AK Blakemore retells the story of Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
In a nutshell, I read books for a living. I interview authors for The Bookseller's weekly Author Profile slot and write the monthly New
...moreThe award-winning writer returns with her most ambitious historical novel yet, unfolding hour by hour across 16 turbulent days.
In a nutshell, I read books for a living. I interview authors for The Bookseller's weekly Author Profile slot and write the monthly New
...moreThe poll tax – that is, a tax levied per head rather than per household – has not been very successful in these isles. When it was introduced most recently, by the Conservative government in 1990, it prompted widespread outrage and rebellious acts both large and small across England. A friend of mine claimed to have paid his at the post office in pennies, sliding them one by one across the counter, and an anti-poll tax march in London drew an estimated 100,000 protesters. It did for Margaret Thatcher, forcing her resignation at the close of that year.
Clearly, no one in charge was paying attention to the history books. The first attempt at imposing a poll tax on the populace occurred 600-odd years earlier, leading to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – and this is the subject of AK Blakemore’s extraordinary third novel, an involving, exhilarating tour de force.
We begin on the road to Brentwood, Essex, with two men, childhood friends, on horseback; Jack Straw, a farmer and family man, and Robbie Crane, a soldier and veteran of the long wars with France, who will soon be known by another name – Wat Tyler. Doom Painting unfolds hour by thrilling hour, across 16 turbulent days and 672 pages, to tell the story of how one Essex boy rose to lead a ramshackle peasant army of thousands in protest against unfair taxation in a country that had not long survived the Black Death. “It is just astonishing to think that one guy, Wat Tyler, becomes one of the most important people in Europe for about two weeks,” observes Blakemore, when we sit in the cosy front room in her very old house in Essex – complete with, she shows me, actual witches’ marks on the wooden beam above the fireplace.
It’s a novel, more than anything, about how we imagine vastly better worlds than the ones we’re living in
Blakemore cannot remember exactly when she first heard the story of Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt. With a bookseller father passionate about history, she reckons it might have been a childhood visit to the Tower of London, or perhaps it was growing up close to Blackheath, the site of preacher John Ball’s rousing sermon to the peasants. It has been a part of English history that has long “fascinated” her, and when she moved from London to Essex three years ago, to a picturesque town mentioned in the annals of the Peasants’ Revolt, the time felt right: “Not in a sort of witchy-woo way, but I felt a more intimate connection to that history living here.”
But she needed to find the right way in. As fans of her previous books will know, she does not “just want to write a past tense, first-person historical novel”. Doom Painting swoops down for the close perspectives of the central players – among them Tyler, spoilt boy-king Richard II and his mother Joan – but also pulls back to soar far above the countryside observing the slow-gathering masses.
The prose is gorgeous, opulent and rich; the man who will become Tyler is, Blakemore writes, “a wolf, madly fang-brained – a creature of a decade’s gestation in the blood-soaked soils of France”. Her writing brings the towns of medieval England to vibrant, eye-wateringly pungent life (it is one of the most olfactorily fulsome novels I have ever read) while also evoking “a world that felt more charged with meaning, and sacred, than ours does”. The descriptions of the natural world are fresh and vivid. These peasants are not just living off the land, we understand, they are as one with it.
The dialogue blends the medieval with the modern day, which gives it an earthy immediacy. The year 1381 is, at the same time, unfathomably far back in time and also within touching distance. Blakemore credits Chaucer (who makes several appearances in the novel) for this. “I read a lot of Chaucer to try and get back into that rhythm of speech and also pick up those juicy little words and vocabulary that it felt like I could transpose into the novel without it being too alienating for a contemporary reader. But yeah, it was just wildly fun to write as well. Dialogue is always my favourite part.”
There are also some distinctly non-medieval bits. “I love a bit of cheeky anachronism. I’m really into that, I suppose because I’m not writing novels that I want to be 100% authentic mirrors of the past. They’re artificial. A sort of modern representation of history always has to be. So, I want you to be able to see the seams and the scaffolding.”
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Blakemore’s debut novel, The Manningtree Witches, set at the time of the English Civil War, established her from the off as a writer of truly original literary historical fiction. It won the Desmond Elliott Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. Her second novel, The Glutton, was set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, and now the Peasants’ Revolt – she seems very fond of a revolution? “You see the best and the worst of human behaviour. You know, solidarity and daring and bravery, but also, very often, unwanted violence and chaos and people making very bad decisions in these moments. And that’s really interesting to me, those kind of extremes of human behaviour that revolutionary political moments unleash.”
She is also drawn to writing about those at the opposite end of the social spectrum to royalty or nobility, perhaps the traditional focus of historical fiction. This has its advantages, creatively, as not much is known about the real Tyler. Blakemore’s Tyler is 33 years old “because I was 33 when I started writing it. And I also wanted it to be his Jesus year, you know, sort of messianic echoes.”
A “doom painting” is a type of medieval devotional artwork that shows the end of the world, designed for peasants who could not read: “So, they’re very often very funny and vivid and have this Hieronymus Bosch quality to them… you’ve got the fishwives and the prostitutes being sent down to hell in one corner and the very, very boring, virtuous, pious people rising up to heaven and Jesus presiding over it all and little demons dancing around poking everyone with sticks.” These paintings, with “that sort of Chaucerian everyone-in-the-boat quality”, felt like the “visual equivalent of what I was trying to do in the novel”.
But the title can be read in another way. Blakemore explains that the word “doom” was not necessarily negative to the medieval mind. It meant the end of the world, but also the future: “Going to meet your doom just meant experiencing what was going to happen next.” So, “doom painting”, read as a verb, means trying to envision or imagine one’s future. “One of the things that I find most astonishing about the Peasants’ Revolt is you have these people that we think of as quite backward and non-literate… imagining these really quite radical, unbelievably radical, changes to the world.”
“It’s a novel, more than anything, about how we imagine vastly better worlds than the ones we’re living in and how we do that together and how that is absolutely vital if we want the world to get better, I suppose.”
Now, that is a lesson for the history books.
Metadata
Imprint Granta Books
Publication 24th September 2026
Formats HB (£20, 9781803512730); EB (£20, 9781803512761)
Rights sold Two territories to date, including the US (Scribner)
Editor Bella Lacey
Agent Zoe Ross, United Agents
