Revolting Women · Part 1 · First published August 2025
Joanna Ferrour and the Women of 1381
The Peasants’ Revolt is usually narrated through Wat Tyler, John Ball and Richard II. The surviving legal record also preserves women — not as background figures, but as people accused of riot, arson, theft and leadership.
Joanna Ferrour in the record
Joanna Ferrour of Rochester appears in a King’s Bench case arising from the rising of June 1381. The accusation presents her in striking terms, describing her as a leading participant in incidents associated with the Savoy and with violence in London.
But an accusation is not a verdict. The later proceedings matter just as much as the indictment. On the surviving record, the Middlesex jury acquitted Ferrour on the Savoy and Clerkenwell allegations. The Tower allegation was not resolved by that jury because it fell outside the jurisdiction being tried. She was bailed to reappear.
That leaves us with something more interesting than either a heroine or a villain: a woman whom royal justice considered worth prosecuting as a serious participant in the rising, but whose case did not produce the simple conviction later retellings can imply.
Women beyond Ferrour
The original 2025 article drew attention to other women named in records connected with the revolt, including Katherine Gamen of Canterbury, Alice Benet and Isabella Fauconer. Their cases vary, and the surviving evidence does not allow us to reconstruct motive with confidence. What it does show is that women appear in judicial material connected with riot, arson, theft and resistance.
That matters because the conventional popular picture of 1381 is overwhelmingly male. Court records complicate it.
Why women were present
The revolt grew out of pressures that reached directly into households: taxation, labour regulation, food, markets, local authority and the obligations imposed by government. Women were therefore not separated from the economic and administrative world that produced grievance.
That does not mean every woman named in an indictment was a political activist in the modern sense. It means the evidence does not support a story in which women simply watched from the margins.
The problem of narrative
Major narrative chronicles give far less attention to these women than the legal record does. That difference is itself useful evidence. Chronicles and court records were created for different purposes, and each preserves different kinds of detail.
The lesson is not that one source type must always be trusted over another. It is that claims about participation need to remain attached to the sources that actually preserve them.
From 1381 onward
This is the starting point for the Revolting Women series. Part 2 moves to the Pilgrimage of Grace, where women appear in depositions, provisioning, communication networks and the prosecution of Margaret Bulmer. Part 3 reaches the English Civil War, when women petitioned, published, financed, defended and organised.
