Hollywood has a nasty habit of distorting history and telling falsehoods about the past in order to pander to the cultural prejudices and political leanings of its target audience. Few cinemagoers will forget the egregious exaggerations and untruths presented to them in Braveheart (1997) and The Patriot (2000), both of which wantonly perverted chapters in history for their own cynical ends.
Garfield said he hoped the movie would leave billionaires ‘scared shitless’
With this in mind, one can hardly expect a forthcoming movie depicting the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, The Uprising, to be any better. To judge by comments made by a star of the film, Andrew Garfield, who plays a farmer in the rebellion that emerged in East Anglia, Essex and Kent in the reign of Richard II, this looks set to be a cinematic outing aimed at the kind of people who sympathise with Zack Polanski or Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, both of whom are fond of inveighing against ‘billionaires’ and ‘neoliberalism’. Garfield remarked this week that he hoped the movie about the uprising would be ‘galvanising’ and ‘awakening’ for audiences and leave billionaires ‘scared shitless’.
Such sentiments are disconcerting, because in truth the Peasants’ Revolt was not a typically working-class event and barely involved any people we would identify today as peasants. As practically all history books on the event will tell you, the name itself was misleading. It was foremost a rebellion on behalf of a rural and urban middle class of skilled artisans, mobile labourers, tradesmen and merchants.
As Philip Lindsay and Reg Groves wrote in their work of 1950, The Peasants’ Revolt 1381, ‘this name, although neither accurate nor exact…does convey something of its extent and purpose’, in that it encompassed a widespread upsurge that affected the entire south of England. As they explain, it was one enacted by the lower orders against landowners and the Church, one performed and supported by artisans, wage-labourers and small traders.
The rising had its ultimate origins in the Black Death of the 1340s, an occurrence which had killed off a great proportion of the population who worked on the land. With labour still scarce three decades on, the number of those who did remain consequently wielded more power and ability to command better wages.
Indeed, by 1381 most of those who were bound to the land in some capacity were relatively well-off. Over half the population of England now consisted of villeins – workers who paid dues, services or rent to their landlords – and one of the aims of those who revolted was the complete overthrow of the feudal system.
If that was the long-term genesis of the event, the immediate catalyst was the government’s attempt to pay for the Hundred Years’ War in France by imposing a poll tax or standard levy on every adult in the realm. This attempt also coincided with a growing general resentment at a government on account of its corruption and extravagance. Because the poll taxes fell most severely on the most populous and richest counties in England – Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex – it was here where its first stirrings began. Tellingly, the rebellion would scarcely affect the poorer and still strongly feudal north of the country.
It began in the Essex marshes when a Brentwood tax commissioner, Thomas de Bampton, tried to collect the levy from three coastal villages of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope. Widespread resistance to this effort soon developed into rioting and then widespread pillaging. News of the happenings soon spread as far north as Lincoln and then south across the Thames Estuary to Kent, where violence flared up in Gravesend and Maidstone before descending and concentrating on Canterbury, by which time the shadowy figure of Wat Tyler had emerged as the rebellion’s leader in the county. As Liza Picard writes in Chaucer’s People (2017), most of Tyler’s armed followers ‘were accustomed to local responsibilities as bailiffs and constables and the many other village offices’. Their object of ire were the collectors, corrupt government servants and large ecclesiastical landowners.
If these rebels weren’t typical peasants or modern proletariat, neither were they what we would recognise today as left-wing agitators. They were not internationalists – they hated the Flemings in London who had been granted special trading privileges by the king – and they were not republicans. Their watchword during the months between May and August 1381, the period incorporating their bloody and ultimately failed storming of London, was ‘With King Richard and the true Commons.’
Notwithstanding the background and motives of those who enacted the events, there have always been those who have sought to commander this incident to their own political camp. And it was unsurprising that attempts to reinvent the Peasants’ Revolt as a communist insurrection came at the heyday of Marxist historiography from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The most celebrated attempt of this kind came in 1973 with Bond Men Made Free by Rodney Hilton, which avowed to relate the event ‘bottom up’ from the perspective of its protagonists. Hilton had already penned with Hyman Fagan in 1951 The English Rising of 1381, a frank attempt to reframe the rising in terms of Marxist theories about history, reconstructing it as an insurgency against ‘the state’, outlining of the rebels’ aim to establish ‘a federation of self-governing communes’.
While Marxist historiography has faded away, there remains the temptation to see this rebellion through a particular modern, progressive prism, with Dan Jones in his 2009 work, Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, citing one of its motivating factors ‘a grievous lack of social justice.’
That wording is anachronistic and inaccurate, in that it implies that those who carried it out did so for a lofty, abstract cause, when their motives were rather more prosaic: they simply wanted a fair deal and the end to governmental corruption and waste. That truth is not romantic and is unlikely to make for a good cinematic yarn. But then again, middle-class resentment is never endearing or fashionable.
Patrick West holds an MA in Cultural History from Manchester University. He is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)
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