The phrase “peasants’ revolt” inevitably conjures scenes of chaotic rebellion perpetrated – as the late 14th-century chronicler Thomas Walsingham put it, with fastidious disgust – by “filthy” rustics, “uncouth and sordid” serfs, and “ribalds and whores of the devil”. But historians have long ceased to talk in dismissive terms about the events of early summer 1381, when southern and eastern England erupted in violent protest against the corrupt and spendthrift government of the 14-year-old king, Richard II. Lasting a matter of weeks, the uprising was put down with uncompromising force, and in the end achieved none of its stated aims. Yet, along with the names of its heroes (or bogeymen, depending on your view), Jack Straw, Wat Tyler and the radical preacher John Ball, the Peasants’ Revolt has endured in the national imagination like few other popular uprisings before or since.

The title of Juliet Barker’s perceptive book nods to the “English Rising”, an alternative name for the revolt coined by the great Marxist historian Rodney Hilton. It’s an indication of her ambition: to throw light on how and why the revolt occurred, and to bring into focus its participants, dismissed by contemporary chroniclers as an amorphous mass. As historians have long argued and as Barker shows, the “peasants’ revolt” is a misnomer: it was more complicated than that.

In late May 1381, locals in the Essex town of Brentwood ran royal commissioners, who had been seeking taxes, out of town. The tax in question was the third in a sequence of poll taxes, which placed the tax burden on all people aged 14 and over. Behind this immediate trigger for revolt lay a number of issues. Following the horrors of the Black Death and subsequent epidemics of plague, England’s population had fallen by somewhere between a third and a half. Labour was scarce, making the bargaining power of those who had it to sell much greater: a potentially fluid situation that was a disturbing proposition for landowners, both lay and ecclesiastical. Their response, the 1351 Statute of Labourers, marked a nadir in medieval legislation, as Barker notes: “repressive lordship at its worst”. Designed specifically to keep people in their place, and to ensure a continued supply of cheap labour, the statute imposed a wage freeze at pre-Black Death levels and forced the landless and craftless into compulsory labour. To a people with a growing awareness of their rights and grievances as well as the value of their work, the enforcement of this statute, combined with a series of repressive taxes was, by 1381, insupportable.

In exploring the landscape of discontent in late-14th-century England, Barker reveals the texture of the rebellion: showing how the insurgents comprised not a monolithic block of rustics – however much it suited the likes of Walsingham, a man squarely on the side of the establishment, to portray them as such – but a diverse, often articulate and aspirational group, many of whom lived in towns, owned property, and participated in economic and (as far as they were able) political life. In attempting to tease apart what she terms “‘real’ or politically motivated acts of rebellion” from the opportunistic acts of score-settling, criminality and copycat violence that inevitably accompanies revolt, Barker shows how the rebels articulated a set of political ideas and aims that were both revolutionary and grounded in the contemporary language of protest, encapsulated in their watchword: “With whom do you hold? With King Richard and the true commons”. At all times proclaiming their loyalty to the young king, the rebels aimed to sweep away the crowd of corrupt figures around him – men like his extravagantly wealthy and high-handed uncle, John of Gaunt, responsible for a string of military failures; the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury; and the king’s treasurer, Sir Robert Hales – and with them, the props of an unequal society.

From Essex to east Anglia and beyond, Barker shows how the rebels’ violence almost always had focus: usually local officials and their administrative and legal records, the instruments of their repression. The rebels’ targets included religious foundations, some of the biggest landowners in the country: at Bury St Edmunds, they entered the heavily fortified abbey precincts, forced the monks to hand over charters and muniments, dragged out an unfortunate official and beat him unconscious before decapitating him, adding his head to a growing number adorning the town’s pillory. In London, they made their way straight through the city, past other tempting targets, to John of Gaunt’s opulent Savoy Palace on the Strand: there, they sacked the building and torched it. One man, trying to make off with a piece of silver, was thrown into the fire by his fellow rebels who stressed the purity of their cause: they “were lovers of truth and justice, not robbers and thieves”. Gaunt was out of town at the time. Others were not so lucky: Sudbury and Hales, found sheltering in the Tower, were taken out and beheaded (apparently, it took eight cuts to decapitate Sudbury), their severed heads jammed on poles and paraded through the city.

The rebels insisted on receiving a mandate for their actions from the king himself, in person. On 14 June, in an extraordinary confrontation at Mile End, Richard granted them everything they asked for, setting out his concessions in an official letter, drafts of which still survive. For Barker, this is a revolutionary document, detailing, among other things, the total abolition of serfdom in England. What’s more, she contends, it was the product of a king who was patently sincere in his sympathy for the rebels’ aims. Under the direction of his council, Richard subsequently revoked these letters.

However, in the parliament that followed the revolt’s suppression, he asked the Commons (a group of merchants and gentry who took a dim view of the uprising and were, in Barker’s view, “part of the problem”) whether his revocation had been “well made”: “yes”, came the predictable reply. For Barker, this exchange is evidence of Richard’s continued identification with the defeated rebels’ cause. While this may be a moot point, there is much to suggest that the rebels themselves, armed with the royal letters, genuinely believed that they were acting with both the law and the king on their side. It was an assumption that would come back to bite them.

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.

Here, the larger-than-life figures of Ball, Tyler and Straw are little more than walk-on parts, for the simple reason that there are comparatively few contemporary references to them; they are joined by other, more unfamiliar leaders, from the impressively civic-minded St Albans leader William Grindcobbe, a self-proclaimed martyr to his cause, to the more volatile figure of John Wrawe, one of the east Anglian inciters-in-chief. England, Arise purposely slows down the vertiginous speed of the revolt’s progression to a more deliberate pace, in order to explore not the main events of the rebellion but their hinterland. In this, it is a considerable achievement, a meticulous anatomy of this most resonant of uprisings.

• Thomas Penn’s Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England is published by Penguin