and friends, stands out his great, unflinching quality of loyalty to
conscience. When the power was in his hands as lord chancellor, no one
was put to death by Sir Thomas More for heresy in England, though he
did what he could by his pen to check the innovations of Luther, which
he hated,--not only because they broke up the unity of Christendom,
but because, it seemed to him, they struck at all social morality and
decency.[93] The violence of Luther’s outbreak, the determination
of the Lutherans--sure of their own possession of the truth--to
allow no liberty to Catholics, and the antinomian communism of the
anabaptists--all these things made Protestantism detestable to men like
Sir Thomas More and Erasmus, and made More declare that dogmatising
heretics ought to be repressed by the state as breeders of strife and
contention. But his own record is clear: “And of all that ever came in
my hand for heresy, as help me God, saving (as I said) the sure keeping
of them, had never any of them any stripe or stroke given them, so much
as a fillip on the forehead.”[94]
“What other controversialist can be named, who, having the power
to crush antagonists whom he viewed as the disturbers of the quiet
of his own declining years, the destroyers of all the hopes which
he had cherished for mankind, contented himself with severity of
language?”[95]
The author of the _Utopia_ was a critic, as Colet and Erasmus were,
of abuses in the Church; but like his friends he lived and died a
Catholic. He saw Lutheranism as the source of a thousand ills, and with
Erasmus opposed it; but though heretics were anti-social and factious,
he would not put one to death for error.
It is all through Sir Thomas More’s character--this respect for
conscience. There is no going back on the wide toleration of his early
manhood, and high office and responsibilities of state no more cramp or
belittle his faith than they destroy his playfulness or the warmth of
his affections.
He died a martyr for the religion of his life, for the simple right to
abide in the old Catholic paths of his fellow-countrymen.
As Sir Thomas More was not the first of the Catholic martyrs at the
Reformation, for he had seen his old friends, the Carthusian monks,
carried to Tyburn, so he was not the last. For the next fifty years
of Henry and Elizabeth, English men and women were to suffer for
the old faith of England, and in Mary’s reign to die as bravely for
Protestantism.
In spite of monasteries and priories destroyed, and parish churches
stripped and plundered, in spite of penal laws which banned its
priesthood and proscribed its worship, the Catholicism More died for
has endured in England. All that parliament could do to exterminate
the belief in papal supremacy has been done; all that panic and
prejudice could accomplish by “popish plots” to the same end has been
accomplished. These things have been no more successful than the
mad “no popery” riots of Lord George Gordon in crushing the faith
of the Roman Catholic minority. The penal laws have gone, Catholic
emancipation has been obtained, a Catholic hierarchy has been set up,
and to-day in England the freedom of conscience that was refused to Sir
Thomas More is the accepted liberty of all.
In 1887 Sir Thomas More, with Bishop Fisher and the Carthusian martyrs,
were beatified by Pope Leo XIII. Serving their religion in life and
death, they served the cause of human liberty, withstanding Henry as
Anselm withstood the Red King, and as Langton withstood John.
Robert Ket and The Norfolk Rising
1549
AUTHORITIES: _The Commotion in Norfolk_, by Nicholas Sotherton,
1576 (Harleian MS.); _De Furoribus Norfolciensum_, by Nevylle, 1575
(Translated into English by Wood, 1615); Holinshed--_Chronicle_;
Sir John Hayward--_Life of Edward VI._; Strype--_Memorials_;
Blomefield--_History of Norfolk_; F. W. Russell--_Kett’s Rebellion_; W.
Rye; _Victoria County History--Norfolk_.
ROBERT KET AND THE NORFOLK RISING.
1549.
The Norfolk Rising of the sixteenth century was a land war, caused
directly by the enclosing of the common fields of the peasants, and the
break up of the accustomed rural life.
The landowners finding greater profit in breeding sheep and cattle
than in the small holdings of peasants, began, about 1470, to seize
the fields which from time immemorial had been cultivated by the
country people in common, and to evict whole parishes by pulling down
all the dwelling places. For eighty years these clearances were going
on. Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515 to prohibit the
“pulling down of towns” and to order the rebuilding of such towns, and
the restoration of pasture lands to tillage, but both acts were quite
inoperative. In 1517, Cardinal Wolsey’s Royal Commission on Enclosures
reported on the defiance of the law in seven Midland counties, where
more than 36,000 acres had been enclosed; but legal proceedings against
the landowners were stayed on the latter promising to make restitution.
Thomas More, in the first part of his _Utopia_, in 1516, described for
all time what the enclosures he witnessed meant for England.
“For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore
dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain
abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly
revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and
predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in
rest and pleasure--nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the public
weal--leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures;
they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing
standing but only the church to be made a sheep fold.... They turn all
dwelling-places and all glebe land into desolation and wilderness.
Therefore, that one covetous and insatiable comorant may compass about
and inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or
hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by
cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression, or by wrongs and injuries
they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all. By one means
therefore or another, either by hook or by crook they must needs depart
away, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, mothers
with their young babies, and their whole household small in substance
and large in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they
trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no
place to rest in.... And when they have wandered abroad till the little
they have be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then
justly be hanged, or else go about a begging. And yet then also they
be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not:
whom no man will set a work, though they never so willingly proffer
themselves thereto. For one shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up
that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many
hands were requisite.”
This was social England in the early years of Henry VIII., and every
year saw things grow worse for the rural folk, in spite of further
royal proclamations against enclosures in 1526. A series of bad
harvests drove a starving population to riot in Norfolk in 1527 and
1529. In 1536 came the suppression of 376 lesser monasteries, followed
two years later by the dissolution of all remaining monasteries and
priories, and in 1547 by the royal confiscation of the property of the
religious guilds and brotherhoods.
The landowners having established a starving unemployed class by the
simple process of depriving people of access to the land, and the
crown having removed the only source of relief to the unemployed by
destroying the monasteries, it remained for parliament to deal with the
“social problem” thus created by declaring poverty a crime, and the
unemployed person a felon. The lash and the gallows were to solve the
problem.
In 1531, an act of parliament granted licences to the impotent beggar,
and ordered a whipping for all other mendicants. Five years later
stronger measures were adopted, and whipping was only permitted to
first offenders: mutilation and hanging were the subsequent penalties
on conviction, and thousands of unemployed men and women suffered under
this act. But still the unemployed existed, for the enclosures had not
been stopped; and so the first year of Edward VI. saw an act passed
declaring the convicted unemployed “a slave.” (As it seemed to many
that parliament had got rid of papal authority only to bring back
slavery in England, this act was repealed in two years, and the act of
1531 revived.)
The bitterness of the agrarian misery, the violent destruction of all
the old religious customs and habits of the people, the confiscation
of the funds of the guilds, the open despoiling of the parish churches
of the people[96]--all these things plunged the country into confusion
and despair. The general rising in Lincolnshire and the north in 1536
(known as the “Pilgrimage of Grace”) against the suppressions of the
monasteries, and the rising in Cornwall and Devon in 1549 against
Edward’s VI.’s new Book of Common Prayer were strong manifestations of
the popular dislike of the changes made in religion by Henry VIII. and
the ministers of Edward VI.
In Norfolk, in 1537, the people made an insurrection against the
suppression of the monasteries; but the later risings of 1540 (at
Griston, when one John Walker “exhorted the people to destroy the
gentry”), and in 1549, under Ket, were not concerned with the religious
troubles of the times, but were frankly agrarian. The Norfolk rising,
which Ket led, was no more connected with Protestantism than the
Peasant Revolt of 1381 was with Lollardy. Agrarian disturbances took
place in a number of counties in 1549. In May the peasants of Somerset
and Lincoln were in revolt, and in July there were tumults in Essex,
Kent, Wiltshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. A rude Cambridge
ballad of the time extols the pulling down of enclosures:
Cast hedge and ditch in the lake,
Fixed with many a stake;
Though they be never so fast,
Yet asunder they are wrest.
Sir, I think that this work
Is as good as to build a kirk.
In 1548 Protector Somerset had followed Wolsey’s footsteps in issuing
a proclamation for a royal commission to inquire and report concerning
enclosures, and to give the names of all who kept more than two
thousand sheep or who had “taken from any other their commons.”[97]
The commissioners were also “to reform” any cases of the enclosing of
commons and highways, “without due recompense,” which they might find;
“and to the intent your doings may proceed without all suspicion, and
the people conceive some good hope of reformation at your hands, we
would that as many of you as be in any of the cases to be reformed, do
first, for example’s sake, begin to the reformation of yourselves.”
Somerset’s ingenuous suggestion was naturally disregarded by the
commissioners, and beyond making inquiries and publishing a report--to
the effect that in the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Hertford, Kent, and
Worcester nearly all the common lands[98] had been enclosed, while in
Norfolk and Northampton large enclosures had been made--the commission
of 1548 was as fruitless as its predecessors. Somerset, however, got
some reputation by it as an enemy to the enclosures, and certainly
incurred the dislike of the landowners. But where Wolsey, in the
hey-day of power, had failed, there was small chance of success for
Somerset, with the country in a state of anarchy, and the nation rent
and distracted by a violent revolution in the Church.
The only strong movement to prevent the utter downfall of the
country-people was the Norfolk Rising, which Robert Ket directed in
the summer of 1549. It failed in the end, but for more than six weeks
the power of the landlords was broken round Norwich, their enclosures
were stopped, and the hope of better things filled the hearts of the
peasants.
The rising began at Attleborough on 20th June when Squire Green, of
Wylby, set up fences and hedges round the common lands at Harpham and
Attleborough, and the people, excited by news that in Kent similar
fences had been destroyed, proceeded to pull them down. For the next
fortnight the revolt had neither leaders nor organization. “There were
secret meetings of men running hither and thither, and then withdrawing
themselves for secret conferences, but at length they all began to
deal tumultuously and to rage openly.” On July 7th the annual feast at
Wymondham, in honour of the translation of St. Thomas of Canterbury,
brought the country folk together from miles round; and at the close
of the fair they all set off to break down the fences set up round the
common lands at Hetherset by one Sergeant Flowerdew.[99]
Flowerdew, unable to save his fences, proposed a diversion. The Kets at
Wymondham had made enclosures, why shouldn’t the rioters deal with them
in similar fashion? Flowerdew actually paid over 40d. to encourage an
attack on the Kets.
Robert Ket and his brother were well-known men. Both were craftsmen,
Robert, a tanner, and William, a butcher. They were landowners besides,
and men of substance and of old family, for it was said the Kets had
been in the land since the Norman Conquest. Robert Ket held three
manors from the Earl of Warwick; his yearly income was put down at £50,
and his property valued at 1,000 marks. Like other landowners, the Kets
had made enclosures, but on the arrival of the people from Hetherset
they at once declared themselves willing to stand by the movement for
freeing the land. Robert Ket felt the misery of his neighbours. He
saw that if the revolt was to be anything more than a local riot it
must have necessary guidance, and his sympathies were entirely on the
democratic side. And so from that time forward he gave up the quiet of
a country gentleman’s life at Wymondham for the strenuous movement of
an insurgent camp.
To the appeal of the people for help, Ket answered passionately, “I
am ready, and will be ready at all times, to do whatever, not only to
repress, but to subdue the power of great men. Whatsoever lands I have
enclosed shall again be made common unto ye and all men, and my own
hands shall first perform it.”
Then Robert Ket went on to commit himself body and soul to the
movement, resolved that the peasants should not be left unaided in the
struggle they had begun, and willing to take upon himself the burden
and responsibility of leadership.
“You shall have me, if you will, not only as a companion, but as a
captain; and in the doing of the so great a work before us, not only as
a fellow, but for a leader, author and principal.”
If the ambition which clutches at sovereignty and rule is despicable,
even more despicable is the weakness which refuses to take command at
times of peril.
To Robert Ket and his brother there was no promise of the world’s
honour and glory should the rising be successful. At the best would
be the satisfaction of a battle fought and won for the deliverance of
long-suffering peasants. At the worst the laying down of life in a good
cause, as Geoffrey Litster and many a Norfolk man had done in bygone
days.
Robert Ket’s leadership was acclaimed with enthusiasm, nor was it ever
disputed throughout the rising. In this, the last of the great popular
risings in England, the Norfolk men were as loyal to their leader as
the men of Kent were to Wat Tyler and Jack Cade. And in each case that
loyalty had ample justification.
There were but a thousand men involved when the rising began, but under
Ket’s command the movement passed rapidly from the fluid “running
hither and thither” condition of the first fortnight, and became the
march of an organized army.
On July 10th, two days after Ket took command, this army was on the
road to Norwich, and after crossing the river at Cringleford, lay
encamped at Eaton Wood.
It is plain from Ket’s speeches to his men, and from “The Rebels’
Complaint,” which he published at this time, that to Robert Ket the
rising was not only to put down enclosures, its aim was rather to
strike at the root of the evil and to put an end to the ascendancy of
the landlord class, and make England a free commonwealth. Either the
people must put down landlords, or very soon the landlords would have
the whole land in their possession, and the people would be in hopeless
and helpless subjection. Had not an act of parliament been actually
passed making “slaves” of the landless men, dispossessed by enclosures?
When parliament was establishing slavery it was time for honest men to
be up and doing, rousing the people to action.
Ket’s speech at Eaton Wood is a fierce attack on the landlords, and a
reminder that having ventured so far, the peasants must advance yet
further:
Now are ye overtopped and trodden down by gentlemen, and put
out of possibility ever to recover foot. Rivers of riches ran
into the coffers of your landlords, while you are pair’d to the
quick, and fed upon pease and oats like beasts. You are fleeced
by these landlords for their private benefit, and as well kept
under by the public burdens of State wherein while the richer
sort favour themselves, ye are gnawn to the very bones. Your
tyrannous masters often implead, arrest, and cast you into
prison, so that they may the more terrify and torture you in
your minds, and wind your necks more surely under their arms.
And then they palliate these pilleries with the fair pretence
of law and authority! Fine workmen, I warrant you, are this law
and authority, who can do their dealings so closely that men
can only discover them for your undoing. Harmless counsels are
fit for tame fools; for you who have already stirred there is
no hope but in adventuring boldly.
In “The Rebels’ Complaint,” the same note is struck. Only by taking
up arms, and mixing Heaven and earth together, can the intolerable
oppression of the landlords be ended.
The pride of great men is now intolerable, but our condition
miserable.
These abound in delights; and compassed with the fullness of
all things, and consumed with vain pleasures, thirst only after
gain, inflamed with the burning delights of their desires.
But ourselves, almost killed with labour and watching, do
nothing all our life long but sweat, mourn, hunger, and thirst.
Which things, though they seem miserable and base (as they are
indeed most miserable), yet might be borne howsoever, if they
which are drowned in the boiling seas of evil delights did not
pursue the calamities and miseries of other men with too much
insolent hatred. But now both we and our miserable condition
is a laughing stock to these most proud and insolent men--who
are consumed with ease and idleness. Which thing (as it may)
grieveth us so sore and inflicteth such a stain of evil report,
so that nothing is more grievous for us to remember, nor more
unjust to suffer.
The present condition of possessing land seemeth miserable
and slavish--holding it all at the pleasure of great men; not
freely, but by prescription, and, as it were, at the will and
pleasure of the lord. For as soon as any man offend any of
these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust
from all his goods.
How long shall we suffer so great oppression to go unrevenged?
For so far as they, the gentlemen, now gone in cruelty and
covetousness, that they are not content only to take all by
violence away from us, and to consume in riot and effeminate
delights what they get by force and villainy, but they must
also suck in a manner our blood and marrow out of our veins and
bones.
The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and
our children are taken away.
The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common,
those are ditched and hedged in and made several; the pastures
are enclosed, and we shut out. Whatsoever fowls of the air or
fishes of the water, and increase of the earth--all these do
they devour, consume, and swallow up; yea, nature doth not
suffice to satisfy their lusts, but they seek out new devices,
and, as it were, forms of pleasures to embalm and perfume
themselves, to abound in pleasant smells, to pour in sweet
things to sweet things. Finally, they seek from all places all
things for their desire and the provocation of lust. While
we in the meantime eat herbs and roots, and languish with
continual labour, and yet are envied that we live, breathe, and
enjoy common air!
Shall they, as they have brought hedges about common pastures,
enclose with their intolerable lusts also all the commodities
and pleasures of this life, which Nature, the parent of us all,
would have common, and bringeth forth every day, for us, as
well as for them?
We can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury;
neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness,
excess, and pride of the nobility. We will rather take arms,
and mix Heaven and earth together, than endure so great cruelty.
Nature hath provided for us, as well as for them; hath given us
a body and a soul, and hath not envied us other things. While
we have the same form, and the same condition of birth together
with them, why should they have a life so unlike unto ours, and
differ so far from us in calling?
We see that things have now come to extremities, and we will
prove the extremity. We will rend down hedges, fill up ditches,
and make a way for every man into the common pasture. Finally,
we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less
wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed. Neither
will we suffer ourselves any more to be pressed with such
burdens against our wills, nor endure so great shame, since
living out our days under such inconveniences we should leave
the commonwealth unto our posterity--mourning, and miserable,
and much worse than we received it of our fathers.
Wherefore we will try all means; neither will we ever rest
until we have brought things to our own liking.
We desire liberty and an indifferent (or equal) use of all
things. This will we have. Otherwise these tumults and our
lives shall only be ended together.
Revolutionary as this manifesto is, Robert Ket is seen all through the
rising exerting his authority on behalf of law and good order, curbing
anarchy and checking ferocity in the rebel camp.
Only one day was spent at Eaton Wood. Ket’s plan was to advance to
Mousehold, a wide stretch of high, well-wooded ground to the east of
Norwich. Here the camp was fixed on July 12th, the river having been
crossed at Hailsdon, and a night’s halt called at Drayton--for the
mayor of Norwich, Thomas Cod, positively refused to allow the rebels to
pass through the city. Ket, anxious to unite citizens and peasants in
a common cause, willingly avoided altercation, and Cod, alarmed at the
rising, and unable to dissuade the insurgents from their enterprise,
was careful to refrain from all hostile demonstrations. Cod’s one
purpose was to exclude Ket’s army from the city, and to accomplish
this he kept on friendly terms with Ket, even while appealing to the
government to send down troops to suppress the rising. Ket’s purpose
was to break down landlord rule in Norfolk, extend the area of revolt,
and to get the king to attend to the complaints of his subjects.
Ket’s company at Mousehold numbered no more than 2,600 on July 12th;
but the ringing of bells and the firing of beacons brought in thousands
of homeless men. At the end of a week 20,000 men were enrolled under
the banner of revolt, and now Ket had all his work to do in maintaining
discipline and in arranging for provisions for the camp.
It is clear Robert Ket was the right man for a leader.[100] The
people trusted him and obeyed his orders. Cod and two other
reputable citizens of Norwich--Aldrich, an alderman, and Watson, a
preacher--attended the camp daily, and along with Ket and his brother
William sat under a great tree, known as the Oak of Reformation, and
administered justice. The 20,000 hungry, disinherited men carried out
in as orderly way as they could the instructions they received.
Ket’s first business was to send to the king a plain statement of
“Requests and Demands.” He knew what was wanted for rural England, and
refused to admit that his purpose was disloyal or that his conduct was
rebellion.
The “Requests” were twenty-nine, and they contained a full statement
of the grievances of the country folk. The chief requests were for the
stoppage of enclosures, the enactment of fair rents, the restoration
of common fishing rights in sea and river, the appointment of resident
clergymen in every parish to preach and instruct the children, and
the free election or official appointment of local “commissioners”
for the enforcement of the laws. One significant prayer was “that all
bond men may be made free, for God made all free with His precious
bloodshedding.”