Cornish Rebellion

3 Key excerpts on "Cornish Rebellion"

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  Rebellion and Riot

  Popular Disorder in England During the Reign of Edward VI

  • John A. Andrew, III(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  The commons of Cornwall and Devonshire rose against the nobles and gentlemen, and required not only that the enclosures might be disparked, but also to have their old religion, and act of six articles restored.

   

  John Stow, Annales of England, London, 1605

  3. THE WESTERN REBELLION

  Significant popular unrest began first in the West of England when the Cornish, inspired by the clergy, opposed the government’s religious reforms. Discontent spread into the neighboring county, Devon, and in 1549 grew into one of the largest rebellions of the Tudor century. The great Western Rebellion arose over local grievances and remained regional in its focus. The rebels first challenged the authority of local officials and later, after a complete collapse of law and order, demanded redress from the king and his ministers. Although the rising was initially directed against religious innovation, it soon acquired important political and social dimensions. The rebellion looked to the past and reflected the attitudes of a remote and an intensely provincial society.

  The world of Devon and Cornwall was small, inward-looking, and parochial. Although all Englishmen were subjects of Edward VI and governed by the laws of Parliament, every man, woman, and child retained strong local loyalties and social ties. For the gentry the county, not the nation, was the natural political environment. The gentry controlled local government and vied for election to the House of Commons either as knights of the shire or as representatives of small boroughs that were all-too willing to entrust their limited interests to wealthy and influential rural neighbors. Although London was emerging as a social and political magnet drawing the gentry toward the capital, the countryside with the comforts of rural life and the easier prestige of county politics continued as the more powerful force. Provincialism was even more the way of life for ordinary men and women. They toiled in the fields, worked in villages and hamlets, worshipped in the parish church, drank and whored in local inns, traded in the small market towns, and at the end of difficult and often short lives came to rest in a graveyard among relatives and close neighbors. Poor roads, the absence of mass communications, and long hours of backbreaking labor discouraged interest in the outside world. The history of early Tudor England was a composite of family, social, and occupational groups living in communities that enjoyed extensive political autonomy in local affairs, a high degree of economic self-sufficiency, and often unique cultural traditions. Nowhere was the provincialism of Tudor England more apparent than in Devon and Cornwall.

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  Policy and Planning for Endangered Languages

  • Mari C. Jones(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, as Rowse (1941) observes, the Cornish ‘remembered they were a conquered people’ and friction with the new order imposed by the Tudors soon led to conflict. During this period, the 1549 ‘Prayer Book Rebellion’ is per- haps the most significant event that took place insofar as the fate of the lan- guage was concerned. The dissolution of Glasney College in 1548 meant that Cornwall had lost the engine that had generated the Cornish religious plays, which were not only important for their literary themes, but also reinforced a sense of Cornwall’s non-English identity. For example, Bewnans Meriasek and Bewnans Ke retell the lives of saints common to Wales and Brittany. The latter, which gives an account of King Arthur, can also be seen as includ- ing a thinly veiled satire aimed at Henry Tudor. However, the imposition of Cranmer’s English Book of Common Prayer meant that the Cornish people stood to lose much more than just an expression of difference. With the loss of Latin and Cornish from Church, English was being imposed as the language of mediation between the people and God. The Cornish rebelled. As Article 8 of the petition to the King says: ‘we will have our old service of Matins, Mass, Evensong and Procession in Latin as it was before. And so we the Cornish men (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly refuse this new English’ (Payton 2004: 123). Following an attempted siege of Exeter, this rebellion was defeated and brutal reprisals followed. Crucially, unlike Wales, there was to be no subsequent translation of the Book of Common Prayer, and the relevance of Cornish to public life was lost. Here, then, is possibly the first ever policy of the English state relating to the Cornish language: one that changed linguistic behaviour suddenly and Cornish: language policy and changing attitudes 209 radically.

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  Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe

  • Jeffrey Denton(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Therefore, the king's liegemen of Kent had assembled to provide redress 'with the help of the king ... and all the commons of England, and to die therefore'. Forming part of the same tradition of revolt was the Yorkshire uprising of 1489. One of its muster proclamations read: 'all the north parts ... shall be ready in their defensible array ... for to gainstand such persons as is aboutward for to destroy [the king] and the commons of England', closing with the statement 'and all this to be fulfilled and kept by every ilk commoner upon pain death,.6The Cornish uprising of 1497 fell into the same category of revolt. A feature of the tradition was a march on London. The rebels of 1381 and 1450 reached their goal, apprehended the evil ministers taking refuge in the Tower and ex-ecuted them; the Yorkshire rebels of 1489, like those of 1536, got no further than Doncaster. Amazingly, considering the distance they had to march, the Cornish rebels of 1497 reached Blackheath, camping where both the rebels of 1381 and 1450 had camped, only to be cut down by the king's army.7 This was described in the Great Chronicle of London: 'in the latter end of May the commons of Cornwall gathered them in great numbers and chose unto them a blacksmith for their head captain'. The chronicler declared that behind the explicit aim of remov-ing a number of evil ministers responsible for imposing a hated tax was Michael Bush 111 the hidden agenda to do 'as Jack Straw (of 1381), Jack Cade (of 1450) and other rebels did before them'.8 The tradition culminated in the two huge rebellions of 1536, the Lincolnshire uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace, soon followed by the Post pardon revolts of 1537 and the two large-scale uprisings of 1549, Kett's rebellion in East Anglia and the Prayer Book uprising in Devon and Cornwall. 9 The Prayer Book uprising produced a petition entitled 'sixteen articles of us the commoners of Devon and Cornwall in divers camps by east and west Exeter'.

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