundred Years War, had to do with the King
of England, Edward the Third, trying to claim the throne of France through a claim that he
made through his mother, Isabella of France. The conflict had to do with a lot of things, fighting
over tribute that was owed because of English possessions in France, Gascony and Normandy.
Constant conflicts between England and Scotland, which was an ally of France. And initially
England scored significant victories against France, notably the Battle of Crecy in 1346,
and the battle of Poitiers in 1348. Although, the arrival of the Bubonic Plague meant that the
depopulation in England kept them from doing much war fighting on the continent for several years.
But France was much larger than England, and so they were able to stave off destruction and
continue the war and by the time of Richard the Second, the cost of The Hundred Year War was not
only constantly draining the Royal coffers, but was causing an economic depression in England.
The war was limiting international trade, and that was hurting the British textile industry,
and that was causing economic depression. And at the same time, France was constantly threatening
cross-channel raids, and that meant that the King had to maintain garrisons all along the coast, and
that was expensive. In order to pay those costs, Parliament created an entirely new kind of tax in
England and was called The Poll Tax. The idea of The Poll Tax was to increase the size of the tax
base in order to raise more money and put a tax essentially on every person in England over the
age of 14. And it was high enough that it could create a significant hardship for someone in the
working class. The tax ended up being regressive, it ended up hurting the working class much more
than the wealthier classes, and it also didn't seem fair and so there was widespread tax evasion.
And the brutal attempts to try to collect the tax were even more unpopular than the tax itself.
These tensions came together in 1381 for the first large-scale revolt in the history of England. The
King, Richard the Second, had been the grandson of the King, Edward the Third, and his father,
Edward the Black Prince and older brother, Edward of Angouleme, had died ahead of him
and so he had become the heir. And upon the death of his grandfather, he became King of England,
at just the age of 10. At the time of Wat Tyler's Rebellion, he was only 14 years old.
The spark for the rebellion in Essex had to do with The Poll Tax. A tax collector came to the
town of Fobbing demanding to know why the tax had not been paid. The town refused to pay and so the
tax collector tried to arrest the man that was speaking on behalf of the town, so the town rose
up and chased the tax collector out of town, killing three of his clerks. In nearby Kent,
the spark was the Statute of Labourers. A local land holder had accused a local labour of leaving
his serfdom, which was illegal under the Act. When they arrested the labourer the townsfolk
rose up and attacked the jail and released him. Both groups then started to march towards London,
gathering more and more rebels as they went along. And on June 7th, in a mass meeting,
the rebels elected as their leader a man named Wat Tyler. Wat Tyler was a tradesman,
and a longbowman, and by all accounts a charismatic leader.
The King was caught off guard. Most of the Royal Army was north in Scotland and so he had very
few troops to defend himself. And London was having its own troubles with tensions
between the increasingly empowered trading class and the nobility, and anger over the
ongoing depression. When the thousands of rebels showed up in London, the gates were left open
for them. For a rebellion they were remarkably well behaved, there was very little looting,
although there was some drunkenness, but what they did do was travel throughout London attacking the
people that they held responsible for their troubles, anybody who represented a royal tax
collection. They burned the beautiful home of John of Gaunt, the King's uncle. They destroyed
the Priory of the Knights Hospitaller, whose Head was the head of the Royal Treasury. They
stomped around town, catching royal officers, and burning their homes. The King met personally with
the rebels on June 14th and promised many significant reforms, including abolishing
the practice of serfdom. But while the king was meeting with Wat Tyler, another group of rebels
attacked the Tower of London and the gate had been left open, awaiting the return of the King,
that they were able to run right in. And there they attacked everybody they didn't like. They
killed the King's Chancellor, who also happened to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. They killed the
King's Lord High Treasurer, they killed several other nobles, they threatened the Kings family.
And while the rebels were able to take London and take revenge on many of the people they blame for
their woes, the rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful. The King met with Wat Tyler
again the next day and in a disputed event where Tyler was said to be disrespectful of the King,
the Mayor of London drew his sword and killed Wat Tyler, and Tyler's troops dispersed. There were
more rebellions in the countryside, there were more royal representatives who were executed,
royal properties and church properties looted. But when the King had time to raise militia he
was able to easily come out and defeat the rebels, and their leaders were tracked down and tried and
hanged, and the King rescinded the reforms that he had promised on June 14th. But conditions did get
slightly better for workers in England because while the Statute of Labourers still existed,
the land holders were much more reticent to enforce it, for fear of sparking another
rebellion. And so workers were able to improve their lot and wages in England in the hundred
years between 1350 and 1450 roughly doubled. There were other rebellions on the continent
that were fairly similar, driven by the economic impacts of the depopulation of the plague,
that also led to incremental improvements in workers' lot, as Europe slowly changed to a more
modern economy. The plague itself would come back again and again, and it struck London in 1665 with
what was called the Great Plague of London. And it was then in the latter half of the seventeenth
century that it gained its more well-known name today, known as the Black Death. It wouldn't be
eradicated clear until the 19th century having killed some...hundred million people...worldwide.
In the end maybe the most important impact of the Wat Tyler Rebellion of 1381 was the impact it had
on the young King Richard the Second. Richard the Second became convinced that he had been
betrayed by his advisers, and over his reign he became more and more dependent upon a smaller and
smaller circle of confidence, and that alienated the rest of the nobility and played a significant
role in his being deposed as king in 1399, and his death likely a forced starvation in 1400. And
it was the ascension of his cousin, who became Henry the Fourth of England, that would give
rise to decades of conflict in England with the War of the Roses and eventually the rise of the
Tudor Dynasty. And so the Rebellion of 1381 had significant impacts on the history of England and
the history of Europe, that was all driven by the specific economic impacts of the massive war, and
the massive pestilence that came at that time. And that significant event deserves to be remembered.
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