Tombland

Many landlords entered the land market by purchasing monastic land in the 1530s and 1540s on terms of ‘knight service’ to the Crown, which meant paying feudal dues to the King. Sometimes – with the aid of unscrupulous royal officials responsible for such dues, the feodary and escheator, or their agents – they attempted to pass these burdens on to tenants. ³ Then they would force the tenants out, or buy them out at knockdown prices. ⁴

In the 1540s inflation was reducing the value of landlords’ rents at a time when demand for wool was insatiable – in 1548 the price doubled. ⁵ Sheep required only a shepherd, a boy and a dog, and those turned off their lands at a time of rising population were often reduced to joining the ranks of impoverished ‘masterless men’ heading for the towns. Others tried to stay put in increasingly impossible circumstances. The 1540s was only one phase of enclosure, limited to certain parts of the country, but it frequently placed those affected in a nightmare position.

1549: A PERFECT STORM

1549 began badly for Protector Somerset. His younger brother Thomas Seymour, always a wild card, had married Henry VIII’s widow Catherine Parr in 1547. After her death in childbirth in September 1548 Thomas embarked on a course of action – taking bribes from the Channel pirates who, as Lord Admiral, he was supposed to be clearing from the seas, blackmailing the keeper of the Bristol mint into giving him coin, and stocking weapons at his home, Sudeley Palace – indicating an intention forcibly to take the Protectorship from his brother. He also paid court to the Lady Elizabeth through her servants. His activities quickly became known, and in January 1549 he was arrested and charged with treason. Elizabeth was put under severe questioning but, having made no commitment to marry Seymour, was released. However the other evidence of treason was clear, and the Protector had no alternative but to execute his brother in March 1549. This could only weaken him. ¹

There is another important factor about 1549 to consider – the weather. There had been three good harvests between 1546 and 1548, but the winter of 1548–9 had been hard, ² and by spring 1549 it would have been clear that the next harvest would likely be poor. ³ It was, indeed, disastrous.

THE MAY ‘STIRS ’

In April 1549 Somerset again issued a proclamation, stating that the King intended to enforce the enclosure laws, made since Henry VII’s time, across the country and ‘to see them executed against all such as shall be found culpable, without indeed pardon or remission’. The commissioners were ordered to proceed ‘with all speed and earnest endeavour’ to the punishment of offenders throughout the country. ¹ Had this proclamation ever been implemented, it would have destroyed the expansion of large-scale sheep farming. The proclamation was publicized across the country, and would have given food for thought, and hope, to the peasantry, who must however also have noted that, as in 1548, there was a complete absence of provisions for enforcement.

In May, a spate of rebellions and demonstrations broke out across southern England. There were disorders at Landbeach in Cambridgeshire over landlord overstocking of common land, ² and outbreaks of revolt against landlords and enclosures in Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Kent and Hampshire. Most were small-scale and easily dealt with by the local elite through conciliation or force; ³ in the most notorious incident, when the park of Sir William Herbert in Wiltshire was destroyed, he attacked with 200 men who ‘slaughtered the rebels like sheep’. It is worth noting that emparkment of land for deer-hunting was very fashionable among the gentry and aristocracy, but again took large amounts of land out of cultivation.

Another proclamation in late May condemned those who had taken the King’s authority upon themselves; subjects were reassured that the King intended to reform enclosures but commanded them to cease unlawful activities, and warned that those who did not would be prosecuted ‘by the sword, and with all force of extremity’. ⁴ The commissions would not set out until disturbances had ceased. Here is the mixture of conciliation and threat that, with different emphases, dominated Somerset’s approach to rural unrest until mid-July.

THE WESTERN REBELLION