The Real Story Behind ‘The Uprising’ and the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, When Thousands Marched on London to Demand a Fairer Society

Paul Greengrass’ new film stars Andrew Garfield as a fictionalized, unnamed farmer who leads a rebellion against unfair taxes and the system of serfdom

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

September 9, 2026 1:10 p.m.

L to R: Thomas McKenzie as Alyce, Jamie Bell as John Ball and Andrew Garfield as Ploughman in The Uprising, a new film by Paul Greengrass — L to R: Thomas McKenzie as Alyce, Jamie Bell as John Ball and Andrew Garfield as the Ploughman in *The Uprising*, a new film by Paul Greengrass Courtesy of Focus Features © 2026

The Tower of London has protected England’s capital since it was first built in the 1070s, withstanding medieval sieges and World War II bombing raids alike. On a June day in 1381, however, rebels breached the Tower for the first and only time in its history. Once inside the fortress, the insurgents exacted revenge on their enemies, dragging some of the kingdom’s most powerful men out to an execution block and chopping off their heads.

This unprecedented act of violence took place at the height of the Peasants’ Revolt, a mass uprising sparked by the imposition of a poll tax—the third of its kind in four years. England had been at war with France for nearly five decades, and officials needed more money to pay for the kingdom’s armies and defenses.

The tax was “an unevenly distributed one,” asking more of the lower classes than the wealthy, and it was “very badly administered,” Andrew Prescott, a historian at the University of Glasgow, tells Smithsonian magazine. “That poor administration helped trigger the revolt,” which ultimately evolved from a protest against unfair taxes into a broader push for a more equitable society.

A late 15th-century depiction of the Tower of London and its keep, the White Tower Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The insurgents’ demands ranged from the abolition of serfdom to the redistribution of the church’s riches. Although the rebellion failed to achieve any of its stated goals, it inspired subsequent “large-scale popular uprisings with a political aim,” Prescott says. As Dan Jones, author of Summer of Blood: England’s First Revolution, tells Smithsonian, after 1381, it became “if not impossible, then highly inadvisable, to ignore the effects of policy on ordinary people.”

A new film by Paul Greengrass, a veteran director of tense action films including Captain Phillips and The Bourne Ultimatum, reimagines the Peasants’ Revolt from the perspectives of those who participated in it. Titled The Uprising, the movie stars Andrew Garfield as the Ploughman, a fictionalized everyman who takes up arms against the corrupt politicians advising England’s 14-year-old king, Richard II. Greengrass follows the Ploughman and his fellow insurgents as they make their way to London for a climactic face-to-face meeting with the young monarch.

“I didn’t want to tell [this story] through the names we remember,” like rebel leader Wat Tyler (played by Cosmo Jarvis) and his comrade, the bombastic priest John Ball (Jamie Bell), Greengrass says in a director’s statement. Instead, he wanted to focus on “someone history never named at all: a farmer, the first man to raise his hand in Essex. … I wanted him to stand for all the ordinary people who actually rose up and paid the price for it.”

Here’s what you need to know about the real history behind The Uprising ahead of the film’s arrival in theaters across the United States on September 10.

THE UPRISING - Official Trailer [HD] - Only In Theaters September 10

The inspiration behind The Uprising

Greengrass first learned about the Peasants’ Revolt as a schoolchild. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he saw parallels between the ongoing crisis and the Black Death, which killed an estimated 30 to 50 percent of England’s population just a few decades before the uprising.

The bubonic plague contributed to a growing sense of dissatisfaction in the country in the mid-14th century. At the time, all property in England legally belonged to the king, who granted lesser lords the right to lease land to tenants “in return for certain services and restrictions on their freedom,” Prescott says. Some tenants were villeins (the English name for serfs) unable to leave their land without explicit permission from their lord, let alone sell or bequeath this property. Others were free to travel where they wished or resell their land, but they still owed rent and obligations to their landlords.

The Black Death created a severe labor shortage in England. Realizing that they could now demand higher pay, many remaining workers left home in search of more lucrative employment. (Serfs who absconded without permission could be subjected to harsh punishments, but some did so anyway, enticed by the prospect of a better life.) To shift the balance of power back in the lords’ favor, Parliament passed a 1351 statute freezing wages at their pre-epidemic levels.

The Dark and Deadly History of the Plague

The plague looms large in The Uprising. Garfield’s Ploughman is the sole surviving member of his family, haunted by all that he has lost. When tax collectors arrive in his village with increasingly relentless demands for payment, the Ploughman declares that he and his peers have had enough. “The land is broken,” Garfield says in a trailer for the movie. “We are forced to work beyond what our souls can take.” In the film’s telling, this act of resistance serves as the spark for the revolt, instigating bloody takedowns of tax collectors across the kingdom. As one of the rebels tells the Ploughman, his loved ones “want you to fight this injustice, as they cannot.”

According to Prescott, “the film reflects what you might call a miserabilist view of the uprising, where the demands and the oppression become so great that one just has to lash out and deal with the people who are oppressing you.” He and his colleagues at the People of 1381, an ongoing research project centered on the revolt, take a broader view, suggesting that the rebels were driven by several ambitions: “to have more land, to have land more cheaply and easily, to trade more cheaply and easily.” Prescott adds, “It’s a revolt as much about that as it is about feeling oppressed to the level where life becomes impossible.”

In the weeks leading up to The Uprising’s release, the movie made headlines for seemingly rebranding itself as a Robin Hood origin story. Jones, who served as the film’s historical consultant, doesn’t suggest that the Ploughman is supposed to be the fabled hero himself. He does, however, argue that Robin Hood, who was immortalized in outlaw ballads during the 14th century, “would not have been out of place at all in the Peasants’ Revolt.” Jones says, “You have a character, a yeoman, an ordinary guy who’s in a world in which the law seems to have been corrupted, and the spirit of justice is no longer present within the law. In order for these things to be brought back together, Robin has to fight. He has to take vengeance. He has to be violent.”

Need to know: The legend of Robin Hood

The first known literary reference to Robin Hood appears in Piers Plowman, an allegorical narrative poem written around 1380. Prior to this point, Robin’s story was shared mainly through oral tradition.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th-century “Robin Hood ballads were the poetic expression of popular aspirations in the north of England during a turbulent era of baronial rebellions and agrarian discontent, which culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt.”

The early days of the Peasants’ Revolt

Historians generally agree that the Peasants’ Revolt began on May 30, 1381, when villagers in Essex, a county northeast of London, resisted arrest by commissioners sent to collect tax payments. The uprising quickly gained traction, with “runners and riders” dispatched to identify “like-minded men” across the region, Jones writes in Summer of Blood. On June 2, representatives from neighboring villages convened to discuss the nascent rebellion. They pledged to destroy the corrupt officials surrounding the king “and to have no law in England except only those they themselves moved to be ordained.”

This meeting “reflected the model of rebel organization—sworn chapters or companies of men banded together by oath, led by the natural leaders of village society, in close communication with other bands of rebels and working to a common timetable—which revolved around strategic, coordinated strikes on selected targets,” Jones writes. “As such, the rural revolt can be seen not as a spontaneous, itinerant riot, but a carefully choreographed orgy of violence and retribution.”

Despite its name, the Peasants’ Revolt involved rebels from all walks of life, “drawing people at almost every level below the aristocracy,” Prescott says. The insurgents included servants, laborers, craftspeople, artisans, wealthy farmers, and even members of the landed gentry who had much to lose and little to gain from their participation.

An illustration of Richard II's coronation in 1377, at age 10 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Although men made up the majority of the rebels, women took part in the uprising, too. Joanna Ferrour of Kent, for example, reportedly led the destruction of the Savoy Palace, the London home of Richard II’s unpopular uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. She also personally ordered the beheadings of two of the king’s chief counselors. (The Uprising acknowledges women’s contributions to the revolt through Thomasin McKenzie’s character, an invented rebel named Alyce.)

“We know the names of thousands of the people who took part in the revolt, and this is because there are extensive prosecutions of various sorts afterward,” Prescott says. The People of 1381 database contains some 28,000 records identifying rebels and their victims, jurors who decided criminal cases, and loved ones who paid the insurgents’ bail, among other individuals affected by the uprising. “When you take events like revolts and you look at the actual people who participated, when you start to see them at an individual level and stop thinking of them as a mob, the social categorization becomes much more nuanced and much more complex,” Prescott explains.

Men and women from Kent, a county directly south of Essex, joined the uprising soon after it began, choosing Tyler—a craftsman of unknown origins—as their leader on June 7. The rebel forces then traveled to London, stopping in Rochester and Canterbury along the way. Their modus operandi was much the same wherever they went: To fight back against “all the machinery of royal and civic government,” historian Juliet Barker writes in 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt, they burned administrative records, freed criminals detained in prisons, attacked local officials, and sacked properties owned by the wealthy and powerful. (John Ball, a priest who’d been imprisoned for preaching radical sermons, was one of the individuals released by the rebels.)

Contrary to the popular image of Tyler leading an army of rebels toward London, “marching on foot and swelling their ranks with new recruits in every place through which they passed,” much of the violence that took place en route to the capital was instigated by locals who seized on the uprising as a chance to settle personal scores, Barker writes. This trend continued after Tyler’s forces finally reached the outskirts of London on June 12.

An illustration of Richard II preparing to meet the rebels during the Peasants' Revolt Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Bloodshed in London

As the rebels converged on the capital, Richard and his chief advisers took refuge in the Tower. Although the young king agreed to travel by boat to meet the rebel leaders on the morning of June 13, his councilors convinced him to back out after seeing thousands of insurgents swarming the banks of the River Thames. (Estimates of the rebel forces’ size vary, with contemporary chroniclers suggesting that as many as 200,000 gathered in London; Barker now estimates the group’s numbers at fewer than 10,000.)

Angered by Richard’s reversal, the rebels stormed London, apparently entering the city via London Bridge, whose keeper had lowered the drawbridge after realizing that resistance was futile. One of the crowd’s first targets was John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace. The duke was the de facto leader of the kingdom during Richard’s youth, but he’d lost support in London after clashing with local merchants and the city’s bishop. He wasn’t in the capital at the time of the uprising, so the rebels took their revenge on his property.

“They took all the torches they could find and lighted them, and burnt all the cloths, coverlets and beds, as well as all the very valuable headboards,” the 14th-century Anonimalle Chronicle states. When one of the men attempted to steal some of these riches for himself, in direct defiance of Tyler’s ban on looting, his comrades threw him into the flames as punishment.

Although the rebels framed the attack on London as a way of taking justice into their own hands and ferreting out traitors, their unified approach gave way to “smaller, pettier, more private acts of retribution” as the day went on, Jones writes. In addition to freeing people held in London’s prisons and demolishing houses owned by London lawyers, rebels burned down the priory of the Knights Hospitaller, whose prior, England’s Lord High Treasurer Robert Hales, was hiding out in the Tower with the king.

An illustration of John Ball encouraging the rebels, with Wat Tyler shown at left, in red Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

With few remaining options, Richard called on the rebels to meet him at Mile End, on the eastern edge of London, on the morning of June 14. The conference “was a seminal moment in the revolt and an extraordinary one in the course of English history because, having listened to their demands, the king granted the rebels all their requests,” including rent limits and freedom from servitude, Barker writes.

Why did Richard agree to these concessions? Barker suggests that the king genuinely sympathized with the rebels’ plight and acted in good faith. Jones, however, tells Smithsonian that Richard might have been “slightly drunk on the flattery of the rebels, and when they made their demands, the sugar hit of saying yes to everything is entrancing, bewitching to him.”

In Summer of Blood, Jones posits that Richard was “at Mile End not as a true negotiator, but as a lure,” propped up by his advisers to appease the crowd by any means necessary. Much to these older men’s detriment, however, the king went one step further, telling the rebels that they “could go through all the realm of England and catch all traitors” in his name, according to the Anonimalle Chronicle.

Emboldened, a band of rebels attacked the Tower, where Hales remained holed up alongside Simon of Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s eldest son. Exactly how these insurgents managed to access the fortress remains unclear, but Barker writes that “the only feasible answer is that [they] were let in,” perhaps by sympathizers inside the Tower or well-meaning guards who saw that they bore Richard’s royal standard, gifted at Mile End.

A 15th-century depiction of the executions of Simon of Sudbury and Robert Hales Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Once inside, the rebels targeted Hales, Sudbury and three less prominent figures whom they deemed guilty of treason. (Bolingbroke, who would succeed Richard as Henry IV in 1399, escaped thanks to the intervention of a man who agreed to hide him from the mob.) Taken to an execution block, Sudbury was “first struck severely but not fatally in the neck,” one chronicler wrote. Repeated strikes failed to kill Sudbury, who only died after the eighth blow.

After the five victims were beheaded, the rebels put their heads on spikes and paraded them through the streets, kicking off a day of indiscriminate violence. No longer did the crowd reserve its vigilante justice for the rich and powerful. Londoners in particular took advantage of the chaos to target Flemish merchants whom they viewed as competition, dragging them out of places of refuge and beheading them by the dozens.

As the situation rapidly spiraled out of control, Richard issued yet another proclamation to the rebels, instructing them to meet him at Smithfield, in northwestern London, on the afternoon of June 15. Tyler rode out to present an updated list of demands that went much further than the requests outlined at Mile End. “There should be no more outlawry, and no lordship of any sort, except for that of the king,” the rebel leader decreed, according to Summer of Blood. He also called for the abolition of the church’s hierarchy, perhaps voicing a vision first expressed by Ball.

Multiple chroniclers indicate that Tyler acted disrespectfully during the encounter: According to one report, he started speaking “threateningly to [Richard and] seizing the bridle of the king’s horse with unparalleled audacity.” London Mayor William Walworth, who had accompanied Richard to Smithfield, responded to Tyler’s insolence by declaring that he would arrest him. Tyler tried to stab Walworth but failed to pierce his armor; he was soon brought down by a series of sword strikes, and though he managed to flee Smithfield, he was tracked down and beheaded.

An illustration of the killing of Wat Tyler Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The insurgents had trouble processing the scene unfolding in front of them. With few other options, Richard decided to seize control of the situation. “The king, seeing that there was a danger that there might be a terrible riot, … shouted out, ‘I will be your leader! Follow me!’ and led the rebels away to a point where they could all be rounded up,” Prescott says.

Although The Uprising suggests that Richard sprung a trap for the rebels, guiding them to a field where all but a few (the Ploughman among them) were massacred, in truth, the king simply told the crowd that their leader was dead and allowed them to disperse, “assured of his pardon if they went peaceably,” according to Barker.

The legacy of the Peasants’ Revolt

The revolt didn’t begin or end with “a march of deprived peasants on London,” Prescott says. “Its danger almost arises from the fact that it covers such a large geographical area in such a dispersed form,” drawing rebels from more than half of England’s counties. Local uprisings continued well into July, with mobs dispensing their own form of justice as far as Yorkshire to the north and Gloucester to the west.

Andrew Garfield as the Ploughman in *The Uprising* Courtesy of Focus Features © 2026

To quell the unrest, Richard—reversing course on his earlier promises—authorized a commission to punish rebels “either according to the law of our kingdom of England or by other ways and methods, by beheadings and the mutilations of limbs as seems to you most expeditious and sensible.”

The king’s men tracked down and executed surviving rebel leaders, including Ball, brutally suppressing any hint of dissent. As Jones writes in Summer of Blood, “Richard was restoring his royal power not through reform or assertion of the rule of law, but by a barely legal terror in which viciousness had replaced wisdom, and blind fear stalked the troubled land.” It was only in November 1381 that the king agreed to offer a general pardon to those who had risen up against him, aside from 287 individuals deemed “principal instigators.”

The rebels had failed to secure the reforms they so desperately wanted, but their efforts weren’t for naught. Poll taxes remained deeply unpopular in Britain, with efforts to impose them sparking protests as recently as 1990. Though the revolt “didn’t end feudalism … it paved the way for its decline,” warning landowners that their serfs could rise up at any time—a hard truth that “in turn [led] to fairer treatment of the working classes” and less regulation of wages, historian Helen Carr writes for HistoryExtra.

Woody Norman as Richard II in The Uprising — Woody Norman as Richard II in *The Uprising* Courtesy of Focus Features © 2026

As for Richard himself, the king seemingly emerged from the revolt with a sense that he enjoyed “divine favor,” Prescott says. This belief could have led him “to take high-risk political maneuvers later in his reign, which ultimately contributed” to his deposition as a tyrant in 1399.

Broadly speaking, Prescott adds, the revolt “seems to institute a legacy of rebellion” that endures in the popular imagination. Speaking with Esquire, Garfield describes the events of The Uprising as “a group of people looking around going, ‘Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, and it’s been rotten, and we were told that this was just the way it was.’” The actor concludes:

There’s a kind of genuine awakening happening, an awakening to one’s own dignity, to the dignity of every living thing, and with that a quest to put the world right. What was inspiring and exciting in the making of [the film] was this possibility of justice, this possibility of healing.

The Real Story Behind ‘The Uprising’ and the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, When Thousands Marched on London to Demand a Fairer Society

The inspiration behind The Uprising

The early days of the Peasants’ Revolt

Bloodshed in London

The legacy of the Peasants’ Revolt

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