ABSTRACT
The historian of the 1381 rising is well placed compared with historians of the other movements we have described. In the first place, perhaps most importantly, the survival of English manorial records has made it possible for him to gain a much more detailed and continuous knowledge of the facts of village life over the century and a half preceding the outbreak of the rising than has been possible in the case of other countries. Similarly, the survival of government records, including tax lists, but especially the records of the royal courts of justice, enables us to see, as if on a public platform, the conflicting issues between government and subject and lord and peasant. Even the deliberate destruction of manorial records as an act of policy by the peasants themselves in 1381
the chroniclers of Flanders, France and Spain may have recorded important information about events in their countries, few measure up in detail or interest to such English chroniclers as Thomas Walsingham, or the author of the Anonimalle chronicle, to mention only two out of a half-dozen more or less independent sources. Finally, though we lack a source comparable with the list of the dead at the Battle of Cassel, surviving indictments of rebels presented in the royal tribunals after the defeat of the rising supplement the narrative of the chroniclers as to the scale of local actions, as well as containing information about the wealth and occupations of the rebels.
