One Does Wonder Why the Peasants Simply Didn't Ask

I have just finished reading about Mr. Paul Greengrass's forthcoming picture, The Uprising, which — if the trade press is to be believed, and one supposes it must, since nobody else has bothered explaining it to me — concerns itself with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, a spot of unpleasantness in which a great many agricultural sorts marched upon London because of a tax, and which Mr. Greengrass apparently believes to be the true and secret origin of the Robin Hood myth. A weary two stars, and that is me being terribly generous, because I have not even seen the thing yet, and already I can tell you precisely how it ends: badly, for everyone, and unnecessarily, for all of them.

I want to be fair to Mr. Greengrass. I understand he is known for pictures about violent, chaotic events — hijackings, bombings, that sort of grubby news-cycle unpleasantness — and I am told he brings to them a great documentary seriousness, all shaky cameras and shouting, so that one really feels one is there. Which, frankly, is the last thing I would want from a film about tax season. I go to the cinema to leave my problems behind, not to watch several thousand people in burlap have the exact conversation my accountant and I already had last spring, except with scythes.

But here is what I cannot get past, and I do think it bears saying, gently, as one says most things: a great mob of fourteenth-century persons apparently walked all the way to London — on foot, mind you, in what I am given to understand were extremely inadequate shoes — over a poll tax, when the obvious remedy was sitting right there the entire time and nobody seems to have considered it. One simply asks Father.

I do not say this to be unkind. I say it because it is, genuinely, bewilderingly true, and I have never once in my life encountered a problem for which it did not work. Tax troublesome? One asks Father. Roof leaking, crop failed, plague en route? One asks Father. I recognize that the peasantry did not, historically speaking, have a Father in the relevant sense — a man with the resources and the faint, put-upon affection required to simply make the difficulty go away over lunch — and I do think that is rather the whole tragedy of it, when you look at it plainly. Not the tax. Not even the Tower, or whatever unpleasantness apparently follows once Wat Tyler enters the plot, which I gather does not end well for Wat Tyler, poor lamb, though I confess I do not know the details and am not certain I wish to. The tragedy is structural. The tragedy is that an entire class of people organized an armed march on the capital because none of them had a Father to ring.

It astonishes me, genuinely, that this was ever allowed to become a whole class of people. One does wonder who was in charge of Fathers that century.

I understand — and here I must be delicate, because I know feelings run hot on this — that "the poors," as a general category, have always regarded work as a sort of moral good, an activity one does and then, bafflingly, complains about, rather than a peculiar historical accident that happened to other people and not to me. The Peasants' Revolt seems to have been the purest distillation of this instinct I have yet encountered: thousands of persons, furious not that they had to labor in a field from dawn until collapse, but that the Crown wished to also tax them an additional groat for the privilege of having done so. One does think that if the labor itself was not the sticking point, the tax was rather a small thing to build an entire uprising around, you know? I have paid worse for parking.

Mr. Greengrass, I am told, wants us to understand that this is where Robin Hood comes from — not the cheerful fellow in green tights redistributing coin from a cartoonish sheriff, but something angrier, more historically textured, a folk memory of actual peasants actually revolting. And I do see the appeal of that, as a narrative — it has a nice symmetry, doesn't it, the myth cleaning up after the history, smoothing the whole ugly business into a man with a bow who is merely generous rather than several thousand men with pitchforks who are merely furious. I only wonder whether anyone involved in either the history or the film stopped to ask the far simpler question, which is why nobody simply had a rich relation. Robin Hood himself, as I recall the stories — admittedly from a nursery version, read to me by a woman named Marguerite whom Father found for precisely that purpose — was frequently depicted as a disinherited nobleman. Which is, when you think about it, rather the whole answer sitting right there in the legend and nobody in either the myth or Mr. Greengrass's film seems to draw the obvious conclusion, which is: become the sort of person who has an inheritance to be disinherited from in the first place, and none of this is necessary. One does not storm the Tower. One writes a very firm letter to one's solicitor.

I recognize, reading this back, that I may be accused of failing to grasp the stakes. I am told the tax in question was regressive, which I understand to mean it fell equally on persons of wildly unequal means, which does sound, put that way, like rather poor design, the sort of thing one's own people would never let stand — Father has entire departments for precisely this, men whose sole function is preventing exactly this category of oversight. But I do think it is worth asking, as gently as I can manage, whether an armed march on London was truly the proportionate response, when the tax collector himself was, from what I gather, a single man, poorly guarded, and the peasantry numbered in the thousands. One does not need Wat Tyler and a battle. One needs a rather persuasive letter and, at absolute most, a barrister. I am told this did not occur to anyone in 1381. I am choosing to believe this reflects poorly on the barristers of the period, and not on anyone else.

Still. I shall go and see The Uprising, because Mr. Greengrass is by all accounts a serious man making a serious film, and I do try to support seriousness wherever I encounter it, even when it is about mud. I only hope that somewhere in its two hours it pauses, even briefly, even for one character, to let somebody simply ask their Father, and let the whole dreadful business resolve itself over a nice long lunch, the way God and good breeding intended. I doubt it will. These pictures never do. They would rather watch six thousand people die of a tax than let one of them make a telephone call, and I do think that says rather more about the modern cinema than it does about the fourteenth century, you know?

One simply cannot imagine.

— C.