In many parishes the mere returns of population were not filled in; numbers evaded payment--which spelt ruin--by leaving their homes.

L22,000 was all that came to hand.
Then a man named John Legge came to the assistance of the Government, and was appointed chief commissioner, and empowered to collect the tax.
The methods of Legge and his assistants provoked hostility, and when the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham, and Stanford-le-Hope, in Essex, were summoned to meet the commissioner at Brentwood, their reply was to kill the collectors.
The Government answered this by sending down Chief Justice Belknap to punish the offenders, but the people drove the chief justice out of the place, and Belknap was glad to escape with his life.
This was on Whit-Sunday, June 2nd, and two days later the revolt had spread to Kent; Gravesend and Dartford were in tumult.

In one place Sir Simon Burley, a friend of Richard II., seized a workman, claiming him as a bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of L300; while at Dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife and daughter of one John Tyler.[36] Thereupon this John Tyler, "being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand, and ran reaking home; where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words, and strake at the tyler; whereupon the tyler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with his lathing staff, so that the brains flew out of his head.

Wherethrough great noise arose in the streets, and the poor people being glad, everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler." Now, with the fire of revolt in swift blaze, it was for the men of Kent to see that it burned under some direction.

Authority and discipline were essential if the rising was not to become mob rule or mere anarchy, and if positive and intolerable wrongs were to find remedies.
At Maidstone, on June 7th--after Rochester Castle had been stormed, its prisoners set free and Sir John Newton its governor placed in safe custody--Wat Tyler was chosen captain of the rebel hosts.
History tells us nothing of the antecedents of this remarkable man.