March 2008

Parish History Episode 83 - Rebellions East and West

By order of the King - that is, in reality, by order of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector of England - church services were, on Whitsunday, 1549, and on every Sunday thereafter, to be celebrated according to Archbishop Cranmer’s new Prayer-Book. Seymour, acting on the advice of Cranmer and other Protestant bishops, was presiding over something of a religious revolution. But, acting primarily on the advice of Hugh Latimer, a former bishop who had resigned because he would not serve under Henry VIII, Seymour had also tried to call a halt to the spread of “enclosures”, that is of the practice of hedging fields and taking them out of arable use, and pasturing sheep upon them. In the South Midlands in particular, his officers broke up many recent and illegal enclosures. They ordered the owners to slaughter the sheep, and then to put the land back under the plough, thus providing meat and bread for the urban poor, and work for the rural poor. The gentry, of course, were furious : none more so than John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who resided in Kenilworth Castle, and seemed to own about half of Warwickshire.

He would in time come to be ruler of all England. But that rise to power did not come about purely through championing his own right, and the right of other lords, to enrich themselves through enclosures, through turning peasants off the land, and replacing them by sheep. He gained supreme power through suppressing uprisings by other men, of “lower station”, who attempted to claim their own rights. The first such uprising broke out in Devon in 1549.

The introduction of the new Prayer-Book there, as in all of England, on the Whitsunday of 1549, was to lead to immediate rejection and rebellion in much of the South-West of England. People who had been used to doing more or less whatever they pleased, during the Celebration of the Mass (though they had of course always, or almost always, behaved with what they regarded as due reverence), found it galling to be ordered to stand or sit or kneel at certain points in the service, and to do it all in unison, like soldiers on parade, and they felt it to be childish to have to learn phrases and prayers (such as the Lord’s Prayer) off by heart, and to have to recite them in unison.

These people in effect appear to have objected to the new fashion for involving the laity in the Service, with people bobbing up and down, and chanting responses, instead of concentrating on their own private devotions. They compared the new Service to a “Christmas Game” - it wasn’t a proper Mass.

At the village of Sampford Courtenay, near Okehampton, to the North of Dartmoor, people felt so strongly about it that they walked out of church, on Whitsunday morning, and resolved to march on Exeter, and to demand that the Bishop put a stop to all these innovations. Messages of support came in from other villages, and the march began to look as if it were going to be a large and unruly affair. Hearing of this, the Bishop closed the gates of Exeter city, gathered some soldiers together, and ordered them to man the walls of the city, and to deny entrance to the “rebels”, who were beginning to assemble. More and more “rebels” were coming to Exeter, and were camping outside its walls. All over Devon parish priests were agreeing, willingly or unwillingly, to go back to using the good old Latin Mass, just as it had always been.

The city of Exeter was being subjected to a loose, and rather ineffective, sort of siege. The rebels came from all over Devon, and from Cornwall too. In Cornwall there was opposition to the use of English on the part even of those who were in favour of a reformed service. They argued that English was no more their language than Latin, and that if people were expected now to understand what was going on, then they needed a service in Cornish.

Aside from this complication over language, the Rising in the South-West appears to have been caused entirely by opposition to the new Prayer-Book. Things were more complicated in Norfolk, the other centre for rebellion which flared up immediately after Whitsunday, 1549. The rebels there were opposed to Enclosures, and demanded an immediate end to large-scale sheep-farming. They also had more mixed, and sometimes more radical, views on the new Liturgy. If at first they echoed the complaints of the Devon men about the imperfections of the new Service, there were also old Lollard groups, who, despite intermittent persecution, had managed to sustain themselves, “underground” and in hiding, for over a century, and who now came forward, and tried to take the lead in the protests. Demands were heard for each village to have the right to “call” its own priest, that is to appoint whomsoever they wished to lead the Service in Church, and for the chosen priest to provide the villagers with the type of Service that they wanted. The Tithe, as a legal obligation, would go, and instead the villagers would meet together and vote on how much to pay the priest, and then tax themselves to provide him with the agreed stipend.

Unlike the Devon men, the East Anglian rebels succeeded in capturing their cathedral city, Norwich, and, as the Bishop had fled, they were able to try to apply their ideas in a cathedral service. Realising that they would have to fight to defend what they had achieved, many of them established an armed camp on Mousehold Heath, just outside the walls of Norwich, and elected a charismatic leader, John Kett. He began dispensing justice (of a sort), under the shade of an ancient tree, “the Reformation Oak”, said to have been at one time, over a thousand years previously, a place where Druids assembled, and conducted pagan rites. Seymour’s government in London was not of course inactive, and troops were assembled to suppress these uprisings. The Norfolk Uprising was seen as the most dangerous, as Kett seemed to have something of a “standing army” encamped on Mousehold Heath, and he sent patrols out regularly, into Suffolk and neighbouring counties, to break up Enclosures, and to slaughter the sheep. Kett may have had difficulty in paying his men, but he had no problem in feeding them. These patrols brought plentiful supplies of mutton back to the Heath, and the rebels dined well on shepherds’ pie. With their bellies well-filled, they marched out confidently in July to meet a Royal army which had been despatched against them. The two forces clashed, and the King’s men were defeated, and fell back towards London, leaving Kett in undisputed control of Suffolk and Norfolk.

The other army sent out by Seymour, to subdue the Western rebels, was more successful. The command of this force had been given to John Russell, the First Earl of Bedford. As a younger man, Russell had served at the Court of King Henry VIII, and had been popular with the King, and his loyalty had been well rewarded with the gift of Woburn Abbey, a wealthy Cistercian house in Bedfordshire, and with the title of Earl. The Russell family were to be prominent in English affairs for many centuries. A direct descendant of the First Earl was Lord John Russell, who was twice to serve as Prime Minister during the middle years of the Nineteenth Century; and the grandson of that Lord John was to be the Bertrand Russell who, during the Twentieth Century, would be England’s foremost philosopher - this Bertrand Russell would prove to be a doughty opponent of Christian belief, and also the leader of two great moral “crusades” (in which his main allies would be Christian believers) : the struggle against conscription during the 1914 war; and, during the second half of the Twentieth Century, the opposition to the development and possession of nuclear weapons. All this had arisen out of a piece of bare-faced robbery in the reign of Henry VIII! In 1549, Russell halted at Honiton, while gathering sufficient troops for the task in hand. He then advanced cautiously, and defeated the rebels in a skirmish at Fenay Bridge, and went on to raise the siege of Exeter. The rebels fell back towards the West, and then for some reason decided to make a final stand at Sampford Courtenay. The site was well-nigh indefensible, but was apparently seen as “holy ground”, the place where resistance had begun against the godless policies of the King’s government in London.

There the rebels were easily overcome and massacred by Russell’s well-armed soldiers. Russell then went on to exact vengeance upon the disaffected population. Hangings took place in many villages, of all those men who had actively participated in the Uprising, and of many who hadn’t. Russell’s forces marched on into Cornwall, and exacted similar retribution on the defiant peasantry of that county. The reprisals and exactions inflicted upon Cornwall in 1549, appear, when added to those inflicted half a century earlier, after the much larger and more serious Uprising of 1497, to have started the Cornish language on its journey towards decline and eventual extinction. Speaking Cornish began to be seen as a mark of disrespect to the King.

Meanwhile, back in London, the King’s Court assembled another army, to march on Norfolk, and defeat Robert Kett. In the City, there was much criticism of the Regency, as it was believed, by the rich and influential, that Seymour’s policies of introducing religious toleration for all, and of siding with the peasantry in the matter of Enclosures, and preventing the rich and powerful from making more money out of sheep farming, had been instrumental in leading the vulgar rabble into thinking that they had rights in society. It was realised that a bigger and better-equipped army was needed than that which Kett had defeated last time, and that it needed a strong and resolute commander. The man chosen, by Seymour, acting under the pressure of public opinion (the opinion, anyway, of those enjoying wealth and breeding) was John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, the man who a year previously had been grievously wronged by Seymour’s revocation of the many, allegedly illegal, enclosures with which the Earl had hoped to increase his wealth.

Dudley marched North to reconquer Norfolk. Kett met him at Dussindale, the two armies clashed, and the rebels were completely defeated. Dudley marched on, captured Norwich, and began the systematic subjection of the disaffected population. There were numerous executions of real or alleged rebels, and for many years the bodies of Robert Kett and some of his lieutenants hung, decomposing, from the walls of Norwich. But Law, Order, and True Religion (as Dudley understood them) were restored throughout East Anglia, and society calmed down, and once more men did as they were told.

Dudley marched back in triumph to London. His friends were not only ready to greet him, but they had prepared the way, and had started to undermine the position of Seymour. The Lord Protector realised that most of the rich and powerful men in the City were plotting against him, and he fled, along with his protégé, the boy-king Edward, first to Hampton Palace, and then to the more defensible position of Windsor Castle. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, then, after his triumphal entry into London, rode on to Windsor with his army, to begin the siege of the castle.

It seems that by now almost everybody wanted an end to the strife and bloodshed, and Seymour and Edward agreed to surrender. The young king was put back on his throne, while Seymour was lodged in a secure cell in the Tower of London (He would eventually be brought to trial, and, early in 1552, executed). John Dudley was proclaimed Lord Protector in place of Seymour, and was invested with the title of Duke of Northumberland (the Percies, it may be remembered, had been in disgrace since the Pilgrimage of Grace). His policy, it would prove, would be to allow Enclosures to go ahead almost everywhere, and to support Archbishop Cranmer in his plans for a fully reformed Liturgy.

Thus was a revolution completed, which would see the English Church become fully Protestant, and would see the “new aristocracy”, men like Russell and Dudley, and Seymour too (men who had founded their wealth on the spoils of the monastic houses, dissolved and destroyed by the previous king, young Edward’s father), entrenched in power and influence. Two other abortive revolutions had been destroyed, and swept away : that of those who had wanted to restore the “old Church”, as it had been before King Henry’s time; and that of those of Lollard background, those who had wanted a full revolution, social as well as religious.

Their bodies now hung on the gallows, both in West and East. Their children would continue to resent having to give obedience to the new Church of England which was coming into being. They, or their children, would become, some of them, the Recusants, and others the Dissenters.

Houghton-le-Spring has not of course been mentioned in this article. The North of England lay quiescent while all this violence convulsed much of the South. The main reason for the failure of the North to engage in this violent debate was probably that there was no great pressure on land up here: in fact, as Leyland had noted in his ride across County Durham, there was much waste land, going spare, just awaiting a developer, and therefore there was not much point in quarrelling over land rights.

Also, sheep-rearing had been a major industry in the North for over two centuries now, with most of the crop being exported to the looms of Flanders, and there was not the same opposition to sheep as the peasants expressed so violently in the South. One might also suggest that there were bitter memories in the North about the manner in which the Pilgrimage of Grace had been suppressed, so that few people had much appetite for what would be regarded as further acts of rebellion.

Dick Toy

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