# Wat Tyler and the Rising of 1381 #### The man we cannot see Wat Tyler is one of England's most famous rebels, and almost nothing is known of him. Every detail of his life comes from hostile chroniclers — Froissart, Walsingham and the monks of St Albans — who had every reason to caricature him. They give him the trade of a tiler of roofs, a turner of Margate, a Kentish man of Essex origin; they may be reporting, or they may simply be inventing a name to fit the man, as chronicle-writers did. He enters history in June 1381 and leaves it nine days later. What he actually believed has to be read through the demands of the rebellion he came to lead, and through the sermon of [[John Ball]], which the rebels clearly embraced as their own. #### The road to London The spark was the third poll tax in four years, a flat-rate levy that took the same from a labourer as from a lord. But the fuel was deeper: [[the Black Death]] had upended the labour market, the Statute of Labourers tried to freeze wages at pre-plague levels, and the war with France demanded endless taxation from the same people being squeezed. In late May 1381, tax commissioners in Essex and Kent faced crowds who refused to be counted, opened the gaols, and began to march. Tyler emerged as the captain of the Kentish host — disciplined enough to march on London, radical enough to hold it. #### Mile End: the demands At Blackheath the rebels were perhaps 60,000 strong, and on 14 June the fourteen-year-old [[Richard II]] rode out to meet Tyler at Mile End. The charter Tyler asked for was not vague: an end to serfdom, an end to the lordship that bound men to a manor, abolition of the Statute of Labourers, free trade for all men, and — most strikingly — that all land held in bondage should become rent-free commons at a fixed price. The king granted everything, with clerks copying charters all night. The rebels, believing the world had turned upside down, went home. It was the pivotal mistake. #### Smithfield: the death The next morning, 15 June, a rebel remnant remained at Smithfield, and Tyler rode out alone to the king. The chroniclers stage the scene theatrically — the water-carriers refused, the dagger drawn, the taunts exchanged — but the outcome is certain: the Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth, stabbed Tyler, and a royal squire finished him. His followers, famously, lowered their bows at the sight of the boy king promising to be their captain and leader. That night the charters were worthless, the revolt collapsed, and the reprisals began: John Ball hanged, drawn and quartered within a month, rebels hunted through Essex and Kent under commissions of oyer and terminer. The line tradition hangs on Richard II — *villeins ye are, and in villeinage ye shall remain* — comes from the chroniclers and may never have been spoken. What is certain is the substance: every grant of Mile End was revoked. #### What he stands for Tyler's demands were among the first written articulations of a world without lordship in England: not a riot for bread, but a programme. Three of its strands kept recurring: - **The commons.** The demand that bond-land be turned into rent-free commons anticipates centuries of struggle over enclosure — [[Enclosures]], [[The Enclosure Act]], and the long theft of common right that [[The Commons]] records. - **The refusal of hierarchy.** The revolt's intellectual voice was John Ball's, but Tyler's body carried it: the demand that worth not be fixed by birth was a heresy that did not die at Smithfield. - **The efficacy of refusal.** Though the revolt failed, serfdom quietly withered over the following decades: lords, frightened, found bonded labour unenforceable, and the poll tax was not repeated for four hundred years. Rebellion did not win, but ruling became more expensive than yielding. #### The afterlife of a name Tyler keeps being resurrected at exactly the moments when a poll tax returns. The 1381 rising was invoked against the 1980 Poll Tax, and Thatcher's replacement of rates with a community charge in 1989 produced the biggest tax revolt since his own — the government that fell in 1990 did so under the shadow of the original Wat Tyler's name. There is a Wat Tyler Country Park in Essex, and a pub on Blackheath, the festival ground of 1381, that still carries it. Related: [[John Ball]] · [[1381 Peasants' Revolt]] · [[Richard II]] · [[the Black Death]] · [[Enclosures]] · [[The Enclosure Act]] · [[The Commons]] · [[Anarchy]] · [[A Distant Mirror]] `Concepts:` [[Anarchy]] · [[The Commons]] · [[Enclosures]] · [[Hierarchy]] `Knowledge Base:` [[1381 Peasants' Revolt]] · [[John Ball]] · [[Richard II]] · [[A Distant Mirror]]