The Uprising true story: Wat Tyler and John Ball really existed — the Robin Hood ending never happened

The Uprising opened in the US on September 10, 2026 and in the UK on October 9, written and directed by Paul Greengrass, with Andrew Garfield as a grieving ploughman, Cosmo Jarvis as Wat Tyler, Jamie Bell as John Ball, and Woody Norman as the teenage Richard II. It cost $20 million, took $7.7 million, and sits at 55% on Rotten Tomatoes. The history it's working from is unusually well documented for the fourteenth century, which makes the departures easy to spot.

The revolt, with dates

The Black Death hit England in 1348 and killed something close to half the population. Fewer workers should have meant higher wages; Parliament capped them instead, then levied three poll taxes between 1376 and 1380. Collection on the third one is where it breaks.

• May 30, 1381 — royal official John Bampton tries to collect unpaid tax at Brentwood, Essex, and is driven off. Essex rises, then Kent.
• June 12 — John Ball, a radical priest sprung from prison by the Kentish rebels, preaches at Blackheath. His line is the one everyone still quotes: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?"
• June 13 — the rebels cross into London, open the prisons, burn legal records, and torch John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace.
• June 14 — Richard II, fourteen years old, meets them at Mile End and grants charters abolishing serfdom. While he's there, rebels take the Tower of London and behead Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Treasurer Robert Hales.
• June 15 — Richard meets Wat Tyler at Smithfield. Tyler is stabbed after a confrontation with London's mayor, William Walworth, and dies.

Richard then talked the crowd into dispersing, revoked every charter he'd signed the day before, and let the reprisals run. John Ball was tried at St Albans and executed on July 15. At least 1,500 rebels were dead by November.

"Basic economics tell us that if you lose half the people, wages should go up. Rent should come down," historian Dan Jones told TIME in 2026, describing what the surviving peasantry expected and what Parliament made sure they didn't get.

What the film adds

Garfield's Ploughman is not a historical figure. He's a composite built to give the rebellion a face that isn't Tyler's, and his arc — a tax collector, a lost temper, a spreading revolt — compresses the Essex rising into one man's grief.

The epilogue is the real invention. A year on, the Ploughman is in the forest in green, leading outlaws with bows. Greengrass is proposing the Peasants' Revolt as an origin story for Robin Hood.

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There is no chronicle connecting the two. The Robin Hood ballads were already circulating before 1381 — William Langland's Piers Plowman, written around 1377, has a character who knows "rymes of Robyn Hood" — and the early texts place him in a reign of Edward, not Richard. No rebel leader escaped into Sherwood. Tyler died at Smithfield, Ball died at St Albans, and the survivors were hanged or pardoned.

Focus Features rebranded the US release as "The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood" three weeks before it opened — contradicting the UK distributor's framing and spoiling the epilogue in the process.

What actually changed

The revolt failed inside 48 hours, and the charters were worthless by the end of the month. Serfdom still ended — it drained away over the next seventy years and was effectively finished by 1450 — and Parliament never tried another poll tax, cutting overseas military spending instead, which did the Hundred Years' War no favors.

Jones's summary of the significance is the part the film gets right, even with the forest attached: 1381 is the point where ordinary people walk onto the political stage in England and never leave it again.

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