Riots and Rebels E-Book

Nick Rennison

• Herausgeber: Oldcastle Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The only power otherwise powerless people possess lies in their numbers. Riots and Rebels is an examination of how people have exercised that power in England, Scotland and Wales over the centuries and how governments have reacted to it. From the Middle Ages to the present day, Riots and Rebels discusses and highlights how protests have shaped British history and contributed to the struggle for the vote, labour rights, women's rights, trade unions and climate awareness. Without many of these examples of direct action, modern society would look very different. In 1381, a large army of people marched through the south-east of England to London, demanding an end to unfair taxation and threatening the rule of the boy-king, Richard II. During the eighteenth century, food riots, riots in protest at land enclosure, and riots targeting religious groups and foreigners regularly occurred. In the following century, mass gatherings demanded reform of the electoral system which allowed only a tiny proportion of the population to vote. In the early twentieth century, suffragettes chained themselves to railings, took part in huge demonstrations and endured prison sentences in pursuit of the vote for women. Recent decades have seen tens of thousands of people take to the streets of London and other cities to protest against the Iraq War and, in the last year, the war in Gaza. From the so-called Peasants' Revolt to Just Stop Oil, via the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, Luddites breaking machinery which threatened their livelihood, the infamous Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the Chartist demonstrations of the 1830s and 1840s, 1887's Bloody Sunday and many other, often violent events, Nick Rennison provides a concise, compelling account of popular protest in Britain. For readers of Unruly by David Mitchell, The Restless Republic by Anna Keay and Revolution by Peter Ackroyd. PRAISE FOR NICK RENNISON 'Entertaining and thoroughly readable canter through the events of a century ago... Fascinating' OBSERVER on 1922 'Rennison proves a chatty and amiable guide and offers an enjoyable and evocative ramble down memory lane' TELEGRAPH on 1974 'Hugely entertaining... often wryly amusing... plenty of light entertainment and colourful anecdote' MAIL ON SUNDAY on 1974

Leseprobe

Praise for Nick Rennison

‘Vivid… In this enjoyable slice of popular history, Rennison assembles a month-by-month almanac, including all the most notable moments from science, politics, art and culture’ – GUARDIAN

‘Fascinating and highly readable’ – DAILY MAIL

‘A delightful book… Intelligent and lively’ – SCOTSMAN

‘Entertaining and thoroughly readable canter through the events of a century ago… Fascinating’ – OBSERVER

‘In crisp and evocative snatches, Rennison gives monthly summaries of global events, domestic episodes, newspaper sensations, sporting triumphs and cultural acclaim during 1922’ – SPECTATOR

‘A revealing, kaleidoscopic snapshot of the most important events of a century ago… Rennison succinctly and vividly captures the major upheavals of 1922’ – SUNDAY BUSINESS POST

‘A fast moving and extremely readable book’ – ALL ABOUT HISTORY

‘An enjoyable biography of an important year that serves as another reminder of how much history just twelve months can contain’ – FOREWORD

To my mother Eileen Rennison

Introduction

The British have often liked to think of themselves as a peaceable and phlegmatic nation. Unlike our more excitable neighbours on the Continent, particularly the French, who are always erecting barricades and rioting in the streets, we settle our differences less violently. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we have long been, and often still are, in the words of one recent history book’s title, ‘a fiery and furious people’. We beheaded one of our kings nearly 150 years earlier than the French sent one of theirs to the guillotine. Even a cursory glance through our history shows that we have not been slow to resort to protests and demonstrations, and that these have, not infrequently, resulted in violence.

Riots and Rebels is an attempt to provide a brief survey of such actions. As the subtitle states, it is about popular protests in England, Scotland and Wales. I have not included Ireland. The nationalist struggles of that country to free itself from English/British rule deserve a book of their own rather than to be subsumed into this one. They also form a territory into which an Englishman should probably tread with caution.

How have I defined ‘popular protest’? I have not included rebellions in which the principal aim of the rebels was to replace the king or queen with another monarch. These strike me as being more the result of conflict within the nation’s elite rather than any expression of popular protest. Thus the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 was largely an attempt to replace the Catholic king James II with the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son. The Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were risings against the newly installed Hanoverian dynasty by supporters of the supplanted Stuart dynasty. By contrast, the Pilgrimage of Grace in the 1530s, say, was an expression of ordinary people’s dismay at changes in religious practices and a slump in their economic fortunes. The crowds that gathered at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819, only to be attacked by mounted yeomanry, were there to demand, among other things, reform of parliament and the franchise.

I have begun with the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. There were, of course, examples of communal violence in England before that date. In 1196, a clearly charismatic individual named William FitzOsbert declared himself a champion of the poor and was the focus of what amounted to a minor uprising in London. It was quickly suppressed and FitzOsbert was executed, together with nine of his followers. In Oxford and Cambridge, rivalry between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ sometimes ended in bloodshed. The worst example took place in Oxford on 10 February 1355, St Scholastica’s Day, when two students named Walter Spryngheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, drinking in a town tavern, complained about the quality of the wine and beat up the pub’s landlord. In revenge, the landlord gathered together friends to attack the students. Other students rallied to the support of their peers and, in the escalating brawling that ensued, nearly 100 people, from both ‘town’ and ‘gown’ were killed. However, it seems logical to start in 1381 with an uprising that undoubtedly started among, and was led by, ordinary people, the kind of individuals who do not always feature in the history books.

There is a temptation to believe that protests in the past were mostly on behalf of causes of which today we would approve. This is very definitely not the case. Over the centuries, bigotry has proved as strong a motivating force for demonstrations as, say, reforming zeal. We can, with hindsight, applaud the commitment of those who fought for the right to vote or campaigned for peace but it’s as well to remember that, for example, the Gordon Riots grew out of anti-Catholic protests and that foreigners have very often been the target for violence in popular disturbances. And, before we congratulate ourselves on our greater tolerance for difference today, we should remind ourselves that the most recent riots in Britain at the time of writing – those which followed the terrible killing of three small girls in Southport – were fuelled by racism and xenophobia.

Note: When I have quoted from older documents, spellings have been modernised to make the meaning clearer.

Medieval Rebellion

‘There is a complete absence of large-scale popular rebellions before the 1300s. Around the mid-fourteenth century, something happened across Europe that transformed lower-level struggles between landowners and those who worked the land into mass revolt.’

Edward Vallance

Peasants’ Revolt 1381

In the wake of the Black Death, in which somewhere between a third and a half of the population had lost their lives, those peasants who had survived the pestilence had a new bargaining power. Labour shortages put them in a stronger position. This was not to the liking of large landowners and, in 1351, Edward III’s parliament had passed the Statute of Labourers, an attempt not only to get peasants to work for pre-1348 wages but also to prevent workers from moving from one place to another in search of better terms and pay. Unsurprisingly, this was deeply resented by those it affected and was a simmering cause of anger amongst the peasant classes for decades. The first seeds of the Peasants’ Revolt had been sown. (I have continued to use the familiar term for the events of 1381, although some contemporary historians consider it a misnomer since craftsmen, tradesmen and artisans in the towns as well as the rural peasantry played a significant part in them.)

The final and most powerful motivation for rebellion was provided by the series of poll taxes levied to finance the ongoing war in France. Three such taxes were imposed in the space of a mere four years. The third of these, passed by parliament in 1380, was for a shilling for every adult, and the tax began to be collected across the country in April of the following year. It was hugely unpopular and there was large-scale avoidance of it. The crown stepped up its efforts to prevent this but, in the south-east at least, they backfired. On 30 May 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt began in Brentwood, Essex after the arrival of royal commissioners under a man named John Bampton to look into evasion of this third poll tax. Many of the nearby towns and villages refused point blank to cooperate with them and Bampton, fearing for his life, eventually fled. Success in driving Bampton out encouraged a larger rising and thousands prepared to march on London. Other counties also began to experience disorder. In Kent, trouble was sparked by the arrest of one Robert Belling who was imprisoned in Rochester Castle. Rebels stormed the castle and freed him. The first mention of Wat Tyler occurs at this moment and, by early June, he is clearly the leading figure among the Kentish rebels. Tyler’s origins are unclear but he seems to have been around 40 years of age and to have come from either Maidstone or perhaps Dartford. He probably worked at the trade which provided his surname but he may also have had military experience and fought in France as a longbowman. His first move, once he had assumed leadership of the rebels, was to march his men to Canterbury before they turned towards London, gathering more recruits to the uprising as they travelled.

Apart from Tyler, the most prominent figure in the uprising was John Ball, a priest who had been a thorn in the side of the church and state authorities since the 1360s because of his egalitarian views and supposedly heretical beliefs. He was released from Maidstone jail by the Kentish rebels. It was Ball who wrote the famous words, which have echoed down the centuries for radical thinkers: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughtymen.’

On 12June, the Kentish rebels reached Blackheath where they gathered in force. Although the rebellion was, in the words of one historian, ‘not regicidal in its intent’, the young king, Richard II, was persuaded to take refuge in the Tower. On the following day, Tyler’s men entered the city from the south. At the same time rebels from Essex were approaching the city from the north. Both forces caused mayhem. In Smithfield, they attacked buildings owned by the Knights of the Order of St John, knowing that their prior, Sir Robert Hales, as Lord High Treasurer, was the man most responsible for the collection of the hated poll taxes. The Savoy Palace, the property of the king’s uncle, John of Gaunt, another man seen as heavily implicated in the imposition of the tax, was burned and its contents ransacked. According to a possibly apocryphal story recounted by the much later chronicler, John Strype, some of the rebels entered the building’s wine cellars, where ‘they drank so much of sweet wines, that they were not able to come out in time, but were mured in with wood and stones, that walled up the doors, where they were heard crying and calling seven days after, but none came to help them out until they were dead.’ On 14 June, other houses were burned, and prisoners were released from jail. Many lawyers were physically attacked and foreigners, especially Flemish merchants, became targets for the mob’s wrath. Thomas Walsingham, a contemporary chronicler, wrote that he had heard ‘from a trustworthy witness’ that ‘thirty Flemings were violently dragged out of the church of the Austin friars… and executed in the open street.’

Earlier that morning the king met a delegation of the rebels at Mile End and agreed to the majority of their demands. He asked that they return to their homes in peace and significant numbers did indeed depart the city. However, on the same day, other rebels burst into the Tower of London and into its Chapel of St John the Evangelist, where they seized Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was closely associated with the most recent poll tax. Sudbury was dragged to Tower Hill, together with Sir Robert Hales, the country’s Treasurer, and there both were beheaded by a series of sword blows to the neck.

Richard’s government renewed efforts to persuade the rebels to leave the city. The king and his entourage met with Tyler and his Kentish men at Smithfield on 15 June. There are conflicting accounts of what happened but it appears that, after an initially amicable encounter between the two sides, something went badly wrong. Tyler behaved in what was seen as an insufficiently respectful manner towards the king; one of the king’s men insulted the rebel leader, calling him ‘the greatest thief and robber in all of Kent’. At some point, William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, fearing that Tyler might harm the king attempted to arrest him. Tyler struck out with his dagger but Walworth was wearing armour. Unharmed, he stabbed the peasant leader in the neck and somebody else in the king’s entourage ran him through with a sword. Mortally wounded, Tyler was carried away by some of his followers but was found and brought back to Smithfield where he was beheaded. Deprived of their leader, the rebels lost their fight and most began to disperse.

However, Tyler’s death did not mean the end of the revolt. There was further violence to come. The king’s forces defeated the Essex rebels on 28 June in a battle near Billericay where as many as 500 of the peasant soldiers were killed. At about the same time, rebels in East Anglia were crushed in a confrontation with heavily armed troops loyal to the king and led by Henry le Despenser, the so-called ‘Fighting Bishop’ of Norwich. According to one contemporary chronicler, ‘The warlike priest, like a wild boar gnashing its teeth, spared neither himself nor his enemies.’ On 13 July, John Ball was captured in Coventry and, after a brief trial, he was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Albans two days later. His head was put on display at London Bridge. In the aftermath of the revolt, with the rebels no longer a threat, Richard, or his advisers, lost little time in reneging on all the promises he had originally made to them. ‘Rustics you were and rustics you are still,’ he is reputed to have said, ‘you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher.’ Yet England was not as it was before. The Peasants’ Revolt shook the upper classes of medieval society to their core. As the historian Gerald Harriss wrote, ‘political society had always lived in fear of social revolution, and in 1381 it peered into the abyss and took heed.’

Jack Cade’s Rebellion 1450

Much of the popular unrest in the first half of the fifteenth century was underpinned by religious beliefs. The Lollards were religious radicals and followers of the preacher John Wyclif who initially enjoyed some support amongst society’s upper echelons. However, attempts to condemn their ‘heresy’ and the banning of their English translation of the Bible drove some of them into revolt. In 1414, Sir John Oldcastle, a former friend of Henry V and reputedly one of the models for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, led an attempted Lollard coup which was defeated with some ease. Oldcastle himself escaped and went on the run. He was captured in Wales more than three years later, transported to London and executed.

There was a further Lollard rising in 1431 which was swiftly repressed and its ringleaders executed but a more considerable crisis for Henry VI’s government came in 1449–50. This had little to do with heresy or religious unorthodoxy. Its causes were more material than spiritual. Military failures abroad and tax rises at home provided the catalysts for rebellion. In January 1450, a labourer named Thomas Cheyne who had taken to calling himself ‘Bluebeard the Hermit’ led a brief rebellion in Kent. Abbey buildings in Canterbury were attacked but the response of the authorities was immediate and decisive. Cheyne, who had only a few hundred followers at most, was swiftly captured and executed. His abortive revolt was, however, the precursor of a far more serious insurrection that arose in the same county a few months later. At its head was a man named Jack Cade. As with other leaders of medieval and Tudor rebellions, such as Wat Tyler, there are various, often conflicting stories about his background. He may have been born in Ireland. He possibly spent time in France, fleeing an accusation that he had murdered a woman in Sussex. He was even rumoured to be a sorcerer of the black arts who could summon the Devil. What is certainly true is that he emerged as the leader of a Kentish rebellion in May and June 1450. There had been earlier disturbances in the county in May, and the Duke of Suffolk, one of the king’s chief advisers, had been effectively lynched by an angry mob. Cade issued a manifesto entitled ‘The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent’ which demanded that the king dismiss his most hated ministers and address the grievances of his people. He began to gather supporters and marched towards London.

By early June, Cade was encamped a few miles from the capital with several thousand men. A royal delegation was sent to meet them and hear the rebels’ demands that the king rid himself of ‘traitors’ around him, most notably the allies of the late Duke of Suffolk. However, Henry and his government were not minded to take notice of the wishes of what was seen as a ragtag mob of troublesome peasants. Plans were made to stop the rebellion in its tracks. On 18 June, Henry’s army marched into Kent and an advance guard of the king’s forces, under the command of Sir Humphrey Stafford, a former governor of Calais, met the rebels near Sevenoaks. In the ensuing battle, Cade’s men prevailed and Stafford was killed. The king retreated and even left London. Cade reappeared outside the city with a ‘great power of arms and archers’. Encamped at Southwark, they prepared to cross the Thames. They did so on 3 July, after men cut the ropes on London Bridge to prevent its being raised. Cade himself struck his sword on London Stone (a traditional act for an incoming Lord Mayor) and proclaimed himself lord of the city.

His men now went in search of their enemies. As Lord High Treasurer in the months leading up to the rebellion, Lord Saye was blamed for the country’s economic ills and the suffering of the people. He became Henry’s most hated adviser and was, in effect, sacrificed by the king to placate the rebels. Handed over to Cade’s judgement, he was subject to a sham trial on 4 July and then beheaded in Cheapside. So too was his son-in-law, William Cromer, and in macabre mockery, their two heads were placed on pikes and made to kiss as they were paraded through jeering rioters. By this time, Cade was losing control of his followers, and looting and drunken violence was rife. Many citizens, far from welcoming the rebels, now wanted only to be rid of them. On 7 July, after Cade’s forces had returned to the south bank of the Thames, city officials closed the bridge so that they could not come back. When the rebels tried to do so the following day, they faced a pitched battle with Londoners and royal troops on the bridge. After hours of fighting, they were forced to pull back, having suffered heavy casualties.

At about this point, after a truce and the offer of a royal pardon, Cade withdrew most of his men from London, although some of his supporters continued to fight in parts of Kent. The king, or his advisers, almost immediately reneged on previous promises of pardon and offered a reward of 1,000 marks for the capture of Cade, dead or alive. The rebel leader was badly injured in a skirmish in Sussex on 12 July and captured. He was taken towards London but died en route. His death was not enough to save him from a mock trial and, after he was inevitably found guilty of treason, his corpse was beheaded and lopped into quarters. The head was placed atop a post on London Bridge, and the quarters sent to other towns for display. The Duke of Buckingham was given orders to root out Cade’s followers in the towns where the uprising had garnered most support. He did so with such enthusiasm that many were brought to trial over the next six months and some executed in what became known as the ‘harvest of heads’.

Tudor Turmoil

Rebellion in the Reign of Henry VII

As a king who could plausibly be seen by some as a usurper, Henry Tudor, first of his dynasty, could expect to face rebellion and did so. Less than a year after he had overthrown and killed Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, he easily quashed an abortive uprising by supporters of the defeated House of York. The following year, a young boy named Lambert Simnel, whom some pretended to believe was the Earl of Warwick, a Yorkist claimant to the throne, became the figurehead in a rebellion that was brought to an end in a battle fought near East Stoke in Nottinghamshire. Most of those Yorkist nobles who had used Simnel were killed in the battle as were thousands of their followers; Simnel was spared and was reportedly given a job as a spit-turner in the royal kitchens.

By contrast, the Yorkshire Rebellion, four years into Henry’s reign, was an almost bloodless uprising. Like others to come, it was occasioned by the king’s persistent attempts to raise money through additional taxation. Parliament had granted Henry a subsidy of £100,000 to help him organise a military expedition to aid his allies in Brittany who were at war with the French. Many in the north, particularly Yorkshire and Northumberland, were reluctant to contribute to the subsidy and rumours filtered south that a rebellion was brewing. The king sent Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland to collect the monies to which he felt entitled. Northumberland, together with his small entourage, was confronted by a group of protesters near Thirsk in north Yorkshire and a brawl broke out in which the earl, abandoned by his retinue, was killed on 28 April 1489. (His proved to be the only death during the course of the largely ineffectual revolt, although several of its ringleaders were later executed.) The army of rebels, led initially by a man named Robert Chamber and later by a knight called Sir John Egremont, had become several thousand strong by early May and the king decided that a display of force was needed to quell them. He marched north with a large body of troops and the rebels, unnerved by Henry’s swift response, dispersed when an advance guard under the command of the Earl of Surrey arrived in York. The Yorkshire Rebellion was over before it had properly begun.

Eight years later, in the spring of 1497, Henry was concerned about the threat posed by Perkin Warbeck. Warbeck was another pretender to the throne but one who proved far more of a danger than Lambert Simnel. He claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, presumed murdered in the previous decade. He was being sheltered at the Scottish court of James IV and Henry was eager to raise money for an army to confront any invading force that might cross the border into England. Many of his subjects were much less eager to provide that cash via their taxes. In Cornwall in particular, resentment was high. Under the leadership of Michael An Gof, a blacksmith from the village of St Keverne, and a Bodmin lawyer and one-time MP named Thomas Flamank, thousands rose in revolt. A rebel army headed into Devon, attracting further recruits as they marched. In Somerset, they gained noble support when James Touchet, Lord Audley threw in his lot with them and, because of his rank and military experience, took over as their commander. Perhaps as many as 15,000 strong, they continued towards the capital.

A skirmish with a detachment of the king’s soldiers near Guildford was just about the only time they faced any opposition as they came closer to London. After this, they skirted the city, hoping other rebels would join them, and set up camp at Blackheath. They were finally confronted by a royal army at Deptford on 17 June. The outcome was predictable. The rebel forces had been depleted by desertions on the long march from Cornwall and were heavily outnumbered by Henry VII’s troops. Their hopes of a rising of Kentish men to support them, of which Flamank had been confident, had been dashed. They were soundly defeated. About a thousand Cornishmen lost their lives. Flamank and Audley were captured on the battlefield; Michael An Gof, attempting to seek sanctuary in a nearby church, was also taken. On 27 June, An Gof and Flamank were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered but were spared this peculiarly grisly fate by order of Henry. However, after they were executed by hanging only, they were beheaded. Audley, through his privilege as a peer, was never in danger of the worst kind of death as a traitor but was also beheaded at Tower Hill the following day. The heads of all three men were displayed on London Bridge.

This first Cornish uprising had one almost immediate effect. It became the stimulus for a second rebellion. Perkin Warbeck had noted the discontent in Cornwall and chose Whitesand Bay near Land’s End as the place to come ashore with just over 100 supporters on 7 September 1497. Many Cornishmen rallied to his support and he was hailed as ‘Richard IV’ on Bodmin Moor. With a growing army of perhaps 6,000 men, the pretender besieged Exeter but the king had already responded swiftly to news of Warbeck’s advance. Forces under Lord Daubeney arrived in the West Country, ahead of Henry himself, and Warbeck realised that the game was up. He abandoned his followers and fled for the coast but was cornered in Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire where he surrendered. After two years, during which he withdrew his claim to be the youngest of the Princes in the Tower but continued to plot against Henry, Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn on 23 November 1499.

Evil May Day 1517

The apprentices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London were famous for their propensity for rioting. One of the most notorious examples of their fondness for violent disorder has come to be known as Evil May Day. The early part of Henry VIII’s reign was marked by economic woes and fears of religious heresy. Although only two per cent of London’s population was foreign-born, these ‘aliens’, as contemporaries often called them, were blamed for problems which were none of their making. In April 1517, in words echoed through centuries of xenophobic prejudice, a preacher at St Paul’s Cross stirred up trouble by accusing foreign immigrants of taking English jobs and eating ‘the bread from poor fatherless children’. True Englishmen, he claimed, should not only ‘cherish and defend themselves’ but ‘hurt and grieve aliens’. A few weeks later, some Londoners chose to do exactly that. May Day was usually a day of celebration and drunken revelry. This year, it became a day of violence and rioting. More than a thousand apprentices and other young men gathered in Cheapside. Led by a man called John Lincoln, they proceeded to roam through the city’s streets, attacking and burning houses and workshops belonging to traders from Flanders, Italy, France and the Baltic. An attempt to placate the mob by Thomas More, then one of two undersheriffs in the city, was unsuccessful. It was only when soldiers were deployed that order was restored and the rioting came to an end in the early hours of the following morning.

Several hundred prisoners were taken. The wheels of what was seen as justice turned more swiftly in the sixteenth century than later. Thirteen rioters were convicted of treason and executed on 4 May. Three days later, John Lincoln was hanged, drawn and quartered.

Other prisoners were brought before the king, Henry VIII, at Westminster Hall where Catherine of Aragon and Thomas Wolsey successfully pleaded for mercy for them. Henry granted them their lives whereupon, according to a contemporary account, they ‘took the halters from their necks and danced and sang’.

The Lincolnshire Rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace 1536

Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the dissolution of the lesser monasteries and the policies of Thomas Cromwell were by no means universally popular. In certain areas of the country, particularly the north of England and the West Country, they were often deeply resented.

The foundations of people’s centuries-old religious beliefs were being slowly undermined; buildings that had been integral parts of the landscape and local life were being demolished. These factors combined with other economic and political grievances to drive rebellion.

Lincolnshire was one of the counties in which feelings against the religious reforms ran highest and it was there that the first stirrings of revolt took place. In Louth, on 1 October 1536, the vicar, Thomas Kendall, gave a sermon in St James Church, attacking the new religion propounded by the king and his ministers. Kendall also poured scorn on Cromwell’s commissioners who were in Lincolnshire at the time, assessing its wealth and confiscating the assets of many of its churches and religious foundations. Nicholas Melton, a shoemaker known as ‘Captain Cobbler’ and a close associate of Kendall, became the leader of the rising which rapidly spread to neighbouring Lincolnshire towns such as Caistor and Market Rasen. A mob of many thousands then marched on Lincoln where they occupied the cathedral and, for a few heady days, controlled the city. It could not last. With Henry threatening dire consequences if it did and troops under the command of the Duke of Suffolk already en route to suppress it, the rebels began to drift away. By the middle of the month, most of them had left Lincoln. Kendall and Captain Cobbler were both captured and executed at Tyburn.

In some ways, the Lincolnshire Rising can be seen as a prelude to the main drama of the Pilgrimage of Grace which unfolded not only in parallel with it, but throughout the rest of 1536 and into the following year. The leader of this second movement was Robert Aske, born around 1500 into a notable Yorkshire family from the East Riding village of Aughton. A lawyer and devout Catholic, he was horrified by Henry VIII’s religious reforms, objecting strongly to the closure of monasteries and other religious establishments, but he might not have acted as he did had he not been caught up in the events of the Lincolnshire Rising. Initially held almost as a prisoner by the rebels after he encountered them while travelling from Yorkshire to London on 4October, he soon committed himself to the insurgency. He it was who came up with the oath that all the Pilgrims were asked to swear: ‘And that ye shall not come into our pilgrimage for no particular profit to your self nor to do any displeasure to any private person but by counsel of the commonwealth nor slay nor murder for no envy but in your hearts put away all fear and dread and take afore you the Cross of Christ and in your hearts His faith, the restitution of the church, the suppression of these heretics and their opinions by all the holy contents of this Book.’

Various bands of rebels came together under Aske’s leadership and, on 16October, his army of followers entered York. Three religious houses there which had been suppressed were restored and the Pilgrimage moved on to Pontefract where the elderly commander, Lord Thomas Darcy, was sheltering the Archbishop of York and a number of local gentlemen loyal to the king. Darcy had already written to Henry, informing him that, ‘there was not one gun in Pontefract Castle ready to shoot. There is no powder, arrows and bows are few and bad, money and gunners none, the well, the bridge, houses of office etc for defence, much out of frame.’ The castle was duly taken by Aske’s men on 20 October.