by C. J. Sansom
First, people everywhere were affected by the dissolution of the chantries where masses were said for the dead, and government appropriation of their lands and property. Their funding had come partly from guilds who employed a priest to say masses for the souls of dead relatives and members. Robert Kett was involved in several in Wymondham. Most had a little land whose rentals paid for the chantry priests, and a few had sizeable holdings. Somerset put these lands on the market too.
Meanwhile the appearance of the churches was transformed by the removal of stained-glass, ornamentation and images. These altered the appearance of every church in the land, as Shardlake discovers at Whetstone.
The introduction, in June 1549, of the first Prayer Book in English was the biggest change of all, ending the ancient Latin Mass.2 Like all religious changes since 1533, it was imposed from above. Somerset himself was, I think, a genuine religious radical; he corresponded with European Protestant divines like John Calvin, who influenced him considerably.3
Opposition to the religious changes certainly existed, and the abolition of Henry VIII’s harsh treason laws was negated by increasing restrictions on preaching – only licensed preachers were permitted by 1548. The introduction of the Prayer Book in services on 9 June 1549 was accepted by the bulk of the country – but in Devon and Cornwall furiously hostile opposition sparked rebellion.
THE COMMONWEALTH MEN
The main cause of revolt overall, though, was the ever-worsening lot of the poor. Somerset portrayed himself as their friend, and their situation was well known to him. But what could be done?
Answers were very much tied to the notion of ‘Commonwealth’. This ancient concept, synonymous with the ‘body politic’, came in sixteenth-century England increasingly to mean the duty of the government to further social welfare,1 connecting with the medieval ‘complaint tradition’ where satirical complaint and denouncing of social ills did however not really offer solutions beyond appeals to individual conscience and to the monarch.2
‘Commonwealthmen’ were never a coherent group, though most were radical Protestants. In the 1540s they began complaining fiercely against the ‘greedy rich men’. A sermon of Bishop Latimer spoke of how ‘covetous landlords, by their enhancing of rents’ had produced ‘this monstrous and portentous dearth made by man’.3 Extracts from such sermons were often printed, though they would be the ‘best bits’, ignoring the often greater amounts of time spent condemning lechery.4 Simon Crowley’s ‘Petition Against the Oppression of the Poor Commons’ called on the rich to repent, and threatened uncooperative landlords and MPs with the wrath of the Lord, as did Latimer and Becon.5 Numerous anonymous pamphlets denounced the rich, blaming covetousness for the decay of the Commonwealth.6 Acquisitive landlords driving the poor from the countryside were particular targets.
There is another, contrary, strand in Commonwealth thinking, particularly where it penetrated government circles. This was that the ‘maintenance of good order and obedience’ was its very basis. Anarchy among the commons was greatly feared.7 Thus ‘Commonwealth’ acquired a double meaning. For gentlemen who supported it – like Shardlake, at first – it was about restoring the natural balance and harmony between the classes; for others, however, it came to mean simply the welfare of the commons.8 After the rebellions, the Commonwealth writers were the first to condemn the rebellions, often in ferocious terms.
THE ENCLOSURE COMMISSIONS
To be fair to him, Somerset did attempt practical solutions, albeit half-baked. Little help could be expected from Parliament, composed of members of the gentry and urban elite. A series of radical bills, intended to reverse the conversion of arable land to pasture, failed to pass the Commons.1 Parliament did pass one reform measure: a tax on sheep and cloth production, the former taxing owners of sheep according to the numbers they owned, disadvantaging large-scale farmers. The need to raise more revenue to fight the Scottish war was the argument used on reluctant MPs.
Somerset turned to royal proclamations to deal with the enclosure issue, bypassing Parliament – government by proclamation was a notable feature of his rule. In June 1548 a proclamation ordered a ‘view and enquiry’ on illegal enclosures to be made, to begin with a commission to investigate enclosures in the Midlands. The proclamation recited laws against enclosures ignored since Henry VII’s reign. In each place visited, a jury of twelve was to be empanelled under a commissioner, who could make wide-ranging orders including forcing land illegally turned to pasture to be returned to tillage. The leading commissioner was John Hales, a strong-minded, fierce MP, the only serious Commonwealth-minded reformer to find an executive government role. However, Hales emphasized to commoners that they must not take it upon themselves to pull down enclosures. By concentrating on illegal enclosures Hales brought this particular issue to the fore, at the expense of other rural issues.
The practicality of the idea must be doubted – to reverse illegal enclosures going back sixty years, far beyond the lifetime of most potential witnesses, against the opposition of landlords and local officials would have been a gigantic, probably impossible, task. No arrangements were provided for enforcement, and appeals by landlords to the courts could have kept the matter tied up for decades. However, without getting further than preliminary enquiries in the Midlands, the commission adjourned, probably because Hales, as an MP, had to return to Parliament for the new session, and nothing more happened for a year. All this indicates how low a priority the matter really was for Somerset.
In May 1548, the month before Somerset’s proclamation (perhaps influencing its timing), a sizeable insurrection took place in Hertfordshire.2 The cause was an impending commission (separate from Hales’s commissions) obtained by Sir William Cavendish to authorize enclosure of part of Northaw Great Waste, a very large area of common land. Villagers who used the land, together with outsiders, took action that in many ways prefigured what was to happen the following year, setting up a camp on Northaw Common led by substantial yeomen and local officeholders, creating an infrastructure to supply and run it, and petitioning the Protector. However when local magnate Roger Chomley offered assurances and promises of reform, the rebels dispersed. Several were subsequently prosecuted.
It is worth pausing here to consider what ‘enclosure’ meant.3 The English village used the three-field system, where each year two fields were farmed and one left fallow. The fields themselves were divided into strips, with villagers owning several, positioned in a haphazard way. Additionally there was an expanse of village ‘common land’. This was of central importance to poor villagers especially, used for grazing their own animals as well as a source of game, wood, fish and reeds. Milk from cows and bacon from the pigs were crucial sources of nutrition.
The village was not an undifferentiated mass of peasants. There were several types of holding – copyhold, the commonest, which had replaced serfdom; tenancies at the landlord’s will, often on land occupied long ago by squatters; and freehold, where the freeholder effectively owned the land, subject to a lord’s or the King’s suzerainty.
Sizes of holdings varied greatly. Many ‘cottagers’ had only a few acres, not enough to live on, and worked part time as tradesmen or labourers. Often they relied heavily on their rights on the commons, particularly in the 1540s as inflation ate away at their earnings.
WAS ENCLOSURE A MAJOR PROBLEM?
There were two types of enclosure. The first was where tenants, by exchange or purchase, brought their strips together into a single holding, making for more efficient farming. Often such people profited and were able to expand their holdings. This was the rising class of yeoman from which it was possible, though rare and tricky, to rise to acceptance as a ‘gentleman’.1 Most yeomen kept their share of the common land, though some were not above undertaking illegal enclosures of the land themselves.
The second type of enclosure was quite different, and this was the target of Hales’s commissions. Here landlords, often non-resident, actively sought to expand their sheepfolds and
squeeze out smaller farmers, mainly by attacking the commons. Sometimes they grazed additional sheep or cattle to crowd out other users; sometimes they simply enclosed the commons illegally. Without its commons a village could not survive, and though established rights to use the commons could be enforced in court, this was extremely difficult in practice.2
Many landlords entered the land market by purchasing monastic land in the 1530s and 1540s on terms of ‘knight service’ to the Crown, which meant paying feudal dues to the King. Sometimes – with the aid of unscrupulous royal officials responsible for such dues, the feodary and escheator, or their agents – they attempted to pass these burdens on to tenants.3 Then they would force the tenants out, or buy them out at knockdown prices.4
In the 1540s inflation was reducing the value of landlords’ rents at a time when demand for wool was insatiable – in 1548 the price doubled.5 Sheep required only a shepherd, a boy and a dog, and those turned off their lands at a time of rising population were often reduced to joining the ranks of impoverished ‘masterless men’ heading for the towns. Others tried to stay put in increasingly impossible circumstances. The 1540s was only one phase of enclosure, limited to certain parts of the country, but it frequently placed those affected in a nightmare position.
1549: A PERFECT STORM
1549 began badly for Protector Somerset. His younger brother Thomas Seymour, always a wild card, had married Henry VIII’s widow Catherine Parr in 1547. After her death in childbirth in September 1548 Thomas embarked on a course of action – taking bribes from the Channel pirates who, as Lord Admiral, he was supposed to be clearing from the seas, blackmailing the keeper of the Bristol mint into giving him coin, and stocking weapons at his home, Sudeley Palace – indicating an intention forcibly to take the Protectorship from his brother. He also paid court to the Lady Elizabeth through her servants. His activities quickly became known, and in January 1549 he was arrested and charged with treason. Elizabeth was put under severe questioning but, having made no commitment to marry Seymour, was released. However the other evidence of treason was clear, and the Protector had no alternative but to execute his brother in March 1549. This could only weaken him.1
There is another important factor about 1549 to consider – the weather. There had been three good harvests between 1546 and 1548, but the winter of 1548–9 had been hard, 2 and by spring 1549 it would have been clear that the next harvest would likely be poor.3 It was, indeed, disastrous.
THE MAY ‘STIRS’
In April 1549 Somerset again issued a proclamation, stating that the King intended to enforce the enclosure laws, made since Henry VII’s time, across the country and ‘to see them executed against all such as shall be found culpable, without indeed pardon or remission’. The commissioners were ordered to proceed ‘with all speed and earnest endeavour’ to the punishment of offenders throughout the country.1 Had this proclamation ever been implemented, it would have destroyed the expansion of large-scale sheep farming. The proclamation was publicized across the country, and would have given food for thought, and hope, to the peasantry, who must however also have noted that, as in 1548, there was a complete absence of provisions for enforcement.
In May, a spate of rebellions and demonstrations broke out across southern England. There were disorders at Landbeach in Cambridgeshire over landlord overstocking of common land,2 and outbreaks of revolt against landlords and enclosures in Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Kent and Hampshire. Most were small-scale and easily dealt with by the local elite through conciliation or force;3 in the most notorious incident, when the park of Sir William Herbert in Wiltshire was destroyed, he attacked with 200 men who ‘slaughtered the rebels like sheep’. It is worth noting that emparkment of land for deer-hunting was very fashionable among the gentry and aristocracy, but again took large amounts of land out of cultivation.
Another proclamation in late May condemned those who had taken the King’s authority upon themselves; subjects were reassured that the King intended to reform enclosures but commanded them to cease unlawful activities, and warned that those who did not would be prosecuted ‘by the sword, and with all force of extremity’.4 The commissions would not set out until disturbances had ceased. Here is the mixture of conciliation and threat that, with different emphases, dominated Somerset’s approach to rural unrest until mid-July.
THE WESTERN REBELLION
In early June all seemed quiet again, but when the new Prayer Book came into use on Whitsunday, 9 June, it immediately sparked a ferocious rebellion in Devon, which quickly spread to Cornwall. Perhaps 10,000 men were involved. The traditional account that ‘the Prayer Book Rebellion’ was solely concerned with reversing religious reform has been challenged by subsequent writers, notably Joyce Youings.1 There were no enclosure problems in the two counties, but there was serious resentment against the power of the gentleman and officials. There were very few of gentleman status among the leaders of the Western Rebellion, while some gentlemen were killed and most seem to have kept out of the way. The other leaders and the rank and file ranged from priests to yeomen and labourers. On 2 July the rebels began besieging Exeter, but the Protestant elite retained control of the city. Exeter’s high elevation and strong defences meant the rebels got bogged down there, the city being too large to bypass. Very significantly, the men of neighbouring Somerset refused to join forces with them, although there were risings there from May through July.2 This was crucial in containing the Western Rebellion; its religious conservatism, violent opposition to the government and the hopelessness of their siege strategy may have given the men of Somerset pause. And they may have known that, across the south, quite different tactics were already under consideration.
The Western rebels resembled the later camps only in sending petitions enumerating their grievances to Somerset. Twelve have survived, and have been meticulously studied by Aubrey Greenwood.3 While they show a growing preoccupation with reversing religious changes, they also complain of the sheep tax, inflation and how the King’s officers and magistrates ‘are not trustworthy’ because of newly acquired wealth and lack of accountability. One petition included a demand for the number of each gentleman’s servants (meaning enforcers) to be limited to six, which would have destroyed local seigneurial power. Interestingly, one petition denounced ‘wasting resources on prolonged, failed foreign wars’.
To begin with, the government showed little understanding of the scale of events in the West. They tried a policy of conciliation, while gathering military forces to prevent any further advance. Outside Devon and Cornwall, there was in June what the Earl of Arundel described as ‘a quavering quiet’. On 1 July the Protector summoned much of the nobility and gentry from the Thames Valley and South-East to consult him at Windsor, probably to discuss forming an army to march against the West.4
THE REBELLIONS OF COMMONWEALTH
Then, in the first week of July, rebellions exploded all across southern England and the south Midlands. Apart from one slightly later, isolated rebellion in Yorkshire, northern England remained quiet: it is unclear why, but firm government control established through the ‘Council of the North’ after the 1536 rebellion, lack of serious enclosure problems and fear of Scottish invasion are all likely factors.
The strategy of the southern rebels was to set up camps, often several in each county, usually outside towns, and send petitions to the government setting out their grievances. According to Amanda Jones there are sixteen camps whose location is known, with a question mark over another three, and very possibly other smaller ones. Ten were in East Anglia and Cambridgeshire.1 The range of grievances encompassed both opposition to the religious changes and social discontents, but the East Anglian rebellions concentrated almost exclusively on social issues and stressed loyalty, not opposition, to the government and its religious policies, saying that they were not rebels at all, merely seeking to help implement the Protector’s own agrarian policies. Numbers in the camps varied, and are hard to pin down, but several thous
and were certainly involved both in Oxfordshire and Mousehold Heath. Local ‘stirs’ continued until the end of the year.2
The rebels in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire complained both about religious innovations and enclosure, high rents and prices.3 Priests were among the leadership, but everyone defined themselves as the ‘poor’, and targeted the rich. They were well organized. It seems likely they moved headquarters from Enslow Hill in Oxfordshire to Chipping Norton as 1,500 men, detached from the army sent to deal with the Western rebels, were sent to put them down. Interestingly, this was the same number as the first army sent to deal with the Norfolk rebels two weeks later, implying the camp at Chipping Norton also numbered several thousand. The rebels were defeated in battle on 18 July. Fifteen were later hanged, including five priests from their steeples. Most of the rebels seem to have been husbandmen. The authorities certainly regarded the Midland rebels as anti-government and anti-hierarchical.
Studies by Diarmaid MacCulloch in the 1980s showed that while much the largest in numbers, Kett’s camp outside Norwich was only one of several linked East Anglian camps.4 His work, and Amanda Jones’s work on the ‘lesser stirs’ of what contemporaries were soon calling the ‘commotion time’, are the most important correctives to the long tradition of seeing what happened in 1549 as comprising only the Western and Kett’s Rebellions.5 Jones has suggested that in localities where the authorities were unable to deal with disorder, or perhaps, as in Norwich, reluctantly forced to cooperate with rebels for a while, smaller rebellions may have gone deliberately unrecorded.6
REBEL COORDINATION
That rebellions should erupt across the country in the same week, just when many of the local leaders who would normally be the organizers of local forces were absent, cannot possibly be coincidence. All seem to have adopted the ‘camping’ strategy and avoided armed violence. In June, it seems clear, men had been coordinating and preparing for a new sort of rebellion.