SYMHC Classics: Wat Tyler’s Rebellion

This 2020 episode covers one of the transitional events between the Black Death and the Renaissance. Wat Tyler’s Rebellion was also known as the Uprising of 1381 or the Great Rising. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:48Speaker 02

  Attention Chicken Nugget fans. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. These new Chicken Nuggets are their tastiest, crispiest, juiciest nuggets ever. And because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces, they've reinvented several of their sauces, and they created a brand-new one. The new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants, don't wait around. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets today.

• 2:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. On June 14th, 1381, Wat Tyler presented a list of demands to King Richard II of England, one of the key moments in the uprising that has come to be known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion or the Peasants' Revolt. That was 644 years ago today, on the day this is publishing. So, our episode on the Peasants' Revolt is today's Saturday classic.

• 2:43Holly Frey?

  This originally came out on June 10th, 2020. Enjoy.

• 2:49Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 3:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 3:03Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 3:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the kind of weird things to come out of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a phenomenon that I am liking to call "bad takes about the Black Death." There are various articles and tweets 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.

• 3:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 Wat Tyler's Rebellion and as the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Today, it is more often called the Uprising of 1381, 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 where 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

• 4:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  United States. This episode was actually written the week of May 18th. 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.

• 4:47Holly Frey?

  Right. I also feel like we could do an entire episode of this wasn't a magic switch.

• 4:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Holly Frey?

  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.

• 5:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 5:07Holly Frey?

  It's a very slow progression.

• 5:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 oversimplification.

• 5:23Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  It will become more clear as we get through this episode today.

• 5:28Holly Frey?

  So we're not going to dwell on 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 14th through the 18th centuries. The term "The Black Death" was coined in the 18th century to describe the plague that moved from Eastern or Central Asia through Europe, the Mediterranean, and Northern Africa between 1346 and 1353.

• 6:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 80%. Today's episode is really focused on England, and England's population before the Black Death had been about 60,000 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 20 and 30% of the English nobility died, along with about 45% of the clergy and between 40 and 70% of the peasant class. In some cases, those numbers were even higher. And then the disease itself was just horrifying.

• 6:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  On top of having a high, high mortality rate, its progression, once somebody contracted, it was really gruesome.

• 6:49Holly Frey?

  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.

• 7:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 in 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 villens, 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.

• 7:48Holly Frey?

  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 100 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.

• 8:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 manors also tended to be relatively self-contained, with their own blacksmiths and their own bakeries and their own mills, which tenants were obligated to use. If in estates only blacksmith or miller or brewer died, there might not be anybody

• 9:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  to replace them or anybody else who really knew how to do that work.

• 9:11Holly Frey?

  Although the medieval world wasn't exclusively Christian, the Christian church was colossally powerful. 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.

• 9:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  But the Black Death 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 and 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.

• 9:56Holly Frey?

  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 devastation so immense that people wondered if God was punishing them.

• 10:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Aside from all of that, in the Black Death's immediate aftermath, so many people had died and so much had been disrupted that things turned into a state of near lawlessness.

• 10:35Holly Frey?

  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 13th 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 had happened in those earlier generations.

• 11:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  After the Black Death, though, a lot of families were able to reconsolidate their holdings among the people who survived, and then in some 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.

• 11:37Holly Frey?

  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.

• 12:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 manor, 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 50%, and sometimes more than that.

• 12:42Holly Frey?

  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.

• 13:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  There's also the part where for the lowest-paid people, they sort of went from making not enough to live on to barely enough to live on.

• 13:07Holly Frey?

  Two times zero is zero.

• 13:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right?

• 13:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  People who moved from the country to the city after the Black Death generally had more opportunities available to them, especially because urban employers were dealing with their own labor shortages. Trade guilds started shortening the lengths 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.

• 13:44Holly Frey?

  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.

• 14:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 1349 and the Statute of Laborers in 1351 to return wages to their pre-pandemic levels. Also, to require able-bodied men and women under the age of 60 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

• 14:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 1363, Parliament also passed a censuary 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.

• 15:02Holly Frey?

  So by the time of the 1381 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. To many 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.

• 15:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 15:47Speaker 04

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• 15:50Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:18Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:42Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:44Holly Frey?

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• 18:36Speaker 06

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 18:50Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 19:32Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 20:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Black Death took place during the warfare between England and France that came to be known as the Hundred Years' War, even though it was really a series of intermittent conflicts that played out over a span of 116 years.

• 20:19Holly Frey?

  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 with an immediate 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 advisers, who had demanded their tax money, rather than blaming the military.

• 20:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Hundred Years' War is generally noted as starting in 1337, and England saw a series of victories in the 1340s and 50s. 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 1372, and English forces on the ground in France suffered various setbacks.

• 21:18Holly Frey?

  After using a variety of taxation strategies to raise the money to pay for all of this, Parliament passed a poll tax in 1377. That same year, Richard II, who was aged 10 at the time, ascended to the throne after the death of his grandfather, Edward III. Richard's father, who had been next in line for the throne, had died the year before.

• 21:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 1377 poll tax was different. It was a flat rate of four pence per person, required of everyone over the age of 14, with the exception of beggars.

• 22:13Holly Frey?

  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. Four pence was about the price of a dozen eggs. It was still more than a day's pay for the lowest-paid laborers, though.

• 22:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  England still needed more money, though. In early 1378, 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. Then in 1379, Charles V of France annexed the Duchy of Brittany, and there was another poll tax to try to fund efforts to restore its independence. The second poll tax was on a sliding scale, based on a person's profession, with 33 different professions listed at different tax rates. Anybody who wasn't a member of one of those professions was, again, taxed at four pence.

• 23:11Holly Frey?

  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 20 ships were wrecked. Another fractional tax followed, this one framed as a loan that would be repaid, rather than an actual tax.

• 23:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Taxes had to be approved by Parliament, and Parliament was not expected to be in session again for the next 18 months. So people believed this tax, but really a loan, would be the last one for a while. Instead, Parliament was summoned again in November of 1380 to once again approve another poll tax to fund the ongoing war.

• 23:57Holly Frey?

  Like the 1377 tax, this poll tax was a flat rate.

• 24:02Holly Frey?

  Every person over the age of 15 was required to pay 12 pence 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.

• 24:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 25:04Holly Frey?

  So England's fed up population, sick of paying taxes, just didn't. Tax evasion was widespread, with as many as 30 to 50% of people simply vanishing from the local tax rolls.

• 25:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  People were like, my widowed mother, not part of my household. Not gonna lay a name on there. When the government realized that the amount of money that had been collected was way less than they expected, they dispatched commissioners to investigate this rampant tax evasion. Investigations started in late May of 1381, when John Bampton and Sir John Guildsberg arrived in Brentwood in Essex, which is northeast of London and is part of the Greater London Metropolitan area today.

• 25:52Holly Frey?

  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.

• 26:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 15 or so towns and 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.

• 26:41Holly Frey?

  June 2 was the day that the final tax payment was due. It was also the holiday of Witsun Day, or Pentecost. On that day, people from at least 40 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 and 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.

• 27:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  On June 7, 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 an Eve's span, who then was a gentleman?"

• 27:50Holly Frey?

  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 Wat Tyler were, as their names suggest, a baker and a Tyler.

• 28:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  That doesn't necessarily mean the uprising's tradespeople were all free, though. There were definitely bakers and tylers 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.

• 28:39Holly Frey?

  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 clothed and fed.

• 29:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 29:13Speaker 06

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• 29:57Speaker 06

  reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken, and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 30:09Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 30:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 31:22Speaker 07

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• 32:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 1381, things became increasingly violent.

• 32:34Holly Frey?

  All over southeast England, people attacked manors, abbeys, and the homes of sheriffs, escheaters, and other officials. The escheater handled various matters related to what we describe 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."

• 33:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some of the chroniclers who wrote about this uprising in the 14th century framed all of this as the product of the rebels' willful ignorance and illiteracy. But it was really a coordinated effort, carried out by the residents 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 150 places around England.

• 33:47Holly Frey?

  This also went beyond property destruction. On June 10th, a mob in Essex killed escheater John Ewell 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.

• 34:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  By June 12th, as many as 30,000 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.

• 34:35Holly Frey?

  The assembled forces from Kent, 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.

• 34:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  This, of course, stoked the rebels' anger and resentment. And at some point on June 13th, 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.

• 35:15Holly Frey?

  On June 14th, the king met with Wat 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 traitors, and a general amnesty of the rebels.

• 35:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 traitors 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.

• 36:20Holly Frey?

  However, as that was happening, other rebels broke into the Tower of London. The future King Henry IV was protected by hiding him in the cupboard. The rebels captured and beheaded several prominent people. One was Simon Sudbury, who was both the Archbishop of Canterbury, that was the one who had excommunicated John Ball, who we 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 Legge, a royal sergeant at arms, was also executed.

• 37:01Holly Frey?

  In some of the chronicles of this event, he was described as putting his hands up teenage girls' skirts under the pretense of determining if they were old enough to work. Richard Lyons was killed as well.

• 37:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 140 Flemings in London were massacred.

• 37:34Holly Frey?

  Wat Tyler and the King met for a second time on June 15th. The goal was to persuade Tyler to get the rebels to disperse from London. Instead, Tyler presented additional demands, including an end to tithing and a redistribution of wealth. During a heated argument between Tyler and London Mayor William Walworth, Tyler was stabbed, probably by Walworth, but that is not entirely clear.

• 38:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  The King, at this point, did something which is fascinating to me, which is that he rode out to the assembled mob, told them that he was their leader now, and led them out of town. Tyler was taken to the Hospital of St. Bartholomew, where Walworth later went and killed him. Walworth had also raised his own fighting force of about 5,000 men, and he dispatched them to start putting down this rebellion.

• 38:26Holly Frey?

  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 13th, and he was hanged, drawn, and quartered two days later.

• 38:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 23rd, reportedly saying, "Villains ye are, and villains ye shall remain." In case you're curious, just like "as cheater" is the etymology for cheat, this is where the word villains come from. So people thought the as cheaters were cheaters, and they thought the serfs were villains. He never carried out the other reforms he had promised in that meeting either.

• 39:13Holly Frey?

  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 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.

• 39:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  The only thing that this uprising really concretely achieved was that the government stopped pursuing this whole poll 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.

• 40:07Holly Frey?

  This kind of peasant uprising really was not unique to England in the 14th 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 unrest were widespread all across Europe, from the 1300s through the 1500s. 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.

• 40:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  As 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.

• 41:16Holly Frey?

  The chroniclers in general also didn't necessarily understand the people involved or what their grievances were. There are eight different accounts of the whole uprising, including the Anunnamal Chronicle, which was probably written at Bylin Abbey, the Chronicles of Henry Knighton, who was an Augustinian canon, the Chronicles of Thomas Walzingham, who was a Benedictine monk, and the Chronicles of Jean Froissart, 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 willful ignorance. Froissart characterized John Ball as mad.

• 41:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 been some bad takes about the 1381 Rebellion, including that it literally inspired the French Revolution. While there is some similarity between the uprising's focus on freedom and equality and the French Revolution ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity, I guess you could also

• 42:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  make comparisons between the reign of terror and the beheading of officials and parading their heads around London. That idea just leapfrogs over 400 years of history.

• 42:49Holly Frey?

  Yeah, the cause and effect stuff that sometimes happens when discussing history loses a little bit of track of timeline and nuance.

• 43:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 43:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is [email protected]. You can find us all over social media at MissedInHistory. 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.

• 44:11Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 44:42Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 46:17Speaker 00

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