Ideas
John Ball: ‘Now Is the Time’
The 1366 Langham mandate places Ball in conflict with church authority long before the rising. Later chronicles preserve the radical language associated with him — but not without evidential problems.
Samuel Stephen Chronicles · 1381
The Peasants’ Revolt: Research & Sources
The revolt did not begin with one tax collector on one morning. This research trail follows labour law, fiscal pressure, radical preaching, documentary power, targeted violence and the source contradictions that shaped 1381.
Start thirty-three years earlier.
The Black Death changed the labour market before the revolt changed English politics. Surviving workers gained bargaining power. The Crown answered with wage controls and restrictions on mobility. Over the following decades, law and economic reality repeatedly collided.
From grievance to organised resistance
Wage restrictions and local enforcement did not simply create resentment; they taught communities where power was recorded and enforced. The Great Rumour of 1377 shows resistance moving into a documentary register of its own.
Brentwood
John Bampton and the Patent Roll
The Crown’s enrolled record gives us John Bampton, but its nearest surviving appointment does not itself describe him as the poll-tax commissioner of the familiar story.
Women
Revolting Women
Joanna Ferrour and the wider problem of women who appear in legal records of rebellion more clearly than they do in the best-known narratives.
Power on parchment
Records were themselves a battlefield.
The Bonfires of Paperwork
Why rebels attacked manorial rolls, rentals and charters — and what that reveals about documentary lordship.
The Massacre of the Flemings
The rising also turned violently against immigrant communities in London, complicating any simple heroic interpretation of 1381.
The Blank Roll
The novel takes these pressures down to village level: names, tax rolls, household calculations and the question of when obedience becomes complicity.
How to read the evidence
Chronicles, court records, patent rolls and later historians do not answer the same questions. A chronicle may preserve narrative detail an administrative record omits; an administrative record may correct or complicate the name or office supplied by a chronicler. The aim is not to force them into agreement but to keep each claim attached to the source that actually supports it.
The migrated articles are being revised where later project research has superseded older wording. That is why this hub distinguishes between what the 2025 archive originally argued and what the surviving evidence now supports.
