Peasants revolt why did it happen

For that, he was imprisoned in April Rebels released him in May They should have freedom as a right. When asking for the payment from the people of Fobbing, there was a refusal. This led to the Commissioners being attacked and killed. Soon, neighbouring villages decided to join together to oppose the taxes and to claim their rights of freedom from ties and unfair, treacherous government.

Many men met at Maidstone in the days following this and appoint a rebel leader, Wat Tyler. Tyler and Ball orchestrate the next steps of these rebels. The Peasants Revolt had begun. The Causes of the Peasants Revolt were a combination of things that culminated in the rebellion.

These were: Long term impact of the Black Death; the impact of the Statute of Labourers; the land ties that remained in place to feudal lords and to the church. The Poll Tax was viewed as unjust and unneeded. This was at a time when the views of John Ball were being spread. His calls for freedom from oppression found a welcome audience in these circumstances.

The third Poll Tax in a short period provided a spark for all of this discontent to become an uprising. This book goes beyond the births, deaths, and marriages of the 15th century. The glamour of the court and coronations is joined by plots, uprisings, and reprisals.

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Summary: Causes of the Peasants Revolt The Causes of the Peasants Revolt were a combination of things that culminated in the rebellion.

Close this module. When were the Princes in the Tower last seen? Buy Now. Love Learning? Email Enter your email address. Henry II. The peasants went home, but later government troops toured the villages hanging men who had taken part in the Revolt.

Although the Revolt was defeated, its demands — less harsh laws, money for the poor, freedom and equality — all became part of democracy in the long term. The Peasants' Revolt was a popular uprising. In its demands for rights and equality, it was similar to the Chartists of the 19th century and the Suffragettes of the 20th century - both of whom campaigned for greater political rights - except that, remarkably, the Peasants' Revolt happened six centuries earlier!

A summary of the Peasants' Revolt The Peasants' Revolt started in Essex on 30 May , when a tax collector tried, for the third time in four years, to levy a poll tax.

Portrait of King Richard II. The revolt may have ended in chaos but it had begun as a highly organised challenge to the establishment, directed with precision by charismatic leaders, and aimed at specific revolutionary goals. These men were genuinely egalitarian. For if it had pleased God to have made bondsmen he would have appointed them from the beginning of the world, who should be slave and who lord. This was a movement of the people, seeking wholesale social change. Across hundreds of villages in Essex, Kent, Hertfordshire and Suffolk, commoners rose up against the local authorities, burning and destroying the court records and estate archives that represented the rights and powers of their lords.

The leaders of the rebellion co-ordinated strategies over many miles through letters and messengers. Their targets were political, and they wrote down their grievances and demands. They even sought written agreement and acknowledgement from the king. Those grievances were both numerous and legitimate. The devastation wrought by the Black Death in —49 had had a hugely destabilising effect on the the labour market, as demand for workers outstripped supply, and wages rose.

The government responded with heavy-handed attempts to prevent the rural population from benefiting at the expense of landowners. It capped wages, outlawed free movement, and strengthened the hold of lords over serfs and labourers. Serfdom lay at the very centre of public disaffection: for the unfree could be exploited by their lords at every turn. They were given punitive conditions in return for limited freedoms; to offer just one example, they may have been permitted to work for someone else but compelled to return to help the lord with the harvest each year.

All the while, taxation became ever more burdensome, as the unending war in France took its toll. In November parliament voted to levy a poll tax at the flat rate of a shilling per head — this was three times the rate of the first poll tax, in , and no longer graded according to ability to pay, as a second levy had been in There was widespread evasion and refusal, and as spring warmed into the hot summer of , the government misjudged the mood of the counties in ordering ever stricter enforcement of the tax.

At the end of May, a group of villagers in Brentwood, Essex set upon a tax collector, saying that they would not pay another penny.

This was not purely a local protest in resentment at a punitive tax, but a conscious, and soon widespread, uprising against corruption and oppression. Within a fortnight, rebels held the Tower of London. The rebel ringleaders were rounded up and executed. John Ball, who had preached his incendiary egalitarianism so persuasively, was hanged, drawn and quartered on 15 July.

All legal concessions Richard had made to the commons were repealed in parliament the following month. The king was wrong. The atmosphere had changed, and over the next half-century dealings between lords and their tenants shifted irrevocably.