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🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 50,000 people marched on London.⚔️ The government said it wasn't that many. 🇬🇧 It was much, much more. This is not the first time 📜 It is 1381. England. You wake. The frost is on the ground. You are a serf. You cannot leave your village without permission. You cannot marry without permission. You cannot sell your own labour. The land you work belongs to a lord you have never met. Your father was a serf. His father was a serf. You have been told your son will be a serf too. So you were told. But something had cracked 💔 The Black Death had taken half of England thirty years before. Labour was scarce. Wages had risen. For three decades, ordinary people had been quietly getting richer. The powerful hated it. Every law they made, the people walked around. Then John of Gaunt, the king's uncle and the richest man in England, taxed every adult the same shilling to pay for the war in France 💰 The Poll Tax. In four years, they tried it three times. The third one was one too many. In May 1381, a tax commissioner arrived in the Essex village of Fobbing. The villagers drove him out. The king sent soldiers. The villagers drove them out too. You hear what happened at Fobbing. You hear what happened next. Essex rose first. Then Kent. Then the eastern counties. Villages emptied. In Kent, a man called Wat Tyler took command ⚔️ His first move was to break open Maidstone Prison and free a radical priest called John Ball. By the time they reached Blackheath, just south of the Thames, they were 50,000 strong. That night, John Ball climbed onto a cart and asked a question that would echo for 600 years: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" 📜 They burned the Savoy Palace 🔥 Gaunt escaped on horseback to Scotland. The next morning, the king rode out to meet them. Richard II. Fourteen years old. Just a boy on a horse, in front of 50,000 armed peasants. He agreed to everything. End serfdom. End forced labour. End the Poll Tax. He had clerks write charters of freedom sealed with the royal seal 👑 You hold one in your hands. Freedom. You have won. The next day at Smithfield, the Lord Mayor of London stabbed Wat Tyler in the throat 🗡️ The king rode forward alone and persuaded the crowd to follow him out of London. Then he revoked every promise. "Serfs you are. And serfs you shall remain." 1,500 rebels were executed. John Ball was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Albans. The king was there to see it. The dream is dead. Or so it looks. But they thought they had lost. They had not 📜 The Poll Tax was never collected again in their lifetime. Or their children's lifetime. It would be 609 years before any government in England dared to try it again. Within a hundred years, serfdom in England had effectively died out. Not because the powerful chose to free their people. Because the powerful had learned what happened when they refused 🏛️ The lesson did not die. The Putney Debates. The Levellers. The Chartists. The Tolpuddle Martyrs. The Suffragettes. Every uprising drew on what happened at Smithfield. In 1990, a Prime Minister tried to bring the Poll Tax back. 200,000 people marched on London again. Following the same route the peasants took 600 years earlier. The tax was withdrawn within a year. Within months, the Prime Minister was gone. The powerful learned the same lesson. They always learn the same lesson. Every right we have today was taken, not given. By people like the 50,000 on Blackheath. 📖 Read the full story, get the lesson plan, share the facts → ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ They are still here 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 In every protest. In every refusal. In every "enough" spoken to a power that demanded too much. Same faces. Same blood. Same island 🇬🇧 This is our island. This is our story. This is our culture to keep 📜 Every story we tell, a supporter paid to keep alive. Without them, these stories stay in the past. Without you, the next one never comes out. 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

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