"When Adam delved and Eve span,Who was then the gentleman?"
"When Adam delved and Eve span,Who was then the gentleman?"
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
Besides the sermons, some of the rhymed letters that John Ball sent about the country have been preserved:
"John Ball, Priest of St. Mary's, greets well all manner of men, and bids them in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to stand together manfully in truth. Help truth and truth shall help you.
"John Ball, Priest of St. Mary's, greets well all manner of men, and bids them in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to stand together manfully in truth. Help truth and truth shall help you.
"John Ball greeteth you all,And doth to understand he hath rung your bell.Now with right and might, will and skill,God speed every dell.John the Miller asketh help to turn his mill right:He hath ground small, small:The King's Son of Heaven will pay for it all.Look thy mill go right, with its four sails dight.With right and with might, with skill and with will,And let the post stand in steadfastness.Let right help might, and skill go before will,Then shall our mill go aright;But if might go before right, and will go before skill,Then is our mill mis-a-dight."
"John Ball greeteth you all,And doth to understand he hath rung your bell.Now with right and might, will and skill,God speed every dell.
"John Ball greeteth you all,
And doth to understand he hath rung your bell.
Now with right and might, will and skill,
God speed every dell.
John the Miller asketh help to turn his mill right:He hath ground small, small:The King's Son of Heaven will pay for it all.Look thy mill go right, with its four sails dight.
John the Miller asketh help to turn his mill right:
He hath ground small, small:
The King's Son of Heaven will pay for it all.
Look thy mill go right, with its four sails dight.
With right and with might, with skill and with will,And let the post stand in steadfastness.Let right help might, and skill go before will,Then shall our mill go aright;But if might go before right, and will go before skill,Then is our mill mis-a-dight."
With right and with might, with skill and with will,
And let the post stand in steadfastness.
Let right help might, and skill go before will,
Then shall our mill go aright;
But if might go before right, and will go before skill,
Then is our mill mis-a-dight."
Sometimes it is under the signature of John Trueman that John Ball writes:
"Beware ere ye be woe;Know your friend from your foe;Take enough and cry "Ho!"And do well and better and flee from sin,And seek out peace and dwell therein—So biddeth John Trueman and all his fellows."
"Beware ere ye be woe;Know your friend from your foe;Take enough and cry "Ho!"And do well and better and flee from sin,And seek out peace and dwell therein—So biddeth John Trueman and all his fellows."
"Beware ere ye be woe;
Know your friend from your foe;
Take enough and cry "Ho!"
And do well and better and flee from sin,
And seek out peace and dwell therein—
So biddeth John Trueman and all his fellows."
A more definite note was struck when it seemed to Ball and his colleagues that the time was ripe for revolution, and the word was given that appeal must be made to the boy-king—Richard was only eleven years old when he came to the throne in 1377.
"Let us go to the King, and remonstrate with him, telling him we must have it otherwise, or we ourselves shall find the remedy. He is young. If we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the name of serf, or are held in bondage, will follow us in the hope of being free. When the King shall see us we shall obtain a favourable answer, or we must then ourselves seek to amend our condition."
In another letter John Ball greets John Nameless, John the Miller, and John Carter, and bids them stand together in God's name, and beware of guile: he bids Piers Plowman "go to his work and chastise well Hob the Robber (Sir Robert Hales, the King's Treasurer); and take with you John Trueman and all his fellows, and look that you choose one head and no more."
These letters and the preaching were accepted by willing minds. John Ball was in prison—in the jail of Archbishop Sudbury at Maidstone—in the spring of 1381, but the peasants were organised and ready to revolt. If Wat Tyler is the recognised leader of the rebel forces—"the one head"—John Ball's was the work of preparing the uprising. The vagrant priest had rung his bell to some purpose. In every county, from Somerset to York, the peasants flocked together, "some armed with clubs, rusty swords, axes, with old bows reddened by the smoke of the chimney corner, and odd arrows with only one feather."
At Whitsuntide, early in June, 1381, the great uprising began—the Hurling time of the peasants—long to be remembered with horror by the governing classes. A badly ordered poll-tax was the match that kindled the fire.
The poll-tax was first levied, in 1377, on all over fourteen years of age. Two years later it was graduated, every man and woman of the working class being rated at 4d., and dukes and archbishops at £6 13s. 4d. More money was still wanted by the Government, and early in 1381, John of Gaunt, the chief man in the realm, called Parliament together at Northampton, and demanded £160,000. Parliament agreed that £100,000 should be raised, and the clergy—owning a third of the land—promised £60,000. But the only way of raising the £100,000 that the Government could think of was by another poll-tax, and this time everybody over fifteen was required to pay 1s. Of course, the thing was impossible. In many parishes the mere returns of population were not filled in; numbers evaded payment—which spelt ruin—by leaving their homes. £22,000 was all that came to hand.
Then a man named John Legge came to the assistance of the Government, and was appointed chief commissioner, and empowered to collect the tax.
The methods of Legge and his assistants provoked hostility, and when the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham, and Stanford-le-Hope, in Essex, were summoned to meet the commissioner at Brentwood, their reply was to kill the collectors.
The Government answered this by sending down Chief Justice Belknap to punish the offenders, but the people drove the chief justice out of the place, and Belknap was glad to escape with his life.
This was on Whit-Sunday, June 2nd, and two days later the revolt had spread to Kent; Gravesend and Dartford were in tumult. In one place Sir Simon Burley, a friend of Richard II., seized a workman, claiming him as a bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of £300; while at Dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife and daughter of one John Tyler.[36]
Thereupon this John Tyler, "being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand, and ran reaking home; where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words, and strake at the tyler; whereupon the tyler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with his lathing staff, so that the brains flew out of his head. Wherethrough great noise arose in the streets, and the poor people being glad, everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler."
Now, with the fire of revolt in swift blaze, it was for the men of Kent to see that it burned under some direction. Authority and discipline were essential if the rising was not to become mob rule or mere anarchy, and if positive and intolerable wrongs were to find remedies.
At Maidstone, on June 7th—after Rochester Castle had been stormed, its prisoners set free and Sir John Newton its governor placed in safe custody—Wat Tyler was chosen captain of the rebel hosts.
History tells us nothing of the antecedents of this remarkable man. For eight days, and eight days only, he plays his part on the stage of national events: commands with authority a vast concourse of men; meets the King face to face, and wrests from sovereignty great promises of reform; orders the execution of the chief ministers of the Crown, and then, in what seems to be the hour of triumph, is struck to the ground, and goes to his death.
Under the accredited leadership of Wat Tyler the revolt at once took form. Five days were spent in Kent before the peasant army marched on London. The manor houses were attacked, and all rent rolls, legal documents, lists of tenants and serfs destroyed. The rising was not a ferocious massacre like the rising of the Jacquerie in France; there was no general massacre of landlords, or reign of terror. The lawyers who managed the landowners' estates were the enemy, and against them—against the instruments of landlord tyranny—was the anger of the peasants directed. In the same way John of Gaunt, and not the youthful King, was recognised as the evil influence in government; and while a vow was taken by the men of Kent that no man named "John" should be King of England, the popular cry was "King Richard and the Commons," and all who joined in this were accounted friends of the insurgent populace.
Blackheath was reached on the evening of June 12th, and early the following morning, which was Corpus Christi Day, John Ball—released by a thousand hands from his prison at Maidstone—preached to the multitude on the work before them:
"Now is the opportunity given to Englishmen, if they do but choose to take it, of casting off the yoke they have borne so long, of winning the freedom they have always desired. Wherefore, let us take good courage and behave like the wise husbandman of scripture, who gathered the wheat into his barn, but uprooted and burned the tares that had half-choked the good grain. The tares of England are her oppressive rulers, and the time of harvest has come. Ours it is to pluck up these tares and make away with them all—the wicked lords, the unjust judges, the lawyers—every man, indeed, who is dangerous to the common good. Then shall we all have peace in our time and security for the future. For when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will enjoy equal freedom and nobility, rank and power shall we have in common."
Thirty-thousand men—yeomen, craftsmen, villeins, and peasants, were at Blackheath, and these were soon joined by thousands more from Surrey.
John Wraw and Grindcobbe came to consult with Wat Tyler, and then returned to Suffolk and Hertford to announce that the hour had come to strike.
The Marshalsea and King's Bench prisons, and the houses of ill-fame that clustered round London Bridge, were destroyed before Wat Tyler led his army into the city. An attempt to meet the King in conference was frustrated by the royal counsellors. Richard came down in the royal barge as far as Rotherhithe, but was dissuaded by Sir Robert Hales, and the Earls of Suffolk, Salisbury, and Warwick, from "holding speech with the shoeless ruffians."
Richard rowed back swiftly to the Tower, and Tyler and his army swept into London. The city was in the hands of the rebel captain, but the citizens welcomed the invaders, and offered bread and ale when Tyler proclaimed that death would be the instant punishment for theft.
John of Gaunt's palace at the Savoy, on the river strand, was the first place to be burnt; but Henry, Earl of Derby, John of Gaunt's son (eighteen years later to reign as Henry IV., in place of Richard), was allowed to pass out uninjured, and a wretched man caught in the act of stealing off with a silver cup was promptly executed.
The Savoy destroyed, the Temple—a hive of lawyers—was the next to be burnt, and before nightfall the Fleet Prison and Newgate had been demolished.
Again Tyler demanded conference with the King, and Richard, lying in the Tower with his counsellors, unable to prevent the work of conference, boldly decided to come out and meet the rebels. Mile End was appointed for the conference, and to Mile End Richard came with a very modest retinue. The King was only fifteen, but he was the son of the Black Prince, and he had both courage and cunning. He was fully aware that the people did not lay on him responsibility for the sins of the Government. "If we measure intellectual power by the greatest exertion it ever displays, rather than by its average results, Richard II. was a man of considerable talents. He possessed along with much dissimulation a decisive promptitude in seizing the critical moment for action."[37]
At Mile End Tyler stated the grievances of the people. But first he asked that all traitors should be put to death, and to this the King agreed.
Four positive articles of reform were put forward, and were at once assented to by the King:—
1. A free and general pardon to all concerned in the rising.
2. The total abolition of all villeinage (forced labour) and serfdom.
3. An end to all tolls and market dues—"freedom to buy and sell in all cities, burghs, mercantile towns, and other places within our kingdom of England."
4. All customary tenants to become leaseholders at a fixed rental of fourpence an acre for ever.
That all doubts might be removed, thirty clerks were set to work on the spot to draw up charters of manumission, and banners were presented to each county. At nightfall thousands returned home convinced that the old order was ended, and that the Royal charters were genuine assurances of freedom.
But Tyler and the bulk of the men of Kent and Surrey remained in the city. It seemed to Wat Tyler that better terms still were to be wrung from the King. It looked that night as though the insurrection had triumphed completely. Not only were the charters signed and the royal promises given, but several in high office, whom Tyler held to be "traitors," had gone to their doom. Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, Archbishop Sudbury, the Chancellor—a gentle and kindly old man, "lenient to heretics"—John Legge, the hated poll-tax commissioner, with Appleton, John of Gaunt's chaplain, and Richard Lyons, a thoroughly corrupt contractor of Edward III.'s reign, were all dragged out of the Tower and beheaded on Tower Hill on Friday, June 15th.
On Tyler's request for another conference with Richard on the following day, the King saw he had no choice but to yield. For the second time Wat Tyler and Richard met face to face. The conference was held at Smithfield, in the square outside St. Bartholomew's Priory. The King and two hundred retainers, with Walworth the mayor, were on the east side of the square. Tyler and his army were on the west side, opposite the Priory.
In the open space Tyler, mounted on a little horse, presented his demands; more sweeping were the reforms now asked for than those of the previous day.
"Let no law but the law of Winchester[38]prevail throughout the land, and let no man be made an outlaw by the decree of judges and lawyers. Grant also that no lord shall henceforth exercise lordship over the commons; and since we are oppressed by so vast a horde of bishops and clerks, let there be but one bishop in England; and let the property and goods of Holy Church be divided fairly according to the needs of the people in each parish, after in justice making suitable provision for the present clergy and monks. Finally, let there be no more villeins in England, but grant us all to be free and of one condition."
Richard answered that he promised readily all that was asked, "if only it be consistent with the regality of my Crown." He then bade the commons return home, since their requests had been granted.
Nobles and counsellors stood in sullen and silent anger at the King's words, but were powerless to act. Tyler, conscious of victory, called for a draught, and when his attendant brought him a mighty tankard of ale, the rebel leader drank good-humouredly to "King Richard and the Commons." A knight in the royal service, a "valet of Kent," was heard to mutter that Wat Tyler was the greatest thief and robber in all the county, and Tyler caught the abusive words, drew his dagger, and made for the man.
Mayor Walworth, as angry as the nobles at the King's surrender, shouted that he would arrest all who drew weapons in the King's presence; and on Tyler striking at him impatiently, the Mayor drew a cutlass and slashed back, wounding Tyler in the neck so that he fell from his horse. Before he could recover a footing, two knights plunged their swords into him, and Tyler, mortally wounded, could only scramble on to his little horse, ride a yard or two, call on the commons to avenge him, and then drop—a dead man.[39]
And with Wat Tyler's death the whole rebellion collapsed. Confusion fell upon the people at Smithfield. Some were for immediate attack, but when Richard, riding out into the middle of the square, claimed that he and not Tyler was their King, and bade them follow him into the fields towards Islington, the great mass, convinced that Richard was honestly their friend, obeyed. At nightfall they were scattered.
Wat Tyler's body was taken into the Priory, and his head placed on London Bridge.
Walworth hastily gathered troops together, and the leader of the rebels being dead, the nobles recovered their courage.
The rising was over; the people without leaders were as sheep for the slaughter. Jack Straw was taken in London and hanged without the formality of a trial; and on June 22nd Tresilian, the new chief justice, went on a special assize to try the rebels, and "showed mercy to none and made great havock." The King's charters and promises were declared null and void when Parliament met, and some hundreds of peasants were hanged in various parts of the country.
John Ball and Grindcobbe were hanged at St. Albans on July 15th, John Wraw and Geoffrey Litster suffered the same fate.
All that Wat Tyler and the peasants had striven for was lost; but the rising was not quite in vain. For one thing, the poll-tax was stopped, and the end of villeinage was hastened.
The great uprising was the first serious demonstration of the English people for personal liberty. "It taught the King's officers and gentle folks that they must treat the peasants like men if they wished them to behave quietly, and it led most landlords to set free their bondsmen, and to take fixed money payments instead of uncertain services from their customary tenants, so that in a hundred years' time there were very few bondsmen left in England."[40]
To understand the character and importance of the rising of the men of Kent under Jack Cade in 1450, the first thing to be done is to clear the mind of Shakespeare's travesty inKing Henry VI., Part 2. In the play the name of Cade has been handed down in obloquy, and all that he and his followers aimed at caricatured out of recognition. The part that Jack Cade really played in national affairs has no likeness to the low comedy performance imagined by Shakespeare.
It was a popular rising in 1450, but it was not a peasant revolt. Men of substance in the county rallied to Cade's banner, and in many parishes in Kent the village constable was employed to enrol willing recruits in the army of disaffection.[41]
The peasant revolt was at bottom a social movement, fostered and fashioned by preachers of a social democracy. Cade's rising was provoked by misgovernment and directed at political reform. It was far less revolutionary in purpose than the revolt that preceded it, or the rising under Ket a hundred years later.
The discontent was general when Cade encamped on Blackheath with the commons of Kent at the end of May, 1450. Suffolk, the best hated of Henry VI.'s ministers, had already been put to death by the sailors of Dover, and Lord Say-and-Sele, the Treasurer, was in the Tower under impeachment. Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, another Minister, was hanged by his infuriated flock in Wiltshire, and Bishop Moleyns, of Chichester, Keeper of the Privy Seal, was executed in Portsmouth by a mob of sailors. Piracy prevailed unchecked in the English Channel, and the highways inland were haunted by robbers—soldiers back from France and broken in the wars.
The ablest statesman of the day, the Duke of York, was banished from the royal council, and there was a wide feeling that an improvement in government was impossible until York was recalled.
Whether Cade, who was known popularly as "Mortimer," was related to the Duke of York, or was merely a country landowner, can never be decided. The charges made against him after his death were not supported by a shred of evidence, but it was necessary then for the Government to blacken the character of the Captain of Kent for the utter discouragement of his followers. All weknowof Cade is that by the Act of Attainder he must have been a man of some property in Surrey—probably a squire or yeoman.
The army that encamped on Blackheath numbered over 40,000, and included squires, yeomen, county gentlemen, and at least two notable ecclesiastics from Sussex, the Abbot of Battle and the Prior of Lewes. The testimony to Cade's character is that he was the unquestioned and warmly respected leader of the host. The Cade depicted by his enemies—a dissolute, disreputable ruffian—was not the kind of man to have had authority as a chosen captain over country gentlemen and clerical landowners in the fifteenth century.
The "Complaints" of the commons of Kent, drawn up at Blackheath and forwarded to the King and his Parliament, then sitting at Westminster, called attention in fifteen articles to the evils that afflicted the land. These articles dealt with a royal threat to lay waste Kent in revenge for the death of the Duke of Suffolk; the wasting of the royal revenue raised by heavy taxation; the banishment of the Duke of York—"to make room for unworthy ministers who would not do justice by law, but demanded bribes and gifts"; purveyance of goods for the royal household without payment; arrest and imprisonment on false charges of treason by persons whose goods and lands were subsequently seized by the King's servants, who then "either compassed their deaths or kept them in prison while they got possession of their property by royal grant"; interference by "the great rulers of the land" with the old right of free election of knights of the shire; the mismanagement of the war in France. A certain number of purely local grievances, chiefly concerned with the maladministration of justice, were also included in the "Complaints," and five "Requests"—including the abolition of the Statutes of Labourers—were added.
Henry and his counsellors dismissed these "Complaints" with contempt. "Such proud rebels," it was said, "should rather be suppressed and tamed with violence and force than with fair words or amicable answer." But when the royal troops moved into Kent to disperse the rising, Cade's army cut them to pieces at Sevenoaks. Henry returned to London; his nobles rode away to their country houses; and after a fruitless attempt at negotiations by the Duke of Buckingham and the Archbishop of Canterbury,[42]the King himself fled to Kenilworth—leaving London at the mercy of the Captain of Kent.
On July 2nd Cade crossed London Bridge on horseback, followed by all his army. The Corporation had already decided to offer no opposition to his entry, and one of its members, Thomas Cocke, of the Drapers' Company—later sheriff and M.P.—had gone freely between the camp at Blackheath and the city, acting as mutual friend to the rebels and the citizens. All that Cade required was that the foreign merchants in London should furnish him with a certain number of arms and horses, "and 1,000 marks of ready money"; and this was done. "So that it was found that the Captain and Kentishmen at their being in the city did no hurt to any stranger."[43]
On the old London stone, in Cannon Street, Cade laid his sword, in the presence of the Mayor and a great multitude of people, and declared proudly: "Now is Mortimer lord of this city." Then at nightfall he went back to his headquarters at the White Hart Inn in Southwark.
The following day Lord Say-and-Sele, and his son-in-law, Crowmer, Sheriff of Kent, were removed by Cade's orders from the Tower to the Guildhall, tried for "divers treasons" and "certain extortions," and quickly beheaded. Popular hatred, not content with this, placed the heads of the fallen minister and his son-in-law on poles, made them kiss in horrible embrace, and then bore them off in triumph to London Bridge.
A third man, one John Bailey, was also hanged for being a necromancer; and as Cade had promised death to all in his army convicted of theft, it fell out that certain "lawless men" paid the penalty for disobedience, and were hanged in Southwark—where the main body of the army lay.
Cade's difficulties began directly after Lord Say-and-Sele's execution. London assented willingly to the death of an unpopular statesman, but had no mind to provision an army of 50,000 men, and, indeed, had no liking for the proximity of such a host. Plunder being forbidden, and strict discipline the rule, the urgent question for the Captain of Kent was how the army was to be maintained.
Getting no voluntary help from the city. Cade decided that he must help himself. He supped with a worthy citizen named Curtis in Tower Street on July 4th, and insisted before he left that Curtis must contribute money for the support of the Kentish men. Curtis complied—how much he gave we know not—but he resented bitterly the demand, and he told the tale of his wrongs to his fellow-merchants.[44]The result was that while Cade slept in peace as usual at the White Hart, the Mayor and Corporation took counsel with Lord Scales, the Governor of the Tower, and resolved that at all costs the Captain of Kent and his forces must be kept out of the city. After the treatment of Curtis the fear was that disorder and pillage might become common.
On the evening of Sunday, July 5th, and all through the night battle waged hotly on London Bridge, which had been seized and fortified before Cade was awake, and by the morning the rebels, unsuccessful in their attack, were glad to agree to a hasty truce.
The truce gave opportunity to Cardinal Kemp, Archbishop of York, the King's Chancellor, to suggest a lasting peace to Cade. Messengers were sent speedily from the Tower, where Kemp, with Archbishop Stafford, of Canterbury, had stayed in safety, to the White Hart, urging a conference "to the end that the civil commotions and disturbances might cease and tranquillity be restored."
Cade consented, and when the two Archbishops, with William Waynfleet, Bishop of Winchester, met the Captain of Kent in the Church of St. Margaret, Southwark, and promised that Parliament should give consideration to the "Complaints" and "Requests" of the commons, and that a full pardon should be given to all who would straightway return home, the rising was at an end.
Cade hesitated, and asked for the endorsement of the pardons by Parliament; but this was plainly impossible because Parliament was not sitting. The bulk of the commons were satisfied with their pardons, and with the promise that Parliament would attend to their grievances. There was nothing to be gained, it seemed, by remaining in arms. On July 8th, the rebel army had broken up, taking the road back to the towns and villages, farms and cottages in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. Cade, with a small band of followers, retreated to Rochester, and attempted without success, the capture of Queenborough Castle. On the news that the commons had dispersed from Southwark, the Government at once took the offensive. Alexander Iden was appointed Sheriff of Kent, and, marrying Crowmer's widow, subsequently gained considerable profit. Within a week John Cade was proclaimed by the King's writ a false traitor throughout the countryside, and Sheriff Iden was in eager pursuit—for a reward of 1,000 marks awaited the person who should take Cade, alive or dead.
Near Heathfield, in Sussex, Cade, broken and famished, was found by Iden, and fought his last fight on July 13th, preferring to die sword in hand than to perish by the hangman. He fell before the overwhelming odds of the sheriff and his troops, and the body was immediately sent off to London for identification.
The landlady of the White Hart proved the identity of the dead captain, and all that remained was to stick the head on London Bridge, and dispatch the quartered body to Blackheath, Norwich, Salisbury and Gloucester for public exhibition.
Iden got the 1,000 marks reward and, in addition, the governorship of Rochester Castle at a salary of £36 a year.
By special Act of Attainder all Cade's goods, lands and tenements were made forfeit to the Crown, and statements were published for the discrediting of Cade's life.
No allusion was made in Parliament to the "Complaints" and "Requests," and, in spite of Cardinal Kemp's pardons, a number of men were hanged at Canterbury and Rochester for their share in the rising, when Henry VI. and his justices visited Kent in January, 1451.
The revolt failed to amend the wretched misrule. It remained for civil war to drive Henry VI. from the throne, and make Edward IV. of York his successor.
A century after the rising of the commons of Kent came the last great popular rebellion—the Norfolk Rising, led by Ket. This insurrection was agrarian and social, concerned neither with the fierce theological differences of the time, nor with the political rivalries of Protector Somerset and his enemies in Edward VI.'s Council.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century England was in the main a nation of small farmers, but radical changes were taking place, and these changes meant ruin to thousands of yeomen and peasants.
The enclosure, by many large landowners, of the fields which for ages past had been cultivated by the country people, the turning of arable land into pasture, were the main causes of the distress.[45]Whole parishes were evicted in some places and dwelling houses destroyed, and contemporary writers are full of the miseries caused by these clearances.
Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515, prohibiting the "pulling down of towns," and ordering the reversion of pasture lands to tillage, but the legislation was ignored. Sir Thomas More, in his "Utopia" (1516), described very vividly what the enclosures were doing to rural England; and a royal commission, appointed by Cardinal Wolsey, reported in the following year that more than 36,000 acres had been enclosed in seven Midland counties. In some cases, waste lands only were enclosed, but landowners were ordered to make restitution within forty days where small occupiers had been dispossessed. Royal commissions and royal proclamations were no more effective than Acts of Parliament. Bad harvests drove the Norfolk peasantry to riot for food in 1527 and 1529. The dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 and 1539 abolished a great source of charity for the needy, and increased the social disorder. Finally, in 1547, came the confiscation by the Crown of the property of the guilds and brotherhoods, and the result of this enactment can only be realised by supposing the funds of friendly societies, trade unions, and co-operative societies taken by Government to-day without compensation.
All that Parliament would do in the face of the starvation and unemployment that brooded over many parts of England, was to pass penal legislation for the homeless and workless—so that it seemed to many that Government had got rid of Papal authority only to bring back slavery. The agrarian misery, the violent changes in the order of church services and social customs, the confiscation of the funds of the guilds, and the wanton spoiling of the parish churches[46]—all these things drove the people to revolt.
Early in 1549 the men of Devon and Cornwall took up arms for "the old religion," and were hanged by scores. In Norfolk that same year the rising under Ket was social, and unconcerned with religion. Lesser agrarian disturbances took place in Somerset, Lincoln, Essex, Kent, Oxford, Wilts, and Buckingham. But there was no cohesion amongst the insurgents, and no organisation of the peasants such as England had seen under John Ball and his companion in 1381.
In 1548 Somerset, the Lord Protector, made an honest attempt to check the rapacity of the landowners, but his proclamation and royal commission were no more successful than Wolsey's had been, and only earned for the Protector the hatred of the landowners.
The Norfolk Rising was the one strong movement to turn the current that was sweeping the peasants into destitution. It failed, as all popular insurrection in England has failed, and it brought its leaders to the gallows; but for six weeks hope lifted its head in the rebel camp outside Norwich, and many believed that oppression and misery were to end.
The rising began at Attleborough, on June 20th, when the people pulled down the fences and hedges set up round the common fields. On July 7th, at the annual feast in honour of St. Thomas of Canterbury, at Wymondham, a mighty concourse of people broke down the fences at Hetherset, and then appealed to Robert Ket and his brother to help them.
Both the Kets were well-known locally. They were men of old family, craftsmen, and landowners. Robert was a tanner by trade, William a butcher. Three manors—valued at 1,000 marks, with a yearly income of £50—belonged to Robert Ket: church lands mostly, leased from the Earl of Warwick.
Ket saw that only under leadership and guidance could the revolt become a revolution, and he threw himself into the cause of his poorer neighbours with whole-hearted fervour. "I am ready," he said, "and will be ready at all times to do whatever, not only to repress, but to subdue the power of great men. Whatsoever lands I have enclosed shall again be made common unto ye and all men, and my own hands shall first perform it. You shall have me, if you will, not only as a companion, but as a captain; and in the doing of the so great a work before us, not only as a fellow, but for a leader, author, and principal."
Ket's leadership was at once acclaimed with enthusiasm by the thousand men who formed the rebel band at the beginning of the rising. The news spread quickly that Ket was leading an army to Norwich, and on July 10th, when a camp was made at Eaton Wood, every hour brought fresh recruits. It is clear from Ket's speeches, and from "The Rebels' Complaint," issued by him at this time, that the aim of the leaders of the Norfolk Rising was not merely to stop the enclosures, but to end the ascendancy of the landlord class for all time, and to set up a social democracy.
Ket's address at Eaton Wood was revolutionary:
"Now are ye overtopped and trodden down by gentlemen, and put out of possibility ever to recover foot. Rivers of riches run into the coffers of your landlords, while you are par'd to the quick, and fed upon pease and oats like beasts. You are fleeced by these landlords for their private benefit, and as well kept under by the public burdens of State, wherein while the richer sort favour themselves, ye are gnawn to the very bones. Your tyrannous masters often implead, arrest, and cast you into prison, so that they may the more terrify and torture you in your minds, and wind your necks more surely under their arms.... Harmless counsels are fit for tame fools; for you who have already stirred, there is no hope but in adventuring boldly."
"The Rebels' Complaint" is equally definite and outspoken. It rehearsed the wrongs of a landless peasantry, and called on the people to end these wrongs by open rebellion. The note of social equality is struck by Ket throughout the rising.
"The present condition of possessing land seemeth miserable and slavish—holding it all at the pleasure of great men; not freely, but by prescription, and, as it were, at the will and pleasure of the lord. For as soon as any man offend any of these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust from all his goods.
"The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and our children are taken away.
"The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common, those are ditched and hedged in and made several; the pastures are enclosed, and we shut out.
"We can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury; neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness, excess, and pride of the nobility. We will rather take arms, and mix Heaven and earth together, than endure so great cruelty.
"Nature hath provided for us, as well as for them; hath given us a body and a soul, and hath not envied us other things. While we have the same form, and the same condition of birth together with them, why should they have a life so unlike unto ours, and differ so far from us in calling?
"We see that things have now come to extremities, and we will prove the extremity. We will rend down hedges, fill up ditches, and make a way for every man into the common pasture. Finally, we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed.
"We desire liberty and an indifferent (or equal) use of all things. This will we have. Otherwise these tumults and our lives shall only be ended together."
But though the method was revolution and the goal social democracy, Ket was no anarchist. He proved himself a strong, capable leader, able to enforce discipline and maintain law and order in the rebel camp. And with all his passionate hatred against the rule of the landlord, Ket would allow neither massacre nor murder. There is no evidence that the life of a single landowner was taken while the rising lasted, though many were brought captive to Ket's judgment seat.
Ket was equally averse from civil war between the citizens of Norwich and the peasants. When the Mayor of Norwich, Thomas Cod, refused to allow Ket's army to cross the city on its way to Mousehold Heath, where the permanent camp was to be made, Ket simply led his forces round by Hailsdon and Drayton, and so reached Mousehold on July 12th without bloodshed. A week later, and 20,000 was the number enrolled under the banner of revolt—for the publication of "The Rebels' Complaint" and the ringing of bells and firing of beacons roused all the countryside to action.
On Mousehold Heath, Robert Ket, with his brother William, gave directions and administered justice under a great tree, called the Oak of Reformation. Mayor Cod, and two other respected Norwich citizens, Aldrich, an alderman, and Watson, a preacher, joined Ket's council, thinking their influence might restrain the rebels from worse doings.
Twenty-nine "Requests and Demands," signed by Ket, Cod, and Aldrich, were dispatched to the King from Mousehold, and this document gave in full the grievances of the rebels. The chief demands were the cessation of enclosures, the enactment of fair rents, the restoration of common fishing rights, the appointment of resident clergymen to preach and instruct the children, and the free election or appointment of local "commissioners" for the enforcement of the laws. There was also a request "that all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with His precious bloodshedding."
The only answer to the "Requests and Demands" was the arrival of a herald with a promise that Parliament would meet in October to consider the grievances, if the people would in the meantime quietly return to their homes.
But this Ket would by no means agree to, and for the next few weeks his authority was supreme in that part of the country. He established a rough constitution for the prevention of mere disorder, two men being chosen by their fellows from the various hundreds of the eastern half of the county. A royal messenger, bearing commissions of the peace to certain country gentlemen, falling into the hands of Ket, was relieved of his documents and dismissed. Ket then put in these commissions the names of men who had joined the rising, and declared them magistrates with authority to check all disobedience to orders.
To feed the army at Mousehold, men were sent out with a warrant from Ket for obtaining cattle and corn from the country houses, and "to beware of robbing, spoiling, and other evil demeanours." No violence or injury was to be done to "any honest or poor man." Contributions came in from the smaller yeomen "with much private good-will," but the landowners generally were stricken with panic, and let the rebels do what they liked. Those who could not escape by flight were, for the most part, brought captive to the Oak of Reformation, and thence sent to the prisons in Norwich and St. Leonard's Hill.
Relations between Ket and the Norwich authorities soon became strained to breaking point. Mayor Cod was shocked at the imprisonment of county gentlemen, and refused permission for Ket's troops to pass through the city on their foraging expeditions. Citizens and rebels were in conflict on July 21st, but "for lack of powder and want of skill in the gunners" few lives were lost, and Norwich was in the hands of Ket the following day. No reprisals followed; but a week later came William Parr, Marquis of Northampton—Henry VIII.'s brother-in-law—with 1,500 Italian mercenaries and a body of country squires, to destroy the rebels. Northampton's forces were routed utterly, and Lord Sheffield was slain, and many houses and gates were burnt in the city.
Then for three weeks longer Robert Ket remained in power, still hoping against hope that some attention would be given by the Government to his "Requests and Demands." Protector Somerset, beset by his own difficulties, could do nothing for rebellious peasants, could not countenance in any way an armed revolt, however great the miseries that provoked insurrection. The Earl of Warwick was dispatched with 14,000 troops to end the rebellion, and arrived on August 24th. For two days the issue seemed uncertain—half the city only was in Warwick's hands. The arrival of 1,400 mercenaries—"lanzknechts," Germans mostly—and a fatal decision of the rebels to leave their vantage ground at Mousehold Heath and do battle in the open valley that stretched towards the city, gave complete victory to Warwick.
The peasants poured into the meadows beyond Magdalen and Pockthorpe gates, and were cut to pieces by the professional soldiers.
When all seemed over Ket galloped away to the north, but was taken, worn out, at the village of Swannington, eight miles from Norwich.
More than 400 peasants were hanged by Warwick's orders, and their bodies left to swing on Mousehold and in the city. Robert Ket and William Ket were sent to London, and after being tried and condemned for high treason, were returned to Norwich in December for execution. Robert Ket was hanged in chains from Norwich Castle, and William suffered in similar fashion from the parish church at Wymondham—to remind all people of the fate that befall those who venture, unsuccessfully, to take up arms against the government in power.
So the Norfolk Rising ended, and with it ended all serious popular insurrection in England. Riots and mob violence have been seen even to our own time, but no great, well-organised movement to overthrow authority and establish a social democracy by force of arms has been attempted since 1549.
The characters of Robert Ket and his brother have been vindicated by time, and the rebel leader is now recognised as a disinterested, capable, high-minded man. Ket took what seemed to him the only possible course to avert the doom of a ruined peasantry, and failed. But his courage and humaneness are beyond question.[47]
The enclosures did not end with the sixteenth century, and for another one hundred years complaints are heard of the steady depopulation of rural England. In the eighteenth century came the second great series of enclosures—the enclosing of the commons and waste spaces, by Acts of Parliament. Between 1710 and 1867 no less than 7,660,439 acres were thus enclosed.
To-day the questions of land tenure and land ownership are conspicuous items in the discussion of the whole social question, for the relations of a people to its land are of very first importance in a democratic state.
The English Parliament throughout the sixteenth century was but a servile instrument of the Crown. The great barons were dead. Henry VIII. put to death Sir Thomas More and all who questioned the royal absolutism. Elizabeth, equally despotic, had by good fortune the services of the first generation of professional statesmen that England produced. These statesmen—Burleigh, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Thomas Smith, and Sir Francis Walsingham—all died in office. Burleigh was minister for forty years, Bacon and Mildmay for more than twenty, and Smith and Walsingham for eighteen years.[48]