The Peasant's Revolt

England, 1381.

More than thirty years after the Black Death transformed the balance between labour and land, royal officials entered the villages of Essex to enforce a deeply unpopular poll tax. What began as resistance to taxation rapidly became the greatest popular uprising medieval England had ever witnessed.

Led by figures including Wat Tyler and the radical priest John Ball, rebels from Essex and Kent marched on London, opened prisons, destroyed the Savoy Palace and forced the fourteen-year-old Richard II to negotiate. They demanded freedom from serfdom, fairer rents, an end to corrupt government and the removal of the officials they blamed for England's suffering.

For several extraordinary days, the machinery of royal government almost collapsed.

THE PEASANTS' REVOLT explores the full story of the uprising of 1381, from the social upheaval caused by the Black Death and the harsh Statute of Labourers to the poll taxes, the march on London, the killing of royal ministers, Wat Tyler's death at Smithfield and the brutal restoration of royal authority.

Drawing upon medieval chronicles, taxation records, manorial evidence, legal documents and modern historical scholarship, Gordon J. MacKenzie separates documented events from later legend while examining the revolt's lasting place in the history of labour, freedom and political resistance.

This is Book One of THE LAST PLANTAGENETS, a ten-volume history of England from the Peasants' Revolt to Bosworth and the end of Plantagenet rule