Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Plague has ravaged the population and left trauma, uncertainty, and distrust of authority in its wake. An unpopular and seemingly arbitrary Forever War is hemorrhaging money from the state coffers. Shifts in the climate have made it harder to live comfortably, increased natural disasters, and thinned the margins for survival. Wage stagnation is preventing most people from building a future for themselves and their families.
I am, of course, talking about the problems of the Kingdom of England in 1381, when a revolt that lasted several months broke out against the government of the young King Richard II.
The Peasants’ Revolt, or Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, or The Great Uprising, as it’s variously known in the UK, is the subject of Paul Greengrass‘ latest film, “The Uprising.” But a funny thing happened on the way to sack London. On August 27, the US marketing team for the film put out some social media materials that included the subhead “The Rise of Robin Hood” and taglines like “Witness the Rise of Robin Hood.”
Writing on Aug. 28, these taglines and subtitles appear to have been removed after an online backlash about the move. Which is understandable. I am only the humble amateur history nerd on IndieWire’s staff, not a PhD on the subject; but even I can conclusively tell you that ain’t no way Robin Hood was a part of the Peasants’ Revolt.
I can do this because the first direct mention of Robin Hood legends crops up in recorded history about five or six years prior to the Peasants’ Revolt; and for almost 120 years prior, you’d get descriptions in English judicial records like “Rabunhod,” “Robinhood,” or “Robbehod” as shorthand for criminals. It was a term of art that, eventually, became the name for a folk character; people have always needed to fantasize about the rich and powerful suffering at least just one consequence for their greed and corruption.
In our own parlance, the evolution of Robin Hood is maybe more like if a mob nickname gradually picked up steam and then became “Scarface,” except the legend of Scarface also includes all the cool shit that happened in “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos.” There was no one “real,” “historical” Robin Hood — which is why the best modern interpretation of Robin is still the one who is a sexy fox.
Now, marketing campaigns go through cycles all the time. They try things out, try and appeal to different crowds. Just look at what Warner Bros. thought was a good marketing move for “The End of Oak Street.” The title of the film is still “The Uprising,” and it is still a piece of historical fiction dramatizing the Peasants’ Revolt. I am sure there was anxiety about the extent to which American audiences might be unfamiliar with the events of the movie or enthusiastic about seeing two hours of Andrew Garfield looking miserable in a bowl cut. Maybe you try to invoke the power of the Big Robby H to get people excited.
When it was being shopped before distributor Focus Features came aboard, “The Uprising” was even called “The Hood,” among other titles; this suggests that, even if it doesn’t include Robin Hood as a character, the film at least wants to connect real events with cultural currents at the time and the legacy of the Great Uprising in our own modern imagination. After all, there’s no better way [Spoilers for a 645 year-old historical event, I guess] to ease the sting of a brutally crushed revolt by having at least one character escape into the woods, perhaps, possibly to live free as a Merry Man. It’s unclear to what extent the Robin Hood legend will be referenced or evoked in “The Uprising,” if at all. We’ll have to see the movie. But both the allusion to the fictional character and the marketing misstep were unfortunate.
They were unfortunate because the Peasants’ Revolt is fantastically interesting, all on its own, and well worth narrative exploration on film without blurring the lines between history and myth.
The situation in England after the Black Death and in the real doldrums of the Hundred Years’ War is, shall we say, a resonant one to our own times. A lot of the fun happened in the South of England, but the revolt was general over the whole country, and is widely considered to be the beginning of the end for the practice of serfdom in England; that is how badly it shook the ruling elite. You have great characters already in Wat Tyler, a soldier who comes back from France to find the instruments of war are here, at home, and that everything is wrong. In some later accounts, Tyler kicked off the revolt by seeing a tax collector trying to assault his daughter (to ascertain whether she had hit puberty, and would then need to pay a higher tax). He “slew the wretch with his hammer.”
You’ve got John Ball, a wildly popular preacher who I sincerely hope is up in heaven right now wearing an “Eat the Rich” T-shirt because that was his whole deal. He was branded a heretic, in part for preaching that the nobility were immoral and so was nobility itself. “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?” is an apocryphal quote attributed to Ball, basically meaning that in the Garden of Eden there was no hierarchy; to bring the world closer to God, we gotta redistribute some fucking wealth.
And you’ve got one of history’s true villains in Richard, who, at only fourteen years old, is recorded to have said this upon crushing the revolt: “You who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were, and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.”
What a shitbag!
As historian Dr. Eleanor Janega put it on Bluesky, the story of the Peasants’ Revolt isn’t some legendary, feel-good romance as many of the Robin Hood stories are. It’s a tragedy. For as much as it’s an incredible achievement of what is possible when ordinary people band together (the revolt did, like, fully take over the City of London), it’s also a story of how the powerful will only ever make changes to the status quo when they are forced to. The moment that pressure disappears, they try to take it all back.
Among many other things, that sounds to me like the makings of a pretty good movie.
“The Uprising” releases in theaters on September 10.