The Real Story Behind 'The Uprising' and the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, When Thousands Marched on London to Demand a Fairer Society

The Tower of London has protected England’s capital since it was first built in the 1070s, withstanding medieval sieges and World War II bombing raids alike. On a June day in 1381, however, rebels breached the Tower for the first and only time in its history. Once inside the fortress, the insurgents exacted revenge on their enemies, dragging some of the kingdom’s most powerful men out to an execution block and chopping off their heads.

This unprecedented act of violence took place at the height of the Peasants’ Revolt, a mass uprising sparked by the imposition of a poll tax—the third of its kind in four years. England had been at war with France for nearly five decades, and officials needed more money to pay for the kingdom’s armies and defenses. The tax was “an unevenly distributed one,” asking more of the lower classes than the wealthy, and it was “very badly administered,” Andrew Prescott, a historian at the University of Glasgow, tells Smithsonian magazine.

The insurgents’ demands ranged from the abolition of serfdom to the redistribution of the church’s riches. Although the rebellion failed to achieve any of its stated goals, it inspired subsequent “large-scale popular uprisings with a political aim,” Prescott says. As Dan Jones, author of Summer of Blood: England’s First Revolution, tells Smithsonian, after 1381, it became “if not impossible, then highly inadvisable, to ignore the effects of policy on ordinary people.” A new film by Paul Greengrass, a veteran director of tense action films including Captain Phillips and The Bourne Ultimatum, reimagines the Peasants’ Revolt from the perspectives of those who participated in it.

Titled The Uprising, the movie stars Andrew Garfield as the Ploughman, a fictionalized everyman who takes up arms against the corrupt politicians advising England’s 14-year-old king, Richard II. Greengrass follows the Ploughman and his fellow insurgents as they make their way to London for a climactic face-to-face meeting with the young monarch. Instead, he wanted to focus on “someone history never named at all: a farmer, the first man to raise his hand in Essex. … I wanted him to stand for all the ordinary people who actually rose up and paid the price for it.” Here’s what you need to know about the real history behind The Uprising ahead of the film’s arrival in theaters across the United States on September 10.

Greengrass first learned about the Peasants’ Revolt as a schoolchild. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he saw parallels between the ongoing crisis and the Black Death, which killed an estimated 30 to 50 percent of England’s population just a few decades before the uprising. The bubonic plague contributed to a growing sense of dissatisfaction in the country in the mid-14th century.

At the time, all property in England legally belonged to the king, who granted lesser lords the right to lease land to tenants “in return for certain services and restrictions on their freedom,” Prescott says. Some tenants were villeins (the English name for serfs) unable to leave their land without explicit permission from their lord, let alone sell or bequeath this property. Others were free to travel where they wished or resell their land, but they still owed rent and obligations to their landlords.