Download - Review Article: The Rebellions of 1549 in England

Review Article: The Rebellions of 1549 in EnglandAuthor(s): Roger B. ManningSource: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer, 1979), pp. 93-99Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539410 .

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The Rebellions of 1549 in England

Marc Bloch believed that peasant movements and rebellions were endemic to the seigneurial regime.' Most of the collective manifestations of peasant discontent were vented within the confines of one or two village or manorial communities. Being small in scale, spontaneous and brief, probably more of these instances of social protest escaped official notice than have found their way into surviving records. However, a conjuncture of disasters, beginning with bad weather and harvest failures and ending in famine, demographic disasters and economic dislocation, a particularly burdensome tax, religious fac- tionalism or a millenarian movement could cause these popular tumults to become epidemic and to coalesce into regional rebellions.2

The specific form of protest varied with time and place: game poaching was almost universal but necessarily limited in scale; social banditry flourished in those continental countries where authority was weak and protective cover was available. Revolts protesting royal taxation were especially common; England saw several such outbreaks in 1489, 1497 and 1513-1525.3 In the 1530s and 1540s extensive outbreaks of hedge-breaking or anti-enclosure riots are associated with population pressure, agricultural innovation and a fluid land market following the redistribution of monastic properties. In the North of England, the threatened dissolution of the monasteries and other unpopular policies attributed to Thoiras Cromwell helped to precipitate the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536-1537 - a rebellion that eventually spread across several large counties. The Pilgrim- age was a relatively peaceful and disciplined demonstration. While there was some expres- sion of histility to the aristocracy expressed in the circulation of seditious rumors, it more closely resembled some of the late medieval and early Tudor rebellions insofar as it was held together by an uneasy alliance between lord and peasant.

The rebellions of 1549 differ from the Pilgrimage of Grace in several ways: they began in 1548 with enclosure rioting that had spread into more than half of the counties of England by 1549 and which continued into 1551; although the most serious resistance was encountered in Cornwall, Devonshire and Norfolk, the necessity of deploying military force to deal with lesser insurrections in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Leicestershire and Rutlandshire delayed the suppression of the principal rebellions. Moreover, these rebellions and the enclosure riots and seditious murmurings that accompanied them were specifically anti-aristocratic in nature and constituted the most serious questioning of the social order since the Great Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Although rebel armies in Cornwall, Devon and Norfolk conspicuously lacked the leadership of any members of the peerage or greater gentry, they were remarkably well armed, and Protector Somerset's inept handling of the situation brought about his downfall.

The rebellions of 1549 have never received the kind of systematic analysis they deserve, but the recent publication of two new books on the subject by Julian Cornwall4 and Stephen K. Land' both make significant contributions to our knowledge and suggest

I French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sond- heirner (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 169-170; see also Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. S. Reynolds (New York, .1973), II, 735-739.

2 Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and China, trans. Brian Pearce (New York, 1972), pp. 306ff.; E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York, 1965), pp. 57ff.

3Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (2nd ed., London, 1973), pp. 13-20. 4Revolt of the Peasantry, 1549 (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1977, pp. 254, $14.95). 'Kett's Rebellion: The Norfolk Rising of 1549 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Little-

field, 1978, pp. 165, $15.00).



94 The Sixteenth Century Journal

topics that need further investigation. Neither study will be considered the definitive treatment of the rebellions of 1549, but they do contain valuable material, which when synthesized with recent works on the mid-Tudor crises afford an interim explanation of the rebellions of 1549 in terms of social structures.6

Put briefly, the structural explanation for the failure of the 1549 rebellions can be stated as follows. There existed in mid-Tudor England a social entity called the county community. Given the conjuncture of certain adverse circumstances isolated instances of popular protest and violence could coalesce into a larger insurrectionary movement within the county community. In late medieval England habits of deference and the exercise of "good lordships" normally maintained the social bonds between lord and peasant and prevented outbursts of protest from getting out of hand. But the deliberate destruction of lordship by the first two Tudor kings - especially noteworthy in the counties of Cornwall, Devon and Norfolk where the armed rebellions of peasants would be most formidable, as Julian Cornwall and Stephen Land reminds us - left the gentry in those counties in disarray and unable to deal decisively with the initial popular disturbances. In those counties where "good lordship" still functioned or where the aristocracy acted decisively the popular disturbances were easily suppressed. The Elizabethan system of lords lieutenant, deputy lieutenants and selected "trained bands" of county militia did not yet exist to quell riots, and the professional military resources of the government, consisting largely of foreign mercenaries recruited for the Scottish campaign, could not be deployed quickly enough to keep Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk and the Western Rebellion from growing to menacing proportions. The communications patterns and the social relationships within the county community permitted popular resistance, unchecked by a demoralized aristocracy, to spread quickly within the confines of the community. But such was the provincial exclusiveness of the peasant rebels that they gave little thought to joining forces with fellow peasants elsewhere. Like the peasant rebels of 1381 they frequently articulated their dislike of the gentry, but unlike their predecessors they made no attempt to march on London.

Mid-Tudor England was not yet a nation but something of a federation of county communities. Certainly more than a unit of government administration, perhaps geograph- ically isolated, but more than a territorial expanse, the county comprised a group of people who possessed and articulated a strong sense of community.7 The members of that community might have an ethnic identity or at least a distinctive dialect, they would share ties of kinship which cut across distinctions of social status, and they would be bound together by economic interests which they were prepared to defend against out- side interference. In sixteenth-century Norfolk opposition to the Merchant Adventurers of London, who connived to secure a monopoly on the export of woolen cloth, and to

6 In his discussion of seventeenth-century peasant "furies," Roland Mousnier suggests that it is simplistic to attempt to explain peasant revolts only in terms of structures (ie., oppressive social and political regimes), since when these structures characteristic of the Ancien Regime where swept away (as in France at the end of the eighteenth century) conjunctures of disasters (bad weather, harvest failure, famine and disease) still produced peasant movements of protest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until tech- nological improvements softed the impact of crises of subsistence (Peasant Uprisings, p. 318). Cornwall and Land have been faulted for ignoring recent work on the agrarian background of the rebellions - especially those studies appearing in the pages of the Economic History Review and the Agricultural History Review. Any definitive study will have to incorporate the literature on the circumstances or economic and agrarian background of the rebellions of 1549. But even Professor Mousnier, having uttered his qualifi- cations about the relationship between structure and conjuncture as historical explana- tions, devotes many pages to analyzing the social and political structures.

7J. R. Maddicott, "The County Community and the Making of Public Opinion in Fourteenth-Century England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Soceity, 5th series, XXVIII (1978), 27-28.



The Rebellions of 1549 95

predatory courtiers provided a particularly strong unifying force.' The county community was also the cockpit in which the gentry pursued their ambitions and rivalries. Indeed, down through the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century such feuds, inherited from one generation to the next, continued to distort the ideological issues and parliamentary politics that are supposed to have divided Roundheads and Cavaliers.9

Medieval communities valued their ancient privileges and immunities and a monarch who ignored them invited rebellion. A case in point is the Cornish Rebellion of 1497. Henry VII had secured a large parliamentary grant to finance the Scottish war. The Cornishmen, who marched as far as Blackheath on the outskirts of London, thought that the king's ministers had violated Cornish immunities in two ways: firstly the government proposed to tax Cornwall at the standard rate of assessment instead of the reduced rate allowed to impoverished areas, and secondly they asked Cornishmen to help finance a war, which traditionally they believed ought to be paid for by those who inhabited the marches bordering Scotland. The argument was rather like John Hampden's protest against the extension of the levy of ship money into inland counties. Julian Cornwall argues that all of the popular revolts of the Tudo period grew out of local communities attempting to defend their ancient privileges and immunities against "the claims of a modernising government" which sought to rationalize and standardize the traditional relationships between the monarch and local communities.

Feuding within the county community could also contribute to rebellion. In Lincolnshire the attempt by Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk to intrude himself into the void in leadership caused by death and lunacy among the peers of that county disrupted the patterns of patronage and marriage among the gentry and drove several of them into rebellion in 1536.' 1 Similarly, one of the precipitants of the Norfolk Rebellion of 1549 was the personal animosity between Robert Kett, the leader of the uprising and John Flowerdew, an unpopular lawyer who owned lands at Heathersett. This rivalry in turn had originated in a property dispute of three centuries standing between the monks of Wymondham Abbey and the parishioners of Wymondham Parish Church which together had constituted a double church. When the monastic church was razed in 1540, Flower- dew, acting as the crown's agent, had also destroyed portions of the fabric of the parish church. It was during this dispute that the smallholders of Wymondham found a leader in Robert Kett, a substantial yeoman. And when the Norfolk Rebellion began as a riot in Wymondham, the first enclosures that Kett and his followers levelled were those of Flowerdew at nearby Heathersett." 2 A leader of yeoman rank could emerge in Norfolk because the county possessed a fragmented manorial structure where the boundaries of a manor rarely coincided with a village community. This tended to weaken seigneurial control. Although the prosperity of late medieval Norfolk, founded as it was on the export of worsted cloth and grain, was in decline by the mid-Tudor period, it had lasted long enough to permit the growth of a large body of yeomen freeholders. The Norfolk yeomanry already had demonstrated that they were prepared to defend their interests by either violence or litigation or a calculated combination of both.' 3

8A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558-1603 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 14-16.

9 Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, p. 46. 'lIbid., pp. 44-46. 'M. E. James, "Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England: The Lincolnshire

Rebellion, 1536," Past and Present, no. 48 (Aug. 1970), 3-78. 12 Land, Kett's Rebellion, pp. 22-23; Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, pp.

135-138. l3Cf. my "Patterns of Violence in Early Tudor Enclosure Riots," Albion, V

(1974), 120-133, and "Violence and Social Conflict in Mid-Tudor Rebellions," Journal of British Studies, XVI (.1977), 18-40.




The county community provided both the framework of the rebellions of 1549 and prescribed their limits. This can be seen in the way Kett took over the administration of Norfolk. When Kett communicated the articles containing the grievances of the Nor- folk peasantry to Lord Protector Somerset, he professed to be doing nothing more than carrying out the protector's policies. Since the Norfolk gentry for the most part had fled into hiding, Kett took over the administration of the shire and governed in the king's name as a sort of lord lieutenant. He established a council representing most of the hundreds of Norfolk, and pressed a lawyer into service to draft orders in the proper form. Offences against the king's peace were heard and determined by Kett and his council sitting under the famous Oak of Reformation on Mousehold Heath overlooking Norwich. And like good Tudor magistrates they had their own version of assizes sermons preached to them. But Kett's council allowed only token representation to Suffolk and Kett never attempted to extend his operations into other counties.' 4

The determination of the rebels to possess their regional capitals distracted them from enlarging their sphere of activities. The western regels became bogged down besieg- ing Exeter, while Kett - more respectful of Norwich's liberties - attempted by means of persuasion to recruit adherents in that city. It has been argued that the increasing intru- sion of the gentry into municipal politics and the growing conservatism of municipal oligarchies in regional capitals like Exeter and Norwich caused their decline as centers of regional culture and worked against the success of rebellions.' 5

It tells us something about the continuing importance of the peerage in Tudor society in general and the county community in particular that the destruction of Henry Courtenay, marquess of Exeter and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey and heir to Thomas, duke of Norfolk, the principal peers in Norfolk and the West Country, could leave the gentry demoralized and unable to act decisively in suppressing popular tumults.' 6 This situation originated in the inconsistent policies of the first two Tudor monarchs regarding liveried retainers. Henry VII had secured passage of several Acts of Parliament asserting that a subject's primary loyalty was to the crown and only secondarily to a "good lord." Henry VII adhered to this policy of suppressing "good lordship" and discouraging the maintenance of liveried retainers by avoiding war. But Henry VIII involved England in wars in France and Scotland. Consequently, he bequeathed to his son Edward VI not only those expensive wars, but also the dangerous policy of resorting to the use of quasi-feudal retainers to provide the expeditionary forces in the absence of a royal standing army. The crown also was dependent upon using such forces to suppress domestic rebellion in 1536-1537 and again in 1549.1 7 Exeter and Surrey had both served in the French wars; Surrey had assisted his father in putting down the Pilgrimage of Grace while Exeter's grandfather, Edward, earl of Devonshire, had defended the city of Exeter against the pretender Perkin Warbeck in 1497.' 8 However, both of these noblemen had strong Catholic associations, and represented the old pre-Tudor peerage. Worse yet, they were also grandsons of Edward IV at a time when Henry VIII had determined to eliminate rivals to his young son Prince Edward.'

Exeter was attainted and executed in 1538. The earl of Surrey was judicially murdered in 1547 and his father Thomas, duke of Norfolk, hated and feared by the

"4 Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, pp. 146-149, 235-236. l 5Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (The Pelican Economic

History of Britain, vol. II: 1530-1780), p. 26. 1 6 Land, Kett's Rebellion, pp. 38-39. "7Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), pp.

202-206. "8Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee

(Oxford, 1917), sub Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter and Earl of Devonshire and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.

1 " Land, Kett's Rebellion, pp. 38-39; Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, pp. 48-49.




Seymours and the Dudleys, remained a prisoner during the whole of Edward VI's reign. The appointment of John, Lord Russell to the stewardship of the Duchy of Cornwall and the presidency of the short-lived Council in the West only partially replaced the Courtenay influence. The Duchy of Cornwall acquired many of the Courtenay estates and, indeed, the concentration of wealth and influence in the duchy's hands inhibited the development of a gentry class wealthy and powerful enough to keep order. The heads of the few greater gentry families in Cornwall were to be found anywhere but at home, while the lesser gentry, preoccupied with their own feuds failed to do their duty as high constables of the hundreds and keep the parish constables in check. Many of these parish constables were later prominent among the leaders of the Cornish rebels.2 0 In East Anglia, the most powerful nobleman after the collapse of the Howard influence was Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, who had pacified the Lincolnshire Rebellion of 1536. Brandon had attracted a large following among the gentry extending across East Anglia, but he died in 1545 leaving a ten-year-old son as heir. The only other peer in Norfolk was the insignificant Lord Cromwell.2 Thus, the destruction of the quasi-feudal power of the Howards and the Courtenays certainly contributed to the magnitude of the rebellions of 1549.

In Sussex, by contrast, Henry Fitzalan, 14th earl of Arundel, showed how the paternalistic exercise of "good lordship" could be employed to keep a county community quiet. Arundel could have raised sufficient forces from among his many tenants to crush the Sussex rebels with force, but instead he invited them to Arundel Castle, where he listened to their grievances and took action on his own authority to correct injustices.22

Not wishing to rely upon military forces raised by quasi-feudal noblemen, Lord Protector Somerset had turned to the use of foreign mercenaries for his Scottish campaign and was compelled to divert those forces to the suppression of the rebellions of 1549. But mercenaries were both expensive and difficult to procure, and during the popular unrest that continued through 1550-1551, the duke of Northumberland, Somer- set's successor as lord protector, actually issued licences to keep liveried retainers to supporters of his regime.2 3In Kent, a county that had seen extensive rioting in .1543 and .1549, Sir Thomas Wyatt proposed a scheme for a Protestant militia to protect the new regime. He was later to put his plan into operation in 1554 when he attempted to raise a revolt against Queen Mary's Spanish marriage.2 " All of these expedients hindered the emergence of a more regular militia system.2

The participants in the riots and rebellions of 1548-155.1 shared a common hatred of the gentry and manifested those feelings in the form of seditious rumors, political prophecies2 6 and enclosure riots. One might ask why peasant violence still took the form of hedge-breaking in 1549? Among the enclosures destroyed were many that had been effected by agreement between lord and tenant and had stood unchallenged for many

2"Ibid., pp. 43-44, 46. 21 Smith, County and Court, p. 27; D.N.B., sub Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. 22 Lawrence Stone, "Patriarchy and Paternalism in Tudor England: The Earl of

Arundel and the Peasants' Revolt of 1549," Journal of British Studies, XIII (1974), 19-23.

2 3Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Edward VI, vol. III: 1549-155.1 (London, 1925), pp. 312, 327, 416, 418; vol. IV: 1550-1553, p. 26.

24 D. M. Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 48-50. 2 Even Elizabeth was compelled from time to time to ask the great magnates to

rally their tenants, but she also worked to establish a more reliable militia system. Lords lieutenant were commissioned to command the militia in each county, appoint deputy lieutenants and provost-marshals, and give more intensive training to specially selected "trained bands." The lords lieutenant were still usually peers, but the source of their power was now a grant of royal authority rather than the indenture between a lord and his retinue (Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, pp. 202-206).

2 6 The most systematic discussion of ancient political prophecies will be found in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), pp. 389-432.




years. Moreover, it is now generally agreed that the earlier depopulating enclosures were largely over by 1530.27 It needs to be emphasized that the levelling of a hedge had become a symbolic act by 1549 aimed not so much against particular enclosures as against the grasping landlord who disregarded the traditional rights previously enjoyed by smallholders. Although this social polarization was not sufficient to cause peasant rebels to extend their horizons beyond the county community or to coordinate their activities, it did precipitate an extensive outbreak of rioting across southern England and the Midlands.

Decisive action by the gentry prevented this social unrest from growing to the proportions of the Norfolk or Western Rebellions. But that action sometimes took the form of an ugly aristocratic reaction. Among the first outbreaks of popular unrest were those in Kent in May 1549 which were put down by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who, apparently on his own initiative, summarily hanged several rioters.2 In June of 1549 rioters broke up the enclosures surrounding Sir William Herbert's new park at Wilton in Wiltshire. Herbert was a violent man, who had once killed a man in an affray at Bristol, subsequently fleeing to France to become a soldier of fortune. Upon his return to England he married the sister of Queen Catherine Parr and received extensive monastic estates.29 Although considered an upstart, Herbert kept numerous armed retainers and his response to the rioters was to "overrun and slay them."3 Subsequently commissioned to raise two thousand soldiers from his Welsh estates, Herbert assisted Lord Russell in lifting the siege of Exeter."3

The Thames Valley and the Midlands, comprising Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Rutlandshire, were also the scene of extensive hedge-breaking, disparking and deer- and sheep-killing. One group of rebels was tracked down in the Cotswolds by Lord Grey of Wilton, a veteran of the French and Scottish wars who had been dispatched with a contingent of 1500 mercenaries. Grey is known to have executed 14 rebels, including two priests hanged from their church steeples, before marching on to help pacify the West Country.32 More executions were carried out in Leicestershire and Rutlandshire by the marquess of Dorset and the earl of Huntingdon.3 3

The Norfolk gentry, who earlier had fled before Kett's army, came marching triumphantly back into Norwich with the earl of Warwick's punitive expedition. They busied themselves denouncing their peasant neighbors as traitors and petitioned Warwick for their forfeited estates. Warwick attempted to restrain the Norfolk gentry's venge- fulness and had to remind them that too much severity would cause a labor shortage.34 As it was, historians now generally agree that the losses in life as a consequence of the pitched battles between the rebels and the government forces together with summary executions by provost-marshals and judicial executions by special assizes constituted a demographic disaster in the areas affected.3

27 Land, Kett's Rebellion, pp. 9-10; Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, pp. 144-146.

28 Land, Kett's Rebellion, pp. 28-29; W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King: the Protectorship of the Duke of Somerset (London, 1968), pp. 446-47.

29D.N.B., sub Sir William Herbert, first Earl of Pembroke; Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. 0. L. Dick (London, 1950), pp. 141-143.

3 ?Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King, pp. 449-450, 451. 31W. Phelps, The History and Antiquities of Somersetshire (London, 1836), I, 92

and n.; Troubles Connected with the Prayer Book of 1549, ed. Nicholas Pocock (Camden Society, new series, XXXVII, 1884), pp. xvi-xvii.

32 Public Record Office, SP 10/8/32; Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King, pp. 447-448; Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, pp. 128-129; D.N.B., sub Sir William Grey, thirteenth Baron Grey de Wilton.

" Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History (London, 1838), I, 163. 3 Land, Kett's Rebellion, pp. 125-126; F. W. Russell, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk

(London, 1859), pp. 151-153. 35Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, p.. 234; Jordan, Edward VI. The Young King,

pp. 466-469; 486-493; Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions, pp. 55-66.




Popular involvement in the Rebellions of 1549 had been extensive and the military threat to the government forces very real. Julian Cornwall estimates that nearly all able- bodied Cornishmen exclusive of the gentry participated in the Western Rebellion. His analysis of the county's muster rolls also suggests that the Cornishmen were well-armed and possessed a numerical advantage over the forces at the disposal of the duke of Somerset.3 6 This enables us to understand why the earl of Warwick, styled duke of Northumberland after he succeeded Somerset as lord protector, issued licences to his supporters to raise armed retainers. Successive rulers of England were forced to continue this dangerous policy until a reliable militia system was built up in the mid-Elizabethan period. And it also puts into context what Sir Walter Raleigh meant when he said that "The gentry are the garrisons of good order throughout the realm."3 The gentry, together with the peers, would continue to have an important function to perform in suppressing popular disorders for many years to come. But the source of their authority would be a royal commission rather than the excercise of quasi-feudal "good lordship."

36Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, pp. 57-63, 90-97, 119, .131, 135. 32 "Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-] 714 (New York, 1966), pp.

27-28.

Roger B. Manning Cleveland State University



Download - Review Article: The Rebellions of 1549 in England

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