The peasants are revolting; know your place meddling woman or lose your head! and a murdering president

What happened on this day in history: May 30

1381 England’s Peasants’ Revolt begins. Also called Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, it was the first great popular rebellion in English history. Its immediate cause was the imposition of the unpopular poll tax, which brought to a head the economic discontent that had been growing since the middle of the century.

1431 Unjustly condemned, French heroine Joan of Arc is burnt at the stake by the English.

1536 England’s King Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour, a lady-in-waiting to his first two wives. Married the day after the execution of Anne Boleyn, Seymour’s only known involvement in national affairs was met with a blunt reminder of the fate that her predecessor met when she “meddled in his affairs”.

1806 Future US president Andrew Jackson kills Charles Dickinson in a duel after Dickinson accused Jackson’s wife of bigamy.

1815 The British troopship Arniston is wrecked at Waenhuiskrans (Arniston) after the captain mistakes Cape Agulhas for Cape Point, and heads north for St Helena thinking he has rounded the Cape. The ship grounds.

1883 A stampede on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, caused by a rumour it was going to collapse, kills 12 people.

1899 Wild West outlaw Pearl Hart (1871–1955) holds up a stage coach in Arizona. It is one of the last stagecoach robberies in the Old West.

1900 Lady Violet Cecil writes to Britain’s Lord Salisbury on conditions in Bloemfontein, noting: “Far more have been killed in our hospitals than by Boer bullets... Men are dying by the hundreds who could easily be saved.”

1942 Japanese submarines shell naval bases in Australia and Madagascar.

1967 Daredevil Robert “Evel” Knievel jumps his motorcycle over 16 cars in Gardena, California.

1972 Members of the Japanese Red Army carry out the Lod Airport massacre near Tel Aviv in Israel, killing 24 people and injuring 78.

2012 Former Liberian president Charles Taylor is sentenced to 50 years in jail for war crimes.

2017 A suicide bomb in the diplomatic quarter of Kabul, Afghanistan, kills more than 150 people and injures 400.

2024 Vermont becomes the first US state to pass a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay for damages caused by climate change.

DAILY NEWS