On 6 July 1549 villagers in Wymondham in Norfolk held a festival to commemorate Thomas a Becket. The festival was itself an act of defiance, for everyone knew that Becket was a saint and had been murdered by the henchmen of a king. Indeed, the villagers had good reason to be angry.
The local landowners were enclosing common land, fencing in open fields which had been open to all since time immemorial, and on which the villagers depended for their livelihood. Never mind that such enclosures were illegal at this time, enforcement of the law was up to the very people most determined to break it. And so, deprived of common land for crops and grazing and fuel, and with no means to seek justice in the courts, the peasants had grown desperate.
On that summer’s day they marched angrily towards the estate of John Flowerdew, a notorious landowner. Flowerdew was clever and bribed the crowd not to tear down his fences, but rather to tear down the fences of a neighbour he disliked, Robert Kett. So the mob marched in that direction.
Then something unexpected happened.Robert Kett confronted them, but when he heard their grievances, he listened. And then joined them, even helping to tear down his own fences. Indeed he became their leader.
On Mousehold Heath
On 9 July 1549 Robert Kett led the crowd to Norwich, at that time the second city of the kingdom. The gates were barred, so they set up camp below the city walls, on Mousehold Heath.
In a few days, over 15,000 people had gathered. They tore down enclosures around the city. The Mayor of Norwich offered bribes and pardons for the crowd to disperse, but the people rejected all offers; they were determined to settle for nothing less than justice itself, determined not to ‘endure such great shame, as, 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.’
They knew that if they gave way, oppression would gather pace: ‘Shall they, as they have brought hedges against common pastures, inclose with their intolerable lusts also, all the commodities and please 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?’
The Oak of Reformation
Under a spreading oak tree on Mousehold Heath, which they named the Oak of Reformation, Kett and his council of rebel leaders met. From here they controlled the great crowd, ensuring supplies of provisions and keeping order. On 24th July the insurgents attacked the walled city, armed with nothing more than pitchforks, sticks and mud. After a fierce struggle they entered the city and took control.
If only the king would learn of their grievances, surely he would provide redress. After all, the tyrant Henry VIII was dead and his son, the boy Edward VI, was young and as yet uncorrupted. So under the Oak of Reformation the people drew up their demands:
We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall common upon the Commons.
We pray your grace to take all liberty of let into your own hands whereby all men may quietly enjoy their commons with all profits.
We pray that all bond men may be made free for god made all free with his precious blood shedding.
We pray that Rivers may be free and common to all men for fishing and passage
We pray that the poor mariners or Fisherman may have the whole profits of their fishings as purpres grampes whales or any great fish so it be not prejudicial to your grace.
We pray that it be not lawful to the lords of any manor to purchase land freely and to let them out again by copy of court roll to their great advaunchement and to the undoing of your poor subjects.
We pray that every proprietary parson or vicar having a benefice of £10 or more by year shall either by themselves or by some other person teach poor men’s children of their parish the book called the cathakysme and the primer.
The petition was sent down to London. The great crowd on Mousehold Heath waited in patience and in hope.
How the uprising was crushed
The response of the King and his Protectors assumed a pattern repeated many times down many centuries. On the one hand, they offered promises and pardons to appease the rebels, and on the other hand, they sent an army to hunt them down and destroy them.
A first army of 14,000 soldiers was beaten off. A second army, led by the infamous Earl of Warwick, was a different matter. Three thousand rebels were slaughtered and thrown into a mass unmarked grave, the greatest ever massacre of English citizens by an English army.
Robert Kett was captured a few days later, tortured, convicted of treason, and hung over the side of Norfolk castle, as an example.Other rebels were treated in similar fashion. The branches of the Oak of Reformation were hung with bodies.
Almost, but not quite, forgotten
History is a tale told by the victorious. Contemporary accounts are all but silent about this greatest of all uprisings against the theft of common land. There was no monument to mark the rebellion, no gravestones to show where the dead lay buried.It was as if it had never happened.
It was not until two hundred and fifty years later, when Thomas Spence and Tom Paine were proclaiming that the theft of the commons from the people was the root cause of poverty in the new industrial age, that the story of Kett was for a few years revived.
By the 1790s Mousehold Heath, the site of the rebellion, had itself fallen victim to enclosures by wealthy landowners, and by then enclosures were legalised by Acts of Parliament. In the 1800s two paintings appeared by John Crome and John Sell Cotman. In these paintings Mousehold Heath remains unenclosed. Paths, open to all, wander though a lovely wilderness, under wide skies. Here is a celebration of the world Kett’s rebels fought for, a freedom, once cherished, now forever lost.
A few years later John Clare, the peasant poet, wrote:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene;
No fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect from the gazing eye;
Its only bondage was the circling sky.
A mighty flat, undwarfed by bush and tree,
Spread its faint shadow of immensity,
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds.
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours,
Free as spring clods and wild as forest flowers,
Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once as it no more shall be.
Enclosure came, and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights, and left the poor a slave.
Fence meeting fence in owner’s little bounds
Of field and meadow, large as garden-grounds,
In little parcels little minds to please,
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease.
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine;
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’.
(The Moors, c 1824-25)
Forgotten again for a century and more, much of Mousehold Heath was submerged within the expanding suburbs of the city of Norwich. In the 1960s, the municipal masters of Norwich cut down the Oak of Reformation, to make way for a car park.
Sources
Alexander Neville, Norfolk’s Furies, or, a View of Kett’s camp, 1549.
