If you’ve read anything about the Peasants Revolt (England, 1381; you’re welcome), the image it calls up is of–okay, I’m being obvious here–peasants, and I’ll bet they’re peasants of the male persuasion. Because if I meant peasants of the female persuasion, surely I’d say something along the lines of peasant-ettes, right? Or following the common format of saying female astronaut, or female judge, I’d call them female peasants, because the people whose job titles don’t come adorned with adjectives–well, they’re male.

Besides, we’re talking about a revolt, and historically speaking the people who fight were male. People who led were male. People who left a mark on the world were male. And so on for another six paragraphs.

Ha. Allow me to introduce you to Johanna Ferrour. Or to Joanna Ferrour. Or if you prefer, to Joan Marchall. Same person, and I’ll get around to explaining that in a minute. What I need to slot into place first is that she was a leader of the Peasants Revolt and is (as far as I can tell, given my status as a non-expert) only recently being reclaimed for history.

Let’s get the name issue out of the way

Last names were still a liquid in fourteenth-century England. The tradition of hereditary family names had crossed the English Channel with the Normans in 1066, but married women didn’t have  last names. They were their husbands’ possessions and didn’t need them. As one court put it in 1340, “When a woman took a husband, she lost every surname except ‘wife of.’ “

Thanks, guys. 

As far as I can tell, that business of last names started out by applying only to the people who mattered–the aristocracy–and gradually trickled down from there. The BBC article I’m drawing on here implies that vassals had no surnames. 

That’s a rabbit hole, even if it does look like an interesting one. Maybe I’ll throw myself down it another time. Now, though, let’s sneak ahead of our story for a paragraph: by the fifteenth century, the interpretation of–or at least the verbiage about–marriage had softened and the husband and wife were seen as one person. Except, of course, that person was the husband and the woman took his surname. Legally speaking, she either didn’t exist or barely registered.

In Johanna/Joanna/Joan’s time and among her class, last names (not to mention their spellings) were still fluid and usually drawn from a person’s work or home. She was married to a blacksmith who made horseshoes–a farrier, or ferrour. Or marchall. It all means the same thing.  

Her first name was also fluid. Johanna, Joanna, and Joan were all variations of the same name. Let’s call her Jo. If we don’t, I won’t be responsible for my actions.

 

The rebellion

Although a lot of things contributed to the Peasants Revolt, the cause closest to hand was the imposition of a poll tax, a poll being a head. If you had a head and you were an adult, you paid a tax of 12 pence for the privilege–the same amount the lord and lady of the manor paid for their more luxurious heads.

It was the third poll tax in four years.

What did 12 pence mean to, let’s say, a skilled worker? To answer that, we have to go deep into the realm of guesswork. Too many variables are involved and in a moment of carelessness the fourteenth century’s computer files have been wiped. Still, at a guess, in 1351 a mason might’ve earned 4 pence a day and a carpenter 3. Emphasis on might. So the tax came to three or four days’ pay for a skilled worker and more for a laborer, at a time when keeping a family fed took everything most people had. 

But the revolt wasn’t about just the new tax. The Black Death had left labor in short supply and workers of all sorts in a position to demand better pay. If you’re one of the people who’s paying wages, that’s a Bad Thing. So the government passed the Statute of Labourers, which made it illegal to pay laborers more than they were paid in 1346. 

The final gripe was the enclosure movement, which had started in the twelfth century and was still grinding on. This meant (insert Simplified Explanation warning here) that landowners were seizing common land, which peasants used to use for grazing, gathering firewood, fishing, or–well, it varied from place to place. Landowners across the country were now claiming it as theirs and enclosing it with hedges or fences. For peasants, this was the difference between subsistence and hunger. 

Even though we’re talking about something called the Peasants Revolt, the poll tax and the Statute of Labourers gave townspeople and artisans like Jo and her husband reasons to get pissed off, and the revolt involved not just serfs but also artisans, tradespeople, and tenant farmers–people who rented their land and wanted to shed the feudal inheritance of service their landlords demanded. 

In other words, the king and all his friends and relations were looking at  a large group of pissed-off people. They rose, they marched toward London, destroying tax records and documents that were evidence of serfdom, and one of the interesting things about the Peasants Revolt is that they  don’t seem to have acted like a mob but in a well-organized way. In London, their actions were tightly focused on the people they held responsible for passing and collecting the poll tax. 

If you’re still seeing men when you picture that not-a-mob, consult Professor Sylvia Federico, who argues that women were at the heart of the revolt and did pretty much the same things the men did. They incited crowds. “They were not shy to pick up staffs, sticks, and staves and wield them against perceived oppressors.” One woman was accused of encouraging a group to attack the prison at Maidstone in Kent, another of leading rebels to plunder a number of mansions, leaving servants too scared to return. 

 

Where does Jo come into the picture?

Um, we don’t really know. And neither do the experts. This is the problem with early history in general, but especially about the early history of common people and of women. The lower you sat in the hierarchy, the thinner a record you left behind. Not much is known about the revolt’s leader, Wat Tyler, either. So we can’t blame sexism alone for the lack of information. 

Sorry. I’d love to. Really I would.

What we do know is that Jo and her husband, John, lived in Rochester and owned what a Wikipedia entry (sorry–I try to use more stable sources but I’m desperate) describes as a “not insignificant amount of land.” 

From there, let’s fill in the picture around them: the revolt started in Essex and Kent and swept toward London–not that far if you have a car but a longer trip if you’re on foot with an impromptu army of your fellow furious commoners. Jo and John became part of that army. Court documents describe Jo as “chief perpetrator and leader of rebellious evildoers from Kent.” 

I’ll let the documents tell the tale, because they’re what we have to draw on:

“Joanna wife of John Ferrour of Rochester in the county of Kent went as the chief perpetrator and leader of a great society of rebellious wrongdoers from Kent on Thursday 13 June 1381 to the Savoy in the county of Middlesex and, as an enemy of the king, burned the said manor; she seized a chest containing £1000 and more belonging to John, Duke of Lancaster [you may know him as John of Gaunt], and then she put the said chest into a boat on the Thames and made off with it, all the way to Southwark, where she divided the gold between herself and others.”

How much money was £1,000? In 2024, it would’ve been something along the lines of $1,000,000, although why we’ve changed from pounds to dollars there is anybody’s guess. 

“On Friday 14 June 1381 the said Joanna went as head of the said company to the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in England and made a fire there and completely burnt that house, and carried off two horses loaded with wool worth 6 marks. And the same Joanna together with others went as chief leader to the Tower of London, and laid violent hands first on Simon, lately archbishop of Canterbury, and then on [treasurer] Brother Robert Hales, lately Prior of St John of Jerusalem in England, and she dragged them out of the Tower of London and ordered that they be beheaded.”

The same acts are also attributed jointly to her and her husband. And no, she or they didn’t burn down a building where the sick were cared for. Hospital didn’t take on that meaning until the sixteenth century, and it didn’t mean a place to look after the needy until the fifteenth. 

It’s anybody’s guess what Jo and John’s roles were before the moments when they appear in the historical record, as is what happens afterward. That’s the problem with history: you have to work with the facts. All the damn time. And when they’re scarce you don’t get to make them up.

John was acquitted of the charges against him. Jo wasn’t executed, which implies that she was acquitted, although there’s no record of it. Both their names appear later on the paperwork for houses they gave to Walter Northampton for we’ll never know what reason. You have to be alive for that, so let’s take it as evidence that they lived on after the revolt, unlike most of its leaders. 

How’d they manage that? John might’ve saved the life of the young Earl of Derby, Henry Bolingbroke, who went on to be Henry IV. He also might not have. Some sources name the man who saved Bolingbroke as John Ferrour of Southwark, not of Rochester. One has the kid’s life being saved by a guard named John Ferrour, which wouldn’t be the John Ferrour we’re following. Basically, we’ll never know, but it’s unusual that any leaders of the revolt survived. Most were hanged, with additional killings in Essex, where the revolt hadn’t quite died out. 

No records of women being executed after the revolt  have been found. 

 

And so . . . 

. . . we leave Jo and John in the middle of their story. They lived on. They gave someone a house. John was accused of murder later on and pardoned. And that’s about all we’ve got. The work of reclaiming history’s lost figures usually comes down to filling in a picture around them and leaving the center, where they should stand, empty. 

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I’ve focused on Jo here, and to some extent on John, which leaves the Peasants Revolt in the background. If you want the story of the revolt itself–and it’s an interesting bit of history–you can jump to an earlier post, where it’s foreground.