Peasant Revolts

- [Instructor] in this
video I want to look

at popular uprisings in
late medieval Europe.

So we're talking about between roughly

the 14th and the 16th centuries.

And these are sometimes
known as peasants' revolts,

and we'll talk a little
later about whether or not

that's a really an appropriate term given

who actually participated in the events.

But for now, we'll refer to
them as popular uprisings,

which means that they involved
a lot of common people.

As we look at these events,

we want to keep two questions in mind,

sort of big-picture questions.

The first is why did
people choose to revolt

against their government?

And especially after about the 1320s,

we see a huge number of
these popular uprisings

in a way that just didn't
happen prior to this point.

So why did this happen?

Why did people rebel?

And secondly, we want to think about

were these uprisings successful?

And if so, what does success look like

in these circumstances?

So I want to start with
a specific example,

and that example is the
Peasants' Revolt in England.

This occurs in the year 1381.

So we have a picture here,

and this is a picture from The
Chronicles of Jean Froissart,

and he is writing his
chronicles of what's going on

at the same time that
these events are occurring.

So it's a contemporary account.

The picture is actually from later.

It's added back into the Chronicles later,

so the picture is not entirely
accurate of the period,

but it does give us a sense
of what it might look like

for the king to be confronted

by thousands of angry subjects.

But to go into what they were doing there,

I want to start with a quote

and this again comes from The
Chronicles of Jean Froissart

that I mentioned and this is a quote

that he attributes to John Ball.

John Ball is an English priest
who is preaching at this time

and is considered maybe
one of the instigators,

one of the people who helps
start this revolt in 1381

and part of that is he's spreading ideas

that challenge the existing
authority structure.

And he goes on and says,
"Ah ye good people,

"the matters goeth not
well to pass in England,"

and that's kind of an
old-time way of saying

things aren't going well in England.

And then he goes on and says,

"Nor shall not do till
everything be common

"and that there be no
villains nor gentlemen,

"but that we may all be united together

"and that the lords be no
greater masters than we be it."

So what he's saying there is we have

this structure of society in England

where there are the gentlemen,

the people who are part of the nobility,

and they have this access

to political power and economic power.

And then we have all these other people

who have to basically do work
to support this nobility.

And he says we should really all be equal

and things aren't going to be
well in England until we are.

So that's a pretty radical message

especially for a medieval
European country.

And he goes on and askes this question

and says, "What have we, what
have we the common people

deserved or why should we
be kept thus in servage,

servitude or bondage,

"We be all come from one father

"and one mother, Adam and Eve,

"whereby can they say or show that

"they'd be greater lords than we be."

And what he's doing
there is making an appeal

to the Old Testament of the Bible

and saying that everybody is descended

from the same pair of people.

So we all really are equal in that sense,

so why is it that the nobility have access

to this greater power and wealth.

I should point out that
this idea of challenging

the social hierarchy is not the
only thing that's motivating

rebels in the Peasants'
revolt in England here.

There are a lot of other factors,

and we'll talk about those a little later.

So when we talk about
medieval European society,

before this point we have a structure

that has three estates, three levels

or classes you could think of this as.

And we have the clergy
which are priests or friars,

and basically anyone
involved with the church

and that is the group of those who pray.

You have the nobility and this
is going to be your Knights,

your people who are in control
of large tracts of land

that they hold in service to
the king and to the kingdom

and those are the people who fight.

And then at the bottom you
have the people who work,

which is including most of the population.

Remember this is a low
technology agricultural society.

We're talking about probably
90% plus of the population

is involved in agricultural
production in some way.

So this is the largest chunk of society

and they refer to that as the peasantry.

So to recap that your your model is

you have those who pray, those who fight,

and those who work.

The society needs all of these
roles to function properly,

so all of them are important.

So we want to think about how do we go

from this situation where we have

this relatively stable social order

where the different estates are seen

as more or less equally
important members of society

to what we see in England in 1381

where the people rise up and challenge

the authority of the king.

So there are three broad areas of analysis

that we can use to better understand why

we see these popular revolts breaking out

throughout the 14th century.

The first one of those is demographics

or the study of population.

And we have two major
events that significantly

impact Europe's population here.

The first one is the Great Famine

which occurs between 1315 and 1317,

and that refers to a sequence
of poor agricultural harvests

due to poor weather for
agriculture at this time.

The other event that has a major impact

on Europe's population is
the outbreak of the plague,

the Black Death it's called,

which occurs between 1347 and 1349 here.

And this ends up killing between a third

and a half of Europe's population.

So what you see is a big increase

in how much it costs to hire workers.

And you actually see
in England for example,

in 1349 and 1351,

you see a couple of laws passed

that try to keep workers
wages at pre-plague levels.

So it's a response to the fact that

there are now fewer workers and that makes

workers more expensive.

On top of that, you also
have the Hundred Years' War

going on between England and France.

It starts in 1337 and drags on actually

for more than a hundred years,

but that's the name they've given it.

But that's expensive.

That costs both governments a lot of money

to keep fighting and
maintaining militaries

and so at the same time that you have

these economic problems and struggles,

you also have government's
raising taxes on people

to try and pay for this conflict.

And the last thing that helps explain

some of these uprisings
these popular uprisings,

we saw a little bit already
in John Ball's quote,

but we have religious and cultural issues

going on as well.

The mendicant orders,

the Franciscans and the
Dominicans who are friars,

who go around and preach to common people

and preach the value of
poverty and simple living.

So when you have nobility who are living

very lavish and extravagant lifestyles,

you have some some pushback
against that as being

perhaps against the popular
religious attitudes of the time.

I mentioned at the beginning
that we would talk a little bit

about whether or not a peasant revolt

was the proper name for these events.

And we have in 1358 an event,
known as the Jacquerie,

which is a popular uprising
in the north of France

spurred because of issues relating

to the Hundred Years' War, actually.

And the Jacquerie gets
its name from the fact

that common people kind
of generically called,

Jacques Bonhomme,

like a regular guy was a Jacques Bonhomme,

and then that just translates to something

roughly like, Jack Goodfellow.

So what you see is the elites,
the clergy, the nobility

are applying this notion
of being a peasant,

of being a commoner,

in kind of a derogatory or insulting way

to anyone who's not part of
the nobility or the clergy.

And remember that when we
said what a peasant really is

it refers to a rural agricultural worker.

These revolts, these uprisings,

included a lot more than just
rural agricultural workers.

What they're trying to do
is to dismiss the uprising

as just bad behavior from people

who don't know their place in society.

But in reality, it's much
more complex than that.

So hopefully this starts
to give us a sense

of why did people revolt

against the government at this time.

We had these demographic changes that lead

to these economic changes,

and that leads in some ways to changes

in how people view their roles in society.

To think about whether or
not these were successful,

we want to think about more
than just military success,

because the fact is most
of these popular uprisings

lost militarily-speaking.

The government had more than enough

manpower and money to put
down these popular uprisings.

So when we think about whether or not

these popular uprisings were successful,

we want to think about did
they lead to any major changes

in the social or political structures.

Even if they didn't
win military victories.

And in most cases,

we do see some of those
changes start to take shape.