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.
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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 that what, in effect, whatever lawyers may say, has been their property,
is being taken from them.” While remaining rooted in an essential economic argument,
Tawney touches on one of the underlying causes for the rebellion: “they want only to
have what they have always had. They are conservatives, not radicals or levellers.”2 A more nuanced analysis of Kett's Rebellion, recontextualized through the lens of cultural history, demonstrates that the rebels did not necessarily oppose the seizure of their property. Instead, their objections stemmed from the identities and political legitimacy of those seizing the property, as well as the cultural changes that accompanied the
Reformation and the restructuring of socio-political networks that accompanied the growth of private property during the sixteenth century.
Social historians reconstructed many of these networks using demographic studies, manorial court rolls and economic data to establish the professions of the rebels and their relationships with the local means of production. Diarmaid MacCulloch, using court and
2 Richard Henry Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1912), 333.
4
property records from the region, showed that “the rebellion’s leaders were staging a
giant protest against the ruling classes’ mismanagement of affairs, they were themselves
substantial men with plenty of experience of petty administration, and they were out to
right injustice, not to attack the state.”3 MacCulloch accomplishes this task by
reconstructing economic networks and interdependence, examining both the professions
of the rebels and the regional nature of their complaints, exemplified by the limited
support for enclosure in the Mousehold Articles, the rebels' manifesto and list of
demands.4 These demands included a variety of complaints concerning issues across a
wide spectrum, ranging from ecclesiastical education to land use, and represent the varied
local interests of the participants. Based on the articles, demographic data, and court
records from the trials of rebels in other areas of Suffolk and Norfolk in the same year,
MacCulloch sees evidence for a variety of motives that indicate a diffuse leadership
structure. Often characterized as an anti-enclosure rebellion, the Mousehold Articles
challenge this view by expressing support for enclosure, as MacCulloch observes. The
rebels' demand in the articles that “where it is enacted for inclosing, that it be not hurtfull
to suche as have enclosed saffren grounds” represents the particular needs of the Suffolk
community, which practiced the foldcourse system and depended on enclosure.5 Under
3 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Kett’s Rebellion in Context,” Past and Present 84 (August 1979): 45. 4 These articles, named for Mousehold Heath, a wooded region near Norwich where the rebels camped and drafted the document, contained a list of 29 demands. Signed by representatives from 22 different Hundreds in Norfolk and Suffolk. Each Hundred represented many individual parishes and offered a system of local government above the village or city level. As a result, the articles include a wide array of complaints ranging from economic demands, including restrictions on enclosure and restrictions on dove cotes, to religious and social demands, such as the teaching of the catechism and primer in English. None of the demands represent particularly radical sentiments and seem to primarily represent solutions to local sources of anxiety magnified by the changes of the sixteenth century. Russell, Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk, 47‐56. 5Ibid., 48.
5
this system, landowners permitted cattle and livestock to graze freely, forcing tenants to
erect enclosures to protect their crops. MacCulloch concludes that the regional nature of the foldcourse system, closely related to the types of crops produced, created a rift where the tenant’s “instinct was to consolidate his holding and fence it off for the growing of corn and for the pasturing of his own cattle to provide manure for his crop; the lord’s instinct was to oppose enclosure to preserve his foldcourse.”6 This analysis, while still
rooted in a primarily economic framework, moves past the more generalized systemic
economic issues raised by the anti-enclosure movement to provide a more nuanced
examination of the socio-economic networks that constituted the rebels' leadership and
shifts the focus from Kett to the regional issues particular to each of those leaders.
Andy Wood's excellent study of the 1549 rebellions views Kett's Rebellion as an
event that foreshadows sixteenth-and seventeenth-century changes in class relationships,
when “the gentry withdrew from village conflicts, the descendants of Robert Kett stepped
into their place.” However, his conclusion that “class society could not be wished away;
instead, one form of power replaced another” remains rooted in a discourse that places
Kett's Rebellion primarily in an economic context due to the Marxist framework Wood
effectively uses to interpret the rebellion.7 Looking forward from the Rebellion, as Wood
and other social historians have done, the events certainly represent an early form of
struggle for identity in relation to capitalist modes of production. However, the events of
1549 also represent the waning of feudalism and an end to socioeconomic relationships built on centuries of cultural traditions, internalized and fully incorporated into the
6 MacCulloch, “Kett’s Rebellion in Context,” 51. 7 Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 264.
6
identities of the rebels. Within this discourse, authority and legitimacy derived from hereditary titles and paternalistic relationships that entitled individuals to control the modes of production, and understanding the consequences of economic changes in sixteenth-century England requires a more comprehensive cultural analysis.
Specifically, examining three elements of popular culture in early modern England at the time of Kett's Rebellion – entertainment, including games and plays; concepts of gender and how individuals expressed and defined gender roles; and religious traditions and festivals, which often included subversive humor critical of elites– elucidates the motives behind the rebels' actions during the summer of 1549 and their rhetoric. The rebellion erupted following the performance of the Wymondham Game, a festive celebration commemorating St. Thomas Becket. Celebrating the life of Becket, appointed
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, was a subversive action itself following the prohibition of festivals devoted to the saint by Henry VIII in the previous decade. Earlier insurrectionaries, such as those participating in the 1489 uprising in Yorkshire or standing in opposition to tax increases under Henry II, claimed to act in the saint's name.8
Becket's defiance to Henry II's Constitutions of Clarendon, a proclamation issued in 1164
that challenged ecclesiastical autonomy, created a rift between the king and the
archbishop that culminated in the excommunication of prelates supporting the Crown's
position in 1170. Henry's outrage over the offense motivated four of his knights to kill the
unarmed archbishop inside Canterbury Cathedral, presenting to his admirers a legacy
described by Scully as “a man of great physical and spiritual courage who died a martyr
8 Ibid., 61.
7
while trying to protect the independence of the Church.”9 In the aftermath of the killing,
Henry II expressed remorse and contrition; during an 1174 rebellion in Northern
England, the king performed public penance at Canterbury in 1174 to atone for the death of the saint, and within days both the rebellion and a Scottish invasion collapsed. This
“dramatic reversal of fortune was attributed in the popular imagination,” Scully argues,
“to the intercession of Thomas.”10 Within the discourse of popular culture, Becket
appeared to triumph over the Crown and provided an example of the ability of a just or
righteous cause, even one that challenges established law and authority, to emerge
victorious.
The subversive implications behind the life and beatification of Becket turned the
saint into a lightning rod for popular resistance. Following Henry VIII’s break with
Rome, the Crown undertook a concerted effort to permanently dismantle the saint’s cult
throughout the 1530s that culminated with the destruction of Becket’s shrine at
Canterbury in 1538.11 Placed within the appropriate historical context, still in living memory for even the younger participants in Kett’s Rebellion, the rebels must have understood the implications behind the 1549 celebration of Becket’s life held in
Wymondham. Holding a festival dedicated to a controversial and subversive figure like
Becket indicates the unstable atmosphere that permeated England and East Anglia in
1549. Rather than offering cover for conspirators, as chroniclers of the rebellion believed, the performance of the Wymondham Game in the face of the Crown’s prohibition
9 Robert E. Scully, “The unmaking of a saint: Thomas Becket and the English Reformation,” The Catholic Historical Review 86, no. 4 (October 2000): 581. 10 Ibid., 582. 11 Ibid., 589-951.
8
suggests a dissatisfied populace on the verge of rebellion, which erupted into open
violence at the end of the festive occasion.
Festivals often included popular forms of entertainment, such as mystery plays, which directly engaged audiences using a popular political and religious discourse that included subversive tropes and themes that indirectly challenged authority, often through mockery and humor. Mystery plays retold popular biblical scenes for local audiences, conveying Christian theology to a largely non-literate society and providing an avenue for different groups within the community to express their status. These performances varied widely in scope, sometimes presented in the form of elaborate set pieces and actors placed on mobile stages capable of delivering multiple performances during a feast day or festival to different audiences around cities. Guilds and community organizations often vied for the right to perform the most spectacular and popular biblical stories, an opportunity that allowed them to demonstrate their importance through funding entertainment.12 Theatrical performances served as a battleground between those favoring pre-Reformation religious and cultural traditions and reformers, who used these traditions to delegitimize Catholicism and introduce Protestant elements into popular entertainment.
These performances shaped the worldviews and values of the audience and participants, and provided a “disciplinary discourse,” Clair Sponsler notes, that provided avenues to both reinforce authority and challenge it.13 The rebels voiced their opposition to
enclosure and economic change, but a larger struggle for control over cultural norms and
12 Heather Swanson, "The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns," Past and Present 121 (November, 1988): 44. 13Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xiv.
9
traditions that spans the early and mid-sixteenth century underlay their motives.
Reconstructing those norms and traditions builds on the work of the social historians, utilizing the demographic data collected by historians like MacCulloch and Jane Whittle.
Whittle’s work suggests that a relatively large number of older men participated in the rebellion, permitting inferences about the continuity of popular religious traditions in the face of the Henrician Reformation.14
Plays and games constituted an important aspect of those traditions and require an understanding of the nature of these games and plays as Kett and his contemporaries understood them. Evidence shows that Kett and his family supported the Watch and Play
Society of Wymondham, both materially and through their labor, providing a glimpse into the nature of the content of religious plays in the community a decade prior to the rebellion and suggests a deep-rooted connection between local popular traditions and the
Kett family that proved difficult to sever during the Reformation.15 This local society functioned as an avenue for prominent individuals, like the Kett family, to organize themselves and sponsor entertainment at Wymondham festivals, asserting their status in the local hierarchy in a similar fashion to guilds in urban society. These festive occasions played an important role in pre-Reformation society, creating opportunities for performers to draw the audiences into a performance and engage with them directly.
Directing their real grievances and anger towards dramatic foils on stage provided a release valve for building social tension, although the volatile nature of the performances
14 Jane Whittle, “Lords and Tenants in Kett’s Rebellion 1549,” Past and Present 207 (May 2010): 26. 15 David Galloway, John Wasson, and Janet Cowen, eds., Records of Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk 1330-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 128-129.
10
posed a danger that the mock violence could erupt into real violence, as seen in the summer of 1549. The influence of popular entertainment, particularly theatre, emerged during the course of the rebellion under the boughs of the “Oak of Reformation,” the tree where Kett and his followers held a mock court and convicted their prisoners to death, sentences which the rebels never actually attempted to carry out. Instead of physical violence, they engaged in rhetorical violence intended to mock and humiliate their targets. A close study of popular culture, particularly religious-themed entertainment, places the actions of the rebels within the appropriate context and reveals an internal logic and consistency to their actions.
A similar system governed gender identity and its expression in popular and elite discourse – popular forms of entertainment, such as Robin Hood plays and May Day festivities, offer some assistance to understand the gendered nature of the rebels' behavior, while Sotherton and Neville's own accounts provide some insight into elite expressions of masculinity and anxiety stemming from changes in economic relationships during the sixteenth century. Bodily control and mastery, exhibited through symbols of martial prowess, inspired the rebels' responses to their enemies and captives as a way of asserting their own masculinity or emasculating their enemies.16 Gender and theatre
intersected to create discursive tropes used to express subversive content, tapping into popular notions of “unruly women” and superstitions that reveal elements of masculinity
and femininity among the people of Norfolk at the time of the rebellion.17 May Day
16 Peter Sherlock, "Militant Masculinity and the Monuments of Westminster Abbey," in Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others, eds. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 131-152. 17 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, 27-28.
11
festivities, celebrations of vitality and life that came under attack by Reformers during the sixteenth century, used flowers and trees as symbolic representations of gender norms that provided discursive tools for both shaming and expressing vitality and attraction.
May Day rituals influenced the rebels' behavior, and they used the discourse of festive language to express their dissatisfaction with the gentry as men, not just as landowners.
Economic and social change challenged traditional paternalism, which connected masculinity with political power in the concept of dynastic rule. The people expected good rulers, like good fathers, to ensure the dynastic succession of their own lines as well as the kingdom, and the growth of enclosure and private property challenged both the concepts of good rule and the ability for fathers to secure a future for their children, a critical aspect of masculinity.18
Perhaps equally interesting, women make no significant appearances in the
textual evidence surrounding Kett’s Rebellion, and the particular role they played in the
rebellion remains unclear. Neville’s account recalls how, on the even before the final battle at Dussindale, a snake leaped from a tree into the “bossome of Ketts wife; which thing stroke not so much the heart of many with an horrible feare, as it filled Kett himself with doubtfull cares.”19 This abrupt moment marks Kett’s wife’s first and last appearance
in the narrative. Obviously allegorical, the relationship between the biblical story of Eve
and this account offers a fascinating example of the gendered anxiety felt by Neville’s
class and could benefit from further study by historians interested in elite culture and the
gentry’s response to socio-economic change in the sixteenth century.
18 Tim Reinke-Williams, "Manhood and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” History Compass 12, no. 9 (2014): 687. 19 Neville, Norfolk’s Furies, K1r
12
Festive celebrations, like May Day and the Wymondham Game, as well as the many feast days honoring saints, provided the people of pre-Reformation England with a sense of continuity, shaping their sense of time and offering the discursive tools necessary to express discontent without crossing into open sedition. Unhappiness over social, economic, and religious changes manifest in the rebels' use of traditional religious activities to criticize those in power, and interpreting the rebels' actions through the lens of popular culture offers valuable context for their behavior. In addition to providing an avenue for criticizing misrule by the gentry, popular culture also offered the rebels the opportunity to reaffirm their support for feudalism and paternal rule. The Becket celebration commemorated the memory of a saint that challenged Henry II's overreach from temporal matters into spiritual ones, just as the rebels challenged the gentry's adoption of privileges reserved for traditional feudal lords, such as the keeping of dove cotes. The rebels' anger towards John Flowerdew, a landowner from the nearby village of
Heatherset whose father purchased a local monastery seized by the Crown, mirrors
Becket's resistance to Henry's interference in church affairs. During the course of the rebellion, Kett and his followers turned to popular traditions and festivals to provide the discursive tools necessary to express their anger and approval, criticizing elite misrule and celebrating an idealized and conservative worldview that existed in the world of popular religion and entertainment. This discourse governed the course of the rebellion and guided the participants’ actions and decisions from the outbreak at the Becket festival to the end of the rebellion at Dussindale, where Kett's rebels, guided by prophecy, made their final strand against the forces of the Earl of Warwick.
13
CHAPTER II
MEN AT PLAY: ELEMENTS OF DRAMA AND GENDER IN KETT’S REBELLION
The people of Wymondham gathered together on the evening of Saturday 6 July,
1549 to celebrate a festive occasion locally known as the “Wymondham Game,” an event dedicated to Thomas Becket. At the close of the Becket celebration, on Monday 8 July, the revelers demanded that one of their own, Robert Kett, tear down his enclosures, to which Kett responded by enthusiastically agreeing to destroy his barriers and offering to lead the mob in tearing down the nearby fences of other landowners.1 The subversive
nature of the Becket festival and the interactive nature of plays and games, which
encouraged audiences to express themselves and gave them a discursive tool to express
approval and criticize, pushed the earliest group of rebels to take immediate and direct
action against the perceived embodiment of their problems – enclosure. While the men
who camped across Norfolk during the summer of 1549 raised serious grievances and
expressed a form of plebian politics described by Andy Woods as “reflective of a deeper,
active popular politics,” their behavior at times appears puzzling and comical due to the
influence of popular culture in the construction of the rebels' political identities.2 This form of popular politics resulted from changes in modes of agricultural production, class structure, and religious change that accompanied the expansion of enclosure, the
1 Nicholas Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, ed. Susan Yaxley (Stibbard: Larks Press, 1987), 3-4. 2 Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
14
emergence of a landed gentry who derived their legitimacy from personal wealth, and the
Reformation.
Following the Henrician Reformation and Henry's assumption of his new role as
Supreme Head of the Church in 1531, popular politics and religion intersected as the
Crown asserted authority over both the temporal and spiritual realms. Religious reformers added Protestant elements to traditional plays and games during the sixteenth century, and popular religion and entertainment offered an avenue for social control. The participants in Kett's Rebellion expressed their political identities through their overt defiance of the social and economic changes, observable in the Mousehold Articles.
Concurrently, they also resisted attempts to control culture, religion, and construct a new idealized Protestant identity through the shaming, de-legitimization, or co-opting of extant popular traditions. Claire Sponsler argues that this “disciplinary discourse” and theatre “were caught up in a culture of commodification, themselves produced and consumed as material goods – as texts and performances.”3 Applying Sponsler's framework of resistance through dramatic forms recontextualizes the nature of Kett's
Rebellion, illustrated by the Mousehold Articles. Often understood as a signifier of the rebellion's Protestant leanings, the demand in the articles that “evry propriatoric parson or
3 Anticipating objections to the application of a framework centered around commodification, Sponsler contends that, despite the "dearth of commodities" in the preindustrial period, "late medieval consumers nonetheless were confronted with an array of goods that many could afford to purchase. Based upon Christopher Dyer's observations of important changes in labor, increased standards of living, and expanded rules governing work and the use of consumer goods, "the late Middle Ages were," Sponsler concludes, "marked by new models of consumption that responded to the filling up of the private world with goods." Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997), xiv and Christopher Dyer, "Were There Any Capitalists in Fifteenth-Century England?" in Everyday Life in Medieval England, 2nd ed. (London: Hambledon and London, 2000): 305-327.
15
vicar havyng benefice of x or more by yere shall eyther by themselves or by some other persone teche pore mens chyldren of ther paryshe the boke called the cathakysme and the prymer” expresses an element of resistance to change.4 Demanding control over the
education of their children provided one avenue to retaining access to popular media and
entertainment as consumers; an act that in turn shaped the evolution of popular
entertainment after the Reformation.5 Learning the catechism and other ostensibly pro-
Reformation demands in the Mousehold Articles represent the rebels' struggle for cultural control by adopting aspects of elite culture for themselves. This allowed them to consume popular entertainment and construct their own distinct identities, even under the constraints imposed by reformers. Understanding the rebellion as a struggle for cultural legitimacy in the face of rapid transformations in social, economic, and religious order provides another layer of context. This struggle extended beyond enclosure riots and
rebellion, infiltrating into the most mundane elements of popular entertainment and
making traditions like the Wymondham game subversive.
Demographics suggest that Kett's Rebellion included many individuals who came
of age prior to the Reformation and held a deep affinity for popular religious traditions
and who challenged the introduction of anti-Catholic and pro-Reformation sentiments
into the mainstream. A significant number of older men participated in Kett's Rebellion
4 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), 53. 5 For more on the changes to plays introduced during the Reformation, see Heather Hill-Vasquez, "Modeling Response in the Chester Cycle," in Sacred Player: The Politics of Response in the Middle English Religious Drama (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007): 17-50
16
and they carried with them memories and identities created prior to the Reformation.6
The struggle for religious identity extended beyond the realm of theologians and kings, moving past the sophisticated points presented by Zwingli and Martin Luther at their debate in Marburg and into the realm of popular culture. Understanding the nature of popular religious traditions, which combined the secular and sacred spheres in the form of religious-based games, festivities, and performances provides another layer of context for the actions of Kett and his band of followers. Alexander Neville's “wretched conspirators,” who “bent their wits to powre foorth the venome of their envie against their Countrie,” most likely amount to nothing more than a rhetorical flourish: he describes them gathered together to participate in “a Play at Wymondham, by an olde custome.”7 An anonymous account of the rebellion, most likely a product of an eager
student of Latin using Neville's original 1575 Latin account of the rebellion as a primer,
recalls that, on the eve of the rebellion, “there were sports celebrated at Windhame according to an ancient custom, which continued two days, and two nights.”8 Nicholas
Sotherton, in a chronicle of the rebellion written within a decade of the events of 1549,
claims that “dyvers persons assembled att a certen nyht and daie playe in the towne of
Hymondham callyd Wyndham game which was there played.9
6 From a sampling of thirty-seven participants in the rebellion listed in manorial court roles, Jane Whittle determined that fifty-four percent fell between the ages of forty and fifty, with eleven percent over fifty and only thirty-five percent between twenty-five and forty. Jane Whittle, "Lords and Tenants in Kett's Rebellion 1549," Past and Present 207 (May 2010): 26. 7 Emphasis my own. Alexander Neville, Norfolkes Furies, Early English Books Online (London: William Stansby, 1615), B3r. 8 Emphasis my own. Anon., "Anonymous account of Kett's Rebellion," COL 9/117, Coleman Manuscript Collection, Norfolk Records Office, 2. 9 Emphasis my own. Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 3.
17
All of these accounts use the words “game” and “play” to describe the celebratory atmosphere in Wymondham, requiring an understanding of the term as Kett and his contemporaries would have interpreted the words. Indeed, a precise definition of the term may lie outside the grasp of modern readers, leaving no choice but to create an amorphous and necessarily ambiguous understanding of “play” and “game” consisting of a variety of possible components, none of which are mutually exclusive. The Oxford
English Dictionary provides one obsolete definition of the noun “play,” used in 1586 to describe a “rural entertainment or festivity; a country fair, esp. one involving games, pageantry, drama, etc.”10 It seems likely that the event Sotherton describes included several different forms of popular entertainment, not simply a stage performance.
Lawrence Clopper warns that “the most vexed medieval usage is ludus, or 'pley,' for it is
tempting in many cases to read these terms as 'drama' when there is insufficient evidence
for that understanding.” Clopper argues that “both ludus and 'play' include all kinds of
games and sports,” and that plays describe events ranging from musical performances to
athletic competitions, as seen in the description of the “pley” of Saint Andrew, a “parish
olympics,” found in records of the Dunmow Corpus Christi play.11 However, Clopper acknowledges that by the sixteenth century, the term “play” also came to be associated
with performances, although this term typically expressed some negative connotations
when associated with popular entertainments and the theatre. Suggestive of the inherently
subversive elements underpinning the use of the word, he emphasizes that “when one
sees reference to a stage play, one cannot assume that it is to a licensed drama or a
10 Oxford English Dictionary, “Play,” http://www.oed.com/ 11 Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 12-13.
18
religious drama even if it is being produced in a churchyard,” and cautions that “a stage play is not necessarily a scripted drama; it may be a king game or some other rowdy entertainment.”12 Based upon the prohibitions against the veneration of Becket adopted
under Henry VIII in 1538, and the Crown's disapproval of Becket's cult, one can
reasonably infer that the “play” at the Wymondham game lacked official sanction.
A close analysis of the language used to describe the celebration may also provide
some indication of the nature of the Wymondham game. Sotherton refers to people
“ascembled att a certen nyht and daie playe,” using “playe” as a noun. Based on the
pejorative nature associated with the term “playe” observed by Clopper, we can assume
that Sotherton intended to refer to an unscripted, unofficial popular drama or game
involving audience participation. This participation, an important component to the
immersive nature of religious drama, often took the form of actors and audiences
engaging in direct back-and-forth dialogue, sometimes cautionary or friendly and
sometimes antagonistic, as in depictions of Herod or Pilate.13 The actors portraying these characters addressed audiences directly, sometimes using threats or other means of coercion, which elicited direct and vocal responses from the viewers. Thus, the
Wymondham game may have consisted of a combination of a variety of different athletic
contests, musical performances, and interactive performances emphasizing an interactive
relationship with the viewers. The usage of the noun form of play at the time Sotherton
12 Ibid., 16-17. 13 Peter Ramey, "The Audience-Interactive Games of the Middle English Religious Drama," Comparative Drama 47 (2013): 58-59.
19
wrote his narrative to refer to a stage performance provides linguistic evidence supporting the inference that the Wymondham game included dramatic, theatrical elements.
Further evidence appears in account records created by the Watch and Play Society of Wymondham.14 Invoices documenting the assorted expenses incurred by the society include a line item for “bred & ale at the recordyng of the play.” The invoice suggests food and drink provided for an audience gathered to witness an annual celebration honoring Becket, with play used in the noun form once again. It also includes expenses for the materials used to construct props consistent with the types of scenes depicted in
popular performances. Five items refer to charges incurred for the construction and operation of a “gyant,” while another mentions the purchase of “devyls shoes,” a prop used in the performance. Importantly, William Lombe, the author of the invoice, drafted it on “the xviij day of June in the xxx yere of the Regne of our said sufferen lord Kyng,” one year after the destruction of Becket's shrine in Canterbury and the prohibition against commemorations dedicated to the saint's life. While the celebration of the translation of
Becket occurred on the 7th of July, not June, multiple sources mistakenly identify the
month of the rebellion and the commemoration of the saint one month earlier. Sotherton’s
account of the rebellion states that “dyvers persons ascembled att a certen nyht and daie
playe in the towne of Hymondham callyd Wyndham game which was there played the
Satterday nyght being the vi daie of June 1549.”15 Susan Yaxley, the transcriber of
Sotherton’s manuscript, argues that “this is unquestionably an error” due to the fact that
14 David Galloway, John Wasson, and Janet Cowen, eds., Records of Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk 1330-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 128-129. 15 Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 3.
20
“the Wymondham Game took place annually on the Feast of St. Thomas a Becket and on the preceding day, July 6-7.”16 The same error may have been replicated in the 1539 invoice, making it possible that its contents reveal the expenses of a previous performance of the Wymondham Game.17 Regardless, it still demonstrates the use of the
word “play” in the context of a public performance and allows one to reasonably
conjecture that the event included theatrical elements.
Examining the role of theatre, drama, and the intersection of popular culture and
religion provides another layer of context for the actions of Kett's rebels. In the absence of textual evidence of the contents of the Wymondham game itself, studying common tropes and forms of popular theatre, as well as some instances of dramatic presentations from the same region and period, elucidates the discourse used by the rebels to express their discontent. These forms of entertainment drew upon commonly-shared tropes that reflected “figures that we see in folk ludi and games of sorts” to provide an important component in the way Kett's rebels may have understood themselves in relation to the rest of society. By appealing “to their audiences' sense of reality,” Clopper notes, “folk ludi” made themselves “viable and theatrically effective.”18 Like other aspects of popular
culture and festivals, this effectiveness made the medium a particularly volatile mode of
expression that proved to have dire consequences in the summer of 1549. Already
immersed in a simmering wave of unrest and unease, manifested by concurrent uprisings
as close as Suffolk and as far as Cornwall, the performance of the Wymondham game
16 Yaxley, "Notes," in The Commoyson in Norfolk, 45. 17 Galloway et al., eds., Records of Plays and Players, 128-129. 18 Clopper, Drama, Play. and Game, 236.
21
engaged an already-agitated crowd in a dramatic performance and festive occasion that quickly transitioned from violent spectacle into spectacular violence.19
Plays frequently employed subversive elements, fostered by the nature of the
medium to engage directly with the audience. Peter Ramey observes that the “most
widespread form of interactive audience address in the religious drama is carried out by
tyrant figures, such as Herod, Pilate, and Pharaoh, who initiate a 'coercion game' with the
audience,” noting that “these scenes usually far exceed their immediate narrative
function.”20 Performers encouraged audience members to direct their antipathy towards
exaggerated forms of biblical tyrants, and the dramatic tropes employed in many plays
served as proxies for contemporary figures of authority normally beyond reproach. In the fifteenth-century Towneley cycle, Herod the Great serves not just as a “send-up of the political class or an occasion for mocking, festive release, although he is clearly these as
well. He is also an enactment of real power over the crowd, whom he transforms,
however temporarily, into his subjects.”21 Upon his arrival, Herod antagonized the crowd
and issued grandiose threats, encouraging them to become participants in the play itself
by either subverting the mock king's rule or resisting his commands.
19 While the 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion in Cornwall clearly stemmed from resistance to religious changes, the Suffolk and Norfolk uprisings share several commonalities. In addition to their general anti- enclosure sentiment, MacCulloch argues that the "most remarkable feature of the East Anglian risings of 1549 was the way that they deliberately became static and centred themselves on camps." The camps functioned independently, however, and the very different approaches and fates of the rebel groups in East Anglia support a more granular analysis of the independent motives and actions of the participants in each uprising. Diarmaid MacCulloch, "Kett's Rebellion in Context," Past and Present 84 (August 1979): 44. 20 Ramey, "The Audience-Interactive Games,” 58-59. 21 Ibid., 62.
22
Remaining in character and addressing the audience directly created an important element to plays and games, drawing audiences into the performance and offering a release valve similar to popular festivals that provided the community a chance to redirect real grievances and anger towards dramatic foils. Immediately following the performances at Wymondham on July 7, some of the festival-goers attacked the enclosures of Hobartson of Morley two miles away before returning to the festivities.22
This outburst of violence at the height of the festival, prior to the confrontation of Kett
and the formation of Kett's Rebellion, suggests a failure to redirect the anger of the
Wymondham community into acceptable channels via popular festivals and games.
Instead of diffusing aggression through relatively harmless play, the performance of
potentially subversive material found an audience pushed to their extremes by social and
religious change and they embraced the Wymondham game perhaps too enthusiastically.
While Neville argued that the Becket festival disguised “wretched conspirators” that
“bent their wits, to powre foorth the venome of their envie against their Countrie,” his
interpretation of the events, written in the decades after the turbulent early years of the
Henrician Reformation, must be placed in context.23 Neville's work, himself the secretary
to Matthew Parker after his promotion to Archbishop of Canterbury, is the product of a
larger attempt to deconstruct and reshape popular traditions, including plays.24 Rather
22 Russell, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk, 25. 23 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, B3v. 24 Hill-Vasquez points to Sir Richard Morison's 1542 "A Discourse Touching the Reformation of the Lawes of England," and Morison's desire that plays and other popular religious traditions be made public to expose the flaws of Catholicism. "Given the late date of its manuscripts," Hill-Vasquez concludes, "the Chester cycle certainly seems a text that the forces of the Reformation were more at pains to modify and learn from than to destroy." Neville's attack on the "wretched conspirators" at Wymondham connects the traditional Becket play with seditious behavior and represents an assault on both the rebel participants and the pre-Reformation traditions seen to inspire them. Hill-Vasquez, Sacred Players, 50.
23
than a conspiracy, it seems more likely that the rioters at Wymondham found themselves engrossed in a subversive and interactive form of traditional popular entertainment and, pressed by religious and social change, erupted into a destructive fervor.
The destruction remained limited largely to property, however, until the violent clashes with soldiers under the direction of the Earl of Warwick at the conclusion of the rebellion. While Kett summoned the gentlemen of Norwich to the Oak of Reformation for judgment in his impromptu court, this took on a form resembling the exaggerated but harmless mockery encouraged by theatrical tropes that engaged with the audience directly, such as Herod in the Towneley cycle. Popular entertainment offers insight into sixteenth-century perceptions of abstract and real based on the use of allegory, leading
Clopper to conclude that “the real exists invisibly but makes itself known to use through accidents. If a realist were to write allegory, then he would name that which is real ––
Anger, Charity, Will –– and make it known to use through its accidents, that is, its manifestation in individuals.”25 A similar phenomenon appears in Neville's description of
the trials of the gentry at the Oak. Captured during the rebellion and dragged before the
rebels, some of the gentry “were compelled to pleade their cause out of chaines: and
when the ignorant and rude multitude were asked what they would have done with them;
all as with one mouth cryed out: Let them be hanged, Let them be hanged.”26 However,
Kett's court never carried out these sentences, suggesting these verdicts existed as largely symbolic victories. In the mock court, the abstracted failures of the gentlemen and the
gentry in general functioned similar to Platonic forms, which represented the real. The
25 Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 251. 26 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, D4v.
24
jurors perceived the prisoners brought forward for judgment as accidents, distinct instances representing all of the negative qualities associated with the gentry and the failures of their class. Due to their understanding of allegory, often presented in the form of plays, the rebels felt no need to carry out the sentence in the literal sense. They focused their anger and condemnation toward the abstracted qualities of greed, excess, and pride perceived as the true sources of disruption and misrule. The rebels settled for bringing forth the individual iterations representing these qualities and publicly shaming and haranguing them within the confines of the impromptu court. Their relatively non-violent reaction, despite the violence of their rhetoric, stemmed partly from their understanding of allegory utilized in popular entertainment.
The continuity of the Chester mystery cycle, despite the Protestant elements incorporated into the drama during the Elizabethan period, demonstrates the powerful role of plays in the construction of religious identity. “Religious drama,” Hill-Vasquez notes, served as “a shaping force of religious culture beyond its supposedly medieval boundaries: a consistently popular form of decidedly lay worship powerful enough to craft and define, as well as reflect, the nature of religious discourse well into, and beyond, the Reformation.”27 Introducing Protestant elements into the content of popular drama
and banning the celebration of subversive figures, like Becket, represents one facet of a
larger struggle. Re-contextualizing and altering familiar vehicles of cultural transmission,
such as plays or songs, allowed Protestants to maintain continuity with pre-Reformation
traditions that made up essential components of their religious identity and reconciled
27 Hill-Vasquez, Sacred Players, 3.
25
their religious beliefs with popular culture. Peter Burke refers to this as “counterfeiting,” the replacement of lyrics in traditional secular songs with religious elements that reformers found more acceptable. He cites the examples of Martin Luther's hymn, Vom
Himmel hoch da kom ich her (From Heaven Above to Earth I Come) and Johann Hesse's modification of Innsbruck ich muss dich lassen (Innsbruck, I Must Leave You) as examples of some of the earliest instances of Protestant “counterfeiting.”28 Secular and
religious elements of popular culture provided fertile ground for reform-minded individuals to influence members of their religious community.
The conflict over control of the discourse of popular culture manifested during
Kett's Rebellion, when the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Mathew Parker, and his brother, Thomas, preached an unwelcome sermon to the rebels. As the crowd gathered under the “Oak of Reformation” at Kett's Camp turned on Parker and his brother, a group of minstrels played an English-language rendition of Te Deum while the two men escaped the “cruell and raging minds” of the rebels.29 Neville's account explicitly mentions that the minstrels sang the song in English, illustrating a struggle for linguistic ownership over the hymn. Traditionally sung in Latin, both the rebels and Parker expressed an affinity for translations of biblical and liturgical material often associated with pro-Reformation ideology. However, Parker represented the passing of religious
identity from one official body to another, Church to Crown, while the rebels asserted a
popular claim to religious and linguistic authority by expressing their affinity for the
hymn’s performance in English. Accordingly, following their enthusiastic response to the
28 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe 3rd ed. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 311. 29 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, Dr.
26
minstrels performance, the rebels “came upon him[Parker], and other ministers of that societie, following him with tumultuous clamours, which contended with him chiefely for the great seale, whereby he had licence to preach.”30 By questioning the legitimacy of
Parker to preach, the rebels also challenged his de facto discursive ownership over Te
Deum and offered at least a partial rejection of the Henrician Reformation. Their
resistance to Parker's attempts at linguistically “counterfeiting” pre-Reformation hymns
mirrors the defiance expressed in their celebration of Thomas Becket on the eve of the
rebellion through the form of another pre-Reformation tradition, religious-themed plays.
The structure of the plays deeply integrated them into local popular culture, blending tradition and contemporary issues in an interactive form that reflected religious identities in sixteenth-century East Anglia. As early as the fourteenth century, urban and rural communities, like Norwich and Wymondham, both organized, participated in, and watched plays and public performances that reinforced existing popular concepts of religious and political identities.31 In urban areas, professional identity and religious
identity intersected in religious theatre, where guilds displayed their status in the
community through funding performances.32 The content of local plays engaged in a
bidirectional exchange with the communities consuming popular entertainment, slowly
changing and adapting to popular religion while simultaneously shaping religious
thought. Popular entertainment created a form of political discourse, closely connected
30 Ibid. 31 Mervyn James, "Ritual, Drama, and the Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town," Past and Present 98 (February 1983): 5. 32 Heather Swanson, "The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns," Past and Present 121 (November, 1988): 44.
27
with religious identity following the Henrician Reformation, that at least partially influenced the rebels at Wymondham, and provides context to explain their contradictory or exaggerated behavior during the rebellion. The rebels used this discourse to express their resistance to religious, economic, and political change in East Anglia that threatened the cultural hegemony of pre-Reformation traditions and religious identities. Due to their long-standing and deep roots in the public consciousness, plays and theatre proved difficult for Reformers to eliminate, and instead they attempted to subvert and control their content as part of the Reformation during the mid-sixteenth century.
Protestant revisions to early modern English plays “focused primarily on characterizing, distinguishing, and shaping audience response and devotional behaviors.”33 As Hill-Vasquez notes, the interactive nature of popular drama, which encouraged engagement with the audience, was a feature that “strongly suggests that the role of response in connection with the religious drama, rather than a Renaissance invention, had accompanied the drama as a prominent aspect for shaping devotional practice throughout its lifetime.” Theatre and entertainment proved to be cultural flashpoints where a variety of subgroups vied for control of the content of popular culture
and religion to assert their own legitimacy over a longer period of time. Counterfeiting
plays and songs, including changing their context through linguistic changes or the direct
alteration of their content over time and geographic space, as occurred with the mystery
plays studied by Hill-Vasquez, represents one facet of a continuous discursive struggle
33 Hill-Vasquez, Sacred Players, 6.
28
over identity construction, which manifested as Protestant alterations in the sixteenth century.
The importance of plays and popular entertainment in Kett's Rebellion extends beyond the borders of Wymondham and its Becket celebration to the nearby city of
Norwich, illustrating the role of drama in expressing local civic identity in both urban and rural communities. In the major urban centers of early modern England, such as
Coventry, Chester, and York, the Corpus Christi play cycle expressed a celebration encapsulating the entirety of Christian theology and community, unique and local to each city. This opportunity for expression, Mervyn James argues, “helped to make Corpus
Christi an occasion on which the urban community could effectively present and define itself in relation to the outside world.”34 While the Corpus Christi play cycle, which
provided a platform for local artisans, guilds, and citizens to express civic identity,
occurred months before the outbreak of Kett's Rebellion in July, the “emphasis at
Norwich,” as Joanna Dutka's studies of pageants chosen for a 1541 performance
illustrate, “seems to have been on Trinitarian themes, with special attention paid to the
Holy Ghost.” Norwich's unique form of celebration exemplifies the adaptive nature of
theatre and spectacle to suit the needs of different communities, but it also suggests a
certain amount of manipulation by city leaders to hold plays, which contained “possible elements of spectacle and, hence, crowd-appeal that a civic authority would find advantageous at fair time.”35 For urban communities like Norwich, plays offered a venue
34 James, "Ritual, Drama and Social Body," 12. 35 The 1541 performance subjects included Noah's flood, the conflict between David and Goliath, the resurrection, and the Holy Ghost. Joanna Dutka, "The Lost Dramatic Cycle of Norwich and the Grocer's Play of the Fall of Man," Review of English Studies 35 (1984): 5-6
29
that allowed various civic organizations and guilds to publicly reaffirm their place in the city's hierarchy, creating an intersection of popular religion, entertainment, and politics in a festive atmosphere.
At the time of Kett's Rebellion, various craft guilds of the city of Norwich sponsored and organized scenes from the Corpus Christi cycle, although the popular appeal of the exhibitions depended more on spectacle than on offering a moment of spiritual introspection. A list of twelve plays assigned to craft guilds in 1527 omitted both the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment, suggesting an appeal to popular aesthetic values using visually impressive presentations that provided an opportunity for guilds to assert their status in the community through the spectacle of public pageantry.36 These events,
James notes, played a valuable role in reaffirming hierarchical bonds in urban society and
provided a shared element of identity construction for a community “in which the
alternative symbols and ties of lordship, lineage and faithfulness, available in
countrysides, were lacking.”37 Sotherton's account recalls that, upon the rebels' arrival at
Eaton Wood on 9 July, “evyll disposid people in Norwich, there assemblid unto them
divers vagrand person of the sayd Citty of Norwich whoe, partlie uppon former talke att
the [Wymondham] Game aforesayde, and partly uppon sodeygne admoneshment, were
easly assenting to that Rebellion.”38 Whether the participants of the rebellion conspired
together during the Becket festival in Wymondham or they spontaneously joined with
Kett's band of men after they arrived at the city walls matters less than the fact that
36 Ibid., 3. 37 James, "Ritual, Drama and Social Body," 4. 38 Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 5.
30
Sotherton and his audience found nothing remarkable in the fact that residents of
Norwich, an urban center, would travel to a rural community to participate in a local play and festival. Rather than delineating discrete communities, urban and rural culture must have included intersectional elements popular enough to appeal to disaffected members of opposing cultural subgroups in rural and urban East Anglia. While urban mystery cycles and plays functioned as an important element in the construction of an distinct identity based on their role within the city's hierarchy, the performances also offered a shared experience that established a unique civic identity that distinguished themselves from outsiders, ideological walls that established space just as effectively as the city walls of Norwich.
Productions of The Castle of Perserverence, a fifteenth-century allegorical play produced in East Anglian towns and written by an author from Norfolk, illustrates the commonalities between both urban and rural performances. “The major supporters” of the Castle productions in small communities, as Clopper notes, “would be the counterparts of the urban bourgeois guildsmen who produced the biblical cycles” in cities like Norwich. Acting as members of the “Watche and Playe Socitie,” Kett, a member of this rural bourgeoisie, and his family provided personal financial support and organization for local plays in 1538.39 These supporters consisted largely of “freemen
interested in advertising their status and accumulating money for a civic or religious
project,” often advertised in neighboring towns by vexillatores, a Latin term for banner-
bearers that preceded mystery plays to announce their impending performances. Castle,
39 Galloway et al., eds., Records of Plays and Players, 128.
31
according to Clopper, used “feudal imagery to characterize life in sin,” suggesting that part of its appeal lay in the collective memory of prior uprisings, and that this rural bourgeoisie perceived feudal duties as “stains on their honor, a reminder of a time when they were unfree or only partially free servants.”40 While Kett’s rebels focused their
anger upon the gentry enriched by enclosure, not feudal lords, the underlying causes of their grievances remained the same: an encroachment by socially influential and powerful individuals against the rights of the community to exercise an acceptable level of autonomy. The themes and tropes found in Castle embody the grievances expressed in rebellions throughout the medieval and early modern period.
The content of the plays provided an intellectual framework for the rebels to express their extreme unhappiness as well as a built-in network to rapidly organize and communicate with other communities through the vexillatores. Additionally, professions and trade also offered methods to quickly raise large groups of rebels. Butchers appear prominently in records of manorial court trials following the rebellion, and “it cannot be
coincidence that of forty-seven individuals involved in the East Anglian risings,”
Diarmaid MacCulloch observes, “no fewer than seven were butchers.”41 MacCulloch
emphasizes the importance of profession in distinguishing the different types of
individuals who participated in the rebellion. The presence of so many skilled tradesmen
in the manorial court rolls suggests that some of them may have seen the rebellion as
another opportunity to assert their status in the community, possibly disrupted by
inflation and socio-economic changes. Anger over the disruptive impact of the expansion
40 Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 253-254. 41 MacCulloch, "Kett's Rebellion in Context," 49.
32
of private property and the increased influence of the gentry provides a common grievance for both urban and rural rebels. When Norwich residents left the city on 10 July to join Kett's band, they tore down the “Common Close” outside the city gates, where private citizens rented rights to graze their cattle.42 Attacking the enclosures outside the city offered the city's residents an avenue to express their frustration against Norwich's well-to-do citizens, who could have afforded access to the common close. The Corpus
Christi festival's celebration of the body of Christ reflected the importance of the ritual in maintaining the health of the urban body politic, and the disruption of religious tradition under the Reformation accompanied by social and economic changes that encouraged an influx of migration to urban centers like Norwich inhibited the renewing element of the
play cycle.
Mystery plays, which encouraged audience participation and reflected the time and
place of their performance, both shaped and reflected popular culture at the time of their
production. Reformers, “ostensibly dedicated to righting the wrongs of the earlier faith,”
Hill-Vasquez notes, “produced a kind of revisionist history of religious drama in the
Reformation and early Renaissance era.”43 In addition to hymns, as observed by the
rebels' response to Parker at the Oak of Reformation, religious dramas and plays served
as another point of contention for Protestants and Catholics struggling for control over
political, religious, economic, and cultural legitimacy. Mystery plays served as a cultural
battleground between Protestant reformers and traditionalists, largely due to the fluid
nature of the content and the emphasis on audience participation that made the medium
42 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, B4r. 43 Hill-Vasquez, Sacred Players, 8.
33
so malleable. An analysis of mystery plays prior to the Reformation reveals a systemic process in which factions recycled the contents of popular genres for their own polemical purposes, usefully reshaping, redirecting, and reclaiming the plays, illustrating “the fluid potential of this drama” that provided fertile ground for ideological conflict during the sixteenth century.44 As part of his religious and political reforms, Henry VIII seized both
the temporal and spiritual swords for the Crown, an action that contextualizes the changes
to religious drama. In the decades following the Henrician Reformation, mystery plays
represented an intersection of political speech and religious identity, where familiar
biblical stories underwent radical contextual alterations based on the nature of the
performance and the intended audience. Hill-Vasquez's study of the extant texts from the
Chester cycle reveals elements of pro-Protestant criticisms of Catholic beliefs using the
discourse of theatre. Similarly, the participants in Kett's Rebellion may have used the
Wymondham game and the celebration of Becket to challenge authority, including that of
the Crown, the gentry, and the clergy.
Royal proclamations from the Edwardine and Elizabethan periods suggest that the
Crown understood the subversive nature of plays and games and actively sought to limit
their performances. In 1559, Elizabeth I issued a proclamation which “straightly forbid al
maner interludes to be played eyther openly or privately, except the same be notified
before hande, and licenced within any Citie or towne corporate.” The proclamation also
restricted content, permitting “none to be played wherein either matters of religion or of
the governaunce of the estate of the commonweale shalbe handled or treated, beyng no
44 Ibid., 204.
34
neete matters to be written or treated upon, but by menne of authoritie, learning and wisedome.”45 Edward VI and Mary I both issued proclamations restricting the content of
plays and forbidding them during certain times of year, primarily the summer and spring
months. Clopper concludes that the Crown was not trying to control drama in general,
only material that was satiric, parodic, and polemical, and that the spring and summer
months were times of disorder that necessitated a seasonal ban on performances.46 This response to seditious plays and restrictions on their performances suggests that contemporaries around the time of Kett’s Rebellion recognized a distinct threat to order and authority posed by popular entertainment.
The rebels responded to a number of serious political, economic, and religious changes that threatened the traditional social order through an understanding of the world shaped by popular religion and entertainment. They did this through means that appeared chaotic or jocular to outside observers, typically from elite and literate elements of society, who documented the events in the decades following Kett's Rebellion. However, understanding the rebels in proper context reveals an internal logic and consistency to their actions as shaped by elements of popular culture. Theatre served as an ideological battleground in the struggle between reformers and proponents of traditional religion, and the origins of the rebellion at a public festival that included performances illustrate resistance to cultural, in addition to economic and religious, change. Analysis of the language used to describe the events indicates that the Wymondham Game included
45 Elizabeth I, By the Quene. Forasmuche as the tyme wherein common interludes in the Englishetongue ar wont vsually to be played, Early English Books Online (1559) 46 Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 277-280.
35
performance pieces, and other records from Wymondham suggest a long-standing and deep-rooted local connection to the performances, supported by the Kett family among others, that provided some resilience to change and strong bonds to community leaders like Robert and William Kett. The tropes and interactive nature of religious plays, which encouraged audience participation, provided a framework for the rebels to construct caricatures of the elites to which they directed their ire. While festivals and performances typically provided a relatively safe avenue to voice grievances and challenge elites, as well as communicating social hierarchy, they failed to contain the growing discontent in
East Anglia following years of challenges to traditional social order. The dangerous nature of these plays necessitated controlling the content of popular entertainment through permitting only officially-sanctioned plays and performances in the aftermath of
Kett's Rebellion.
36
CHAPTER III
“BEARDLESSE BOYS OF THE COUNTRIE”: EXPRESSIONS OF MASCULINITY
IN PROTEST
Desperate to contain and subdue Kett's Rebellion before it continued to grow unchecked, the Crown dispatched the Marquis of Northampton, William Parr, with a contingent of knights and Italian mercenaries to Norwich at the end of July. While the
English military forces under the command of Northampton secured the city walls, the
Italians ventured out of the city and engaged in nocturnal skirmishes with the rebels.
During the course of the conflict the rebels captured one of the mercenaries, a man named
Cheavers. Despite the high ransom the rebels could have demanded for the release of the mercenary, one of the rebels, “Cayme of Bongege,” stripped the man naked and hung him from the walls of their encampment at Surrey House.1 Neville claims that the action
revealed “how great and detestable cruelty raigned in those, that had wickedly taken up
Armes against their Country.”2 Closer to ascertaining the rebels' actual motives,
Sotherton argues that “but for his apparell sake,” Cheavers “was hanged over the walls by
a wretched Rebell.”3 Neither of the chroniclers recognized the gendered nature of the
1 There are some discrepencies in the primary accounts of the rebellion concerning the details of the mercenary's execution. Sotherton and Neville both name Cayme as the man who carried out the sentence, but only Sotherton provides his name, Cheavers. Neville also claims that he was hung from an oak at Surrey house, while Sotherton claims that he was hung from the walls of the rebels' camp. Sotherton's narrative, written closer to the events and providing more detail, possibly reflects the more accurate account. Nicholas Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, ed. Susan Yaxley (Stibbard: Larks Press, 1987), 22-23; and Alexander Neville, Norfolkes Furies, trans. Richard Woods (London: William Stansby, 1615), F4r-F4v. 2 Neville, Norfolkes Furies, F4v. 3 Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 23.
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violence against the mercenary and the role of masculinity in driving the rebels' behavior.
Analyzing the events of the rebellion through a framework utilized by Tim Reinke-
Williams – which examines masculinity through the lenses of bodily control, fatherhood, commensality, and politics – provides an important layer of context necessary to understand the motivations and actions of the rebels.4
As Reinke-Williams notes, over the last decade “social and cultural historians of
masculinity have developed an increasing interest in bodies, focusing on issues of
presentation and self-mastery.”5 These developments include a focus on the evolution of
male identity through physical control of the self, looking at evidence of masculine
identity construction from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The rebels' treatment of
their enemies illustrates early forms of masculinity commonly understood at both elite
and popular levels of society, particularly in the form of bodily control and masculine
identity construction through the presentation of an idealized form of the self. Cheavers'
violent end in the rebels' custody demonstrates their emasculation of an enemy and an
assertion of their own prowess as men. Peter Sherlock's studies of monuments erected in
Westminster Abbey, which depict the deceased in military regalia, clearly illustrate the
connection between militancy, masculinity, and an individual's status within the feudal
system as embodied through clothing, an exterior symbol of manhood. While the artistic
styles depicting important figures in England's history have changed over time, Sherlock
finds a common ground between medieval and modern presentations of powerful figures
4 Tim Reinke-Williams, "Manhood and Masculinity in Early Modern England," History Compass 12, no. 9 (2014): 685-693. 5 Ibid., 685.
38
in the connection between martial prowess and masculine identity. “War, and its part in shaping perceptions of communal identity in the spheres of media and politics,” he argues, “is one of the few themes that stretches across both medieval and modern tombs at the Abbey.”6
Under paternalistic feudal governance, individuals depended on pedigree and
lineage to justify their claims to authority, while pre-Reformation monuments to the dead
often focused on intercession on behalf of the deceased, trapped in purgatory. These
elements shifted to accommodate the social and economic changes during the sixteenth
century, and as Sherlock notes, monuments emphasizing individual self-worth increased in number during the Tudor and Stuart periods. The gentry, who possessed an excess of wealth that garnered them political power and influence, used personal monuments as a
means to connect themselves to the sources of traditional political legitimacy. Men like
Robert Dudley used monuments depicting themselves in martial regalia and celebrated
their wartime successes, recreating their bodies in the form of a masculine image shaped
by their conceptions of the traits possessed by an idealized form of feudal lords.
“Monuments,” Sherlock concludes, “offered one strategic means for a family to promote
themselves further, however, reinforcing their power, enhancing their honour, recounting
their lineage, and shaping history to their own advantage.”7
6 Sherlock cites the monument of Edward I, bearing the inscription "Eduardus I Malleus Scotorum,” and the multitude of effigies clothed in martial regalia from the medieval period in the Abbey as evidence for continuity in the depiction of masculine images for nearly a millennium of English history. Peter Sherlock, "Militant Masculinity and the Monuments of Westminster Abbey," in Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others, eds. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 133. 7 Ibid., 140.
39
As traditional hereditary feudal systems gave way to a nascent protocapitalist system, wealth concentrated into the hands of private individuals and they looked to an imagined past to find the symbols of political legitimacy. The statues and monuments in
Westminster celebrating these individuals represent an early form of Baudrillard's hyperreal, retaining “all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is no longer anything but its scaled-down refraction.” Baudrillard argues that “as long as the historical threat came at it from the real,” as is the case with the absence of traditional sources of legitimacy among wealthy landowners in sixteenth-century England, “power played at deterrence and simulation, disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs.”8 Those with political ambition but lacking a hereditary
claim to authority and power recreated hyperreal masculine images of themselves, and
these signs of authority became incorporated into a language of power that connected
military regalia to manhood and authority. When the rebels captured Cheavers and
stripped “away all his garments and furniture which were upon him,” as Neville notes,
“very costly and cunningly wrought,” they also stripped him of his claims to authority
and accompanying masculinity that his garments instilled.9
The rebels internalized the importance of martial prowess and its connection to
legitimacy and masculinity just as much as elite individuals. During a pitched battle at
Pockthorpe Gate for control of Norwich, an armed mob captured Lord Sheffield. The
rebels refused the lord's request to spare his life in return for a promised ransom, instead
8 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 23. 9 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, F4v.
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putting their prisoner to death. Neville claims that “they contended among themselves for the glorie and commendation of this villeny,” nearly coming to blows before agreeing that one of their number, a man named Fulke, carried out the act.10 Political discourse
linked the concept of martial strength and its accompanying accoutrements within
masculine identities. Neville's account suggests that the idea that the rebels fought over
the credit for killing the lord would not appear unreasonable to a late-sixteenth-century
reader, and defeating an enemy wearing the symbols of manhood increased the killer's
status as a man among his peers and signaled his own potency. In death, the rebels treated
their enemies' remains in radically different fashions: they humiliated and stripped
Cheavers, seen as an imposter and unworthy of the authority and status granted by his regalia. No argument erupts over the credit for killing and hanging the Italian mercenary, whose surrender and foreign origins may have played a role in his diminished status as a man among the rebels, shames the victim in death. Sheffield's death in combat instead reaffirms his worthiness to retain the marks of his station and enhances the masculinity of the man who struck the final blow.
Plays and performances popular in the sixteenth century also provide insight into gender identities and their subversive potential. “Robin Hood performances, morality plays, and Corpus Christi pageants,” Claire Sponsler argues, offered avenues for the sixteenth-century English people to “explore alternate possibilities of action and being.”
Through these performances, “bodies and commodities were reassembled in deviant ways that countered authoritative models of subjectivity, reappearing engaged in such
10 Ibid., G3v.
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forbidden acts as cross-dressing, social and sexual misbehavior, and violence against the body to challenge the codes promulgated by official discourse.”11 By donning the clothes of others, Robin Hood adopted their identities and redefined himself by transforming bodily into subversive figures. In the ballad of Robin Hood and the Bishop, Robin exchanges clothes with an elderly woman and assumes her identity to elude the pursuit of a bishop, wrapping “himself in the potent symbolism of the unruly woman, drawing on
her transgressive force to escape the bishop.”12 When Robin returns to the company of
his men, his convincing disguise spurs his men to confront him:
‘O who is yonder,’ quoth Little John, ‘That now comes over the lee? An arrow I will at her let flie, So like an old witch looks she.’13
In addition to tapping into the subversive elements associated with an “unruly woman,”
Robin also draws upon the supernatural fear associated with witchcraft. Clothing allows
the outlaw to bodily redefine himself as a variety of subversive figures, and the rebels'
actions towards Cheavers and Lord Sheffield offer a tangible example of this belief
extending beyond popular entertainment and into reality.
Understanding the connections between gender, theatre, and popular culture provides context for the rebels' actions and how they expressed masculinity through the
11 Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xv-xvi. 12 Ibid., 27-28. 13 "Robin Hood and the Bishop," in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, eds. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997)
42
body and clothing. The importance of a fluid figure like Robin Hood, who embodied both masculinity and femininity through his various disguises, provides some explanation for the rebels' actions shortly after they arrived at Norwich in the days following the turmoil at Wymondham. After being turned away by Mayor Codd on 10 July when the rebels attempted to pass through Norwich, they headed towards nearby Eaton Wood. Before making camp at the wood, Neville tells how sympathetic citizens of Norwich exited the city and made their way to join the rebels, who “beganne to perceive by little bowes in the hands of certaine men, which fled unto them out of the City.” Bolstered by the addition of this “certaine of the scumme of the City,” the mob destroyed the “Common
Close,” an enclosed property outside the city where individuals who owned livestock allowed them to graze before continuing on to the woods.14 Popular culture provides the
context to understand the symbolism of the “little bowes” carried by the rebel
sympathizers of Norwich.15 Peter Burke notes that Robin Hood and St. John, both
integrated into May Day festivities in sixteenth-century England, embodied the
“archetype of a 'vegetation demon,' a supernatural representation of nature that illustrates the close connection between forests, nature, and masculinity.”16 By carrying the boughs
from the city into the woods, the men of Norwich inverted the traditional May Day
festival, a popular tradition in which Henry VIII himself participated in during his youth.
14 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, B4r. 15 Alleviating some confusion over the archaic spelling, Russell explains that the men from Norwich carried "small boughs in their hands." 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), 33. 16 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 257- 259.
43
This action symbolically stripped the masculine potency from the city, an important aspect of the May Day tradition.
While demographic studies indicate no surge in pregnancies corresponding with
May Day festivities, a revelation that suggests young couples did not literally take to the woods for romantic rendezvous in the numbers claimed by polemicists sympathetic to the
Reformation, individuals did celebrate the holiday using largely symbolic gestures involving greenery and nature.17 In Oxford, young girls gathered garlands of flowers to
hang in the parish church, while the women of Newcastle under Henry VIII's reign
collected flowers woven into garlands for sale. Young men left a variety of foliage at the
doorsteps of women in their communities, each of which expressed different meanings
and carried their symbolic interpretations. At Waterbeach in the Cambridgeshire Fens,
sloe blossoms left by a woman's door indicated affection, while a scold may have
emerged from her home on May Day morning to find a bouquet of nettles tied to the latch of her door. While May Day festivities certainly emphasized sexuality and reinforced existing gender roles, this was not the primary purpose behind the symbolic components utilized in the celebrations. Ronald Hutton cautions against the simplistic interpretation associating the maypole and May Day imagery as an intentionally phallic celebration of virility, instead suggesting a more general “rejoicing at the returning strength of vegetation.”18
17 Ronald Hutton notes that increases in pregnancy occurred later in the summer months. However, evidence suggests that participants in May Day festivities enthusiastically celebrated using plants and greenery. Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 229. 18 Ibid., 234.
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The participants in Kett's Rebellion reversed the ritualistic celebration of potency embodied in the May Day symbols, carrying the vegetative symbols of life and vitality out from the city and into the forest. Doing so allowed them to express popular political speech through the language of symbolism and religious tradition, voicing their concern that socioeconomic changes threatened the idealized form of paternal rule held by the rebels. The men of Norwich inverted the May Day celebration, turning symbols expressing an affirmation of rebirth and growth into an act of hostility and a challenge to the masculinity of the gentry of Norwich, deemed unfit and stripped of their political legitimacy just as surely as their masculine potency.
The support for traditional paternalistic feudalism among the rebels appears in their repeated implorations that they supported the Crown, expressions of genuine loyalty toward their idealized conceptions of political power embodied in the head of state. This sentiment held a gendered element, and popular conceptions of royal authority included idealized qualities attributed to masculine and feminine identities. Cynthia Herrup argues that Tudor and Stuart monarchs “required traits associated with both the masculine and the feminine: kings had to be both unyielding and tender, both economical and bountiful with words and goods, and both courageous and peace loving.”19 As the gentry's
socioeconomic influence increased, it threatened the traditional concepts of gender
embodied in the Crown's authority as it weakened the political influence of the nobility.
Kett's Rebellion responded to the disruption of traditional conceptions of government in
terms of paternalistic authority embodied in feudal systems of government with political
19 Cynthia Herrup, "The King's Two Genders," Journal of British Studies 45, no. 3 (July 2006): 498.
45
speech that utilized the symbolic language of popular culture. The gentry of Norwich, viewed as ineffectual and illegitimate by the general public, lost their symbolic claim to the masculine potency required to ensure good governance when the rebels withdrew from Norfolk with boughs in hand.
Popular culture encouraged the belief that the Crown did not carry the blame for misrule, only the individuals charged with carrying out the Crown's will. This theme appears regularly in Robin Hood plays, where Robin battles the tyranny of the sheriff of
Nottingham and Guy of Gisborne, not King Richard. This trend occurred in reality as well as fiction, such as the anger expressed toward Thomas Cromwell rather than Henry
VIII during the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536.20 During the course of the rebellion, the
participants supposedly accused the gentry of being effeminate and lacking in masculine
qualities, supporting the notion that their removal of greenery from Norfolk indicated a
rejection of the qualities legitimating their power and authority. These criticisms, found
in Neville's account of the events, reveals the anxiety of his own class over the legitimacy
of their authority, derived from wealth rather than hereditary titles. His claims that the
rebels accused the gentry of being “not only content to take by violence all away, and by
force and villany to get, which they consume in ryot, and effeminate delights.”21
Although the rebels may have leveled accusations of effeminate behavior and excessive consumption at the gentry, Neville's inclusion of that criticism in his account reflects the political discourse of the period. From 1580 to 1630, Reinke-Williams argues that large numbers of political figures identified themselves as “'public men' who used the language
20 Burke, Popular Culture, 208. 21 Neville, Norfolks Furies, B2r.
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of stoicism to fashion themselves as 'honest patriots' and 'simple men of the country' who stood as political outsiders in contrast to the 'men of business' and parliament men' of
Whitehall and Westminster.”22 The rhetoric attributed to the rebels reflects the same
attributes utilized in the construction of more palatable political identities in the late-
sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, the “public men” who embodied all of the
traits viewed in opposition to the negative aspects of the gentry.
This shift suggests that public figures several decades after the rebellion adopted
many of the grievances that led to Kett's Rebellion into their political identities, shifting
legitimate differences between the socioeconomic and political structures found in rural
and urban communities into abstract political discourse. The effeminate traits ascribed to
the gentry suggests an idealized image of important men in rural communities, the last
vestiges of the paternalism necessary to maintain feudal bonds. The language used in
Neville's chronicle illustrates the anxieties over the transition in masculine identity
construction that accompanied the changes to traditional political and economic
structures. May Day provided an important forum for Kett and the rebels to express their
discontent over these changes and the decline of paternalism, closely linked to idealized
masculine traits expressed in the festivities.
An important celebration, there is “abundant literary evidence that a common custom on May Morning,” observes Ronald Hutton, “was to go into the nearest countryside before sunrise and to return with flowers and greenery to deck streets and
22 Reinke-Williams, "Manhood and Masculinities," 689; Richard Cust, "The Public Man in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England" in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 116 - 143.
47
houses.” Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon participated in May Day festivities in 1515, when the royal couple traveled from Greenwich Palace to Shooter's Hill with their court, eating and drinking in the privacy of the woodland setting. Not only limited to May, this day occurred as late as June or July in some areas, making it possible that the people of
Norwich may have recently celebrated the day.23 The boughs carried out of the city on 10
July may have been the same greenery and foliage carried into the city only weeks
earlier, and their withdrawal of the symbolic representations of nature's potency from the
city back into the forest suggests a migration of the virility of the men of Norwich back into the woods, an environment closely connected with privacy and sexuality.
In popular culture, forests served as a symbolic link between masculinity, privacy, and the subversive elements of popular culture, as illustrated by the forms of entertainment that accompanied the festivities. Robin Hood plays, popular concurrently with May Day festivals and incorporated into public theatrical performances during the
Spring and early Summer, challenged clear delineations of social and economic order by permitting fluidity in identity construction. Popular forms of entertainment and festivals provided a discursive tool for non-elites to express subversive ideas and thoughts without
directly challenging the Crown or the gentry. These elements provided the foundations
for the rebels' worldview and influenced their decisions during the course of the
rebellion. Cross-dressing and disguise allowed Robin Hood to adopt a variety of
identities, which allowed him to “flout norms of honest and fair trade.” As Sponsler
notes, “the cross-dressed Robin Hood becomes a disrupter of the established economic
23 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 27-28.
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order, who undermines the putative authority of accepted practices of labor, pricing, and payment for services.”24 Robin Hood plays threatened established social boundaries and
presented a model for subversion through the redefinition of the body using clothing and
other external symbols. Believing that the symbols of authority instilled legitimacy in the
wielders of those symbols, the rebels adopted them for their own use during the course of the rebellion in the form of trials held under the Oak of Reformation.25 Consistent with
the subversive and mocking elements found in popular culture, the rebels did not
sincerely believe that they permanently usurped the authority of the gentry and the courts.
Like Robin Hood adopting the identity of the elderly woman, they slipped into the guise
of legitimate legal authority when they brought their captives to the court held under the
Oak of Reformation for judgment.26 However, they failed to carry out the sentences and
execute their captives, suggesting they did not sincerely believe they had become legal
authorities anymore than Robin Hood believed he had truly transformed into a woman.
In addition to transformation, Robin Hood plays also include elements of bodily
autonomy through privacy, which Robin obtains by utilizing the concealing power of the
woods. Lurking in the forest allowed the outlaw to conceal the nature of his crimes and
change his identity with ease, reflecting popular conceptions about the woods and
elucidating the rebels' attraction to Eaton Woods. In Early Modern England, forests
provided more privacy than many dwellings and interior places, and Mary Crane argues
24 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 34-35. 25 The rebels also issued edicts from the camp at Mousehold requisitioning supplies and interceding into legal matters, such as the settlement of estates, on behalf of individual patrons. They claimed to act with the authority of the Crown, and their issuing of these writs suggests another co-opting of the symbols of legitimate authority. Russell, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk, 109-110. 26 Sotherton, Commoyson in Norfolk, 21.
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that “real privacy, especially for illicit activities, was, until well into the seventeenth century, most often represented as readily attainable only outdoors.”27 In withdrawing to
the forest, the rebels emulated the actions of Robin Hood, who haunted the forest and
used it to conceal their criminal activities. In addition to shrouding criminal behavior,
popular culture also depicted forests as a place that concealed sexual intimacy. “It is easy
to find examples of illicit sex,” Crane observes, “taking place outdoors in both literary
and cultural texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, usually presented in
passing without special comment.” These also include bawdry accounts of May Day
festivities by sixteenth-century authors Robert Herrick and Phillip Stubbes, whose work
may have exaggerated the lascivious nature of popular culture but remained rooted in
reality.28 Forests offered concealment and freedom from the obligations imposed by the
moral restraints present among both urban and rural communities, allowing the
subversion of the normal social order, maintained by that disciplinary discourse. Behind
the knotted boughs of Eaton Wood, the participants in Kett's Rebellion exerted the
ultimate control over their own bodies by removing themselves from the social
constraints of their communities.
Concepts of identity viewed through the lens of the body influenced the rebels, but chroniclers of the rebellion also used bodily imagery to attack the rebels' masculinity.
Neville describes the rebels as “beardlesse boys of the Countrie” in an attempt to emasculate the rebels, despite the demographic studies of manorial court rolls by Jane
27 Mary Thomas Crane, "Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England," Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9 (2009): 5. 28 Ibid., 8.
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Whittle that showed the rebellion consisted of a relatively high number of older men.29
While many of the most active participants in the rebellion may have been young men,
Neville's language, placed in the cultural context of sixteenth-century masculinity,
suggests an attempt to denigrate the rebels’ standing as men. Until the mid-seventeenth
century, Reinke-Williams argues that “beards acted as markers of full manhood.”30 This symbol of masculinity implies that Neville's characterization of the rebels as “beardlesse” intended to attack the masculinity of the rebels using bodily imagery. When contextualized within popular concepts of masculinity, Whittle's demographic data suggests concerns among the rebels typical to men in their age group.
Many of these older men participating in the rebellion embraced sedition due partly to the failure of paternalistic feudal systems. They opposed the perceived misrule by the gentry and larger landowners displacing traditional feudal authority derived from
hereditary claims to land and title, a change that challenged their notions of masculinity.
Reflecting political structures that stressed paternalistic relationships between lords and vassals and continuity through lineage, men understood their identities as fathers through similar terms. Like feudal lords, fathers “had to think dynastically, which in turn allowed them to inculcate notions of prudence, self-mastery and responsibility into their sons.”31
Fathers derived their masculine identities from their ability to provide a sustainable future
for their signs, a symbol of both their male responsibility and potency as a provider and
29 Neville, Norfolks Furies, E4; Whittle's work studied a group of 37 rebels that appeared in manorial court rolls and determined that 54 percent of them were between forty and fifty years old. Jane Whittle, "Peasant Politics and Class Consciousness: The Norfolk Rebellions of 1381 and 1549 Compared," Past and Present 195 (January 2007): 26. 30 Reinke-Williams, "Manhood and Masculinity," 686. 31 Ibid., 687;
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patriarch embodying the traits of an ideal lord. The emerging gentry and the decline of traditional social, economic, and political systems threatened the foundations of the rebels' concepts of fatherhoods, an important element to their concept of masculinity.
Wealthy private individuals and land owners assumed the property of hereditary lords, but not their feudal obligations, and local communities resented the transgressions of the gentry. Robert Burnam, a participant in the rebellion and Norwich resident, complained in 1550 about the confiscation of parish goods by the gentlemen and regretted that money he had donated to the church had been unjustly seized.32 The
gentry's transgressions against communally-owned property threatened the ability of
fathers to provide for the future of their sons. This explains why, on 12 July during their
movement from Drayton to Mousehold Heath, the rebels stopped to destroy a dove cote
recently converted from a chapel, purchased by a man named Corbet.33 Echoing the
reasons for Burnam's complaints, Corbet's dove cote presented a particular offense to the
rebels due to the conversion of former church property with deep ties to the local
community, into a home for livestock. Additionally, the gentry's acquisition of dove
cotes, traditionally reserved for the nobility, disrupted traditional economic relationships
between lords and peasants that limited hunting rights to a select few, disrupting the
sustainability of systems in place for hundreds of years. One of the Mousehold articles
demanded that “noman under the degre of a knyght or esquyer kepe a dowe howse,
except it hath byn of an ould anchyent costome.”34 Clearly the rebels had no problem
32 Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126. 33 Russell, Kett's Rebellion, 36. 34 Ibid., 50.
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with dove cotes in general, but the expansion of dove cote ownership beyond “ould anchyent costome” represented an encroachment on the traditional economic structure by permitting the gentry, holding money but not titles, to take on privileges typically limited to the nobility.
The gentry represented a threat to the economic survival of yeoman farmers and smaller landlords, like Kett, by privatizing and enclosing property previously held in common or divided among members of the community. This challenged men's notions of fatherhood and threatened their masculine identities as patriarchs and providers for their heirs. Alexandra Shepard argues that paternity did not always accompany the social roles associated with fatherhood due to both “demographic uncertainties” and an “uneven distribution of patriarchal dividends that accompanied the processes of social polarisation through which English society was remade in the early modern period.”35 Fatherhood and
socioeconomic status closely intertwined and the attacks against long-standing and
traditional economic relationships by enclosure and the expansion of private property
threatened the ability for fathers to provide for their children and ensure dynastic
succession. Striking at one of the primary elements of masculine identity, the role of
father, economic and social change during the sixteenth century threatened the legacies of
many of the participants in the rebellion. Kett and the older men involved in the rebellion
responded with violent fury to protect their legacies and the continuity of their
community's traditions and identity.
35 Alexandra Shepard, "Brokering Fatherhood: Illegitimacy and Paternal Rights and Responsibilities in Early Modern England" in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, eds. Steve Hindle, et. al. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), 41.
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Community played an important role in shaping masculine identity, and festival activities that included the excessive eating and drinking observed during the rebellion offered the rebels an opportunity to reinforce qualities understood to be masculine.
Reinke-Williams notes that “rituals and recreational activities associated with drinking were capable of uniting men by endorsing notions of bravura, strength, fraternity, comradeship, neighborliness and good fellowship.”36 Gathering together in the camps
during the summer of 1549, the rebels asserted their manhood through activities that
reinforced their idealized forms of masculinity. During the course of the rebellion, Kett
and the leaders issued one writ granting “license to all men to provide and bring into the
Camp at Mousehold all manner of cattle and provision of vittels, in what place soever they may find the same.”37 On 10 August, Kett and Thomas Aldrich, a former mayor of
Norwich pressed into the rebels' service, signed their names to a writ commanding a man from Great Yarmouth to “repair home, and bring with you, with as much speed as may
be, a last of beer, to maintain your poor neighbours withal.”38 These writs requisitioning
goods from nearby communities suggest that alcohol-laden revelries, accompanied by
copious amounts of food, played in role in fueling the rebels' aggression and bold
behavior. The participants in the rebellion reinforced their places in a community of men
through excessive consumption in a festive atmosphere.
Gender roles and expectations also played an important role in who the rebels'
excluded from the community, utilizing popular conceptions of masculinity and
36 Reinke-Williams, "Manhood and Masculinity," 688. 37 Russell, Kett's Rebellion, 47. 38 Ibid., 110.
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femininity to define deviant behavior that existed in opposition to idealized gender norms. During the course of the rebellion the mob captured a lawyer hiding in Norwich, who, according to Neville, “men thought of a revenging minde, and one that used to raise up Spirits, with fearefull signes and superstitious wonders.”39 In popular culture, witches
presented serious problems to communities due to the threat their existence posed to
proper conceptions of gender roles, structured around domestic identity construction.
Allison Rowlands argues that “the idea of the male witch as the inverse of the good
household head and all that this role entailed,” provide a counterpoint to female witches
as the “inverse of the good housewife and mother.” Rowlands concludes that “the
implication of both ideas is that unacceptable behaviour on the part of men and women
ran the risk of being diabolized by neighbours made increasingly anxious about perceived
social deviance during times of social tension, economic hardship, or religious change.”40
At a point of peak social tension, some members of the Norwich community used the
rebellion as an opportunity to single out the lawyer using a gendered discourse that
defined men's fitness to participate in the community and political life based upon his
qualities as the head of his household. Any challenge to this hierarchy, perceived or real,
created enough anxiety among the rebels that they carried the men away for judgment
with the rest of the gentlemen prisoners at the Oak of Reformation.41
39 Neville, Norfolks Furies, D4r. 40 Allison Rowlands, "Not the Usual Suspects?," in Witches and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison Rowlands (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), 18. 41 Neville notes that the rebels found the lawyer hiding in the woods "among thornes and bryers, for lack of better provision." Like the rebels who retreated into the Eaton Woods, the lawyer believed that the forest offered more privacy than any building. Equally important, "the bewraying of a certaine woman" drew the rebels to his hiding place. Lending credence to the idea that Neville’s description of the lawyer embodies traits viewed as non-masculine, a women betrays his location after he fails to control her. Neville, Norfolks Furies, D4r.
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The rebels did not accuse the lawyer of being a witch simply because he imitated feminine traits, more frequently associated with witches. Primarily, as Malcolm Gaskill notes, “male witches were wicked because they gave themselves to the Devil and attacked their neighbors.” The accusations of witchcraft did not represent shrewd and cynical political maneuvering against local rivals, but instead expressed a genuine fear of the supernatural. However, Gaskill adds a caveat that “gender was relevant to their public censure less because they aped female values than because they failed to measure up to male ones.”42 Neville describes the lawyer as “a subtill fellow, and a man set to sale for
mony.”43 The rebels' prisoner represented all of the worst traits they attributed to the
gentry: men unrestrained by the traditional bonds of paternal feudal connections who
pursued power through profit. These traits rendered him unfit to participate in a
traditional community of men and exposed him to accusations of witchcraft.
During the course of the rebellion, the participants regularly expressed their
idealized masculine forms and occasionally defined them in terms of negative traits, like
the accused lawyer or the mercenary, stripped and hanged. Theatrical tropes present in
Robin Hood plays emphasized the importance of clothing in expressing masculine
identity through a bodily lens, a perspective that contextualizes the difference in
treatment between Cheavers and Lord Sheffield. The participants in the rebellion
included older men with families and households, and their participation stemmed the
decline of paternalistic feudal bonds that encouraged dynastic planning and a fear that
42 Malcolm Gaskill, "Masculinity and Witchcraft in 17th-Century England," in Witchcraft and Masculinities, 184. 43 Neville, Norfolks Furies, D4r.
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these men would not be able to ensure the future of their lineage. The festive atmosphere permeating the rebellion fostered the traditional bonds of masculinity and reinforced the rebels resolve to resist throughout the summer. Symbolic representations of masculinity found in the May Day festivals illustrate one of the ways the rebels communicated popular political identities through a language of foliage, greenery, and other elements of nature. Throughout the course of the rebellion, the participants expressed themselves through a distinctly gendered language.
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CHAPTER IV
FESTIVALS, HUMOR, AND TRADITIONAL RELIGION AS SUBVERSIVE
DISCOURSE
The people of sixteenth-century England closely incorporated religious festivals and feast days into the construction of their mentalités. Within this worldview, the liturgical calendar shaped the conceptualization of time throughout the year and governed the religious and secular spheres, which dictated dietary restrictions, marriage, and delineated the boundaries of the parish community. As Eamon Duffy observes, “to fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century sensibilities the liturgical year was spread over twelve months.”1 Ronald Hutton's study of local traditions and festivals throughout the
year tempers Duffy's bold conclusion by emphasizing the limited regional importance of each festival, but he effectively demonstrates the variety of festivals and traditions that
marked the passage of time in different communities year-round across England.2 Along with providing a conception of time, festive occasions also offered communities, and the individuals within them, an opportunity to express themselves with a distinct language and symbolism. For many illiterate revelers, festivals offered a more accessible mode of expression through mystery plays, songs, and processions. Educated individuals also
1 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 46- 47. 2 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400 - 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 46.
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participated in these events, and the cultural lingua franca of festivals allowed both literate and non-literate individuals within the community to share a common system of behavioral norms and understanding. As Peter Burke notes, elites in society participated in popular festivals and the non-literate found a variety of ways to engage with the written word.3 However, elite participants, often the targets of symbolic ridicule in
popular culture, perhaps too often overlooked the comedic elements of folk humor
expressed during raucous celebrations. Mikhail Bahktin's work demonstrates how feast
days demarcated periods of time throughout the entire year where “the world was
permitted to emerge from the official routine but exclusively under the camouflage of
laughter.”4 Beneath the celebratory atmosphere, festivals provided sixteenth-century
Europeans with a discursive tool, often satirical or humorous in nature, to critique
society. During the summer of 1549, the people of East Anglia utilized this form of
communication to express their discontent with social change, which accompanied
economic changes embodied by enclosure and a decline in commonly-held property.
Economic changes, such as the expansion of enclosure and private property, lay at
the core of the social upheaval in sixteenth-century England, prior to the violence of
1549. Thomas More's fictional traveler in Utopia (1516), Raphael Hythlodaeus, criticized
enclosure, “by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may
be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.” More, speaking
3 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1978), 24- 26. This statement is not meant to imply a perfectly understood shared system of meaning between literate and non-literate member of society. Peter Burke rightly criticizes Robert Redfield's division of culture into two discrete forms, the "great tradition," reserved for literate, classically-educated members of society, and the "little tradition," which includes everyone else, for being both "too narrow" and "too wide." 4 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 90.
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through Hythlodaeus, complained that previously independent yeomen were “forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go,” and, reduced to poverty, he concludes that “what is left for them to do but either to steal, and so to be hanged (God knows how justly!), or to go about and beg?”5 The problems caused by enclosure accelerated in the decades following the publication of Utopia. A proclamation issued by Edward VI in
1548 publically affirmed the young king's displeasure with large landowners enclosing
property for grazing that previously supported yeoman and tenet farmers. Edward,
expressing his “pitifull and tendre zeale to his moste lovyng subjectes,” raised the same
issue that More drew attention to three decades prior : the “poore, whiche is mynded to
labor and travaill for their livyng, and not to live an Idle and loyterng life,” found
themselves increasingly dispossessed with the growth of enclosure, threatening the
security of England. The Crown also recognized the threat posed by a growing number of
idle poor, believing that providing access to arable land for the laboring poor was “of a
most necessarie regarde, to the suertie and defence of his realme, which muste bee
defended against the enemie, with force of menne, and the multitude of true Subjectes,
not with flockes of Shepe, and droves of Beastes.”6 The royal proclamation did little to
defuse the tension between the wealthy gentry and the large number of people impacted
by the changes to the traditional organization of the means of production. The purchase
of property, formerly held by monastic estates, by wealthy individuals led the commons
to perceive socio-economic change as something that, as Andy Wood notes, benefited “a
vague class of 'rich oppressors' while simultaneously depriving 'the commons' of cultural
5 Thomas More, Utopia (1901; Project Gutenberg, 2005), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2130/2130-h/2130-h.htm. 6 Edward VI, A Proclamacion . . . against enclosures, 1548. Early English Books Online.
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identity, spiritual salvation and material sucour.”7 Reluctant to accept the rapid
abandonment of feudal hierarchies, which emerged over a long period of social evolution and shaped the discourse of political legitimacy, many people aggressively asserted their preference for the paternalistic, pre-existing order.
During the course of Kett's Rebellion, the rioters reaffirmed their affinity for traditional feudal political structures by playing at roles typically reserved for vassals acting in the king's name. One of the writs produced by Robert Kett, a leader of the rebellion, demanded that “all men by the authoritie hereof, that as they wish well unto the
King, and the afflicted Commonwealth, they be obedient to us his Delegates.”8 Kett's writ
commanding “all men” to yield to his authority, claimed in the name of the Crown,
expressed a genuine belief in the rightness of his cause, but it also contains an element of
satire, a key component of the unofficial, popular elements of religious festivals. Popular
concepts of royal authority linked the interests of the king and the people, but, as Maya
Mathur argues, “if the ruler failed to remedy his people's grievances or was misled by
corrupt advisors,” the duty fell to the commons to “remedy their problems independent of
his authority.”9 Kett and the individuals who followed him did not necessarily desire a
radical restructuring of society, and their riotous behavior during the summer of 1549 did
not offer a direct challenge to the tradition of royal authority. When understood in the
proper cultural context, however, Kett's statement exemplifies the ambivalent nature of
7 Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion, and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 60. 8 Alexander Neville, Norfolkes Furies, trans. Richard Woods (London: William Stansby, 1615), C2r. 9 Maya Mathur, "Rebellion from Below: Commonwealth and Community in The Life and Death of Jack Straw," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 2 (May 2015): 346.
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popular culture, which tended to offer both genuine praise and mockery in equal measure.
Within the discourse of popular religious festivals, “there is no pure abstract negation,” as
Bahktin notes, instead “it tends to embrace both poles of becoming in their contradiction and unity.”10 Throughout the course of the rebellion, Kett and his followers expressed
themselves through the language of popular unofficial religious festivals, an integral
component to the worldview of sixteenth-century English people, using it to criticize
elements of society normally above reproach.11
On the eve of the rebellion's outbreak, July 7, the people of Wymondham gathered
together to celebrate a festival commemorating the translation of relics sacred to the cult
of Thomas Beckett to Canterbury. A controversial figure during the time of the Henrecian
Reformation, Henry VIII undertook an iconoclastic campaign against images of Beckett's
cult starting in 1535 after high-profile opponents to Henry's religious reforms invoked the
memory of St. Beckett to bolster their arguments against the encroachment of the Crown
into ecclesiastical governance.12 Kett's family, deeply connected to the local
Wymondham community, personally supported and organized a variety of religious plays and activities, including celebrations of Beckett. The mystery plays and feasts commemorating the saint, controversial in light of the increasing control over the church that Henry VIII demanded, did little to allay the anxieties of a crowd already agitated by
10 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 203. 11 The punishment of Robert Burnam, a city watchman who denounced the Norfolk gentry shortly after Kett's Rebellion as traitors and thieves, provides an example of the fate of those who freely criticized the individuals at the top of the social hierarchy outside of the discursive protection of popular culture and festivals. A judge sentenced Burnam to have his ears cut off at the pillory in 1550 as punishment for his seditious statements. Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126. 12 Robert Scully, "The Unmaking of a Saint:Thomas Becket and the English Reformation," The Catholic Historical Review 86, no. 4 (2000): 587.
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unpopular long-term religious and economic changes. Instead, the subversive nature of
Beckett perhaps encouraged some of the participants in the festival to challenge the authority of the local gentry, whose appropriation of communally-owned property and lack of hereditary title challenged boundaries firmly established under feudal society.
Simmering resentment against large landowners and enclosure, combined with the raucous atmosphere that accompanied a typical feast day, inspired some of the community to tear down their neighbor's enclosures on July 8, the day after the end of the
Beckett festival. Many of the contemporary chroniclers of the events that played out over the summer of 1549 blamed a small group of nefarious conspirators for using Beckett's festival as an opportunity to put their plots into action, rather than the random actions of a mob. Alexander Neville described an existential threat to England from “these wretched conspirators,” who “hereunto onely bent their wits, to powre foorth the venome of their envie against their Countrie, watching so fit an opportunitie of time and place.”13 The conspirators came to Wymondham, according to another account, “hoping to find an opportunity to discover their banefull designs to advantage. Therefore at first they had private meetings and cabals, but at length made an open insurrection.”14 The primary
agitators at Wymondham may have been from the nearby community of Attleborough, where a mob tore down the enclosures of John Green, the Lord of Wilby Manor on June
20. On July 7, a mob of festival-goers, perhaps including members of the group that destroyed the enclosures in Attleborough, formed in Wymondham to cast down the
13 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, B3r. 14 Anonymous account of Kett's Rebellion, Col 9/117, The Coleman Manuscript Collection, Norfolk Record Office, 2 (hereafter cited as Coleman MSS).
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hedges of Hobartson of Morley, two miles away from Wymondham, before returning to continue the festivities.15 This group, not directly connected to the outbreak of Kett's
Rebellion in any of the primary documents, illustrates the volatile nature of the situation
in East Anglia in the summer of 1549.
Neville's conspiracy theory provided a compelling narrative, but, when placed in its
proper historical and cultural context, it seems more likely to be a series of spontaneous
but related events rather than a pre-arranged uprising. The atmosphere surrounding the
Beckett festival exemplifies the “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from
the established order” that Bakhtin observed in unofficial, popular feasts and
celebrations.16 Responding to decades of social and economic changes, having a largely
negative impact on local communities, the people of Wymondham turned to feasts and
festive culture as a way to solidify their communal bonds in turbulent times by rejecting
the established order that returned following each festive occasion. Similarly, the festive
nature surrounding the rebellion also attracted some of Norwich's citizens, who looked to leave the city and join in commensality with Kett's band.
Following the destruction of enclosures outside Norwich, “a great number of scoundrels, who had heard something of this cursed conspiracy, sneak'd out of the City,” according to an anonymous chronicler of the rebellion, “and join'd themselves with Kett's men.” Together, the rural residents of Wymondham and the urban inhabitants of Norwich
15 Frederic William Russell, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk: Being a History of the Great Civil Commotion that Occured at the Time of the Reformation, in the Reign of Edward VI (London: Longmans, 1859), 24-25. 16 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 10.
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celebrated their bonds using traditional festive forms. The tumultuous activity outside the city walls and the flow of individuals from the city attracted the attention of the mayor,
Thomas Codd, who traveled to their makeshift camp near Eaton Wood, where he found the rebels “all wickedly occupied, giving themselves to ryot and excesse.”17 Codd attempted, “with money and fair words, to win them from the purpose and induce them to
return peaceably home; but they turned a deaf ear to all his offers.”18 No doubt frustrated
with his failure to convince Kett's followers to disband peacefully, Codd left the camp
and returned to the city.
Over the summer of 1549, as the constituency of the rebels grew to include
individuals from other parts of East Anglia, and the festive atmosphere permeated the
rebel encampments. In total, representatives from twenty-six different hundreds from
areas across Norfolk and Suffolk signed the Mousehold Articles, a diverse list of
demands presented by the rebels to representatives of the Crown.19 In order to feed such a
large demand for food and drink, Kett and his men commandeered supplies from the
countryside in large numbers. Sotherton claims that Kett's impromptu commissioners
seized 3,000 heads of cattle, 20,000 sheep, and took large numbers of game animals,
including swans, geese, and other birds, from local parks.20 The copious volume of food
and drink continued to flow throughout the summer, and after taking control of Norwich
in early August, Kett's followers reached out to the nearby community of Yarmouth for
17 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, B4v. 18 Russell, Kett's Rebellion, 32. 19 "Appendix O: Kett’s Governous," in Kett's Rebellion: 203-204. 20 Nicholas Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk:1549, ed. Susan Yaxley (Stibbard, Norfolk:The Larks Press, 1987), 12.
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more supplies. On August 5, Kett and Thomas Aldrich, “commissioners of the King's camp at Mousehold,” appointed “out of our camp aforesaid, one hundred of men to return from us to Yarmouth, for the maintenance of the King's town there against our enemies.”
In the same commission, Russell notes that Kett and Aldrich also appointed several individuals to the role of collecting “more sufficient and necessary victualling of our said hundred men.” Days later, on August 8, Kett issued another commission ordering one resident of Yarmouth, John, to “repair home, and bring with you, with as much speed as may be, a last of beer, to maintain your poor neighbors withal.”21
Throughout the course of the uprising, Kett and the other heads of the rebellion
constantly struggled to maintain the tremendous amount of supplies necessary for the
festive atmosphere. Subjected to the disruptive impact of enclosure and struggling to
manage the declining purchasing power that accompanied stagnating household incomes,
the people of Norfolk and Suffolk found themselves pulled into the feast-like atmosphere
at the rebel encampments. “The popular images of food and drink,” active and
triumphant, as Bakhtin notes, “conclude the process of labor and struggle of the social
man against the world. They express the people as a whole.”22 The festive environment
and abundance of food found at Kett's encampments offered a way for the rebels to
challenge threats against popular, traditional culture by enjoying communal meals, which
directly confronted the emerging notion of private property and excessive individualism.
Originating spontaneously from an unofficial celebration of Thomas Beckett, the subversive nature of popular festivals provided a natural avenue for the community of
21 Russell, Kett's Rebellion, 107-110. 22 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 302.
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Wymondham to express its grievances and assert its identity as a unified body. Contrary to the claim that conspirators traveled to Wymondham seeking an opportunity to execute their “banefull designs,” most of the individuals involved in casting down the enclosures of Hobartson were expressing their collective anger over transgressions committed against them. The anti-enclosure mob viewed the perpetrators of these transgressions differently based on their connection to the local community rather than the nature of their crimes, as evidenced by the differences in the mob's reactions to Robert Kett and
John Flowerdew.
Rather than simply destroying Kett's enclosures, the mob “earnestly beg[ged] of him, that he wou'd tear him all the Hedges and resign whatever land he had inclosed, to the publick use.”23 The rioters recognized Kett, a prosperous yeoman farmer and tanner
descended from a family with deep connections to Wymondham, as a member of their
community, albeit one who had violated traditional notions of ownership by restricting
access to property previously held in common. Robert Kett and his brother, William,
belonged to a local society, “the wache and play of Wymondham,” and were heavily
involved in the production of mystery plays associated with religious festivals. In 1538,
the two brothers organized a mystery play for the group, paying performers and purchasing supplies that included six pence to “mother Kett bakyng ii buschells of whete
& bruying a combe of malt.”24
23Anonymous Account, Coleman MSS, 2. 24 David Galloway, John Wasson, and Janet Cowen, eds., Records of Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk 1330-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 128-129.
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When the mob arrived at Kett's property and demanded the destruction of his enclosures, they sought public contrition for his transgression against traditional cultural and social norms vis-à-vis enclosure. Public shaming as a method to correct behavior that challenged the community's standards and customs remained popular well after the
Reformation. The charivari, a form of public shaming utilizing imprompteou instruments, improvised or real weaponry and armor, animal parts, mock proclamations, and lampooning verses, provided one way for communities in early modern England to internally regulate their behavior.25 These popular forms of protest often took on political
elements, as Martin Ingram notes. “Certain enclosure riots,” Ingram argues, “do seem to
have involved elements of charivari. The most notable examples occurred during the
revolts against disafforestation and enclosure in the west of England in 1626 - 32.”26 The mob sought to publically shame Kett and remind him that he had violated the community's norms, demanding a correction in his behavior to maintain his status.
Neville described how Kett acquiesced to the judgment of the community and agreed to cast down his own enclosures before promising “moreover to revenge the hurts done unto the Weale publike, and common Pasture by the importunate Lords thereof.”27 In this
moment, Kett publically reaffirmed his bonds with the community, expressed contrition,
and, with his act of contrition accepted, assumed his place once more as a leader in the community. Popular festivals often offered the community the opportunity to criticize and correct the behavior of its individual constituents when they strayed from established
25Martin Ingram, "Ridings, Rough Music and the 'Reform of Popular Culture' in Early Modern England," Past and Present 105 (November, 1984): 86. 26 Ibid., 91. 27 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, B3r.
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norms. Intended to shame, riotous mobs in seventeenth-century France adopted elements of the charivari when they forced tax collectors from their towns.28 Importantly, the mob
confronted Kett directly rather than simply tearing down his enclosures. Their actions
signaled their intent to challenge the behavior of a member of the community, whose
adoption of attitudes favoring private property proved more problematic than the
presence of the enclosures themselves.
Finding Kett amenable to their corrective measures, the crowd eagerly agreed to his
resolution to tear down the offending enclosures and lead them. From his own property
just outside Wymondham, Kett guided the mob to the property of John Flowerdew,
where they violently destroyed enclosures while Flowerdew “reproved Kett very
harshly,” according to one account, “calling him villain, the Destroyer of his Country,
and the leader of vagabonds.”29 None of the sources documenting this stage of the
rebellion mentioned the mob presenting Flowerdew with a similar offer to the one
extended to Kett. Their actions were in large part due to several developments that cast
Flowerdew, unlike Kett, as an outsider to the community.
One of the factors influencing Flowerdew's status with respect to the Wymondham
rebels resulted from simple geography. Hethersett lies over ten kilometers from
Wymondham, making the residents of that community “false foreigners,” a term used by
Robert Muchembled to describe the “distant but acceptable allies against an otherwise
28 Burke, Popular Culture, 199. 29 Anonymous Account, Coleman MSS, 2.
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hostile and alien world” on the periphery of rural social networks.30 Muchembled,
drawing upon a regressive analytic model credited to Marc Bloch, examined a mid-
twentieth-century village and its relationships with neighboring communities. He
concluded that rural villages formed insular communities, marrying and maintaining
strong local ties. Villages within ten to twenty kilometers were not included in those ties and were not considered part of the community, but they were not entirely alien. To an extent, the festive atmosphere and frequent feasts previously mentioned helped break down these natural barriers, evident in the treatment of Flowerdew, over the course of the summer. Popular religious festivals reinforced community identity, particularly along parish lines. Many celebrations featured games that pitted parishes against each other, while the Rogation procession “beat the bounds” as a way to delineate communal space.
Violence between rival parishes occasionally occurred during Rogation processions, when opposing parishes believed their neighbors were attempting to drive demons over the boundaries into their own community. The popularity of Rogation processions testifies to the important role of the festival in renewing and asserting communal identity.31 The motivations and underlying structure behind the rioters' behavior changes
when placed into a geographic context, despite their actions appearing to be the same
superficially. In both cases they attacked enclosures, which they perceived as the physical
manifestation, and primary cause, of the rapid social and economic changes shaping
30 Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400-1750 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 45-46. 31 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 136-139; Ronald Hutton, "Rogationtide and Pentecost," in The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 277- 287; and David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: A National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 23-24.
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sixteenth-century England. However, the destruction of the enclosures served two different purposes, healing a rift within the community and asserting parish boundaries.
In destroying Kett's enclosures, they confronted a member of their own community using elements of popular culture, such as the charivari, to embarass and shame him. When the rebels cast down Flowerdew's enclosures, they challenged an outsider, drawing upon popular festive forms, particularly Rogation, intended to assert their solidarity and identity.
Flowerdew's offenses against the people of Wymondham extended far beyond his construction of enclosures and his status as a wealth landowner. According to Frederic
William Russell, in 1540 “the parishioners and inhabitants of Wymondham, desirous of saving their noble church from destruction, petitioned the king to have certain parts of the church,” including bells, lead, and other objects purchased for the monastery by the parish, “granted to them.”32 Despite this, Serjeant Flowerdew, John's father, seized the
lead used to cast the churches bells and nearly destroyed the choir in his efforts to strip
the monastery's wealth. Incensed, the people of Wymondham, according to Russell,
“never forgave Flowerdew, but endeavoured to do him and his family all the prejudice
imaginable ever after.”33 When the mob from Wymondham arrived at the Flowerdew
property and destroyed his enclosures, they also destroyed a physical representation of a
perceived external threat to their community. This symbolic violence performed the same
role as the burning of an effigy during carnival.
32 Russell, Kett's Rebellion, 26-27. 33 Ibid.
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When placed within the proper geographic, historical, and cultural context, the destruction of the enclosures and the rebels' reactions to Kett and Flowerdew illustrate the ambivalent nature of popular festival culture. It offered a means to reconcile divisions within the community, while also providing a discursive tool to criticize, chastise, and confront threats using a rhetoric of violence and humor, often employing both. One of the rebels gathered at the large camp on Mousehold Heath, channeling the violent nature of popular humor, joked that “as many as would come to the campe tomorrow, should buy a
Cods head for a penny” while they held the mayor of Norwich, Thomas Codd, hostage.34
Most of the violence remained limited to the rhetorical realm, but on a few occasions the
festive violence manifested in physical form. After the rebels had taken control of
Norwich, they led one man, Mr. Wharton, from the Oak of Reformation, the site of Kett's
court and the source of the rebels' judgement, back to the city in chains. Along the road,
“garded with a lane of men on both sydes,” the rebels, according to Sotherton's account,
“pricked him with theyr spearis and other weapons on purpose to kill him had they not
had greate helpe to withstand theer malice and creweltye.”35 While Sotherton asserted
that the rebels intended to kill the man, their actions resembled the elements of festival
culture intended to publically shame the victims, not to actually kill Wharton.
Sixteenth-century popular literature reflects the duality of violence in festive
culture, employed as a rhetorical device intended to playfully mock or humiliate and,
occasionally, as a justification to inflict a painful punishment on a particularly offensive
34 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, F1v. 35 Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 13.
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individual. A parallel to Mr. Wharton's treatment after his judgment at the Oak, abused by a gauntlet of spear-wielding men on a humiliating procession back to Norwich, appears in Rabelais's Fourth Book of Pantagruel (1552), when a Chicanous visited the court of the Seigneur de Basché. Basché, anticipating the Chicanous's arrival, invited the man into his court under the pretense of attending a wedding ceremony. After the
Chicanous delivered his writ and received a gold coin from Basché, he participated in a festive ritual involving mock violence between the guests. Until this point, the guests exchanged light, playful blows with one another, “but when it came to the turn of chicanous they regaled him so thoroughly with great biffs from their gauntlets that he stood there all battered and bruised, with one eye poached in black butter, eight fractured ribs, his breast-plate stroven in, his shoulder-blades in four quarters and his lower jaw in three pieces. And all done with a laugh.”36 For Rabelais, the violence against the
Chicanous served as both physical retribution to the con-artist and a source of comical
humiliation that inspired festive laughter in the crowd. The carnivalesque nature of the
fictional wedding in Rabelais, as Bahktin notes, “grants the right of a certain freedom and
familiarity, the right to break the usual norms of social relations.” Beneath the festive
environment, however, lay “a scene of dual meaning in which the slanderer receives real
blows dealt with 'armed fists.'“37 The men roughly assailing Wharton with their spears
most likely derived similar amusement from the festive violence they meted out to an
36 Rabelais describes the Chicanous in this context as an individual who delivered legal writs to wealthy individuals and attempted to incite a violent response from the target. After receiving a beating, the Chicanous demanded monetary compensation. Rabelais, "How Pantagruel passed Procuration; and of the strange way of life amongst the Chicanous," in Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 697-701. 37 Bahktin, Rabelais, 200-201.
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individual whose socio-economic status ordinarily provided protection from humiliating violence, both rhetorical and physical.
During popular religious celebrations, such as Carnival, the participants temporarily dissolved social norms and hierarchies and instituted an inversion of traditional order, which governed the revelers until the end of the festival.38 Kett and the rebels issued writs and rendered judgment upon their captives from the Oak of Reformation, the name they gave the large oak tree under which they constructed makeshift seating and scaffolding for their mock court. Sotherton recounts how the rebels took their captives “to the Tree of
Reformacion to bee seene of the people to demande what they would doe with them: where some cryde 'Hang him!' and some 'Kill him!'.”39 At the Oak, leaders in the local
community, including Thomas Codd and Thomas Aldrich, addressed the rebels, but the responses from the crowd to these elite members of society indicates a breakdown of the traditional social hierarchy. When the theologian Matthew Parker, later appointed
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559, preached a three part sermon to the crowd admonishing the rebels' actions, urging them to eschew violence, and to desist from their cause, they responded with violent rhetoric.40 According to Neville, who served as
Parker's secretary and drew upon him as a source for his narrative, some of the rebels at
the Oak “cried out fiercely, 'It were good that hee which hath spoken so well, and hath
powdred his Sermon with such eloquent words and sentences, were compelled to come
38 Burke questions whether "ordinary people saw the topsy-turvy world as a bad thing," and notes the same elements of subversive language used by the participants of Kett's Rebellion. Burke, Popular Culture, 189-90. 39 Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 12. 40 Russell, Kett's Rebellion, 63-64.
74
downe, being shot through with pikes and arrowes.”41 Despite the threatening language
used by the rebels at the Oak, they rarely followed through on their threats with actual
violence. Only two individuals, the aforesaid Mr. Wharton and a Norwich lawyer,
accused of raising spirits and practicing witchcraft before escaping from his captors, met
with any serious harm.42 During the course of the rebellion, Kett's followers only
executed a single captive, the Italian mercenary captured in a skirmish. Perceived as a
gentlemen due in part to his dress, he was “taken of the Rebells gorgeously apparrelled
and carryed up to the Campe, the seyd Rebellis not content to hold him prysoner but for
his apparell sake was hanged over the walls.”43 The Italian mercenary, as a member of
the gentry from a distant land, was too far removed from the local community of Norwich and East Anglia to receive the same mercy as the local gentry. Similarly, John Flowerdew suffered humiliation and the loss of property as a result of the rebels' violence but he did not receive the violent treatment reserved for Cheavers. Contrasting the treatment of the rebels' prisoners demonstrates the limits of popular culture to correct and criticize unacceptable behavior within the community and delineates geographical boundaries and the boundaries between mockery and truly violent intent.
Illustrating the ambivalent nature of popular culture and festive discourse, the rebels present at the Oak of Reformation believed that adopting the forms and symbols of legitimate authority also legitimated their own actions. Based upon the fastidious records of expenses kept by communities supporting the encampments and the use of writs and
41 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, C4v. 42 Russell, Kett's Rebellion, 72. 43 Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 23.
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legal frameworks to execute their judgments, the rebels' believed in the legitimacy of their actions and structured the nature of their protest around this notion.44 However, the
incongruence between the rhetoric of the audience at the Oak and their actions suggests
that they did not render their verdicts with total sincerity. At the Oak, the audience at
Kett's court subjected their captives to the judgment of the community, as Sotherton
describes, “them they had noe complaints of they cryd 'A good man, a good man!' the other that were complained of they cryied 'Hang him, hang him!' wythout furder judgement.”45 The verdicts rendered at these mock trials served a dual purpose: they praised and shamed individuals and offered a criticism of the social order and the gentry, whose growth in wealth and influence disproportionate to the rest of society fostered resentment. For the crowd gathered at the mock court under the Oak of Reformation, proceeded over by Kett, the trials of the gentry represented a festive, comedic release of anxiety, felt by a large number of people in sixteenth-century England. However, these trials also provided an opportunity for the rebels to express serious grievances with the perceived misrule of the gentry, an element of popular festivals found in other regions of
Europe.46 French clerics defended the Feast of Fools, a festival involving the election of a
mock bishop, parodying of religious ceremonies, and a temporary exchange of positions
in the social hierarchy, as a necessary release to deescalate social tensions in a fashion
similar to the release of air from fermenting wine. Occasionally, “the wine barrel
44 Wood, The 1549 Rebellions, 156-57.
45 Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 21. 46 Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400-1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 56-58.
76
sometimes blew its top,” as Burke notes. Rioters expressed their grievances “in ritualised forms, but the ritual was not always sufficient to contain the protest.”47
Ritual provided a familiar structure for the rebels following Kett. In the face of the
theological and ecclesiastical changes accompanying the Henrecian Reformation, they
turned to traditional expressions of popular religion as a form of protest. The persistence
of pre-Reformation practices implicitly challenged royal authority, and demonstrates an assertion of popular religion in the face of heavy-handed attempts to assert the Crown's prerogative over theology. While attempting to resolve religious uprisings in 1536, most notably the Pilgrimage of Grace led by Robert Aske in Yorkshire, Henry VIII issued the
Ten Articles, a series of concessions to the advocates of traditional religion that preserved many popular traditions in more limited forms. The articles included the continued use of religious images as educational tools to instruct the laity, the honoring of Saints as
“Christian people in earth, but not with that confidence and honour which are only due
unto God,” and the continued practice of rites and ceremonies “not to be contemned and
cast away, but to be used and continued, as things good and laudable.”48 Henry VIII
understood that religious discontent and an affinity for traditional religion served as the
primary motivation for the Pilgrimage of Grace.49 Despite adopting a conciliatory attitude
in the articles, Henry's recognition of the people's religious affinity did not extend to
mercy for Aske and the other leaders of the rebellion, whom the king ordered to be
executed in January 1537. Traditional popular religion sincerely expressed faith, but it
47 Burke, Popular Culture, 201-203. 48 Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, F. L. Cross, ed., Third Edition, E. A. Livingstone, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1587-1588. 49 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 400.
77
also offered a way to implicitly criticize and challenge the highest figures of authority within the political and ecclesiastical spheres when taken up in defiance of official prohibitions.
On July 12, just days after the festival commemorating Beckett, Kett's followers marched to Mousehold Heath and encamped at St. Leonard's Hill on July 12. On the eve of the Henrecian Reformation a priory and church dedicated to St. Leonard, which housed an image of Henry VI believed to possess the extraordinary power to cure a wide array of ailments, had occupied the site for nearly two centuries. In 1536, Henry granted the property to Thomas Duke of Norfolk, whose son, Henry Earl of Surrey, constructed an opulent manor home on the spot where the church and priory once stood. Henry occupied the home, known locally as Surrey House, until his execution on January 19,
1547, after which the property returned to control of the Crown. The home remained abandoned until 1562.50 Abandoned for over two years, when the rebels “entred that
goodly house,” Neville notes, they defaced Surrey House with “the markes of their
villanies.”51 While no description details the destruction caused to the home, the damage,
intentional and unintentional, left in the aftermath of the rebellion exemplifies the
contempt they held for the building and its former occupant. Doing so allowed the rebels
to temporarily reclaim a sacred location and protest an encroachment by the gentry
against popular religious traditions that Surrey House represented.
50 William Dugdale, "Appendix F: Priory of St. Leonard at Norwich: a Call to the Cathedral," in Kett's Rebellion, 178-179. 51 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, C1v.
78
In addition to festivals and pilgrimage, prophecy also influenced the movements and decisions of the rebels. On August 6, facing subjugation and defeat at the hands of the soldiers under the command of John Dudley, the earl of Warwick, the rebels placed their lives into the hands of prophecy and withdrew from Mousehold Heath and the area surrounding Surrey House to nearby Dussindale. Sotherton recalls that “instead of putting theyr trust in God,” the rebels “trustid uppon faynid prochecies which were phantastically devisid, which prophecys they had often cawsid before to bee openly proclaimid in the markit & other placis as matters of greate tryall as they thought to maintaine them, emongs which was one that spake of such assemblys and that in Dussens Dale there should the perish both greate & small.”52 Neville recalls the exact wording of the
prophecy:
The Country gnooffes Hob, Dick, and Hick With clubbes, and cloused shoone, Shall fill up Dussyn dale With slautered bodies soone.53
Invigorated by the belief in the inevitability of their victory, the rebels fortified their
position at Dussindale and prepared to make their final stand.54 However, before they set
forth the men encamped at Mousehold Heath ignited their provisions and temporary
shelters, creating a bonfire that “seemed to bring night almost upon the whole skeyes, and
52 Sotherton, The Commoyson in Norfolk, 42. 53 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, Kv. 54 Russell, Kett's Rebellion, 142.
79
covered the Plaines with thick darknesse” from the smoke.55 Bonfires played an
important role in popular religious festivals, particularly in the celebration of St. John's
Eve, which occurred later in the year during the summer months in England.56 Fire
festivals, an ancient tradition in England that predated the widespread adoption of
Christianity, the burning of the supplies at Mousehold Heath signified what David Cressy
terms an expression of “honour and approbation” celebrating the community spirit
engendered by the rebellion and the festivities accompanying it during the summer of
1549.57
Ironically, the rebels fulfilled Neville's rendition of the prophecy on September 1
when the final battle took place. According to his account, the cavalry led by the earl of
Warwick killed thirty-five hundred men, a number most likely inflated.58 Following the confrontation, “slautered bodies” filled Dussindale. Despite the decisive defeat, faith in the power of prophecy did not stem simply from desperation — popular culture provided
the rebels a reason to believe in the power of prophecy. When Henry VII, Edward VI's
grandfather, seized the throne, he marched his army under the banner of a red dragon, co-
opting the symbolism of the prophecy of Merlin to claim political legitimacy following
his military victory over Richard III at Bosworth in 1485. This prophecy also provided a
powerful motivator for other individuals in sixteenth-century England. In the 1580s,
Welsh monks drew upon the prophecy as the basis for a historical argument to assert their
distinct national identity in the face of English dominance at the English College in
55 Ibid. 56 Burke, Popular Culture, 283-285. 57 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 82-84; Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, 394. 58 Neville, Norfolk's Furies, K2v.
80
Rome.59 Henry VII's utilization of the prophecy of Merlin and the actions of the Welsh
monks elucidate how thoroughly the belief in the power of prophecy permeated British society.
Prophecy, festivals, and traditions rooted in popular religion provided the discursive structures for participants in riot and rebellion in Early Modern England to express their discontent and assert their own identities in the face of rapid social and economic changes. While the enclosure of the commons provoked violent outbursts throughout the sixteenth century, the primary root of these uprisings stemmed from the ascent of the gentry, which disrupted the long-standing feudal hierarchy. Celebrations of traditional religion, such as the veneration of Thomas Beckett, transformed into subversive acts following the Henrecian Reformation, and, in the case of Kett's Rebellion, prompted the outbreak of a rebellion that reflected its origins in popular culture. Feasts and festival traditions provided a common bond for communities spread across wide distances and provided the means for Kett's uprising to attract and integrate many individuals from both the countryside and the city into a cohesive body. Utilizing the elements of mockery and symbolic violence present in popular festivals, the rebels criticized the gentry, whom they perceived as violators of traditional social norms and standards. A powerful belief in prophecy and pilgrimage influenced the rebels' response to Warwick's forces and their movement during the rebellion. Throughout the summer of 1549, Kett and the men
following him resisted heavy-handed religious, social, and economic changes through a
59 Jason Nice, "Being 'British' In Rome: The Welsh at the English College," The Catholic Historical Review 92, no. 1 (January 2006): 2-7
81
complex, often ambivalent, symbolic system of shared meaning derived from popular culture and religion.
82
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
The final confrontation on 28 August between the rebel army, encamped at Dussindale, and the forces commanded by the Earl of Warwick ended poorly for Kett and his followers.
Bolstered by prophecy, the desperate men who remained with Kett made a final stand that inflicted heavy losses on Warwick's troops, particularly the mercenaries in his service, but a charge by the earl's cavalry broke the rebel lines. Following their defeat, Kett himself found himself captured by Warwick's men on the day after he fled the battlefield.1 After being taken to
London for trial, the Crown indicted Kett for issuing “traitorous proclamations,” conspiring “by
war and in warlike manner to destroy the people of our said Lord the King.” At the same time the indictment praised the Earl of Warwick, who “honourably subdued and conquered” the rebel
forces.2 Originally sentenced to death by drawing and quartering, the Crown changed Kett's
sentence on 7 December, ordering him hanged in chains from the walls of Norwich “as a
murderer a traitor against the King.”3 In death, Kett's body served as a powerful image of the
price of rebellion and resistance to religious and socio-economic change and provided the local
gentry of Norwich to demonstrate their dominance and authority, challenged by the rebels.
1 Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 68‐69. 2 Frederic William Russell, "Appendix X," in 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), 220‐223. 3 Frederic William Russell, "Appendix AA," in Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk, 230.
83
Kett's final end as a symbol of authority and the violent power of the gentry illustrates the symbolism and cultural context present throughout the rebellion, both in the rebels' challenges to authority and the responses their actions provoked from the ruling class. Anthony Fletcher and
Diarmaid MacCulloch blame the Marquis of Northampton for the violent direction of the rebellion, arguing that “he had succeeded in turning a vast popular demonstration into a full- scale rebellion, when everywhere else the commotions had been defused.”4 Fletcher and
MacCulloch contrast the response in Norfolk to that in Suffolk, where Sir Anthony Wingfield
successfully convinced a concurrent group of rebels that the Crown would pardon them if they
dispersed.5 Northampton's initial violent response to the rebellion, ordering Italian mercenaries to
engage in skirmishes with the rebel encampment, may have resulted from misunderstanding the
motives and meanings of the rebels' actions and provoked them to a more extreme response.
However, socioeconomic factors influenced the gentry's response to the rebellion just as much as
it shaped the rebels' actions. “In any exploiting mode of production,” Jim Holstun notes, “the
systematic extraction of surplus ultimately depends on potential or actual violence,” a violence
that “has consequences for the killers as well as the killed.” Requiring a process of otherizing to
distance themselves from the violence necessary to maintain their control over the modes of
production, “Tudor gentlemen pseudospeciate rebellious peasants as the beast with many heads,
or distance themselves from conspecific corpses with hired hangmen and a vast repertoire of hemp-and-gallows humour, or employ foreign mercenaries.”6
4 Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, eds., Tudor Rebellions, 4th ed. (London: Longman, 1997), 69. 5 Ibid., 68. 6 Jim Holstun, “Utopia Pre-Empted: Kett’s Rebellion, Commoning, and the Hysterical Sublime,” Historical Materialism 16 no. 3 (September 2008): 23.
84
In Northampton's worldview, Kett's Rebellion represented a real threat to the marquis's authority and the authority of his class, requiring a violent response from his mercenary forces.
They interpreted the words and actions of the rebels through their own cultural lens, heavily influenced by the violence necessary to maintain their authority. Masculine imagery and male identity reflect the fetishization and normalization of violence and the celebration of martial culture among the gentry in sixteenth-century England that Holstun observed. Dissenting using discursive elements from popular religion and entertainment, the rebels' expressed themselves through forms and tropes that occasionally took a satirical, humorous, or exaggerated form. Kett and the rebels did not anticipate the intensity of the response from the gentry, who viewed the mockery and subversive actions as a genuine and serious threat.
Perhaps the best illustration of this appears in both Sotherton and Neville's account. Both chroniclers recall how one young man participating in the rebellion approached the walls of
Norwich and exposed their “bare buttocks” to the city guards. In response, one of the guards on the wall shot the young man dead where he stood.7 The disproportionate response suggests a lack
of serious intent on the part of the rebellion that led them to misunderstand the threat of violent
retribution their actions provoked. The inability of Northampton and other authority figures to
understand the rebels' actions through the proper context created an escalating series of violent
exchanges. The rebels' failure to appreciate the reality of their actions and the serious nature of
their uprising blinded them to the danger posed by their challenge to the gentry. Kett's Rebellion
exemplifies the volatility of cultural change: popular culture, slow to change, provided the rebels
with a language that the gentry did not entirely understand in 1549. They targeted enclosures and
7 Alexander Neville, Norfolkes Furies, Early English Books Online (London: William Stansby, 1615), E4r.
85
the gentry in the mistaken belief that attacking manifestations of socioeconomic change could reverse the larger structural impact of the transition from feudal economies to early capitalist systems. The rebels attempted to reclaim and reoccupy sacred spaces using forms familiar in popular religion, struggling to control the pace and direction of religious changes. They asserted their own idealized masculine identities in the face of economic changes that left many men economically and socially insecure. Understanding the rebellion in the proper cultural context illustrates the danger posed by uneven cultural change.
86
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