Simon Kitchener

This Impatient Nettle Simon Kitchener

This Impatient Nettle is a historical novel set during the Peasants' Revolt. Eschewing the mythology surrounding this event, the narrative stays close to the known facts and follows some of the key players in the two-week uprising of June 1381. It tells their story from a human perspective, relating the remarkable events in a way any person might have, had they been alive to see them. Why a human perspective? Because whatever the significance of the Peasants' Revolt, it was primarily a human struggle initiated by identifiable people. For the 30 years leading up to the Revolt, the rulers of England had stubbornly refused to adjust to the demographic and economic shifts that proceeded the Black Death. During those decades the economy grew, resulting in significant numbers of people becoming relatively, and absolutely, better off. The rulers, mostly land-holders and the Church, reacted to these circumstantial changes, through their rapacious agents, with increasingly punitive and corrupt behaviours all designed to confiscate the commoners' wealth. When an increasingly independently-minded folk eventually responded, they found no resistance and so took their cause all the way to the king. It was not freedom from serfdom the rebel leaders sought, they were already free of that, it was freedom from an officially sanctioned extortion racket widely seen as iniquitous. This is their story, told from the perspective of real and fictitious folk who, for whatever reason, found themselves caught up in a mid-summer's dream that ended as nightmare.