Wat Tyler

Wat Tyler led the Peasants' Revolt for about a fortnight and was stabbed to death in front of the king at Smithfield, which ended it. Almost nothing is known about him before June 1381 - he was probably a roofer or tiler from Kent or Essex, possibly a veteran of the French wars - and he emerges fully formed as the commander of the Kentish rebels after they took Rochester and Canterbury. The rising was set off by the third poll tax in four years, levied at a flat rate on a population that had been legally prevented since the Black Death from charging what the labour shortage was worth. The rebels released John Ball from Maidstone gaol, entered London on 13 June with the gates opened from inside, burned John of Gaunt's Savoy palace while forbidding looting, and executed the archbishop of Canterbury and the treasurer on Tower Hill. Richard II, fourteen years old, met them at Mile End and granted the abolition of serfdom and a general pardon. At the second meeting at Smithfield the next day Tyler rode out alone to present further demands - the end of lordship, church lands to the commons, one bishop for all England - and was cut down by the mayor William Walworth in a scuffle whose cause the chroniclers describe differently. The king rode forward and told the crowd he would be their leader; they dispersed, and the charters were revoked within weeks. Some fifteen hundred were executed in the reprisals. Serfdom nonetheless faded within a century for the economic reasons that had produced the revolt. William Walworth was knighted for the killing and a dagger appears on the arms of the City of London, though the connection is a later invention. Tyler is commemorated by a stone at Smithfield.

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