Episode 374 - The English Peasants' Revolt: Part 1

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom.

We're peasants in the small Essex village of Pupton-upon-Dick.

And we've spent our long days toiling in the fields of our lords, farming the things that Essex is most known for.

Giant veneers, wildly overpriced cancer-causing sunbeds, and skinny jeans.

However, unfortunately, we cannot partake in the bounties of our labor.

We're crushed with ever-increasing taxes so our lords and ladies can travel to the faraway land of Turkey to receive hair transplants and cut-rate plastic surgery.

We yearn for freedom, equality, and a Mercedes on 20% interest of our own.

How you doing, buddy?

What's happening, Go?

You alright?

You see the badge on my Stone Island tunic?

It is fucking class, innit?

Like, I got the kettle on.

You ain't got a real fucking sundial on your wrist.

Mine's pure stone.

Something about this, like, I understand I don't really fully conceptualize the United Kingdom or England.

Yeah.

How does watch end up as kettle?

I don't really know.

It is Cockney rhyming slang.

So

I'm not really sure how it is, but like all my friends who are like from Essex or Kent, like all either like call it a kettle or like our big like Stone Island get the badge in people.

I really like the ideas like have you seen my kettle and it's literally a tiny tea kettle.

I can make tea wherever I go.

Yeah, it's a we're gonna dive so deep into the pure English genome here.

Like it's a the reason why the diggers revolt in 1641 failed is because the lords didn't want them to democratize the growth of hair transplants and turkey teeth on the land just a field of teddy vanirs sticking out of the dirt

it ain't much but it's a living

oh yeah um since we are uh recording in the lovely uh uk together in person that's right i want to give you an update on a classic type of guy in the UK.

We talked,

might have been last year, whoever.

Someone will remember, and please like message on the Discord of when we talked about it.

But do you remember the Somerset GIMP?

I do.

I vividly remember the Somerset Gimp.

I feel like this is a Lineslit by Robots story.

100%.

So the Somerset GIMP, for those who don't listen to Lineslit by Robots, is you should support the show on Patreon.

You can listen to our robot shenanigans.

Yeah, you can listen to us talk about Neon Genesis at Yvonne and the gym.

Two great, you know, rewarding pastimes.

Exactly.

But yeah, the Somerset game was a guy who got arrested and I think he got held on remand and charged.

He was wearing a gim suit and like running around fields in Somerset and like slithering on the ground towards people.

And it like it.

I think he got charged with like public menacing or something like that.

Was it a menacing slither?

Yes.

It was a threatening slither.

Yeah, and literally like part of the stipulation of the charge was that, like, for X amount of years, he can't wear all black and slither on the ground, which I think is a violation of his fundamental rights, you know, as a British person.

You know, like, I should be allowed to slither on the ground in all black.

This is essentially, someone's going to accuse me of like, Tom's turning into a reform party voter because they've taken away our right to slither on the ground.

We support the Reform Slither Party.

They're very, they're even smaller.

It's just him.

But we have a new British cryptid, the Weirl Cat Man.

Okay, just going off the name, I'm going to say, is it like a cat woman suit for a man or are we talking full furry?

From the photos, it looks just like a kind of another gimp suit situation.

Photos, like the furry Bigfoot picture.

Wait, wait, wait, I'll show you.

Like, there is a high-quality photo, and...

But this guy seems like way more kind of dangerous because like he's been trying to break into people's cars while they're in them and like running around yeah that doesn't seem good but the like my favorite part aside from the fact that like britain doesn't have any cryptids they just have costumed perverts

is that this guy is from the whirl and like all the british people are gonna know what i'm about to do but the whirl is on the other side of the mersey from liverpool okay so the guy definitely talks like this why can't i slither on the ground dressed as a cat.

It's my fuck alright.

Britain hates scouses.

I'm pretty sure it's written in the Magna Carta that he's allowed to do that.

Yeah, I saw the signing of the Magna Carta.

I've seen the Eye of Horror, and it enshrines my right to dress like a costumed pervert.

Exactly.

There's no freedoms in this country except dressing like a cat.

I mean, the king dresses like one all the time.

Big old sausage fingers.

It was like, yeah, it was so, it was such whiplash the other day.

I can't remember what it was, but like someone

mentioned the king, and like King Charles is like so ineffectual and like such a nothing person that like no one even really cares that he is the king.

I've noticed that nothing has been changed away from like Queen Elizabeth on all the signage and everything.

Like all the signs still say like Her Majesty and stuff like that.

So like even the states like either A, we can't afford it or B, we don't care.

Yeah, it's like when they had to like put them on the banknotes and all this sort of stuff.

I did a convention last weekend in Bristol, well, at the time of recording, and someone handed me a 50-pound note, and I, I was like, who the fuck is on the 50-pound note?

And then the person sat beside me was like, it's Alan Turing.

And I'm like, what?

They put Alan Turing on the money?

Isn't that a motherfucker?

Like, the state that drove you to death is now putting you on the currency.

The state who chemically castrated him to the point he was just like suicidal.

Yeah.

Well done, UK.

Speaking of the UK, the reason why.

Speaking of being castrated by the state.

Actually, yes.

But we'll get there.

Today is the first part in a three-part series.

And the reason why we started off talking about Essex and Kent is because we're talking about the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Are you familiar with that at all?

I am.

I'm not familiar with the details of it.

I do know...

kind of the surrounding stuff.

So it's like 1341,

the Black Death is spreading throughout Europe.

So everyone, once again, a common theme in these episodes is boobo maxing.

Yeah, we're definitely boobo maxing for the next three episodes.

This is,

is it in the middle or at the end of the Hundred Years War as well?

It's kind of smack dab in the middle.

Oh, okay.

Fair.

And it's also one of those things, kind of like the Taiping Rebellion, kind of like the Boxer Rebellion, that gets kind of shoehorned in people talk about like pseudo-Marxist uprisings.

Yes.

I feel like this is the closest one to I will actually agree with that is the case.

Because I remember when we talked about this before, I strongly disagreed with that because, you know, the other ones were very mystical and religious in nature.

And this one has a lot of religion involved as well, but it certainly has a lot more of like equality being one of the number one complaints.

Yeah, this is going to be like a reel in my wheelhouse of the fundamental, I suppose, cancer at the heart of British society is Protestantism.

Is that like we need to make Britain Catholic again?

I mean,

this is the 1300s.

It's still Catholic.

Yeah, you know, everything was great before Henry VIII.

Everybody knows the Catholics have ruined anything.

No, we haven't.

No, no, this is once again in my belief that Britain cannot be ran by the British.

They cannot be trusted, so they should give Britain to Ireland.

Make really big Ireland.

Yeah, big Ireland.

But in order to talk about the English Peasants' Revolt, we have to talk about kind of the problems at the base of it.

And to do that, we have to talk about the Black Death in England.

Now, obviously, it goes without saying that this is not an exhaustive history of the plague, rather, only what you need to understand in the context of our story.

So it all kind of makes sense.

So between 1348 and 1350, roughly one-third of Europe's population got connected to God's Wi-Fi via blood and pus-filled boobos during the world's most cursed white boy summer.

In some areas, it was much, much worse than others.

And it was considered pretty much an apocalyptic event in parts of England.

Yeah.

And parts of Spain, for example, in the Mediterranean, the death toll is closer to like 80% of the population in some areas.

Where in England, they lost like 70% of their strategic Baz supply.

Yeah, I hate when a series of plague-infected rats take out all my flatnose geezers, all my flat-nose farmers.

Just like a fucking massive guy with like three signet rings with a hoe turning potatoes in the field every anniversary there's a day where uh we have to toll the bell for all the bin men that were killed by the rats listen britain was such a poor country culturally before the invention of stella artois

hey as someone who likes stella you know it it's true i'm fine with stella i have no strong hatred uh or or love of it though i did date a woman for a while who had this visceral hatred for it and she can never quite place why but at the same time i didn't debate it with her.

Like, I get it.

Yeah.

She greatly hates the Belgian.

Who doesn't?

Who doesn't?

Stella is Belgian, as far as I can remember.

Also comes in 660 mil cans, which is

good.

That helps.

The Black Death knew no class or caste system.

Everyone died.

But of course, due to the ungodly squalor of your regular peasants' living situation, lice, which actually did cause the plague, rats, filth, and waste being a normal part of everyday's life at the best of times, meant that they were ripe to be taken out by the plague.

As every nation or state, as much as they existed back then, is propped up by the people that do labor, this caused massive secondary effects down the line.

Soon after waves of disease killed people who were working the land, famine struck, but mostly thanks because the crops were still growing but not able to be harvested.

Because the workforce was dead.

Yeah, I hate when you're in a country where there is a mass amount of crops being grown, but for some reason you can't eat them.

Yeah.

Never will happen again.

Nope.

No.

I can't think of anything.

Yeah.

I mean, what else could you compare ice to other than the plague?

Yes.

Yes.

They are rats.

They do hurt overwhelmingly laborers that prop up the states they live in.

Ice is a booboety.

That is true.

We are not boobo maxing that boobo.

No, no, no.

Not all boobos are the same.

Though it should be Lanced.

This caused a rolling mess of economic collapses, made worse by ongoing war, bad governance.

And, you know, this wasn't just in England.

This is pretty much the world at large.

And this left everything as a little more of like a rotting hole of corpses by the time the whole thing passed.

And this is just one wave of the plague, really.

And this is a couple of hundred years before Count Orlock would land in the UK.

You know, it's, it's a...

Exactly.

By the end of the plague, a lot of...

what you consider things thought to be set in stone, things, ideas, and beliefs that society was based around were pretty much destroyed.

Even if a lot of them would eventually be rebuilt over time, for starters, the relationship between landholders and people who were effectively serfs.

Because the serf is not, surf is not normally a term used in England.

Yeah.

Though they were serfs.

Fundamentally, they were serfs.

They worked

seasonal jobs, tilling the land for a certain section of the year for the local lord and landowners.

They're not allowed to not work.

They're not allowed to negotiate prices.

They reserves.

They're allowed to live there.

It's kind of like working on this podcast.

That's right.

Don't you fucking forget it.

Before the plague, there was more than enough peasants to go around.

If someone didn't want to work for shit wages and get spit on by some inbred freak with a deformed jaw, there wasn't any choice in the matter for your average peasant.

Not working was a crime.

And they were more than happy to prosecute you for said crime and simply bring in someone else.

Do not become addicted to leisure time.

This will become a problem later.

Yes.

And since the government was run by those same landholders, they obviously were not going to step in and help your regular blue-collar Joe shit shoveler.

You know, I mean, being a blue-collar Joe shit shoveler has been throughout the vast majority of history a pretty raw deal, but particularly right now, because you're fucking covered in poo-boos, everyone is starving, and there's just fields of wheat yeah like hey you know if you paid us like an extra three pigs teeth or whatever um i would more than willingly harvest this wheat as you vomit pus across his desk and he says no thank you get back and work in the fields like i said he also vomits pus across the desk yeah like it's it's really interesting there's accounts of the spread of the black death across europe that are contemporaneous from the time there's not a huge amount of them because it is the medieval ages and obviously the term the dark ages is not because it was particularly dark.

It was because there's a lack of sources on the time.

No, the sun just never came out.

Yeah.

It's just like Netherlands in January.

But like the descriptions of like the spread of black deaths throughout Europe are like horrifying.

Like it is insane.

Like thank God they didn't have Twitter like then because you would have had some like lord saying like, oh, the Chinese created the Black Death and escaped a lab and woo.

To be fair, they just blamed the Jews.

Yes, true.

Yeah.

And the other lords would be wanting to go to Sturgis in like North Dakota and see Smash Mouth play.

Why can't I go on my holiday to Marbea?

Exactly.

I don't have it.

No one I know has had the boobos.

Meanwhile, he's this like massive second head growing out of his neck.

It's like, I've always been that way.

If you don't like it, fuck off.

If you don't like it, there's the door.

If you don't like my boobos, there's the door.

You're prejudiced against boobos.

I'm starting a new freedom party for people who have boobos.

It only has like a a life cycle of four weeks.

Now everyone involved in these previously established norms are mostly dead.

Suddenly there's a massive labor shortage.

Stories of the post-Black Death years in England make it sound like quite legitimately the end of humanity.

Farms are abandoned, fields lay open and untended.

Livestock are just meandering about because everyone involved in the labor of keeping them is dead.

The previous system that kept labor in place and what amounted to be serfdom, people bound to the land, broke under the pressure.

Too many people were dead, too much land was left unattended, and something had to give.

And it did, at least for a little bit.

Okay, so not to turn into a animorph into like Karl Marx for a second, but there is like a really good theory about how

ecological structure affecting like the relationship of like labor and the economy in that like there are fundamentally like unstoppable forces that exist outside of like the power of the government or the state or labor's relationship to it.

Like natural disasters, essentially like something like the Black Death or even like COVID, that fundamentally there is a before period and an after period and how that massively changes like the relationship of labor to produce and to the employer.

And it's like at this time, like William Morris wrote a lot about it.

It is like insane how much there is a before period and an after period in terms of like how the Black Death fundamentally changed the structure of like all of Europe, and that includes the British Isles.

Yeah, like the English definitely put in a lot of work putting that cat back in the bag, so to speak, but not all the way.

Yeah.

Soon, peasants are able to move around and realizing for the first time in their lives that, you know, maybe we could collectively get together and do this thing called bargaining.

I don't like the idea of collectivism or bargaining.

You take the price I give you and you pay me or you fuck off and die.

Like forming local peasants 681 union out of Essex, you know.

Peasants began to demand higher wages because there was no one to replace them now.

These same peasants were also suddenly gifted the possibility of social momentum for the first time for the same reason.

They could leave the life of menial labor to work in a different line of work because the class of people who once did those were wiped out.

So the social norms in place beforehand had to bend and in some cases broke.

Hell, some people could just elect not to work, which was a freedom they never had before.

And I should point out here, it's still technically against the law, but the laws are becoming unenforceable.

As peasants learned for the first time that they were on the good side of the concept of supply and demand, they demanded more money for their work, leading other peasants to do the same thing.

And suddenly the labor costs in England, which had previously been, you know, free, began to cost more than they ever ever had before.

Let me tell you about this theory.

It's called supply and demand.

One graph goes up, the other goes down.

It would be a real shame if that graph got boobos.

Oh, no.

It's turned into a dot map.

The fucking my back just looks like a correlation map because of all of the boobos.

Now, because there are fewer people, all of whom had more money and virtually the same number of livestock were still around, that also meant that meat and dairy entered a peasant's everyday diet for the first time.

it was affordable and suddenly available to them all at the same time yeah also as well because if you have like fundamental restructuring of the labor force there's less people not only to tend to the crops and to the livestock there's like less people to slaughter them less people to process them and suddenly you are left with like an excess of produce that you can't necessarily uh have processed for sale outside of like local areas.

They weren't doing much trade outside of local well they were but not a huge amount.

So, suddenly, it's like, oh, I'm eating ribeye for the first time in my life.

I'm about to jizz in my pants.

Imagine how crazy those first shits would have been.

Just pure milk and dairy.

And you have fucking ye old fucking Mike Isratel saying, He's like, Well, actually, the beef is full of amino acids.

It makes you better at working on the farm.

Yeah, that's right.

Everybody is now jacked.

Never mind people who are like, you know, anarcho-primitives or fucking like paleo people.

It's like, no, we need to go back to this specific time.

Just chugging whole milk and eating fucking prime rib around the clock.

That's just the liver king.

Oh no, they've all been arrested in Austin, Texas.

I mean, he does look like he is a giant boobos.

He's got that healthy red color to his skin.

The Black Death middle class blossomed, and they bought new clothes, they ate new food, and began to rebuild the world from the ashes or the pus that was left behind.

Obviously, the upper classes classes and the nobility could not sit back and let this happen.

They began to pass what was known as consumption laws, or laws regulating what a person of a specific class could eat or wear.

This regulated everything to how pointy a peasant's shoes could be, who could wear fur, and who would be allowed to eat meat and dairy.

And guess what?

It ain't you.

It's a small meat and dairy club and you're not in it.

Yeah, they would be astonished at how pointy Mexicans' boots would become in like 700, 800 years.

They would take one look at the pointy curved boots and be like, my lord, we must pass the law against this.

It's like the

law based on like your taxation on your house was based on how many windows you had.

Yes.

Or there's famously, Cairo has like, you only get a property tax if your building is complete.

Okay.

So people just stop building it right before it starts,

which is masterful.

I love how, you know, one continuous thing through history is just like, how do i pay the least amount of tax oh we're gonna get there don't worry okay okay what amounted to be the first real English labor law in 1349 called the ordinance of labor was quickly passed this froze any pay raise to peasants and set the acceptable pay level to what it had been prior to the plague

it also made offering peasants more money to move farms and properties illegal it fixed prices reinforced the concept of not working being illegal and gave a stern talking to the landholders who were willing to work around these laws for the benefit of their properties.

I love living under the dominion of fucking King Tom Skinner.

That's a joke that's completely lost on you, but I hate Tom Skinner so much.

He is going to run for the Reform Party.

Oh, well, I mean, nice to know who's probably going to win the next election.

Hate the peasants, love labor, love grain, enough said.

The laws are met with a giant wet fart for starters it was a massive all-encompassing law in a place that in general did not have a massive all-encompassing administration to enforce it

and the peasants still held all of the cars and could honestly just ignore the law yeah if landholders or nobility didn't want their businesses and holdings to collapse they would have no choice but to pay what people were asking and if the lord didn't pay what they're asking, they would strike.

They would just refuse to work for them.

And for the ones who did refuse, the landholders, nobility, gentry, the peasants refused to work their lands.

The result of which was a mass crashing out of landholder rent.

Because remember, these people live on the land, so they have to pay them rent.

If everybody refuses to live on work on their land, suddenly it's like an American mall that's been left behind.

It's like, we guess we got to turn into a fucking skate park or something.

There's just loads of peasants wearing like Seosin tunics.

You don't understand, mom.

I don't want to work on the farm.

I heard there's this thing called a seven-string loot.

I'm going to create ye old gent.

Fucking

12th century metal core.

You know, what's interesting is like people say like the big

New York City blackout is what helped cause like the expansion of hip-hop.

I wonder what would cause like, you know, everybody's striking and leaving these properties to collapse.

I wonder what like sick loot bands bands could have been formed if people took all of the loots.

Or I assume drums also existed.

They would have just.

Oh, no, they would have just invented Mumford and sons.

No, I was going to say they would have invented Dragon Force.

Loot Dragon Force.

Through the fire of flames, we will steal all the grain.

It's Dragon Force, but they actually legitimately believe in dragons.

I mean, no.

Between the royal court and the manor courts, those being what amounted to be private courts of the law held in manors of the nobility on the the same land people were working, nearly 70% of all criminal cases suddenly involved the labor disputes as the upper class of England tried desperately to claw back their levers of control and power.

All of this from taking their pointy shoes to seemingly and rapidly taping together Serfdom 2.0 set the English peasantry into a rage.

They began to organize.

They still refused to work, as the laws demanded.

And they did everything they could to get one over on the king and the asshole lords that worked for him.

And the House of Commons, which at the time was largely made up of wealthy gentry, thankfully that has changed.

Right?

Right?

Fuck.

They warned that peasants were arming themselves and threatening to kill people, who in effect became scabs and went to work for the lords who refused to raise their wages.

Which is, remember, this is all against the law.

And it's not like England had cops back then.

Not really.

I mean, they had the local sheriff and the bailiffs, but they would be like a handful of dudes.

If a whole village said, fuck you, there was literally nothing they could do.

Bring it back.

Bring it back.

Abolish the police.

Bring back barons and lords.

We already are fucking.

Fuck you.

We're in the UK.

It's already a thing.

And they're doing a pretty good job of abolishing the police just because they hate them.

That is like a thing that I find so

insane about like British, like British right-wing politics because like.

The polity in like most other countries, like the right-wing, like venerates the army, venerates, you know, the the state venerates the military but like here they just like hate it they want to replace the entire British security state with one guy who works for g4s

yeah the g4s army I mean we're probably closer to that than we think but like British people hate the army because it's like they think it kind of like is a waste of money They also hate the police because the police are both simultaneously woke, but also a waste of money.

It's like literally yesterday, a second-class post is not going to be delivered on a Saturday anymore.

And I'm like, this is just a thing that has existed since, you know, basically the foundation of like Royal Mail.

And now it's just like, oh, this is ridiculous and too expensive.

British people are just the tightest cunts on the planet.

I'm sorry, the one guy who works for G4S can't deliver your mail on Saturday anymore.

No, it's the one guy from G4S is doing all of the civil service jobs.

I mean, that's essentially what they were doing then.

Yeah.

The local bailiff who also has a G4S vest on.

Yeah.

Then hilariously came a wave of lawsuits.

Now, technically, peasants had been given a fair amount of rights in comparison to what they had been before.

As a result of the Magna Carta, this was reinforced, but what I can only be described as the 1300s version of an ambulance-chasing lawyer mixed with quite possibly the world's first sovereign citizens.

Okay.

Lawyers would go to an area, villages, towns, whatever, you know, that would be up against the Lord, you know, somewhat striking, whatever.

And they would tell them, according to the doomsday book, which is actually a name we'll get into in a bit,

it was a survey done by William the Conqueror about 300 or so years before.

And according to that, this village and all of the lands around it did not belong to any lord.

Therefore, it's permanently free.

And most importantly, so are you.

Hell fucking yeah, brother.

Doesn't listen to your brother.

Land you're living on is free and you are free.

Cut as much grain as you want, brother.

This is the exact same thing that's happening in motel rooms across Idaho.

I believe that the people on the land in 1341 should be free and that the lords are being run by ye old wind energy Jew.

That's probably not too far from what they actually believe.

Yep.

And this is mostly a thing in sovereign citizenship in like in the United States.

It's probably dripping in the canon at this point because we contaminate everything we touch.

But it's mostly based around like custody battles, you know?

Yeah.

Back then it had to do with farms.

I am being oppressed by family corn.

Yes.

Yes.

I must pay my tithe to the family corn.

The family court knight coming in to slaughter the single fathers.

There's the sheriff of Nottingham coming to catch you and you're like, no, I am redistributing all this wealth to all of the local strippers in my area.

They need it more than my child.

Who's to argue with that?

My dad did the same thing.

Stealing from the rich your ex-wife and child and giving to the poor these wonderful, wonderful exotic dancers.

The day shift strippers down the street.

Yeah.

A small side note here, the doomsday book was real and it wasn't named the doomsday book because it was thought to contain like the end times.

In Middle English, And just generally, it meant a final judgment of a thing.

Yeah.

With a doom meaning, in essence, a law or a judgment instead of, you know, doom,

a different kind of doom.

Yeah.

The boring law doom.

I'm not going to say this doesn't rule English sovereign citizenship in the 1300s, but the lawyers were absolutely fucking these people over.

So what would happen is the lawyers could read and write.

Most of the peasants, of course, could not.

So they would come in.

They would be like, look, this is all going to happen.

You just have to pay me.

And now they have money, right?

Because they're getting some sick extra

pence or whatever

so they pay the lawyer he files the paperwork with the crown and then promptly off before the crown gets back to like kicking these peasants in the face for wasting their time

now one of the reasons why the crown hated these guys is obviously nobody was printing anything back then legal documents all had to be handwritten so the lawsuits would always include a request for a written copy of the entire doomsday book and if you would like uh to get a written copy of a document from the crown court why don't you come see us live in Glasgow on the 3rd of October in the Flying Duck, where we will probably end up being a prescribed group, much like Palestine Action and Kneecap.

Tickets are in the description of this episode.

Really good, you know, organic plug there.

Nailed it.

We're so good.

This is why advertisers are kicking down our door.

Now, after the doomsday book would be handwritten, it would need to be sealed by the king officially to be considered a legal document and to evaluate the claims made by William the Conqueror.

Virtually none of these requests, and these lawyers made dozens, if not hundreds of them across England, were filled because the government had no idea how to fulfill all of them because they've never had to do this before.

But it did kind of start to scare the shit out of them because the way the ruling class is looking at it, the nobility, the gentry, whatever, like they're learning how to navigate law and politics.

These people aren't meant to read.

Exactly.

Let alone know about the law.

You're supposed to be digging up like the veneer seeds that we planted.

You're not supposed to be requesting paperwork.

Shut the fuck up.

Listen, there are lords in Kent and Essex who need new teeth.

They cannot effectively eat turkey legs anymore.

Just taking one bite of a turkey leg with your new turkey teeth and your whole mouth comes out.

Just your face collapses like a neutron star.

So with the economy shitting itself and dying, and people just getting over, literally shitting themselves and dying,

people were kind of falling for the English peasantry's version of sovereign citizenship.

There was also one more thing about the land that was going to send everyone over the deep end.

A tax increase.

Because we have to talk about the Hundred Years' War.

Ah, yes.

This is something that Britain loves to do is fight a unwinnable war and incur massive amounts of tax debt.

Something that they won't repeat for hundreds and hundreds of years and probably are going to try and do very, very soon.

In the defense of the English crown back then, it was at least closer.

It was in France.

Luckily, I am one, not a British citizen, two, too old, and three,

neurodivergent enough that I cannot be conscripted.

That's what you think, motherfucker?

Yeah, I mean, look, you know, you want someone who has autism in like some sort of engineering department to invent the gun that kills better.

I mean, that is is just the entire employee base of like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

It's going to be a mass conscription of G4S guys.

That's all it's going to be.

Starting in 1336, England and France, eventually others, would be stuck in a 116-year-long war.

That would, you know, it wasn't 116 years straight, on again, and off again.

You know, it's like Ross and Rachel.

Exactly.

And in the end, they both died.

Like Ross and Rachel.

Most people don't know this is Ross and Rachel actually died in 9-11.

Yeah,

it was all just actually a dream that was happening in Joey's head.

Yeah.

What?

There was actually a TV show.

I can't remember what the name of it is where it's like it ran for seasons and seasons.

And then at the very end of it, it was like, oh, this was all imagined inside the kid's head.

I know what you're thinking of, but I can't remember the name either.

And everybody listening right now is so mad at us.

I don't care.

Look at like, this is like lost.

You know, JJ Abrams has a lot to answer for.

I mean, this is.

This is also way...

This show we were talking about was way before lost.

I mean, look, don't even get me fucking started because I'm worried.

Have you seen Severance?

i've seen season one severance is 100 going the way lost it um they don't know what the they're getting at anymore that's my take on that show because i'm sure that's what you turned in for um

listen they tune in for the riffs the history is answered in the very beginning king edward iii of england was a young man and his mind had yet to been turned to gravy by advancing age During that time, shit was going great for England and the war.

This was the era of the Black Prince, which we've talked about before, had the funniest and most painful death of dysentery I think we've ever covered.

England won victory after victory, and soon their land holdings began to spread further into what is considered France.

Not that I recognize that.

That's right, France.

That's right.

By the 1360s, France was muscled into a treaty, the French king was captured, and things were still going pretty great for England.

Obviously, the monetary cost of the war was insanely high, deploying men that far from home, supplying them, paying them, all that stuff.

But the cost was handled somewhat by the constant stream of sweet, sweet booty, making it into royal coffers.

Unfortunately, the king they captured, Jean, died while in English captivity, opening the throne to Charles V, who was actually very good at his job.

The war turned against England, the booty dried up.

Shame.

The cost of the war increased, and as a result, so did taxes on the English to make up for their shortfalls in the war financing.

If only, you know, buy now pay later had exist.

Well, it kind of did exist then, but like not in the form of like Klarna or after after pay.

Klarnaing my entire war.

I mean, look, we are two years away from the British and America just doing that so they can nuke Iran.

I do look forward to like fighter jets selling sponsor space, like an English football jersey or like a European hockey jerseys where they're just like covered in sponsorships.

And somehow every company is still funded by the Saudis.

Yeah, exactly.

This airstrike brought to you by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

I mean, that is just just Yemen.

Thank you so much, Masayoshi Sean.

The first rounds of taxation fell on the gentry and the nobility, which makes sense.

They are the ones with money in the first place, and they should be the ones that are paying.

This will be the last time any sentence I say makes sense.

But after years of this, they got sick of paying.

In 1377, the House of Commons proposed something called a poll tax, which in America means something very different.

In American history, a poll tax is paying to vote, and it was used to disenfranchise black voters.

In this case, a poll tax is a flat tax.

Four pence flat across the board for everyone over the age of 14.

Famously will not cause any riots about like fucking 20 years ago.

Obviously, a flat tax is sometimes championed by various different political ideologies as being more fair.

But this overwhelmingly hurts those with less money, as four pence is a lot more to people who only have, say, 10 than those with thousands.

Fucking obviously, that is how math works.

I can't believe people still think this is a good idea in the year 2025, what we're sitting.

I mean, look, also to correct myself, the poll tax rise were in 1990.

Margaret Thatcher, famously the descendants of Margaret Thatcher's ideology, are trying to maybe do it again.

Fun.

So we have, yeah,

medieval lords essentially doing like

paleo Thatcherism.

Oh, God.

Weirdly, they also hated Argentina.

Yeah.

I love that Margaret Thatcher's in hell, just like roasting and being crushed into being like a neoliberal conservative Ammonite.

This was the first time taxation in England would have been universal.

And most importantly, it was insanely high for your average English person.

Four pence was roughly equivalent to three days of work at the current rate locked in at the labor laws.

Remember, they can't make any more than the law says they can.

So the four pence price is really kicking them in the dick.

Obviously, this is all wins for the gentry and above.

The main weight of the tax would be spread out amongst the poorest of the country, while they, in comparison, paid far, far less than they had in the past, which is what a flat tax is, in case people listening do not know.

The law passed without any hurdles, and then a few months after the law went to the books, King Edward, long senile and half dead, finally died.

This left the throne to his 10-year-old grandson.

Yeah, this is a

This is something that recurs throughout history and is never good when you put a child on the throne.

I disagree.

I think we should go further.

We should put an infant on the throne and just follow it, follow its cries and squeals like it's the god-emperor of 40k.

The king god boy says we all need to shit ourselves to take a nap.

I mean, I can get behind it.

It's better than any other option we currently have.

I mean, like, at this time, people were shitting themselves and taking a permanent nap quite regularly.

Damn, that must be very restful.

Now, the government was largely controlled by a council of uncles.

Oh, yes.

We're going unkmoan.

It's it's unknocracy.

Yeah, we got random.

Oh, that's a, that's an episode name.

We got random unk shooting poison.

It's great.

All while the government burned through the poll tax, and then as a result, was forced to pawn off royal treasures to afford the ongoing war, which is very funny to think about.

While the government was bankrupted, the English coast was under attack, and soon parliament was spending most of its time screaming at one another and fighting.

They passed more and more taxes, and it just didn't matter.

They were still broke as shit, and the war was going worse and worse.

The main uncle, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, and the regent, who had been mostly running the government, became a universally hated figure.

He pissed off the London city gentry through mismanagement, he pissed off the peasants through, well, everything, and he pissed off the clergy via his support for John Wycliffe.

Not Wycliffe John.

Yeah, a music reference.

I did it.

I mean, I did it.

They didn't even know Haiti existed at this stage.

Thank God for that.

Yeah.

A man who advocated for church reform in a way that, like, the concept of the church could be a landlord and accumulate wealth.

And he thought that was heretical.

And John of Gaunt thought that was a great idea.

And mostly because he just hated the wealth of the church and he wanted it for the crown.

He didn't actually have any theocratic debates.

Taxing me softly from my coin,

shitting my pants with my boils.

Boil coin.

Skin sliding off my bones.

Taxing me softly

of my coin.

Come see us live in Scotland.

Wyclef surprise, surprise, was thought to be a dangerous heretic that needed to be suppressed in a time when England was Catholic and the laws against heresy were very solidly on the books.

In 1377, when he caught charges in London, John of Gaunt personally got involved.

However, this turned into a popular issue at large due to the fact that since everyone hated Gaunt, the bishop in charge of the trial came out as being on the side of the people at large and a mob formed that chased John of Gaunt out of his own home in London.

And mind you, this is a palace that is almost as big as where the king lives.

Ah, and there's a reason why the palace doesn't exist anymore in London, but we'll get there.

Yeah, they sent in a couple of crackheads.

They like stripped all the.

Well, actually, actually, yes, but hold that thought.

Fuck's sake.

Remember, this guy is still in charge of the government.

Things didn't get much better when a short time later, a knight murdered two people in the middle of a church service, and John of Gaunt came to his defense, arguing largely that those two motherfuckers deserved it.

They weren't singing from the same hymn sheet, you know, and at that time, it was punishable by death.

Yeah, you were supposed to be a falsetto.

You fucked it up.

You gotta die now.

This can be simply chalked up to the Duke really wanting to get in a pissing match with the church for really over anything and using his personal authority as the the regent.

And he managed to strike out virtually every time, which is truly incredible for a guy with this much power.

He was just posting L after L after L and somehow remaining in power, though again, chased out of his own home and each time ending with more and more people hating him than ever before.

Just as another example, Gaunt was so obsessed with trying to force his authority on people to the detriment of his own continued governance.

that he fired London's head grocer, which was a very important position in London at the time, and the head of the Fishmongers Guild, who was also the war treasurer, both of whom were personally bankrolling elements of the war in France, independent of the tax stream, freeing up government-owned resources.

So, if of course, as a fuck you to gaunt, they stopped paying out of their pockets, leading to a cratering of money available for the war.

So, angered by the accumulated wealth and power of the London gentry, that he began to tell ambassadors to London that they would need to move their trading houses to a different town.

Yeah, all of the like super wealthy, like London, like like aristocracy and elite was like, bro, that's crazy.

My dad's a farmer in Surrey.

He was like, no, your dad owns the farm.

In Surrey.

He owns all the people.

We have a rural property.

Yeah.

And on it is part three BMWs and you have a servant.

He told everyone that they would have to move their trading house to Southampton just despite the Londoners who hated him.

Yeah.

Which again, he's just shooting his own capital in the knees to piss off the people that he hates.

When the ambassador of Genoa agreed to this, he got stabbed to death on his own front doorstep.

This is like, oh, is it a fucking Lori Lightful is the mayor of Chicago?

I think she still is.

Yeah, and she's just like universally hated.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Worried about what would happen next, instead of trying to solve the crime of an ambassador being stabbed to death, Gaunt framed two poor fuckers that he had tortured in a basement until they blamed his two political opponents, the Fishmonger Union and the Groceries union, and paid them to do it.

Look, uncritical support for the fishmongers union and the grocer's union.

We used to be a proper country.

Proper jobs had proper unions.

I really like the idea that the ambassador to Genoa got got by a fishmonger, and you could tell because he had been descaled.

Yeah, it was like

people used to be fishmongers.

Now people are like, oh, I'm like making up an Instagram post on Canva.

It's like, no, we need fishmongers.

We need more fishmongers.

Yes.

People are getting stupider because we're not getting enough omega-3 this is due to a lack of fishmongers yep that's right universal basic mongers when i get elected for the reform party it is going to be on a platform of we need more fishmongers and we need more grocers that's right we need you know diversity in the boss man in the corner shop unionize the off-license guys i mean look you know the most important person in any community in London is the boss man who runs the corner shop because they see you at your best, at your worst.

My local one sells me single cigarettes when I'm drunk at night coming home from the pub.

Yeah, my experience with the off-license guy is no matter how bad I look stumbling in there and no matter what hour of the day, he always gives me the same dead glass-eyed stare.

Yeah.

And that's fine.

I'm not being judged.

I know he doesn't give a fuck.

I could drop that on the floor.

He just kicked me outside.

Actually, a couple of weeks ago was really funny.

I was like going on a night out and I stopped in the corner shop because I just wanted to get a bottle of water for the train because it was fucking really hot.

And I hadn't seen

the boss man who was the boss of boss man or boss men of my local shop for like maybe two weeks.

And he had just gotten like a fresh hair transplant.

And I was just like talking to him about it.

I was like, oh, when'd you get done?

He's like, oh, I got done two weeks ago.

He had like the bandage around his head and everything.

And we were just like chatting.

And then I think it's maybe like six or seven hours later, I came back.

blasted drunk and he was like, oh, good night.

And I was like, yeah, man, it was really fun.

And he was like, do you want another bottle of water?

And I was like, that's actually a good idea.

Hell yeah.

I could go on about John of Gaunt.

He's a fucking idiot who really only governs on personal grievance.

Thankfully, it's not a thing that happens anymore.

So in 1380, Parliament convenes once again.

Though this time, Northampton instead of London due to Gaunt, probably worried about getting lynched.

At the forefront of the meeting is they needed to come up with another tax.

This time, due to bad loans, increasing costs of soldiers, and even worse, war reality, the amount they would need to tax is eight times higher than it had been the year before.

So again, they fell back on the idea of a poll tax.

But obviously, since they needed eight times more money, they couldn't simply ask for four pence.

The currency used back then was known as a groat,

which sounds like somehow monetizing the area between your asshole and ball sec.

That's what I'm going to call the tokens on my like Twitch live stream.

It's like, oh, thank you for the groats.

Yeah.

Let me see them groats.

God damn, donated 100 groats.

Thank you.

Do you want to see us live in Scotland?

Pay your groats.

It will only cost you 20 groats.

That's right.

Now, one groat was roughly four pence.

This time the poll tax would be five groats, which if you're keeping track of home, it's a lot of groats.

Yeah, and it was really weird that at this time they called like a coin purse a scroat.

So I was like, let me get my groats out of my scroll.

It's roughly a week's worth of wages per adult per household.

Yes.

There's a little argument over this new tax, and it's quickly passed.

Soon afterwards, a small army of tax collectors is sent across the country to take the taxes owed by each community, which was normal for the day.

They would have been collected by the local governments first and kept, you know, they keep a running tally of who paid and who hadn't, at which point they submit to the crown.

Yeah.

To direct all this, Gaunt appointed Sir Robert Hales.

Hales did a quick audit of the tax receipts.

He found with each poll tax, the taxable population had a sudden and dramatic drop-off.

For example, in Essex, between the last tax and the new one, 18,000 people has suddenly vanished.

All my growths gone.

Where be all my groats?

Where the groats at?

Where the groats, where the groats, where the groats are.

Trying to do the like Scrooge McDuck, like diving into all my growths.

Just a flat packing sound of skin on skin.

I'll just carrying like a massive scroll on my back full of my groats.

That's right.

When he did the math at the tax before that in 1381, Southeast England had seemingly lost half of its population.

Now, this would have made sense during the era of the Black Death because that did legitimately happen, but that era is over.

So he came to the conclusion this could only be massive, wide-scale industrial tax fraud, and not a single barbershop had been opened.

Fucking hell yeah, uncritical support for tax fraud.

Oh yeah, I don't think the peasants are wrong at all in doing this.

I will say the way they came to do this is kind of fucked up, but they worked on the systems that they were given.

The peasants had outsmarted the tax system with one simple trick.

They simply would not report having any unmarried women in the homes over the age of 14.

Okay.

This was easy to do, as they are not kept on any official role until they turned a taxable age.

So they simply never reported them as existing unless they got married, because then they were someone else's problem.

If a woman got widowed, they would fall off the rolls again.

The reasoning for this was both deeply fucked and simultaneously making perfect sense.

These women were not paid for work that they normally did because their work normally centered on domestic duties thanks to social norms.

But the household would still have to pay tax on them.

So they would just stopped reporting them.

They technically faked all of them, Doc.

This happened all across England in virtually every village and every town.

So this isn't like a collaborative effort.

They all came to the same conclusion at the same time.

It must have been so hard to be a wife guy at this time.

It's like all your growths are gone.

All your wives are gone.

You got to pay for your wife existing in your home.

Yeah.

This meant when Hale did collect taxes, there was a massive shortfall, which is not a good thing when you happen to be the treasurer of a bankrupt country.

So Hales, with permission from Gaunt, launched a royal inquisition to figure out just how many people had been tax frauded out of existence.

Royal commissions are made and dispatched into the countryside with a mission to uncover the depth of the fraud and most importantly, force people to pay back what they'd been skipping out on on the spot with either cash them groats or shit they had laying around the house hey boy let me see them groats run them groats motherfucker

the commissions had the power to imprison anyone who got in their way or were found to be committing fraud as you can imagine they use these powers very very freely to make all of this easier each government commission was also sent nights in case anybody wanted to get a little bit froggy about them groats being taken away.

These commissions pissed people off immediately.

They went to people's homes to count people.

And there were rumors that in a lot of ways, if they found a woman who looked like she was under 14, they would make them stripped naked to prove she was under 14 and therefore untaxable.

So they were like the nonce patrol.

Yeah, it's just weird guys on Twitter just saying like, oh, it's okay.

She's over 14.

It's a completely different thing.

Yeah.

Ugh, God.

And you can imagine, like, because of social norms back then, how that's even more fucked up.

Yeah.

Because of like decency and whatever.

I I mean, this is always fucked up, but like to a to someone have this happen to their family back then, that's like a blood feud.

Yep, there's Albanians in the mountains

who would start a generational war for less.

The second an Englishman's daughter gets inspected by the local knight, he just like a black eagle appears behind him.

He hates Serbs.

On top of being the Royal Nuns Commission, they were also just stealing from people because as one of their stated goals to make up for a taxation shortfall, no single commission wanted to be the one that didn't bring anything back.

So they just kind of treated the entire English countryside as one giant loot drop.

And most importantly, these commissioners had to be paid, right?

Yes.

Well, they were paid by if they brought back a surplus of money that covered the shortfall.

So they just turned into like locusts on the countryside.

And the people that were doing this were all known people in the area in which they were operating.

And since the main place we're going to be talking about in the beginning here is Essex, they're the dickheads in charge of the Royal Commission were three people that had to be the most hated men in the area before this even happened.

That's Sir John de Guildsborough, Sir John de Brampton, and the Sheriff of Essex, Sir John Sewall.

For people who maybe don't know, a sheriff in this context was technically in charge of keeping the peace, but most of his job was collecting taxes and mustering men for the military as well.

Yeah, at this time, like a sheriff is a combination of like several different roles, of essentially civil administration.

So it's like taxation collection, administering of the law, recruitment for what is essentially conscription into the army,

but also acting as a kind of public official on behalf of the government.

So it's kind of like, you know, you're wearing many hats.

Probably actually, a lot of them were physically wearing many hats.

Yeah.

He's the G4S guy of his day.

He's a lot.

He doesn't do much.

Get the Stone Island tunic in.

I'm ordering from the Blue Orchid later.

Look at my D squared buckle hat.

Is the squared a brand that they would like?

That makes sense because I see it and that thing looks terrible.

Yeah, it's D Squared has kind of fallen off.

I remember like six years ago, it was like super popular with like the sort of people that we're joking about.

But it's kind of fallen.

Now they're just wearing like D squared t-shirts rather than the D squared hat, which was the thing because People bought the hat because it was the cheapest thing to buy from D Squared.

Sure.

Your average person of the day already had a brutally hard life, and depending on how old they were, they had just survived what amounted to be an extinction-level event.

Then, after all of that, after a lifetime of government largely not existing to them, it kept popping up to tell them they couldn't make a certain amount of money, wear the kind of pointed shoes that they wanted, and came around year after year after year to steal their money.

Then, when they all but kicked open the door to their waddle-and-dob shithole and robbed them for back taxes they may or may not have owed, the authorities in the area did that thing that authorities all eventually do.

They overplayed their hand.

Once upon a time, the peasants feared these men and rightfully so.

Even stepping out of line a little bit left them and their families liable to be punished in horrible, horrible ways.

But now that fear had turned to pure, undying hatred.

And soon members of the landholders and the gentry class began to hear whispers about the commoners plotting their deaths.

So they dispatched a peace commission chaired by the exact same men as the Royal Inquisition, the same guys who had just robbed the fuck out of them and made their daughters stripped naked.

The Essex Commission was set up in Brentwood and ordered each town and village in Essex to send a representative to voice their concerns to them.

Brentwood is a it's a nice area.

All right, that's good.

The commission was met with a wave of hatred and one representative from the town of Fobbing, a man named Thomas Baker, accused them of taking advantage of the pure, sweet boy king.

The commission fired back, accusing Baker and his town of being tax cheats who owed the crown untold amounts of money.

Baker helpfully pointed out out that they had already taken more money from him and his town a few months before.

Baker even accused them, a group of gentrymen, for using the Peace Commission as an excuse to levy another tax and steal from them.

And as funny as that is to us, it's unheard of for a peasant like Baker to talk to these men that way.

And they were solidly clutching pearls.

The commission threatened him.

with their accompanying contingent of knights, but there was only two of them.

Normally, this would have been more than enough, but again, Baker and his people had been pushed too fucking far because there was hundreds of them there that had been called to the commission.

And they told the commission to fuck off.

They're not getting another cent.

There are two versions of events as to why Baker suddenly found himself squaring off with almost certainly, at this point, a certain death sentence for a man like him.

One version is he was simply a man pushed too far.

The other is he was an avenging father, as one of these men, one of the commissioners or a knight in their service, had assaulted his daughter during one of the tax roundups.

So he was out for blood.

Brampton ordered the knights to take Baker into custody, which caused the peasants to grab weapons, mostly like the farm tools and rocks they had laying around, and chase the knights and the commissioners away from the town back towards London.

From here on June 1st, 1381, the peasants really didn't have a plan, so they grabbed their weapons and retreated into the forest, officially kicking off the English peasants' revolt.

Now, I should point out here that normally when you say a bunch of peasants ran off into the woods away from knights, they would be badly prepared for what was eventually going to come for that ass, right?

But not in the case of the English peasant.

Thanks to Edward III starting about 20 years before the events in Essex, training with a bow and arrow would have been mandatory for all men minimum one day per week, normally on Sunday.

To further reinforce the training of archery as the only hobby available for the common man, In the same declaration, the king banned football because it was a distraction to bow practice.

This was more state-enforced military training than anyone else was mandatory to have at the time.

In short, this is a revolt made up of the most dedicated and skilled bowmen possibly in Europe.

So soon across Essex, men were gathering up their illegally mandated stockpiles of bows and arrows.

Messengers from the men who chased off the commission were heading back to where they were coming from in order to spread word about what had happened.

After years of being fucked with, there was no shortage of men and women who grabbed weapons in order to join them.

And the small fact that a bunch of regular everyday people had just chased off the commission only bolstered that spread.

And for the day, the word spread fast as fuck.

Just by the next day, word had gotten out across the county of Essex, helped by the fact that it was a holiday of Whitsun, the Pentecost, because that meant people from the surrounding area all were already gathered together in large numbers to pray, feasts, games, shit like that.

Eventually, these men all gathered together in bawking to swear oaths to one another and to swear to murder any any royal officials who dare come through and ignore any law that did not come from either themselves or the king directly.

That's like where the beginning of this is.

They believe that the sweet boy king is being taken advantage of by the council of unks.

The unkocracy is corrupt.

My court is full of unks.

My court is full of scheming unks.

They also agreed that anyone who did not join the revolt would have their houses burned to the ground.

That's one thing.

This revolt revolt is mostly burning shit to the ground.

As soon as that happened, that same weekend, the rebellion was already spreading outside of Essex into Kent through a man named Abel Kerr.

While Kerr and his neighbors didn't have a run with the tax man like Baker and his guys did, the people of his village of Arith had a long-running land dispute with a local abbey.

The people of Arith also had a common issue with their abbey of that the abbey was being run like a mafia.

They were squeezing the town for increased rent and protection money, and it was way too much.

So, Kerr grabbed a group of people, whipped them into a revolutionary fervor, and stormed the abbey and captured the abbot, William de Heath.

There, upon the threat of death, they forced the abbot to swear an oath to support the revolt and the boy king.

And he did, probably because the other option was getting his skull ventilated with a fucking arrow.

I mean, that is the most accurate like Kent and Essex thing.

It's like, I am having a land dispute with my neighbor, and I am willing to have a revolution over it.

Soon afterwards, Kerr and his men boarded boats, crossed the Thames, and marched to Essex to meet the bros and beginning to plan what to do next.

That is when Kerr suggested they go after a royal judge named Sir Robert Belknap, who, like many judges of the day, was also something of a traveling tax assessor.

And he was on his way to Dartford in his regularly scheduled weekend assessing visit.

Belknap had heard what was going on.

It was hard to miss at this point, but he and virtually everyone else in the government at the time thought, well, they'll probably calm down anyway.

After all, don't they know who who I am and the authority I carry with me?

They won't possibly touch me.

It's the royal version of, okay, but I'm built different.

Yeah.

As soon as Belknap and his crew got to Dartford, they were immediately assaulted by a mob.

He got snatched up and got his ass beat.

The crowd made him swear on a Bible that he would never act as judge or collect taxes ever again, and then he was released to flee back to London.

It had been about a week since the fine people of Essex and Kent rose up.

And they were kind of surprised that, well, the government hasn't sent anybody to deal with us yet.

The reason for that was, well, they couldn't.

The crown had no available army.

We already talked about all the problems with the general funding of the armies and the ongoing war in France and the holdings that they have to garrison and all that.

But the newest army they had,

formed with the last round of taxation, was given to John of Gaunt and was sent to protect the border with Scotland.

So there's absolutely nobody in London or in the surrounding areas.

To the peasants, they had seemingly broken the state's monopoly on violence, and it was time for them to take it away completely.

One of the things that Belknap was made to do before being released was turn over a list of names of people who had snitched them out to the government for tax fraud.

Kerr and Baker quickly labeled these men traitor, captured them, cut off their heads, staked them on poles, and carried the polls around them as if they were banners.

That's a drastic move, I'm going to say.

There's going to be a lot of heads on polls here.

The growing army of peasant rebels spread through in Essex countryside, spreading the word of their seeming victory.

After all, look at these heads.

Word of the revolt spread all the way to London, and soon men from London were running out to the countryside, telling the revolt's leadership, or the ad hoc leadership, that if you walk to London, there's plenty of allies in the city and no army to stand against you.

Ah.

And as nice as that probably sounded, the countryside rebels had a revenge mission to carry out.

Also, despite all the odes or whatever, they were hardly unified.

As you probably already picked up, there's a hard divide between the Essex and Kent men.

The Essex contingent was largely but not always led by Baker, and the Kent contingent was entirely led by Kerr.

Baker wasn't much of a rebel.

He seemed to be a guy out for revenge, while Kerr had higher but not necessarily well-thought-out ideas.

Baker and his Essex men took the revenge mission towards Sheriff Sewal's house, who for some reason was still at home, like nothing was going on.

He's just chilling.

He's watching Severance, you know, he's just having a mental health down.

Yeah, he's checking in on the lads who are burning down his house.

Yeah,

sometimes you need to burn down someone's house for men's mental health.

I don't disagree.

Meanwhile, Kerr and his Kent men marched toward the town of Rochester, home of Rochester Castle.

Now, the Kent rebels knew they weren't going to put the castle to siege.

Of course, they have no siege weapons.

Instead, they just began ravaging the village of Rochester itself, hoping to cause everybody to freak out.

And it worked.

Seeing hundreds of armed men outside the village burning, the castle guards just ran.

They abandoned their post, allowed the mobs of civilians to climb the castle walls and open the gates and flood inside.

Then they broke into the castle dungeon, freeing everybody held in detention there.

The rebel ranks swelled with numbers, and the castle's commander was captured, largely without any real fight.

Word once spread again.

They had taken a fucking castle.

More rebels joined the ranks from all over the southeast, and soon the only road heading to London in the entire region is locked down and under the control of the the rebels.

Anyone passing the road would be taken aside and forced to swear an oath to the true boy king and refuse to serve orders from anyone else who they were now loudly proclaiming to be traitors who have taken over the government.

On top of that, they made people to never follow a quote king named John, meaning John of Gaunt, the regent.

The head unk.

Head unks.

At the town of Maidstone, that was the next to fall.

Once again, the jail was broken into and the men inside became the newest recruits.

But among the followers who are now joining the ranks and sprung from jail were two men, Watt Tyler and John Ball, who quickly ascended to the ranks of leadership.

John Ball protesting the king taking growths out of your scroat.

That's why he's John Ball and not John Balls.

There's only one of them.

There's only one John Ball.

Tyler was a military man, a veteran of the war in France, with a mind for tactics more than anyone else.

Nobody's entirely sure why he was in jail, but he was.

Then there was John Ball, a radical priest.

He had spent his life touring the countryside, whipping people up into a frenzy with his sermons, and had been imprisoned so many times by the Archduke of Canterbury that everyone in the dungeon was on a first-name basis with him.

His belief system, to make a very long story short, effectively kind of made him a Jesuit,

but also like an apostolic.

He believed that the church institutions had been corrupted by wealth.

The clergy had lost sight of the true meaning of Jesus in order to simply become landlords and tyrants.

And the best way to fix this was to make priests live as Jesus did, i.e., poverty, own nothing.

Over the years, Baal's belief system followed in what, in my opinion, was the only road it could go down as a true believer.

Lords, feudalism, kings, all of that was a slight against God.

Even the ranks of clergy were heretical because Last time he checked, Jesus never preached any of that shit.

Instead, he wanted to strip the church down to its bare bones and leave, at best, an archbishop overseeing the entire country.

And of course, that archbishop should be hit.

Of course.

Obviously.

It's the natural choice that, like, we are going to radically reform the church and, you know, trim down the administration and have one person run it.

And obviously, that choice is me.

Yeah.

Who else could it be?

Yeah.

It did not take long for the rebels, spiteful of the various injustices committed against them by the same men ball was now preaching against for them to buy into his ideas so now with the rebels sadly with an ideology and a military leader that is where we'll pick up next time on part two

i am so excited uh these guys are going to get so up and it is also as well uh you know we get to talk about men's mental health you know how sieging the capital is good for men's mental health yeah and how also weirdly these guys could have also drank Stella Artois at this time.

It does remind me of my walk over here.

I saw a sign outside the train station that said, get together and crowd the boys.

Yeah, exactly.

No, Madri wouldn't be invented for another a couple hundred years, shy of a thousand years, but they could have had cans of Stella.

Buckfast is almost around, I think.

Yeah, Buckfast, I think, is like 1500.

No, like the brewery that made Stella was founded in 1366.

Okay, so they are literally all tipped to the gills on fucking Stella.

Yeah, they're just, they are Millwall fans.

Oh, I mean, that does explain why their ideology isn't great, but they're really good at fighting people.

Yeah, there you go.

That is part one.

Tom, you host other podcasts.

Plug those podcasts.

Beneath the skin, show about the history of everything, told you the history of tattooing.

And also, I should have books back in stock.

Both my photography book and some cool tattoo flash books.

So check out beneath skin shop.com.

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