The heath was used for local administrative meetings and executions for several hundred years as well as a site for large gatherings of the populace. Wat Tyler led a mob gathered at Penenden Heath to Union Street in Maidstone in an early skirmish in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The heath continued to be used as a gathering place in the 16th century to voice popular opinion or to amass the public, in particular during Wyatt's rebellion, and early references to the heath as such were made in Alfred Tennyson's 1875 drama "Queen Mary" about the 1554 Rebellion. George Goring, Earl of Norwich and leader of the Kent Royalists during the Second English Civil War gathered an army of 7,000 men on Penenden Heath in May 1648 in his unsuccessful defence of the town of Maidstone from the Roundhead army of Lord Fairfax.