A revolt gets its first movie

Paul Greengrass's The Uprising, with Andrew Garfield and Jamie Bell, dramatizes the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. It is the first feature film ever made about it.

It started with a head tax

In late May 1381, riots broke out in rural England after Parliament tried to collect unpaid poll taxes, a levy charged on every single head.

They loved the boy king

Thousands of rebels marched on London fiercely loyal to 14-year-old Richard II. They blamed his wicked counselors for everything, not him.

Equality, then bloodshed

The goal was a post-feudal society where everyone stood equal under the king. Getting there meant burning palaces and murdering politicians, lawyers, churchmen and Flemish immigrants.

A paradigm-breaking event

Yale medievalist Paul Freedman frames why this shook England more than any foreign war did.

“It's one thing to have a war with the French. But a kingdom-wide rebellion of one's own people is a paradigm-breaking situation.”

Not actually peasants

Purdue's Michael Johnston says the name misleads. The rebels were not one undifferentiated mass against a few villains, but "mostly middle-management types."

The Ploughman is invented

Garfield's character, who lost his wife and children to the Black Death, never existed. Historian Dan Jones calls him a vision of a person we never think of as an individual.

“I am what I do.”

Borrowed from a poem

The character owes its shape to Piers Plowman, William Langland's 14th-century allegory. Chroniclers report that real rebels rallied around the figure of Piers, imagining him cheering them on.

John Ball, proto-socialist

Ball was likely a wandering priest with no parish and no security. Hostile chroniclers record him preaching that the split between rich and poor came from human sin, not from God.

Cut down the noxious weeds

The film's bloodthirsty Ball draws on Thomas Walsingham's account of the Blackheath sermon, where Ball called for killing lords, then lawyers and jurors.

“cut down the noxious weeds…by killing the most powerful lords of the realm”

Ball's real ending was worse

He survived the revolt by about a month, then was captured, tried at St. Albans, and hanged, drawn and quartered. The film gives him something more heroic.

Wat Tyler may be a ghost

Chroniclers name Tyler as a top leader, but so little is known that Johnston doubts he existed. Many rebels really had fought in France, whoever led them.

A head in a bag

Tyler reportedly met Richard at Smithfield and was killed by the mayor of London's men, his head set on a pole. In the film, Richard pulls it from a bag to show the rebels his betrayal.

A child on the throne

Richard held no real power in 1381. Uncles, officials and churchmen ran England, and the rebels beheaded two of them, Treasurer Hales and Archbishop Sudbury.

“Woe, woe to the land where the king is a child.”

He rode out anyway

Richard really did face the rebel horde in person, and people at the time thought it brave. Johnston says the peasants would have knelt to him, exactly as the film shows.

The women the film added

Freedman notes that equality between men and women was not on the rebel agenda, though Jones counters that women were half the workforce and half the crowd. Joan of Kent and the peasant Alyce are largely inventions.

“We know nothing about her influence in the revolt.”

The plague made them richer

Surviving the Black Death of the late 1340s meant better food and better land. With a third of the population gone, wages should have soared and expectations rose with them.

Then Parliament froze wages

Laws in 1349 banned wage increases, and the 1351 Statute of Labourers stopped peasants moving for better pay. Historians doubt it worked, but it enraged a class that had tasted more.

Rage that cuts both ways

Freedman sees the rebels' anger in tax-the-rich socialists, in George Floyd protesters, and uncomfortably in January 6. We approve of 1381 because we see ourselves in it.

“That's because we see ourselves as well-meaning.”

What it actually won

Richard took back his concessions, and prosecutions over the next years ended in many executions, though most rebels were pardoned. Serfdom still declined, and lords never regained the same arbitrary power.