Interpretations of the Peasants’ Revolt

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

R. B. Dobson

Published:

1983

Publisher:

Palgrave Macmillan UK

No sooner had the immediate dangers of the great revolt receded than contemporaries began to speculate on its causes and its significance both for the immediate future and sub specie æternitatis. The common belief that medieval chroniclers and other writers had no sense of historical causation and little interest in explaining the reasons for the events they related can hardly survive a study of the commentators on 1381. Indeed writers of the late fourteenth century usually generalised about the causes of the insurrection with a confidence sadly lacking in modern historians. Needless to say, much of this early comment was highly rhetorical and excessively moralistic in tone (nos. 65, 66, 73). It was generally and immediately assumed that the revolt was the direct result of mans sinfulness and God’s consequent displeasure. Vor those who cared to probe more deeply, the gravity and extent of the rebellion tended to seem inexplicable except in terms of some vast conspiratorial thesis. However, the evidence for the existence of a large and well-organised peasant ‘underground’ movement was, as it still is, extremely slender and ambiguous. Walsingham and Knighton hardly strengthened their case by introducing into their chronicles copies of mysterious allegorical letters, alleged to have been written by John Ball and other rebels. These famous ‘dark sayings’ throw more light on the religious attitudes than the political objectives of the English commons: by the standards of the sl…

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