When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
The so-called Peasants' Revolt: the largest social uprising of the Middle Ages
It is that time of year again. Medieval historians hark back to the summer of 1381. The year that Wat Tyler and John Ball lead a band of pitch fork wielding troglodytes to London and caused havoc for the king and his government. At least, this is the popular understanding of the so-called Peasants’ Revolt, another classic Victorian moniker that has stuck like super glue, despite its woeful inaccuracy.
Contemporary records refer to the rebellion that took place in June 1381 as a ‘rising’, not lead by angry peasants but the populace. Peasants made up some of the coalition of rebels, but they were joined by soldiers, merchants, clerics, tanners, smiths, tilers, artisans. Women and children. The elderly as well as the young. The rising was because people across the realm were desperate. Taxed beyond their capacity for a war that never seemed to end. As collectors moved through the counties gathering tax, they were relentless in their pursuit. A particular villain, John Legg, peppers accounts of what occurred in the months before the rising, his intimidation verging on tyrannical. According to the chronicler, Henry Knighton, Legg obtained a commission from the king for himself and three others to collect tax across ‘Kent, Norfolk and other counties’ and by means of rooting out young married women avoiding payment, Legg began to conduct virginity checks. ‘He would assemble the men and women before him, and horrible to relate, would shamelessly raise the young girls skirts to discover whether they were corrupted by intercourse with men’. If he believed these girls to be sexually active, he ‘would compel their friends and parents to pay the tax for them, for many would rather choose to pay than to see their daughters shamefully mistreated’. It was only a matter of time before people fought back.