Kett's Rebellion

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kett's Rebellion began on the 8th of July 1549 with a prosperous farmer tearing down his own fences. Robert Kett was about 57 years old, one of the wealthier landowners around the town of Wymondham in Norfolk. He had listened to the grievances of angry peasants at his gate. Then he joined them. He helped dismantle the enclosures he had built himself, and walked with the crowd toward Norwich. Within weeks, some 16,000 people were camped on Mousehold Heath, laying siege to the city from above. What drove a settled landowner to lead such a force? And what did those thousands of people actually want?

• 2. Roots in the Soil

  ›

  Across England in the 1540s, a generation of farming families was being pushed off the land. Wealthy landlords were fencing common fields that local people had grazed for generations. The practice was called enclosure, and it was remaking the countryside. Some landlords went further, evicting tenants to convert arable fields into sheep pasture. Wool had grown more profitable than grain, and the calculations of the powerful were changing faster than the lives of the poor could absorb. Inflation was rising. Rents were rising. Wages were falling.

  The historian Julian Cornwall put it plainly: the common people 'could scarcely doubt that the state had been taken over by a breed of men whose policy was to rob the poor for the benefit of the rich.' Edward Seymour, the 1st Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector during Edward VI's minority, had issued a proclamation against illegal enclosures. Yet the practice continued. A month before the Wymondham uprising, rioters had already torn down fences at the nearby town of Attleborough. They believed they were acting within the law, following Somerset's own proclamation.

  In Norfolk, these tensions produced what became the most serious uprising of that year. The trigger for open revolt came in a Norfolk town with an illegal celebration and a bribed lawyer.

• 3. The Feast and the Fences

  ›

  On the weekend of the 6th of July 1549, the town of Wymondham, some ten miles south-west of Norwich, held its annual feast. The celebration included a play honoring St Thomas Becket, co-patron of Wymondham Abbey. That performance was illegal. Henry VIII had decreed in 1538 that Becket's name should be struck from the church calendar. The feast drew a crowd, and old civic loyalties ran close to the surface.

  When the feast ended on Monday, a group set off for the villages of Morley St. Botolph and Hethersett to tear down hedges and fences. Their primary target was Sir John Flowerdew, a lawyer and landowner at Hethersett. Flowerdew had overseen the demolition of Wymondham Abbey during the dissolution of the monasteries and had enclosed common land besides. He was broadly disliked. Rather than face the crowd, Flowerdew bribed the rioters. He paid them to leave his enclosures alone and attack those of Robert Kett instead.

  The Kett family had farmed in Norfolk since the twelfth century, their name appearing in records under several spellings: Ket, Cat, Chat, and Knight. Robert's nephew Francis was a clergyman. His eldest brother William would soon join the rebellion. Kett had his own history with Flowerdew; he had been prominent among the parishioners who saved their church from demolition when the abbey was torn down. When the crowd arrived at his property, Kett listened to their case. He agreed to join their cause and led them to Hethersett to demolish Flowerdew's enclosures in turn. By Tuesday the 9th of July, the group was marching on Norwich with Kett at their head.

  Norfolk County Council has preserved Kett's Oak, on the road between Wymondham and Hethersett, as a marker of the rebel route. Local tradition holds the tree was a gathering point on the march to Norwich. Nine of the rebellion's participants were later hanged from its branches.

• 4. The Camp and Its Demands

  ›

  On Friday the 12th of July, Kett's forces reached Mousehold Heath to the north-east of Norwich. The high ground gave them a commanding view over the city below. They would remain there for six and a half weeks. The camp grew into the largest of several rebel encampments that had appeared across East Anglia that summer. It eventually grew larger than Norwich itself. At the time, Norwich was the second-largest city in England, with a population of about 12,000.

  Kett established his headquarters in St Michael's Chapel, the ruins of which would later be known as Kett's Castle. A house called Mount Surrey served as a prison for captured gentry. Mount Surrey had been built by the Earl of Surrey on the site of the despoiled St Leonard's Priory and had stood empty since the Earl's execution in 1547. The rebel council met under a tree on the heath that the rebels called the Oak of Reformation. Representatives came from the Hundreds of Norfolk, with one from Suffolk. The Mayor of Norwich, Thomas Codd, former Mayor Thomas Aldrich, and a preacher named Robert Watson all accepted the rebels' invitation to join the council.

  Once the camp was settled, the rebels drew up a list of 29 grievances signed by Kett and sent it to Protector Somerset. The document called for reduced rents and the punishment of corrupt officials. It demanded the replacement of royal counsellors who had enriched themselves at the public's expense. The rebels conducted their services using the new prayer book and asked that priests who failed to teach their congregations should be removed. Strikingly, only one of the 29 articles directly addressed enclosure, and even that article called for an exemption for 'saffren grounds.' Historians have puzzled over the phrase. One has suggested it was a scribal error for 'sovereign grounds,' meaning land held in outright private ownership. Others have pointed to saffron's economic importance to the region.

  One demand stood apart from the rest. The rebels asked 'that all bondmen may be made free, for God made all free, with his precious blood shedding.' The target may have been the 1547 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds. That law allowed a discharged servant to be enslaved if they had not found new work within three days. Or the demand may have reached further, calling for the freedom of the thousands of men and women still legally serfs in England.

  On the 21st of July, York Herald Bartholomew Butler rode out from London to Mousehold. He proclaimed the gathering a rebellion and offered a royal pardon. Kett turned it down flat. He said he had committed no treason and had no need of mercy from the crown.

• 5. The Battle for Norwich

  ›

  On the 22nd of July, Kett offered a truce but the city authorities refused. Rebels charged from Mousehold toward Bishopsgate Bridge, crossing the River Wensum while city defenders fired volleys of arrows into them. The defenders could not halt the crossing. Norwich fell. The rebels captured guns and military supplies inside the city. Civic leaders were brought to Mousehold and held in Surrey House. Thomas Codd stayed in the rebel camp; his deputy Augustine Steward remained in the city.

  The government sent the Marquess of Northampton with about 1,400 men, including Italian mercenaries. Steward opened the city gates to let the royal force in. Kett pulled his forces back to the high ground and waited. He had calculated that miles of city walls were too difficult to defend properly. He would let Northampton's smaller army hold the city while he laid siege to it from above.

  On the night of the 31st of July, rebels used their knowledge of Tombland's narrow alleys to launch hit-and-run raids in the dark. After three hours the troops drove them off. By the morning of the 1st of August, Lord Sheffield retired to the Maid's Head inn for breakfast, believing the danger had passed. A report reached Northampton that rebels were gathering at the Pockthorpe gate to negotiate. Sheffield rode with the Herald to meet them. When he arrived, there were no rebels at all. As thousands crossed the Wensum near Bishopsgate, Sheffield led a cavalry charge through the cathedral precinct and into Bishopsgate Street. Outside the Great Hospital, his horse threw him into a ditch. He removed his helmet, expecting to be captured and ransomed in the usual fashion. A rebel named Fulke, reportedly a butcher, struck and killed him instead. With Sheffield dead and his men scattered through street fighting, Northampton ordered a retreat.

  The Earl of Warwick took command of a second force of around 14,000 men, including mercenaries from Wales, Germany, and Spain. Warwick entered the city on the 24th of August by attacking the St Stephen's and Brazen gates. Rebels retreated through the streets, setting fire to houses to slow the advance. On the 25th of August, bitter street fighting cleared the city once more. Then on the 26th of August, 1,400 German landsknechts arrived to reinforce Warwick. They were a mix of musketeers and zweihander-swordsmen. Faced with this combined force, Kett led the rebels down from Mousehold to seek an open battle.

• 6. Dussindale and Aftermath

  ›

  On the morning of the 27th of August 1549, the two forces faced each other outside Norwich at a place called Dussindale. In the open, against well-armed and trained professional soldiers, the rebels were routed. About 3,000 rebels died at Dussindale; Warwick's army lost roughly 250 men.

  The exact location of Dussindale has never been confirmed. Musket balls and lead shot recovered from the area have pointed to Long Valley, to the north-east of the city centre. Anne Carter of Norfolk Archaeology found parish records referencing a place called 'Dussings Dale' near the village of Great Plumstead, further to the east. The Council for British Archaeology published a map regression analysis supporting Carter's proposition. It placed the precise site about 200 metres to the west of her location.

  Kett was captured at the village of Swannington the night after the battle. His brother William was taken with him. Both were brought to the Tower of London and tried for treason. Found guilty, they were returned to Norfolk at the start of December. Robert was hanged from the walls of Norwich Castle on the 7th of December 1549. William was hanged from the west tower of Wymondham Abbey on the same day.

  Warwick had already executed 49 rebels before the final battle, during his initial entry into the city. On the morning of the 28th of August, more rebels were hanged at the Oak of Reformation and outside the Magdalen Gate. Estimates of that number range from 30 to 300. Through the entire campaign, the rebels had committed only one documented killing in cold blood. That was the hanging of one of Northampton's Italian mercenaries after his capture. The first written histories of what had happened would not extend them much credit for it.

• 7. Memory and Legacy

  ›

  Nicholas Sotherton, the son of a former Norwich mayor, wrote the only surviving eye-witness account of the rebellion. It is openly hostile toward the rebels. Alexander Neville's 1575 Latin history, De furoribus Norfolciensium, was equally condemnatory. Neville was secretary to Matthew Parker. Parker had preached to Kett's followers under the Oak of Reformation on Mousehold, appealing to them without success to disperse. In 1615, a Norfolk clergyman named Richard Woods translated Neville into English as Norfolke Furies, and it was reprinted across the following century.

  In 1550, the Norwich authorities decreed that the 27th of August should be observed as an annual holiday marking 'the deliverance of the city.' They paid for lectures in the cathedral and parish churches on the sins of rebellion. That tradition of official condemnation ran for more than a century.

  Francis Blomefield's History of Norwich was published in parts during 1741 and 1742. Blomefield drew on Neville but also consulted Raphael Holinshed, Peter Heylin, and Thomas Fuller, along with local records. He allowed himself enough impartiality to reproduce the rebels' grievances without comment, then condemned them for going beyond their original intentions.

  It was only in the 19th century that more sympathetic accounts began to appear. An anonymous work published in 1843 challenged Neville's version of events. In 1859, a clergyman named Frederic Russell uncovered new material in the archives. He concluded in print: 'though Kett is commonly considered a rebel, yet the cause he advocated is so just, that one cannot but feel he deserved a better name and a better fate.'

  In 1948, Alderman Fred Henderson, a former mayor of Norwich, proposed a memorial to Kett. Henderson had himself been imprisoned in Norwich Castle for his part in the food riots of 1885. He had hoped for a statue. He settled for a plaque. Unveiled in 1949, 400 years after the rebellion, the plaque bore words of Henderson's own composition. On the 7th of December 2011, the anniversary of Kett's execution, members of Norwich Occupy and the Norwich Green Party held a memorial march. They laid a wreath at the gates of Norwich Castle.

  Kett's name now appears on schools, pubs, streets, and a walking route around Norwich and Wymondham. Woodforde's Brewery in Norwich produces a beer called Kett's Rebellion. Malcolm Arnold composed the Robert Kett Overture, his Opus 141, in 1988. Novelists from Frederick H. Moore in 1876 to C. J. Sansom in 2018 have returned to the story. Robert Kett died on the walls of the castle that now carries his plaque. He spent three centuries as a traitor and has spent another two as something rather different.