"The Peasants are Truly Revolting: The Uprising (2026)"
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Distributed by:
Focus Features (US)
Entertainment Film Distributors (UK)
Leonine Studios (Germany)
Produced by:
Thank You Pictures
Supernix
Blumhouse Productions
Reviewed by
Kevin J. Harty
La Salle University
As earth-shaking as it must have been in its own day, the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England hardly registers today. COVID finds a ready precedent in the Black Plague of 1348—a point nicely made in a fresh reading of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal by Dorsey Armstrong (see Cinema Medievalia, [2024] pp. 23-39). But what recent political upheaval, even if it echoes events in England in 1381, would have been carried out by disaffected citizens who even knew about this late fourteenth-century revolt?
Greengrass’s film is peopled with the correct historical personages—Richard II (a wide-eyed and eventually unnerving Woody Norman), John Ball (Jamie Bell), Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterston), the Lord High Treasurer Robert Hales (Tom Hollander), Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury (Stephen Dillane), and the Lord Mayor of London William Walworth (Jonny Lee Miller). But the hero of the film is an unnamed Ploughman (Andrew Garfield)—perhaps his name is Piers!—through whose eyes we see and judge the events that enfold when Richard’s council decides that it will raise taxes for foreign wars by levying a poll tax on the poor. To levy the tax on the merchant class would mean sharing power with them; and the riches of the church are only stored up on earth for their use in heaven, or so the Archbishop of Canterbury would have his fellow privy council members believe.
Ploughman’s threadbare existence is all that much more miserable because of the death of his wife and two children from the plague. When the royal tax collectors descend upon his Essex village, they demand Ploughman pay either a death or a poll tax, neither of which he has any money for. As the king’s soldiers repeatedly sexually assault the village women to see if they are young enough to avoid having to pay the tax which has been levied on all those 15 and older, Ploughman steps in striking and killing one of the king’s men. Immediately sentenced to the king’s justice, hanging, Ploughman is rescued by his fellow villagers who rise up against the king’s men.
In nearby Kent, there are similar stirrings of civil discontent fomented by the itinerant and heretical preacher John Ball whose message calls for the abolition of the class system. The historical Ball was noted for his poetic eloquence; his most famous open-air sermon quipped: “When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman?” In the film, Ball, freshly released from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prison, has joined forces with Watt Tyler, the rebellion’s leader, and a former archer who served with King Richard’s father, the Black Prince, in France during the Hundred Years’ War. Soon enough, the fires of rebellion have been lit across southern England, and a force of some ten thousand or more marches on London to free King Richard from the evil councilors whom they argue have kept him prisoner. And indeed, Richard, only ten when he ascended the throne, was four years later under the control of his councilors, whose interests lay with themselves more than anything else. From the start, the mob’s loyalty in the film to Richard is remarkable—their affection for him is genuine. That he eventually fails to return that affection is the tragedy that informs the climax of the film. Both their initial affection and his royal betrayal have a basis in the historical record.
But what the peasants in the film seek involves a bit of garbling of history. The peasants maintain that the Doomsday Book records who rightfully owns what in England, and that subsequent charters issued after 1066 have appropriated and stolen wholesale what was rightly the property of the English. Indeed, the first thing the peasants do is burn all the charters and historical rolls that they can get their hands on, and they wish Richard to issue new charters for each town based on what is recorded in the Doomsday Book.
The march on London is to coincide with Corpus Christi, and there is hope that there will be multiple miracles—that of Corpus Christi itself, and that of the righting of all wrongs by God’s representative on earth, King Richard. On route to London, Ploughman encounters the entourage of Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, who historically was sympathetic to the Lollards and also Richard’s one honest councilor. The mob’s deference to her is a further testimony to their affection for King Richard—they do not seek to overthrow the crown. They seek a classless society under Richard’s beneficent rule—as impractical and impossible as such a society might be. And they do initially have the upper hand, as Richard’s armies are in Scotland and France fighting those foreign wars which those new taxes have to underwrite. So, Richard makes the extraordinary decision to meet with the mob, sailing down the Thames to hear their petition, but the sheer size of the crowd soon sends him scuttling back to the safety of the Tower. That petition calls for the abolition of the class system and the execution of the traitors—the members of the privy council.
Richard aligns himself with the Lord Mayor and the Merchant Guilds of London and throws his privy council under the bus—or onto the chopping block—as civil war and riot break out fueled by the poverty of the slumdwellers of London and anti-Dutch sentiment by overly protective English tradesmen. Richard seems to agree to the demands put forth by Ball, Tyler, and Ploughman as a cadre of scribes begins issuing new charters for all the towns of England in preparation for yet another meeting with Richard, this time at the Priory of St. John. With the aid of the Lord Mayor, Richard has managed to surround the priory with armed horsemen and archers, and he convinces the people to lay down their arms. When they do so, Richard directs that the newly sealed charters be burned, and that the crowds be slaughtered. Tyler has already been killed, and Ploughman flees with a handful of followers. Joan of Kent soon arrives to survey the carnage and looks with disgust on her son, who has now clearly grown from being a boy king frightened by his nightmares to being the living embodiment of a nightmare as king.
Historically, Richard did indeed betray the peasants, but it took him some time to hunt them down and punish them—there was no immediate mass slaughter at the priory. Ironically, Richard’s dealing with the peasants in the way he did, as ruthless as it was, did help him briefly secure his hold on the throne. The Lord Mayor did kill Tyler, under circumstances that remain unclear. But Richard would eventually be deposed in 1399 after a troubled reign—though how we view that reign today is largely influenced by Shakespeare’s depiction of the king in his Richard II. But Greengrass is not content to leave King Richard II’s story at the point where he betrays the peasants who have looked to him for justice.
An intertitle tells us that a year has passed, and we see Richard and his mother travelling under guard through a forest—surely not Sherwood Forest (!)—when they are set upon by a group of masked, long-bow toting men in (Lincoln?) green, who halt the royal progress, kill the king’s protective detail, and drag Richard out of his coach and into the mud. Their leader is, of course, the Ploughman, who decides that Richard isn’t worth killing—he’d only be replaced by another king. Ploughman may also spare Richard in a chivalric nod to his mother whose presence he acknowledges, and whose hand he had kissed when he encountered her on the road to London a year earlier. Ploughman doesn’t quite let Richard off scot-free; he curses the king, who began the film afflicted with nightmares, with even worse ones, and the last scene of the film is of the royal castle at night seemingly peaceful until the king’s terrified shrieks pierce the skies.
Even the most cursory search of the marketing history for The Uprising will reveal that the film briefly had a different, longer title with a colon followed by a subtitle—the kind of double-handed title that used to be de rigueur for scholarly articles of a certain ilk!—The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood. Without getting into the debate about the historicity of Robin Hood, any attachment of his rise to the reign of Richard II is a decided stretch, and a cinematic explanation of how Robin Hood became Robin Hood has already been on offer in Ridley Scott’s 2010 film Robin Hood, which also allowed Maid Marian a brief turn as a Joan of Arc figure in full armor for good measure.
Technically, The Uprising is sparse on dialogue—the film depends instead upon long stares and glances to convey the moods of its characters. Filming took place in Germany. Drones provided long camera angles with mixed results, while hand-held cameras produced some at times jerky close ups. The acting is consistently good—Garfield has established a successful career playing Everyman-like characters. Missing from the film is any love interest. Aside from Joan of Kent, the only woman with a presence in The Uprising is Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), a former nun raped by a monk who gives birth to his daughter. The daughter is taken from her, and she is banished from her convent. She has joined Ball and his followers and tries unsuccessfully to cheer Ploughman up as they march on London. She survives Richard’s treachery, and is with Ploughman when he confronts Richard in the forest.
If Umberto Eco is correct in saying that we invoke the Middle Ages to meet the urgent needs of our times, then the connection between the post-plague trauma in The Uprising and our continuing reaction to the COVID pandemic is easy enough to make. Connections between the film and the modern political landscape might also be possible. The film tells of a disgruntled disempowered underclass who rise up in support of a leader whom they think will rescue them, who will abolish corruption, who will allow them to drive out foreigners, and who will right decades of wrongs, only to betray them and make their lot worse. Whether, with its mix of myth and history, the film is capable of supporting such a contemporary critique is another matter, and The Uprising may ultimately like those reciting the old children’s nursery rhyme “all fall down” in trying to do so. [The Peasants’ Revolt may be having a bit of a cultural moment. In the UK, Granta has recently published A. K. Blakemore’s massive 672-page novel about the event, Doom Painting. For a mostly positive review of the novel, see the TLS 4 September 2026: 26-27.]
THE UPRISING, written and directed by Paul Greengrass; produced by Jason Blum, Paul Greengass, Gregory Goodman, Joanna Kaye, Joe Neurater, and Lars Sylvest; starring Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Jonny Lee Miller, and Katherine Waterston; release dates 10 September 2026 (US) and 9 October 2026 (UK); running time 128 minutes.
