Kett's Rebellion

4 Key excerpts on "Kett's Rebellion"

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  Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England

  • Andy Wood(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Rebellion in Sixteenth-Century England 65 conflict had shifted instead to the lords’ imposition of sheep flocks on to the enclosed fields of tenants. The enclosure riots that occurred in the course of Kett’s rebellion, MacCulloch argues, all took place in the wood-pasture parts of the county, where enclosure remained a hot issue. 41 Such local variations in the nature of rebel complaints once again remind us of intense localism of popular political cultures. Yet the insurrections in the south and the east followed similar patterns, were directed against similar enemies, were defined in similar language, and articulated their complaints to the same person: Protector Somerset. Thanks to his military difficulties elsewhere, and perhaps also influ-enced by a sympathy for the rebel demands, over the course of July 1549 the Duke of Somerset was drawn into comprehensive negotiations with the southern and eastern rebels. Royal heralds, local gentry and enclos-ure commissioners carried letters between the Protector and the leaders of rebel camps at Mousehold Heath and Thetford in Norfolk, St Albans in Hertfordshire and unspecified camps in Oxfordshire, Essex, Hamp-shire and Suffolk. It was in the course of this correspondence that the rebels drew up their lists of complaints, of which only the articles from Kett’s camp at Mousehold Heath have survived. 42 A close analysis of Somerset’s correspondence has recently allowed Ethan Shagan to conduct a radical reassessment of the mid-Tudor polity. In Shagan’s analysis, this held a far greater potential for a ‘dynamic interplay between rulers and ruled’ than historians had hitherto supposed. For Shagan, the concentration of Tudor political historians upon adminis-tration, dynastic politics and court faction has blinded them to the ‘extra-ordinarily promiscuous relationship between “popular” and “elite” politics’ in 1549.

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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)

  40 Although we know nothing of Kett’s commissariat, it was obviously vital to the success of the rebellion. Otherwise, without adequate food, rebels who had left their homes and families behind could have been held together for only a short time.

  As the number of rebels on Mousehold Heath grew to 20,000, Kett had not only to provide food and arms but also rudimentary discipline for his supporters. The most famous scene from the rebellion is the commanding figure of Robert Kett dispensing justice beneath the great oak, called the Tree of Reformation. With him were governors representing twenty-four of Norfolk’s thirty-two hundreds plus one Suffolk man. Idealistic admirers of Kett and writers with strong sympathies for the oppressed praised Kett as a wise lawgiver and humane righter of social wrongs. Contemporary narratives, written from the point of view of the Tudor establishment, were less charitable. Alexander Neville, the most hostile writer, flatly accused the rebels of robbing one another after spoiling the countryside. The earliest narrative account of the rebellion, written by Nicholas Sotherton, who, like Neville, had no love for Kett, conceded nonetheless that he and his fellow governors admonished the rebels “to beware of their robbing, spoiling, and other … evil demeanors.”41 Considering the size of the rebel camp as well as the traditional disorderliness of outraged, uneducated peasants, what is remarkable is not the lack of discipline, but rather Kett’s remarkable genius for maintaining a high degree of order at the Tree of Reformation. Without his leadership, the rebel force might not have held together for seven weeks, and violent attacks on the gentry might have resulted.

  The rebels brought captured gentlemen to the Tree of Reformation and shouted abuse at them. “Some cried, ‘Hang him,’ and some, ‘Kill him,’ and some that heard no word cried even as the rest even when themselves being demanded why they cried answered for that their fellows afore did the like.” In other cases rebels pressed their weapons against the captives, attempting to kill or injure them. Master Wharton was pricked with “spears and other weapons on purpose to kill him.” Several gentlemen were fettered with chains and locks to prevent escape.42

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  Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe

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

    (Publisher)

  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'. 0 Again, it planned to march on London so as to bring to the notice of the boy king the fact that the government was ruling badly. Its main chronicler, John Hooker, de-scribed a movement of the commons: 'the commons ... having driven the gentlemen to flight, do openly show themselves traitors and rebels; and therefore assembling themselves do appoint out captains': a tailor, a shoemaker, a labourer and a fish-drier. He then identified another central feature of the tradition, declaring: 'howbeit, it was not long before that certain gentlemen and yeomen of good countenance and credit, both in Devon and Cornwall, were contented not only to be associates of this rebellion but also to carry the cross before this proces-sion and to be captains and guiders of this wicked enterprise' .11 Kett's Rebellion unequivocally presented itself as belonging to the same tradition. It camped on Mousehold Heath where the rebels of 1381 had camped, and its 29 articles closed with the demand that the king give licence under the great seal 'to such commissioners as your poor commons hath chosen ... for to redress ... all such good laws ... which hath been hidden by your justices, sheriffs, escheators and other your officers from your poor commons since the first year of the reign of Henry VII'.12 Two points were made here: that the rebel-lion was raised in the cause of the commons; that, although the griev-ances were agrarian and against the landlords of the region (some of whom were brought to trial before the oak of reformation), the rebels, in accordance with the tradition, were politicised by their conviction that the problem was rooted in bad governance.

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  The Elizabethan World

  • Susan Doran, Norman Jones, Susan Doran, Norman Jones(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Twenty-Two Rebellion and Disorder K. J. Kesselring DOI: 10.4324/9781315736044-22

  S tudies of rebellion, crime and disorder can expose the anxieties and actions of people at all levels of society. As such, these subjects have received attention from a wide range of social, political and legal historians. An early generation of social historians looked at the records of crime and the courts to examine the experiences of those men and women long left out of the historical record. These scholars valued riots and rebellions as moments when popular beliefs, norms and needs erupted from beneath the usual habits of deference. Their efforts reinvigorated and reshaped long established legal and political histories of the early modern period, for the records of riot, crime and disorder say much of the priorities of the politically powerful, too. Indeed, what counted as a crime or a riotous assembly in any given instance depended much on the definitions solidified in statute or constructed by the courts; what the authorities deemed ‘disorder’ might sometimes more objectively be seen as ‘conflict’. Thus, much recent work on crime and rebellion has focused on the ways in which authority was constructed, experienced and challenged in interactions between governors and governed, on the nature of the relationships between rulers and ruled rather than the experiences of one group or the other.

  Because of the nature of the questions that long underpinned studies of disorder, such histories are rarely segmented by reigns and are more often demarcated by dates of demographic or economic import. Yet, the Elizabethan period warrants a survey specific to itself, if for no other reason than to query its usual portrayal as a golden age of stability. In Queen Elizabeth’s reign, rebellions of the medieval sort were left behind, and the disorders of the Continental wars of religion remained in the distance. The turmoils that plagued the earlier Tudors came to an end, while those of the Stuarts had yet to begin. By some measures, then, these were years of domestic peace. But these same years witnessed some of the highest murder and execution rates in recorded English history. A period of crisis in the criminal courts began in the 1580s which would stretch beyond Elizabeth’s reign into the late 1620s. Historians today disagree about whether crime and rebellion should be seen as points linked on a continuum of social conflict, but many Elizabethans believed these links to be evident. For them, an evaluation of crime and rebellion as separate features of their world made little sense. And contemporaries were by no means so sanguine as historians in evaluating their world. Many an Elizabethan commoner located the golden age in the past, with longing or angry words of complaint. Their governors, in turn, feared the ‘many-headed monster’ of popular unrest and believed small crimes to be the seeds of serious tumults.

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