XXIV

art The poor at enclosing do grudge,

because of abuses that fall,

Lest some men should have but too much,

and some again nothing at all.

In the spring and summer of 1549 the commons of England rose in massive protest against the government. There was violence in Hertfordshire, Essex, Norfolk, Gloucestershire and a half dozen other places; in Oxfordshire an incipient revolt broke out. In Cornwall pent-up grievances exploded early in June when by government order the new English communion service was read on Whitsunday in place of the Latin mass. The following day the parishioners of one Cornish village forced their priest to promise to bring back the mass, and before long the new service was thrown out in many Cornish towns and the mass restored. Meanwhile parts of Devon had risen and a large crowd was massing for an assault on Exeter, the largest town in the West Country.

The rebels besieged the town while the force sent by the Council to subdue them stood by and did nothing. The commander Lord Russell, a seasoned veteran of Henry’s campaigns, saw that his fighting men were too few, and waited for reinforcements. As he waited the rebel army grew stronger, and the siege of Exeter gave added urgency to the insurgents’ demands. They complained of food shortages and high prices, but their principal demands concerned the religious changes. They wanted to keep the mass and to have the old statues and pictures of Jesus, the virgin Mary and the saints restored. The litanies, offices and familiar sacraments should be brought back, they insisted, along with the blessed bread and holy water, and at Eastertime, the palms and ashes. Two of their demands show how eager they were to return to the days before re form doctrines had been mooted in England: they wanted two abbeys rebuilt in every country, and they wanted Cardinal Pole to be brought back from his exile and placed in King Edward’s Council.

In August the West Country rebels were finally defeated, but not before the commons of Norfolk had risen in a widespread and potentially dangerous protest that had something of the millennial character of medieval popular revolts. Led by the wealthy tanner Robert Ket, the Norfolk rebels tore through the grazing lands around Norwich, pulling up fences, breaking hedges and obliterating every boundary marker that symbolized the private seizure of what had been common land. After a time they gathered in a huge camp at Mousehold Heath, two miles from Norwich, and as their numbers grew they set up a loosely organized community whose leaders called themselves “commissioners” of the “King’s Great Camp at Mousehold.” There were at least ten thousand of them—some said nearer twenty—and it took an alarmingly large royal force to subdue them. Dudley was at the head of that force. He took Norwich on August 24, and three days later faced Ket and his men at Dussindale. Leaving much of the fighting to his German mercenaries, Dudley’s men carried out a merciless slaughter. When the battle ended, more than three thousand rebels lay dead on the field. The survivors straggled home, their leaders seized as prisoners and executed. Ket was hanged on Norwich Castle, and nine others on the “Oak of Reformation” on Mousehold Heath.

The revolts of 1549 seemed to confirm the worst fears of the Council—that beneath the uneasy acquiescence of the people lay deep dissatisfactions with religion and government which an inflammatory incident or a popular leader could trigger into violence. In mid-July, when the revolts in the west and north were in full cry, spontaneous uprisings in the counties around London made Council members frightened for their own safety. Mobs of angry tenants moved in disorderly fashion toward the capital, coming so dangerously close that at one point they broke the fences of one of the king’s parks at Elton near Greenwich. It was said they planned to besiege London until all rebel prisoners were returned to them alive, and rumors of every sort—including revived fears of reprisals against foreigners—spread throughout southern England in the anxious weeks before the rebellions ended.¹

Behind the rebels’ immediate grievances lay the pent-up frustrations of decades of severe hard times in the countryside. The process known as enclosure, in which large areas of farmland and the meadows and pastures that for centuries had been held in common were fenced in by landlords to make grazing land for sheep, swept away many small farms and caused entire villages to shrink or to disappear altogether. Social critics of the time bemoaned the hundreds of deserted villages to be found throughoutEngland, their ruined churches and houses a poignant witness to the once flourishing rural life that had gone forever. Sometimes the very ruins themselves were obliterated. “I know towns,” wrote one observer, “so wholly decayed, that there is neither stick nor stone standing.”

The displaced farmers wandered the roads searching for another few acres to make a fresh start. Some made it to the capital, and survived there; many did not, and became a marginal vagabond population, distrusted by all who saw them and treated with brutality or indifference by the government that feared them. Those who hung on to their farms amid the upheaval in rural life found themselves faced with enormous increases in rents and other fees; landlords were accused of inhuman exploitation and every sort of rapacity. Edward VI’s Primer contained a “Prayer for Landlords” asking God that “they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack, and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands.” Between the enclosing of the fields and the raising of rents fewer acres were being farmed, so that as the numbers of the landless and the unemployed grew, there was less and less food to go around. A contemporary believed that for every plow idled six men lost their livings, and seven more their sustenance. And this at a time when the population as a whole was increasing faster than at any time in the last two hundred years.

In the face of this turmoil the frightened members of the ruling Council took refuge in shrill reiterations of the importance of obedience and maintenance of the social order. To be discontented with one’s lot was a sin against the divine order, they insisted. For God has ordained that “some are in high degree, some in low, some kings and princes, some inferiors and subjects, some rich and some poor,” and to chafe against these preordained categories was to loose the evils of “abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and babylonical confusion.”² Take away the agents of the divinely appointed social hierarchy—rulers, magistrates, judges and the natural leaders, the aristocracy—and the result would be that “no man shall ride or go by the highway unrobbed, no man shall sleep in his own house or bed unkilled, no man shall keep his wife, children and possessions in quietness.”

Beyond making pronouncements such as these the government did little to alleviate the crisis. The one positive policy was the ill-advised expedient of debasing the coinage. Henry VIII had periodically ordered more base metal mixed with the gold and silver of his coins, and in other ways manipulated the currency for profit. He made perhaps half a million pounds in this way to add to his treasury, but by the 1540s his debts were so huge that the profit from the mint could not begin to cancel them. The 1544 campaign in France and the border warfare with the Scots in the final years of his reign cost him more than two millionpounds, and he had to borrow heavily from the merchant bankers of Antwerp to keep barely ahead of his creditors at home. When Henry died he left his debts to his son, and in Edward’s name the Protector ordered still further debasement. By 1549 most coins had dropped to slightly more than half of what they had been worth when the decade began, with the result that food costs doubled or tripled.

3a. Pietro Torrigiano’s bust of the young Henry VIII.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.