The Uprising Wastes a Good Class-Struggle Story

In 1381, more than a hundred thousand poor English people rose up demanding an end to serfdom. During the uprising, they killed a coterie of hated government officials, and, in turn, the fourteen-year-old King Richard II massacred thousands of them.

The best-remembered figure of the English Peasants’ Revolt is one of its leaders, John Ball, whose speeches and sermons captured the spirit of what would eventually, centuries later, develop into socialism. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” he famously asked, meaning that in the Garden of Eden, the Bible’s first people labored only for their own sustenance, with no concepts of lords and serfs.

As a socialist and fan of medieval period pieces, I was excited to see the new film The Uprising, which dramatizes the English Peasants’ Revolt and stars Andrew Garfield as a fed-up farmer-rebel. The subject matter has the makings of a thrilling class-struggle movie — and indeed, Garfield and director Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, two films in the Bourne trilogy, and Bloody Sunday) promoted the movie as a tale of resistance to oligarchy. As The Hollywood Reporter writes, “The Uprising feels strikingly of the moment. Modern-day oligarchs wield outsized influence over elections and self-enriching policies. Working people, meanwhile, continue to struggle with the rising cost of living.”

The film’s director and star express hope that The Uprising will be “galvanizing.” “We’ve had enough,” declared Greengrass. “I hope there’s some awakening,” Garfield told a live audience this month. “And I hope that if any billionaires watch it,” he continued, that “they’re scared shitless.”

It’s a welcome sign that Hollywood wants to tell these kinds of stories. But far from giving hope that the masses of ordinary people can make social change, The Uprising condemns social movements as self-defeating, promotes a misguided faith in select elites, and ends with a nihilistic moral of individual revenge. Billionaires have nothing to fear from The Uprising.

Medieval Class War

The fourteenth century was a grim time for the common people of England. Kings threw thousands of lives away in a failed effort to take the French throne, known as the Hundred Years’ War, which bankrupted the state in the process. As much as half of England’s population died in the black plague in the mid 1300s.

Many rural poor were serfs. Serfs had their own plots of land to feed themselves, but for that privilege they had to work on their lord’s land for free and pay exorbitant fees. Serfs and their children were bound to their land and their lord forever, not unlike slaves. Other peasants were free but still chafed at the high rents and violent control that their noble or ecclesiastical landlords exerted over them.

Despite its modern designation as the Peasants’ Revolt, many of those who would rebel in 1381 were not landholding peasants but unlanded laborers and artisans who worked for a wage — the proto-working class. A common source of rage for peasants and workers alike was that their employers were also their landlords, lawmakers, judges, and jailers. As Marxist historian Rodney Hilton writes in Bond Men Made Free, the rebellion would be “one of the whole people below the ranks of those who exercised lordship.”

By the late 1300s, these groups had begun pushing for political rights, lower rents, and higher wages. The plague, while traumatic, increased their leverage: labor demand now far exceeded supply, and depopulated land needed tenants. Thus, peasants and workers benefited from greater bargaining power vis-à-vis their superiors, and they pressed their demands with protests, petitions, and riots.

This plebeian agitation threatened the social system and outraged England’s rulers. In response, they passed a series of laws to keep the poor in their place. One law fixed wages at their pre-plague, pre-inflation rates. Another commanded that those who abandoned their employer to seek better pay be branded on the forehead with an F for “falsity.”

This ongoing class struggle forms the backdrop for The Uprising’s opening scenes, where the king’s greedy, gold-encrusted advisers decide to once again tax the common people to pay for the crown’s losing war. The 1381 “poll tax,” a flat tax for every person over the age of fifteen, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. One particularly hated official even conceived of an invasive “puberty test” to check who was of age.

The Great Unwashed

The story of 1381 should encourage a healthy hatred of the rich and sympathy for the poor, and The Uprising gets off to a strong though lurid start. Tax collectors come to the village of the rustic Ploughman, a fictional farmer turned reluctant leader played by Garfield, and push people around. After the third teen girl is violated by a soldier’s puberty check, Ploughman’s rage at the medieval Epstein class boils over: “That’s enough!” he shouts, before cutting them down with his scythe.

Ploughman soon meets the historical leaders of the movement, the outlaw preacher John Ball (Jamie Bell) and the soldier turned revolutionary Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis). We get to see Ball deliver his famous line about Adam and Eve to a cheering crowd — but missing from the speech is Tyler and Ball’s more temporal vision for an egalitarian society. One chronicler reports Ball calling for a society in which “all things shall be held in common, when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.”

Unfortunately, The Uprising gives us little chance to appreciate the radical and modern vision animating the rebels. In fact, the movie — perhaps unwittingly — seems to hold the mass of commoners who comprise the movement in contempt. Besides the leaders of the movement and a fictional love interest for Ploughman (the fanatical Alyce played by Thomasin McKenzie, hair cropped close like Joan of Arc), the entire crowd of thousands is little more than background scenery. There’s hardly a close-up of even one rank-and-file rebel, and in the background their faces are usually blurred.

This is a far cry from the historical epics Greengrass claimed to be emulating like Gladiator or Braveheart, and further still from the plebeian-centric films of leftist directors like Ken Loach. In one incredible scene from Land and Freedom, Loach’s 1995 movie about the Spanish Civil War, peasants and antifascist militants debate whether they should redistribute their former lords’ land in the context of civil war, imperialism, and revolution.

If Loach imbues the poor with full, vibrant, and dignified interiority, Greengrass mostly collapses them into a threatening swarm. In The Uprising, virtually no peasant besides the protagonist even speaks a line that isn’t a background shout or scream. Given the opportunity to exact revenge on their rulers, the mob goes completely wild. In an animalistic frenzy, they not only decapitate their foes but bask in their grisly victory with smiles and songs. Alyce is shown speaking in tongues during one lynching.

At the height of their power, the mob invades the Tower of London, where they capture and behead several of the king’s hated advisers. The mob goes on to attack anyone who looks rich and even start scapegoating Flemish immigrants. Their leaders are soon overwhelmed by the bloodthirsty mob in a slow-motion montage of carnage reminiscent of the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan — except that, besides Ball, Tyler, and Ploughman, all the rabble are joyfully hacking away. The next morning, an ashamed Ball and Tyler try to make sense of the massacres. Ball, the most extreme of the revolutionary leaders, explains to Ploughman that “If the end be well then all be well.”

The film further establishes a parallel between the rebel leaders and the king’s hated council. The base passions on both sides — pride and a lust for power, wealth, and revenge — hasten the tragic massacres. The mob, meanwhile, is easily manipulated, and Richard slaughters them before they can consolidate their victories.

For all their talk of striking terror into the heart of billionaires, one senses that the film’s architects are consummate liberals. The Uprising’s John Ball is certainly how liberals see the revolutionary misleaders of the twentieth century, whose lofty goals were betrayed by cynical ends-justify-means tactics. And the message conveyed by the film’s attitude to the mob is familiar after a decade of centrists’ warnings about “populism,” left or right: radicals and the untamed masses they unleash are as much a problem as the oligarchs they oppose.

Nowhere is the film’s tepid liberalism more evident than in the character of the king’s mother. Throughout the film, the widowed Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterston) is portrayed as reasonable, compassionate, and moral. She objects to the punitive policies of the king’s advisers and supports the commoners. Joan becomes the moral voice of the movie, consonant with but more articulate than Ploughman himself. When the two later meet in London and together decry the mob violence on the streets outside, Joan puts forward a thesis straight out of The West Wing: it is reason and words that uplift, she says, “not the mob. Without words, there is only chaos and fear.” Later, after her son massacres his peasant detractors, Joan frowns her disapproval.

In reality, of course, a member of the royal family would have had a vested interest in maintaining the feudal system, the wealth and power of the monarchy, and the church and aristocracy who upheld these. The poll tax that sparked the rebellion was, after all, meant to fund the monarchy’s war to conquer France. But in the gauzy moral world of The Uprising, Joan is Ploughman’s most important ally: if only the two of them could get her son’s ear and use their words, all the violence and suffering could be avoided.

The Mangionification of Robin Hood

Until the rising fails, Ploughman counsels moderation. When the rebels finally bring their demands to the king, Tyler asks for the end of serfdom, and Ball demands the executions of the royal councilors. Ploughman, more modest and less bloodthirsty (for now), declares with a straight face: “There will be no peace until we are healed.”

But the king betrays them, and neither freedom, justice, nor “healing” is forthcoming. Failed by the idiotic mob, unable to persuade the king through his benevolent mother, only one option remains for our hero: individual vigilante violence.

The movie jumps one year ahead and we see Ploughman and his band, all sporting green hooded capes, jumping from the woods to ambush the king’s entourage. Ploughman has become Robin Hood!

Greengrass has made it clear that he intended The Uprising to be a Robin Hood origin story, and US promoters marketed the film as the “Rise of Robin Hood.” While he admits he is departing from historical accuracy, Greengrass wanted the film to have a happy ending after the uprising gets crushed, and the Robin Hood turn is his solution.

So Ploughman returns as Robin Hood, but not to steal from the rich and give to the poor — which is the core of the traditional Robin Hood story and, while not transformative, is at least useful. Instead, this is Robin Hood as a Luigi Mangione figure, terrorizing the rich as payback.

After killing the last of the king’s hated advisers in a rote and bloody duel, Ploughman delivers a speech befitting Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. While Ploughman won’t kill the king (because “there’ll always be another”), he announces that now “we rule ourselves” in the forest, with “no kings.” Ploughman then promises to haunt the king’s dreams for the rest of his days.

A knowing look is shared between Ploughman and the king’s mother, who apparently approves of this violence, maybe because it’s carried out by Andrew Garfield rather than the faceless mob. The film fades to a long shot of the king’s residence in the evening. We hear screaming and know the king’s sleep is indeed haunted by Ploughman and by the guilty conscience of everything he’s done.

This is the happy ending Greengrass invents after the end of the rising. The horrid, stupid mob and their dishonest leaders are gone. The queen mother has failed to persuade the king to dismantle feudalism. At least our hero can carry out gruesome assassinations and disturb elites’ mental peace.

I went into The Uprising hoping for a good class-struggle flick. But I left the theater feeling that this movie, rather than inspiring an “awakening,” will be discouraging for all but would-be vigilante terrorists. But don’t scare the rich too much! Since the film disregards the agency of the poor masses it should be celebrating, we’re left hoping that rich people come to their senses and save the day. Satisfied that The Uprising contributes to this goal, Garfield explains that “billionaires [are] the ones that might be the most soul sick. They’re the ones that might need healing the most.”

When the Rabble Won

Lucky for us, the real history of the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt is itself galvanizing. Groups rose up simultaneously in different parts of the country, and then more risings followed as word spread. Peasants and laborers, led by sympathetic lower clergy or literate town leaders, demanded, and in some cases temporarily won, reprieve from feudal strictures and confiscatory fees, as well as local autonomy for villages and towns.

The rebels did kill, and some Flemish migrants were slaughtered. (Hilton speculates these were the victims either of their competitors, the London weavers’ guild, or their employees, English journeymen weavers.) On balance, however, the rebels’ destruction was relatively contained and focused for a medieval army of more than one hundred thousand. Top government officials, all ultrawealthy nobles or church leaders themselves, were prime targets, as were their palaces. The most common targets for burning, however, were the documents that recorded the feudal dues and services owed to lords by their subjects.

After King Richard II tricked and killed rebel leaders — Tyler was stabbed in the back, Ball drawn and quartered — he unleashed a campaign of bloodshed and terror far larger than that inflicted by the poor against the rich. While estimates vary, the revolt claimed the lives of between ninety and two hundred people; in the three months that followed its defeat, the king killed between 1,500 and 7,000. Surely his guilt-wracked mother frowned for each one.

This is certainly depressing, but fortunately it is not, as Greengrass thinks, the end of the story. The revolt was crushed in 1381, but many of the demands of the movement were achieved over the coming years. The flat poll tax that incited the risings was abandoned, de facto and then de jure, as were the laws depressing wages.

Some historians contend that serfdom was on its way out by this point anyway due to economic factors. However, it’s hard to believe that such a massive and well-organized show of popular power didn’t also discourage elites from enforcing their rights over their bondmen. As Robert Brenner writes:

The revolt of 1381, despite the defeat of the peasant rising, seems to have opened the floodgates. Peasants now streamed away from their manors, and their lords could do nothing to stop them . . . By the second quarter of the fifteenth century, the vast majority of English peasants had won their freedom, and, as a consequence of their much improved bargaining position, were paying, at least for the time being, much lower rents.

Through The Uprising, Greengrass and Garfield would warn us to keep aloof from the crowds and put our faith in a few enlightened elites who will right the ship. Failing that, we haunt their dreams.

We have yet to see something so spectacular in the twenty-first century as the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt, or even the labor and civil rights movements of the twentieth century, which also won enormous improvements in social welfare and individual liberty. The powers arrayed against us are enormous, and the conditions not always favorable. But while ordinary people do not choose our conditions, we can, as Karl Marx writes, make our own history.

Fourteenth-century peasants couldn’t know that the society they won would become capitalism — more prosperous and free than feudalism but still unequal, chaotic, and violent. As the nineteenth-century socialist William Morris ponders in A Dream of John Ball, “Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”

Today we’re carrying on the fight for John Ball’s radically egalitarian society. We owe a great deal to our forebears. The least we could do is give them a good class-struggle movie treatment, not The Uprising’s nihilistic liberalism.