England Arise by Juliet Barker review - 14th-century discontent

A new study of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 puts faces on the men who rebelled

The phrase “peasants’ revolt” inevitably conjures scenes of chaotic rebellion perpetrated – as the late 14th-century chronicler Thomas Walsingham put it, with fastidious disgust – by “filthy” rustics, “uncouth and sordid” serfs, and “ribalds and whores of the devil”. But historians have long ceased to talk in dismissive terms about the events of early summer 1381, when southern and eastern England erupted in violent protest against the corrupt and spendthrift government of the 14-year-old king, Richard II. Lasting a matter of weeks, the uprising was put down with uncompromising force, and in the end achieved none of its stated aims. Yet, along with the names of its heroes (or bogeymen, depending on your view), Jack Straw, Wat Tyler and the radical preacher John Ball, the Peasants’ Revolt has endured in the national imagination like few other popular uprisings before or since.

The title of Juliet Barker’s perceptive book nods to the “English Rising”, an alternative name for the revolt coined by the great Marxist historian Rodney Hilton. It’s an indication of her ambition: to throw light on how and why the revolt occurred, and to bring into focus its participants, dismissed by contemporary chroniclers as an amorphous mass. As historians have long argued and as Barker shows, the “peasants’ revolt” is a misnomer: it was more complicated than that.

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