The Three Poll Taxes and the Outbreak of Revolt

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

R. B. Dobson

Published:

1983

Publisher:

Palgrave Macmillan UK

According to the unknown author of an English poem on the rising of 1381, ‘Tax has tenet us alle’. Certainly no account of the Peasants’ Revolt which fails to give due emphasis to the three poll taxes of 1377 to 1381 can hope to he at all convincing. There is no serious doubt that the English government’s desperate attempts to break out of a position of extreme financial insolvency precipitated the riots which led to a general revolt. As the following extracts show, the means by which the parliamentary commons were induced to grant these taxes can be studied in considerable detail, as can the complicated procedure used to assess and collect the levies.1 By comparison the location and dating of the first outbreaks of active discontent are problematical to a degree. It seems probable that isolated acts of resistance to the activities of the poll tax commissioners occurred early in May. Certainly by the end of that month there is evidence of armed opposition at a more than local level. At first sight the accounts of the early disturbances written by contemporary chroniclers appear to conflict seriously with one another; but the main outlines of their narratives can be reconciled with that of the best informed source, the Anonimalle Chronicle. Open defiance of the tax commissioners apparently first led to outright rebellion in three marshland villages near Brentwood, from which it soon spread to the rest of the county of Essex.

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