Smithfield and the death of Wat Tyler: fairs, tournaments and revolt

Place card

Place: West Smithfield, the open ground in front of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and St Bartholomew the Great, including the modern Wat Tyler plaque on the hospital wall.

Area: the north-western edge of the historic City of London.

Nearest stations: Farringdon; Barbican and St Paul’s are also within walking distance.

Period: market and fair activity is documented from the twelfth century; Richard II’s meeting with the rebels and Wat Tyler’s mortal wounding took place on 15 June 1381.

Themes: the Great Rising, poll tax, villeinage, urban markets, Bartholomew Fair, tournaments, public execution, chronicles and political memory.

Access: the square and streets are public; the hospital is active and church interiors keep their own hours. Do not obstruct clinical access or film identifiable patients and staff without consent. The plaque commemorates an event; it does not establish the exact archaeological point of every blow.

The setting

Begin with the empty space, not the dagger. In the morning West Smithfield feels like a pause in London’s dense fabric. Victorian market buildings stand on one side, a hospital and medieval church on the other. Traffic circles the garden, clinic doors open and passengers emerge from Farringdon. Only the width of the ground explains why, in June 1381, a king’s small retinue and several thousand armed people could face one another here.

Six and a half centuries ago this was a field beside the wall, not a formal square. Trampled grass, dust, dung and market waste mingled underfoot. Horses, oxen, cows and pigs were sold here. Stages and barriers appeared for fairs and tournaments. Executions drew spectators. The priory and hospital of St Bartholomew stood at the edge. Smithfield healed, traded, entertained and killed.

On 15 June the fourteen-year-old Richard II came to speak with people who had entered London, destroyed the Savoy Palace, freed prisoners and killed senior officers of the crown. Their leader, known to us as Wat Tyler, rode towards the king. They negotiated. Then a gesture, an insult or a movement towards a weapon—the chronicles disagree—turned an audience into an attack. Mayor William Walworth struck Tyler. Another man, perhaps the royal esquire Ralph Standish, delivered a further wound. Tyler reached or was carried to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, but was pulled out, beheaded and returned to the field as proof that authority had recovered.

The scene’s most famous line belongs to Richard. He supposedly rode towards the shocked rebels and declared that he would be their captain. The action may have saved his party. The chronicles may also have shaped confusion into perfect royal drama. The useful question is not which picture is most exciting. It is how Smithfield functioned as political theatre: a field where a market crowd could become an army, negotiation an execution, and an execution a civic foundation myth.

The story

Smithfield is commonly explained as the “smooth field”. In the Middle Ages it lay outside the north-western wall of the City, beyond Newgate and beside western routes. Open land was valuable beside crowded streets. It allowed animals, traders, spectators, knights and armed companies to assemble without immediately entering the urban bottleneck.

William Fitzstephen described a Friday horse and livestock market here in 1174. Animals arrived from distant counties, rested, were sold and then moved towards slaughterhouses and other city markets. Do not picture a clean green. Medieval Smithfield was a working threshold: loud, animal-scented and cut by drove roads, pens, fences and temporary stalls.

The priory and hospital of St Bartholomew were founded in 1123. A royal charter supported an annual Bartholomew Fair from 1133. Initially associated with cloth, pilgrimage and the saint’s feast, the gathering developed across seven centuries into a seasonal city of food, performance, bargaining and disorder. Its later entertainments became notorious. For 1381 the older function matters most: Smithfield was already a recognised site of temporary law, commerce and mass assembly.

People played football, practised archery and watched tournaments on the field. Richard II staged a great international tournament here in 1390, nine years after the revolt. That royal spectacle is a warning against treating Smithfield as a single-purpose “field of death”. The same openness served courtly prestige, food supply, religious celebration and punishment.

William Wallace’s execution in 1305 made Smithfield part of royal intimidation before Tyler. Heretics and Protestant martyrs would later be burned here. These deaths must not be compressed into one timeless queue. The field changed, judicial categories changed and the political language of punishment changed. What persisted was visibility: a site at the gate allowed authority to address a large audience through a body.

The causes of 1381 began far beyond Smithfield. The Black Death of 1348–49 removed an enormous part of England’s population. Labour became scarce and more valuable. Landholders and government tried to preserve obligations and restrain wages. Villeinage, abusive lordship, legal corruption, war with France and distrust of the young king’s advisers created a combustible structure rather than one simple grievance.

The immediate detonator was the third poll tax, granted in 1380 to support war. Collection failed. When commissioners were sent in the spring of 1381 to investigate arrears, resistance in Essex became revolt. One chronicler tells a notorious story of an official indecently examining girls to determine whether they were old enough to pay. It conveys a memory of invasive collection, but it is not a securely documented single origin for the national rising.

The rebels of Essex and Kent were not one undifferentiated peasant mass. Cultivators marched beside artisans, traders, parish officers, veterans and townspeople. Some possessed land or local status. Women such as Johanna Ferrour directed action in London. “Peasants’ Revolt” is familiar but restrictive; historians also use the Great Rising or the Rising of 1381.

Almost nothing certain is known about Wat Tyler before June. Wat is a form of Walter. Tyler may be a surname or an occupational label for a roofer. Later biographies confidently supply a birthplace, trade and a family outrage, but contemporary evidence does not secure them. What can be said is more impressive: during the Kentish mobilisation he emerged as a leader able to organise movement, maintain a degree of discipline and obtain direct audiences with the king.

Kentish groups reached Blackheath on 11 or 12 June. The priest John Ball gave social protest a biblical vocabulary. The line “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?” comes through hostile or later chroniclers, yet it captures the movement’s challenge to inherited rank. The rebels often framed their purpose as gaining access to the true king and removing corrupt counsellors, not abolishing monarchy.

On 13 June they moved through Southwark and crossed London Bridge. Who enabled the crossing was politically contentious. Chronicles variously blamed civic weakness, London sympathisers, frightened guards or treachery. The sound conclusion is that a force of this size could not enter so quickly without fear, division or cooperation inside the city.

Targets in London were chosen for meaning. The Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt was destroyed. Prisons were opened. Legal buildings and records were attacked. Manorial documents embodied rent, debt and lordship; burning them was political action, not random dislike of parchment. At the same time, killings and theft occurred, including deadly attacks on Flemish residents. The rising should be neither polished into a peaceful democratic march nor dismissed as a natural eruption of “the mob”.

On 14 June Richard met a large rebel group at Mile End. He agreed to charters promising an end to villeinage, free labour, contractual rent and pardon. Clerks began producing documents and many people departed satisfied. While the king was away, other rebels entered the Tower. Archbishop and chancellor Simon Sudbury, treasurer Robert Hales and others were dragged out and beheaded.

Mile End and the Tower formed two simultaneous Londons: negotiated concession and exemplary killing. Tyler and a Kentish core remained. They may have wanted a more radical programme, distrusted the promise or understood that parchment granted under force could be revoked. They requested another meeting.

The two sides assembled at Smithfield on 15 June. Numbers are uncertain. The king had a relatively small party; the rebels occupied the field in strength. Open ground offered sightlines but created the danger of encirclement. Priory walls, the hospital and roads towards the gates defined the edges. It was a negotiating chamber without a secure exit.

The fullest account appears in the Anonimalle Chronicle, a fourteenth-century text probably informed by someone close to events and familiar with London. It says Tyler rode forward alone, only half bent his knee, addressed Richard as “brother” and took the king vigorously by the hand. In a hierarchical court such familiarity could communicate deliberate equality. Yet this is not a neutral transcript. The chronicler fashions Tyler as confident, theatrical and transgressive.

Tyler then stated demands. Different summaries include the abolition of villeinage, equality beneath the king, free trade, an end to outlawry, redistribution of church wealth and a return to the “law of Winchester”. That last phrase is obscure and may represent an imagined older order. No signed programme written by Tyler survives. These are demands reported by chroniclers, not minutes approved by the movement.

The narratives then become almost too dramatic. Tyler asks for ale or water and rinses his mouth. A royal esquire insults him as a thief. Tyler moves towards a dagger. Walworth intervenes. Froissart, Walsingham and other writers vary the sequence, the aggressor and the weapons. Their audiences needed a justification for killing a negotiator in the king’s presence. The more discourteous and dangerous Tyler appears, the more defensive the mayor’s blow becomes.

The secure core is narrower. Conflict erupted during the meeting. William Walworth struck Tyler. Men of the royal party wounded him again. He fell or rode away mortally injured. Some traditions name the king’s esquire Ralph Standish as a second attacker. A City of London walk carefully says an esquire stabbed Tyler, after which he was taken into the hospital, dragged out and beheaded. London Museum emphasises Walworth’s attack and the later execution.

St Bartholomew’s Hospital is not mere scenery. If Tyler was carried inside, the boundary between care or sanctuary and the mayor’s coercive power lasted only minutes. Walworth or his men found him, returned him to Smithfield and cut off his head. It was later displayed on London Bridge. Within hours the body of one man passed through three political conditions: negotiator, patient, trophy.

The king’s party remained acutely vulnerable. Chronicles say Richard rode forward alone and called to the rebels: “I am your king and captain; follow me.” He led or diverted them towards fields at Clerkenwell while Walworth gathered the city militia. Wording differs, but the political outcome is clear. The rebels did not strike immediately. The crown gained time. Organised force from the City changed the balance.

The charters were soon revoked. Government restored control, executed leaders including John Ball and pursued participants across the counties. A general pardon later helped close the judicial aftermath. The specific programme of Smithfield did not become law in 1381. Yet villeinage was not eternal; it eroded gradually under economic and social pressure. Both “the revolt instantly freed the peasants” and “the revolt changed nothing” are misleading.

Walworth was knighted and entered the City’s heroic memory. Later images show him saving the king while Tyler is already drawing a weapon. Richard appears as the composed boy monarch who masters an army with one sentence. Many such images were created centuries later. They reveal the politics of the eighteenth or nineteenth century as much as the afternoon of 15 June.

Tyler acquired a competing afterlife. Reformers and radicals treated him as a martyr against unjust taxation. During resistance to the twentieth-century community charge, widely called the poll tax, the comparison returned in speeches and protest culture. That memory is historically important, but resemblance does not make the programmes of 1381 and 1990 identical.

Modern Smithfield also edits the scene. Victorian markets, roads and hospital buildings obscure the medieval scale. The Barts plaque is a valuable prompt, not a centimetre-accurate death marker. The field was larger and its boundaries shifted. A responsible production should overlay the wall, Newgate, hospital precinct and open ground on the present map, using a shaded zone rather than a dramatic red dot.

The decisive question is larger than “who drew first?” Competing political models met here. Rebels believed direct access to the king could remake labour, law and property. The royal party treated hierarchy as the foundation of peace. Civic authority defended trade, gates and its own autonomy. One disputed gesture allowed that authority to convert negotiation into suppression.

People to remember

Wat Tyler should remain a person with an unknown early life, not an empty mask for a folk hero. Nearly everything we see comes from a few days filtered through opponents’ writing. His organisation of the Kentish march and success in obtaining royal meetings are better supported than legends about his family.

Richard II was fourteen, but not a passive child. His physical presence was a tool of kingship. Riding towards the crowd may have been a genuinely courageous crisis decision and was then polished by chroniclers into proof of natural monarchy.

William Walworth, fishmonger, mayor and representative of the civic elite, delivered the attack that brought him a knighthood. One tradition calls him London’s saviour; another calls him the killer of a negotiator. Both are judgements. Begin with his actions and institutional interests.

Remember John Ball, Johanna Ferrour, Thomas Baker and the thousands of named and unnamed participants. Women commanded attacks and made political choices. Artisans, soldiers and townspeople disrupt the comfortable picture of a purely rural crowd.

Finally remember the patients, religious brothers and workers of St Bartholomew’s. The hospital entered this story because political violence crossed its threshold. A modern storyteller’s duty is to keep an active medical institution from becoming a murder-reconstruction backdrop.

Fact, interpretation and legend

Documented: the rising was connected to poll tax, labour conditions, villeinage and political grievance; Kentish rebels entered London; Richard issued charters at Mile End on 14 June; he met Tyler at Smithfield on 15 June; Walworth took part in the fatal attack; Tyler was beheaded; the rebels dispersed and the charters were revoked.

Probable or source-dependent: Tyler had organisational or military experience; the Anonimalle author drew on well-informed royal-side testimony; Ralph Standish delivered one wound; Tyler was taken specifically into St Bartholomew’s Hospital and pulled from it.

Not demonstrated: an exact rebel number at Smithfield; a verbatim conversation; one official list of demands; who first reached for a weapon; the precise order of wounds; a modern plaque marking the death to the nearest metre.

Legend or misleading simplification: every participant was a landless serf; the entire rising began because a tax collector assaulted Tyler’s daughter; Richard defeated tens of thousands alone with one sentence; Tyler’s death immediately ended disorder across England; the revolt directly and rapidly abolished villeinage.

The place today

Begin beside the western Smithfield Market buildings, then reveal the central open ground in a long, still shot. Move to the wall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and locate the Tyler plaque. Keep circulation clear and do not point a camera towards patients.

The second layer is St Bartholomew the Great and Cloth Fair. They establish the priory edge and the long fair tradition. The exterior of the Hand and Shears evokes the later cloth fair and its piepowder court, which rapidly settled traders’ disputes. Do not project the surviving interior unchanged into 1381.

Walk towards the line of Newgate to explain that Smithfield was outside the wall. Graphics should label a reconstructed area, not one execution point. Date all imagery. An eighteenth- or nineteenth-century engraving is political history painting, not eyewitness reportage.

Record the present honestly: market ventilation, bells, traffic, footsteps and hospital doors. A fourteenth-century market soundscape may layer animals, traders and metalwork, but label it as reconstruction. The fatal moment is stronger with sudden silence than with exaggerated blade effects.

Research bibliography

S0026. London Museum, How the Peasants’ Revolt rocked medieval London — chronology of 11–15 June, participants, Mile End, Smithfield and Tyler’s fate.

S0027. London Museum, The history of Smithfield Market — the market from the twelfth century, tournaments, executions and Bartholomew Fair.

S0028. The National Archives, Revolt: The story of England’s first protest — archival account of causes, poll tax, routes and negotiations.

S0029. The National Archives, E 179: Poll tax document notes — government tax records and the context of collection in 1380–81.

S0030. City of London, The Medieval City self-guided walk — official route, plaques, hospital setting and cautious summary of Tyler’s death.

S0031. City of London, Smithfield Public Realm: Statement of Significance — historic topography of market, fair, tournaments and executions.

S0032. Historical Research / Oxford Academic, The role of news and rumour during the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381 — chronicle comparison, rumours, demands and evidential limits.