In 1381, more than a hundred thousand poor English people rose up demanding an end to serfdom, killed a coterie of hated royal officials, and were then massacred by the fourteen-year-old Richard II. Paul Greengrass’s new film The Uprising dramatizes that revolt with Andrew Garfield as a farmer turned rebel, and both men sold it as a story for the oligarch era: “I hope that if any billionaires watch it,” Garfield told an audience, that “they’re scared shitless.” Jacobin’s Jeremy Gong went in as a socialist and a fan of medieval period pieces. He came out arguing that billionaires have nothing to fear from this film.

What it gets wrong about the rebellion:

  • The crowd is scenery. Apart from the leaders and a fictional love interest, no rank-and-file rebel gets a close-up or a line that isn’t a background shout — faces in the crowd are usually blurred, and the movement collapses into an animalistic swarm that needs restraining
  • Faith gets placed in elites instead. The king’s mother, Joan of Kent, is written as the film’s moral voice, telling the hero that it is reason and words that uplift, “not the mob. Without words, there is only chaos and fear” — a royal with a direct stake in feudalism
  • The invented ending is vigilante nihilism. After the rising is crushed, Ploughman becomes Robin Hood, but not to rob the rich for the poor — rather as an assassin who kills the last royal adviser and promises to haunt the king’s dreams
  • The film’s own frame follows: Garfield explained that billionaires “might be the ones that need healing the most”

The real history is more useful than that fable:

  • Many 1381 rebels were not landholding peasants but unlanded laborers and artisans working for wages — in Rodney Hilton’s phrase, “one of the whole people below the ranks of those who exercised lordship”
  • The Black Death had killed as much as half of England and left labor scarce, so workers pushed for higher wages, lower rents, and political rights. Rulers answered with laws fixing wages at pre-plague rates and ordering that anyone who left an employer for better pay be branded on the forehead with an F for “falsity”
  • The 1381 poll tax — a flat levy on everyone over fifteen, enforced in places by an intrusive “puberty test” — was the spark
  • John Ball’s famous line about Adam and Eve was only part of it; one chronicler has him calling for a society “when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves”
  • The rebels’ killing was contained by the standards of a medieval army of 100,000+, and what they burned most often was the paperwork recording feudal dues. Their rising killed ninety to two hundred people; Richard II’s reprisal killed between 1,500 and 7,000 in three months
  • And they partly won. The poll tax and the wage-suppressing laws were abandoned, and as Robert Brenner writes, the revolt “seems to have opened the floodgates”: peasants streamed off the manors, and by the second quarter of the fifteenth century most English peasants had won their freedom, at far lower rents

Gong’s complaint is not that a Hollywood film took liberties — it is the moral it chooses. The Uprising treats mass movements as self-defeating, the crowd as a danger to be managed, and change as something granted by enlightened individuals at the top. That is the liberal reading of every revolution, and it is why the film’s own stars can praise it as a warning while reassuring the rich that they are the ones who most need healing.

The actual peasants of 1381 offer no such comfort, and William Morris drew the right lesson from them 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.”