This study offers an overview of the growth of peasant resistance from the early Middle Ages into the sixteenth century. Touching upon major questions of the ideology and organization of the Peasant War and its predecessors, it serves as an introduction to the problems to which this special issue is devoted. The author registers the recurrent waves of peasant resistance throughout the medieval centuries but stresses the novel qualities of the late medieval ones, beginning with the English rising of 1381, through the Hussites to the Peasant War of 1525. In particular, the mature ideological formulations and the innovative forms of organization and propaganda were the signs of a new type of movement. The defeat of the peasants was not without consequences: it served as one of the factors in the emergence of the early modern state.