A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  The durability of this popular memory is a reminder that the largely hostile accounts of these rebellions might be understood very differently by different audiences. Just as the ballads of Robin Hood might speak of the values of chivalry to the nobility, their originally intended audience, but of a rough social justice – taking from the rich and giving to the poor – at a popular level, so the harsh portrayals of vainglorious and violent rebel captains might appeal to, rather than disgust, those they were meant to instruct in the evils of rebellion.

  4

  THE ‘COMMOTION TIME’

  The last major popular rebellion of the late medieval/early modern period occurred in 1549. ‘Kett’s rebellion’, as the rising in East Anglia is now widely known, became an inspiration to nineteenth- and twentieth-century radicals. In the 1920s the rebel camp that its leader, Robert Kett, established at Mousehold Heath was seen as a precursor of land nationalisation schemes. For the Labour alderman Fred Henderson, the connections with 1549 were more personal: like Kett, Henderson had been imprisoned in Norwich Castle for his part in a food riot in 1885. In 1948, in the climate of buoyant socialist aspiration that followed Labour’s landslide election victory, Henderson moved that a monument to Kett be erected in the city. Despite the differences between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, Henderson said, Kett’s struggle reflected the constant ‘urge in the spirit of the people of this land, whatever the circumstances of their times might be, to seek for freedom and the establishment of just conditions’. The following year, a plaque dedicated to Kett was placed on the wall of Norwich Castle, in ‘memory of a notable leader in the long struggle of the common people of England to escape from a servile life into the freedom of just conditions’.1

  Robert Kett himself appears an unlikely rebel leader. Far from being of peasant stock, the Ketts were descendants of the gentry Le Chat family and Robert’s wife Alice may have been the daughter of Sir Nicholas Appleyard of Bracon Ash. Robert was a tanner and his brother William a butcher, but both were substantial landowners. The Kett family had settled in Wymondham in Norfolk in 1483. Here Robert leased the manor from John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Hostile chroniclers liked to portray Kett as the stereo-typical popular demagogue: a vainglorious upstart bent on manipulating the mob for his own gain. In fact, he was a wealthy pillar of the community with much to lose by supporting the enclosure rioters. That he did so suggests not only that the politics of 1549 were very complicated, with rebels believing they were making common cause with the royal government against grasping local landowners, but also that there was a ring of truth in later romantic depictions of him. Ultimately, the Kett who emerges from recent research on the rebellion was a man of principle, who sacrificed his own material comfort, and later his life, in an attempt to secure greater freedoms for those less fortunate.

  But the events of 1549 were much more than the story of one man. In the sixteenth century, the rebellion was more accurately described as the ‘camping’ or ‘commotion time’. For, far from being an isolated insurrection that involved just East Anglia and was dependent on the leadership of one rebel captain, the ‘commotion time’ signified a period when the whole of southern and eastern England rose in revolt. Thanks to the work of the historians Diarmaid MacCullough, Andy Wood and Amanda Jones, we now know it was an astonishingly widespread crisis, taking in twenty-five counties as well as Devon and Cornwall – effectively all of lowland England as far north as Seamer, overlooking the Derwent Valley in the North Riding of Yorkshire, but with the important exception of London. No equivalent degree of popular disruption would be seen in England until the start of the civil war in 1642. Besides Kett’s at Mousehold Heath, eighteen other rebel camps were set up, and a further nine popular petitions emerged from these camps in addition to the six from the ‘western rebellion’ in Devon and Cornwall and the one from the Norfolk rebels.

  The catalyst to the ‘commotion time’ also appears to have originated outside Norfolk. In the Hertfordshire village of Northaw on 20 May 1548, a crowd devastated the rabbit warrens of the government official and lord of the manor Sir William Cavendish, blowing up burrows and killing over two thousand animals. This symbolic act of violence was a reaction to the royal commission that Cavendish had obtained to enclose the very extensive common land in the area. The protesters argued that the enclosure commission had no legal force as Edward VI was still a minor, and set up a camp on the disputed commons.

  Enclosure was a massive source of political tension in late medieval and early modern England. By 1500 it has been estimated that 45 per cent of cultivable land had been enclosed. Enclosures continued apace in the sixteenth century, though now their aim was largely to help landlords increase rents (enclosed land could be rented at three times the price of unenclosed property) rather than to convert arable land to pasture. In the longer term, the social impact of enclosure was unquestionably to increase the wealth of the landowner at the expense of the wage-labourer and small tenant farmer. Socially divisive as they were, enclosures continued to be a catalyst for riot and revolt into the seventeenth century.2 In the wake of the Northaw confrontation Edward Seymour, the King’s uncle, known as Protector Somerset due to his effective control of the government during Edward’s minority, established a commission to investigate illegal enclosures, under the leadership of the civil servant John Hales, a leading ‘evangelical’ (a zealous supporter of the Protestant Reformation).3

  The commission failed to prevent conflict over the enclosure of common land. A year after the Northaw incident, similar disputes broke out in Wiltshire, Somerset and Bristol. Protector Somerset tried to calm the situation by issuing a conciliatory proclamation promising to redress local grievances, but it appears only to have encouraged further disturbances. On 3 July, the Lord Mayor had taken part in special watches of the City of London because of ‘the rebellion in divers places of this realme’. By 5 July, Somerset was having to write a personal letter in reply to a petition articulating the demands of the commons of Essex prepared by a leader who had taken the representative name ‘William Essex’. Two days later, Somerset sent a letter to ‘divers unlawfull assemblies’ in Oxfordshire, attempting to placate them with the offer of a royal pardon. Before Kett had even become involved in the risings, rebels in southern England and the Midlands had established camps and forced concessions from the Edwardian regime.

  Though it was not the first county to rise in 1549, Norfolk did have a recent history of social revolt. The Walsingham conspiracy, thwarted in 1537, had seen Ralph Rogerson, a yeoman and lay chorister of the priory plan to seize the gentry and murder any nobles who resisted. Driven by anger at the greed of local gentlemen, it gave an early glimpse of the social forces that would drive the larger rebellion of 1549.4 In 1548, there were complaints from the Mayor of Norwich concerning rhymes circulated touching on the ‘kinge maiste [majesty]’ and ‘Rayling against the governme[n]t of Mr Mayor’.5

  The ‘commotion time’ began in earnest in Norfolk on 20 June 1549, as people from three villages around the small town of Attleborough pulled down the hedges of a local landlord who had enclosed part of their common land. A fortnight later, from 6 to 8 July at Wymondham, while the neighbourhood gathered to put on a play, crowds again pulled down hedges in nearby villages, including those of John Flowerdew, one of the many successful lawyers among the Norfolk gentry. Flowerdew hoped to exploit the crowd’s aggressive mood by persuading them to tear down the hedges of a nearby enclosure belonging to the Kett family, with whom he was engaged in a feud. The Ketts were closely associated with the local church, a former abbey that Flowerdew had demolished at the Reformation. However, the ploy backfired: Robert Kett agreed that the common land that he had enclosed should be made common again; he would stand by the rioters, he said, until they had obtained their rights. According to the hostile chronicler Alexander Neville, secretary to Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Kett said he was ‘ready not only to restrain but also to subdue the Power of the Nobility: that, as they [
the commons] were weary of their Misery so he hoped in a little time to make the others sorry for their Pride’. He promised to ‘revenge the Losses they suffer’d in their Commons, at the expence of their cruel Oppressors’, and to take care ‘that the Land he had inclosed, should all be made publick, by filling up the Ditch with his own Hands’. In conclusion, ‘he offer’d himself not only as a Companion, but as a Leader; not only as a Partaker of so great an Exploit, but as a General, Author and Principal: that he wou’d not only assist at, but preside over all their Counsels’.6

  Kett decided to march on Norwich, rapidly gaining support on the way. He arrived at the city on 10 July, and found that some of the poorer citizens had already destroyed the hedge around the main close. By 12 July he had set up camp on Mousehold Heath, the same spot favoured by the Norfolk rebels in 1381. Within a few days, the rebel numbers had reputedly climbed to sixteen thousand. There were further encampments in the north-west of the county, at Castle Rising, which later moved to Downham Market, and another in mid-Norfolk, at Hingham. In Suffolk, a camp had been set up outside Ipswich and was dispensing justice to the people, while another was established near Bury St Edmunds. In Kent, the so-called ‘rebellion of Commonwealth’ had set up camps at Canterbury and outside Maidstone, under a leader called Latimer (once identified, mistakenly, with Bishop Hugh Latimer).7 The site of Latimer’s camp, Penenden Heath, was the spot where Wat Tyler had mustered the Kentish rebels in 1381 and where Jack Cade had raised his men seventy years later.8

  The timing of the risings, at the beginning of July, caught the gentry off guard. Many were away in London or had followed the royal summons to court at Windsor. As in earlier rebellions, sporting events and the festive calendar were probably used as a cover for seditious meetings. The earlier, Walsingham conspiracy had been planned under the pretext of an archery tournament, while the rebels at Wymondham had used the celebration of the feast of St Thomas the Martyr to mask their activities.9

  For over a week, Kett’s rebels remained unmolested in the camp on Mousehold Heath. Kett himself was living in style, having taken over the former palace of the Earl of Surrey. From here, the rebel council, which at the time included Thomas Codd, the Mayor of Norwich, and Alderman Thomas Aldrich, issued orders, requisitioned food and recruited new followers.10 Meanwhile, the government of Protector Somerset had been busy attempting to quell the rebellion by a combination of persuasion and force. On 21 July, a royal herald arrived offering pardon to the Norfolk rebels if they dispersed. According to contemporary accounts, Kett refused the offer on the grounds that they were not rebelling against the King and required no pardon. The herald, making a mockery of the offer of clemency, then denounced Kett as a traitor, snatching away the chance of a negotiated settlement. However, Mayor Codd, along with Alderman Aldrich, accepted the royal pardon. They, along with other Norwich gentry, now made preparations to defend the city, ordering six guns to be hauled into firing positions on the walls. The insurgents, though, had brought in their own cannon – taken from the coastal defences – and began a (largely ineffective) bombardment of the city. The following day, after the local authorities’ refusal to grant a truce, the rebels attacked, armed with spears, swords and pitchforks. The chronicler Nicholas Sotherton’s account provides a vivid picture of their unorthodox tactics:

  So impudent were they and so desperate that of theyr vagabond boyes … brychles and bear arssyde came emong the thicket of the arrows and gathered them up when some of the seid arrows stuck fast in theyr leggs and other parts and did therwith most shamefully turne up theyr bare tayles agenst those which did shoote, which soe dismayd the archers that it tooke theyr hart from them.11

  With the defenders’ spirits apparently broken by this display of bare-arsed defiance, Norwich was in the insurgents’ hands by the evening. The Mayor was seized and made to set his signature to the warrants issued by the rebels. Leading aldermen along with captive gentry were imprisoned in the Earl of Surrey’s palace. A royal army, led by the Earl of Northampton, arrived at the city gates on 31 July. Though the army gained easy access to the undefended city, they endured heavy rebel attacks during the night. The next morning, the main rebel host made their assault, routed the royal forces and killed Northampton’s second-in-command, Lord Sheffield, in the mêlée. This victory offers another reminder, even after Cade’s rebellion, of the potency of ‘unprofessional’ rebel armies in this period.

  According to Neville, the rebels at Mousehold Heath, ‘lurking in those wood covers, transgressed all Laws both human and divine’.12 His lurid account of their actions does not tally with what we know, not only about the rebel camps in Norfolk but about those across the country, which aimed at the restoration of good government, not its destruction. Once encamped on Mousehold Heath, the rebels had established a governing council made up of representatives from each of the hundreds in both Norfolk and Suffolk from which the rebel host had been drawn. A mini-parliament, it sat under an oak tree which became known as ‘the oak of reformation’, and here issued warrants for food, cattle, arms and manpower in the name of the ‘King’s friends and deputies’.

  It is important to stress the collective nature of the decision-making at Mousehold. There is no strong evidence from the rebel articles of petition themselves that Kett played any particularly prominent role in their framing. Indeed, his name was added to the text of the articles at a later date (in the seventeenth century) simply as a means of labelling the document. Furthermore, the unnumbered articles in the original give no clear indication, either, of the rebels’ order of priorities. Overall, they called for the exclusion of the gentry from the commons and from dealing in land. They appealed to the Crown to act as a fair arbiter between the lords and the commonalty and to take on some of the powers of the magisterial classes. Rents were to be fixed at the levels of 1485. The articles also hinted at the rebels’ religious radicalism, calling for the clergy to adopt an educative, preaching ministry and to end their involvment in the land market. The most far-reaching of the articles seemed to combine social and religious aspirations: ‘We pray that all bonde men may be made Fre[e] for god made all Fre[e] with his precious blode sheddyng.’ For contemporaries such as Sir William Paget, writing to the Protector on 7 July, the evangelicals’ programme had acted as the spark to social revolution just as Luther’s teachings had done in Germany, unleashing the bloody chaos of the Peasants’ War of 1525.13 As we shall see, however, the extent of the Norfolk rebels’ commitment to Protestantism is questionable, and the parallel with the revolutionary millenarianism of the German Anabaptists spoke more of English upper-class anxieties than of the reality of the rebels’ intentions.

  Throughout the ‘commotion time’, though anger at the greed and maladministration of the governing classes was starkly evident, it was also apparent that those involved in the rising did not see themselves as rebels. Those encamped on Mousehold Heath and elsewhere, in the language of the warrants issued under the oak of reformation, saw themselves as the King’s true servants and friends who would restore good government and right injustices. Many of their leaders, including men like Kett, were individuals of substantial wealth who had experience of government themselves, albeit at a lower level than that exercised by the traditional magisterial class. John Levet, a butcher and captain of the Bury St Edmunds rebels, was a nephew of Giles Levet, a minor gentleman and one of the bailiffs of Bury. Captain Brand at Ipswich was probably Robert Brand, who held the office of chamberlain in the borough of Ipswich in the 1540s; John Harbottle was a lesser merchant of Ipswich and had been chamberlain two years before Brand.14 Many of the petty officers who were so heavily involved in the risings saw their activities as part of their official business. The rebels’ desire to maintain what they perceived to be ‘right government’ was so strong that those in Norfolk even issued their own commission of purveyance so as to preserve the grain already collected for the Scottish armies, despite the deep unpopularity of the levy. Beyond collecting money and supplies for the camps,
the rebel administration also sought to dispense justice and right longstanding wrongs. In Suffolk, the Bury rebels put one George Swinbourne into possession of his stepchildren’s property in the town and allowed him to assume custody of the children against a rival claimant. At Ipswich, two complaints to the rebel captains against leading gentry are recorded, one of which led to a detachment from the Ipswich camp been dispatched to restore the complainant to his former copyhold at Nacton, four miles away.15

  One of the chilling lessons of 1549 for England’s governing classes was, then, that large swaths of the country could be run perfectly well – arguably more equitably and efficiently – without them. The oft-repeated threat in official homilies that rebellion would lead to anarchy, terror and destruction proved hollow. However, the rebels’ administration would be short-lived and their victory over the Earl of Northampton’s forces a pyrrhic one. In the following weeks, insurrection in the rest of the country was gradually subdued, so that the Norwich rebels became increasingly isolated. Though Northampton had presided over a debacle at Norwich, he had succeeded in suppressing the camp at Bury St Edmunds. The camp at Thetford melted away, while the one established at King’s Lynn was destroyed, apparently with great loss of life. Great Yarmouth, despite rebel incursions, remained in the hands of those loyal to the regime. Rebels at Essex and Ipswich took up the offer of a royal pardon, and dispersed.

  While all this was going on, a much larger royal army of fourteen thousand men was being assembled under the leadership of the Earl of Warwick, Kett’s erstwhile landlord. At Henry VIII’s death in 1547, John Dudley, then Viscount L’isle, had been one of the wealthiest and most important men in the kingdom. Created Earl of Warwick in February of that year, Dudley had many years of soldiering behind him, having recorded victories against the French and Scots during Henry’s reign, and was renowned for his personal courage and coolness under fire.