In 1381, peasants in southern and eastern England rose in revolt against the government of King Richard II (ruled 1377–99). They were protesting against a new poll tax (meaning "head" tax) levied on everyone regardless of their wealth, and against the law that forbade them to change jobs in search of higher pay. More than 60,000 men from Essex led by John Ball and 50,000 more from Kent led by Wat Tyler marched on London. There they burned the court rolls on which the poll tax was based, attacked the houses of the rich and beheaded both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the king’s Lord High Treasurer. The protesters were met by the king, who agreed to their demands. Once the peasants had left London, however, the king went back on his word and suppressed the revolt with great severity. Many rebel leaders were hunted down and hanged, although the poll tax was abolished.

Grievances

In 1348–49, the Black Death swept across England, claiming the lives of between a third and half of the population. This left a shortage of people to work the land. For the peasants who survived, it meant they could charge more for their work and receive better working conditions. For the landowners, dependent on their labourers, it meant higher costs and so falling profits

The ruling classes, made up mostly of bishops and baronial lords, who were themselves landowners, set about remedying this unsatisfactory situation in their favour. Parliament passed two laws, the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the Statute of Labourers (1351), which not only set a maximum wage, but also ruled that refusal to work for that wage was punishable by fines—later by imprisonment. The laws also gave landowners the power to stop people moving elsewhere for better wages.

Peasants

In the Middle Ages, the majority of the English people lived in the countryside. The land was divided into estates, or manors, managed by a lord or, in some cases, a monastery or a college. Around 85% of the population of England were "peasants", people who worked the land for food, fuel, wool and other resources. There was a hierarchy (social ranks) within the peasantry. At the upper end were the freemen. They rented land from the lord, or even owned land in their own right, and were able to make money from their produce. At the lowest end were the serfs or villeins, who were tied by law to the land they worked and forced to grow their own food, as well as labour for the landowner.

Poll tax

In 1377 Richard II , a boy of 10, became king. His uncles, chief among them John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, became rulers of England until Richard was old enough to assume his duties as monarch. Meanwhile, the war against France, today known as the Hundred Years' War, ground on, with neither side able to secure a decisive victory. The war was proving expensive: garrisons in Calais and Brest alone, for example, cost £36,000 a year to maintain—a fortune in those days. To pay for the wars, Parliament introduced a new form of taxation called the poll tax, by which everyone over the age of 15, no matter how much money they earned, had to pay 4d (four pence)—later rising to one shilling. For a rich landowner, this was a relatively small sum. But it to a farm labourer, it was a significant amount. In March 1381, the government issued a demand for a third poll tax in four years.

On the march

Villagers from other parts of Essex quickly came together and decided to march on London in order to present their case for a better deal to the young king. Loyal to the monarch, their anger was chiefly aimed at his advisers, whom they regarded as corrupt (open to receiving bribes). Chief among them were Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and John of Gaunt, effectively the country's ruler. On 2nd June, the villagers, now joined by people from Suffolk and Norfolk, met up Chelmsford before setting off for London.

Revolt also flared in Kent. Landowner Sir Simon de Burley had accused a serf named Robert Belling of escaping from one of his estates and had had him imprisoned at Rochester Castle. Furious at this decision, a group of local people marched on Rochester on 6th June, forcing his release. After electing Wat Tyler (Walter the Tiler) as their leader at a gathering in Maidstone on the 7th, the Kentish rebels then advanced to Canterbury, entering the walled city on 10th June. There they attacked state officials and freed prisoners from the local jail. They also demanded that the Archbishop, whom they saw as one of the main oppressors, was replaced.

Having already shared their plans by letter with the Essex rebels, the Kentish rebels set off for London the next morning, armed with sticks, battle axes, swords and bows, attacking towns and villages as they went. They reached Blackheath, just to the southeast of the capital, on 12th June.

Meanwhile, word of the revolt had reached the court of King Richard at Windsor Castle on the night of 10th June. Amid worries for his safety, the next morning the boy travelled by boat down the River Thames to the powerful fortress of the Tower of London. Here, along with the Archbishop of Canterbury and several of his senior advisers, he took up residence.

Who were the rebels?

While the uprising of June 1381 has come to be known as the Peasants' Revolt, not all of the 110,000 men and women who took part were peasants. They were led by reeves (managers of the manors) and even some landowners. Also among the rebels were churchmen who were deeply opposed the way the Church was run. These included John Ball, who was a Lollard, a member of a religious movement which held the Bible to be "the only valid source of religious doctrine" and who challenged the powers of the Church. Others taking part in the revolt included tradespeople, such as carpenters, masons, cobblers, tailors, bakers, butchers and innkeepers. The serfs, the very poorest peasants, probably formed a minority of the rebel movement. 

All these people marched on London to demand justice and equality.

At the same time as the Kentish rebels crossed London Bridge on the afternoon of 13th June, the rebel force from Essex swept through Aldgate, which was opened by local townsfolk—many sympathetic to the rebels' cause—to let them into the city. 

The Kentish rebels had drawn up a list of people whom they wanted the king to hand over to them for execution, including John of Gaunt, Archbishop Sudbury and Robert Hales, the Lord High Treasurer. 

Now joined by many rebellious Londoners, the crowds began storming prisons. They set fire to law books and buildings in the Temple, and they destroyed tax records and registers, killing any officials who objected to them doing so. Buildings where government records were kept were burned to the ground. John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace, along with residences of government officials, including that of John Fordham, the Keeper of the Privy Seal, and buildings belonging to the Church were also destroyed.
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In an attempt to prevent further trouble, the young king agreed to meet a group of rebels led by Richard Wallingford at Mile End on 14th June (an earlier negotiation at Rotherhithe having failed because Richard was unwilling to come ashore from his royal barge). At the meeting, the king promised to abolish serfdom, although he did not agree to hand over any of his officials for execution, saying only that he would personally carry out any justice that was required. 

While this meeting was taking place, some of the rebels had broken into the Tower of London. There they murdered, amongst others, Archbishop Sudbury—it is said that eight strokes of an axe were needed to behead him—and Robert Hales. 
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Death of Wat Tyler

The next day, 15th June, the royal government agreed to meet Wat Tyler and the Kentish rebels at Smithfield, just outside London's city walls. The king's party included around 200 men-at-arms. 
Richard called Tyler forwards from the crowd to ask why the rebels had not yet left London. Tyler angrily requested that a further charter be drawn up, demanding that the law should be less harsh, that the Church's wealth be given to the poor, that there should be no lords and all men should be free and equal. When an argument broke out between Tyler and some of the royal servants, the Mayor of London, William Walworth, intervened, ordering Tyler to be arrested. As Tyler attempted to attack the Mayor, Walworth stabbed him. Ralph Standish, a royal squire, then repeatedly stabbed Tyler with his sword, fatally injuring him.
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Suppression

While the Revolt was unfolding in London, a rebel force, led by John Wrawe, was on the move in East Anglia. The authorities failed to organize defences and key towns fell easily to the rebels. Unrest also broke out in St Albans in Hertfordshire after 13th June, with abbey property and financial records being destroyed, and in Cambridge on the 15th, where buildings, the library and property belonging to the University—which, staffed by priests, enjoyed special royal privileges—were ransacked and destroyed. The troubles extended north to York, Beverley and Scarborough, and west to Bridgwater in Somerset. 
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Aftermath

Later claiming that his promises to the rebels had been made while under threat, and therefore not valid in law, King Richard did not keep his word. For the time being, the peasants were forced back into their old way of life. Serfdom was not immediately abolished, but gradually declined in the decades following 1381—though mostly for economic reasons: labourers' pay gradually went up, while more and more lords allowed their serfs to buy their freedom. By the early 1400s, feudalism and serfdom was all but over in England.

There were no further attempts by Parliament to impose a poll tax. Instead, it concluded at the end of 1381 that the war with France should be "carefully but substantially reduced". 
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