In the play the name of Cade has been handed down in obloquy, and all that he and his followers aimed at caricatured out of recognition.

The part that Jack Cade really played in national affairs has no likeness to the low comedy performance imagined by Shakespeare.
It was a popular rising in 1450, but it was not a peasant revolt.

Men of substance in the county rallied to Cade's banner, and in many parishes in Kent the village constable was employed to enrol willing recruits in the army of disaffection.[41] The peasant revolt was at bottom a social movement, fostered and fashioned by preachers of a social democracy.

Cade's rising was provoked by misgovernment and directed at political reform.

It was far less revolutionary in purpose than the revolt that preceded it, or the rising under Ket a hundred years later.
The discontent was general when Cade encamped on Blackheath with the commons of Kent at the end of May, 1450.