Heresy, Rebellion and Utopian Courage: The English Peasant Rising of 1381

Abstract

By the mid to late fourteenth century, most of the population of England lived in small, scattered village communities. These people worked the severalty of small parcels of land divided between themselves. Increasingly, however, the villages clustered together, either near to, or certainly in the economic and social orbit of, one of the great manor houses of a region. Less often they would be located right alongside of a manor house and its land or demesne. The boundaries of the vill might even enclose the manor house if they were large enough.1 The manor, around which the medieval village revolved, was a highly organized and hierarchical economic unit. This rule-bound and claustrophobic village society pressed heavily down upon the lowest in the social order. These were the peasants, whose lives were dominated by backbreaking, arduous and unremitting labour, and by the constant payment of tribute and tax. They were of two kinds — the free and the unfree, or villeins. The situation of the villeins was truly miserable. The essential primary producers of the feudal system, they were accorded a social status barely above that of the animal world. The Franciscan, Alvarus Pelagius, writing near the beginning of the fourteenth century, made his opinion of the lives of the peasants clear: For even as they plough and dig the earth all day long, so they become altogether earthy; they lick the earth, they eat the earth, they speak of earth; in the earth they have reposed all their hopes, nor do they care a jot for the heavenly substance that shall remain.2