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Notable for its millenarian influences and orientations, the English peasants' revolt of 1381 opposed tax raises that were seen as an attempt to reduce yeomen to serfs. Some 100,000 peasants marched from Essex and Kent to London, capturing towns along the way. Upon reaching London, the peasants of Kent freed the prisoners, killed the Archduke, and declared that all rich people and non-begging clergy must be killed.[1] The peasants were joined by artisans and desistute townspeople. They opposed the Statute of Labourers which established maximum wages.[2]
A crowd of 20,000 peasants in London demanded a meeting with 14 year-old King Richard II, whom as Murray Bookchin emphasizes, "they naively viewed as their protector against the feudal lords." Meeting them on horseback, Richard "flippantly granted all their demands." Satisfied, the peasants departed and some even stayed to express their allegiance to him.[3] Richard II promised major reforms including cheap land and the abolition of serfdom. He did not actually keep these promises. [4]
Ultimately, Richard II's forces crushed the rebellions, and the peasants' economic demands were not met.[5] Bookchin explains that this was a scenario "that was to be repeated again and again as nobles were able to defeat trusting peasant rebels through fraud and finally through callous murder."
Norman Cohn, and later, Bookchin, have argued that the revolt marked perhaps the first time when a movement of medieval Europeans saw egalitarianism as a future ideal rather than just a relic of some distant golden age.[6]
The rebels were influenced by the preacher John Ball, who insisted that all human beings must be equal since they all descended from Adam and Eve. Reportedly, Ball sermonized: "And if we are all descended from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve, how can the lords say or prove that they are more lords than we are - save that they make us dig and till the ground so that they can squander what we produce?" Cohn comments that even if the exact words of Ball's speeches have been changed, "there is every reason to believe that the teaching which they enshrine was indeed being disseminated at the time of the revolt."[7]
- ↑ Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism.
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/event/Peasants-Revolt.
- ↑ Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution, Volume One: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era (London: Cassell, 1996), 29.
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/event/Peasants-Revolt
- ↑ Marshall, Demanding the Impossible.
- ↑ Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Paladin, 1970), 198. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982), 201.
- ↑ Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 199-200.