The Black Death and three poll taxes lit England's great rising of 1381
After plague killed an estimated half of England's people, surviving labourers could suddenly demand higher pay. Lords and Parliament tried to freeze wages, then taxed every adult head to fund a failing war with France. By 1381 resentment exploded into the uprising later called the Peasants' Revolt, though many rebels were not peasants.
The Black Death reached England in 1348. With workers scarce and land plentiful, wages shot up and landlords' profits shrank. Emergency laws followed, an Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and then a Statute of Labourers in 1351, both trying to hold pay at pre-plague levels and making it a crime to refuse work. In practice only labourers were punished, and penalties were toughened in 1361. Even so, rural purchasing power rose by around 40 percent between the 1340s and the 1380s, and Parliament's 1363 attempt to stop commoners buying luxury goods proved unenforceable.
War added the second strain. Edward III began the Hundred Years' War in 1337, but by the 1370s English armies abroad were draining money: the Calais and Brest garrisons alone cost £36,000 a year. When Edward died in 1377 his grandson Richard II was ten, and government fell to his uncles, above all John of Gaunt. Parliament tried something new, a poll tax of four pence on every person over 14, which raised £22,000. A graded second tax in 1379 brought only £18,600 of a hoped-for £50,000.
In November 1380 at Northampton, Archbishop Simon Sudbury warned that £160,000 was needed. A third poll tax followed, a flat 12 pence per head over 15 with no allowance for married couples. Many people in the south-east simply avoided registering, and in March 1381 commissioners were sent to question local officials, deepening anger. London was already unstable: citizens resented a royal court in Southwark, foreign Flemish weavers and John of Gaunt, whose backing of John Wycliffe looked heretical to many.
The name itself is late. Contemporary chroniclers gave the events no title, the English word peasant only appeared in the 15th century, and the earliest use of Peasants' Revolt that Paul Strohm found was in 1874. Historians once credited the rising with ending serfdom; scholars today are less sure. It did deter later Parliaments from new war taxes, and it inspired William Morris and debates over the 1980s Community Charge.
Source: Peasants' Revolt
