I just searched this topic because I just completed my undergrad thesis on this subject!

When approaching this question, the main difficulty arises from terminology and definition. Traditional historiography has of course focused on societies’ ruling classes and significant individuals, but we are fortunate today in that there is a large body of work that has developed over the last half century studying the historical subaltern and their resistance to power structures. When it comes to the issue of medieval peasant rebellions specifically, this is useful because it fills in a lot of context that the traditional history of focusing exclusively on large-scale armed uprisings excludes.

In this topic the work of James Scott, especially his book Weapons of the Weak is a really good entry point. It was written from his experience living among Malaysian peasants in the 1970s, and focuses on forms of “everyday resistance” that are in fact much more common that armed revolt. When we look at popular resistance, we can understand it along an axis of collective action. So on one end we have small-scale acts of everyday resistance, ranging from the individual say refusing to work or working slowly or acts of sabotage on one farm, etc. And on the other end the most notable historical examples of large-scale armed revolt with tens of thousands of participants.

Unfortunately,when it comes to medieval Europe, the only primary sources we have are chronicles from the perspective of the literate elites, which include only the latter cases.

If you’re really interested in this topic, I’d strongly encourage you to read Samuel Cohn’s Lust for Liberty the goal of which is to answer your exact question through primary research into archival records throughout Europe. His conclusion is that resistance was everywhere common throughout the continent. Most were relatively small in scale, occurring on for example one manor or in individual towns in response to specific local issues.

It’s only when we begin to see the expansion of medieval life through greater commercialization of the economy and centralization of administration that we see large-scale popular uprisings. It is these I focused on in my thesis, particularly the cluster of revolts in the 14th century (notably in Flanders 1323-1328,England 1381 and Florence 1378).

The other issue is in defining what exactly constitutes “peasant”. The popular conception of medieval society assumes a simple dichotomy between nobility and peasant, but in reality (especially where major revolts happened) there was quite a bit more distinction between different groups. The rebels in Flanders and England came from the most commercialized areas in Europe and many were laborers, townspeople, and even city-dwellers. What they did share in common with traditional peasantry was their exclusion from systems of political power.

This got too long, but the simple answer is that popular resistance was extremely common, major revolts less so. If you have any more questions please feel free to ask me.