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One man has Wat Tyler by the neck, with a sword up in his other hand. This is William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London. A royal squire ran Tyler through a moment later, in front of the king who had come out to hear him.

A 14-year-old king rode out to a meadow at Smithfield, just outside London’s wall, on the fifteenth of June, 1381, to talk to tens of thousands of angry countrymen who had already taken the city. Richard the Second had been king since he was ten. For three days the rising the schoolbooks call the Peasants’ Revolt had run through London. They burned the Savoy Palace of the king’s uncle and broke open the prisons. They stormed the Tower itself, dragged out the Archbishop of Canterbury, and cut off his head on Tower Hill. The trigger had been a poll tax, a flat charge on every head, and it fell hardest on the poor. Under it lay a whole world of anger left by the plague a generation earlier. The plague had killed so many workers that the survivors wanted higher wages, and the lords had passed laws to stop them. At Smithfield the rebel leader, a man remembered as Wat Tyler, came forward to put demands to the boy: an end to serfdom, an end to lordship beyond the king’s. What happened next happened fast and is disputed in every detail. Tyler said or did something taken as insolent. The Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth, spurred in and struck him, and a royal squire named Ralph Standish ran him through. Tyler wheeled his horse, cried out to the commons that he was killed, and fell. For a moment it could have tipped either way, thousands of armed men watching their leader drop in front of the king who had come out to talk with them. What the 14-year-old did then is the thing worth keeping. He rode forward alone, toward the crowd. According to Froissart he asked them whether they would shoot their own king, and told them he would be their captain and would give them what they wanted. He led them off the field, north to the open ground at Clerkenwell, while Walworth galloped back into the city for the militia. The promises were worthless. Once the crowds had dispersed to their villages the charters of freedom were revoked, the ringleaders hunted down and hanged, and serfdom went on. But at Clerkenwell the boy had walked into a mob that had spent three days killing his ministers, and talked it into going home. The picture is a manuscript miniature from a copy of Froissart made about 90 years later, painted in Bruges by Loyset Liédet in the 1470s. It tells the story twice in one frame, as medieval painters often did. On the left Walworth in the act of striking Tyler down. On the right the young king on horseback in blue, facing a wall of armored men who wear the red cross of Saint George, the crowd he has just turned. Tyler’s head went up on London Bridge, on the same spikes where his rebels had lately mounted the heads of the men they killed.