[Note: The featured image for this post is from a memorial to a 20th-century rebellion (i.e., not directly relevant to medieval history). The post itself makes obvious why I thought that it would be a suitable image for this content.]

If you read deeply in medieval history, eventually you will encounter statements by nobles or clergy about the stupid, brutish, lazy, or disgusting peasants. To modern ears, a lot of the statements are so appalling that many historians soften them, possibly even subconsciously.

Dana Carleton Munro, in The Middle Ages, 395–1272, opened a chapter on “The Peasants” by writing, “The income of the nobles, both lay and ecclesiastical, was derived mainly from the labor of the peasants. . . . The other classes looked down upon them, and it is seldom that they are mentioned in the literature of the day” (331). One anonymous writer describes a peasant this way: “He was tall and marvelously ugly and hideous” (331).

But if you set aside the romantic blinders or deceptive civics lessons that promote our arrival at democracy only because of the well-educated, affluent gentlemen of the Enlightenment, you notice a nearly constant pattern of resistance among peasants, tradesmen, and low-ranking clergy.

Peasant were humans, after all. So they wanted more food, better food, more money, fewer service obligations, more safety, more rights, and more respect. And they tried to get them, often trying peacefully to use every civic tool at their disposal and then, from frustration or desperation, eventually using physical tools as weapons to try to improve their situation.

The economic and social historians show countless attempts by peasants and less-powerful people to try to use the courts to protest offenses against them and to defend themselves from varieties of oppression. The system literally was rigged against their interests, but they stubbornly tried to assert their rights and to seek justice. Over and over again.

The tax levies to pay for all of the nobility’s frequent wars always hit the peasants, the artisans, and the merchants heavily, especially because they had smaller surpluses to absorb the unexpected expenses. And no matter what the prevailing circumstances (e.g., a bad harvest), many administrations operated according to the principle that the lord must suffer no loss in revenue or dues. So many revolts happened shortly after tax levies or famines.

Once you open your mind and start to look for signs of resistance from the other 97.5 percent of the population (minus ~1 percent of nobility and ~1.5 percent of clergy), you find the evidence everywhere, from peasants through craftworkers and parish priests.

On Wikipedia, you can find this compilation of some peasant revolts, but I’m going to highlight a number of the revolts most interesting to me.

This posting is going to be an evolving mess because I’m going to add some relevant content to it progressively (as I finish learning about specific revolts) and because so much evidence of its main claims exists in the historical records. Remember that all those castles were built not only to defend against foreign invaders but also to protect the powerful from the common people they were extracting resources and money from.

In the histories and other historical records, you frequently stumble upon references to “widespread discontent” or “an uprising.” See Chester and Cheshire in the early 1350s or Oxfordshire in 1355, when the St. Scholastica Day Riot seemed to expand into mob thefts of numerous inns and taverns. Many of these examples seem related to excessive taxation or class resentments, and while many don’t seem to explode into violent revolts against legal authorities, many seem to correlate with population declines (people leaving the area?). But the records also tell the stories about a lot of violent resistance, too.

Here are some examples for thought about those supposedly docile lower classes:

Normandy, peasant revolt, 996 (against Richard II, who was Rollo’s great-grandson, I think)

France, 1358, Jacquerie (Guillaume Cale); started in a village near Paris

Flanders or Flemish Revolts, 1302 (Battle of the Golden Spurs, or Courtrai), 1323–1328, 1338–1349; 1379–1385 (Revolt of Ghent)

The Great Uprising of Braunschweig, 1374

The English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 (See Wat Tyler and John Ball.)

Ferrara and the Tax Revolt of 1385 (Italian city state)

Coventry, 1523 (assassination plot against mayor and aldermen); 1525 (riot and civic collapse) [See Phythian-Adams, 252–257.]

The German Peasants’ War, 1524–1525 (A huge, bloody revolt)

And on and on. With only a bit of looking, I’ve found references to dozens and dozens of revolts against various aristocratic orders. Often, the rebels seek the displacement of intermediaries characterized as corrupt rather than the sovereign ruler. This inhabitation fit with people’s understanding of secular and divine order. But the unhappiness was deep and pervasive. (In U.S. revolutionary history, for example, take a look at how quickly Thomas Paine generated multiple takedowns of the monarchy. People often brood over grievances and inequities for a long time before they voice dissent or take action.)

Most times, the revolts end in a bloody slaughter of the rebels, but they almost always do a lot of damage to the lords first. When the revolts succeeded, they typically caused major inflection points in world history (recent historical examples will be more familiar to contemporary people—revolts such as the American and French Revolutions, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and so on).