“The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, on the present, is the source of all the sins and sophistries in history,”

Reading the riot act: 

the true story of the Great Revolt

BY PAUL KINGSNORTH

Richard II’s meeting with the rebels is one of the most astonishing moments in English history, as a 14-year-old boy rides out to meet thousands of his armed and angry people.

“The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, on the present, is the source of all the sins and sophistries in history,” insisted the historian Herbert Butterfield in 1931. His famous warning against what he called the “Whig interpretation of history” – viewing past events as mere stepping stones towards the present, or judging them according to contemporary prejudices – remains worth heeding, precisely because it is both so necessary and so hard to follow.

Take this sentence, from Juliet Barker’s timely and comprehensive new history of the Great Revolt of 1381, more commonly – and less accurately, as it turns out – known as the Peasants’ Revolt: “It must have seemed to many of those struggling to earn their livings and feed their families that their hard-earned money was being seized only to finance the personal ambitions of powerful princes.” Squint your eyes enough and you can make out a faint image of early 21st-century Britain, with its hollowed-out politics, disconnected elites, deepening inequality and rudderless waves of anger at the savage effects of globalisation.

Fortunately, Barker does not fall into the trap of openly drawing such comparisons. She has more important aims than writing pop history: she wants to show that the Great Revolt was more significant than has sometimes been assumed, that it was urban as well as rural, and that those who took part in it were often respectable and middle class. Most intriguingly of all, she wants us to take seriously her claim that King Richard II, only 14 years old when the rebellion came so close to uprooting the English elite, sympathised with the rebels and tried to help them achieve their aims.

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