“WE STRIKE ON CORPUS CHRISTI -
The English Peasant Revolt of 1381”
By the “Red Star Ministry”
After the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe in the 1340's, the English ruling class was faced with a problem. They wanted to maintain the wealth to which they had grown accustomed, but with everybody dead, the land was only capable of yielding about half of its former productivity.
Downsizing their extravagant lifestyles was absolutely unthinkable, so the aristocrats turned to the peasants to subsidize their grandeur. They held the serfs to impossible quotas based on a census taken before the plague had wiped out millions. They brought in hired labor - a fairly new and growing class of travelling yeoman farmers - who, unsurprisingly, demanded to be paid more for all of the extra work that was expected of them. (The job market was in their favor too, since they were in possession of the bodies, minds, and hands that the ruling class desperately needed to maintain their wealth).
When the yeomen started organizing and negotiating, the aristocracy completely freaked the fuck out.
"Nobody wants to work anymore".
Parliament enacted its first ever labor law - a maximum wage forbidding laborers from charging more than an amount predetermined by the ruling class.
While all this is going on, a barely adolescent King Richard II is waging the Hundred Years War with France, (a conflict inherited from his predecessor), and levying huge taxes to fund it. After decades of intensifying corruption and oppression, the people revolted.
The yeoman and artisan classes organized through tradesmen's guilds and used their superior knowledge of England's roads to mobilize an assault on London. They raised an army of peasants galvanized around the liberation theology of a man named John Ball.
He preached what should have been common fucking sense for centuries: that it is ridiculous to believe that God, who had supposedly bequeathed the Earth to Man, wanted an elite few to muscle their way into exclusive ownership and control over it. He preached an end to feudalism itself - and an egalitarian control over the means of production.
"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" Was their rallying cry.
"From the beginning," Ball preached. "All men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty* men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, He would have appointed who should be bond, and who free."
*[Naughty, meaning wicked].
With Wat Tyler's military leadership, and John Ball's words, they mobilized an attack on London. They chose the Feast of Corpus Christi - a date that was known to all - as the time to strike. But it wasn't just a memorable day on the calendar. Corpus Christi is all about the Eucharist - a celebration of Jesus' continued presence on Earth. The message here was not lost on its medieval audience: that God is with us, here and now - that God sides with the oppressed.
They stormed London. They burned records. They killed public officials They attacked strategic targets while leaving most of the city unharmed.
This was not about plunder. This was a disciplined assault - and a successful one (at first). They seized the Tower of London. They took out most of their targets. They cornered Richard, and got him to agree to their demands, including an abolition of the entire feudal system.
Here's where they fucked up:
With all their egalitarian theology - with all their grievances against the aristocracy, and class society itself - the people never stopped to imagine a world without monarchy. Their plan, from the very beginning, had been to smash the aristocracy, and air their grievances before the king.
So of course, Richard betrayed them the moment that the pressure was off. Of course, as soon as the siege was over, and the bulk of the peasant army went home, those that remained were slaughtered.
The lessons here seem obvious, but they actually aren't. It's easy to look at this morally righteous revolt and say, "you should have gone all the way; you were so close!"
But they weren't. They were never close.
In order to topple a power structure, you need something stronger primed, ready, and capable of taking its place.
What would it have taken to awaken a true revolutionary consciousness of a people raised under the Divine Right of Kings? Rallying people around regicide would have been much more difficult. What kind of cultural revolution would it have taken to create the sort of change in thinking necessary to galvanize behind overthrowing the monarchy? And even if they had achieved that kind of political will, and actually killed the king, what would it have taken to repel all of the lords and knights of England clamoring for power in the aftermath?
The peasants would have had to be organized over the long term, and prepared to wage a protracted people's war.
What would it have taken to raise an army capable of repelling France, which would undoubtedly have staged an invasion, and attempted to impose feudalism on the people of England all over again? What would it have taken to train and arm professional soldiers capable of this kind of victory?
It's not enough to make gains. You need to be able to defend them, and you need to do so without duplicating the institutions of your former oppressors.
In our age, it's easy to look back and say, "Divine Right of Kings is exploitative and the rebellion failed because they were idealistic suckers," and while the Divine Right is a disgustingly exploitative doctrine, the blindspot of the Great Rising of 1381 is understandable when you consider that their lack of hatred of the monarchy was actually rooted in a concrete material need for a force capable of repelling the French, and a lack of understanding of how society could potentially be organized any other way.
The real lesson here is how easy it is for the true nature of exploitation to hide itself in plain sight. When there's a boot on the back of your neck, you can't see the face of the person wearing it. You can burn tax records, and attack tax collectors, but still remain totally blind to the fact that the cause of those taxes was the war waged by the king - the very man whom you have hinged your entire movement on.
How many libertarians today look at the 20% the government takes out of their paychecks, and rally against taxes rather than the bosses' stealing the surplus value of their labor? In socialist movements, how easily does bourgeoisie ideology bleed into decision making, or worse yet, outright revisionism if we're not careful?
People are easily mobilized against oppressors that they can actually see. In 1381, that was tax collectors, and aristocrats who robbed both serf and yeoman alike of the fruits of their labor. In 2020 America, it was the police. During the Chinese Revolution, it was landlords.
What made Mao's movement unlike the others, however, was that the anti-landlord violence he incited was geared toward a broader campaign - a prolonged effort that sought to expand public consciousness, and attack not only oppressors, but oppressive systems.
Today is the feast of Corpus Christi. We should remember the religious awe of a downtrodden people who dared to unite under a noble, (but flawed) vision of what it meant to be free. Jesus was, in fact, with them, as He is with us right now, and all of the oppressed around the world.
As Christian revolutionaries, we should reflect on that with reverence, but also meditate on it with humility. That presence carries with it a dire responsibility. God does not liberate masses of people here on Earth.
He has left that sacred task to us - all of us.
***
"Red Star Ministry" is a radical Christian Community "dedicated to the revolutionary teaching of Jesus Christ"- that of bringing the good news to the poor and oppressed.