The Background to the Peasants’ Revolt

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

R. B. Dobson

Published:

1983

Publisher:

Palgrave Macmillan UK

The following extracts are intended not to explain the great revolt but to set the English political and social scene for the violent events of May and June 1381. They cannot provide a comprehensive guide to the causes of the Peasants’ Revolt for the simple reason that the rising was so complex a series of episodes and incidents that it continues to defy simple analysis. Our knowledge of the social forces present in late fourteenth-century England is still less than adequate to explain the surprising developments of 1381. Two themes can however be distinguished relatively clearly within the changing political and economic activities of Englishmen in the generation before the great revolt. The first appearance of bubonic plague, the Black Death of 1348–9, ushered in a period of falling population and rising wages. The response of the government and of the county landlords represented in the English parliamentary commons was an attempt to control competition for a dwindling supply of labour by means of stringent labour laws (nos. 5–6).

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