Tombland

However, as July continued there was no sign of their coming, except in Kent where they arrived at the large camp outside Canterbury on 17 July, after a royal Herald had been received rudely. Conciliatory letters, money and beer were distributed to encourage the rebels to disperse, rather than dealing with their grievances, although this failed and the camp remained in place until mid-August. ¹⁰ Elsewhere they disappeared from the picture as, from mid-July, the Protector, urged by the Council, moved to a strategy of confrontation.

EAST ANGLIA : BACKGROUND TO REVOLT

Norfolk and Suffolk had a long tradition of rebelliousness. Suffolk especially had been central to popular rejection of Henry VIII’s ‘Amicable Grant’ tax in 1525. ¹ A decade later, during the Pilgrimage of Grace, copies of the Yorkshire rebels’ petition were found in Norfolk, and some tried to begin an insurrection at Walsingham; Richard Southwell, who played an important part in suppressing the conspiracy, was one of those picked as a target three years later by John Walter, who was hanged for attempting to start another rebellion. Norfolk commoners were also notoriously litigious, well used to clubbing together to go to court where their lords were consistently presented as a network of mutually supportive gentlemen. ²

Why was East Anglia so radical? Geographically, much of Norfolk and Suffolk had poor, ‘light soil’, where sheep dung provided the fertility needed to raise corn through the ‘foldcourse’ system, where landlords ran sheep on the fields in winter. ³ In the 1530s and 1540s, however, landowners were increasingly keen to get the tenants off their lands. As noted above, their principal tactic was to encroach on common lands, taking the opportunity to abuse the foldcourse system, for example by running very large numbers of sheep on both tenants’ fields and on the commons.

Politically, the fall of the Duke of Norfolk in 1546 had removed the figure at the apex of local government, a religious conservative and a harsh and unpopular landlord, who still had bondmen on some of his estates. Another central authority figure, William Rugge, Bishop of Norwich, equally conservative and unpopular, was by 1549 weak, his diocese in financial trouble (after the death of his predecessor, it appears a good deal of cathedral property was embezzled by Sir Richard Southwell as a Crown official). Under Rugge’s rule ecclesiastical office-holders remained conservative. ⁴ So, very likely, did the priesthood.

Finally, to understand Kett’s Rebellion one must look at the situation in the city of Norwich, England’s second largest and with one of its biggest markets, although the population may have been as little as 8,000. In the mid-sixteenth century it had serious problems, due largely to decline in the long-established worsted cloth trade, which had a knock-on effect on other city trades. ⁵

The governing structure was similar to other English cities, with ‘common’ councillors and above them aldermen, drawn from a few wealthy commercial families, with a mayor at the apex. The gulf between rich and poor was enormous, with the richest concentrated in the central wards of the city; it was widening in the sixteenth century. According to the survey for the 1525 Amicable Grant, twenty-nine men owned more than forty per cent of the taxable wealth, and around a quarter of the population was too poor to be taxed at all. With the inflation of the 1540s more must have fallen into desperate poverty.

There were signs that trouble was feared in early 1549. In May Norwich became the first English city to legislate for compulsory contributions to poor relief. ⁶ At the June Assizes, which feature prominently in Tombland , the judges were welcomed not with the usual feast but only with beer. ⁷ Both imply a fear of popular disturbance. And the poor of Norwich were to be vital participants in Kett’s Rebellion.

WYMONDHAM