Peasants' Revolt on Film: The Uprising Reviewed

Gone Medieval

Matt Lewis and Dr. Eleanor Janega review Paul Greengrass's film 'The Uprising,' examining its portrayal of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in Engl

Key takeaways

• The Black Death created temporary economic opportunities for survivors, which were quickly suppressed by restrictive labor laws like the Statute of Labourers.
• Heavy taxation, especially the poll tax, was a primary catalyst for the revolt, with the government's miscalculations exacerbating public anger.

Main topics

• The Peasants' Revolt of 1381
• Impact of the Black Death on medieval society

Notable quotes

"For a day, at least. England almost... changed forever and for the better."

Conclusion

While 'The Uprising' takes creative liberties, it effectively captures

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:01) From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarnagher, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week exploring... everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Speaker 1 (0:42) In 1991, two hikers in the Alps found a body melting in the ice. They assumed a fallen climber. What they'd actually found was a 5,000-year-old murder victim. Welcome to Buried Evidence. Join archaeologist Professor Raksha Dave and me, historian Rebecca Radiel, as we dig up some fascinating true crime through history. Launching on Friday the 4th of September, you can find Buried Evidence wherever you watch or listen to your podcasts. Subscribe at thecrimedesk.com and get episodes a week before anyone else. Speaker 3 (1:15) Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Speaker 3 (1:56) It's 1381 and England is at breaking point. The Black Death has laid waste to half the population and crippling taxes have ignited the Peasants' Revolt. A civilian army of thousands stormed through the capital, breaching the walls of the Tower of London for the only time in its history, and they made their demands to their king. And the crazy part? It actually worked. For a day, at least. England almost... changed forever and for the better. But they were betrayed. Their victory was snatched from them. So how accurate is Hollywood's take on this bloody rebellion? Paul Greengrass's new film, The Uprising, stars Andrew Garfield as a fictional ploughman, alongside Cosmo Jarvis as Watt Tyler and Jamie Bell as the radical preacher John Ball. Bizarrely and briefly, it was rebranded in the US as The Rise of Robin Hood, which we have. thoughts about. And the grainy, grimy, muddy art direction, which we definitely have more thoughts about. The Peasants' Revolt really happened. It's packed with drama and intrigue, but how does that translate to the movie screen? Well, we're here to be your cinematic companions, so let's get into it. Speaker 4 (3:17) All right, Matt, I suppose we need to begin at the beginning. Let's do the state of play in 1381. How's England doing? She doing good? She doing all right? Speaker 3 (3:28) It's a mess. Things have gone badly for a while now. Most notably, the Black Death has been around. Speaker 4 (3:36) Yeah, it's endemic at this point. So we've had the first big breakout, which kills a lot of people, but it just keeps coming back in successive summers. So we do have a pretty huge loss of life overall. So everyone alive is terribly traumatized. So Speaker 3 (3:52) everybody is grieving. Everybody is struggling to work. You know, there's not enough people to... to work the fields and bring in the harvests and the crops and things like that. And they've seen the unexpected opportunity that the Black Death created has kind of been taken away from them by the government as well. So there was an unexpected positive side to the Black Death for those who survived it, but that's been ripped away from them too. So for them, there's kind of nothing. good is coming out of this period. And Speaker 4 (4:21) I think this is an incredibly important point because there's this tendency that people say, oh, well, one of the good things that happened with the Black Death is that people were able to argue for higher wages. And I'm like, yeah, for about five minutes. And then the king shut that down. Speaker 3 (4:35) That's it. You get the year after the Black Death hits, you get the Ordinance of Labourers, which is later backed up in statute with the Statute of Labourers that says you can't earn any more than pre-pandemic levels. If you were getting paid a penny a day before, you get paid a penny a day now and you can't demand... any more than that. And you can't leave your land. And, you know, by the 1360s, they're bringing in extensions to those laws that you can be branded with an F on your forehead for falsehood if you try and run away from the lands that you're tied to. So they're doing everything they can to strip away the unexpected opportunities that come out of the tragedies of the Black Death. Speaker 4 (5:05) And this is 100 % the bedrock. on which all of this rests is there isn't this romantic, like wonderful, bright upside that happens as a result of the Black Death. And indeed, the other issue on top of the fact that you aren't able to argue for better wages, you're not able to move down the road in order to go find them, is also that there's an incredibly heavy taxation burden at the time because the king is also like, where did all my money go? And if you say, well, all your money is not coming anymore because everyone's dead so they can't pay taxes, they're like, doesn't sound like my problem. Speaker 3 (5:40) No, and alongside that, you've got the fact that the Hundred Years' War, which we're, you know, not all that far into at this point, but far enough, had been going well. And when war's going well, it makes tons and tons of money for all of the rich people so they don't feel the need to go after ordinary people. for taxation. I think there's 14 years in the middle of the 14th century where there's no direct government taxation. Well, you get used to that pretty quickly, wouldn't you? And then once Edward III becomes older and iller and the Black Prince is kind of off the scene and we move into the beginning of Richard II's reign, the war is not going well, but it is still costing an awful lot of money. So the government are constantly saying, we need more. We need more and we need more. And they experiment with all of these versions of taxation. So this is where you get the dreaded poll tax coming in. You get the parish tax as a one-off thing where they try and work out how many parishes there are in England, divide the total amount of money they want by the number of parishes. And that's what each parish has to pay. And, you know, slightly progressive in that they don't care what you pay in tax or what I pay in tax. They care what the community puts in. So the idea would be that wealthier people could contribute a little bit more. It does happen. It does happen. Speaker 4 (6:52) Some wealthier people are good. Speaker 3 (6:55) Yeah. But they get the maths horribly wrong because they calculate that there's 45,000 parishes in England when there's like about a fifth of that. So they wonder why they don't raise enough money. And you get poll taxes where everyone is charged a flat rate. And then you get another round of poll taxes, which is the most... progressive medieval tax I've ever seen, in which you get kind of 33 different layers of taxation from dukes and archbishops being charged an absolute fortune all the way down through earls and bishops and knights to the people at the very bottom. There's even a poor married couples allowance so that the poorest people pay four pence. But if you're the poorest married couples, you pay four pence for the pair of you. And it does feel progressive, but doesn't raise as much as they want it to. So then they go back to a poll tax, which instead of being four pence each is 12 pence each with none of the relief. So if you're Speaker 4 (7:44) a Speaker 3 (7:44) poor married couple who just paid four pence in taxation, you've now got to find 24 pence. Which Speaker 4 (7:49) is an absolute... ton of money at the time. And I think it's also important to note here, you know, now when we pay our taxes, you know, for example, here in the United Kingdom, we get stuff like the NHS, you get your roads paid for. It's going to go towards all of the daily minutiae that keep our society running. Medieval taxes don't do that. You're not getting anything. Like there's no schools that this is paying for. There are no roads. There are no hospitals this is paying for. This is just this is for the king. This is for your Lord. And they use it in order to do whatever it is they wish to do. They use it to fop about and start wars. It Speaker 3 (8:26) tends to Speaker 2 (8:26) be Speaker 3 (8:26) big project money, doesn't it? So you're paying a tenth of your income to the church in your tithe. But you might feel like you're getting something to some extent for that. You're getting your spiritual care. And the church provides hospitals and bits of education and all of that kind of thing. So you're 10 % to the church. OK. But when the king turns up asking for money, it's because he wants to go and... try and make himself richer and more powerful in another country. And it's like, what do I get out of that? Speaker 4 (8:49) Yeah. And so it's not one of these things where you look at this taxation and you say, yeah, well, we all do have to pay taxes here. You do have to pay taxes, but there's literally nothing in it for you. It is just extractive, first and foremost. And I think. That's important for us to get our heads around as part of it. And Speaker 3 (9:07) when we get to 1381, it's kind of a reassessment of the third poll tax that is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Speaker 4 (9:13) Yeah. I mean, imagine again, again, on top of everything else, you know, you're grieving your family. You are. Trying to figure out how to live, many people's villages have collapsed entirely. You know, you don't even have your old community around you. You don't have enough money to survive, really. And here they come once more and say, more taxation, please. And Speaker 3 (9:33) this reassessment seems to spark things off because it's much more invasive than previous ones. You know, we have this idea that medieval peasants maybe had no... privacy and everything else. But when the King's tax collectors are coming into your house and starting to count the things that you own and value them, that's a real invasion of your privacy that medieval people aren't used to from the government. They don't like it and they don't expect it and they don't want it. And that's really what they're pushing back against in that instant. Speaker 4 (9:59) That is an incredibly important point because we are used to high levels of taxation. That is certainly something that has happened as you've demonstrated already. And even though you are unfree and you're tied to the land and you can't move about, you do own your home, right? You do. Sure, you have to pay a tax on the land and these things, but that house, that's your house. You probably built it, you know, or your father did something like that. These have to be kind of rebuilt over and over again. That is your little private world. And having the king's people come into it and start going through your pots. To see if you've paid enough tax. That is a huge invasion of privacy and they do not take it well. Speaker 3 (10:38) No. Speaker 4 (10:39) And Speaker 3 (10:39) we ought to point out we've got a 14 year old king as well at this point in Richard II. He's been king since 1377 when his granddad Edward III died. The kingdom is still largely ruled by a council on behalf of this young king who everyone seems to have forgot needs to be taught how to be a good king. Speaker 4 (10:56) Well, I mean, I think that at this point in time, the people who are kind of controlling the council don't. really hope that you'll ever try to get around to kinging so hard and it is so bad the situation is so bad that we often refer to these groups of people around richard as the evil senate the evil and literally just that's that's the moniker that we use for them so it's that is a indication of how bad this group of people was and how they were seen by their contemporary peers. Speaker 3 (11:28) And for the purposes of the Peasants' Revolt, we've got kind of two of the main players. So we've got the Chancellor, who is kind of the medieval equivalent of a Prime Minister, Simon Sudbury, who is also the Archbishop of Canterbury, who interestingly also resigns his position as Chancellor the day before the Peasants' Revolt gets into London. Smart move, doesn't really work out for him though. And the other one is Sir Robert Hales, who is the Treasurer. So they're really going after the... The politics man and the money man, they're the two people that the peasants in the Peasants' Revolt are blaming for everything that's gone wrong. Speaker 4 (11:57) And the peasants are so real for that. I absolutely love it. But OK, listen, this is this is the setup. Here we go. This is the the cauldron of bubbling frustrations that we see before the peasants uprising breaks out. And this is a movie, The Uprising, about said uprising. However. There was some confusion, was there not, a week or two ago about what this movie was. Would you care to speak on that? Speaker 3 (12:29) I mean, I probably shouldn't go into the depths of the conversation that we had on WhatsApp. Speaker 4 (12:33) I mean, it's true. It's like, literally, Matt and I are like, you know, just texting each other really quick. Because, so, I mean, what happened, I think, from, I suppose I will say what the Americans did. All right. So, it seemed as though... There was advertising specifically within America, which added a tagline to the uprising, which said, witness the rise of Robin Hood. Speaker 4 (13:05) And nerds around the world were heard to give out a collective groan. Garments were rent, mine included. You and I were texting furiously about how frustrating this was because we were like, I don't understand what's going on. I thought this was a film about the Great Uprising. I did not think this was a Robin Hood film. And this was then swiftly retracted, at least. from the UK perspective. Here in the UK, they said, no, actually, haha, like, I don't know what they're doing over there. I don't know who told you that. That's crazy. They said that, you know, kind of a thing. And people sort of went, all right. And I suppose the important points to make here about why we are frustrated with that as historians is, first of all, there's an established Robin Hood tradition well before. the uprising ever takes place. And at first, it isn't necessarily written down because obviously the sorts of people who would tell stories about somebody who robs the rich and gives to the poor. No one's like, hey, give those guys some parchment. we should write this down, like write down the story. And it's Speaker 3 (14:14) like Speaker 4 (14:14) that Speaker 3 (14:15) classic, we got one copy of Beowulf because these things don't get written down for a very long time. Speaker 4 (14:19) And we do know that people are telling these stories though, because certainly we find that there are references, for example, in the extended utopian poem, Pierce Plowman, where they will say, men tell tales of Robin Hood. We see them come up in frustrated sermons at times where people will say that ordinary people wish to hear songs of Robin Hood. as opposed to going to mass, which, yeah, guilty, sorry. Speaker 3 (14:43) Yeah. Sorry, yeah. And the issue with Piers Plowman is that appears five years before the Peasants' Revolt. So that's our first written surviving reference to Robin Hood, which points to a long, long oral tradition that exists before that. So it's hard to position this as a rise of Robin Hood film. And I wondered whether this was, we've talked about this, was this a deliberate mistake by the US marketing team to kind of say, if you like Robin Hood films, this is for you? And then, oh, no, it's not a Robin Hood film. It's not. Speaker 4 (15:11) Oh, what am I like? Yeah, we didn't really need, we didn't say Speaker 3 (15:14) it was a Robin Hood film. Speaker 4 (15:15) Yeah. And I do think that that is, that is kind of like a frustration because there is this tension here surrounding it about what it is and what it means. Yeah. Speaker 3 (15:24) And I think the part of the frustration that we both had with it as well was the Peasants Revolt doesn't need something adding to it. It's a fabulous story on its own that deserves. To be told, it doesn't need Robin Hood bolting onto it. Speaker 4 (15:37) And this is in and of itself one of the most exciting historical things that has ever happened. It is a true story of ordinary people rising up against the wealthy who are oppressing them. It's done. Jobs are good in. Right. We do. We do not need a fictional version kind of ratcheted on the top here. I don't think to the credit in the movie, the words Robin Hood are never spoken. Speaker 3 (15:59) True. And I mean, we ought to give a little spoiler alert here. Spoiler alert. If you haven't seen the film. Stop listening, but do come back. There is a kind of thing at the end of the film that kind of kind of does the Robin Hood thing without saying it's Robin Hood, which was which it didn't feel like the film needed it. Speaker 4 (16:16) Yeah, I think that was sort of frustrating for me because I think in terms of plot, it doesn't work. Either because I think that if one does have the opportunity to confront the person who killed all of your friends, you probably don't let them live. And I feel like it was just so tongue in cheek. It was either commit to the bit or don't. And I mean, I do also think that if what we were going to do is we were going to commit