Medieval revolt and royal authority

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John Ball.

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Source A is useful for studying the government's response because it captures the harsh mood of the king and his advisers in the weeks after Smithfield. Walsingham reports that Richard told the Essex rebels that they would remain serfs, 'in a far harsher bondage'. This matches what the government actually did. On 2 July 1381 Richard revoked the charters of freedom he had granted at Mile End, saying that they had been granted hastily. Royal troops defeated the Essex rebels at Billericay at the end of June, and Richard toured Essex and Kent with an army. Rebels were tried by judges such as Chief Justice Robert Tresilian, and leaders were executed, including John Ball, who was put to death at St Albans on 15 July.

However, the provenance means we cannot be sure that Richard used these words. Walsingham was a contemporary writing in the 1380s, but he was probably not at Waltham, and chroniclers often wrote speeches that suited their message. As a monk of St Albans, where the townspeople had risen against the abbey, he approved of firm punishment of the rebels, and he may have made the king sound sterner than he was. The words are, however, consistent with the government's actions that summer, which makes the general message believable.

The source is also limited because it shows only the immediate response. In the longer term the government was more cautious. A general pardon was granted to most rebels in December 1381, no further poll tax was imposed, and lords found it difficult to enforce serfdom, which declined over the following century. Overall, Source A is useful for showing the government's determination to restore order and the old ways in 1381, but its exact words are uncertain and it does not show the more conciliatory measures that followed.

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The Peasants' Revolt was significant for the relationship between ordinary people and the government because, for the first time, ordinary people challenged the government directly and on a huge scale. Tens of thousands of peasants and townspeople from Essex and Kent marched on London, and there were risings in Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and elsewhere. They took control of the capital, forced the king to meet them face to face at Mile End and Smithfield, and executed the Chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, and the Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. Although they claimed loyalty to King Richard, they showed that ordinary people could hold the king's government to account for unfair taxes and laws.

In the short term, however, the government reasserted its authority. After Wat Tyler was killed, Richard revoked the charters of freedom on 2 July 1381, royal troops defeated the Essex rebels at Billericay, and leaders such as John Ball were tried and executed. The rebels gained no political rights, and Parliament, which represented landowners and merchants, continued to pass laws to control labourers, such as the Statute of Cambridge of 1388.

In the longer term, though, the revolt changed the way the government treated ordinary people. A general pardon was issued in December 1381, and Parliament did not impose another poll tax on ordinary people for centuries. Lords became more cautious about enforcing labour services, and serfdom declined over the next century. The revolt also became a symbol: later radicals saw Wat Tyler and John Ball as heroes of popular resistance to unjust authority. Overall, the revolt failed in its immediate aims, but it was significant because it showed the power of ordinary people and made rulers more careful about how they treated them.

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Ideas of equality have inspired many of the most important challenges to authority by ordinary people in Britain. However, most popular challenges were triggered by economic hardship or by unjust actions by the government, and ideas of equality usually gave shape to grievances that already existed.

Ideas of equality were important as early as 1381. John Ball's sermon at Blackheath, based on the saying 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?', argued that God had created all people equal and that serfdom was unjust. This helps explain why the rebels demanded an end to serfdom at Mile End and why Wat Tyler demanded at Smithfield that there should be no lordship except the king's. During the Civil War, ideas of equality became even more radical. The Levellers argued that the poorest men had as much right as the rich to choose their government, and at the Putney Debates in 1647 Thomas Rainsborough declared that 'the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he'. In the 1790s Thomas Paine's Rights of Man inspired radical societies, and in the nineteenth century the Chartists' six points, including votes for all men, were based on the belief that working men deserved equal political rights. Later, ideas of equality inspired the campaign for women's suffrage and the struggle against racial discrimination, such as the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963.

However, economic hardship was often the main reason why ordinary people challenged authority. The Peasants' Revolt grew out of thirty years of anger at the Statute of Labourers after the Black Death, and it was triggered by the poll tax of 1380 and the commissioners sent to collect it. The crowd at Peterloo in 1819 was suffering from unemployment and high bread prices caused by the Corn Laws, and many Chartists were driven by poverty, so that one Chartist described the movement as 'a knife and fork question'. The match girls' strike of 1888, the dock strike of 1889 and the General Strike of 1926 were about wages and conditions.

The actions of government were also important. In 1381 the rebels attacked the officials who enforced the labour laws and the poll tax, and in 1981 the Brixton riots followed anger at police stop and search under the 'sus' law. Religion inspired some challenges more than equality did: the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was a defence of the monasteries and traditional religion, not a demand for equality, and its leaders accepted the social order. War also created conditions for challenge, as when the Civil War radicalised the soldiers of the New Model Army.

The role of individuals and communication mattered too. Leaders such as John Ball, John Lilburne and Feargus O'Connor spread ideas of equality, and printing, newspapers such as the Northern Star and mass petitions allowed these ideas to reach large numbers of people.

In conclusion, ideas of equality were very important because they gave many challenges their aims and their justification, from John Ball in 1381 to the Chartists and the suffragists. However, ordinary people usually challenged authority when economic hardship or unjust government made their lives unbearable, and some challenges, such as the Pilgrimage of Grace, were driven by other beliefs. Ideas of equality shaped what protesters demanded, but economic hardship was more often the main reason they protested.