Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (9 page)

            her fallow leas

The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory

Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts

That should deracinate such savagery;

The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth

The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,

Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,

Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems

But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,

Losing both beauty and utility.

In the lanes between the ruined fields, leaving the homes from which they had been evicted or driven out of by poverty, trudged the beggars and the vagabonds, the victims of the agrarian revolution. They tread their woeful paths in More’s
Utopia
: ‘All their household stuff … they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else but steal, and then justly, pardy, be hanged, or else go about a-begging? And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not; whom no man will set to work, though they never so willingly proffer themselves thereto.’ That was written in 1516, and as the century progressed the ranks of the beggars did not diminish. Roger Ascham told Protector Somerset that the existence of the poor was not life but misery. Bernard Gilpin, preaching before Edward VI, declared that ‘thousands in England beg now from door to door who have kept honest houses’. The vagabond was so
familiar to the age, he became a common character in the literature, his thieving and conniving ways anatomized in such books as Harman’s
A Caveat for Common Cursetors
(1567). From these treatises Shakespeare took them, and put them into his plays—Autolycus the sharp-eyed ‘pedlar’, Christopher Sly the drunken ‘tinker’, the ‘wild rogue’ who shares the straw with King Lear and the swine, and Edgar disguised as ‘poor Tom’, who ‘walketh bare armed and bare legged and faineth himself mad’. Most of this riff-raff, the diseased and the cunning, the mad and the despairing, made for London where they poisoned the arteries of the city and displayed their pain to the callousness of the wealthy. ‘London,’ wrote Brinklow in 1545, ‘being one of the flowers of the world as touching worldly riches, hath so many, yea innumerable of poor people forced to go from door to door and to sit openly in the streets a begging, and many not able to do for other but lie in their houses in most grievous pains and die for lack of aid of the rich, to the great shame of thee, O London!’ ‘O Merciful Lord,’ Lever declaimed from the pulpit, casting his eye over Edward’s England, ‘what a number of poor, feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly, yea with idle vagabonds and dissembling caitiffs mixt among them, lie and creep begging in the miry streets.’

In the country, the labourers left in the crumbling villages were hardly better off than the town beggars. Rye was the staple crop for bread, and what with bad farming, bad harvests and high prices, there was little enough of it for the poor man’s table. Vegetables, other than beans or peas, were little known; milk and cheese from a lean cow and a few eggs made the balance of the diet. Salted meat was sometimes available, fresh meat hardly ever; fish, as in Caholic times, was still ordained for twice a week, and in Elizabeth’s reign, for reasons of ‘civil policy’ a third fish day was added. Oxen were expensive and prized for strength, not fatness; sheep were kept chiefly for their wool. On the poor, ill-drained land of the common, the miserable livestock of the labourers grazed, half-starved in winter and pestered by gadflies in the summer so that the scant flesh hung on the bones of the animal. And the sheepmasters, in their avaricious enthusiasm, even tried to enclose the common land of the poor villagers. Nor was the shepherd, the one favoured worker of the country, well rewarded by his master; the shepherd was traditionally the worst paid of the rural workers, and he benefited little from the prosperity of the
sheep farmers, as Shakespeare’s shepherd commented in
As You Like It
:

But I am shepherd to another man,

And do not shear the fleeces that I graze.

Robert Kett was born and raised in this time of rural sorrow. His first years were passed in decent obscurity; it is not known where he was born or what age he was at the time of his rebellion. But he came from a Norman family of petty landowners well established in Norfolk for generations. Robert was a tanner and his brother, William, a butcher, and both had prospered. Robert owned land at Wymondham and small properties in other parts of Norfolk; a contemporary chronicler remarked with disgust that he could set out £50 a year for the purchase of land. Kett was, in fact, a minor representative of the new moneyed class who bought and enclosed land by way of an investment.

The counties of East Anglia were much enclosed. And the bitterness of the country folk was the greater since they knew that the rich soil of these counties was particularly good for arable farming. The social discontent of the first half of the sixteenth century broke out into several risings and rebellions. The first one, which followed immediately after the dissolution, of the monasteries in 1536, seemed to have religious differences as the chief cause. Uprisings of this kind were the Lincolnshire rebellion and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, and the later West Country rising of 1549 in Devon and Cornwall. Yet even in the earliest revolts the economic troubles caused by enclosures were made part of the grievance. The rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace demanded the ‘casting down of enclosers of commons’; later, the Bristol chronicler of the West Country rising stated that the aim of the rebels was ‘to have their old religion restored again as well as the enclosures’. ‘Hunger is a bitter thing to bear’, wrote the shrewd and sensible John Hales in his
A Discourse of the Common Weal
, explaining why enclosures were ‘the most occasion of these wild and unhappy uproars amongst us’; when the people lack, he went on, ‘they must murmur against them that have plenty, and so stir up these tumults’.

For many years the murmurs had been heard in Norfolk. In 1537 a canon of Walsingham tried to raise an insurrection to remedy the ‘much penury and scarceness’ that prevailed. In the
same year attempts were made to incite the people against the landowners at Old Buckenham and at Fincham. Three years later John Walker of Griston denounced the gentlemen of the county in the most violent language; he was all for killing the oppressors, ‘yea, even their children in the cradle: for it were a good thing if there were so many gentlemen in Norfolk as there be white bulls.’ The country people noted that the townsmen of London, Bristol and other cities had from time to time turned on the landlords. Desperation was driving the slow countrymen to copy the quick, turbulent action of the towns.

In the late ’forties, as the noise of discontent grew louder, the government was disposed to listen. The new ‘commonwealth party’ in Parliament, which stressed the duties rather than the rights of property, under John Hales the member for Preston, carried on an energetic campaign against enclosures in the Commons. This parliamentary action failed against the solid ranks of property holders in Parliament, but it warned the King’s ministers that something should be done. In 1548 the powerful preaching of Cranmer and Latimer denounced enclosures, and petitions from countrymen worried Protector Somerset. In June, Somerset issued a proclamation ‘against enclosures, letting of houses to decay, and unlawful converting of arable ground into pastures’. A commission led by Hales was sent to make a survey of enclosures; but it met such determined opposition from the gentry, such packing of juries, such fraud and intimidation that its results were useless. Offenders were given a pardon and then returned, said Hales, ‘to their old vomit, began immediately to enclose, to take away the poor men’s commons, and were more greedy than ever they were before’. Up and down England the poor now resolved to make a fight for their rights and livelihood. In the spring of 1549 the men of Somerset rose and outbursts of rebellion spread from there through the South to Kent. In the North the Yorkshiremen also rose, forgetting the ferocious defeat they had suffered in the Pilgrimage of Grace thirteen years before. These spontaneous outbursts, which were easily put down, were soon elbowed from the government’s mind by Kett’s rebellion in Norfolk.

The uprising began as a country brawl. On 20th June 1549 the people of Attleborough pulled down the fences of a certain Green who had enclosed part of their common. The country labourers were emboldened by this success. On 7th July, when
the feast of St Thomas Becket was being celebrated at Wymondham, the peasants broke away from the festivities and tore down the fences of the neighbouring gentry, including those of Serjeant Flowerdew.
¹
Flowerdew was certain that the Ketts were the cause of this outrage, for he had an ancient quarrel with the family going back some ten years to the time when Flowerdew despoiled and ruined the beautiful monastic church of Wymondham, much to the distress of the Ketts who were the chief citizens of the village. Flowerdew therefore approached the rebels and gave them 3s. 4d. to destroy the hedges and fences of Robert Kett. The mob flowed out towards Kett’s lands, and here met a very surprising reception. Kett himself greeted them and sympathized with their cause against the landowners, saying that ‘power so excessive, avarice so great, and cruelty of every kind so unheard of, cannot but be hateful and accursed in the sight of both God and man’. He then willingly joined in the destruction of his own enclosures, proposed himself to the crowd as ‘your general, your standard-bearer, and your chief’, and sent them off to do joyful wreckage against other enclosures, especially those of Flowerdew. Flowerdew’s ditches were filled and his hedges levelled, and then the crowd surrounded Kett, acclaiming him as their leader and his brother William as second-in-command. Kett received this popular mandate with dignity. ‘The office’, he declared, ‘I will never lay down until you have obtained your rights. Your deliverance and safety are with me objects of the greatest interest, and to obtain these I refuse not to sacrifice my substance, yea, my very life itself, so highly do I esteem the cause in which we are engaged.’ The country turmoil had found its leader and become a rebellion.

Within a few days the band of insurgents, swelling all the time with new arrivals, had marched to Norwich. On the way, they had pulled down hedges and destroyed a certain amount of property, but for a band of country rebels their behaviour was restrained and their discipline good. Kett brought them to a halt across the river from Norwich, occupied a hill on the edge of Mousehold Heath, and there set up his Great Camp. Beacons and pealing bells let the whole of East Anglia know that at last a stand was being made against the tyranny of the landowners; the poor, the desolate and the oppressed hurried to the camp, so too did the
vagabonds and the outlaws. Soon there were 16,000 rebels on Mousehold Heath. Kett invited the people of Norwich, who were unmolested by the rebels, to come and trade with the camp, an offer which the merchants quickly took up. A regular and fairly orderly commerce developed which spoke well for the peaceful intentions of the insurgents and for Kett’s ability to control and administrate.

When the camp was established, the first business was to draw up a list of grievances. These were made out in the name of the delegates from twenty-two hundreds in Norfolk and one in Suffolk, and sent in the form of a petition to the King. The first and greatest complaint concerned the enclosing of the people’s common land, and added to this were several other complaints about the conduct of the landowners: the high rents and fees they demanded, their bad way of buying up freeholds and turning them into copyholds, and, in general, the injustice of most of their dealings with the tenant. Unaware of the workings of inflation, the rebels innocently asked that rents, fees and certain prices should be put back to what they had been in the first year of the reign of Henry VII, sixty-four years before.

The petition, however, was not merely the complaint of the tenants against the landlords. Most of the peasant risings throughout Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century were fostered by a vague religious, communistic ideal which demanded, in God’s name, freedom and justice for the people. The ideal was most clearly expressed in the twelve articles of the German uprising in 1525, a revolt that was put down with the utmost brutality by the army of the nobles at Frankenhausen in 1526. Kett’s rebellion was also moved by this wistful idealism. ‘We pray that all bond men’, says one of the articles of the petition, ‘may be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood shedding.’ And the petition demanded that the people should be free to take the fish from the rivers and the fowl from the air, seeing that the gifts of nature were for the well-being of the community not just for the pleasure of the landowners. Indeed, a care for the community was at the heart of the rebels’ petition; it asked that ignorant or slothful priests should be dismissed, that each parish church should establish a school, that the evil practices of wardship, whereby the guardian had all the profit from the ward’s estate, should be abolished, and even that a parliament of the people—the ‘poor
commons’—should be set up to assist in the general reform of the laws.

The early historians of Kett’s rebellion, members of the property-owning middle classes, picture Kett and his men as dangerous savages out to destroy the laws, customs, property and religion of the land. The mild, temperate nature of the petition suggests otherwise, and this impression is confirmed by the conduct of the rebels on Mousehold Heath. Few people were harmed and none were killed. Hostile landlords were held as prisoners, but they were treated reasonably unless they tried to escape. Kett established himself on a platform beneath a large oak, and from this ‘oak of reformation’ he administered rough, summary justice to his followers to prevent them rioting and pillaging; Kett also pressed the reluctant mayor of Norwich to sit with him in this rustic court. Anglican services were conducted by a Norwich priest, and Matthew Parker, a Norwich man and a future Archbishop of Canterbury, was allowed to preach to the rebels from Kett’s oak. The orderly restraint of the rebel leaders only enraged the gentry. Kett’s attempts to keep the peace in the camp were contemptuously described by Sir John Hayward as ‘actions covered and disguised with mantles, very usual in a time of disorder’.