The Consequences of the Peasants' Revolt: What Changed?

Written by Simon Williams

The Peasants' Revolt was crushed within weeks. Richard II revoked every promise made at Mile End, hundreds of rebels were executed under commissions of oyer and terminer, yet the government abandoned the poll tax forever and villeinage slowly declined over the following century.

• Charters revoked: by early July 1381, within roughly three weeks of Mile End
• Villeins quote: "villeins you are, and villeins you shall remain", attributed to Richard II by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, reportedly delivered at Waltham, Essex, around 22 June 1381
• Judicial reprisals: commissions of oyer and terminer sent into Essex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire through summer and autumn 1381
• Chief Justice: Robert Tresilian, appointed to the King's Bench on 22 June 1381 after his predecessor Sir John Cavendish was murdered by rebels, presided over many of the trials
• Poll tax: abandoned after 1381; no English government levied another poll tax until the Community Charge of 1990
• Villeinage: not abolished by the revolt itself, but had effectively disappeared across most of England by around 1400

Stand at Smithfield on the morning of 16 June 1381 and the revolt looks like it has won. Wat Tyler is dead, but the charters promised at Mile End two days earlier are still, on paper, the law of the land. Villeinage abolished. Rents fixed and low. Free access to markets. A general pardon. For a rebel walking home to Essex that week, carrying a parchment sealed by the king himself, it must have felt like victory.

It was not. Within a fortnight, the same government that had granted those charters was tearing them up, and by the end of the summer the leaders of the rising were dead, the poll tax was gone, and villeinage was still, technically, the law. Two things can be true about 1381 at once, and most accounts of the revolt only tell you one of them.

This article sets out what actually changed after Smithfield, separating the crown's fast, brutal, and total victory in June and July 1381 from the much slower, quieter shift in the balance of power between lords and labour that unfolded over the following century, largely for reasons that had nothing to do with the rising itself.

The Charters Are Revoked Within Days

The Mile End charters did not survive contact with a functioning government. Once London was secure and the immediate danger had passed, the council moved fast. Parliament, meeting in November 1381, formally and unanimously annulled every charter and manumission granted during the crisis, ruling that promises extracted under duress by an armed crowd carried no legal force. In practice, royal authority had reasserted itself long before Parliament made the annulment official: by early July, commissioners were already moving through the southeast collecting the charters back from the villages that held them.

The speed of the reversal is the detail worth sitting with. Richard's government did not quietly let the promises lapse. It actively hunted them down. That urgency tells you how little the concessions were ever meant to survive the emergency that produced them.

Commissions of Oyer and Terminer: Judicial Reprisals Across Essex and Kent

Special commissions of oyer and terminer, meaning "to hear and determine", were dispatched into the counties most involved in the rising: Essex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. These were emergency tribunals empowered to try suspected rebels quickly, often on the word of local juries settling old scores as much as identifying genuine ringleaders. Robert Tresilian, appointed Chief Justice of the King's Bench on 22 June 1381 after his predecessor Sir John Cavendish had been dragged from his own manor and beheaded by rebels, presided over a substantial number of these trials and became notorious for the severity of his sentencing.

Estimates for how many rebels were executed in the reprisals of summer and autumn 1381 vary between sources, and the precise figures should be treated with caution rather than repeated as settled fact. What is not disputed is that the reprisals were harsh, geographically widespread, and deliberately public, intended as a demonstration that the rising had achieved nothing except its own destruction. The Earl of Buckingham led punitive action in Essex and Hertfordshire, and Richard himself travelled into Kent that summer to oversee the restoration of order in person.

The End of the Poll Tax: A Direct Fiscal Consequence

If there is one unambiguous, uncontested win for the rebels of 1381, it is this: nobody tried to collect a poll tax again for six hundred years. The flat, per-head levies of 1377, 1379 and 1381, the last of which had triggered the Essex disturbances at Fobbing and Brentwood that opened the revolt, were abandoned as a method of royal finance. The next English government to attempt a head tax was Margaret Thatcher's administration with the Community Charge in 1990, itself provoking riots that echoed 1381 closely enough that journalists at the time drew the comparison directly.

This was not an act of royal generosity. It was a hard lesson in the practical limits of taxation, learned at the cost of an archbishop's head. Parliament continued to fund the crown through other means, including taxes on wool and moveable property, that fell less visibly and less equally on the rural poor. If you want to see the tax regime the rebels were actually rebelling against in forensic detail, our companion piece on the poll tax of 1381 sets out exactly how three successive levies pushed Essex past breaking point.

Villeinage's Slow Decline: A Long Term Consequence, Not a Revolt Victory

Here is where the story gets genuinely contested, and where students are most often tested on their ability to separate cause from coincidence. Villeinage, the unfree, hereditary status that bound a peasant and his labour services to a manor, was not abolished in 1381. It was still legally intact when Richard's government revoked the Mile End charters, and it remained legally intact for generations afterward. Yet by around 1400, historians broadly agree that serfdom had all but disappeared from most of England in practice, and by the mid fifteenth century it survived only in isolated pockets.

The explanation for that decline is where the historiography splits. John Hatcher has argued that the Black Death brought improved material conditions for survivors but did not bring a swift end to villeinage on its own, and that the institution eroded gradually rather than collapsing. Older Marxist readings, associated with R.H. Hilton, took a different view, treating the labour shortage after the plague as something landlords initially tried to resist through firmer enforcement of serfdom before market pressure eventually won out. What both readings agree on is the underlying mechanism: it was demographic scarcity after repeated plague outbreaks, not the political defeat of an armed uprising, that gave individual peasants the leverage to bargain, to withhold labour, or simply to walk away to a manor offering better terms. The revolt did not create that leverage. The Black Death did, decades earlier, and kept renewing it with each fresh wave of plague through the late fourteenth century.

Richard II's Reputation and "Villeins You Are, and Villeins You Shall Remain"

The clearest single piece of evidence for how completely the crown believed it had won is the line the chronicler Thomas Walsingham attributes to Richard himself, reportedly delivered at Waltham, Essex around 22 June 1381, once royal authority had been reasserted across the southeast.

"Villeins you are, and villeins you shall remain."

Whatever the exact wording Walsingham recorded in Latin, and translations vary slightly, the sentiment is unambiguous. This was not a king making a strategic retreat from a difficult position. It was a fourteen year old who had just watched royal will, asserted with sufficient confidence, scatter a rebel army twice in two days, and who drew from that experience a hardened rather than a softened view of his own authority. Our companion article on Richard II's role at Mile End and Smithfield traces how directly that lesson shaped the more autocratic kingship he pursued through the 1390s, and which ultimately cost him his throne in 1399.

Historiographical Debate: Crushing Defeat or Turning Point?

Two readings of 1381 exist side by side in the scholarship, and a good exam answer needs to hold both rather than choosing one. The first reading, favoured by chroniclers writing close to the events and by older popular histories, treats the revolt as an unambiguous, total failure. The rebels lost every specific demand. Their leaders were killed. Hundreds of participants were executed. Nothing they asked for at Mile End was granted in law.

The second reading, associated with more recent social and economic historians, argues that judging the revolt purely by its immediate legal outcomes misses the point of what it actually achieved. On this view, the revolt was a symptom of a shift in the balance of power between lords and labour that was already underway because of the Black Death, and its real significance lies in demonstrating, unmistakably, that the rural poor could organise, march on London, and force a king to negotiate in person, something that had been unthinkable a generation earlier. Juliet Barker's research into the judicial records of the aftermath suggests many participants genuinely believed they were loyal subjects correcting corrupt officials around a good king, not revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the crown itself, which complicates any simple win or lose framing.

So Who Won the Peasants' Revolt?

The honest answer depends entirely on the timeframe you are asking about, and conflating the two timeframes is the single most common mistake in exam answers on this topic.

In the short term, measured in weeks and months, the crown and the landowning class won decisively. Every charter was revoked. The rebellion's leaders were dead or executed. Hundreds of ordinary participants paid with their lives in the reprisals that followed. Villeinage remained the law. By any narrow legal or military measure, the rebels achieved none of their stated aims.

In the long term, measured in decades, the position looks very different, though crediting this to the revolt itself overstates the rebels' achievement. Labour's negotiating position strengthened steadily across the following century, driven by the same demographic scarcity that had helped provoke the rising in the first place, not by anything the rebels won at the negotiating table. The poll tax genuinely was a direct casualty of 1381, abandoned for six centuries. Villeinage's decline was not: it was a slower structural shift that the revolt reflected and perhaps hastened at the margins, but did not cause. For readers exploring what set that shift in motion decades before Wat Tyler ever marched on London, our companion piece on the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt traces the labour shortage back to its source, while the Statute of Labourers explains the law the rebels were trying, unsuccessfully, to overturn.

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This article is part of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 series. Explore all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/historical-events/timeline-peasants-revolt-1381.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ Peasants' Revolt 1381: Full Timeline of Events: see the revocation of the charters and the summer reprisals placed within the full seven week chronology of the rising.

→ Causes of the Peasants' Revolt: Immediate and Long Term: the companion piece to this article, covering the grievances that produced the rising this piece explains the consequences of.

→ What Happened at Smithfield?: the moment Wat Tyler was killed and the crisis that produced the promises Richard would soon break.

→ King Richard II and the Peasants' Revolt: how the fourteen year old king's conduct at Mile End and Smithfield shaped the harder, more autocratic kingship he pursued afterward.

→ The Poll Tax of 1381 Explained: the tax whose abandonment is the clearest direct consequence of the revolt covered in this article.

→ The Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt: the plague driven labour shortage that explains why villeinage declined over the following century, independent of the revolt's failure.

→ The Statute of Labourers 1351: the law the rebels wanted repealed at Mile End, and which stayed on the books long after 1381.

People Also Ask

What were the consequences of the Peasants' Revolt?

The immediate consequences were the revocation of every charter granted at Mile End, the execution of hundreds of rebels under commissions of oyer and terminer sent into Essex, Kent and neighbouring counties, and the reassertion of full royal authority by the autumn of 1381. The longer term consequences were the permanent abandonment of the poll tax as a form of taxation and, over the following century, the gradual, uneven decline of villeinage across most of England.

Who won the Peasants' Revolt?

In the short term, the crown and the landowning class won decisively: every promise was revoked, the rebellion's leaders were dead, and villeinage remained the law. In the long term, ordinary labour's negotiating position strengthened considerably over the following century, though this was driven by demographic scarcity following the Black Death rather than anything the rebels achieved militarily or politically in 1381 itself.

Did the Peasants' Revolt end serfdom?

No, not directly. Villeinage was not abolished by the revolt and remained technically legal for generations afterward. Serfdom did decline sharply across England by around 1400, but historians attribute this primarily to the labour scarcity created by repeated outbreaks of the Black Death rather than to any legal or political victory won by the 1381 rebels, whose demand for its abolition was formally refused.

What happened to the poll tax after 1381?

The poll tax was abandoned entirely as a method of royal taxation after 1381. No English government attempted to levy another head tax until the Community Charge, commonly known as the poll tax, was introduced in 1990 under Margaret Thatcher's government, an episode that provoked comparisons to 1381 at the time.

How many people were executed after the Peasants' Revolt?

Contemporary and later sources give varying figures for the reprisals carried out across Essex, Kent, Hertfordshire and East Anglia during the summer and autumn of 1381, and modern historians treat the precise numbers with caution. What is well established is that the commissions of oyer and terminer, presided over in large part by the newly appointed Chief Justice Robert Tresilian, carried out executions on a significant scale across multiple counties.

Did the Peasants' Revolt achieve anything?

Judged by its own stated demands, the revolt achieved almost nothing directly: the charters were revoked and villeinage survived. Its clearest concrete legacy was the permanent abandonment of the poll tax. Its less direct legacy was demonstrating that ordinary people could organise and force a personal negotiation with the crown, a demonstration some historians argue shaped the tone of later relations between the crown and the common people even without changing the law.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Barker, Juliet (2014): 1381: The Year of the Peasants' Revolt, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. A detailed modern account drawing on judicial indictments and court records from the commissions of oyer and terminer to reconstruct the reprisals of summer 1381.
• Jones, Dan (2009): Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, HarperCollins. A narrative account of the rising and its aftermath, including the revocation of the Mile End charters and the judicial response.
• Dobson, R.B. (1970): The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, Macmillan. Collects translated primary source extracts, including chronicle accounts of the reprisals and the parliamentary annulment of the charters in November 1381.
• The National Archives, Kew: holds the surviving King's Bench and commission records relating to the 1381 trials, including material connected to Chief Justice Robert Tresilian's proceedings.
• The Historical Association: The Great Revolt of 1381, history.org.uk, a teaching resource covering the aftermath, the commissions of oyer and terminer, and the abandonment of the poll tax.

Note: the precise number of rebels executed in the 1381 reprisals varies between sources and is treated here as an area of ongoing uncertainty rather than an established figure. The historiographical debate over whether villeinage's decline should be credited to the Black Death's demographic effects or to a broader post revolt shift in landlord attitudes is a live scholarly disagreement rather than a settled consensus, and this article's framing, crediting demographic scarcity as the primary driver, follows the Hatcher reading as one informed position within that debate.

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