This day in political mayhem

I have a morbid fascination with politically inspired violence and June 15th is the anniversary of Wat Tyler's death, leading to the end of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. I read a book years ago contending that the Revolt (also known as "Wat Tyler's Rebellion") was fomented by a Great Society that was descended from the suppressed Knights Templars and would later reemerge (over 200 years later) as the Freemasons. The main argument of the book is that after the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon were suppressed in the early 14th century and much of their property given to the Knights Hospitaller, the remaining Templars went "underground," maintaining their weird occultish rituals and recruiting new members who were antipapal, anti-authority malcontents. This organization eventually evolved into the Freemasons, whose weird occultish rituals bear certain resemblances to the Templars'. Much of the author's evidence is circumstantial and doesn't eliminate the possibility that the Masons just borrowed stuff from the Templars, whose lore drew from and contributed to all the alchemical rosicrucian catharist illuminati stuff infecting medieval Europe. His extended analysis of the Peasants' Revolt is the strongest evidence of an organizational continuity between the two, although it isn't airtight either. A very interesting read, though, back when I was a hyperactive paranoid undergrad who could've passed for one of the characters in Foucault's Pendulum.