How the Bold and Bloody True Story Behind The Uprising Reverberates Through History
How Paul Greengrass approached his account of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which stars Andrew Garfield as an anonymous rebel with nothing left to lose.
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
Tom Hollander as Treasurer Hales, Woody Norman as King Richard II and Katherine Waterston as The CountessCourtesy fo Focus Features
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.
The plague also changed the terms on which the survivors lived. Labor became 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
Thomasin McKenzie as Alyce, Jamie Bell as John Ball, and Andrew Garfield as PloughmanCourtesy of Focus Features
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.
That rich idea shaped Greengrass’ choice of hero. Tyler and Ball could have supplied the film with a soldier and a priest, two historical figures already established in the record. Instead, the filmmaker begins with a farmer at the first spark in Essex, then follows him as the uprising gathers people, reaches London, and begins to turn against itself. The character is invented, but he comes from the revolt’s own language. Jones notes that actual letters found on Ball after his arrest, written to sustain the rebellion’s spirit, appeal to archetypal figures of the working land, including ploughmen like the one Garfield plays.
That loss follows Ploughman beyond the hut and into his encounter with Richard II. He was taught that the king speaks with God’s authority. When the crown proves capable of betrayal, Garfield sees the break as spiritual as much as political. “It’s like waking up from a cult,” he says. “It’s like waking up from being manipulated and misled and brought down a path that was being governed by evil, power-hoarding, oppression, being disguised as a kind of spirituality.”
Greengrass places Ploughman’s awakening beside Richard’s. “Here’s this powerless farmer who is struggling to find agency in the world,” he says, and opposite him is “this 14-year-old boy king” trying to find agency of his own. Their paths cross, then diverge. “One goes from being the farmer to the outlaw, and the other goes from being the powerless king to the tyrant.”
The London uprising scenes required the opposite approach: not courtly rooms and corridors, but night shoots packed with bodies, smoke, fire, and a city coming apart. Garfield does not think of the German supporting artists who stayed through the shoot as simply “extras.” “These supporting actors were the vital ingredient of this project,” he says. “It was a really profound experience to share that march and those fights with the same group of people every day.” Greengrass moved that company through a handful of locations, recomposing them for each setup until a modest crowd read on screen as a revolt spilling across the capital, and shot the scenes in firelight, with takes that could last 15 or 20 minutes. Within those long takes, Garfield had to keep track of his character, what he saw, and how he responded as the crowd shifted around him. The firelit crowds give the film its largest scenes. But more critical than the technical logistics of these shoots was posing the questions that arose from their aftermath. What remained, the film asks, after Richard II effectively took London back and the revolt ended?.
What the revolt left behind
Woody Norman as King Richard IICourtesy of Focus Features
By summer’s end of 1381, the rising was broken: Tyler dead, Ball captured and executed, and the freedom charters canceled. Measured against its concrete demands, the revolt failed almost completely.
But the decades that followed tell a more complicated story. Serfdom, the institution the rebels once asked their king to abolish, withered; by 1450, Jones says, when England’s next great rising came under Jack Cade, it was effectively finished, and the people who marched that time were more politically fluent than their grandparents. Greengrass sees in 1381 a distant beginning for the individual rights that developed over centuries. Jones brings the historian’s longer view to that reading. “Straight lines can only be drawn through history with retrospect and with the blinkers on,” he says. “But this is a moment when the ordinary people step onto the political stage in the English-speaking world, and they are never thereafter off it.”
Greengrass’ ambivalence about such moments in history stems from his early work as a documentarian, when he filmed upheaval in Northern Ireland,
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