Wat Tyler and the Uprising of 1381

There were many transitional events between the the Black Death and the Renaissance; it wasn't a case of a one leading right to the other. One of those transition events was Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, also known as the Uprising of 1381 or the Great Rising.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. One of
the kind of weird things to come out of the
ongoing COVID nineteen pandemic has been a phenomenon that I

(00:23):
am liking to call bad takes about the Black Death. UM.
There are various articles and tweets and comments on our
Facebook page that are all about how the Black Death
was a good thing actually, because sure, while it did
kill as much as half of Europe and also did
everything from increasing wages to literally causing the Renaissance. UM,

(00:44):
medieval and early modern historians have done so much debunking
of these ideas through tweets and blog posts and various
op eds, and today we have a topic that really
illustrates that there is not some kind of a switch
they got flipped that magically turned the Black Death into
the Renaissance. Like. It's not like in a video game
where you grind up a certain amount of experience and

(01:06):
then you unlock the Renaissance. It did not work that way.
This incident has been known as what Tyler's rebellion and
as the peasants revolt of One. Today it is more
often called the uprising of One or the Great Rising.
And I just want to take a minute. I can
imagine people listening to this episode and thinking that maybe

(01:26):
we chose it because of parallels to the current situation
where has there has been a lot of violence and
destruction and property damage and some in some cases deaths
um through this ongoing week of protests and violence that
have been happening in the United States. Um, this episode
was actually written the week of May eighteen, So if people,

(01:50):
uh see parallels between this episode and what's currently happening,
they are not something we tried to pick as some
kind of political statement, right. Uh. I also feel like
we could do an entire episode of this wasn't a
magic switch, right, Like, there are a lot a lot
of the way that history is taught is that way

(02:11):
where it's like this happened and it catalyzed this, And
that's true to some extent, but it's not as though
everything shifts gears suddenly. It's a very slow progression. Well,
in one of the op eds that's that's really been
focused on debunking this whole idea since pretty clearly that
a lot of ap world history classes have really framed
the idea that the Black Death caused the Renaissance, but

(02:33):
it's like it's a huge oversimplification. It will become more
clear as we get through this episode today, So we're
not going to dwell in the details of the Black
Death as an illness, but it is a necessary part
of the context of this uprising. The Black Death was
really one piece of a larger pandemic, the Second Plague pandemic,
which progressed through Asia, Europe, and Africa in waves from

(02:56):
the fourteenth through the eighteen centuries. The term the Black
Death was coined in the eighteenth century to describe the
plague that moved from eastern or Central Asia through Europe,
the Mediterranean, and northern Africa between thirteen forty six and
thirteen fifty three. The Black Death was truly catastrophic. At
least a third of the population of Europe died, and

(03:18):
it was possibly as much as half. In some specific
regions that was as much as eighty percent. Today's episode
is really focused on England, and England's population before the
Black Death had been about sixty people. Afterward, it was
half that, although some of that drop came from people
who fled to other parts of Europe to try to
escape the plague. Between twenty and thirty percent of the

(03:41):
English nobility died, along with about forty five percent of
the clergy and between forty and seventy percent of the
peasant class. In some cases those numbers were even higher.
And then the disease itself was just horrifying. On top
of having a high high mortality rate, its progression once
somebody contracted it was gruesome. Because the plague recurred in

(04:02):
waves over the course of several years. People also didn't
know when it was really over. It would seem as
though the danger had passed, only for another wave of
illness to strike. And since there were other outbreaks of
the plague in the decades after the Black Death ended,
it took generations for the population to really start to recover.
England was largely a grarian and the land was considered

(04:25):
to belong to the monarch. The monarch granted land to
the nobility in exchange for service, including providing soldiers or
funding at a time of war. This exchange of land
for some kind of service was replicated on the Lower
rungs of the social and economic ladder, and this went
all the way down to freeholders who owned or rented
small amounts of land, and then the unfree tenants who

(04:47):
were known as villains, bondsman or surfs, and they were
legally obligated to work for their landlord and subsist on
a small plot that they kept for themselves. They were
not free laborers, they were obligated to do this in
this land for service system. When a households main tenant died,
his son or another heir had to pay a fee
to take his place. In England for a baron, that

(05:10):
might be a hundred pounds for a peasant. It was
typically the household's best livestock animal. During the Black Death,
so many English tenants died that landlords received more livestock
than they could possibly take care of or use, and
this was in spite of a livestock plague that had
previously killed many of these animals. Landlords sold off so

(05:31):
many surplus animals that the market collapsed because the plague
was the worst in the summer, and a lot of
areas there wasn't enough labor alive by the fall to
harvest the crops. That had been planted in the spring.
This labor shortage led to food shortages as unharvested crops
rotted in the fields in the Similarly, not like in

(05:51):
a video game analogy, there's just not a one to
one correspondence between how many people it takes to harvest
the food and how many people that food will feed.
In normal times, Medieval manners also tended to be relatively
self contained, with their own blacksmith and their own bakeries
and their own mills, which tenants were obligated to use.

(06:13):
If an estate's only blacksmith or miller or brewer died,
there might not be anybody to replace them, or anybody
else who really knew how to do that work. Although
the medieval world wasn't exclusively Christian, the Christian Church was
colossally powerful. High placed church officials also held high ranking
government positions, and high ranking nobles were often prominent in

(06:35):
the church. Aside from that, religion was threaded through virtually
every aspect of everyday life. But the Black Death started
to undermine the Church's power. Because the disease spread so easily,
the most compassionate and most involved clergy, the ones who
really tried to comfort and care for the sick and
their families. They were among the plague's first victims. In general,

(06:58):
the clergy who survived were the ones who had not
been doing that work. The plague also really devastated monastic
communities where people lived in very close quarters. This caused
such a huge labor shortage within the church that it
had to relax its criteria for clergy, and that led
to an influx of people who were more interested in
the income or living that came with the position than

(07:20):
in actually carrying out a clergyman's duties. People became more
distrustful of clergyman and of the Church and its involvement
in everyday life, especially in the face of devastations so
immense that people wondered if God was punishing them. Aside
from all of that and the Black Deaths immediate aftermaths,
so many people had died and so much had been

(07:42):
disrupted that things turned into a state of near lawlessness.
And this brings us to some of the things that
have led people to argue that the Black Death was
maybe a good thing, although none of them are all
that straightforward. Before the Black Death, England was in the
middle of a land crunch in addition into an increasing population.
Leading up to the thirteenth century, people had divided their

(08:05):
estates among their heirs, which had resulted in people holding
smaller and smaller amounts of land. This led to a
shift to primogeniture, in which the eldest son was the
only one to inherit, but that shift couldn't really undo
what had happened in those earlier generations. After the Black Death, though,
a lot of families were able to reconsolidate their holdings

(08:26):
among the people who survived, and then in some cases,
to increase those holdings further through inter marriage with other
neighboring families. People went from having estates that were just
too small to be profitable to having ones that were
actually lucrative. Again, people who had not been able to
acquire land at all because there just wasn't any were
able to buy or rent these newly available parcels. That said,

(08:49):
because of the labor shortage, it wasn't uncommon for people
to have trouble finding enough workers for these newly consolidated estates. Also,
a landlord whose tenants had died or left was no
longer being paid rent. He was no longer collecting fees
for the use of the manners, mills, or ovens. If
he couldn't find hired labor to replace his previous workers,

(09:10):
his crops went to waste and his livestock went untended.
With an excess of land and a shortage of workers,
many turned their attention from cultivated crops to livestock, which
was less labor intensive. The massive labor shortage made it
easier for surviving workers to negotiate better terms for themselves.
People who were dissatisfied with their pay or their working

(09:33):
or living conditions could find a different job on another manner,
or they could move to a city or a town
more easily. Tenant farmers are able to negotiate lower rents
or to rent larger amounts of land that could, at
least in theory, yield a bigger income, and general wages increased,
often by as much as fifty percent and sometimes more
than that. However, in many cases it probably wasn't that

(09:56):
people were being paid more for the same work. People
were working more to make up for the shortage of labor.
The increase in incomes was also at least partially offset
by rising inflation and higher prices on goods that were
now in short supply. There's also the part where for
the lowest paid people, they sort of went from making
not enough to live on too barely enough to live

(10:18):
on two times zero is zero. Right. People who moved
from the country to the city after the Black Death
generally had more opportunities available to them, especially because urban
employers were dealing with their own labor shortages. Trade guild
started shortening the links of their apprenticeships to try to
replenish their numbers, but this really meant that there was

(10:40):
also a big loss of knowledge, skill and quality among
the various trades, and in some cases, the number of
newcomers to the cities just outstripped the number of available jobs,
causing these recent arrivals to just become a drain on resources.
As a trend, merchants fared better than rural landlords because
their work didn't require the large labor force that agriculture did.

(11:03):
This was especially true is increasing wages and ongoing shifts
in supply and demand allowed more people to buy better
quality and luxury goods. Of course, England's wealthiest classes saw
all of this. The increased freedom for workers, the rising wages,
and the luxury goods becoming more available to the masses
as a threat. They tried to return things to the

(11:25):
way they had been before the plague. Parliament passed the
Ordinance of Laborers in thirteen forty nine and the Statute
of Laborers in thirteen fifty one to return wages to
their pre pandemic levels, also to require able bodied men
and women under the age of sixty to work, and
to prevent people from moving to find different or better work.

(11:47):
These statutes were not always enforced very well, but when
they were, the focus was most often on the working
people who were being paid more money, not on the
employers and the landlords who were paying the um. In
thirteen sixty three, Parliament also passed a sumptuary Law to
try to keep the trappings of wealth only with the wealthy.

(12:08):
This was like the latest in a series of these laws,
some of which had been back before the Black Death.
So by the time of the One Uprising things were
at least somewhat better for some of England's population, but
in general the people who had gained the most in
the wake of the Black Death were the people who
already had some wealth to start with. Too many working people,

(12:29):
it had seemed like they were going to have meaningfully
more money and opportunities, but thanks to things like shortages,
other illness outbreaks, and the statute of laborers, those theoretical
gains had largely disappeared or plateaued, and England's poorest people,
the serfs, were still not free. We have not even
talked about taxes yet, and taxes were really the spark

(12:51):
that started this rebellion. We will get into that after
a sponsor break. The Black Death took place during the
warfare between England and France that came to be known
as the Hundred Years War, even though it was really

(13:12):
a series of intermittent conflicts that played out over a
span of a hundred and sixteen years. In England, the
primary way to raise money for war was through taxes,
and at the time, the only acceptable reason to directly
tax the population was to deal with an immediate threat
to the realm. This meant that warfare and taxation were
tightly linked in people's minds, so if the war was

(13:34):
going badly for England, public opinion was more likely to
blame corruption and ineptitude from parliament and royal advisers who
had demanded their tax money, rather than blaming the military.
The Hundred Years War is generally noted as starting in
thirteen thirty seven, and England saw a series of victories
in the thirteen forties and fifties, but then the tide

(13:55):
started to turn. France allied with Scotland and attacked parts
of the English coast and started reclaiming territory that it
had previously ceded to England. France's Castilian allies also destroyed
the English fleet in thirteen seventy two, and English forces
on the ground in France suffered various setbacks. After using

(14:16):
a variety of taxation strategies to raise the money to
pay for all of this, Parliament passed a poll tax
in thirteen seventy seven. That same year, Richard the Second,
who was aged ten at the time, ascended to the
throne after the death of his grandfather, Edward the Third.
Richard's father, who had been next in line for the throne,
had died the year before. Earlier taxes had been fractional taxes,

(14:40):
like their names suggests, they were based on a fraction
of how much someone's movable goods were worth. These were
assessed at the community level based on how large and
affluent the community was, and they left it up to
each community to figure out who should pay what, so,
at least in theory, it was based on your ability
to pay the tax. But the thirteen seventy seven poll

(15:01):
tax was different. It was a flat rate of four
pence per person required of everyone over the age of fourteen,
with the exception of beggars. Even though everyone was paying
the same amount regardless of how much money they had,
this poll tax didn't seem all that egregious to people.
Fourpence was about the price of a dozen eggs. It

(15:22):
was still more than a day's pay for the lowest
paid laborers. Though England still needed more money though in
early thirteen seventy eight, Parliament passed another fractional tax that
was due that February. Many towns were also required to
build ships to bolster the English fleet, and since they
had to pay for this themselves, this was perceived as

(15:43):
yet another tax. Then, in thirteen seventy nine, Charles the
fifth of France annexed the Duchy of Brittany and there
was another poll tax to try to fund efforts to
restore its independence. The second poll tax was on a
sliding scale based on a person's profession, with thirty three
to professions listed a different tax rates. Anybody who wasn't

(16:04):
a member of one of those professions was again taxed
at four pence. The government had pawned the King's jewels
and had secured loans from several towns, but combined with
the poll tax, this still wasn't enough, in part because
of increasing tax evasion, and then the newly raised English
fleet was scattered in a storm and nearly twenty ships

(16:25):
were wrecked. Another fractional tax followed, this one framed as
a loan that would be repaid rather than an actual tax.
Taxes had to be approved by Parliament, and Parliament was
not expected to be in session again for the next
eighteen months, so people believe this tax but really alone,
would be the last one for a while. Instead, Parliament

(16:48):
was summoned again in November of thirteen eighty two, once
again approve another poll tax to fund the ongoing war.
Like the thirteen seventy seven tax, this poll tax was
a flat rate and free person over the age of
fifteen was required to pay twelvepence or one shilling to
add insult to injury. This tax was due in two

(17:08):
installments the first at the end of February and the
second at the beginning of June. There was not a
lot of time to plan for that first payment, and
since it was due towards the end of winter, it
was also at the hardest time of year for rural people.
It's possible that no tax would have possibly gone well
at this point, but this tax was despised. It was

(17:30):
three times as large as the previous flat rate tax,
and for large households it just added up to enormous
amounts of money. People also doubted that the tax was
really necessary. The king's uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster,
who was highly placed in the administration, had asked for
more tax revenue than the military budget really seemed to require.

(17:53):
People thought he was either lining his own pockets with
this money or using it to pay for his own
ventures that weren't directly related to the military needs of
the kingdom. So England's fed up population, sick of paying taxes,
just didn't. Tax of asion was widespread, with as many
as thirty to people simply vanishing from the local tax roles.

(18:16):
That people were like my widowed mother, not part of
my household, not not going to lay name er on there.
When the government realized that the amount of money that
had been collected was way less than they expected, they
dispatched commissioners to investigate this rampant tax of Asian. Investigations

(18:36):
started in late May one when John Bampton and Sir
John Guildsburg arrived in Brentwood in Essex, which is northeast
of London and as part of the Greater London Metropolitan
Area today. Bampton was a Justice of the Peace and
when delegates from Brentwood and the surrounding communities arrived to
meet with him, they may have thought that he was

(18:58):
there for the upcoming June Court session. When they learned
that it was really a tax investigation, the delegates were
angry and astonished. Thomas Baker of Fobbing insisted that everyone
had paid already and that they had a receipt from Bampton,
saying so, and that they would not be paying anymore.
When the commissioners ordered their guards to start making arrests,

(19:19):
the delegates ran them out of town, armed with things
like bows and arrows. Then the delegates returned to the
fifteen or so towns and villages where they lived, and
they started organizing a resistance, including spreading the word into
other nearby towns in Essex. Meanwhile, the unrest also spread
into Kent. June two was the day that the final

(19:41):
tax payment was due. It was also the holiday of
Whitsun Day or Pentecost. On that day, people from at
least forty Essex communities meant in Boking, which is northeast
of Brentwood, and swore an oath to their cause. They
also started making plans to break radical priests John Ball
out of prison. Ball preached on things like a quality

(20:02):
in the abolition of England's class structure. His ideas were
considered heretical and he had been excommunicated by the Archbishop
of Canterbury. Ball had been incarcerated at an ecclesiastical prison.
On June seven, rebels in Kent named former soldier Walter Tyler,
known as What as their leader. People from Essex and

(20:22):
Kent then marched on London, with the people of Kent
first converging on Canterbury and making their way to London
via the Pilgrimage Road. At some point during all of this,
John Ball was broken out of prison, and his speeches
to the rebels continued to advocate for a classless society,
including the widely quoted quote when Adam delved and Eve

(20:45):
span who then was a gentleman, as we said at
the top of the show. For a long time this
was known as the peasants Revolt, and the word peasants
generally conjures up an image of poor agricultural workers or
landless people, and some of the people involved with the
revolt definitely do fit that description, but there were also
free tenants and small landholders, as well as clergy apprentices

(21:09):
and tradespeople. Thomas Baker and what Tyler were as their
names suggest a Baker and a Tyler, that doesn't necessarily
mean the uprisings trades people were all free, though there
were definitely Baker's and Tyler's and other workers who were
classified as surfs. At the same time, some of the
people involved were also relatively powerful people in their communities,

(21:32):
including having previously served as assessors or constables or bailiffs.
Women were also a huge part of the uprising, both
as participants and as targets of the taxes and policies
that were being protested, and as had been the case
with most of the other protests, uprising and strikes that
we have talked about on the show. Women were generally
the ones who were making men's participation possible by making

(21:55):
sure that the demonstrators stayed clothed and fed. As the
uprising moved toward London, some of the nobility became involved,
and some of the city's merchants as well. And we
will get into the uprising in London after a sponsor break.

(22:16):
That late May incident in Brentwood had ended with John
Bampton and the other commissioners being run out of town,
and although the commissioners said that the delegates had been
pursuing them with the intent to kill them, it seems
as though everyone escaped without injury. But as this uprising
progressed in the early June one, things became increasingly violent

(22:39):
all over Southeast England. People attacked manners, abbeys and the
homes of sheriffs as cheaters and other officials. The cheeter
handled various matters related to what we described today as
the feudal system that includes collecting of the fee after
the death of a tenant, and yes, that is the
etymology as a term. Cheater. Rebels burned records, including tax

(23:00):
records and documentation of people's serfdom. In Cambridge, a woman
named Marjorie Starr was described as throwing the ashes of
these burned documents into the wind, saying away with the
learning of clerks, away with it. Some of the chroniclers
who wrote about this uprising in the fourteenth century framed
all of this as the product of the rebels wilful

(23:20):
ignorance and illiteracy, but it was really a coordinated effort
carried out by the residents of communities all over England,
especially in the southeast, to destroy all the written records
of a system that they felt was oppressive and corrupt.
If there was no record of their taxation and their bondage,
and their rents, or all the other expenses and commitments

(23:44):
that were associated with their lives, then they could be
free of it. Documents were seized or destroyed, and more
than a hundred and fifty places around England this also
went beyond property destruction. On June tenth, a mob and
Essex killed a s jeeter John Yule before burning his records.
That same day, the king's ministers started attempting to negotiate

(24:04):
with the rebels, who were demanding an audience with the king.
By June twelfth, as many as thirty thousand people had
encamped at Blackheath, which is part of London today, and
the King's court had moved from the Palace of Westminster
into the Tower of London out of fear for their
own safety. Outside of London, crowds from Essex and Suffolk

(24:24):
had ransacked the home of Henry English, which was in Birdbrook,
and Richard Lions, which was enlisted. English was the sheriff
of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, and Lions was a widely hated
merchant and financier. The assembled forces from Kent, Essex and
Suffolk vastly outnumbered the King's available army, so the king

(24:46):
agreed to negotiate with the rebels. He traveled down the
Thames by boat to meet them, but once he arrived
at the meeting point, it was decided that it was
just too dangerous for him to go ashore. This, of
course stoked the rebels and and resentment, and at some
point on June somebody it is not clear who, opened
the gates of London to the assembled crowd. Once inside,

(25:09):
they burned Savoy Palace, which was the home of John
of Gaunt. They also looted and burned the homes of
other prominent officials, as well as the buildings that were
situated along London Bridge. On June fourteenth, the King met
with Watt Tyler and men from Essex at Mile End.
Tyler presented the King with a series of demands, including
the abolition of serfdom, community self governance, execution of several

(25:34):
widely hated public officials who he described as traitors, and
a general amnesty of the rebels. There are various interpretations
of the king's response. Either his youthful inexperience meant that
he wasn't a very good negotiator, or he really did
feel some sympathy for the rebels. He also might have
felt like there was no other option because these rebels

(25:56):
vastly outnumbered his army and had done i'll kinds of
destruction and killed people. He made some really really sweeping promises,
including that he would abolish serfdom and forced labor, that
he would bring the so called traders to justice, which
included some people that were high up within his own court,
and that he would issue a blanket pardon for anybody

(26:17):
who had participated in the uprising. The King gave Tyler
signed charters that granted the serfs their freedom. However, as
that was happening, other rebels broke into the Tower of London.
The future King Henry the Fourth was protected by hiding
him in the cupboard. The rebels captured and beheaded several
prominent people, one with Simon Sudbury, who was both the

(26:40):
Archbishop of Canterbury that was the one who had excommunicated
John Ball who he mentioned earlier, and the Chancellor of England.
Another was Lord High Treasurer of England Robert Hales, who
was also the Admiral of the West and Grand Prior
of the Knights of Malta. Their heads were reportedly put
on display and paraded around London. Among others. John Legg,

(27:03):
a royal sergeant at arms, was also executed. In some
of the chronicles of this event, he was described as
putting his hands up teenage girls skirts under the pretense
of determining if they were old enough to work. Richard
Lyons was killed as well. The targets of this violence
also went beyond the officials who were associated with taxes

(27:23):
and serfdom and other issues that were being protested. The
mob focused on Flemings who were a widely hated ethnic
group in London. Flemish homes and businesses were targeted, looted
and burned, and roughly a hundred and forty Flemings in
London where massacred. What Tyler and the King met for
a second time on June fifteenth, the goal was to

(27:45):
persuade Tyler to get the rebels to disperse from London. Instead,
Tyler presented additional demands, including an end to tithing and
a redistribution of wealth. During a heated argument between Tyler
and London Mayor William Walworth, Tyler was stabbed, probably by Walworth,
but that is not entirely clear. The King at this

(28:06):
point did something which is fascinating to me, which is
that he rode out to the assembled bob told them
that he was their leader now, and led them out
of town. Tyler was taken to the hospital of St. Bartholomew,
where Walworth later went and killed him. Walworth had also
raised his own fighting force of about five thousand men,

(28:27):
and he despatched them to start putting down this rebellion.
With Tyler gone, the government moved to put down the rebellion,
and aggressive and bloody effort that went on for weeks.
Hundreds of people were killed in fighting all around southeastern England.
John Ball was captured on July and he was hanged,
drawn and quartered two days later. Although the king had

(28:50):
made a series of very broad promises to what Tyler,
most of them were never carried out. He withdrew the
charters that had given the serfs their freedom on June,
reportedly saying villains ye are, and villains ye shall remain
in case you're curious, just like a s cheeter is
the etymology for cheat. This is where the word villains

(29:10):
come from. So people thought the cheaters were cheaters, and
they thought that the surfs were villains. He never carried
out the other reforms he had promised in that meeting either.
The people who were believed to be ringleaders of this
whole rebellion were rounded up, some were hanged, some were
drawn and quartered. But after the executions were done, the
king did order a general amnesty, and amnesty records are

(29:31):
one of the sources of information for who these rebels
actually were and where they lived. At the same time,
a lot of people took this as an opportunity to
get a pardon for crimes that they had not committed,
either fearing that they might be accused of something later,
or just thinking that a documented pardon might be a
useful thing to have in a time that was clearly
so socially and politically chaotic. The only thing that this

(29:54):
uprising really concretely achieved was that the government stopped pursuing
this whole poll tax issue. At the same time, though,
this was England's first large popular uprising, so on a
more intangible level, it demonstrated to everyone that such a
thing was even possible. This kind of peasant uprising really
was not unique to England in the fourteenth century. The

(30:18):
same conditions that led people in England to rise up
existed in most of the rest of Europe as well.
Popular revolts, civil wars, and other social unrest were widespread
all across Europe from the thirteen hundreds through the fifteen hundreds.
A lot of the gains that the lower classes did
see during these centuries were not simply because the Black
Death had killed so many people. It came out of

(30:40):
this widespread unrest and violence. Class is always the case
with everything in history. This uprising has been interpreted and
reinterpreted in the centuries since then. Even though the rebels
destroyed a lot of the records of their own lives
and personal histories, the uprising is still pretty heavily documented
through court records, medieval chronicles, and works of literature. But

(31:04):
all these sources have their own biases. The court records,
for example, are frontal legal system that was innately biased
against the defendants, and then the chroniclers who detailed the
day to day occurrences of the uprising often disagree with
one another on the specific details. The chroniclers in general
also didn't necessarily understand the people involved or what their

(31:26):
grievances were. There are eight different accounts of the whole uprising,
including the Anonomal Chronicle, which was probably written at by
Land Abbey, the Chronicles of Henry Knighton, who was an
Augustinian canon the Chronicles of Thomas Walsingham, who was a
benedicting monk, and the chronicles of Jean Foassoire, who was
a medieval poet and court historian. In general, their lives

(31:49):
were fairly removed from the people that they were writing about,
and they lumped the rebels together as uneducated peasants motivated
by willful ignorance. Frozaar characterized John Ball as mad. So
we kicked off this episode by talking about bad takes
about the Black Death, which sort of compressed the whole
timeline between the Black Death and the Renaissance, just skipping

(32:11):
over centuries of unrest, and also something we didn't really
get into in this episode, imagining the Renaissance as a
time that was a lot better for working people than
the medieval period had been, which was not necessarily true
at all. But there have also has been some bad
takes about one rebellion, including that it literally inspired the

(32:32):
French Revolution. While there is some similarity between the uprisings
focus on freedom and equality and the French Revolution ideals
of liberty, equality, fraternity, I guess you could also make
comparisons between the reign of Terror and the beheading of
officials and parading their heads around London. Uh, that idea
just leap frogs over four hundred years of history. Uh yeah,

(33:00):
the cause and effect stuff that sometimes happens when discussing history, Uh,
loses a little bit of track of timeline and nuance.
Yeah yeah, I mean you can make lots of arguments
about all kinds of things, where like we see patterns
in history when we look back on them, or how
one thing set conditions in place that made another thing
more likely. But the Black Death caused the Renaissance. Really oversimplified. UM,

(33:26):
do you have a little bit of uh? Non oversimplified
listener mail? I do? I This is from Aaron, and
Aaron sent this wonderful email after our homemech. Uh. It
wasn't exactly a two parter, but we spent a week
talking about home mac and practice babies. Um and Erin
writes High Tracy and Holly. My high school had an
Infant Lab class. This was an elective for those high

(33:49):
school or seniors who were not parents, but for students
like myself who had a baby at sixteen, it was mandatory.
This class was a godsend for me. Obviously, without it,
I probably would have had to drop out of high school.
The class taught the young parents and students how to
care for an infant and toddler. It was seen as
a support to the parents and the cautionary tale to

(34:11):
the other students. It covered topics like child development, nutrition,
educational play, child safety, stress management, and other life lessons.
It was fortunate because the teachers who taught the class
were supportive suite and caring, and the students who also
took care of my son were amazing too. To my knowledge,
they ended the program after we graduated in two thousands

(34:31):
two because the program was seen as a crutch for
teen parents and not enough of a deterrent from teen pregnancy.
I don't know what happened to the teen parents who
came after me. I hope they were able to find
the support that they needed to finish high school. As
you mentioned, this topic touches on so many other issues
that I won't drawn on about here, socioeconomic reform, education

(34:51):
and tuition reform, a woman's right to choose the foster
care systems, etcetera, etcetera. All of these things play a
part in the endless politic well shell game that will
continue costing the most vulnerable of us more than just money.
But I digress. Thank you for your clear, concise presentation
of this topic. I never knew about practice babies, even
though my son basically was one for two years. Stay safe.

(35:14):
Aaron PS attached to a picture of my son with
one of his and my favorite student caregivers. He's twenty
now and likes to joke that he liked high school
so much the first time that he went back for more.
Thank you so much, Aaron. UM. We have gotten so
many lovely and personal emails about the whole neck episodes
and the practice baby episodes, and I'm sure we will

(35:35):
read more of them in the future. UM. When I
was in high school, anybody who had a baby in
high school was sent to a different school. UM. Which
when I started high school in our particular school system,
it was called optional education, which is a terrible name.
The school system rebranded it as Independence High School, and

(35:58):
it was like it was the high school where teenage
parents went um as well as where like the kids
that had been expelled from schools were able to go
there to continue their educations. UM. And I uh tried
to go figure out, like, what's what's the school system
I grew up in doing now? I did not get

(36:18):
a great answer to that question. UM. So anyway, thank
you again Aaron for that wonderful email and for the
great picture. UH. If you'd like to write to us
about this or either podcast or history podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. We're also all over social media at
miss in History. That's where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on

(36:40):
Apple podcast the I heart Radio app, and anywhere else
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