Replacement for June 13
The post for June 13 was boring so it was replaced with this one for the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down, which you can purchase at JamesFell.com.
June 13, 1381
In the 1983 film Scarface a drug dealer asks his henchman Omar what he thinks of this up-and-comer gangster Tony Montana and Omar replies, “I think he’s a fucking peasant.” For all of history, elites have looked down upon lower classes, seeing them as little more than a source of labor and tax revenue. But sometimes the peasantry gets tired of being seen as filthy and revolting and actually revolts, which happened in England in 1381 and led to a flowing of blue blood.
Fourteenth-century Europe was a fucked-up place, what with the Black Death wiping out half the population. In the aftermath, there was a lot of socio-political upheaval, because that’s what happens when all of a sudden there isn’t a glut of labor to exploit and the peasants can start saying shit to the ruling classes like “You need us more than we need you.” Now there was more land than peasants to work it, and wages went up while profits for the landowners went down. You know, supply-and-demand kinda shit.
There was also this Hundred Years’ War thing going on and wars cost money and that means extra taxes and the peasants were all fuck your taxes. As the peasants grew not only in financial power but also in freedom to do things other than dig in the dirt all day, the elites became more fractious and divided.
There was a moral panic about these uppity lower classes seeking to rise above the station God meant them to be in [sarcasm font], and there were years of turmoil preceding the 1381 Peasants Revolt that began in late May in Essex when some royal fucktruffle said hey where’s our fucking taxes? Rather than say oh sorry here are your taxes, milord, shit got mean, and the violence spread o’er the land with grand rapidity. Before long, teenage king Richard Number Two was hiding in the Tower of London going #2 in his pants because he rightfully believed they wanted to waste his ass and his troops were off fighting that hundred-year thing in France.
Shit got real on June 13, 1381, when the revolting peasants destroyed the Savoy Palace and went on a royal killing spree across London. The next day the hoards entered the Tower of London and killed the Lord Chancellor and the Lord High Treasurer, while at the same time King Richard was meeting with the rebels and saying okay I’ll go along with these demands of yours. But it was all about buying time to get his forces mustered to crush the rebellion, which was complete by the following November, and Richard said fuck your demands and reneged.
In the aftermath the crown did decide to pull back from its war with France and didn’t pursue the additional taxes or engage in reprisals against the peasantry out of fear of another rebellion.