The wind reaches the fens of eastern England before the light does, moving over the marshes in long gray sweeps. Andrew Garfield, muddied and short of breath, labors through it: a farmer with his ox, cutting furrows into the land. His character, Ploughman, is a man who refers to himself simply by what he does. Grief has pared him down to labor and memory. The plague took his wife and children, and all that remains is a hut, the animal that shares it through the winter for warmth, and the daily toll of survival. It’s slow and thankless work, the kind a kingdom takes for granted as readily as the earth beneath its feet.
That lone farmer anchors Paul Greengrass’ new film The Uprising, in theaters Sept. 11. Written and directed by Greengrass, the filmmaker’s deepest reach into the past yet dramatizes the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when tens of thousands of English commoners, taxed past endurance in the long shadow of the Black Death, marched on London to demand a fairer world. Around Garfield, Greengrass assembled a cast that includes Jamie Bell as the rebel priest John Ball, Cosmo Jarvis as the revolt’s military leader Wat Tyler, Thomasin McKenzie as Alyce, a fictional follower of Ball, Woody Norman as the boy king Richard II, and Katherine Waterston as the Countess, Richard II’s mother.
The film follows its hero from fens to road and road to London, then London toward the forest—as private grief grows into collective fury and fury reaches the gates of power. Beneath the armor and beyond the crowds, Greengrass’ epic hinges on the moment when people long treated as expendable begin to act on their claim to dignity and agency.
Greengrass invented Ploughman for the film, but the forces pressing in on him are no invention. The director opted not to build The Uprising around one of the revolt’s historical figures, such as Tyler or Ball. “I didn’t want my central character to be a soldier or a priest,” he tells TIME. “I wanted him to be emblematic of all the tens of thousands of people who rose up. They were all ordinary farmers, ordinary people who lived in villages and small towns, who’d had enough.”
That decision turns a vast uprising into the story of one man whose loss forces him to confront the larger indignities of the world that remains. Garfield recognized that feeling across centuries. “I think that everyone watching will feel that connection,” he says. “A kind of sense of: What do you do in the face of such grave injustice? How do we heal? How do we fight for our right to live a life of freedom and of dignity, and of connection?”
A glimpse of what life could be
The Black Death reached England in the summer of 1348, most likely aboard ships that came into the Dorset port of Melcombe. Moving through the country at an estimated one to five miles a day, it reached London by November and, within two years, killed as much as half of England’s population. In its wake, whole villages were left empty. The horror was intimate and unrelenting: households vanished, kin buried kin, and parishes lost the priests who once baptized and married their people. Fields went to weed, and livestock wandered untended; the familiar rhythms of rural life gave way to an eerie void.
scarcer, and scarce labor has a price. “What life could be is probably at the heart of this whole story,” says Dan Jones, the historian whose 2009 book Summer of Blood remains a defining account of the revolt. “Basic economics tell us that if you lose half the people, wages should go up. Rent should come down. Life for survivors ought, in theory, to get better.” Those left standing had reason to believe that life might improve.
That possibility ran up against what Jones calls the “vested interests of power structures.” In England, he says, the government “immediately passes laws to suppress wages”: It imposed a maximum wage and sent judges into the countryside to enforce it. Mass death had made the old hierarchy newly fragile, and Parliament moved to restore it, with the laborer kept in his place and the landowner’s command protected.
Then came the demands of war. England’s long conflict with France, a struggle over disputed territory as well as English claims to the French crown, continued, ruinous as ever, even as the plague cut the tax base and diminished the country’s productive power. The crown’s answer was a series of poll taxes, imposed on a population already strained by loss, labor restrictions, and military levies. There is, Jones says, “a class analysis to this rebellion”: elites were “taking aim squarely at the ordinary people,” first preventing them from improving their lot and then taxing them in ways they had not faced before.
By the spring of 1381, deprivation gave way to imagination. People who ached for a better life were being ordered back into the old one, by statute and tax collector alike. The revolt drew force from a realization that threatened every hierarchy above it: the social order was made by people, and people could change it.
When the country catches light
It began at the end of May, when villagers in Essex turned on the commissioners sent to collect the tax from them yet again. Within days, the uprising spread to Kent. On June 7, Tyler, likely a veteran of the French wars, emerged at the head of the Kentish rebels, who freed Ball, who had been jailed for seditious preaching, from the Archbishop’s prison at Maidstone; by June 10, they entered Canterbury.
The couplet most famously associated with Ball put the rebellion’s challenge in a single question: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” In a kingdom that understood rank as God’s design, the question was revolutionary. Adam worked the soil and Eve spun thread; no aristocrat stood beside them. So who, the couplet asks, gave one class the right to rule another?
Jones describes Tyler and Ball as the revolt’s two hands, one holding the sword and the other the scriptures. Tyler brought military organization; Ball gave the movement its moral argument. “Between them, they create a very potent movement, because it’s not only organized but it’s radicalized,” Jones says.
The name history settled on undersells the people who rose up. “It’s a very broad coalition,” Jones says, and the term “Peasants’ Revolt,” a historian’s term, can “obscure just what a wide range of people were involved.” This was not a rising merely of the utterly destitute. Whole villages moved with their structures intact: local leaders, parish priests trusted with their neighbors’ souls, craftsmen, and laborers, were joined in the capital by Londoners keeping their own accounts of unfairness. By Jones’ estimate, the coalition’s grievances ran through some 85% of the country, aimed at a thin sliver at the top—not at the king, whom they claimed as their own, but at the advisers, bishops, aristocrats, and officials they believed corrupted the realm.
Women were certainly among the rebels. The surviving records place them at critical moments, including the storming of the Tower of London. Jones calls the revolt a “truly popular movement,” one that did not require its participants to possess the formal power otherwise held by men in a patriarchal society.
What happened inside the city is the part no telling can sanitize. The rebels threw open the prisons and set fire to the New Temple, a Thames-side compound where lawyers-in-training lived and kept the books and records that helped sustain the kingdom’s legal order. They breached the Tower itself, where the king sheltered, dragged out the two men they blamed for the tax, Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Treasurer Robert Hales, and beheaded them.
Jones contends the revolt demands two judgments at once. The grievances were real, and the people were being exploited. But the rising also became brutal, with violence extending beyond royal officials to others who were perceived as enemies of the revolt but had no hand in the tax. “You have to say that this was a good cause, and the rebellion got hideously out of control,” he says.
By midsummer, the revolt reached its breaking point. Richard II was 14, a boy raised from infancy to believe he was fated to save the realm. On June 14, he rode out to meet the rebels and granted their demands, the abolition of serfdom among them. At Smithfield the following day, Tyler was killed during a parley with the king’s entourage. Richard calmed the crowds by declaring they would have no leader but him, then turned against the rising. Within weeks, he canceled the freedom charters granted in London. His government hunted down the movement’s leaders and executed them, and the king is said to have told the petitioners that serfs they were and serfs they would remain, on terms harsher than before.
There is a catch in knowing this version of events. Many chroniclers were churchmen, and the church was among the rebels’ targets. The legal records are rich, Jones says, but were created from the “perspective of the suppression of the rebellion.” Historians, he says, “have to read against the sources.” The archive preserves the rebellion mostly as seen by those who feared or punished it.
Comments