The Poll Tax of 1381 Explained

Written by Simon Williams

England's peasants paid three separate poll taxes between 1377 and 1381. The third, sold to Parliament as fairer because it was graduated by wealth, still demanded a shilling a head, sparking evasion, an enquiry into fraud, and a violent revolt.

• First Poll Tax: 1377, flat rate of 4d per lay person aged 14 and over
• Second Poll Tax: 1379, graduated by social rank, aged 16 and over
• Third Poll Tax: granted by Parliament at Northampton, November 1380, collected 1381
• Third Poll Tax rate: graduated from a minimum of 4d to a maximum of 20 shillings, with an average target of one shilling (three groats) per head, aged 15 and over
• National shortfall: roughly one third of the 1377 taxpayer base, close to half a million people, missing from the 1381 returns
• Essex return: 30,533 people declared liable in 1381, against 47,962 who had paid in 1377
• Enforcement commissions: appointed March 1381 to investigate evasion vill by vill
• Flashpoint: the commissioner John Bampton's inquiry at Brentwood, Essex, 30 May 1381, and the resistance at Fobbing

Picture a small hall in Brentwood, Essex, on the last Thursday of May 1381. A royal commissioner named John Bampton sits behind a table with his clerks and two sergeants-at-arms, working through a list of villages he believes have cheated the Crown. He calls forward the men of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope and tells them to pay up, again, on a tax they are certain they already paid. Within minutes the meeting has collapsed into violence, and Bampton is running for his life.

Most accounts of the Peasants' Revolt treat the poll tax as a single, simple grievance: a hated tax, an angry village, a rebellion. It was not one tax. It was three, levied in four years, each built differently, each failing in its own way, and each teaching the government the wrong lesson about what it could get away with next.

What makes the third poll tax extraordinary is not just its rate. It is the machinery built to chase down everyone who tried to dodge it, and the specific, traceable sequence of decisions that turned an unpopular tax into a national uprising in the space of about a week. This article goes through the mechanics of all three taxes, the commission sent to find the missing money, and the exact confrontation at Fobbing that lit the fuse.

Why a King Needed a Tax on Every Head

By the 1370s the Crown's war with France had swallowed decades of conventional taxation. Customs duties on wool, the traditional mainstay of royal finance, were falling as trade slowed and as the war disrupted the routes that carried English wool to Flemish looms. Parliament, dominated by the same landed and merchant interests who resented paying repeatedly for a war that seemed to bring no victories, was reluctant to grant fresh subsidies on income or property.

The poll tax offered a different logic. Instead of taxing land or goods, it taxed people simply for existing. The first version, granted by the so called Bad Parliament in the spring of 1377, set a flat rate of four pence for every lay person aged fourteen and over, rich and poor alike. It was administratively simple and, for a government desperate for cash quickly, attractively blunt. It was also, from the outset, a strikingly regressive instrument: a labourer and a lord paid the identical four pence.

The Second Attempt: Graduated by Rank, 1379

The flatness of the 1377 tax had been unpopular enough that the 1379 version tried a different approach. This time the tax was graduated according to the taxpayer's rank and social position, running from dukes and earls at the top down through knights, merchants, craftsmen and labourers, with the poorest paying only a groat. On paper this looked fairer. In practice it created a huge administrative burden, since every collector now had to make a judgement about where each household fitted on the social ladder, and it opened the door to exactly the kind of local negotiation, favouritism and underassessment that would plague the third tax two years later. The 1379 poll tax had been expected to raise more than fifty thousand pounds. It brought in well under half that figure.

The Third Poll Tax: One Shilling a Head, 1381

Parliament granted the third poll tax at Northampton in November 1380, under the guidance of Simon Sudbury, who combined the roles of Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor. It kept the graduated principle of 1379 in name, with a stated minimum of four pence and a maximum of twenty shillings, but it was built around a fixed target: every community had to produce an average of one shilling, three groats, for every lay person aged fifteen and over.

That average was the trap. In villages where the wealthy successfully argued their way into a lower assessment, or where household numbers were quietly under-reported, the shortfall did not simply vanish. It had to be made up from someone, and the someone was almost always the labourers and smallholders least able to negotiate or bribe their way out of it. A tax presented to Parliament as more equitable than its flat-rate predecessor functioned, at village level, as one of the most regressive taxes of the medieval period.

How the Tax Was Collected, and How It Was Evaded

Collection ran through the existing machinery of hundred and vill. Local constables and assessors compiled lists of liable taxpayers, collectors gathered the money, and the totals were forwarded up to the Exchequer. It was a system that depended almost entirely on local honesty, and local communities discovered quickly that it could be gamed.

Households under-reported their numbers. Adult children were hidden or claimed to have already left home. Servants disappeared from the record between one tax and the next. The scale of this evasion only became visible when the 1381 returns were compared against those from 1377. Nationally, close to a third of the taxpayers recorded in 1377, something approaching half a million people, could not be found on the 1381 rolls. Essex alone had declared 47,962 liable taxpayers in 1377; in 1381 the figure returned was 30,533. No plague, famine or migration on that scale had occurred in the intervening four years. The missing taxpayers were not dead. They were hidden.

The March 1381 Commissions of Enquiry

Faced with a shortfall that threatened to derail the entire subsidy, the royal council responded in March 1381 by appointing new commissions of local landholders and lawyers, tasked with re-examining every vill's return and rooting out concealment. These commissioners were given real teeth: the power to interrogate village officials directly, and in several cases the incentive of keeping a share of any additional revenue they recovered above the original assessment.

Each commissioner typically travelled with two sergeants-at-arms, a detail that tells its own story about how these visits were expected to go. For communities that had already endured three poll taxes in four years, on top of the wage caps and labour controls enforced under the Statute of Labourers since 1351, the arrival of an armed commission demanding a second payment on a tax they believed they had already settled was not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It was an insult with soldiers attached.

Fobbing, Essex, and the Spark of Revolt

On 30 May 1381, the commissioner John Bampton, a former sheriff of Essex and justice of the peace, held an inquiry at Brentwood for the hundred of Barnstable. Some chroniclers and later historians record his name as Thomas Bampton rather than John; the sources disagree, and this article follows the version most commonly used in modern accounts while flagging the inconsistency. Whichever his first name, his purpose was not in doubt: he summoned representatives of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope and demanded payment on the poll tax a second time.

The villagers of Fobbing, led by a man named Thomas Baker, refused outright. They insisted they had already paid, and that they held a receipt from the original commissioners to prove it. When Bampton ordered the arrest of the ringleaders, the crowd drew their bows and drove him out of Brentwood. Three days later, on 2 June, the Crown sent Chief Justice Sir Robert Belknap to punish the villages and arrest the offenders. He fared no better: the villagers seized him, forced him to swear an oath never again to take part in collecting the tax, and beheaded several of the local jurors who had cooperated with the commission.

News of Fobbing's defiance travelled fast along the roads and rivers of Essex and into Kent. By 2 June both counties were in open revolt, and within a fortnight rebel armies from Essex and Kent were converging on London.

The Tax That Was Never Tried Again

What strikes me most about the third poll tax is not its cruelty, exactly, but its carelessness. The government had already watched the 1379 tax underperform through evasion. It knew, from its own March 1381 commissions, that concealment was widespread and organised. And it chose, at the exact moment communities were already straining under labour laws left over from the Black Death, to send armed men back into the same villages to squeeze out the difference. It is one thing to misjudge a tax. It is another to misjudge it twice and then send soldiers to collect the mistake a third time.

After the revolt was suppressed, the poll tax as a fiscal instrument was quietly abandoned. England would not attempt another national tax on every head until the Community Charge of 1989 to 1990, a levy that carried the same nickname and provoked its own, very different, wave of public fury. For readers who want to see how the fallout from the Black Death set the economic conditions that made a tax like this so combustible, our guide The Labour Machine traces exactly how survivors of the plague were legally bound back into a labour system designed to keep wages down and resentment high.

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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 exactly where the Fobbing incident sits within the seven week rising, from Brentwood to Wat Tyler's death and John Ball's execution.

→ The Causes of the Peasants' Revolt: how the poll tax combined with the Statute of Labourers and the legacy of the Black Death to produce a genuinely national grievance.

→ Who Was Wat Tyler?: the Kentish leader who took the revolt from Essex villages to the gates of London within a fortnight of Fobbing.

→ Who Was John Ball?: the radical preacher whose sermons gave the tax revolt an ideological backbone.

→ King Richard II and the Peasants' Revolt: how the fourteen year old king responded once the rebellion the poll tax created reached London.

→ The Statute of Labourers 1351: the labour law already straining village life a full generation before the poll tax arrived.

→ The Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt: how plague mortality reshaped the labour market and set up the confrontation over wages and taxes that followed.

People Also Ask

What was the poll tax of 1381?

The poll tax of 1381 was the third of three head taxes levied in England between 1377 and 1381. Granted by Parliament in November 1380, it required every lay person aged fifteen and over to pay towards a community average of one shilling, with a stated minimum of four pence and a maximum of twenty shillings. In practice, gaps left by wealthier taxpayers were often passed down to the poor.

How much was the poll tax in 1381?

The 1381 poll tax was set at a graduated rate averaging three groats, or one shilling, per liable adult, with the poorest paying a minimum of four pence and the wealthiest paying up to twenty shillings. This was three times the flat four pence rate of the first poll tax in 1377, making it the heaviest of the three levies.

Why did the poll tax of 1381 cause the Peasants' Revolt?

The poll tax caused the revolt because the government tried to collect it twice. After discovering that around a third of 1377's taxpayers had vanished from the 1381 returns, royal commissioners were sent back into villages already struggling with wage controls under the Statute of Labourers. Communities that believed they had already paid, and had receipts to prove it, experienced the second visit as an intolerable provocation.

What happened at Fobbing in 1381?

On 30 May 1381, the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope refused the commissioner John Bampton's demand for a second poll tax payment at Brentwood, Essex. When Bampton tried to have their leaders arrested, the crowd drove him out of the town by force. This confrontation is widely regarded as the spark that ignited the wider Peasants' Revolt.

Who was John Bampton?

John Bampton was a royal tax commissioner, former sheriff of Essex, and justice of the peace who had represented the county in Parliament several times. In late May 1381 he was sent to Brentwood to investigate poll tax evasion in the hundred of Barnstable, where his confrontation with the villagers of Fobbing triggered the uprising. Some sources give his first name as Thomas rather than John.

Was the 1381 poll tax the only poll tax in medieval England?

No. It was the third poll tax in four years, following a flat rate levy in 1377 and a rank-graduated levy in 1379. Both earlier taxes had underperformed through evasion, which is part of why the government pursued the 1381 shortfall so aggressively, with fatal consequences for the commissioners involved.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Fenwick, Carolyn C. (1998, 2001, 2005): The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381, Records of Social and Economic History, British Academy, published by Oxford University Press. The standard modern edition of the surviving poll tax returns, county by county.
• Dobson, R.B. (1970): The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, Macmillan. Collects and translates the main chronicle accounts of the tax collections and the Fobbing confrontation.
• The National Archives, Kew: Exchequer Lay Subsidy Rolls, catalogue series E 179, which include the surviving poll tax assessments and collectors' accounts for 1377, 1379 and 1381.
• The Historical Association: The Great Revolt of 1381, history.org.uk, a teaching resource setting out the sequence of the tax collections and the outbreak of the revolt.
• The 1381 project: 1381.online, an academic digital humanities project mapping the participants, places and records of the revolt, including village level poll tax evidence.

Note: the precise figure of nearly half a million missing taxpayers nationally is drawn from comparison of the 1377 and 1381 returns as analysed by modern historians; it should be read as a scholarly estimate based on surviving records rather than an exact contemporary count, since some regional returns from 1381 do not survive complete. The identification of the Brentwood commissioner as John Bampton, rather than Thomas Bampton, follows the version used in most modern secondary accounts, but readers should be aware that primary sources are not fully consistent on this point.

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