# The Uprising: the 1381 revolt that never quite died > Paul Greengrass turns the Peasants' Revolt into one farmer's story, and asks what ordinary people are owed. - Title: The Uprising: the 1381 revolt that never quite died · TIME - Summary: Paul Greengrass turns the Peasants' Revolt into one farmer's story, and asks what ordinary people are owed. The 1381 rising lost everything it asked for, yet… - Keywords: history, film, medieval england, class, protest, Uprising, 1381, revolt, never, quite, died, TIME - Source: TIME — https://time.com/article/2026/09/08/the-true-story-behind-the-uprising - Author: JP Mangalindan - Published: 2026-09-11T13:00:04.149+00:00 - Read time: 4 min - Topics: history, film, medieval england, class, protest ## A farmer in the fens Andrew Garfield plays a man called only Ploughman, cutting furrows in eastern England with his ox. Plague took his wife and children. Labor and memory are what's left. ## Greengrass goes medieval The Uprising, in theaters Sept. 11, dramatizes the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, when tens of thousands of English commoners marched on London to demand a fairer world. ## Not a soldier, not a priest Greengrass invented Ploughman rather than centering Wat Tyler or John Ball. He wanted a character who stood in for everyone who rose. > They were all ordinary farmers, ordinary people who lived in villages and small towns, who'd had enough. ## A question across centuries Garfield thinks audiences will recognize the feeling instantly: what you do when the injustice is bigger than you, and how you fight to live with dignity. > How do we fight for our right to live a life of freedom and of dignity, and of connection? ## Half a country, gone The Black Death landed at Melcombe in 1348 and killed as much as half of England within two years. Villages emptied, fields went to weed, livestock wandered untended. ## Scarce labor has a price Historian Dan Jones puts it in plain economics: lose half the people and wages should rise, rents should fall. Survivors had reason to expect a better life. > What life could be is probably at the heart of this whole story. ## Parliament caps the wage Instead the government moved to suppress wages, imposing a maximum and sending judges into the countryside to enforce it. The old hierarchy was being nailed back together. ## Then came the poll taxes The war with France ground on even as plague shrank the tax base. The crown's answer was poll taxes on people already stretched by loss and labor laws. > Taking aim squarely at the ordinary people. ## An order made by people By spring 1381 the realization had spread that the social order was built by human hands, which meant human hands could rebuild it. Every hierarchy above them was threatened. ## Essex to Kent in days In late May, Essex villagers turned on the tax commissioners. Tyler emerged at the head of the Kentish rebels on June 7, freed Ball from the Archbishop's prison, and took Canterbury by June 10. ## Who then was the gentleman Ball's couplet asked who granted one class the right to rule another. In a kingdom that read rank as God's design, that was a revolutionary question. > When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman? ## The sword and the scripture Jones calls Tyler and Ball the revolt's two hands. Tyler brought military organization, Ball the moral argument, and together they made the movement both organized and radicalized. ## Not just peasants Whole villages moved with their structures intact: local leaders, parish priests, craftsmen, laborers, plus Londoners with their own grievances. Women were there too, including at the Tower. > It's a very broad coalition. ## London comes apart Rebels threw open the prisons, burned the New Temple with its legal records, breached the Tower, and beheaded Archbishop Sudbury and Treasurer Hales. ## Two judgments at once Jones refuses a clean verdict. The grievances were real and the exploitation was real, and the violence still spread to people who had nothing to do with the tax. > You have to say that this was a good cause, and the rebellion got hideously out of control. ## The boy king's betrayal Richard II, 14 years old, rode out on June 14 and granted the demands including the end of serfdom. Tyler was killed at Smithfield the next day. Within weeks the charters were canceled and the leaders hunted down. ## Written by the winners Most chroniclers were churchmen, and the church was a target. The legal records survive from the perspective of the suppression, so historians read against the sources. > Nearly everything that survives of the rebels comes down through their enemies' pens. ## The Hood, in lockdown Greengrass started writing on day two of COVID lockdown, and the script was first called The Hood. Ploughman ends beyond the king's law, in the forest, beside the outlaw tradition Piers Plowman first named in writing. ## Waking from a cult Ploughman was raised to believe the king spoke with God's authority. Garfield plays the betrayal as spiritual, not just political: oppression dressed up as spirituality. > One goes from being the farmer to the outlaw, and the other goes from being the powerless king to the tyrant. ## The ledger comes later Serfdom withered within decades, and by 1450 it was effectively finished. Greengrass, who filmed Northern Ireland and apartheid South Africa, stays wary: revolutions eat themselves, and the accounting only happens afterward. > This is a moment when the ordinary people step onto the political stage in the English-speaking world, and they are never thereafter off it. ## Key takeaway The 1381 rising lost everything it asked for, yet it put ordinary people on the political stage for good.