England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381
Juliet Barker

Book Reviews

• "thorough, clear-eyed and intelligent new volume adds much to the field: packed with vivid pen portraits of the rebels and the men they hunted, and with several interesting new arguments about key figures and moments in the rebellion... a vivid and exciting portrait of a country in angry upheaval ."
  Dan Jones, Sunday Times
• "vivid and exciting narrative history of the Peasants' Revolt with plenty of modern echoes of the popular rage."
  Sunday Times
• "...this brilliant account..a richly detailed account of the England of 1381 based on painstaking detective work..."
  Times
• "...a seriously good book, scholarly but a terrific read quietly sorting out myth from probably truth, leaving the crisis of the 14th century as clear as it is likely to become..."
  Tribune
• "…serious and valuable…"
  Helen Castor, Literary Review
• "Superb analysis of the real story behind the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381…a compelling narrative of a struggle against injustice ."
  Eastern Daily News
• "An accessible and informative read for history enthusiasts and useful for undergraduate students as the most complete modern account of the rising… An engaging and thought-provoking account…"
  History Today
• "Barker is meticulous about her research… It is Barker’s great skill in selecting precisely the right small, individual human stories that really bring the past alive."
  Yorkshire Post
• "...an accessible and informative read for history enthusiasts and useful for undergraduate students as the most complete modern account of the rising…an engaging and thought-provoking account."
  History Today
• "Juliet Barker’s timely and comprehensive new history of the Great Revolt of 1381 … shows that, without doubt, the turmoil of 1381 cannot be left off anyone’s list."
  New Statesman
• "Barker brings order to the patchwork of uprisings – “a confused series of events happening simultaneously in many places”, lamented Walsingham – not as they unfolded through time, but region by region. Hers is a thickly descriptive account, recovering the names and lives of the rebels, and the circumstances that forced them briefly on to the historical stage ...it is a considerable achievement, a meticulous anatomy of this most resonant of uprisings."
  The Guardian
• "British historian Juliet Barker, in her 2005 book Agincourt, took an incredibly familiar and much-studied subject and, through a combination of painstaking research and clear, strong prose, worked the minor miracle of making it seem entirely new, and she worked a similar miracle in her massive volume on the lives of the Brontes. So it should come as no revelation that her new book … is a stunning performance – but even so, the sheer heft and confident inquiry of the thing out-does even Barker’s own previous excellent work … [it is] by far the best history of that rebellion ever written."
  Open Letters Monthly: an Arts and Literature Review
• "...amazing parallels exist between the past and the present, as Juliet Barker brilliantly exposes ..."
  Camden New Journal
• "A wonderfully readable, almost gossipy account of proceedings, with lots about the people involved. It sweeps along with the vividness of a novel, but even more dramatic…This is a great read for anyone with the slightest interest in a largely-neglected chapter in our history ."
  Northern Echo
• "...detailed and based on thorough research."
  Times Literary Supplement
• ".. thoroughly researched, engagingly written "
  BBC History Magazine