Power and Anxiety in Kett's Rebellion, 1549
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POWER AND ANXIETY IN KETT’S REBELLION, 1549: THE ROLE OF DRAMA, MASCULINITY, AND FESTIVALS IN SHAPING RESISTANCE TO SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHANGE ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Chico ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History ____________ by Chris Paintner Spring 2019 POWER AND ANXIETY IN KETT’S REBELLION, 1549: THE ROLE OF DRAMA, MASCULINITY, AND FESTIVALS IN SHAPING RESISTANCE TO SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHANGE A Thesis by Chris Paintner Spring 2019 APPROVED BY THE INTERIM DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES: ________________________________ Sharon Barrios, Ph.D. APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE: ________________________________ Jason Nice, Ph.D. ________________________________ Kate Transchel, Ph.D. ___________________________________________ Allison Madar, Ph.D. DEDICATION For my mom, my first and best teacher. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the patience and dedication of my committee. Without their support, this thesis would not have been possible. Thank you to Dr. Kate Transchel and Dr. Allison Madar for their insightful feedback, notes, and editorial comments. Their valuable guidance in both this project and our seminars together in my time as a graduate student helped me to develop into a better historian and writer. I would like to particularly thank Dr. Jason Nice, my chair, for inspiring my interest in Early Modern England, fostering my curiosity, directing it into productive avenues, and encouraging me to expand my intellectual horizons. Thank you to my fellow graduate students, Rod Thomson, Jerrad Benedict, and Jeanette Adame, who all served as volunteer editors and sounding boards at different points in my writing process. Without Jerrad’s constant encouragement, enthusiasm, and directing questions, I could not have finished this project. Finally, thank you to my friends who supported me during all the late nights and long days that went into writing this thesis. You all made it possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Dedication ..................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... iv Abstract ......................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I. Introduction .................................................................................................. 1 II. Men At Play: Elements of Drama and Gender in Kett’s Rebellion ............... 13 III. “Beardlesse boys of the Countrie”: Expressions of Masculinity in Protest .. 36 IV. Festivals, Humor, and Traditional Religion as Subversive Discourse .......... 57 V. Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 82 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 86 v ABSTRACT POPULAR CULTURE IN KETT’S REBELLION, 1549: THE ROLE OF DRAMA, GENDER, AND FESTIVALS IN SHAPING RESISTANCE TO SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHANGE by Chris Paintner Master of Arts in History California State University, Chico Spring 2019 Cultural historians have firmly established a link between popular culture and subversive challenges to elites by broader elements of society utilizing festivals, religious traditions, and entertainment as discursive tools in the late medieval and early modern periods. However, this framework has not yet been systematically applied to many of the specific uprisings and rebellions that occurred from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Scholarship studying these events primarily interpret them through economic and social lenses, focusing on the direct causes for rebellions, such as enclosure or religious changes. These interpretations provide valuable insight into the conditions inciting widespread unrest, but they assume an external consistency, seriousness, and rationality as the primary factors guiding resistance among large swaths of the population. vi Instead, this study seeks to focus on the internally consistent logic guiding the construction of gendered and political identities in the context of popular forms of entertainment. Urban and rural individuals alike participated in festivals, watched performances, and feasted to celebrate fantastical events, idealized lives of saints, and other events with a tenuous connection to reality. This is apparent in the actions of the individuals participating in Kett’s Rebellion in 1549 East Anglia, who interpreted the problems of enclosure and economic changes and responded to those challenges through this discourse. Examining the rebellion in this context provides valuable insight into the construction of mentalités in sixteenth-century East Anglia and provides an explanation for the apparent inconsistencies, absurdities, and contradictions in the rebels' behavior during the summer of 1549. vii 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION On 8 July 1549, a small mob of rioters gathered in Wymondham to plot the destruction of enclosures owned by the resident of nearby Heatherset, John Flowerdew. At the head of these men stood Robert Kett, a local yeoman farmer and landholder of similar status to Flowerdew. Early chroniclers differ in their accounts of how Kett, whose name is now synonymous with the uprisings in East Anglia in 1549, claimed leadership of the rioters, but all accounts identify enclosure as the primary focus of the mob's rage. Alexander Neville argues that the mob tore down the enclosures of Kett before he took charge of the band and directed them at his local rival, Flowerdew.1 Nicholas Sotherton, who wrote his account within a decade of the events of 1549, claims that Kett led the rioters directly from the “Wymondham Game,” a local festive event, to the enclosures of Flowerdew after vowing to tear down his own fences.2 Later scholarship, particularly Russell's Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk, accepted Neville's account, although evidence for the Kett's participation as an organizer of prior festivals in the community and the close chronological proximity to the events lend credence to Sotherton's account.3 Nicholas Sotherton, an eyewitness of the events of the summer of 1549, suggested that a royal 1 Alexander Neville, Norfolkes Furies or a view of Ketts campe necessary for the malecontents of our time, for their instruction, or terror, ed. Richard Woods (London: William Stansby, 1615), Bv. 2 Nicholas Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, ed. Susan Yaxley (Stibbard: Lark’s Press, 1987), 3. 3 Frederic William Russell, Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk: Being a History of the Great Civil Commotion that Occurred at the Time of the Reformation, in the Reign of Edward VI (London: Longmans, 1859), 9 2 proclamation denouncing enclosure and creating commissions to investigate complaints created “a rumor that in Kent and other places divers that had layd open, perceiving many others did not the same, and therfore thought good of theyre owne authority to lay those growneds open allsoe.” Alexander Neville, writing three decades after Kett's Rebellion, goes even further, imploring that the rebels desired “not only to lay open the common pastures, inclosed by the injurie of somemen, but to powre foorth their ungodly desires against the Commonwealth.” Neville served as the secretary for Archbishop Matthew Parker, the same clergyman who attempted to preach to the rebels at the Oak of Reformation during the summer of 1549, until his death in 1575, and it is possible that he drew much of his inspiration for Norfolk’s Furies from Parker’s memory of the events. An elite member of society, Neville went on to represent Christchurch in Parliament in 1585 and his perspective and account of the rebellion should be understood through this lens to correctly identify his intended audience and his unconscious biases that appear in his work.1 Nineteenth-century historian Frederic William Russell argued that the rebels viewed enclosure as a product of “the old oppressive system” of feudalism, “maintained in ever-increasing severity.” Starting with the earliest accounts of the rebellion, historians of the events focused primarily on the rebels' grievances against enclosure, primarily crediting the source of their anger to changes in the modes of production. Undoubtedly, the rebels expressed discontent over enclosure and acted out violently against the fences and hedges of the East Anglia countryside during the course of the rebellion. However, that represents only one facet of the many grievances expressed by 1 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., vol. 40, Murrell-Nooth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 482-483. 3 the rebels and the variety of disruptive acts they committed during the summer of 1549. Focusing on enclosure and anger over a troubled economy represents the concerns of wealthy landowners, the targets of the mob's anger and individuals who derived their socioeconomic legitimacy from their property rights. This historiographic distortion, which ignores the larger issue of social and cultural change that manifested in religious and economic changes, continues to shape the perceptions of Kett's Rebellion as primarily an anti-enclosure movement. Richard Tawney reduced the motives of Kett's Rebellion and other popular uprisings to a “very simple” complaint, “very ancient and yet very modern. It is