Tombland

As well as war and inflation, England in 1547–9 faced radical religious change. Some have argued that Somerset’s religious changes were fairly moderate, but this is incorrect. ¹

First, people everywhere were affected by the dissolution of the chantries where masses were said for the dead, and government appropriation of their lands and property. Their funding had come partly from guilds who employed a priest to say masses for the souls of dead relatives and members. Robert Kett was involved in several in Wymondham. Most had a little land whose rentals paid for the chantry priests, and a few had sizeable holdings. Somerset put these lands on the market too.

Meanwhile the appearance of the churches was transformed by the removal of stained-glass, ornamentation and images. These altered the appearance of every church in the land, as Shardlake discovers at Whetstone.

The introduction, in June 1549, of the first Prayer Book in English was the biggest change of all, ending the ancient Latin Mass. ² Like all religious changes since 1533, it was imposed from above. Somerset himself was, I think, a genuine religious radical; he corresponded with European Protestant divines like John Calvin, who influenced him considerably. ³

Opposition to the religious changes certainly existed, and the abolition of Henry VIII’s harsh treason laws was negated by increasing restrictions on preaching – only licensed preachers were permitted by 1548. The introduction of the Prayer Book in services on 9 June 1549 was accepted by the bulk of the country – but in Devon and Cornwall furiously hostile opposition sparked rebellion.

THE COMMONWEALTH MEN

The main cause of revolt overall, though, was the ever-worsening lot of the poor. Somerset portrayed himself as their friend, and their situation was well known to him. But what could be done?

Answers were very much tied to the notion of ‘Commonwealth’. This ancient concept, synonymous with the ‘body politic’, came in sixteenth-century England increasingly to mean the duty of the government to further social welfare, ¹ connecting with the medieval ‘complaint tradition’ where satirical complaint and denouncing of social ills did however not really offer solutions beyond appeals to individual conscience and to the monarch. ²

‘Commonwealthmen’ were never a coherent group, though most were radical Protestants. In the 1540s they began complaining fiercely against the ‘greedy rich men’. A sermon of Bishop Latimer spoke of how ‘covetous landlords, by their enhancing of rents’ had produced ‘this monstrous and portentous dearth made by man’. ³ Extracts from such sermons were often printed, though they would be the ‘best bits’, ignoring the often greater amounts of time spent condemning lechery. ⁴ Simon Crowley’s ‘Petition Against the Oppression of the Poor Commons’ called on the rich to repent, and threatened uncooperative landlords and MPs with the wrath of the Lord, as did Latimer and Becon. ⁵ Numerous anonymous pamphlets denounced the rich, blaming covetousness for the decay of the Commonwealth. ⁶ Acquisitive landlords driving the poor from the countryside were particular targets.

There is another, contrary, strand in Commonwealth thinking, particularly where it penetrated government circles. This was that the ‘maintenance of good order and obedience’ was its very basis. Anarchy among the commons was greatly feared. ⁷ Thus ‘Commonwealth’ acquired a double meaning. For gentlemen who supported it – like Shardlake, at first – it was about restoring the natural balance and harmony between the classes; for others, however, it came to mean simply the welfare of the commons. ⁸ After the rebellions, the Commonwealth writers were the first to condemn the rebellions, often in ferocious terms.

THE ENCLOSURE COMMISSIONS

To be fair to him, Somerset did attempt practical solutions, albeit half-baked. Little help could be expected from Parliament, composed of members of the gentry and urban elite. A series of radical bills, intended to reverse the conversion of arable land to pasture, failed to pass the Commons. ¹ Parliament did pass one reform measure: a tax on sheep and cloth production, the former taxing owners of sheep according to the numbers they owned, disadvantaging large-scale farmers. The need to raise more revenue to fight the Scottish war was the argument used on reluctant MPs.