King Richard II and the Peasants' Revolt

Written by Simon Williams

Richard II was fourteen years old when the Peasants' Revolt reached London in June 1381. He rode out to Mile End and Smithfield, granted charters of freedom to defuse the crisis, then broke every promise within weeks, telling the rebels villeins they were and villeins they would remain.

• Born: 6 January 1367, Bordeaux
• Became king: 1377, aged 10, succeeding his grandfather Edward III
• Age during the revolt: 14
• Minority government: a series of "continual councils" governed 1377 to January 1380, influenced by his uncles John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock
• Mile End meeting: 14 June 1381, charters of manumission granted to Essex rebels
• Smithfield meeting: 15 June 1381, Wat Tyler killed by Lord Mayor William Walworth
• Key quote: "Villeins you are, and villeins you shall remain", attributed to Richard by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, reportedly spoken at Waltham, Essex, around 22 June 1381
• Aftermath: all charters revoked; commissions of oyer and terminer suppressed the revolt across Essex, Kent, Norfolk and Suffolk

Try to picture the scene honestly. A boy who has not yet turned fifteen rides out through the gates of London to meet a rebel army that, by some estimates, numbers in the tens of thousands. Behind him is a city where the Tower has just been stormed and two of his most senior ministers murdered on Tower Hill. In front of him is a crowd that has burned his uncle's palace to the ground. There is no adult regent standing between Richard II and this crisis. He faces it in person, twice, on consecutive days.

The standard version of this story treats Richard's conduct in June 1381 as either heroic improvisation by a boy king finding his nerve, or as a piece of theatre managed by the older men around him. Both readings survive in the sources, and historians still argue about which is closer to the truth. What is not in dispute is what happened next: within a fortnight, every promise made at Mile End had been withdrawn, and Richard himself is recorded delivering one of the coldest lines in medieval English kingship.

This article works through Richard's minority government, his conduct at both meetings, the broken promises that followed, and the historiographical debate about whether his actions in 1381 reveal genuine courage, careful coaching, or the first signs of the absolutist self-image that would eventually cost him his crown.

A Fourteen Year Old King Facing a Kingdom in Revolt

Richard had become king in 1377 at the age of ten, on the death of his grandfather Edward III, and the government of England during his minority had been placed in a succession of "continual councils" rather than a single regent. These councils ran from 1377 until January 1380, after which formal conciliar government lapsed without being fully replaced. By the time of the revolt in June 1381, there was no single figure with clear constitutional authority to act on the young king's behalf.

His most powerful uncle, John of Gaunt, was away from London, engaged on business connected to the Scottish border, when the revolt broke out, and his London residence, the Savoy Palace, was one of the rebels' first targets, burned to the ground rather than looted. In this vacuum of adult authority, the decisions of mid June 1381, including whether to negotiate at all, fell substantially on Richard himself, advised by a shrinking circle of councillors after Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Treasurer Robert Hales, the two most senior ministers, were killed by the rebels on 14 June.

Mile End, 14 June 1381: Concession or Survival?

On 14 June, Richard rode out to Mile End, then open fields east of the city walls, to meet the Essex contingent of the rebel army. There he agreed to sweeping concessions: the abolition of villeinage, free access to markets, a fixed low rent for land, and a general pardon for those involved in the rising. Clerks, reportedly around thirty of them, were set to work immediately drafting charters bearing the royal seal, to be carried out to manors and shires across the country.

Whether Richard believed these promises when he made them is unknowable. What is clear is that Mile End worked as a piece of crisis management. A substantial part of the Essex rebel force, satisfied that they had won what they came for, began to disperse and head home carrying their charters. It bought the Crown time and thinned the rebel numbers in London by the following morning.

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The Tower Falls While the King Talks

The concessions at Mile End did not stop the violence elsewhere in the city. While Richard was negotiating, a separate group of Kentish rebels forced their way into the Tower of London, reportedly the best defended fortress in the kingdom, and dragged out Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Lord Treasurer Robert Hales. Both men, blamed by the rebels for the poll tax and its collection, were beheaded on Tower Hill.

The killings underline how little control the Crown actually had over events on 14 June, even as its king was personally negotiating a settlement a short distance away. Richard's concessions at Mile End were not made from a position of strength. They were made because the alternative, by that point, looked considerably worse.

Smithfield, 15 June 1381: The Killing of Wat Tyler

The following day, Richard agreed to a second meeting, this time at Smithfield, with Wat Tyler and the remaining rebel leadership. Accounts of what happened next differ in detail, but the outline is agreed: Tyler, in an exchange chroniclers describe as disrespectful toward the king, was seized by Lord Mayor William Walworth, who struck him with his sword. Royal retainers finished the attack, and Tyler died shortly afterward.

For a moment, the rebel army, watching their leader cut down in front of them, seemed close to erupting into a massacre of the royal party. It was at this point that the fourteen year old king rode forward alone toward the crowd and, according to tradition, declared himself their leader.

"I am your captain, follow me."

Whatever combination of nerve, coaching and calculation produced that moment, it worked. The crowd, disoriented by Tyler's death, followed Richard away from Smithfield toward Clerkenwell Fields, where the immediate crisis in London finally broke.

"Villeins You Are, and Villeins You Shall Remain"

The charters granted at Mile End did not survive the month. Within days, royal forces were being mobilised across the southeast, and by early July the government had formally revoked every concession, arguing that the charters had been extorted under duress and therefore carried no legal force.

The chronicler Thomas Walsingham records Richard delivering a blunt verdict to the rebels once royal authority had been reasserted, reportedly at Waltham, Essex, around 22 June 1381: rustics they were, and rustics they would remain, not as before but incomparably harsher, so that their bondage would stand as a warning to others. This is usually rendered in English as "villeins you are, and villeins you shall remain." Commissions of oyer and terminer were sent into Essex, Kent, Norfolk and Suffolk to try and execute those identified as ringleaders, and hundreds of rebels are estimated to have been killed in the reprisals that followed through the summer of 1381.

Courage or Calculation? The Historiographical Debate

The gap between the boy who rode alone toward an armed crowd at Smithfield and the king who delivered the villeins line a week later is the central puzzle of Richard's role in 1381, and historians read it in genuinely different ways. Walsingham himself, writing with the benefit of hindsight and a chronicler's taste for providential narrative, presented Richard's composure at Smithfield as evidence of an almost divinely ordained self-possession, a king who instinctively knew how to command.

Modern historians are considerably more cautious. Some read the Mile End and Smithfield performances as genuinely improvised, the reaction of a frightened but quick-witted teenager who understood, correctly, that hesitation in that crowd meant death. Others argue that Richard's every move at both meetings was closely managed by the experienced councillors and civic officials around him, men like Walworth, who had every reason to coach a young king through exactly the theatre that would defuse the crisis without conceding real royal authority. Nigel Saul's modern biography of Richard treats the events of 1381 as an important, formative moment in the king's developing sense of his own sacred authority, one that arguably hardened rather than humbled his view of kingship. I find this reading the more persuasive of the two, since the coldness of the villeins speech only a week later fits a king who had just learned that royal will, asserted with sufficient confidence, could bend a crowd of thousands. Whichever reading is right, both agree the revolt was a formative experience rather than an isolated crisis Richard simply survived and forgot.

What the Revolt Meant for Richard's Kingship Going Forward

It is tempting to treat June 1381 as a self-contained drama with a beginning and an end, but its afterlife in Richard's reign was considerable. A king who had watched his own broken promise reassert royal control more effectively than his uncle's regency ever had was not likely to conclude that concession was the safer path. The confidence, or the recklessness depending on the historian, that Richard displayed in his later assertions of personal authority through the 1390s has been traced by more than one biographer back to the lesson he appears to have drawn from 1381: that decisive, even ruthless, royal will could overpower a threat that consultation and compromise could not.

For readers following the wider arc of the crisis, our companion piece on the poll tax that provoked the revolt shows exactly what Richard's government was trying, and failing, to collect in the weeks before Mile End and Smithfield, while our guide The Labour Machine sets Richard's broken promise to abolish villeinage against the longer legal campaign to keep former serfs bound to the land in the decades after the Black Death.

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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 Mile End and Smithfield placed within the full seven week chronology of the rising.

→ The Causes of the Peasants' Revolt: the deeper grievances over labour law and taxation that Richard's councillors had failed to resolve before June 1381.

→ Who Was Wat Tyler?: the Kentish leader whose death at Smithfield forced Richard's decisive intervention.

→ Who Was John Ball?: the preacher whose ideas about equality Richard's promises at Mile End briefly seemed to concede.

→ The Poll Tax of 1381 Explained: the tax collection crisis Richard's government had created in the weeks before he rode to Mile End.

→ The Statute of Labourers 1351: the labour law whose repeal Richard promised at Mile End and never delivered.

→ The Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt: how the labour shortage after the plague shaped the demands Richard faced in 1381.

Editorial note: at the time of writing, historiesandcastles.com does not yet have a dedicated Richard II biography article on the medieval-english-monarchy blog. This is a confirmed content gap worth flagging for future cluster planning, since a standalone Richard II article would be a natural cross-link target for this piece.

People Also Ask

How old was Richard II during the Peasants' Revolt?

Richard II was fourteen years old in June 1381, having been born on 6 January 1367 and crowned king in 1377 at the age of ten. He personally met the rebel leadership at both Mile End and Smithfield within his fifteenth year, without an adult regent formally standing in for him at either meeting.

What did Richard II do at Mile End?

At Mile End on 14 June 1381, Richard met the Essex rebels and agreed to their central demands, including the abolition of villeinage, free access to markets, low fixed rents, and a general pardon. Clerks were set to work drafting charters under the royal seal to carry these promises out to manors across the country, and a significant portion of the rebel army began to disperse satisfied.

What happened at Smithfield in 1381?

At Smithfield on 15 June 1381, Wat Tyler was killed by Lord Mayor William Walworth during a confrontation whose exact cause chroniclers dispute. With the rebel army on the brink of violence, the fourteen year old Richard rode forward alone, declared himself their leader, and led the crowd away from the scene toward Clerkenwell Fields.

Did Richard II keep his promises to the rebels?

No. Within days of Smithfield, the government began revoking the charters granted at Mile End, arguing they had been extracted under duress and had no legal force. Commissions of oyer and terminer were sent into the affected counties to punish the rebellion's participants, and the promised abolition of villeinage was never implemented.

What does "villeins you are, and villeins you shall remain" mean?

The line, recorded by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham and reportedly delivered by Richard around 22 June 1381, told the rebels that their unfree, villein status would not only continue but would be enforced more harshly than before. It stands as the clearest evidence that the promises made at Mile End were never intended to survive the crisis that produced them.

Was Richard II praised or criticised for his role in the Peasants' Revolt?

Both. Chroniclers writing soon after the events, particularly Thomas Walsingham, largely praised Richard's composure at Smithfield as evidence of natural royal authority. Modern historians are more divided, with some crediting Richard's personal courage and others arguing his actions were closely managed by experienced councillors, while broadly agreeing the episode shaped his later, harder view of his own royal power.

Where can I buy a book on the Peasants' Revolt and impact of the Black Death?

Histories and Castles produces revision and study guides, aswell as Investigated Histories including The Price of Survival: The Impact of the Black Death guide begins where the medical history ends, at the moment when the survivors had to decide what kind of England to rebuild, and some people began making that decision for everyone else. The Labour Machine: Survivors of The Black Death fully argued, historical investigation into the Statute of Labourers: the law Edward III's government passed while the Black Death was still killing people, designed to reverse the only economic advantage ordinary workers had ever held.

The Histories and Castles Academy also has a number of study and revision guides on topics ranging from the Crusades to the Normans and Medieval law.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Saul, Nigel (1997): Richard II, Yale English Monarchs series, Yale University Press. The standard modern scholarly biography, with detailed treatment of the 1381 revolt as a formative episode in Richard's kingship.
• Dobson, R.B. (1970): The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, Macmillan. Collects translated extracts from Thomas Walsingham, the Anonimalle Chronicle and other contemporary sources covering Mile End and Smithfield.
• Galbraith, V.H., ed.: The Anonimalle Chronicle 1333 to 1381, Manchester University Press. The fullest surviving eyewitness style account of the Smithfield meeting and Tyler's death.
• The Historical Association: The Great Revolt of 1381, history.org.uk, a teaching resource covering Richard's role at Mile End and Smithfield.
• The 1381 project: 1381.online, an academic digital humanities project on the participants and events of the revolt, including the royal response.

Note: the exact wording, date and location of the villeins quote vary between translations of Walsingham's Latin chronicle, and some modern historians treat it as representative of the government's post revolt position rather than a verbatim transcript of Richard's own words. The debate over whether Richard's conduct at Mile End and Smithfield reflects genuine personal courage or careful management by his councillors is a live historiographical disagreement rather than a settled fact, and this article's own reading, favouring the courage-hardening-into-later-authoritarianism interpretation, is presented as one informed position within that debate, not as consensus.

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