I'm writing a story in which the protagonist sits at an inn in Venice and hears word of the Peasants' Revolt in England. Would this be accurate? Would a commoner in those times hear of news like this, much less care?
In a major commercial city like Venice? Probably (in the rest of Europe? Not so much). "Lombard Street" in London is so named because it was a hub of North Italian bankers and traders, colloquially called "Lombards." Although the representatives of Venetian mercantile families there would be well-educated and upper class, it is within the realm of possibility that they had lower-class assistants. Plus, the Venice-Southampton shipping route was one of the key mercantile routes, and had been nationalized by the Venetian government by the late thirteenth century.
The 14th century diary of Francesco Contarini, a member of one of Venice's wealthiest mercantile dynasties, narrates that four or five of the Venetian Arsenal's sturdiest galleys set sail from Venice for England (the diary had been studied in detail by Ugo Tucci at the University of Bologna; Ugo Tucci, Mercanti, navi, monete nel Cinquecento veneziano, Il Mulino; Bologna 1981). Contarini recounts that the convoy set sail for Southampton in the early august; by November the convoy would be docked in Antwerp for the winter. By early June, the convoy would set sail for Italy, with a brief stopover in an Aragonese port (typically Mallorca) and Sicily (Palermo and/or Messina, as business dictated) before proceeding to Corfu and other Venetian possessions in the Adriatic before returning to Venice by October. At each stop, government bureaucrats on the ships would oversee the cargo to be unloaded and handed over to local agents of the Venetian merchants, while also picking up new cargo from those same agents. These agents were almost close family members who would have been living in the country for years at a time; thus it is certainly conceivable that a sailor, clerk, or minor patrician who worked in England might recount the Peasants' Revolt while sitting in a Venetian Osteria (the Italian counterpart of a Pub, typically offering wines and staple foods). It might not be probable, as the vast majority of the population wasn't going off on mercantile adventures (as important as they were for the economy) but it is certainly within the ream of possibility.