Inside the Peasants Revolt

In 1381, a highly organised civilian army marched on London, demanding an end to generations of unfairness. Matt Lewis and author A. K. Blakemore explore the human stories behind the Peasants' Revolt. They discover how Chaucer viewed the uprising from his home within London and uncover the forgotten women of 1381, including widows seeking the king's justice, who navigated the chaotic London streets searching for freedom. MORE Peasants' Revolt on Film: The Uprising Reviewed Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/peasants-revolt-on-film-the-uprising-reviewed/id1564113746?i=1000790042840 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ZQ25JDHfUf9CQnEqzQB8W Richard II vs. Henry IV Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/richard-ii-vs-henry-iv/id1564113746?i=1000671468160 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6FwoVILnFD15Q5S7Qm3WhP Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Want even MORE history? Watch Dr. Eleanor Janega's series Meet the Normans on History Hit. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:21Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:01Matt Lewis?

  On Thursday, the 13th of June, 1381, Marjorie Tawney tried to push her way through the crowds that seemed to fill every street in London. It was the Feast of Corpus Christi, so there was going to be crowds. But Marjorie had never seen anything like this in the city. Her son, a grown man now, holds her hand like he did as a child, both frightened of being separated and swallowed by this mass of humanity. The king, the teenage Richard II, has let it be known that he will hear the legal case of anyone with a complaint if they will bring it to him at the Tower. Marjorie has a complaint. The dean of the College of Windsor owed her late husband money.

• 2:44Matt Lewis?

  Money she now desperately needs. Money he won't pay. Marjorie and her son, with no hope of bringing an expensive legal case, had despaired. But now the young king offers hope, and she will take it. But it isn't just the crowds that are the problem. They aren't here for Corpus Christi. They're here threatening to overturn the government of England. Though, is it a threat if Marjorie, like so many others in London, agrees with the tens of thousands who have come out from the countryside to seek justice? Not fleeting restitution for one misdemeanor, but the permanent correction of generations of unfairness.

• 3:29Matt Lewis?

  It should be a happy time of the promise of a brighter future. How can the handful of rich men, noble as they may be, resist the tide of people moving against them? The crowds are only ever a moment away from becoming a mob. And it isn't just the number of people making Marjorie's progress to the Tower difficult. Somewhere nearby, something is on fire. Word runs through the people like the fire itself. It's the Savoy Palace, the home of the king's uncle, and other places too, they say. Marjorie's son grips her hand. He's trying to pull her back, but Marjorie urges herself on, her free hand pushing away

• 4:12Matt Lewis?

  through the ever denser thicket of bodies. Smoke rolls down the street, carried on the light summer breeze. It fills Marjorie's nose and makes her cough. It stings her eyes, so they glow red and stream with tears. Holding her sleeve over her mouth, she takes another step closer to the Tower, closer to the king, closer to justice and the salvation of her family. But her son doesn't move with her. He's planted his feet. She looks back at him, desperation painted across her tear-stained face. He shakes his head. She opens her mouth to protest, but only a hacking cough escapes. He shakes his head again. She sees his mouth move,

• 4:57Matt Lewis?

  though she can hear no words above the clamor around them. Not today, it looks like he's saying. Tomorrow, mother. Tomorrow. She knows he's right, though she hates it too. These people are here to fix the world, but they're keeping her little one broken for longer. She gives in to the drawer of her son's hand, and they melt back from the crowds, from the flames, from the smoke. And for now, from justice. But Marjorie will try again tomorrow, and she will be heard. I'm here to tell you, she will be heard, and she will win her case,

• 5:38Matt Lewis?

  though justice comes at the most brutal cost for her. This is just one real story from inside the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Today, I'm delighted to shine a light deeper into the uprising by talking to author A.K. Blakemore about her brand-new novel, Doom Painting, which pulls readers into the heart of the complex and fast-moving Peasants' Revolt. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Amy. It's great to have you with us.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

• 6:08Matt Lewis?

  I'm really looking forward to digging into this. I mean, the Peasants' Revolt is having a moment at the present time, isn't it? So your novel is hitting it right in a sweet spot.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is truly bizarre. So we were just saying before I started, I spent like two years of my life telling everyone who would listen, it was mad that there wasn't a Peasants' Revolt film, and then one comes along about a couple of months ahead of the release of my novel. But I don't know, it's really, it's really exciting. It's really interesting how much both the film and the novel seem to have captured people's imaginations.

• 6:41Matt Lewis?

  What made you want to write a novel set during the Peasants' Revolt? Why 1381? Why, why is that a good moment to look for stories?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'd always felt a kind of geographical proximity, I suppose, to the history. I grew up in South London, so I was kind of, you know, drinking on Blackheath as a teenager. I went to school in Rotherhithe, walking sort of along the road that the peasants would have used to enter Southwark and then eventually London, kind of, you know, noticing Wat Tyler Roads and John Ball Roads. And I now live in Colchester, which also has sort of these profound connections to the revolt. So my mum's from Kent, which is the kind of, you know, the focus of some of these big sort of dramatic incidents from the revolt. So I suppose it was kind of always there in the back of my imagination

• 7:34Speaker 02

  as something I would want to take on someday. And just, you know, sort of it's some of the most dramatic and cinematic, dare I say it, moments from medieval history. Richard II facing down the peasants on myelins and, you know, the abandoned meeting on the Thames Forshore, the storming of the Tower of London, all of these things, which before I could sort of envision the entirety of a novel and what ended up being a really, really long novel. So sorry about that.

• 8:09Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I mean, because it is just such a moment of high drama and tension. And had it succeeded, would have so radically changed the country that it's impossible, because I think it's so easy to think of the Peasants' Revolt and think, oh, you know, a bunch of angry people from Kent marched into London, set fire to the place, and then got shooed off again. But as you say, there is so much more going on, not just in London, but all around the country. And so many, as you say, people joining it for, for different reasons, from different social classes, that it kind of lends itself to the drama of a fictional retelling. But it's something that hasn't really appeared in fiction before. I mean, we said the uprising

• 8:52Matt Lewis?

  is the first time the Peasants' Revolt will be represented on film. How often has it appeared in fiction before? I mean, I guess Shakespeare has so closely affected our view of Richard II and his kingship, but he doesn't show us the Peasants' Revolt at all, does he?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  No, he doesn't. But it's very interesting to think about the psychological effects that the Peasants' Revolt ended up having on Richard. You know, in some ways, Richard II is generally thought of as quite a disappointing sort of a feet king.

• 9:23Matt Lewis?

  That's being very gentle for this podcast. Eleanor is really not a fan of Richard II. I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to him than she is.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, writing it has made me strangely fond of him, for a horrible murderer, narcissist, et cetera, and so on. And I think a lot of historians have sort of, yeah, yeah, traced sort of the contours of Richard's psychology around the Peasants' Revolt. And the Peasants' Revolt is sort of almost thought of as the golden moment of his reign, this one moment where he does show sort of decisiveness and courage in the face of tragedy and chaos. And then it sort of all just tapers off from there. In terms of the sort of literary handlings of the Peasants' Revolt in the context of Richard's reign, there's, there's sort of less of that. I mean, there aren't even that many contemporaneous, I suppose, literary

• 10:07Speaker 02

  or imaginative references to it. It turns up in Chaucer, allusively a couple of times. His poetics were sort of a massive influence when I was writing the novel in terms of how I was handling both the language and the idea of all these sort of competing perspectives. You know, classic Canterbury Tales stuff. I think there's a reference to it in, I think it's the Miller's Tale. So he describes chickens squawking and running around sort of as loudly as Jack Straw and his men. And there are a couple of other allusions to it, which I think are sort of more disputed in Chaucer's work. And Gower, another 14th century poet, makes explicit references to it. And of course, Chaucer was living in London at the

• 10:51Speaker 02

  time, was living in an apartment over the Old Gate by which peasants were pouring into the city. It's interesting how even in Chaucer, it sort of almost makes me think that the experience of the revolt maybe wasn't quite as terrifying for the average Londoner just out in the streets, as the chroniclers who had associations and loyalties to the aristocracy would perhaps have had us believe from their interpretations of it. The fact that when Chaucer writes about it, I'm, you know, I'm not denying, I'm sure it was very terrifying for an awful lot of people. But the fact that Chaucer writes about it comically is

• 11:34Speaker 02

  interesting to me, when he writes about it, is interesting to me, rather than as this sort of like black incidence of terror in, in sort of his, his history. And he would have witnessed it firsthand. There's later on, definitely for sort of the romantics, Wat Tyler and especially John Ball were, I suppose, these sort of templates for a kind of radical English identity for people like Coleridge and William Blake and William Morris. William Morris wrote a quite strange play about John Ball, which contains like one of my favourite lines, "I come not from heaven but from Essex", which I loved. And I was thinking about maybe making the epigraph of the novel, but I didn't in the end. I

• 12:18Speaker 02

  think Richard, for the obvious reason that he's the king, is of all the figures in the novel, the one who's sort of had the most famous sort of overweening literary treatment, obviously in Shakespeare and Richard II. But I was writing about a much younger Richard, a 14-year-old Richard. And he's been king for four years, but he's only just emerged from his regency. And I think Richard, for me, I mean, writing a 14-year-old boy as a 35-year-old woman would be difficult anyway. But writing a 14-year-old boy who also believed himself to essentially be kind of a divine emanation, the appointed, sort of, you know,

• 13:00Speaker 02

  steward of the virgins' dower in England, was even more difficult. And I kept coming back to, I suppose, you know, as you say, my treatment perhaps is more sympathetic than a lot of treatments of Richard. These sort of ideas of care and vulnerability and Richard as a child, and the people around him, and how you are meant to offer care to someone who has an entire nation, apparently, in their care.

• 13:30Matt Lewis?

  Because I tend to be more sympathetic to Richard, I think, from the point of view that as, as a 14-year-old boy who arrives at the events of the Peasants' Revolt, here is someone who, for, for years now, has been told he's the single most significant and important person in the country, that he has all of this power, that he's one step closer to God than anybody else because he's been anointed at his coronation. And yet, for, for all of those four years that he's been king, he can't actually do anything because his council is, is doing, and kind of, you know, just patting him on the head and saying, "Don't worry, we'll do this". So he's in this weird position of being presented with the idea that he's all-powerful, but has no real power.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  No real power.

• 14:09Matt Lewis?

  And that must be confusing for a 14-year-old boy.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  It would be confusing for anyone. And I think it was in Helen Castor's book about Richard and Henry, his cousin who succeeded him. I really liked her take on it, which is that, you know, obviously, we don't know what those terrified conversations happening around the tables in the Tower of London were looking like when the peasants were beating their drums outside. But she gets the sense that this was also a moment in which Richard realised, kind of quite rightly, that it wasn't him that the peasants were angry at, that, that he in many ways wasn't the focus. It's, it's often described and characterised as a rebellion against the king. But it wasn't really. They wanted to talk to the king.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  They wanted to tell the king about their oppression and their suffering with this idea that if Richard was able to understand their lives and the corruption that they were living under, he would do something about it. And they also appear to have kind of rightly understood that Richard was a child and couldn't really be held responsible for the corruption of the adults around him. Like, they had quite a sympathetic reading of, of Richard as their sovereign. And Helen Castor sort of puts forward this idea that we see the beginnings of the sort of narcissism and, and sort of emotional exceptionality of, of Richard later on, in this idea that he realises he's almost the only person in

• 15:37Speaker 02

  the room not in danger. That he's sort of the, the only person in the room who could walk out into a crowd of these peasants and remain untouched.

• 15:46Matt Lewis?

  I read the encounter at Mile End as perhaps less of an example of Richard's personal bravery in that moment, and almost a completely naive belief that he is not in any danger. I don't think he, he thought he was being brave. I think he thought, "All of these people absolutely love me and would never dream of hurting me. So why wouldn't I ride towards them and tell them all to go home and, and behave themselves?"

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's, in some ways, completely bizarre, extravagantly mad behaviour, which of course later is something he comes to be known for. I think the Peasants' Revolt, another, another reason there's so much sort of like proleptic drama there, is there's so many of these moments where something could have gone slightly differently, and who knows where we would be now. Not to suggest, you know, we'd be on King Tyler XIV or anything. But we don't know why so many of the decisions were made that were made. And it was really, really fun as a novelist, digging into what I felt was the most dramatically satisfying or likely explanation for, for instance, why, when we've got sort of the entire royal

• 16:55Speaker 02

  flotilla out on the Thames, going towards Rotherhithe so Richard can meet with Wat Tyler, do they suddenly decide to turn around? Whose decision is that? Is it Richard who loses his nerve? Later events would kind of suggest no. Is it everyone around him who suddenly, like, "We can't do this"? Do they see them? And, and just sort of the sight of, perhaps they didn't quite believe 10,000 people are marching on London. That was, that was an enormous army by the standards of the time. And, and just these moments where we only know very vaguely, or sort of suggestively, what happened, what was said, who was it said by, who was making the decision in that moment, is so sort of tantalising.

• 17:40Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it must be so interesting to explore all of those things, because I, I tend to think, you know, here's Richard, again, thinking, "This is fine for me. I'm not in any danger. These people all love me". And it's all of the, the adults on the boat, who may well be some of the targets of the, the irritation of the mob, who sort of turn a bend in the river. And I think they might have been expecting to see, you know, a delegation of a dozen of them out in their Sunday best, waiting for the king at the side of the river. And then suddenly, they turn a bend in the river and they're confronted by rows and rows and rows and, and innumerable people piled up on the bank of the River Thames.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Armed and doing something.

• 18:17Matt Lewis?

  And they just get terrified.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting because one of the sort of most vivid accounts of, of Tyler himself, I think it's the Frasart, I'm probably pronouncing that horribly, which is one of the few contemporaneous accounts, one of the fullest contemporaneous accounts of, of the revolt. And it describes the final meeting, spoiler, between Wat Tyler and Richard. And Wat sort of walking out and shaking the king's hand and calling him brother. And not in a threatening, but you can sort of imagine it, that the sort of like pale, milk-skinned king sitting on top of his horse and this bluff sort of countryman stepping out and like grabbing his hand and sort of kindly addressing him with this like level

• 19:00Speaker 02

  of solidarity and familiarity that the king is wholly unprepared for. And then how shocking that is for everyone standing around. And then Wat Tyler asks for a drink of water, splashes it around his mouth and spits it out in the grass. And Frasart is describing this like, "And you will never believe what he does next. Disgusting behaviour". But it's, it's so human, reading it now. You can, you can sort of see the man there sort of screwing his eyes up against the sun and wiping the sweat from his forehead. And it's, it's such a, a sort of beautiful evocation of this man, who was sort of an empty outline

• 19:40Speaker 02

  in, in all the other contemporaneous records, really. And that was really sort of formative as a moment, I think, to how I chose to write both Richard and Wat. That was sort of the moment that, that captured me. As a way into both of them.

• 19:57Matt Lewis?

  It must have been interesting for you to be able to get inside the minds and the motivations of all of the people involved in the revolt. And I was keen to hear what you made of Wat Tyler. What is your Wat Tyler like?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  So my Wat Tyler, in a sort of literal biographical sense, is a veteran, I suppose, of the wars in France, the Hundred Years' War, which has been going on for more than a generation at this point. He's from the town of Orset in Essex, and he is drawn into the revolt more or less accidentally. I wanted my Wat to have, to an extent, an external perspective on the early events of the revolt. I wanted him to be an Essex man, because I live in Essex, and it just felt like I could sort of connect to that more. Obviously, we don't know where he was from. Essex has claimed him, and so has Kent, and I'm not

• 20:55Speaker 02

  going to kind of litigate on that. And I wanted him to have an external perspective on the events, because A, it made it a bit more natural when people were explaining things to him, and thus to the reader. And it also felt that he could stand as a sort of avatar for the reader more easily if he was also bearing witness to things he maybe couldn't quite understand, in terms of the political machinations, I suppose. Because my take on the revolt, and this is again, another thing that there will probably never be a

• 21:35Speaker 02

  definitive answer to, is it all began so quickly, from events in Brentwood, when there's an attack on these tax collectors, that a lot of historians reckon there must have been some planning going on ahead of this first sort of flare of violence. There must have been almost kind of a network at work ahead of that. And I wanted my Wat Tyler to be external to any sort of network, I suppose, of planning and arranging, but sort of drawn in with a level of inevitability once events and the sort of momentum of events begins to mount. Because that's the other really astonishing thing about the Peasants'

• 22:17Speaker 02

  revolt. In terms of Tyler's leadership, it's over in just over two weeks. And there's the sort of astonishing pace of action there and forward momentum. And my Wat Tyler, I suppose, in a way I had before, my first novel is about the Essex witch trials in the 1640s and the witch finder general. And with him, I was very much trying to think my way into what sort of charisma might this man have possessed to drive communities into, like, essentially sociopathic hysteria that led to the deaths of hundreds of women. And

• 22:59Speaker 02

  with Wat Tyler, it's a much more positive charisma, obviously. There the analogy ends between the two figures. But who was this man who evidently must have had an astonishing level of charisma to emerge from total obscurity to become one of the most important men in Europe for a matter of weeks? What must that have felt like for him? Did he want it? What were the problems, the issues, the terror that came with that? Like, he must have known at a certain point, either he was going to become the closest thing to a king there was, or he was going to die incredibly violently. There wasn't really a middle ground for him,

• 23:41Speaker 02

  which is a very terrifying idea, but also a very exciting one. Yes, I wanted him to be quite guileless, in a way. I wanted him to be and to feel like he was kind of subject to greater forces and forces outside of his control, partly because that felt like, you know, I sort of wanted to examine but move away from this idea of, you know, kind of the great man theory of history, the idea that the Peasants' revolt would never have happened without Wat Tyler. Certainly, for me, it was a movement that was bigger than a single person or collection of persons. And so I suppose I wanted to do justice to

• 24:24Speaker 02

  that. One of, I think it's kind of, I don't know exactly where it came from, but one of the ideas, the sort of notions that has been put forward about Wat Tyler was that he was an avenging father, whose daughters had been wronged by a tax collector. And that feels to me very kind of a Victorian moralistic explanation.

• 24:44Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think it's a story that first emerges in the 16th century. That's when they begin to attach all of these ideas of it needing to be vengeance for violence against women in particular.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that seems to me almost quite a patronizing explanation for the Peasants' revolt. This idea that these people couldn't possibly have been thinking politically, couldn't have been thinking in an individuated and complex way about the world they lived in and what they wanted changed about it, that surely it had to be a Jason Statham thing. So I suppose I wanted to move back towards a more complex political understanding of the Peasants' revolt, and the Peasants themselves as knowing political actors who had hopes and dreams for their futures and a critical understanding of why they were

• 25:35Speaker 02

  in the disempowered position they were in. So I wanted my Wat to add up to that as well. He maybe isn't thinking particularly politically at the beginning of the novel, but by the end, his mind has been opened to, I suppose, you know, these more complex ideas about the world.

• 25:52Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, because I always think that you've got so many people there who get involved in this revolt, who I think would have been very well aware of the dangers that they are putting themselves into by taking up arms against every representative of the king. Not the king himself, but everybody else with power in the country. And I think it's also interesting to think harder than we usually do about the ways in which by 1381, England is such a militarized society. You know, we're several decades into the Hundred Years' War. So many of those men would have served in France in some capacity or another, that it's not unusual that they know how to organize themselves, that they

• 26:36Matt Lewis?

  know how to set musters, that they know how to be in the right place at the right time, that they know how to march under some degree of order. And that, you know, Wat Tyler or the broader leadership of the Peasants' revolt are able to maintain an extraordinary amount of order amongst tens of thousands of people who are marching with a purpose.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really astonishing. That was one of the things that surprised me in sort of my early research. Obviously, there were these intensely violent episodes during the revolt, and kind of intense violence focused against specific individuals or groups of individuals. But in some ways, it's astonishing how little violence there was, considering the scale of events, or how focused the violence was. That they do appear to have understood that we can't go around just burning people's houses and looting and causing chaos because it will damage sympathy for our cause. That that seems to have been a specific idea quite

• 27:37Speaker 02

  early on, that they had to be focused in the way that they used violence and force, and when they did. Which is very interesting, because again, I think a lot of people assume the Peasants' revolt was essentially just this big splurge of hideous chaos across southern England. And the job of Richard and the people around him was just to sort of tidy things up. But not at all. It was remarkably organized, as you say.

• 28:17Matt Lewis?

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• 29:00Matt Lewis?

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• 30:55Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think that that idea that it's this wanton violence by a mindless mob is very much buying into what Richard's government wanted you to believe about the peasants revolt in the immediate aftermath. That's how they pictured it and positioned it, because what they didn't want to do was admit that this was a hugely sophisticated and very carefully organised protest that came within a whisker of success. They simply couldn't allow that to be the truth. It had to be a mindless mob.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Entirely. And there were all these, again, sort of insanely dramatic moments. Like, one of my favourites, which I don't know if it's kind of apocryphal, I don't think we'll ever know about the true sort of historical veracity of it. It's certainly possible. So this is the idea that Joan of Kent, the king's mother, her carriage was stopped by the rebels when, while she was travelling between Kent and London, that she had a personal interview with Wat Tyler and then she was released again. And I think it's possible that it did happen because the anniversary of the Black Prince, the Black Prince's death

• 32:08Speaker 02

  occurred during the revolt. And there were, you know, all sorts of services were happening at Canterbury Cathedral where he'd been interred. And it's quite possible she would have been in Canterbury for that, and then travelling back through rebellious Kent to London at the time this is supposed to have happened. And just the idea, I mean, it occurs in the novel, because how could it not? Like, what a taste he seems to write. But there are all these moments, you know, they have Henry, they have Richard's cousin in the Tower, and he also survives. So it's very interesting who the decision is taken to execute by the rebels, and who is basically spared, freed. And the idea that they might have had the

• 32:52Speaker 02

  king's mother in their charge, they could have held her hostage and essentially let her go, I suppose is sort of, is testament to the really considered way they were doing things. And it's also interesting because it relates to this idea of, well, how did they overcome Rochester Castle? How did they get into the Tower of London? That was something no other army had done. When Rochester Castle was besieged by a king and his army, it had taken them six weeks to get in. Why were these guys able to do it? And probably the simple answer is that the guards were sympathetic to them, that people were sort of turning face quite frequently. Yeah. So that was kind of another point in writing the novel,

• 33:34Speaker 02

  where I was like, okay, how do I do this? How does this scene happen? How do I get the characters from here into here?

• 33:40Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And there are, there are a number of women who are involved in or affected by the events of the peasants revolt. How do you approach their involvement in your novel? Because I guess it could be easy to either overstate or understate the role of women in the revolt.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it is obviously still a very like laddy novel and laddy story in all sorts of ways. But I suppose being a feminist with like a fascination with history and this historical epoch is that whenever you're reading about like a war or a battle or any sort of event that involves a mass moving of people, one of the first things I'm thinking about is, okay, who was making the food for them? Okay, who were they leaving back at home to feed the dogs and look after the garden? So one of sort of the, the early thoughts I had about how I might approach this novel was, okay, it's the peasants revolt,

• 34:40Speaker 02

  but it's about their wives they left at home. Kind of what is their perspective on these events that they're hearing about through, sort of through hearsay back in London. And I thought that that could be an interesting approach, but then I couldn't quite make that work. And so I really wanted to showcase, such a lame word, but, but I wanted there to be this focus in a way I had never really encountered before in sort of other fictional, like imaginative handling of the peasants revolt, on the idea of sort of all the domestic and socially reproductive work that was going on around the big events themselves.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  And part of the way I tell the novel in terms of, so it's structured in a sort of hour by hour, there are 16 chapters, each one corresponding to a day, and each chapter has 24 sections within it corresponding to, you know, hour by hour. Part of the reason I wanted to do that was it felt like it didn't give primacy to any single perspective or character. Obviously, we spend more time with certain characters than others, but it sort of levels the playing field in terms of who is important and who isn't, what is important and what isn't. I had to boil down these big dramatic events like the sermon

• 36:05Speaker 02

  that John Bull gives on Blackheath to occupy the same amount of space as three pages earlier when women are boiling eggs over a campfire and discussing where they think this is all going to go. And there are some individual women who have managed to kind of like creep into the historical record. Joanna Farah is, I suppose, kind of like, she's, she's not a Wat Tyler or a John Bull, but she is probably the, the female participant in the revolt who has sort of had the most historical interest since. She was accused

• 36:45Speaker 02

  of basically leading the attack on the Savoy Palace, which belonged to John of Gaud, and stealing a thousand pounds from him. And she appears, as far as we know, obviously, there's, there are sort of like lots of missing leads here. But she appears to have been absolutely fine afterwards. You know, she wasn't, she wasn't punished, she wasn't executed. So she's a very interesting figure. And there are sort of all these moments at which women sort of pop their heads over the parapet and sort of vanish again. We know that when the rebels broke open the prison at Canterbury, they were actually quite disappointed by how few people they were in there. But there were several women

• 37:28Speaker 02

  in there who'd been arrested for prostitution. That's something that is recorded. And so I was, that, that sort of then led to some scenes I included of women in the jail discussing the events. And so I suppose I was sort of trying where I could to magnify these few incidents we do have, and to sort of colour in, I suppose, around the edges, and not sort of, I suppose, place these women quite at the very centre of events in a way that to me felt like a historical or anachronistic, but to expand their stories based on the

• 38:10Speaker 02

  scraps that we do have, in a way that felt satisfying, in a way that felt true, I suppose. And Joan of Kent was very much part of that as well. As I was saying earlier about the idea of wanting to write Richard authentically as a child, or, you know, an adolescent, but on the, on the very edge of childhood, and this idea of care, or how Richard could possibly be supported or cared for, or what, what role sort of his mother's influence might have played on his life. Because Joan of Kent has been blamed in all sorts of ways for the man Richard became. There's this idea of sort of, oh, well, he was, of course he turned into this sort of effeminate narcissist. He was the, the apple of Joan's eye, and

• 38:55Speaker 02

  she spoilt him, and all of these sorts of things. But that was a way into thinking about Joan's perspective on events as Richard's mother, and how she may have felt about the way he was handling things. And how she may have felt, I suppose, more broadly about these lands she had known and lived in, and how she might have felt connected or disconnected from the rebels themselves was really interesting to me.

• 39:32Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. I unashamedly love Joanna Farah's story as part of the peasants revolt. I think she's an absolutely fascinating character. There's a couple of other, yeah, my, my favourite stories of women involved in the peasants revolt. One of them is, is slightly, because I get to make a joke at the end of it. One of them reminds me of what you were saying earlier on about Geoffrey Chaucer, you know, living above one of the gates and, and not necessarily feeling overly threatened by the events of that day. There's a woman named Marjorie Tawney who gives evidence in court after the revolt, and says that the government had issued this proclamation that everybody with a complaint should go to the Tower to see the king, and he would set it all right. And she says on the, on the day of Corpus Christi, she, she goes out into the street heading for the Tower

• 40:16Matt Lewis?

  because she's got this issue with the, the dean of Windsor Chapel. But she can't get there because there's just such a press of people. And she's like, you know, it was just a bit busy. But she doesn't say it was horrific and horrifying and I'm never going to go again. She was like, everyone was trying to get there and it was a bit too busy. So she goes back the next day. Again, that idea that this isn't a terrifying place that nobody is willing to go out into, that actually there's some structure, there's some organisation to this and people are being told to go and present their complaints. And the other one that I like is actually-

• 40:46Speaker 02

  That's something my nan would do, like-

• 40:48Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  They told me to go down and talk to the king, so I was there.

• 40:52Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I did as I was told.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:55Matt Lewis?

  The other one is actually partly it demonstrates the reach of the events of the peasants revolt. Because this is a woman up in Morley in Derbyshire. And she's the kind of matriarch of this family and her five sons are both accused of going and attacking a priory in a castle and stealing and burning records, which is a lot of what goes on in the peasants revolt. All five of her sons have been soldiers in France. So again, it points us at this militarisation of society. But she's kind of wrapped up in the accusation against her sons as well. And I only find it interesting because her name is Gadea the Dastatham, but she doesn't have a son named Jason. Because if there was a Jason Dastatham involved in the peasants revolt, that would have just been very cool.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  You've got your move right there. Yeah, yeah.

• 41:37Matt Lewis?

  But it speaks to the fact that this has such a long reach.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  It does. There's also the amazing story in Cambridge of the sort of the bonfires of the town records and the ashes falling from the sky like snow and there are women dancing in it. And I can't remember her name, I think it's Dorothy something, but she's described as sort of dancing and swaying in this falling ash and screaming, down with the learning of scribes, something like that, which is quite a beautiful image.

• 42:05Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, we've had enough of experts, not quite the same thing.

• 42:09Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, because again, that burning of the records is one of the real drivers of the peasants revolt. And I guess for you writing a novel about this, how do you approach the idea that those documents carried such weight and importance? But also that actually we would tend to think today the destruction of historical records is a bad thing. But to them in 1381, this is the only way that they can obtain freedom.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting because I think it speaks to a certain superstition around the written word and about like kind of a record of debt was almost magical. Like it was an almost, a contract was an almost magical document. There's kind of the idea that if you destroyed a record of a debt, the debt no longer existed, which is false. But also in a sense, absolutely true, right? Like it taps into, I think, quite a contemporary anxiety of, well, what is money? If it all stops working tomorrow, how do we know who has what? Which in some ways is like, I think it's easy to understand as superstitious or mindlessly destructive.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  But I think you can kind of more sympathetically interpret it as absolutely sort of making sense in some ways as a sort of anti-establishment move. Because also, you know, this was the 14th century, there weren't backups, there weren't centralised databases. In a very real way, if you did destroy this information, who did know?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  And I also think it speaks, I suppose, to, I don't want to say kind of like a, an anti-intellectualism per se. But I think like a concern with the way knowledge was being centralised, I suppose, sort of like particularly in like a religious context. I was very interested in the idea of kind of heretical preaching, like the idea of John Ball as a hedge priest.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  And thinking my way into how he might have appealed to the masses and sort of propagandised the rebellion, even as it was going on, because that's sort of a role he appears to play in my mind. And I was doing a lot of research into sort of the history of Christianity and the history of heresy in the medieval period, or, you know, the later Middle Ages. And I encountered in, I think it's David Bentley Hart's book, he's a theologian, the idea that the New Testament, the Bible was very radical in the literary sense

• 44:56Speaker 02

  in that in the disciples, for the first time, the emotions of rustic of peasants are being taken seriously. We have Peter crying for Jesus's death. And up until that point in classical literature, rustic and peasants are always the butt of the joke. Their emotions aren't taken seriously. The tears of rustic are funny, they're less than human, always. So it struck me that part of what John Ball is doing is essentially making the claim of, well, Jesus and his disciples aren't their guys, they're our guys. Like Jesus belongs to us.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  And I think one of the things that is also really interesting and perhaps unexpected about the revolt is, it sounds very simple, but we associate, I suppose, religiosity and religious fervour with social conservatism now on quite an innate level. But John Ball was taking from scripture a radical call for social equality. And that was something I really wanted to sort of involve in the complexities of that. And I suppose almost competing claims on faith. On the one side, you've got the nobility saying, well, no, God has put this social order in place. God has set us above you.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  And to aspire to improve your social condition is tantamount to heresy. And on the other hand, you've got a figure like John Ball saying, well, no, it's right there in black and white. You know, it's harder for a rich man to pass into heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of an eagle. You know, absolute wealth is evil. And I think it speaks, sort of the burning of documents and the burning of church rolls and all these sorts of things speaks to, not necessarily a kind of like absolute anti-intellectualism, but a sort of preference for a more kind of like folky and vernacular wisdom, more teaching.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  You know, kind of, I'm not an expert on lollity or anything by any means, but that was certainly playing a role there as well.

• 47:24Speaker 01

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• 48:01Speaker 05

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• 48:54Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, you've got people like John Ball, because this is the beginning of lots of the big religious moves against the church. You know, John Wycliffe will come very soon afterwards and Jan Hus will follow in Wycliffe's footsteps and ultimately lead to Martin Luther's Reformation. It's all part of the same kind of journey that they're on. And I think John Ball, you know, the sermons that he's credited with when Adam delved in Evespan, who was then the gentleman and all that kind of thing. What he does is take that attitude that's coming from the nobility, that the world is ordered as the Bible says it should be, and says, well, where's the Duke of Lancaster in the Bible? Show me, because he's not there.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Nowhere is Jesus like, and by the way, you should let them eat all the trifle.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really interesting. It's really interesting. I think kind of, I wanted this novel to, despite, I suppose, the nominal failure of the peasants revolt, I wanted this to be an optimistic novel, I suppose, on an essential way. Because it's really, really dizzying to me, the sort of like mental and imaginative leap it must have been for this many people to contemplate the overthrow of aristocracy in the way that they did. It's truly just astonishing that these people were thinking about like refiguring the world to such an extent.

• 50:18Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I mean, one of the questions I was going to ask you is to what extent do you, do you want your readers to be able to enjoy the hope of the peasants revolt, the belief that this could work, that there could be some radical change that will make everybody's lives infinitely better? Because you've got to rip that away at the end if you do that. But did you want your readers to be able to enjoy that feeling of being on a journey that will change the world?

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It's kind of that Gramsci quote, right? Like pessimism of the mind, optimism of the heart. And I think the peasants revolt sort of epitomises that. I think it's very easy to kind of like write it off as a chaotic failure. But kind of who's to say if it had not occurred, how much worse things might have become for serfs and villains? You know, I think we certainly after the revolt, despite the violence kind of with which it was repressed, there's a certain level of anxiety around the idea of exploitative taxation, around the idea of kind of strengthening bondage that lasts for a very long time. I think, I think it-

• 51:31Speaker 02

  It definitely shows that sort of the third estate can kind of cannot be pushed an infinite distance, I suppose, that a breaking point comes. So kind of, I don't necessarily like the, you know, the description of the Peasants' Revolt as a failed revolt. That's certainly sort of not my interpretation of it. I also sort of wanted to capture the fun and the mischief of, of all these events. Cause I think part of what I'm talking, you know, this imaginative leap to, okay, what if we all got together and changed the world? Part of why that was able to happen was because of this kind of almost like Bacteanian idea of like the carnivalesque.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  It's really interesting that the revolt maps onto Corpus Christi and these, this sort of medieval holidays, holy days that were times of play and kind of times for sort of light social subversion and cheekiness and getting a bit pissed and lying out in the sun. Because that was a massive part of the revolt as well. You know, there are all these descriptions of them running around the Tower of London, tweaking the guards' beards and running, you know, running into Joan of Kent's chambers and bouncing on her bed and hitting each other with sticks and, and drawing silly faces on statues and all of that sort of thing. And I think it must have been really fun as well, to an extent.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  There must have been a level of excitement in the subversion. And I don't necessarily think that that is contradictory to the political importance that these people put into what they were doing. That part of the reason you were going along with it was because it was exciting, because it was a bit of a thrill, because it sort of felt like you're at a music festival, the medieval equivalent thereof. So I wanted, I wanted it to be a funny novel and I wanted it to be an exciting and a pacy novel as well, to sort of capture that feeling and do justice to it.

• 53:34Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, wonderful. And I wanted just to end on, what do you think, having studied the Peasants' Revolt for a few years to help you write this book, what do you think we can take away today from the Peasants' Revolt? Does it still have relevance? Does it still reverberate today?

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Oh, entirely. I wanted to write about the Peasants' Revolt because, you know, it's the Peasants' Revolt in and of itself. I wasn't trying to write through it about anything else. But I don't think it's an accident that I was kind of drawn to a story about a complete collapse in trust in institutions and a story about people sort of debating and litigating the limits of power and corruption of those institutions and, and how governments should function. And has, should we and can we expect morality of the people who are meant to be leading us? Um, I think is a really crucial question, was a crucial question in the 14th century

• 54:37Speaker 02

  and is a crucial question now. I think, you know, it's, it's a bit of a lazy comparison, but in 1381, we're talking about a post pandemic world as we are now, where a lot of people have been driven to the very edge of kind of toleration in terms of personal pain and economic oppression. And you reach a point where a lot of people are kind of like, well, this, you know, this is the line. This is the world that has gone before and this is the world we are moving into and what do we want it to look like? And I suppose the message I sort of wanted the novel to give where is, well, as long as we can talk to each other, as long as we can tell each other what we want the world

• 55:21Speaker 02

  to look like, there is hope that the world gets better. I don't want to sort of give away the final scene or, or line of the book, but I suppose that that is it in essence. Yeah. And then that it's about more than an individual, I suppose as well. Um, I knew again, to kind of give the novel shape, that it had to broadly follow, I suppose, that the arc of what Tyler and that there had to be an ending. I, it's not a spoiler, he dies. But I, I also needed to gesture to the fact that the rebellion he led was bigger than one man, that it was always bigger than him and that it continued after him as well. And that sort of the energy that the Peasants' Revolt captured, that there's a continuity there, certainly.

• 56:01Matt Lewis?

  I think there's a lot to see in it today and, and so many, so I, I made a documentary about the Peasants' Revolt a couple of years ago because we're living in a post pandemic world with wage suppression and war in Europe and rising taxation and all of those kinds of things. And it just felt like, hang on, that, that's not a million miles away from where we are. These, these must be people with complaints and issues and problems in their everyday life that we can, to some extent, identify with today.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And I kind of don't go in for, I don't go in for sort of basic parallels or analogies. Like there are many, many aspects of the late, the late medieval world, which are of course wholly different and almost impossible to imagine our way into. And when I was writing, I was kind of came across all this. They marched under the St George's Cross and I was like, God, I hope people don't, you know, interpret what I'm trying to do here. You know, I don't think they were sort of the medieval equivalent of the taxpayers' alliance, put it that way. Kind of taxes then and taxes nail.

• 57:06Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  And completely different things and were used in completely different ways. So, you know, there's, there's lots of ways in which it's more knotty and more confusing than those easy analogies, I suppose. But certainly wanted to, I suppose, write the novel as a tribute to, to the sort of almost magical thinking that it takes to make political change, I suppose.

• 57:35Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Amy. It's been absolutely wonderful to, to explore your writing and your novel and your research into the Peasants' Revolt in a little bit more detail. And, and I hope people will go away and read Doom Painting now.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 57:49Matt Lewis?

  You can find a recent episode Eleanor and I did on the Peasants' Revolt and the new movie, The Uprising, as well as more in our back catalogue on the work of the people of 1381 Project and on Richard II. By the way, Marjorie's story doesn't get a happy ever after. She did win her legal case, but in retribution, the dean of the College of Windsor had her son beaten so badly that he died. As was the case for so many in 1381, hope was torn away and replaced by more tragedy. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history.

• 58:31Matt Lewis?

  Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.