England, Arise

by Juliet Barker

First published 2014

Amazon

4.1(79)

Juliet Barker places the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 inside the society that produced it. In the decades after the Black Death, labour shortages, changing wages, manorial obligations, wartime taxation and an increasingly assertive rural population unsettled old relationships between lords and tenants. Barker moves from villages and workshops to royal government, showing how ordinary people experienced law, work, religion and local authority before rebellion spread across southern and eastern England.

The uprising brought thousands of rebels to London under leaders including Wat Tyler and the radical priest John Ball, confronting the fourteen-year-old Richard II and demanding the abolition of serfdom and sweeping political change. Barker reconstructs the violence, negotiations and reprisals while challenging the idea that the revolt was a sudden explosion by an ignorant peasantry. England, Arise presents 1381 as a broad, organised political movement rooted in profound economic and social change.