Peasants' Revolt 1381: Full Timeline of Events

Written by Simon Williams

The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 ran from a single tax collector's visit to Essex on 30 May to a priest's execution at St Albans on 15 July. In seven weeks, rebel armies occupied London, executed the Archbishop of Canterbury, and forced a fourteen year old king to negotiate in person at Smithfield.

• Trigger: Enforcement of the third poll tax of 1381 at Fobbing, Essex
• Revolt began: 30 May 1381
• Kentish leader: Wat Tyler, elected at Maidstone on 7 June 1381
• Ideological leader: John Ball, the "hedge priest" of Blackheath
• Peak of the revolt: 13 to 15 June 1381, London occupied
• King: Richard II, aged fourteen
• Wat Tyler killed: 15 June 1381, Smithfield
• John Ball executed: 15 July 1381, St Albans
• Outcome: All royal concessions revoked; poll tax abandoned; judicial reprisals through the autumn

I have read a lot of medieval chronicles that compress months of upheaval into a single tidy paragraph, and the Peasants' Revolt is one of the worst offenders. Ask most people when it happened and you get "1381" and not much else. Ask what actually happened, in what order, and the answer usually collapses into "peasants marched on London, one of them got killed, the end."

That compression does the revolt a disservice, because the sequence matters. This was not one uprising. It was a chain reaction that moved from a doorstep argument in an Essex village to the gates of the Tower of London in under a fortnight, driven by decisions made and unmade almost day by day. Understanding the order of events is the difference between seeing the revolt as a spontaneous riot and seeing it for what it was: a rapid, coordinated, and briefly successful challenge to the government of England.

What follows is that sequence, dated as precisely as the surviving chronicles allow, from the poll tax collectors' arrival in Essex to John Ball's execution seven weeks later.

May 1381: The Poll Tax Collection Sparks Resistance

On 30 May 1381, the commissioner Thomas Bampton arrived at Fobbing in Essex to investigate why the village had underpaid its poll tax. The villagers, led by Thomas Baker, refused to pay further and drove Bampton's men out of the town. Within days the resistance had spread to neighbouring Essex villages including Corringham and Stanford le Hope, and by early June bands of rebels were burning court rolls and attacking the homes of tax officials and local lords across the county.

The poll tax itself was not new. It was the third such levy in four years, following earlier polls in 1377 and 1379, and it was the flat rate structure of the 1381 tax, charged per head regardless of income, that made enforcement in the poorest villages so combustible. For the fuller mechanics of how the tax worked and why its collection proved so explosive, see our companion article on the Poll Tax of 1381.

7 to 12 June 1381: Wat Tyler's Rise and the March to Blackheath

By the first week of June, Essex's example had spread across the Thames estuary into Kent. On 7 June, rebels stormed Rochester Castle and freed prisoners held there, and at a gathering in Maidstone shortly afterwards the Kentish rebels chose Wat Tyler as their captain. Almost nothing is known of Tyler before this moment, a gap in the record that has fuelled centuries of speculation about his background.

On 10 June the rebels entered Canterbury, broke into the cathedral, and demanded the resignation of Archbishop Simon Sudbury, who was also serving as Richard II's Lord Chancellor and was therefore closely associated with the poll tax's collection. The following day, 11 June, the Kentish rebels left Canterbury and marched on London. By 12 June they had reached Blackheath on the capital's southeastern edge, where the priest John Ball is recorded as delivering the sermon that became the revolt's rallying cry: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" On the same day, a separate Essex rebel army converged on Mile End, just outside the city walls.

13 to 14 June 1381: London Occupied

On 13 June the Kentish rebels crossed London Bridge, reportedly let through by sympathisers within the city. What followed was less a single battle than a series of targeted attacks. The Savoy Palace, home of John of Gaunt, the king's deeply unpopular uncle, was destroyed by fire. The rebels also broke into the Temple, home to lawyers whose profession they associated with the machinery that enforced the labour laws, and burned its legal records. Flemish merchants living in the city were sought out and killed, a reflection of resentment against foreign wool traders competing with English craft guilds.

On 14 June, the fourteen year old Richard II rode out to meet the Essex rebels at Mile End. There he agreed to abolish serfdom, grant free access to markets, and pardon the rebels, issuing charters of manumission on the spot. While the king was at Mile End, a separate group of Kentish rebels stormed the Tower of London, an event without precedent before or since. Inside they seized Archbishop Sudbury and the King's Treasurer, Robert Hales, and beheaded both men on Tower Hill, mounting their heads on London Bridge.

15 June 1381: The Meeting at Smithfield

The following morning, Richard II met the remaining rebels, now led by Wat Tyler, at Smithfield, just outside the city walls. Accounts of what happened next differ in detail, but the outline is agreed: an altercation broke out between Tyler and the Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth, during which Walworth stabbed Tyler. Tyler died of his wounds shortly afterwards. In the tense moments that followed, the young king rode forward alone to address the rebel crowd, declaring "I will be your leader," and led them away from the city into the fields at Clerkenwell, defusing a confrontation that could easily have turned into a massacre in either direction. Our companion article on what happened at Smithfield covers this episode, and the conflicting chronicle accounts of it, in full.

16 June to July 1381: Suppression and Broken Promises

With Tyler dead and the London crowds dispersed, the government's position hardened almost immediately. Royal forces were mobilised, and over the following weeks commissions of enquiry moved through Essex, Kent, Norfolk, and Suffolk, where pockets of rebellion had also flared. Rebels were tried and executed in significant numbers, and on 2 July 1381 Richard II formally revoked the charters of manumission and the promises made at Mile End, declaring that the villeins would remain in their previous legal condition.

John Ball, who had fled after Smithfield, was captured at Coventry in mid July. He was tried before the king at St Albans and executed there on 15 July 1381, hanged, drawn, and quartered in Richard's presence. His death effectively closed the revolt's active phase, though isolated resistance and reprisals continued into the following months.

The Aftermath

By November 1381, Richard II had issued a general pardon to most participants, excluding the ringleaders of the most serious incidents. The poll tax itself was never collected again in its 1381 form, and English monarchs would not attempt a comparable per capita levy for centuries. Serfdom did not end by royal decree in 1381, as the Mile End charters had promised, but the institution was already in slow economic decline, and the revolt is widely seen by historians as accelerating that decline rather than reversing it. I find it telling that the single most radical concession of the entire medieval period, offered by a panicking teenage king in a field outside London, lasted barely three weeks before being torn up in writing. The memory of what had briefly been promised, though, proved much harder to revoke.

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This article is part of the Peasants' Revolt series. Explore all articles as they publish on our historical events blog.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt: the full thirty year causal narrative connecting the plague of 1348 to the uprising of 1381, for readers who want the deeper economic and social background behind this timeline

→ The Statute of Labourers 1351: the labour legislation that suppressed post plague wages and set the legal grievance the poll tax reignited thirty years later

→ Causes of the Peasants' Revolt: a structured breakdown of the immediate and long term causes behind the events in this timeline

→ Who Was Wat Tyler?: a full biography of the Kentish leader who emerges suddenly in this timeline on 7 June and dies eight days later

→ Who Was John Ball?: the priest behind the Blackheath sermon and the revolt's most enduring words

→ The Poll Tax of 1381 Explained: the mechanics of the tax that triggered the events of 30 May 1381

People Also Ask

How long did the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 last?

The active phase of the revolt lasted roughly seven weeks, from the resistance at Fobbing on 30 May 1381 to John Ball's execution at St Albans on 15 July 1381. The most intense period, when rebel forces occupied London and negotiated directly with the king, lasted only three days, from 13 to 15 June. Scattered reprisals and regional suppression continued into the following months, but the revolt as an organised movement was effectively over once its two most prominent leaders, Tyler and Ball, were dead.

What happened on 14 June 1381?

Two major events happened simultaneously on 14 June. Richard II rode to Mile End to meet the Essex rebels, where he agreed to abolish serfdom and issued charters of manumission. At the same time, a separate group of Kentish rebels stormed the Tower of London, seized Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Treasurer Robert Hales, and beheaded both men on Tower Hill. The day therefore combined the revolt's high point of royal concession with its most violent single act against the establishment.

Why did the revolt start in Essex and Kent?

Essex and Kent were the counties where poll tax commissioners pushed hardest to recover underpaid revenue in the spring of 1381, following a collection that had come in far below expectations nationally. Both counties also had large populations of relatively prosperous free peasants and artisans with the resources, literacy, and local organisation to resist collectively, rather than the poorest labourers with the least capacity to organise.

Did the Peasants' Revolt achieve anything?

In the immediate term, no. Every concession Richard II made at Mile End was formally revoked by 2 July 1381, and hundreds of rebels were executed in the following months. In the longer term, the poll tax in its 1381 form was never levied again, and the revolt is widely seen as hardening resistance to any attempt to reverse the post plague decline of serfdom, even though serfdom itself persisted in parts of England for generations afterwards.

Who put down the Peasants' Revolt?

Richard II, still only fourteen, personally defused the immediate crisis at Smithfield on 15 June. The wider suppression over the following weeks was carried out by royal commissions and armed retinues led by nobles including the Earl of Buckingham and other loyalist lords, who moved through Essex, Kent, Norfolk, and Suffolk trying and executing rebels through the summer of 1381.

Was Wat Tyler the only leader of the revolt?

No. Tyler led the Kentish contingent from 7 June until his death on 15 June, but the revolt had no single overall commander. Jack Straw is named in several chronicles as a leader of the Essex rebels, and John Ball, though not a military leader, provided the ideological framework that united separate regional uprisings under a shared set of demands.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Anonimalle Chronicle (contemporary, 14th century): the fullest surviving eyewitness style account of the events in London, including the meetings at Mile End and Smithfield, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Available in translation in R. B. Dobson, The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, Macmillan, 1970.
• Thomas Walsingham, Chronicon Angliae (contemporary, St Albans monk): the principal source for events at St Albans, including John Ball's trial and execution, held at the British Library.
• Jean Froissart, Chroniques (contemporary, continental perspective): a near contemporary French language account, useful for comparison with the English chronicles though written at a remove from events.
• R. B. Dobson (1970): The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, Macmillan, the standard scholarly documentary collection, gathering translated primary source extracts with commentary.
• Juliet Barker (2014): England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381, Little, Brown, a modern narrative history drawing on the chronicle sources above.
• The National Archives, Kew: holds surviving legal and administrative records relating to the poll tax collection and subsequent judicial commissions. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

Note: the precise sequence of events on 13 and 14 June, particularly the order in which different rebel groups moved through London, varies between the Anonimalle Chronicle and later accounts such as Froissart's. The dating given here follows the consensus of modern scholarship, principally Dobson and Barker, rather than any single chronicle taken alone.

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