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.

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........

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