The rebels were, in the main, laborers, peasants, and
serfs, but their number included craftspeople and even
some relatively prosperous landowners.
The revolt’s origins go back to the BLACK DEATH
(1348–49), which created labor shortages, allowing
the laborers and workers to demand larger wages. This
“seller’s market” for labor led to greater geographical
mobility among the lower classes. In response, wealthy
landowners produced a series of laws fi xing wages and
restricting the movement of laborers. This class tension
was aggravated by the extensive taxation fi nancing the
HUNDRED YEARS WAR; a poll tax instituted by Parlia-
ment in November 1380 directly sparked the revolt.
Falling disproportionately on the poor, the tax inspired
many to evade it, resulting in punitive investigations.
Riots broke out in Essex and Kent in early June
1381, quickly spreading throughout the counties. Led
by Wat Tyler, large bands of the rebels marched toward
London to demand reform. Professing loyalty to the
king, Richard II, the rebels directed their anger against
great lords, ministers, and the day-to-day administra-
tors of government. The king met with the rebels on
June 14 and agreed to their demand for the manumis-
sion of all serfs. The rebels had already attacked law-
yers and engaged in vandalism; after the meeting with
the king, they broke into the TOWER OF LONDON and
beheaded, among others, the treasurer and the arch-
bishop of Canterbury. During the king’s next meeting
with the rebels on June 15, Wat Tyler was killed in a
scuffl e, and the king persuaded the rebels to move
away from the city, effectively dispersing them. The
government, revoking the royal agreement to the reb-
els’ demands, used armed force to pacify the counties
and executed those considered to be instigators of the
revolt.
The rising not only appears in literature but is also
evidence of attitudes about written culture among the
classes who left few records of their own. The 1381 reb-
els seemed to view the written word as a tool of their
oppressors, and also had a canny grip on how it func-
tioned. They destroyed documents that held records of
their obligations to landholders and executed the law-
yers, clerks, and offi cials who produced them. Some
cryptic letters associated with the rebels have survived
in CHRONICLEs, suggesting that they may have spread
their ideas through circulating poem-like texts. These
texts seem to refer to WILLIAM LANGLAND’s PIERS PLOW-
MAN, prompting the hypothesis that a shocked Langland
may have removed infl ammatory social statements from
his poem for the post-1381 text.
Despite (or because of) these signs of literacy in the
rebels, contemporary chroniclers depict them as ani-
malistic, irrational, and debased. It is their denigration
of the rebels as yokels that contributed to the eventual
popularity of the term Peasants’ Revolt. JOHN GOWER lit-
eralizes the chroniclers’ animal metaphors by depicting
the rebels as an army of beasts in his Vox clamantis.
Chaucer treats the event less directly. He makes only
one precise allusion to the rising, in “The NUN’S PRIEST’S
TALE,” but critics have suggested that the rising is
refl ected in his view of the interaction among different
social classes, especially his depiction of a peasant
mocking aristocratic values in “The MILLER’S PROLOGUE
AND TALE’s” parodic inversion of elements of “The
Knight’s Tale.”
See also PIERS PLOWMAN TRADITION.
FURTHER READING
Dobson, R. B., ed. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. 2nd ed. Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1983.
Hilton, Rodney. Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant
Movements and the English Rising of 1381. Introduced by
Christopher Dyer. London: Routledge, 1983.
Justice, Steven. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Brantley L. BryantPEMBROKE, COUNTESS OF See HERBERT,
MARY SIDNEY, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE.PERSONIFICATION Personifi cation is a fi g-
ure of speech that attributes human abilities and
responses to things that are not human. In many lan-
guages, personifi cation is unavoidable due to the lin-
guistic practice of attaching a feminine or masculine
gender to proper nouns. Personifi cation is widespread
in the poetry of even those cultures whose language is
comparatively nongendered, since, long before the
invention of print, poets spoke and sung of nature in
ways that embodied it with human qualities. GEOFFREY
CHAUCER’s GENERAL PROLOGUE TO THE CANTERBURY TALES316 PEMBROKE, COUNTESS OF