Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 hasn’t proved particularly attractive to writers of historical fiction. Pierce Egan, better known for his essays on boxing, wrote an interminable novel called Wat Tyler in 1841, and Robert Southey produced a dramatic poem of the same title which he later disavowed.
David Horspool
Who was then the gentleman?
But at least Melvyn Bragg captures some of the drama — of noble peasant versus ignoble king —in his latest novel Now is the Time
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