Tombland

Were there women in the camp? Large-scale rebellion would not have been considered women’s business, though women were often involved in Tudor riots. However two pieces of evidence suggest some women were present. There is a reference in Neville to an adder falling from a rotten tree onto the breast of Kett’s wife just before the Battle of Dussindale. ⁴ More significant is a hitherto unnoticed reference in F. W. Russell’s nineteenth-century history of the rebellion, citing a document where, after the rebels’ unsuccessful August attack on Great Yarmouth, city constables were ordered to find out the names of those who had joined the camp and also ‘how many of the rebels wives are in the camp, and how many be at home’. ⁵ I suggest that a minority of wives followed their husbands into the camp – I have portrayed this in Tombland . The majority of rebel wives would, I think, have stayed behind to deal with children, businesses and farms.

As for the class and occupational structure of the rebels, two important studies, by Aubrey Greenwood and Jane Whittle, have contributed to our understanding, although both authors agree this is still limited since where rebels’ names and occupations are traceable, they tend to be the most prominent members. ⁶ Of a sample of 121 leading rebels, three were yeomen, twenty husbandmen, thirty-three poorer peasants and no less than forty-two artisans – though this ranges from butchers, who were usually wealthy, to a shoemaker and a rat-catcher, probably poor village artisans partly dependent on the village commons. ⁷ Whittle has studied manorial records, which show the rebels as a cross-section of the tenant population, but as she points out, manorial documents do not record the very poorest. ⁸

Whittle’s study also looked at the ages of her cross-section: eleven per cent were over fifty, fifty-four per cent between forty and fifty, and thirty-five per cent between twenty-five and forty. ⁹ She concludes that while the impetus for the rebellion came from the poor, the richer farmers took over the leadership; although they, like Robert Kett, were potentially in conflict with the poor rebels, especially over their share of the commons. For the time at least they had common grievances over issues of gentry encroachment on common land – and the corrupt exactions of the escheator and feodary. ¹⁰

The unrecorded majority of the rebels were likely to have been poorer and younger. Twenty to twenty-five per cent of the rural population of Norfolk were landless labourers. ¹¹ Those most likely to come to the camp were, I think, those with little to lose; small-scale village artisans, cottagers, labourers and bond men as well as unemployed ‘masterless men’ like Simon and Natty in Tombland .

ADMINISTRATION OF THE CAMP

At the top of the escarpment facing Norwich, from which Mousehold Heath stretches away, stood the executed Earl of Surrey’s vast Italianate mansion, Surrey Place, now empty except, probably, for caretakers. It may be symbolic that while the great mansion was used for storage and imprisoning some of the detained Norfolk gentlemen, Kett did not make his headquarters there but at the nearby, much smaller, St Michael’s Chapel, a survival from the old St Leonard’s Priory which was demolished to build Surrey Place.

Members of the gentleman class played no part in the government of the camp. As the rebels sent parties out into the countryside to requisition goods, more gentry prisoners were brought in. They were stripped, beaten, humiliated, subject to trials – but not killed. The rebels must have been well aware from the start of the revenge they would wish to wreak on their tenants if things went wrong. This made the enterprise an all-or-nothing venture from the start.

Robert Kett was undisputed leader of the camp, and a highly effective one who knew how to delegate. Two ‘governors’ from each of the thirty-three Norfolk ‘Hundreds’ were elected, although the franchise is not known. Like much else in the camp, the use of the Hundred subdivision mirrored official structures – two high constables had been chosen annually for each Hundred to report local offences to the court. We know the delegates’ names, and several, like Kett, had been involved in previous disputes. ¹

This was an effective way of subdividing the huge camp, which I have portrayed as being laid out according to Hundreds. Many groups came in waving village banners, and I have had these kept flying, useful markers for people finding their way around a vast camp composed mostly of strangers.