Thesis: During the Middle Ages peasants made a number of revolts against taxation and duties forced on them by monarchs and the papacy, while monarchs made a stance against papal authority. Main Point 1: Peasants felt that "taxing life's essentials" was an unfair practice of the state, and they objected to governmental regulations disregarding their local traditions. (Mather 1, 2) Main Point 2: The monarchy, now at "the dawn of the modern-nation state", resented papal authority and began "diverting and restricting church tax revenues" from Rome once they realized the connection between the fullness of the pope's power and the fullness of the pope's treasury. (Mather 3).
Part 2:.
In the early to mid-fourteenth century Europe was in the midst of an economic crisis, and compounding this problem, Europeans were being ravaged by the Bubonic Plague. The millions of people who died during the Black Death created economic turmoil, and "nobles tried to make peasants bear the brunt of the crisis." The peasants in defense of their rights rose up in a series of revolts against the nobles. (Perry, Chase, Jacob, Jacob, and Von Laue 281-283) " Panicked peasants, pompous prelates, and passing gas: a brief survey of tax revolts in the Middle Ages" expounds upon the general knowledge of the tax revolts in the Middle Ages because it provides specific examples of the peasants revolting against the monarchy and papacy, because it delves deeper into how the monarchy resisted papal authority, and because it shows how the people of this time were on their way to a societal revolution.
Economic and social tensions between the peasants and nobles escalated into rebellions, and although each rebellion had its own specific causes, it generally was because the peasants were reacting to protect their traditional rights. In 1323 the free peasants of Flanders rose up in revolts that lasted five bloody years in their attempt to resist old manorial obligations being placed over them.
