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Violence and Social Conflict In Mid-Tudor Rebellions*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Roger B. Manning
Roger B. Manning*
Affiliation:
Cleveland State University
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Extract

Two of the most common manifestations of social tension in Tudor England were the enclosure riot and the seditious rumor. Both are essentially pre-political forms of social protest, but the first must be viewed as more primitive than the second. Enclosure riots, at least prior to the riots and rebellions of 1548-49, were not particularly directed against the governing elite, but rather were aimed at innovations which threatened the traditional agrarian routine within the manorial or village economy. Thus, enclosure riots, which were procured as frequently by gentry as by peasants and often were calculatingly combined with litigation, did not especially menace the social order. On the other hand, seditious rumors — particularly those that were threatening and anonymous — raised the possibility of social polarization and violent protest on a larger scale than that of the enclosure riot. Before the rebellions and riots of 1548-49, enclosure riots were almost invariably confined within a single village community or between two neighboring communities, but during those troubled years the wide-spread circulation of rumors threatening the gentry resulted in the destruction over a widely-scattered area of enclosing hedges which had stood unchallenged for generations.

The rumor as a vehicle of social protest could either express the collective fear that some supposedly hostile group such as the rural aristocracy had put together a conspiracy to harm the peasantry, or could, conversely, convey the desire of peasants and artisans for social levelling or even social inversion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Spring 1977 , pp. 18 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1977

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Footnotes

*

A shorter version of this essay was read to the Ohio Academy of History in Columbus, Ohio on April 6, 1974. The author gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance provided by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, which permitted a research trip to England in 1973.

References

1. As a consequence of the threats to public order and social stability perceived by crown officials and local governors in Tudor England, the legal doctrine of sedition underwent considerable development during the sixteenth century. The crime of sedition during this period was viewed as encompassing much more than the more modern notion of inciting by words or writings disaffection towards the state. According to the legal concept that evolved in the court of Star Chamber during the second half of the sixteenth century, the crime of sedition comprised slanders or libels upon the reputations and/or actions, public or private, of public officials, magistrates, and prelates, which sought to divide and alienate “the presente governors” from “the sounde and well affected parte of the subjectes.” It was not necessary for seditious utterances or writings to be published, and if the facts alleged were true, that only made the offence worse, since a true slander was more likely to cause a breach of the peace than a false one. “An aduertisement touching seditious wrytings,” PRO, SP 12/235/81; The Case de Libellis famosis, Easter 3 Jac. I, The Fifth Part of the Reports of Sir Edward Coke (London, 1738), ff. 125–26Google Scholar.

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54. This grumbling may have originated in the Statute of 27 Hen. VIII, c. 22, which restricted flocks to no more than 2000 sheep, and was revived by the famous tax on sheep contained in the Subsidy Act of 1549 (2 and 3 Edw. VI, c. 36), which had just the opposite effect of that intended by Hales and the Commonwealth Men. They had pressed for the sheep tax to restore balance to an agrarian economy upset by overmuch grazing. See Jordan, , Edward VI, I, 424–35Google Scholar and Holinshed's Chronicles, III, 924Google Scholar.

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66. “Staffordshire Suits in the Court of Star Chamber, temp. Hen. VII and Hen. VIII,” ed. Boyd, W. K., William Salt Archaeological Society, N.S. X(i) (1907), 115–19Google Scholar. Some were persuaded to participate by the threat that their cattle would be maimed if they refused. For a discussion of the attempts by the crowd in sixteenth-century France to legitimate their actions in grain riots and religious riots, see Davis, N. Z., “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present, No. 59 (May, 1973), 61Google Scholar.

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89. PRO, SP 10/9/46.

90. “[Staffordshire] Star Chamber Proceedings. Henry VIII and Edward VI”, pp. 176-77, See also PRO, SP 10/8/9 for reference to the use of the threat of forfeiting their holdings if tenants refused to help their landlords suppress popular disturbances.

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96. Under the conditions prevailing in sixteenth-century England, probably only a millenarian ideology would have been sufficient to produce a genuine, popularly-based revolutionary movement. See Hobsbawm, E. J., Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York, 1959), pp. 6–7Google Scholar.

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98. Bush, M. L., The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Montreal, 1975), p. 86Google Scholar. At the same time the government was unprepared to act against the rebels immediately because of the expedition that it was preparing against the Scots.

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