The G.C.S. E question worth 8 marks asks students to explain two ways in which the Peasants’ Revolt and the campaign for the People’s Charter were similar. This is not a complete answer. It could be developed and tweaked but it covers the key points. It raises the interesting question of what other key events in British history might be compared – for instance could Chartism be compared to the English Civil War? And what else could the Peasants’ Revolt be compared with – certainly to the French and American revolutions.
The Peasants Revolt of 1381 and Chartism which was most active for the decade between 1838 and 1848 were both about ordinary people trying to improve their lives with more freedom or a greater say in how their lives were governed. In both cases, economics had a part to play. The peasants of 1381 were tied by serfdom, the wage limits of the 1351 Statute of Labourers that kept pay to pre-Black Death rates and by the poor harvests that followed the Black Death and the impact of the medieval mini Ice Age. Trade was also badly impacted by piracy resulting from the Hundred Years War and the French raids on the Isle of Wight and southern ports including Rye. The 1830s saw bad harvests and the impact of the corn laws keeping bread prices artificially high.
In 1831, peasants wanted their freedom from a feudal hierarchy that saw 40% of them described as serfs, unable to leave the manor where they lived without their lord’s permission, to work without pay and to pay feudal dues including the right to inherit their father’s property. They also wished to abolish the poll taxes that saw everyone over 15-years-old paying the same taxes, whatever their rank in society. Wat Tyler demanded that corrupt officials should be punished. During the Nineteenth century the ordinary working classes were disappointed by the failure of the 1832 Reform Act to give people more rights and in 1833 the Factory Act failed to limit the working day to 10 hours. For those who fell into poverty there was also the impact of the 1834 Poor Law Act which forced paupers into workhouses and made poverty a crime to be punished. Ordinary people in Medieval England and the Nineteenth Century felt that there should be better wages and living conditions for everyone not just the elite. The Chartists demanded regular elections and full male suffrage, ending the 40 shilling property bar that prevented most adults from voting.
The peasants were united in their demands and turned to violence to ensure that evidence of their servitude was destroyed and that local JPs and churchmen were punished. Simon Sudbury, one of Richard II’s advisors and the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered by the peasants when they were let into London. The Chartists were more divided in the way that their goals could be achieved. Some of them preferred argument and moral force but in the end violence was less easy to ignore. In 1837, Feargus O’Connor, an Irish lawyer living in Leeds, published the Northern Star, a newspaper that campaigned for better wages and living standards. O’Connor supported Physical Force Chartism, which championed using violent means. He felt that even if the violence was negative, that in the long term there would be positive outcomes.
The Chartists were emulating the men and women who were part of the reform movement that led to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. The event, named after Waterloo, was something of a turning point for the working classes in the nineteenth century. The meeting in Manchester asking for universal male suffrage ended in chaos and 11 deaths when the authorities seized Henry Hunt, a political reformer. Some people blamed the violence on the authorities while others blamed the 60,000 strong crowd. The poet, Shelley, urged the working classes to ‘rise like lions from slumber’ but his words weren’t published until 1832. The authorities wanted to keep the country calm but they feared a revolution of the kind that happened in France. On 4 November 1839, 10,000 Welsh Chartists at Newport, many of them miners, were waylaid by soldiers. Between 22 and 24 of the protesters were killed. The chartists who were not armed really stood no chance – something of a difference to the peasants of 1381 who were armed with whatever they could find and who had killed justices and churchmen during May and June 1381. The Newport chartists’ leader, John Frost, was sentenced to be executed along with several other men who were at the forefront of the campaign – it was the same fate of hanging drawing and quartering that befell the leaders of the Peasant’s Revolt. For John Frost and other chartists the sentence was changed to transportation.
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Something for any G.C.S.E. students or anyone interested in the concept of power and the people.
