The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Poverty drove them to resistance, the commons claimed; a claim hard to gainsay. In Yorkshire in 1513 the commons volunteered their personal services for war, but no money, 'because they have so little of it'. A decade later Henry VIII demanded a tax large enough to finance his ambition to win 'the whole monarchy of Christendom'; a sum, said the Commons in Parliament, 'impossible to be levied'. In 1525 the King called for the Amicable Grant, which was neither amicable nor, as it turned out, a grant. There were 'pitiful curses and weepings' from a commons already undermined by catastrophic harvests, recurrent plague, and a collapse in the wool trade. In Kent many accounted themselves as 'desperates'. In Suffolk there was mutiny. 'Two or three hundred good poor fellows together . . . would have a living' by whatever means, they threatened, and 'he that had the most should have the least peradventure'. Crowds flocked to present their grievances, clamouring like 'geese in corn'. Asked who was their captain, the reply came: 'Forsooth, his name is Poverty, for he and his cousin Necessity hath brought us to this doing.' Claiming poverty exculpated the commons from charges of treasonous rebellion and allowed a king, who was unable to subdue them by force, to concede and to pardon with seeming grace. The perennial dearth and calamity which clouded the world of the peasantry lay behind every popular revolt, yet there were causes for rebellion far more compelling and unifying than poverty alone.
The greatest rebellions of the century were in the name of faith and justice. So it was in the Lincolnshire rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536. When the assault upon the monasteries gave focus to all the inchoate fears and rumours of heretical innovations imposed by an alien court, of inequitable taxation, of despoliation of churches and transfer of land and disruption of tenure, the whole of northern society was threatened and rallied to the defence of 'its old ancient customs'. A rebel force rallied so large that no royal army could counter it. The commons of the North had initiated the great rising, and much of it was created in their image. The oaths they swore were to 'God, the King and the commons', and the names of the common and the commonwealth were constantly evoked to strengthen their resolve. In the North-West the commons' leaders were 'simple poor men', whom they called Lord Poverty, Captain Pity and Captain Charity. At the great Pilgrim councils the commons' voice was heard through their own representatives. But they could not act alone. Because they were conservative, because it was their 'old ancient customs' they were determined to restore, they wanted, indeed demanded, the support of their natural superiors; the nobility and gentry. With the accustomed battle cries - 'thousands for a Percy', 'a Dacre, a Dacre' - they called upon their traditional leaders to lead them as before. But this seeming deference took strange forms. The gentry and nobility assumed the leadership of a movement whose aims they approved but whose means they abhorred: but they were adamant that they were captives of the mutinous commons, victims of the rising not its prime movers. Sir Stephen Hamerton claimed that upon his return from hunting he was warned by women that he must save himself. Surrounded by 300 armed men at Giggleswick, he was told that 'he had ruled them, but they would now rule him', and was compelled to swear the rebel oath. Is his story to be believed? Certainly the King and those around him found it hard to absolve the gentry and to accept their pleas that their servants and tenants would not stand with them. But when the leaders of the army sent against the Pilgrims wrote 'in desperate sort as though the world would be turned upside down' if the King did not accede to the rebel demands, their fears were genuine, the subversion real. The deference of a nobleman's retinue was conditional, and the loyalty of tenants mutable. The force that a nobleman mustered against the Pilgrims could detect to the Pilgrim ranks. In 1533 the commons would marshal successfully to impose their will upon their social leaders and effect a great political and religious transformation. Their actions attested not only to their conviction, but their confidence. In England, wrote the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, 'every man standeth upon himself and buildeth his fortunes upon his own faith and self-assurance'.
Hierarchies and structures of power were extended and diffused throughout society. In their parishes and villages men sought office and authority and a political voice. Yet participation in the public life of a parish was highly circumscribed. Yeomen and wealthier tradesmen monopolized the higher parish offices such as churchwarden; lesser offices, like that of sidesman, went to husbandmen. For the labouring poor there was nothing. Parish office was not only a measure of rank, but conferred real power; the controol of land, distribution of poor relief, or moral regulation. Although parish life, centred upon the church, was ideally based upon the values of charity and neighbourhood which should transcend rank and degree, still there were deep divisions between the 'better' or 'chiefest sort' who gave poor relief, and the poorer, 'meaner sort' who received it. The parish leaders came to give alms conditionally. Sometimes they opposed the marriage of poor people, on the uncanonical grounds that they were likely to become a burden on the parish. In 1570 the 'chiefest' of Adlington in Kent were 'sore against' Alice Cheeseman's match, urged her to abandon it, and threatened to expel her from the parish if she defied them. The poor, like her, might be powerless even to marry and to settle in personal security. When Spenser wrote so confidently of the self-assurance of the English commons, he was comparing them to the Irish. 'Now this ye are to understand,' said the character Irenius in Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, rebellions in Ireland were never 'begun by the common people, but by the Lords and Captains of Countries', whom the people were 'forced to follow'. Not a single peasant rising was known in medieval Ireland. The oppressive system of coyne and livery kept the people poor, submissive and silent. The lords hardly needed to listen to the popular voice. Ruling by the 'strong hand', they knew that the commons dared not challenge them. By the late sixteenth century the lords claimed the right to retain their tenants and denied them the right to leave the land. The English planters and administrators chose to see the Irish peasantry - 'churls', as they called them - as bond slaves. In law, the peasantry may not have been subject to a hereditary condition of unfreedom; in practice, their status and standard of living were so low that it seemed so.
There were people in England and Wales also who were powerless and without justice. This was not only because of their poverty, for even the poorest had legal status and rights. Thieves who stole out of desperation could and did plead necessity in mitigation. Those without justice were the bondmen. Serfdom survived still in England and Wales throughout the sixteenth century, and on those estates where this antediluvian form of tenure persisted, lords had an unfettered right to seize the property of bondmen, to imprison and beat them. The rapacious 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Norfolk tried to extend serfdom on their estates. Henry VII had in 1507 granted manumission (freedom) to serfs in Merioneth, Caernarvon and Anglesey, but Tudor kings lacked the power or the will to intervene on private estates. By 1549 villeins on the Howards' Norfolk estates were asking, like the German peasants in 1525, for manumission in the name of the Lord of all lords: 'We pray that bondmen shall be made free, for Christ made all men free by his precious blood shedding.'
Within the smallest communities - even the family, especially the family - there were those who held power and those who owed duty. All communities, except nunneries, were patriarchial. Female power and freedom had no place in Tudor views of the social and political order. 'Ye are underlings, underlings, and must be obedient,' so Hugh Latimer explained. That unfreedom was enshrined in the English common law, which distinguished a femme sole, a widow or unmarried woman legally of age, from a married woman, or femme coverte. Single women could acquire or dispose of property, contract debts, make wills, and engage independently in a craft or trade. Married women could not. But women's social and legal subordination did not mean that a husband's supremacy was always imposed, nor prevent husband and wife from working in partnership to sustain the family and household. Wives were named as executors of their husband's wills and administrators of their estates in full confidence that they would know how to manage them. Women were unlikely to be passive and submissive under an overbearing patriarchy, whatever the theory. Denied a role in the public, political sphere, at any level, their influence might nevertheless be immense. Even the fundamental principle that women should not bear rule was soon breached by two Tudor queens regnant.