For decades, I’ve been showing my medieval history students the “autonomous collective” scene from the 1975 film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

The clip is funny because it features two medieval peasants haranguing King Arthur while using the lexicon of a modern political Marxist. When Arthur explains that he was their king because the Lady of the Lake gave him Excalibur, one of the peasants objects: “Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!”

It also subverts the assumption that medieval people were politically passive, with resistance to abuses of authority largely absent before the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation.

But far from being an age of unquestioning obedience, the Middle Ages – the period from roughly 500 to 1500 – witnessed a remarkable number of popular revolts and collective political action.

Even if they didn’t speak in the language of Karl Marx, ordinary people back then held strong views about the working of political authority. And when they believed authorities had violated their obligations or lost their legitimacy, they routinely challenged rulers, bishops, tax collectors and urban elites.

Enough is enough

In the 11th and 12th centuries, northern French peasants famously resisted carrying out the work or paying the money that they owed to the lords who controlled the land they farmed.

But perhaps the most well-known insurrection is the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the subject of the new film “The Uprising,” starring Andrew Garfield.

After the first wave of the Black Death in 1348 created a massive labor shortage in Europe, workers were better positioned to negotiate for higher wages and better conditions. Serfs – peasants bound to the land and subject to a lord’s authority – increasingly pushed back against oppressive feudal obligations.

But kings and lords resisted change. In 1351, England’s King Edward III decreed the Statute of Laborers, which froze wages, derailing any aspiration for social mobility among the peasant class. Resentment continued to build with recurring episodes of the plague.

Then, in 1381, Edward’s grandson and successor – 12-year-old King Richard II – instituted a one-time tax of 12 pence to raise funds for England’s ongoing war with France. Because the tax was charged per person rather than according to wealth, it placed a particularly heavy burden on poorer families.

The people had had enough: Crowds attacked tax collectors and eventually organized into a larger movement, burning houses, castles and the records that documented their obligations to their lords. They killed government officials before marching to London to confront the king.

The king met the rebels and pledged to abolish the poll tax and serfdom, while lowering the rent of agricultural land.

He later recanted those promises: His forces hunted down the rebels, quashing the uprising.

A tradition of collective action

Insurrections like the English Peasants’ Revolt erupted, in part, because in cities across Europe, regular people had cultivated a strong tradition of collective action. There was broad membership in guilds, which were voluntary associations of merchants and craftsmen. Then there were neighborhood religious confraternities, which were akin to today’s religious mutual-aid societies. Together, they gave ordinary townspeople networks through which they could organize around shared interests and grievances.

Over in France, the Hundred Years’ War caused a breakdown in authority. People were increasingly being asked to pay taxes they couldn’t afford. Unpaid troops routinely raided the countryside, and the French military suffered a number of significant military defeats.

In 1358, the Jacques – a derogatory name for members of the lower French peasantry – razed noble estates and killed members of the aristocracy. They also joined forces with the Parisian bourgeoisie and the city’s chief political leader, Étienne Marcel, to fight for a greater voice in French government.

The rage underpinning the violence of what became known as the Jacquerie emerged from the fact that the same aristocracy that demanded so much of them could not fulfill their basic part of the bargain: protect them.

A little over a decade later, violence erupted in Florence, Italy. The city-state was an industrial juggernaut ruled by guilds, but their representatives all belonged to the urban elite. The lower classes of the textile industry weren’t represented by guilds and were largely disenfranchised. So the Ciompi – low-level woolworkers – demanded a role in the guild system. Those demands fell on deaf ears.

In June 1378, the Ciompi revolted and attacked government offices. Thanks to their efforts, they won participation in the guild system for four years, up until the city’s old powerful merchant elite dissolved their lower guilds.

Contesting the church

Nor was the other main source of authority, the church, immune to attack.

When power vacuums emerged after the death of an abbot, bishop or even the pope, regular people routinely ransacked their property, taking with them a substantial amount of the dead’s movables.

As cardinal Peter Damian wrote in 1050:

“From various reports we are aware of the perverse and wholly detestable practice of certain people, who at the death of the bishop break in like enemies and rob his house, like thieves make off with his belongings, set fire to the homes on his estate, and with fierce and savage barbarity cut down his grape vines and orchards.”

Early Christian elections were initially open to entire congregations. Though these elections often gave the lion’s share of voting power to the wealthy and well-connected, there was the general understanding that everyone would play a role: “vox populi, vox Dei,” or “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”

However, by the end of the 13th century, the papacy had successfully established its authority over both ordinary people and secular rulers. On religious matters, there would no longer be public input. Instead, beginning in 1274, a conclave of cardinals elected the pope. The pope, sometimes still under the influence of higher lords, then nominated abbots and bishops.

The voice of the people had largely vanished. Nevertheless, they made themselves heard.

An April 1314 papal election in Carpentras, a small city in southeastern France, turned so violent that it delayed the naming of a new pope for nearly two years.

Deadlocked over the candidates, the cardinals dragged out the election for so long that frustrated locals attacked the episcopal palace where the conclave was being held. Cardinals and their staff fled and delayed until August 1316, when, under the protection of the French king’s forces, they nominated Pope John XXII.

Over 60 years later, in March 1378, Pope Gregory XI died. Amid threats from a crowd demanding an Italian pope, the cardinals elected Urban VI, an Italian, the following month. But over the ensuing months, the cardinals soured on Urban and declared their election invalid on the grounds that they had acted under duress. They elected a rival pope, triggering the Great Western Schism, during which two competing papal courts existed from 1378 to 1417.

Violence could also erupt for seemingly minor affronts.

In October 1367, Pope Urban V was in Viterbo, Italy. The pope and his court were French. The Viterbese took offense when papal court officials washed a little dog in their fountain of Piano di Scarano, which served as a source of drinking water. A confrontation followed, which escalated into a two-day uprising. The fountain was destroyed, and the pope and his cardinals were forced to take refuge in the Rocca Albornoz, the papal fortress.

Authority is a two-way street

Ideologies have evolved and technologies have advanced, but the fundamental struggle over who wields power, how authority earns legitimacy, and how compliance is enforced remains strikingly familiar.

The levers that leaders pull – taxation, welfare, infrastructure projects, propaganda, law enforcement – are largely the same, too.

Yet medieval folks understood that authority was a two-way street. When those in power didn’t hold up their end of the bargain, they were quick to resist, demand accountability and challenge authority.

In this sparring over power and consent, we can see, as one of Monty Python’s peasants put it, “the violence inherent in the system.”

Joëlle Rollo-Koster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.