The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

There was a long tradition of popular revolt in England. Tudor chronicles told of the insurrection of 1381, when peasants and townspeople, in their great hour of corporate articulacy, had subverted the social order, denounced their oppressors, and wrought havoc. The fear was always that the commons would rise again. Yet the power of the people was usually latent. The poor would be cast weeping from their homes when land was enclosed, consigned to dereliction without offering resistance. Any use of their strength in numbers was illegitimate; mob rule. Yet, under duress, they might be provoked to action. Insurgency of a greater or lesser kind - whether rebellion against the Crown or revolt against landlords - might have seemed the natural consequence of a political system which allowed the great majority no channel for grievance, in which any appeal for redress was taken as rebellion. What else could they do but rebel? Sometimes the voice of desperation was heard. 'We shall never have good world till we fall together by the ears,' so a Norfolk woman threatened in 1537, 'and with clubs and clouted shoon shall the deed be done.' These were the only weapons of the peasantry, but frightening if wielded by many.
Rebellion took many forms, inspired as it was by myriad motives. Most commons' revolts were local, animated by particular grievances and directed against particular objects and persons, typically against enclosing by venal landlords which threatened commons' rights. Usually, after spontaneous breaking down of fences, the rioters would retreat. The violence was almost always shortlived and soon subdued, for in local trials of strength between landlords and commons there was little contest, especially where the lord moved swiftly to exercise summary justice ' to the terror of others'. Few of these commons' riots aspired to challenge the bonds of 'estate and degree' which bound society in chains of mutual dependence. But a few did. In a May game in Suffolk in 1537 the player acting the part of Husbandry in a play of 'a king how he should rule his realm' said many things gentlemen which were not in the text; and three years later, in neighbouring Norfolk, a confederacy against gentlemen, who bore 'little favour . . . to us poor men'. It would be good, some said, ominously, if there were 'as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there be white bulls'. Such threats were rare, and usually empty, but the East Anglian gentry had cause for alarm, as the events of 1549 would show, and the East Anglian commons had reason for animus against a venal gentry which was unfit to govern. The central authorities expressed were not against them. But not all commons' revolts were of a peasantry chafing against local injustice; some were for a cause which was national. These were more dangerous by far. Suppose the passions of the people of a whole region were roused against the action of the government? At times, the commons showed allegiances quite contrary to those which the Tudor monarchs required, especially in moments of greatest royal insecurity. At Henry VII's accession loyalty to Richard III and the Yorkists remained strong in the North, and the commons was the elements in northern society most persistent in refusal to accept the first Tudor. They followed captains who took names like 'Robin of Redesdale', which were evocative because they had been used before in rebellion against the Crown. London often threatened to declare itself for the Tudors' enemies; a fearful threat, for it was, as John Stow, its greatest chronicler admitted, 'always a mighty arm and instrument to bring any great desire to effect, if it could be brought to a man's devotion'. The 3rd Duke of Buckingham listened to advice to 'win the favour of the commons and he should have rule of all', and when he was executed in 1521 for his treason the universal grief of the Londoners caused the City fathers to set watches. In London a few could raise many, rumour turn to action, and threats to violence. In 1517 two London apprentices had, within hours, mustered hundreds of others to rise on May Day against foreigners: a riot remembered as 'Evil May Day'. Thereafter the apprentices were always distrusted as an unstable element, especially on holidays and their traditional days of misrule.
Although few denied the obligation to support the monarch in times of necessity, the commons might baulk if the royal necessity were not theirs. In Yorkshire in 1489 the commons, led by the pseudonymous captains Master Hobbehirst and Robin Goodfellow, opposed the levying of taxes to fund the King's campaign in distant Brittany. So, too, in Cornwall in 1497 the commons revolted against taxes to finance war in even more remote Scotland, a war, they said, which was 'but a pretence to poll and pill the people'. Fifteen thousand Cornishmen, led by Michael Joseph ('The Smith'; An Gof in Cornish), Thomas Flamank, a gentleman, and Lord Audley, marched, largely unopposed, to London. Their demonstration and defiance ended, as others would, in carnage. Ill-armed and ill-led, they were cut to pieces or put to flight at Blackheath.