Mad Tom's Rising

The Revolutionary Mystic Sir William Courtenay and the Last Battle Fought on English Soil

Ian Breckon

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781837732272
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A story of faith, fanaticism, and the uncanny power of the imagination.


The dawn of the Victorian era: the world is changing rapidly. Poverty and the workhouse cast long shadows across rural England, and a traditional way of life is coming to an end.


In the villages and fields of Kent, the discontented find an unlikely champion in John Nicholls Tom. Calling himself 'Sir William Courtenay', he appears to the local magistrates and gentry as a madman, a charlatan, or a dangerous radical. But for the labouring people he is the New Messiah, come to lead them in a revolt against the forces of oppression, and to herald the end of the world.


But equality and wealth redistribution are dangerous ideas, and in May 1838 Tom's crusade ignites into bloody violence. The confrontation that follows will shock the country, and become known as the last battle ever fought on English soil.


Mad Tom's Rising presents an alternative vision of early Victorian England, as a place of mystical religious faith, riot and disturbance, surveillance and insecurity, arson and uproar. Drawing on original sources, it reconstructs the strange and astonishing events of that time, and the lives and experiences of those forever marked by them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prologue – Bossenden Wood
• Introduction
• 1. ‘An Outrage upon Common Decency’
• 2. ‘Truth Bears off the Victory’
• 3. ‘Sir William Courtenay … Has Become Insane’
• 4. ‘Low Persons of Suspicious Character’
• 5. ‘From the Bonds of Satann’
• 6. ‘The Earth Shall Rise Up’
• 7. ‘To the World’s End’
• 8. ‘I Have Jesus in my Heart’
• 9. ‘Mad Tom of Canterbury’
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements