That lone farmer anchors Paul Greengrass’ new film The Uprising, in theaters Sept. 11. Written and directed by Greengrass, the filmmaker’s deepest reach into the past yet dramatizes the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when tens of thousands of English commoners, taxed past endurance in the long shadow of the Black Death, marched on London to demand a fairer world. Around Garfield, Greengrass assembled a cast that includes Jamie Bell as the rebel priest John Ball, Cosmo Jarvis as the revolt’s military leader Wat Tyler, Thomasin McKenzie as Alyce, a fictional follower of Ball, Woody Norman as the boy king Richard II, and Katherine Waterston as the Countess, Richard II’s mother.
Greengrass invented Ploughman for the film, but the forces pressing in on him are no invention. The director opted not to build The Uprising around one of the revolt’s historical figures, such as Tyler or Ball. “I didn’t want my central character to be a soldier or a priest,” he tells TIME. “I wanted him to be emblematic of all the tens of thousands of people who rose up. They were all ordinary farmers, ordinary people who lived in villages and small towns, who’d had enough.”
Tom Hollander as Treasurer Hales, Woody Norman as King Richard II and Katherine Waterston as The Countess —Courtesy fo Focus Features
The Black Death reached England in the summer of 1348, most likely aboard ships that came into the Dorset port of Melcombe. Moving through the country at an estimated one to five miles a day, it reached London by November and, within two years, killed as much as half of England’s population. In its wake, whole villages were left empty. The horror was intimate and unrelenting: households vanished, kin buried kin, and parishes lost the priests who once baptized and married their people. Fields went to weed, and livestock wandered untended; the familiar rhythms of rural life gave way to an eerie void.
That possibility ran up against what Jones calls the “vested interests of power structures.” In England, he says, the government “immediately passes laws to suppress wages”: It imposed a maximum wage and sent judges into the countryside to enforce it. Mass death had made the old hierarchy newly fragile, and Parliament moved to restore it, with the laborer kept in his place and the landowner’s command protected.
By the spring of 1381, deprivation gave way to imagination. People who ached for a better life were being ordered back into the old one, by statute and tax collector alike. The revolt drew force from a realization that threatened every hierarchy above it: the social order was made by people, and people could change it.
When the country catches light
Thomasin McKenzie as Alyce, Jamie Bell as John Ball, and Andrew Garfield as Ploughman —Courtesy of Focus FeaturesThe couplet most famously associated with Ball put the rebellion’s challenge in a single question: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” In a kingdom that understood rank as God’s design, the question was revolutionary. Adam worked the soil and Eve spun thread; no aristocrat stood beside them. So who, the couplet asks, gave one class the right to rule another?
The name history settled on undersells the people who rose up. “It’s a very broad coalition,” Jones says, and the term “Peasants’ Revolt,” a historian’s term, can “obscure just what a wide range of people were involved.” This was not a rising merely of the utterly destitute. Whole villages moved with their structures intact: local leaders, parish priests trusted with their neighbors’ souls, craftsmen, and laborers, were joined in the capital by Londoners keeping their own accounts of unfairness. By Jones’ estimate, the coalition’s grievances ran through some 85% of the country, aimed at a thin sliver at the top—not at the king, whom they claimed as their own, but at the advisers, bishops, aristocrats, and officials they believed corrupted the realm.
What happened inside the city is the part no telling can sanitize. The rebels threw open the prisons and set fire to the New Temple, a Thames-side compound where lawyers-in-training lived and kept the books and records that helped sustain the kingdom’s legal order. They breached the Tower itself, where the king sheltered, dragged out the two men they blamed for the tax, Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Treasurer Robert Hales, and beheaded them.
By midsummer, the revolt reached its breaking point. Richard II was 14, a boy raised from infancy to believe he was fated to save the realm. On June 14, he rode out to meet the rebels and granted their demands, the abolition of serfdom among them. At Smithfield the following day, Tyler was killed during a parley with the king’s entourage. Richard calmed the crowds by declaring they would have no leader but him, then turned against the rising. Within weeks, he canceled the freedom charters granted in London. His government hunted down the movement’s leaders and executed them, and the king is said to have told the petitioners that serfs they were and serfs they would remain, on terms harsher than before.
Garfield and the rebels —Courtesy of Focus Features
The Uprising grew from an ambition Greengrass held for years. The filmmaker behind United 93, Captain Phillips, The Lost Bus, and three of the Bourne films had long wanted to make a historical epic in the tradition of Gladiator and Braveheart. The material found him during the COVID-19 pandemic. He began writing on the second day of lockdown, when there were no vaccines and no way of knowing how far the crisis would spread. The last pandemic on that scale led him back to the 14th century. By the time Jones first met with Greengrass, a map of London during the rebellion was already hanging in the director’s office. Soon, the filmmaker says, the period felt “eerily contemporary.”
Jones sees the Peasants’ Revolt and medieval outlaw tales, including stories of Robin Hood, as products of the same political world: one in which ordinary people saw legal authority serving the powerful rather than protecting them. The early Robin Hood was no polished folk hero, Jones says, but a violent, devout yeoman pushed to society’s edge by corrupt officials. Its central tension was the “fundamental difference between law and justice.” As Greengrass puts it, at a time when people “felt powerless and betrayed,” they told stories “about outlaws who stood up to power when they couldn’t.”
Giving Ploughman a life
Garfield felt the pull of his role at once. “It’s not often that I will read something and fight to play that part, and I did that with Paul,” he says. His note arrived after years of halting development, from an actor Greengrass knew only casually. “It’s the email you dream of getting from a brilliant actor who says, ‘I’ve read your movie. I really want to be in it,’” Greengrass says.
His wife and children are dead before the film begins, but Garfield imagined the life Ploughman lost so he could carry that grief across the film. He developed their history and their absence until they became, as he puts it, the “kind of invisible visible spirit characters that are there throughout the story.” Their absence helps explain why the character continues to seek justice, even after the uprising begins to lose its way. “They are the characters that are drawing him forward throughout the action of the film,” Garfield says.
Greengrass places Ploughman’s awakening beside Richard’s. “Here’s this powerless farmer who is struggling to find agency in the world,” he says, and opposite him is “this 14-year-old boy king” trying to find agency of his own. Their paths cross, then diverge. “One goes from being the farmer to the outlaw, and the other goes from being the powerless king to the tyrant.”
With little of medieval London still standing, Bavaria offered spaces that could be more readily adapted for the film’s 14th-century settings. At Penzing Studios, the open-air museum at Bad Windsheim, the fortress at Lichtenau, and sites in Nuremberg, the production found medieval stonework, corridors, chapels, crypts, and staircases suited to the royal court. St. Sebaldus Church, built in the 13th century, became several locations within the film. Constructed sets and visual effects widened those spaces.
What the revolt left behind
Woody Norman as King Richard II —Courtesy of Focus FeaturesBy summer’s end of 1381, the rising was broken: Tyler dead, Ball captured and executed, and the freedom charters canceled. Measured against its concrete demands, the revolt failed almost completely.
Greengrass’ ambivalence about such moments in history stems from his early work as a documentarian, when he filmed upheaval in Northern Ireland, apartheid South Africa, and other places where political orders were breaking apart. “Revolutions always eat themselves,” he says. “They start off with people’s intense hopes and dreams, but once you pull authority down, the result is chaos, and it’s only later, when it’s all over, that you can draw a ledger.” How to weigh that ledger, Greengrass leaves to the audience: gripped, he trusts, by Ploughman's journey, recognizing something of their own restless present in its medieval setting, and free to draw their own conclusions.
That invisibility is rooted in centuries of historical silence. The archive remembers the crown, the church, and the officials who repressed the uprising more fully than it preserves the villagers who made it possible. Nearly everything that survives of the rebels comes down through their enemies’ pens; Greengrass’ film reaches toward lives that history left largely unseen. And while the revolt was put down in a distant summer, the claim beneath it—to dignity and agency—was not. It outlived the gallows, the revoked charters, and the chroniclers who reduced the people to a mob, and it endures in a handful of letters attributed to Ball urging the ploughmen of England to hold fast, written as if their author knew that in some inky field, one of them would look up. With The Uprising, Greengrass made a film about the man who does.
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