Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt
The year was 1381 and England was on the brink, not just of civil war, but of a revolution that would rend the very fabric of society.
But a meeting at Mile End between the King and a peasant preserved the fragile social structure of the realm.
London in the mid-1300s was a booming city. Banks were doing good business funding new enterprises like breweries and tanneries, and to staff the growing firms of the capital, people were pouring in from Essex and Kent.
By the 1350s, the population of the City touched 80,000, doubling in 50 years, and the populace was squeezed into an overcrowded, dirty and in-creasingly diseased square mile.
Filth piled up in the streets and, in 1348, bubonic plague reached London. By the start of 1349, 200 bodies a day were being shovelled into the plague pits of the City and Smithfield, and over the next two years, almost half of those 80,000 souls died of the dreadful disease.
By the 1380s, London’s population had recovered a little but not enough to man the still thriving economy. More people were sucked in from the farms around London and that’s when the English social structure started to unravel.
Feudal society
In the early Middle Ages England was still a feudal society – farm workers were tied to the gentry and nobility who owned the farmlands, indeed they were more or less owned by their masters themselves.
But as the City filled up, the farms depopulated, and peasants found themselves expected to work harder. At the same time, they were hit by new taxes, including the hated poll tax.
It was only a matter of time before they discovered their power. An army of rebelling peasants, led by Wat Tyler, marched on London. They had no quarrel with King Richard II, but were out for revenge on the fat cats, the wealthy landlords and corrupt men of the Church, who they saw becoming rich at the expense of the sweated peasants.
And chief villain was Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Peasants’ Revolt coalesced on Blackheath, where Tyler rallied his men and marched on London. They made for Lambeth Palace, still the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury today, and set it on fire.
The now-roused rabble crossed the Thames. Many more joined the band in London and soon the streets of the Square Mile were littered with corpses.
Sympathisers opened the doors of the Tower itself, and the peasants murdered the Archbishop and his men, removing their heads and spiking them on London Bridge.
The band then moved out of the City to set up camp. It was there, at Mile End, the worried king came to negotiate.
Rather than challenge them head on, Richard played to their sympathies and announced himself as their ally. He asked the band to follow him to Clerkenwell where he would address their complaints.
In the narrow and winding City streets it was simple for the king’s men to pick the peasants off.
By the time they reached Clerkenwell, and the spurious conference, many were dead and the rest had fled. And Tyler, who had led his men to the brink of revolution, lay dead, a soldier’s sword in his back.