Tombland

Studies by Diarmaid MacCulloch in the 1980s showed that while much the largest in numbers, Kett’s camp outside Norwich was only one of several linked East Anglian camps. ⁴ His work, and Amanda Jones’s work on the ‘lesser stirs’ of what contemporaries were soon calling the ‘commotion time’, are the most important correctives to the long tradition of seeing what happened in 1549 as comprising only the Western and Kett’s Rebellions. ⁵ Jones has suggested that in localities where the authorities were unable to deal with disorder, or perhaps, as in Norwich, reluctantly forced to cooperate with rebels for a while, smaller rebellions may have gone deliberately unrecorded. ⁶

REBEL COORDINATION

That rebellions should erupt across the country in the same week, just when many of the local leaders who would normally be the organizers of local forces were absent, cannot possibly be coincidence. All seem to have adopted the ‘camping’ strategy and avoided armed violence. In June, it seems clear, men had been coordinating and preparing for a new sort of rebellion.

Who were they? The importance of deserters from the Scottish wars is, I have suggested, more central than previously suggested. The military-organizational skills of soldiers, particularly officers, were I think to be important especially in Kett’s huge camp. Among the confusing blizzard of proclamations by the government in July, one referred to ‘criminals, deserters and loiterers’ as spreading ‘rumours’ that misled people to gather in unlawful assemblies, ¹ while in a letter to Philip Hoby talking of the rebels, Somerset wrote ‘the ruffians among them and the soldiers, which be the chief doers, look first for spoil’. ²

Meanwhile Thomas Smith, Somerset’s Chief Secretary, was terrified of the spread of the ‘camp-men’, as they were already being called. ³ There was an abortive plan for a large Hampshire-Sussex Rebellion, with a conservative religious hue, led by Garnham, a Winchester carpenter, and one Flint of Sussex. However, Flint failed to appear at a crucial meeting and was probably captured. ⁴ This raises another interesting issue, the question of government agents among the rebels; in Kent a man called Latimer (not the Bishop) travelled the county claiming he had Somerset’s approval to take bills of complaint. But he also received money from the government and may have been used by Somerset to try to pacify the rebels with money. ⁵ In other words, he became a double agent. Elsewhere, the authorities sent Edward Loft to the Thetford camp in south Norfolk ‘as a scout watch’, fearing the Cambridge commons were about to join the Norfolk rebels. ⁶ So the presence in the Mousehold camp of a government spy, which I have portrayed in Tombland , was perfectly likely.

MacCulloch, however, has emphasized the importance of substantial yeomen and townsmen in leading the rebellions, arranging meetings under cover of the sporting competitions so popular throughout the year, and refers to the regular paranoia exhibited by the gentry about such gatherings. ⁷ To the sporting competitions may be added plays and religious festivals, such as the Wymondham Game Play where Kett’s Rebellion began. I would suggest that yeomen and ‘runagates’ played complementary roles in instigating the rebellions.

What were the aims of the ‘camp-men’? Both those in the Midlands who opposed the religious changes, and those in the east who supported them, expressed the same hatred of ‘gentlemen’ and government officials, and wanted reform of rural conditions. Although only fragmentary evidence has survived, the camp-men sent numerous petitions to the Protector. I would suggest that part of the motivation for this strategy, especially in the east where religious questions mattered less, was the promise of the arrival of the enclosure commissioners. Indeed Somerset, on 8 July, at last announced the formation of the new commissions, presumably as a gesture of appeasement. ⁸ I suggest that the 1549 camp-men, only too aware of the commissioners’ lack of any enforcement powers, set up the camps partly to provide exactly that muscle, as well as a force to influence their strategy. I have shown the Norfolk rebels initially following this plan in Tombland. It is also true that petitions from the camps were overwhelmingly made to the Protector, not the commissioners, but they had not been named yet. The petitions were not limited to grievances about enclosure. Nicholas Sotherton, our main contemporary source for Kett’s Rebellion, considered that it was the very failure of the Protector to set a date for the commissioners to start work that caused the commons of East Anglia and Kent to decide to take matters into their own hands. I suggest however that setting up the camps was designed rather to force their coming, pre-emption not bypassing, and this ties in with the East Anglian rebels’ emphasis on their loyalty to the King. ⁹