Now that copyright rules allow me to freely share some of my peer-reviewed research, over the next few weeks I’ll be making available some of the PDFs for people to download. The first that I will share is my article on Chartist newspaper portrayals of Wat Tyler.

Reference:

Basdeo, Stephen, ‘Rousing the Spirit of Wat Tyler: Chartist Newspaper Portrayals of the Rebel Leader’, in Subaltern Medievalisms: Medievalism ‘from below’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. by Michael Sanders and David Matthews (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021), pp. 110-123.

Description

“Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’: Chartist Newspaper Portrayals of the Rebel Leader” examines the nineteenth-century political afterlife of Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and argues that the Chartists played a far greater role in rehabilitating his reputation than has usually been recognised. While earlier writers often portrayed Tyler as a violent demagogue and celebrated his killing by the Lord Mayor William Walworth as a patriotic act, this chapter shows how Chartist journalists, poets, and editors transformed him into a heroic figure of labouring-class resistance. In doing so, they turned Tyler from a villain of elite historiography into a symbol of protest, liberty, and historical memory.

The chapter focuses especially on the appearance of Wat Tyler in Chartist newspapers and related radical print culture, including titles such as The Northern Star, The Odd Fellow, and the English Chartist Circular. These publications did more than simply mention Tyler in passing. They reprinted Robert Southey’s radical drama Wat Tyler, published original poems, and offered historical commentaries that treated the Peasants’ Revolt as the first great struggle of the British working classes against an oppressive ruling elite. The chapter therefore challenges older scholarship which suggested that Tyler’s legacy was only marginal or ambiguous within Chartism. Instead, it demonstrates that Tyler occupied an important place in the movement’s political imagination.

A central argument of this study is that Chartist writers were engaged in creating an alternative national history “from below.” At a time when mainstream historians focused upon kings, ministers, and “great men,” radical writers looked instead to rebels, labourers, and popular movements. Wat Tyler became the focal point of this alternative tradition because he could be represented as a man of the people who opposed tyranny, unjust taxation, and class oppression. Through poetry, newspaper essays, and historical sketches, Chartists recast the events of 1381 as an early workers’ struggle whose memory could inspire modern campaigns for democracy and political reform.

The chapter also explores the literary methods through which this rehabilitation took place. Chartist poets presented Tyler as a respectable rebel, a patriotic labouring man, and even a mythic revolutionary voice speaking across the centuries. In some poems he is shown exhorting Victorian workers not to forget the struggles of the past; in others he becomes a symbol for unfinished political business after the disappointment of 1848. The study further shows that Chartist appropriations of Tyler were linked to wider themes in radical culture, including class consciousness, republicanism, popular education, and international solidarity with oppressed peoples abroad.

By tracing these newspaper portrayals, this chapter demonstrates that the Chartists did much more than borrow a medieval rebel for rhetorical colour. They helped secure Wat Tyler’s place in modern political memory. Their writings ensured that he would survive not merely as a figure from the chronicles, but as a lasting emblem of resistance whose legacy would later be taken up by socialists and other left-wing movements. This essay is therefore a study of Chartism, radical print culture, medievalism, and the enduring power of historical rebellion in nineteenth-century Britain.

Significance

This chapter is significant because it revises the history of Wat Tyler’s reception by showing that the Chartists were central to his nineteenth-century rehabilitation. Rather than treating him as a marginal medieval figure, Chartist writers made Tyler a hero of working-class memory and used his story to build an alternative national tradition rooted in labour, protest, and resistance to oppression. The essay also highlights the importance of newspapers and popular poetry in shaping political historical consciousness, showing how radical print culture preserved and reinvented the past for new democratic struggles.