IN HIS 2015 novel Now is the Time, Melvin Bragg tells the story of the great rising of 1381 from the perspective of both the nobles and the rebels. The historical rebels were motivated by the imposition of a deeply unpopular poll tax by the government of Richard II. Marching on London from Kent and Essex, they sacked the Savoy palace of the widely disliked John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and occupied the city. Confronting the rebels himself, Richard promised concessions. In a further meeting, the rebel leader Wat Tyler was killed; the rebels then dispersed and Richard went back on most of his promises, though there were some improvements in the lot of the peasants and the poll tax itself was dropped (not to be revived again, equally unsuccessfully, until the late 1980s). In Bragg's retelling the story ends, as it must, on a note of pessimism and tragedy. His sympathies are quite clearly with the rebels, and in a note he says that he wrote the novel out of a sense that the 1381 rebellion was one of the least known of English history.

This uprising used to be known as the Peasants’ Revolt. Historians have for some time resisted this – the social origins of the rebels were more diverse than the word ‘peasant’ suggests. But the idea, with its accompanying jokes about ‘revolting peasants’, has proved difficult to dislodge (this is why we have persisted with the term ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ throughout this volume, as this was how it was understood in the nineteenth century). Bragg is probably right to say that the event is less well known in the public consciousness than its importance would suggest it ought to be. His own novelistic version of Tyler is a rare phenomenon, in recent literature at least. Among legendary medieval English heroes, the name of Wat Tyler, unlike Robin Hood or King Arthur, is not one that provokes instant recognition.

Not long after the publication of Now is the Time, as the United Kingdom approached its deadline for leaving the European Union in March 2019, a leading figure in the right-wing anti-EU UK Independence Party, Martin Costello, drew on the rhetoric of the revolt, describing himself as a ‘modern-day Wat Tyler’.

he debt narrative is encapsulated in the conundrum of why postapartheid South Africa chose to cripple itself with debts that it could so easily have been repudiated. Nelson Mandela described the apartheid debt as “the greatest single obstacle to progress in this country.”

Among social stimuli, the human face is unique. Its properties and features, both static and dynamic, reveal different aspects of a person. Perceivers use this information when they aim, for example, to recognize individuals, identify their social groups, discern their personality, detect their focus of attention, understand their verbal and non-verbal behaviours, and infer their emotions. Emotions that we read from facial actions are crucial to social interaction: They provide information that helps us understand social intentions, how to react to others, and to evaluate the affective meaning of many events that we encounter in our environment. In this chapter, we focus on social appraisal – one of the central mechanisms involved in affective social learning. In particular, we discuss the notion that, through a particular socio-affective inferential mechanism, social appraisal plays a significant role when the emotional expression of person A is used to learn about the value of the emotion expressed by person B. The first section of this chapter provides a brief historical introduction to the relation between contextual information and emotion recognition in faces. Then, we focus on the construct of social appraisal and its manifestation in socio-affective inferential mechanisms involved in emotion recognition. In the third section, we present empirical evidence supporting the automaticity of such socio-affective inferential mechanisms and discuss its implication for the theoretical framework of affective social learning. Next, we discuss the idea that ambiguous situations may be particularly prone to social appraisal taking place. Finally, we discuss how social appraisal, underpinned by a socio-affective inferential mechanism, may be integrated into the affective social learning framework.