Some were for immediate attack, but when Richard, riding out into the middle of the square, claimed that he and not Tyler was their King, and bade them follow him into the fields towards Islington, the great mass, convinced that Richard was honestly their friend, obeyed.

At nightfall they were scattered.
Wat Tyler's body was taken into the Priory, and his head placed on London Bridge.
Walworth hastily gathered troops together, and the leader of the rebels being dead, the nobles recovered their courage.
The rising was over; the people without leaders were as sheep for the slaughter.

Jack Straw was taken in London and hanged without the formality of a trial; and on June 22nd Tresilian, the new chief justice, went on a special assize to try the rebels, and "showed mercy to none and made great havock." The King's charters and promises were declared null and void when Parliament met, and some hundreds of peasants were hanged in various parts of the country.
John Ball and Grindcobbe were hanged at St.Albans on July 15th, John Wraw and Geoffrey Litster suffered the same fate.
All that Wat Tyler and the peasants had striven for was lost; but the rising was not quite in vain.

For one thing, the poll-tax was stopped, and the end of villeinage was hastened.
The great uprising was the first serious demonstration of the English people for personal liberty.

"It taught the King's officers and gentle folks that they must treat the peasants like men if they wished them to behave quietly, and it led most landlords to set free their bondsmen, and to take fixed money payments instead of uncertain services from their customary tenants, so that in a hundred years' time there were very few bondsmen left in England."[40] JACK CADE, CAPTAIN OF KENT, 1450 To understand the character and importance of the rising of the men of Kent under Jack Cade in 1450, the first thing to be done is to clear the mind of Shakespeare's travesty in _King Henry VI._, Part 2.