The Peasants' Revolt T-Shirt

Reproduction of Richard II of England meets the rebels of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Copy of Jean Froissart's Chronicles. The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages was a series of events in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that ended centuries of European stability. Three major crises led to radical changes in all areas of society: demographic collapse, political instabilities, and religious upheavals. The Great Famine of 1315–17 and Black Death of 1347-1351 reduced the population perhaps by half or more as the Medieval Warm Period ended and the first century of the Little Ice Age began. It took until 1500 for the European population to regain the levels of 1300. Popular revolts in late-medieval Europe and civil wars between nobles such as the Wars of the Roses were common-with France fighting internally nine times-and there were international conflicts between kings such as France and England in the Hundred Years' War. The Peasants' Revolt, also named Wat Tyler's Rebellion or the Great Rising, was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. The revolt had various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black Death pandemic in the 1340s, the high taxes resulting from the conflict with France during the Hundred Years' War, and instability within the local leadership of London. The final trigger for the revolt was the intervention of a royal official, John Bampton, in Essex on 30 May 1381. His attempts to collect unpaid poll taxes in Brentwood ended in a violent confrontation, which rapidly spread across the south-east of the country. A wide spectrum of rural society, including many local artisans and village officials, rose up in protest, burning court records and opening the local gaols. The rebels sought a reduction in taxation, an end to the system of unfree labor known as serfdom, and the removal of the King's senior officials and law courts.