The Peasants' Revolt of 1381: Wat Tyler, a Boy King and the Week England Nearly Came Apart
In June 1381, a crowd of English villagers, craftsmen and old soldiers walked into London, burned down the grandest house in the country, pulled the Archbishop of Canterbury out of the Tower and cut off his head. Then they sat down to negotiate with the king. He was 14.
You'll see it called the Peasants' Revolt, Wat Tyler's Rebellion or the Great Uprising. It's back in the conversation thanks to Paul Greengrass's film The Uprising, which came out in September 2026 and puts an invented ploughman at the centre of it. The real cast was odder than anything a screenwriter would dare.
This is the long version. It covers why it happened, what went on day by day in London, the risings most accounts skip, and how the story finally ended 18 years later on a clifftop near Colwyn Bay.
Quick Answers
The Peasants' Revolt was a mass uprising across England between late May and July 1381.
The trigger was a poll tax, the third in four years, charged at the same rate for rich and poor.
Its best known leaders were Wat Tyler, from Kent, and the radical priest John Ball.
Rebels held London from 13 to 15 June and killed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Treasurer.
Wat Tyler was killed at Smithfield on 15 June by the Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth.
Richard II took back every promise he'd made, but the poll tax was dropped and serfdom faded over the following decades.
Most of the rebels weren't peasants. The name only caught on in 1874.
Richard lost his crown in 1399 after being tricked out of Conwy Castle and ambushed at Penmaen Head, near modern Colwyn Bay.
Timeline at a Glance
30 May 1381: Essex villagers defy the king's tax commissioner at Brentwood
6 June: Kent rebels take Rochester Castle
7 June: Wat Tyler is chosen as leader at Maidstone
10 June: Rebels enter Canterbury; Cressing Temple is attacked in Essex
12 June: The Kent rebels camp at Blackheath, outside London
13 June: Rebels cross London Bridge and destroy the Savoy Palace
14 June: The king meets rebels at Mile End; the archbishop is beheaded at the Tower
15 June: Wat Tyler is killed at Smithfield
25 or 26 June: Norfolk rebels are beaten at North Walsham
28 June: Essex rebels are defeated near Billericay
2 July: Richard II formally cancels the charters of freedom
15 July: John Ball is executed at St Albans
November 1381: Parliament meets and a general pardon follows, with 287 people excluded
August 1399: Richard II is trapped in North Wales and loses his throne to Henry Bolingbroke
Why England Was Ready to Blow
Start with the plague. The Black Death killed somewhere between a third and a half of England's people in the middle of the 14th century. For those who survived, it meant something new: bargaining power. There weren't enough workers, so workers could ask for more, and for a generation wages climbed.
The people at the top didn't care for that. An ordinance of 1349 and a statute of 1351 tried to force wages back to pre-plague levels and made it a crime to turn down work. In 1361 the penalties were stiffened to include branding. The laws were enforced by the same local gentry who were paying the wages.
Then there was serfdom. Many villagers were still legally unfree. They were tied to a lord's manor, owed him unpaid labour and needed his permission to leave or to marry off a daughter. With land going spare and wages rising elsewhere, those rules chafed more every year.
On top of all that came the bills for the war in France, which was going badly. In 1377 the government charged a poll tax of four pence a head, about three days' pay for a farmhand. A second in 1379 was at least graded by rank. The third, agreed in late 1380, was a flat shilling for everyone over 15. That was triple the first one, and a ploughman owed the same as a merchant.
People did the obvious thing and hid. When the returns came in they showed roughly a third fewer taxpayers than in 1377. In March 1381 the royal council sent commissioners into the counties to find the missing names.
The king was no help, because he was a child. Richard II had been crowned at ten. The man most people held responsible for the tax and the failing war was his uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the richest man in England.
John Ball, the Priest Who Wouldn't Shut Up
The revolt had a voice long before it had an army. John Ball was a priest who first turns up in the Colchester court rolls in 1352. He trained in York, worked in Norwich and Colchester and then took to the road.
What he preached on village greens was dynamite. He said tithes shouldn't be paid to unworthy priests, that lords had no natural right to rule and that things wouldn't go well in England until goods were held in common. The church banned people from listening to him in the 1360s and locked him up several times.
In April 1381 he was arrested again for attacking the poll tax and put in the archbishop's prison at Maidstone. He's said to have told his judges he'd be set free by 20,000 armed men. He wasn't far wrong.
Brentwood, 30 May: Where It Started
On 30 May 1381 a tax commissioner called John Bampton (older books call him Thomas) summoned men from Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope to Brentwood in Essex. They came armed with old bows and sticks. Their spokesman, Thomas Baker of Fobbing, said the village had paid already and wouldn't pay again.
Bampton ordered arrests. It turned into a fight, some of his clerks were killed and he fled to London. A senior judge, Sir Robert Belknap, was sent to restore order. He was surrounded and made to swear he'd hold no more hearings.
After that it moved fast. Rebels met at Bocking on 4 June to agree a plan. On 10 June they attacked Cressing Temple, a manor belonging to Robert Hales, the Lord Treasurer. Researchers have identified 148 people who took part, all but two of them from Essex. They left the great barns alone, which is why you can still visit them.
Burning paperwork was the point. Manor records were what proved who was a serf and what they owed. At Wix in Essex, court records name Joanna Welbetyn and Joanna Alfred among those who burned the manor's documents. Another band, led by Nicholas Carter, marched more than 30 miles in a couple of days and included a widow the clerk only called the former wife of William Dekne.
Kent Rises and Wat Tyler Appears
Kent went up at the same moment, and over a similar grievance. A royal knight, Sir Simon Burley, claimed a man called Robert Belling was his runaway serf and had him locked in Rochester Castle. Around 5 June an angry crowd gathered at Dartford. On 6 June they marched on Rochester, and the constable handed over the castle and the prisoner without a fight.
The next day, at Maidstone, the rebels chose a leader: Wat Tyler. Almost nothing is known about him before that week. One chronicle suggests he'd served as an archer in France, which would explain why he knew how to move thousands of men. Another leader, Jack Straw, turns up in the chronicles too, but historians aren't sure he existed. He may be a nickname for Tyler.
They freed John Ball from the archbishop's prison, marched into Canterbury on 10 June and made the cathedral monks swear loyalty to their cause. By 12 June they were camped on Blackheath, a few miles from London Bridge.
Ball preached to them there. His famous rhyme asked a simple question: when Adam dug and Eve spun, who was the gentleman? In other words, nobody was born to be a lord.
One thing is easy to miss. The rebels didn't think they were rebelling against the king. Their watchword was "With King Richard and the true commons". Their quarrel was with the men around him, and they had a list of the ones they wanted dead. Gaunt, the archbishop and the treasurer were at the top of it.
13 June: London Opens Its Gates
Richard had been at Windsor. He was brought downriver to the Tower of London on 11 June with his ministers. On the morning of the 13th he took a barge to Greenwich to meet the Kent rebels, with four boatloads of soldiers. He saw the size of the crowd on the bank and wouldn't land. They wouldn't talk unless he did. He went back to the Tower.
That afternoon the rebels came over London Bridge. Someone let them in from inside. On the other side of the city the Essex men walked through Aldgate, which was also opened for them. Plenty of Londoners joined in. They had their own grudges, especially against Gaunt.
The crowd tore open the Marshalsea and Fleet prisons and went for the Temple, where the lawyers kept their records. Books and rolls were dragged into the street and burned. One royal official on the death list survived because the men ransacking his lodgings didn't notice he was still in the building. The headquarters of Hales's order at Clerkenwell was burned too.
Then they went for the Savoy, Gaunt's palace on the Thames. Luckily for him he was in the north, negotiating with the Scots. One chronicler reckoned the silver plate alone would have filled five carts.
What happened there tells you this wasn't a looting spree. The order was that nothing was to be stolen. Plate was smashed, furnishings and the duke's records were burned and jewels were crushed and thrown in the river. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham, no friend of the rebels, has them calling themselves "zealous for truth and justice, not thieves and robbers". One man caught pocketing something was reportedly thrown into the fire.
Later tellings add two grim details. Some rebels threw barrels on the fire that turned out to hold gunpowder, and the hall blew up. And 32 men who'd gone down to the wine cellar were trapped when the building collapsed. In one Victorian account drawn from the old chronicles, "they were heard crying and calling seven days after". Nobody dug them out.
Court records put names to a few of the crowd. One was Joan Pode of Charlton, who went to the Savoy with her husband and another relative. Gaunt spent years suing people over that night. The last cases weren't settled until 1387.
14 June: Mile End
The next morning Richard rode out to meet the Essex rebels at Mile End, east of the city, with only a small escort. He left the archbishop and the treasurer behind in the Tower.
The rebels asked for an end to serfdom, land rented at four pence an acre, the right to buy and sell freely and a pardon. They also asked for the hated officials to be handed over. Richard agreed to almost all of it. He wouldn't hand anyone over, but said he'd see justice done himself. Around 30 clerks started writing out charters of freedom on the spot, and copies were soon on their way around the country.
Historians still argue about why he said yes. Juliet Barker thinks the boy may have meant it. Dan Jones thinks his advisers were using him as bait to draw the crowd out of the city. Either way, many of the Essex men took their charters and went home.
The Tower Falls
While the king was at Mile End, several hundred rebels walked into the Tower of London. How is a mystery. The fortress was garrisoned and nobody fought. Barker's view is that they must simply have been let in.
They found Simon Sudbury, who was both Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, with Treasurer Hales in the chapel. Both were dragged to Tower Hill and beheaded, along with John of Gaunt's physician and a royal official called John Legge. Sudbury is said to have died only at the eighth blow. The heads were paraded through the streets and stuck up on London Bridge.
The king's mother, Joan of Kent, was in the Tower too. The rebels are said to have mocked her and let her go.
A later indictment names a woman, Johanna Ferrour, as the leader who ordered both beheadings. She's also accused of leading the attack on the Savoy. Sylvia Federico, the scholar who dug the women's names out of the court rolls, found them doing nearly everything the men did. There's no record of any woman being executed afterwards.
One teenager in the Tower got lucky. Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt's 14-year-old son, is said to have been saved by a man called John Ferrour, who talked the crowd out of killing him. That story comes from a later record, not from 1381. But the boy lived. Remember him, because he comes back.
As for the archbishop, his head never rejoined his body. The skull is still kept at St Gregory's Church in his home town of Sudbury in Suffolk. In 2011 forensic artists at the University of Dundee used it to rebuild his face.
The Massacre of the Flemings
The ugliest part of the week had nothing to do with tax. Over 13 and 14 June, crowds hunted down Flemish immigrants living in London. Around 140 were murdered. Thirty-five were dragged out of one church, St Martin Vintry, and beheaded in the street.
Why them? They were foreigners, and they were competition. Flemish weavers had been invited into England by the crown, and London's own cloth workers resented them. Some historians think the weavers' guilds steered the mob. It's a reminder that not everyone in the crowd was there for John Ball's sermon.
15 June: The Death of Wat Tyler
With many Essex men gone, the Kent rebels were the ones left. Richard agreed to meet them at Smithfield, a market field just outside the city wall. He came with about 200 men. Several thousand rebels were drawn up on the far side.
Tyler rode across to speak to him. He's said to have shaken the king's hand, called him brother and told him to cheer up. His demands had grown. Now he wanted the church's wealth shared out, only one bishop in England and, in the words of one chronicle, "no lordship of any sort, except for that of the king".
What happened next depends on who you read. The chroniclers don't agree. One says Tyler called for a drink, rinsed his mouth and spat in front of the king. Another has him tossing a dagger from hand to hand. A third says a royal servant called him the biggest thief in Kent and Tyler went for him.
They all agree on the ending. Mayor Walworth tried to arrest him. Tyler stabbed at Walworth, whose armour saved him. Walworth struck back, wounding Tyler in the neck and head, and a royal squire called Ralph Standish ran him through. Tyler managed to ride a short way before falling. He was carried into St Bartholomew's Hospital nearby. Walworth had him dragged back out and beheaded.
That should have been the moment the rebels loosed their arrows. Instead Richard rode straight at them and told them he would be their captain now. They followed him north to the fields at Clerkenwell. Walworth galloped back into the city, raised the militia and surrounded them. Richard let them go home, and they went.
Walworth was knighted on the spot. He was a fishmonger by trade, and Fishmongers' Hall by London Bridge still shows off a dagger said to be the one he used.
Smithfield went on to see worse. It's the same ground where Anne Askew was burned in 1546. A memorial to the revolt was put up there in 2015.
It Wasn't Just London
The march on the capital gets the attention, but the rising reached more than half the counties of England. There was trouble as far west as Bridgwater in Somerset and as far north as Yorkshire and Chester. Most of it was local people settling local scores.
St Albans
The townspeople of St Albans had been fighting their abbey for generations over who owned the woods, the fishponds and the right to grind corn. Led by William Grindcobbe, they broke open the abbey's prison, pulled down its fences and burned its records in the market place. The abbot, Thomas de la Mare, wanted to hold out but his frightened monks talked him round, and on 16 June he signed away the abbey's rights.
Suffolk
A priest called John Wrawe led the Suffolk rising. At Bury St Edmunds the crowd stormed the abbey. The prior, John Cambridge, got away, was caught two days later and beheaded.
The Chief Justice, Sir John Cavendish, ran for a boat on the River Little Ouse at Lakenheath. A woman called Katherine Gamen was later accused of shoving it out into the river before he could reach it. The crowd caught him and cut off his head.
Cambridge
In Cambridge the target was the university, which townspeople saw as a privileged nuisance. Corpus Christi College was ransacked and the university's archives were burned in the market square in mid-June. One account has an old woman called Margery Starre scattering the ashes and shouting for an end to the learning of clerks.
One of the Cambridgeshire leaders was a landowner called John Peper of Linton, who'd come home from the war in France that May. He was eventually pardoned.
Norfolk
In Norfolk a dyer called Geoffrey Litster took Norwich on 17 June after the knight defending it, Sir Robert Salle, was killed. Litster then set himself up in style and made captured gentlemen wait on him at table.
It didn't last. The Bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, was a soldier by temperament. He put on armour, gathered men as he rode and smashed Litster's force at North Walsham on 25 or 26 June. Litster was hanged, and the bishop is said to have heard his confession first.
The North and West
York, Beverley and Scarborough all saw townspeople turn on their ruling families. In Scarborough the rebels wore a uniform of white hoods with red tails. In Bridgwater on 19 June a crowd forced the master of the local hospital to hand over his privileges and broke open Ilchester gaol.
Who the Rebels Really Were
Nobody in 1381 called it the Peasants' Revolt. The historian John Richard Green made the label stick in 1874, and it's misleading.
The People of 1381 project has built a database of about 28,000 records from court rolls, tax lists and military records. Its researchers say the rebels were "drawn from every level of medieval society beneath the aristocracy". That means farmers, yes, but also carpenters, weavers, bakers, innkeepers, servants, around 20 clergymen, small landowners and soldiers back from France.
Plenty of them were the sort of people who ran their villages: reeves, constables and jurors. That goes a long way to explaining how well organised it all was.
Take Walter Spittebotter of Blackmore in Essex. He first appears taking on land in the 1350s, joined an attack on a royal manor in 1381 and died in 1404 holding a cottage and six acres. He was an ordinary man with something to lose.
The numbers were smaller than legend has it too. Chroniclers talked about 200,000 rebels. Barker thinks fewer than 10,000 reached London.
One more thing to keep in mind. Every account we have was written by the other side. The chroniclers were monks and courtiers who called the rebels beasts and fools. Nothing survives from a rebel's own pen except a handful of cryptic letters attributed to John Ball.
The King Takes It All Back
Once the crowds had gone home, the promises went with them. Around 4,000 soldiers were gathered in London and sent out into the counties.
When Essex men came to Richard at Waltham to ask him to honour the charters, he's reported to have said: "Serfs you are and serfs you will remain." On 28 June a royal army caught a force of Essex rebels near Billericay and killed around 500. On 2 July the charters were formally cancelled.
A new Chief Justice, Robert Tresilian, toured the rebel counties. John Ball was caught hiding in Coventry and tried at St Albans. He's said to have been offered two extra days to repent and refused. On 15 July he was hanged, drawn and quartered in front of the king. If you want to know what that involved, the life of a medieval executioner covers it. His head went up on London Bridge.
Grindcobbe was executed at St Albans as well. In Suffolk, John Wrawe tried to save himself by informing on two dozen of his own men. It didn't work, and he was executed in May 1382.
How many died is unclear. One figure often quoted is 1,500, but nobody was keeping count and it may be too high. When parliament met in November it blamed the whole thing on greedy royal officials, which was more or less what the rebels had been saying. A general pardon followed, with 287 named ringleaders left out.
So Did the Revolt Fail?
In the short term, yes. Tyler and Ball were dead, the charters were waste parchment and serfdom was still the law.
But the poll tax was abandoned, and parliament became far more careful about what it asked ordinary people to pay. With less money coming in, the war in France had to be scaled back.
Serfdom went too, though more slowly. Lords who needed workers found it easier to offer wages and rents than to enforce old duties, and tenants were not shy about reminding them what had happened in 1381. By the middle of the next century serfdom had largely died out in England without anyone formally ending it.
And the memory lasted. When a British government brought in a new poll tax in 1990, it was met with mass protests, and the comparisons with 1381 wrote themselves.
Eighteen Years Later: Richard II's Last Ride Through North Wales
The story has a coda, and it happened on the North Wales coast. The boy who faced down the rebels at Smithfield grew into a king who trusted nobody and was trusted by few. In 1398 he banished his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, the lad who'd been spared in the Tower. When John of Gaunt died in February 1399, Richard seized the whole Lancaster inheritance.
That was a mistake. In May 1399 Richard sailed for Ireland. Around the end of June, Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire to claim what was his, and the country went over to him almost without a fight.
The Road North
Richard got back to Wales around 24 July, landing at Milford Haven. His army began to melt away almost at once. So he left it. According to Jean Creton, a Frenchman travelling with the royal party, the king slipped away at night dressed as a poor priest and rode for North Wales with a handful of companions.
He was heading there for a reason. He'd sent the Earl of Salisbury ahead to Conwy to raise a second army from North Wales and Cheshire, his most loyal recruiting ground. Salisbury had done it, too. But the king took too long to arrive. A rumour went round that he was dead, and the Welsh gentry said as much and went home. By the time Richard rode in, Salisbury had about a hundred men left.
Conwy Castle
So by the second week of August the King of England was holed up in Conwy Castle, Edward I's fortress at the mouth of the river. It was close to impregnable, and that was about all it had going for it. Creton says the royal castles along the coast had been left bare. Richard moved restlessly between Conwy, Beaumaris and Caernarfon and for several nights slept on straw.
Bolingbroke was by now at Chester, less than 50 miles away. He didn't fancy besieging Conwy. Instead he sent Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, to talk the king out.
Northumberland left his soldiers hidden along the road and came into Conwy around 12 August with only a few attendants. His offer sounded reasonable. Richard would stay king. Bolingbroke would get his inheritance back. Parliament would deal with a few of Richard's advisers.
Richard wanted more than his word. So, in Creton's telling, mass was said in the castle chapel and Northumberland swore on the consecrated host that he intended "no deceit". The little chapel in the castle's Chapel Tower is still there. Creton also says Richard told his friends privately that he had no plans to keep his side of the bargain either.
The Ambush at Penmaen Head
Richard left Conwy around 15 August with about 23 companions. There was no bridge, so they'd have crossed the estuary by ferry and then ridden east along the coast towards Rhuddlan, where Northumberland had promised dinner would be waiting.
There was no Colwyn Bay then. The resort is a Victorian creation. The road ran through farmland in the parish of Llandrillo and on past the hamlet of Colwyn. A couple of miles further on, the hills come right down to the sea at Penmaen Head, also called Penmaenrhos, between Old Colwyn and Llanddulas. The old road had to climb over the headland.
That's where Northumberland had hidden his men. As the king's party came over the rise, they saw armed soldiers and Percy banners below them. With the cliff on one side and the sea on the other, there was nowhere to go. Northumberland knelt and explained that this was simply an escort. Everyone present understood that the king was now a prisoner.
The headland looks very different today. Much of it has been quarried away and the A55 runs along its foot. But this spot, on the edge of Old Colwyn, is where Richard II's reign effectively ended.
Rhuddlan and Flint
They did stop for dinner at Rhuddlan Castle. Then Richard was taken on to Flint Castle on the Dee estuary, which Northumberland's men already held. Cadw calls Flint the earliest and most unusual of Edward I's Welsh castles, with a great round tower standing apart in its own moat.
Creton describes Richard climbing onto the walls the next morning and watching Bolingbroke's army come along the shore from Chester. Bolingbroke entered the castle in full armour and bowed. He told the king he'd come back early because the people felt they'd been badly governed for 22 years, and that he'd help him govern better. Richard replied that if it pleased his cousin, it pleased him.
The date is given as either 16 or 19 August, depending on the source. There's also a famous story about the king's greyhound, Mathe, deserting him in the courtyard to fawn on Bolingbroke. It comes from the chronicler Froissart, who wasn't there, so treat it as legend. Shakespeare set one of the great scenes of his Richard II at Flint.
Chester and the End
From Flint the king was taken to Chester and then on to London. He was in the Tower by 1 September. At the end of the month he was made to give up the crown, and on 13 October Bolingbroke was crowned Henry IV. Richard was moved to Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire and was dead by the middle of February 1400, most likely starved.
It's hard to miss the symmetry. At Smithfield, a 14-year-old Richard won by making promises he didn't mean to keep. At Conwy, aged 32, he lost by believing someone else's.
North Wales wasn't finished with the new king, either. Many in the region had been Richard's men. On Good Friday 1401, two brothers from Anglesey, Rhys and Gwilym ap Tudur, got into Conwy Castle by posing as carpenters and held it for about three months. They were cousins of the man who was about to give Henry IV the fight of his life, Owain Glyndŵr.
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Sources
London Museum: How the Peasants' Revolt rocked medieval London
Smithsonian Magazine: The real story behind The Uprising and the 1381 Peasants' Revolt
The Conversation: Who were the 'peasants' of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt?
British History Online: Victoria County History of Hertfordshire, St Albans Abbey
Medievalists.net: Face of 14th-century Archbishop of Canterbury revealed
Bates College: Peasants' Revolt included women too, Federico proves
Medieval History: The adventures of young Henry of Bolingbroke
Living London History: Tracing the Peasants' Revolt through London's streets
Colwyn Bay Heritage Group: Richard II meets a sticky end near Colwyn Bay
History Points: Site of Richard II's ambush, Penmaen Head, Old Colwyn
