the Uprising of 1381: Wat Tyler, John Ball, and Peasants' Revolt That Shook Medieval England

In June 1381, tens of thousands of English commoners marched on London. Within days they had broken open the city's gates, burned the finest house in the kingdom, executed the two most powerful officials in England, and stood face to face with a fourteen-year-old king who had to decide, in a single desperate afternoon, whether to negotiate or die.This is the full story of the Peasants' Revolt: a plague that killed a third of England and reshaped its economy, a law written to freeze wages after that plague, a costly war in France that emptied the royal treasury, and three poll taxes that finally broke the patience of the English countryside. It follows Wat Tyler and the preacher John Ball from obscurity to the center of English history, traces the march on London hour by hour, and recounts the two extraordinary royal meetings, at Mile End and Smithfield, where a boy king met the rebels face to face.Drawing on the medieval chronicles and the modern historians who have tested them against the documentary record, this book tells the rising honestly: what the sources agree on, where they contradict each other, and what the revolt actually changed in the century that followed, when the system of English serfdom it failed to abolish by charter nonetheless began, slowly, to disappear.Clear, carefully sourced, and honest about the limits of six-hundred-year-old evidence, this is the real history behind England's largest medieval uprising.