PROTEST & PROGRESS - Peaceably if we May, Forcibly if we Must

From the perspective  of the 21st century, we have little remaining sense for just how ground breaking the upheaval of the British Industrial Revolution was. As the first Western country to become fully industrialised, people from other countries were flocking to visit Great Britain to observe for themselves, to learn of the latest innovations, see what was actually going on in its streets and market places.

Whenever you are the first to do anything, you are the one who makes the mistakes that others learn from. The ones you have to go back on later to correct. Things happen that you do not anticipate. It's you who encounters unexpected economic consequences. How do you respond to increased social tensions? What happens when your drive to modernise the economy, ignores the welfare of its own working class citizens? When riots or disease break out in the insanitary conditions of cheap urban slum housing? Britain was the first country that had to find answers to these questions. Essentially, how do you maintain social order in a rapidly developing technologically led economic boom? And the rule of the British Parliament at this time was definitely not fit for that purpose. It was basically a closed shop of privileged, extremely well off individuals, looking after their financial investments and property portfolios. Their responsibilities towards the social fabric and collective cohesion came very low down the list of its priorities.

Marx and Engels

Frederick Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842, sent by his family to work in the family mill there. This move had been designed to extract him from the political radicalism he'd become actively involved in back in Germany. Though Engels spent his days dutifully working in the family firm, in the evening, with the help of Mary Burns who knew the city well, he ventured out to investigate for himself how working class factory workers lived and survived in these newly urbanised conditions. What eventually resulted from these nocturnal adventures was a highly influential pamphlet - The Conditions of the Working Class in England. One of Engels newer politically radical friends, Karl Marx, inspired by this document, came to stay with him. And together they began formulating a more radical socialist alternative to the rampant capitalism they saw ruining and debasing working people's lives in Manchester. This project eventually produced the Communist manifesto.

The Luddite Riots in the early years of the nineteenth century, were notable because they were the first real sign of the working class protesting their dissatisfaction with the conditions of their new urban life. The industrialised northern towns were becoming the magnet for a wide range of radical political, economic and social theories. Ordinary working people were politicised on the streets by reading pamphlets and broadsheets, and hearing public talks, about these ideas. They were increasingly more prone to noisily demanding better work conditions, pay, and the right to vote. Manchester, became a particularly intense hot bed for a broad range of these radical campaigning groups, and politically out of the box thinking. The sort of ideas being proposed by Engels and Marx, would eagerly feed into this.  A new economic reality demanded a new politics, and a truly representative people's democracy lay at the centre of that.

In the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of 1818, voting and electoral reform continued being campaigned for. They initially held out a hope for the Reform Act of 1832, but this failed to extend voting rights. It was also followed by The Poor Law of 1834 which robbed the poor of the most basic access to financial support, and made the workhouse their only option if they fell on hard times. So in 1838 a new and more politically astute voting reform group was formed, The Chartist Movement. This very quickly became a huge nationwide campaigning organisation. Initially focusing on staging large and impressive mass protests in Salford, Birmingham, Glasgow and London.  

Chartist meeting Kennington Common 1848

They presented a petition to Parliament asking for universal (male) sufferage, the abolition of the property qualification for candidates, regularised elections every four years, equal sized constituencies, yearly Parliaments, MP's to be paid a statutory salary. These may sound perfectly reasonable to us today. But from 1838 to 1848 the Chartists presented three such petitions to Parliament to no discernable response from government. The Houses of Parliament in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth, was stuffed to the gills with nobility, landowners and businessmen. It was inherently corrupt and self serving. Getting this legislative assembly think in a visionary and democratic manner about its own electoral reform, was always going to be a tall order. 

Chartism's peaceful protest marches began to regularly get more out of hand. Frustrated fringe groups within it began to advocate taking more violent action. This appeared to play into the governments agenda to discredit Chartism and to ignore the eminently reasonable requests of its aims. After the 1848 petition failed to be adopted by Parliament for the third time, the whole Chartist Movement seemed to lose heart and slowly faded out of existence.

Manchester had always been the powerhouse stronghold of Chartism. Chartists there had successfully blocked some of the actions of the cities Tory dominated civic administration. Seen in retrospect, Chartism was in many ways the political precursor of the Labour Party. Many former Chartists did later become active socialists. Another legacy of Chartism was that it introduced and trained many ordinary working class people in how to be politically active and to campaign effectively for change. 

Though it did not appear to achieve it's stated aims within the ten or so years of its existence, all but one of its original proposals did eventually become law, the last being achieved in 1911. Parliament then and now, likes to think of itself as being the primary instigator of legislation, and does not wish to be seen being pushed or coerced into action by external protests or pressure from its own citizens. So once the Chartist Movement had dissolved, piecemeal legislation did begin to slowly appear, that were almost word for word what Chartism had demanded. Chartism's mass protests and strategy did succeed in changing the legislative mood within Parliament, leaving an abiding influence upon the future direction of electoral reform. It was the first modern movement to pioneer mass nationwide protests as a way to keep applying political pressure, for demanding social or political change, and this became the blueprint strategy for subsequent protest groups.

Next Episode - Fetter Not A Brother's Limbs

PROTEST & PROGRESS - Unsettling Revolutions

The Stuart dynasty ran out of legitimate Protestant monarchs, with the death of Queen Anne. Parliament pro-actively searched across Europe for likely candidates, settling on George the Elector of Hanover, whose mother Sophie was James 1st's granddaughter. The Act of Union in 1707 had inveigled Scotland of its sovereignty. So George 1st's controversial accession in 1714 provoked a series of Catholic Stuarts from 1715 to 1746 to return to claim the throne. Whipping up rebellion in Scotland against becoming the obedient lapdog of England. All these Jacobite rebellions ultimately failed. With the death, in 1788, of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart dynasty finally came to an end. The era of the newly concocted entity 'Great Britain' began.

Succession became the least of the Hanover dynasties challenges as the 18th century progressed. The imposition of a Stamp Tax upon tea imported by the British East India Company, proved a huge misjudgement. American colonists, fearing that Britain was about to unleash the depredations of the East India Company upon them. A company with a reputation for unprincipled and corrupt trading practices. Proud in their independent non-conformist origin, Americans were not going to accept being preyed upon or penalised in this way. A delivery of the equivalent today of a million pounds worth of Indian tea was thrown into Boston Harbour. In short order, such righteous indignation quickly accelerated into an all out revolutionary war. America declared its independence in 1776, and the ensuing seven years of war ended in an ignominious British defeat. By 1783, America was a nation permanently separated from the auspices of British control.

Six years later, revolution came closer to home, across the English Channel in France. Where economic and political crisis was tearing that country apart. As ever, it was the imposition of taxes upon its citizens by a high handed insensitive monarchy, that triggered the initial revolt, stirring demands for representative people's democracy. That this ended in the monarchy being sent to the guillotine, spread alarm across all the other monarchies of Europe. As France descended into anarchy, the government of privileged landowners and nobility that ran the recently launched capitalist economy of Great Britain, feared a copy cat revolution erupting here.

Back in the leafy green rural countryside of England, there were simmering resentments, but mostly of a different origin. A revolution was brewing, but a technological one. For many centuries England had a vibrant trading economy within Europe, mostly through the superiority of its wool and weaving industries. The working backbone of this industry depended upon a vast army of compliant peasant spinners and weavers working in there own small holdings, or doing piecework for local farmers. This was labour intensive, poorly paid, but nevertheless integral to the functioning of a local, and distinctly rural based economy.

In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, a machine that could spin multiple threads of yarn simultaneously. Vastly increasing production and reducing costs, this one single technological innovation had dramatic consequences. A huge increase in the production of spun yarn, led to increasing demand for any remaining 'common land' to be enclosed.  Enclosure of common land, as we have documented in earlier episodes in this series, had been a long running sore of discontent amongst rural peasantry. This process had, until now, been executed in an illegal ad-hoc way for centuries, as common land was stolen by powerful influential landowners simply performing a land grab. The difference in the eighteenth century, was that you could legally apply to Parliament to enclose the land. And, as Parliament was literally stuffed to the gills with self serving landowners, thousands of such appeals were easily granted over the 18th and 19th centuries. All in order to meet the burgeoning demand for more profitable grazing and arable land.

Besides technological there were procedural innovations like crop rotation systems. Further enabling enclosure, these processes revolutionised the efficiency of the wider arable agriculture economy. Putting additional economic pressures on rural peasant workers as they fought to keep their poorly paid jobs, in the face of a rapidly declining need for them as a workforce. What started as the 18th century Agricultural Revolution evolved into the 19th century Industrial Revolution. It then became easier to relocate the entire spinning and weaving industries into the innovative large manufacturing factories, based near or in towns. Where access to energy and transport was easier to obtain. And the poorly paid cheap labour would simply have to follow.

All of these 'revolutions' in agriculture and production led to the collapse of the rural economy in the late 18th century. Poor people gave up the fight over enclosures and left the countryside in huge numbers for the towns, simply in order to survive. In the early decades of the 19th century, these former rural farm workers were further disaffected by the conditions they found they were expected to work in, in these new factories. They formed themselves into gangs that went around destroying the spinning and weaving factories that had sprung up. The new machinery being literally smashed to bits or incinerated. Was this the begining of a similar revolution kicking off in England, to those in France?

These weaving machine wreckers were referred to as 'Luddites'. Used at the time and ever since as a pejorative term, for someone mindlessly destroying the machines of human progress. But that was far from the whole truth of the matter. A large section of society, the newly urbanised working class, were being routinely mistreated. Their former rural lives had already been ruined, their lifestyle destroyed by the juggernaut of technological progress rolling over them. The Luddite revolts were driven by a demand for their contemporary plight to be taken notice of. Truly atrocious working and living conditions, low poverty wages and the erosion of any skilled workmanship, was rife. Rather than being anti progress, they were anti the wilful degradation of their humanity in the pursuit of this progress. But the greedy desire for increased profit and efficiency in this newly industrialised capitalist economy, was not going to be so easily derailed.

It simply exacerbated centuries old inequalities, long held resentments over how ordinary working class people had no real say in what happened to them. Not allowed to vote, they found they had little option but to take to the streets in protest and these could easily tip over into violent affray. In the aftermath of the Luddite rebellions, a campaign for democratic representation did step up. An economic slump after the end of the Napoleonic war, the failure of the harvest in 1815, made worse by the Corn Laws artificially keeping the price of bread high, and anger over less than 2% of the population having the right to vote, lay festering at its core. A large rally was organised, attended by 60,000 people in Manchester, on St Peter's Field. Local authorities, nervous at such an unusually large number of protesters, sent in the military to break up what had actually been a largely peaceful gathering. In the ensuing panic, as soldiers charged through the crowd on horseback, their swords in their hands, eighteen people were killed and up to seven hundred injured. This was the infamous Peterloo Massacre.

This level of fatalities and the disproportionate nature of the response, caused a public outcry. Fearful of giving further credence, and hence purpose, to such large protests and rallies, the Tory government simply cracked down harder. Banning all unauthorised gatherings, plus manufacturing an alleged insurrection, in order to justify this suppression. Stoked up fears of revolution being on the edge of breaking out. The Peterloo Massacre was to become a truly potent symbol for the injustice and plight of ordinary peoples lives. It clearly highlighted what was truly rotten and morally indefensible in how the governing elites ran Great Britain. Voting reform slowly developed an inevitable momentum, that had its totemic beginnings in what happened in St Peter's Field, Manchester on the 16th August 1819.

The Next Episode - Peaceably if we May, Forcibly if we Must.

PROTEST & PROGRESS - Uncivil & Civil War

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it's the period before, during and after the Civil Wars.

The middling compromise that Elizabeth 1st's religious settlement of 1559 made, between old and new religious traditions, superficially stabilised the country. But that settlement entailed a huge degree of ostracizing of Catholics from high public office and influence. Anti-Catholic suspicion, derision and outright hatred, that still persists in the UK's collective psyche to this day, has its cultural foundations in this period. As her reign neared it's end, Catholic plots concerning Elizabeth's successor circled around Mary Queen of Scots, who, though deeply flawed as a monarch, was the best Catholic option available.  Eventually, with some ministerial pressure and her own reluctance overcome, Elizabeth removed the problem by executing her.

The only realistic claimant left was James 6th of Scotland, ironically Mary's estranged son, deliberately brought up to be a Protestant. Though she never clearly stated this preference, Elizabeth was canny enough to know full well that James was the obvious candidate. Her apparent dithering may simply have been tactical, to prevent any premature opposition to her successor developing.

An undertow of Catholic resistance, however, would quickly resurface in James 1st's reign, with the infamous plot to explode Parliament and kill King James. That the removal of Parliament was part of the objective, recognised how much the levers of power was shifting towards it. Increasingly split religiously between Catholic and Protestant sympathisers, Parliament was becoming noticeably less willing to genuflect to the kings will. James, though prone to paranoia, did at least manage to hold the ship of monarchy steady. On the succession in 1625 of his son Charles 1st, things took a rockier, more combative turn. Charles was flamboyant, an aesthete, married to a Catholic, he also took worryingly long trips to Catholic European countries, ostensibly to buy the latest fashions in baroque art. He was the last inflexible flush of a monarchy for whom the medieval concept of 'the divine right of kings', was an ardently held reality. That his wishes and demands should prevail over those of Parliament.

Parliament's religious and political divisiveness had its echoes across the country. The Protestant philosophy of 'salvation by faith alone' had introduced a new radical individualism into the country's religious practice. One which Elizabeth 1st's father Henry 8th, had himself demonstrated. Once you broke from adherence to Rome and the Pope, you could turn yourself into the leader of your own church or sect. 

One's faith was becoming increasingly a matter of personal choice, rather than requiring adherence to a collectively imposed belief system. And some truly radical sects were popping up all over the fertile soil of England's ferment. Charles's alleged Catholic sympathies served only to amplify a strong vein of 'republican' revolt amongst his own citizens, already opposed to the whole idea of a hereditary monarchy and ' Popery'. Disquiet undoubtedly was present, with a huge plethora of uncivil religious and political dissenting groups emerging before, during and after the Civil War's turmoil broke out. 

These groups further exemplify how political and religious allegiances were becoming inseparable, centering on ideas for how a new fairer more equitable society could be created. And if this was not to happen in England, from The Mayflower in 1620 onwards, these groups could emigrate, taking there religious convictions to America. Most dissenters had some religious theory or view point, which had specific political or social implications. Even the most basic list of them is long - Anabaptists, Baptists, Barrowists, Behemenists, Brownies, Diggers, Enthusiasts, Familists, Fifth Monarchists, Grindletonians, Levellers, Muggeltonians, Philodelphians, Puritans, Quakers, Ranters, Sabbatarians, Seekers, Socinians. Here are details of three, to give you a flavour of them.

The Levellers
Originally a term to describe rural peasants who levelled illegal enclosure walls and hedges.  The Levellers were a political movement active between the 1st and 2nd Civil Wars. Essentially campaigning for equality and widening the vote as a natural right, and electing a sovereign by popular vote. They were the first political dissenting group to disseminate their ideas through the distribution of pamphlets, petitions and soap box populism. Though their ideas were widely held within the New Model Army, they were very effectively sidelined by Parliament and Cromwell's Republic. 

The Diggers
Originally a disgruntled offspring from the above, who called themselves The True Levellers. They were more radical as an organisation, their political and religious philosophy would these days be called 'agrarian socialism'. Demanding common ownership of land and property in line with what was outlined in The Acts of the Apostles. They were non-conformists who wanted reform of the social order and created small communities based on egalitarian principles. They tried to re-establish farming on common land. This led to them being called 'diggers', and they were constantly being violently removed by local authorities and landowners.

The Grindletonians
Once you feel able to question the authority of the king, it becomes feasible to extend that questioning to all external authority, whether that be religious or political. The Grindletonians were a short lived phenomena in 17th Century England, exhibiting an extreme antinomian tendency. Emerging first in London in a sermon preached in 1627. The central belief of Grindletonian Familists, to give them their full name, was that salvation by faith and divine grace were one's sole binding moral authority, and no other law or power could take precedence over them.  Obedience to any common law, became dependent upon whether it conformed to your Christian belief or not. No other external authority would be recognised, whether that was King or Parliament. 

This tendency the Grindletonians represented was vehemently opposed, even by the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther. Their leadership came mostly from local clerics. So it was primarily an internal Church of England matter to police, and several vicars were hauled before church courts to answer for their antinomian sentiments, The last know English Grindletonian died in 1680.  Though this antinomian notion did spread, influencing other dissenting groups such as the Ranters and Quakers. The growth of Presbyterianism to America, means to this day it still manifests this antinomian tendency in Evangelical groups there.

Throw a defiant vain Catholic monarch into this simmering, growing pool of dissent and watch it transform rebellious uncivil behaviour into a civil war, and ultimately regicide. Even after two bouts of Civil War, nothing from a dissenting point of view was to them fully settled. Why accept a compromise when you could achieve a perfection unsullied by practicalities. Cromwell, may have started as a staunch Parliamentarian and anti monarchist, but soon found keeping the lid on a wide range of unreasonable demands from Protestant dissenters, was as much of an issue as containing Catholic and monarchist insurgency. His role as Protector of the Realm, soon became a king by another name, equally as ruthless, and ideologically proved to be more tyrannical. Though the Republic was short lived, it did firmly establish Parliament as the primary governing authority in England. When the monarchy was restored with Charles 2nd in 1660, this was came with Parliaments full approval. Though the Civil Wars were one long rebellious fight for this supremacy, there were a couple of other 17th century rebellions of significance.

THE WESTERN RISING 1627-1632
In the run up to the Civil Wars, the most significant rebellion was The Western Rising. This erupted across the West Country, spread sporadically east into the Midlands over a five year period. This was yet another protest about illegal enclosure, which arose from a different direction than before. Across England were numerous royal forests, such as the Forest of Dean. By adjusting the legal status of these royal forests as crown property, bits of them could now be sold off to the highest bidder. This was done to increase the royal coffers, to service Charles 1st's notably expensive tastes. Once this land was purchased by new owners they would enclose it, local rights would be removed, and access actively prohibited. These forest enclosures during the uprising were being regularly breached or dismantled, the age of defiant trespass of privately owned land had arrived. Local councils started to complain of the increased burden upon them, when an influx of impoverished peasantry moved into the wealthier towns and cities. Once again the consequences and effect on the poor of such egregious enclosure was never accounted for, at all. 

THE MONMOUTH REBELLION 1685
Primarily this rebellion, led by the Duke of Monmouth, one of Charles 2nd's bastard sons, was an attempt to overthrow James 2nd. A monarch who was crassly and openly exposing Catholic sympathies, barely twenty five years after the end of the Civil War. Underneath this challenge to the succession, were festering wounds and grievances from those wars still not fully healed to many people's minds. The Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, had been, for many Protestants, a gross betrayal of what the Civil War had supposedly been fought for. And now James 2nd was trying to reverse the Reformation and restore the primacy of the Pope too. Monmouth attempted to hitch his claim to the throne alongside these still simmering resentments. But despite pre-arranging a simultaneous rising in Scotland, and provocatively crowning himself in Taunton, the appetite for further conflict just was not there to be stoked. Monmouth failed to attract and build the sort of ardent following you would need to ensure a rebellion would succeed. 

Eventually on his defeat at The Battle of Sedgemoor on the 6th of July, he was captured and speedily executed a week later in the Tower of London. The battle had a huge rebel death toll of nearly 3,000, compared to the 27 royalists. James, nonetheless, set up The Bloody Assises, where Judge Jeffries tried and executed some of the remaining rebel leaders. Though mostly rebel sympathisers were sent to serve their sentence out working in England's relatively new colony of the West Indies. James clung on a further three years as monarch, vainly trying to restore Catholic fortunes in the face of widespread opposition. Only to be deposed by another cousin William Duke of Orange in 1688, in what became known as the Glorious Revolution. This anachronistically was neither glorious nor revolutionary, but merely a peaceful, cleanly executed transition of monarchical power, which Parliament had actively instigated. James's subsequent exile to Europe meant his Stuart descendents, fifty years later, would return to re-state their claim.

For all the upheaval, huge loss of life and political turbulence that broke out in the middle decades of Seventeenth Century England, very little was actually achieved beyond the execution of a king and establishing the primacy of Parliament. You might say social mobility improved, but then it had been doing so for at least two centuries already. Little of direct benefit to the everyday lives of ordinary lower class English citizens was felt. Parliament may have become stronger as an executive, but it still only represented the nobility and politically wealthy landowning elites. The Restoration of the monarchy appeared to return England to business as usual, as though the Civil Wars and The Republic, were an aberration that had never really happened. 

The protests and rebellions over the next few centuries became multi faceted ones, fighting cronyism, corruption, that old nemesis the enclosures, technological revolutions, and the expansion of Parliamentary representation. These were to be long hard fought for battles, and you could argue, ones that still have some road left to be travelled, even today. When democracy itself appears to have forgotten why and how it came into being in the first place.

Next Episode - Unsettling Revolutions 

PROTEST & PROGRESS - Kett's Rebellion

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it's the Kett's Rebellion.

1549 - THE KETT'S REBELLION
Once the dissolution of the monasteries finally concluded in 1541, the question was, what happens to the vast landholding, the estates of these institutions? Henry 8th required cash more than land. He used former monastic land as capital to pay for his extravagances and palace building, but also as bribery to secure the allegiance of the nobility. There was a form of competitive tendering going on between landowners to obtain the prime richest most fertile bits of monastic farmland. This legitimised land grab took place right across the country. Illegal enclosure of common pasture had been going on for centuries, slowly nibbling away at its edges, undermining the very principle of commonly held pasture. And though officially such enclosures were illegal, unofficially a blind eye was taken towards them. Particular by those who made the law and it's enforcement, who were often the chief infringers of it. After a few years, who would remember it was once land set aside for peasants to graze their animals on?

East Anglia had still not reached the peak of its wool and weaving boom, that had turned it into one of the richest counties in England. Post the dissolution illegal enclosures were rife here. Agriculture which had been such an integral part of those institutions economic support system, was now in crisis. Without common land peasants had no where else to graze their livestock on. Large landowners forced tenant farmers off their land in order to incorporate it into their ever enlarging estates. Converting arable pasture into land suitable for raising sheep on, which was an incredibly profitable move. The whole 'wool' economy was now in danger of over heating, inflation and unemployment were rising, just as real wages were plummeting. With these sort of economic conditions a revolt of some sort was inevitable.

Tempers frayed and broke first in Wymondham in July 1549. In the previous month the lord of the manor in near by Attenborough has suddenly erected fences around common pasture land. These had angrily been torn down by local peasantry. Convinced they were acting within the law, because Edmund Seymour, The Lord Protector of the child King Edward 6th, had recently issued a proclamation declaring the illegality of such enclosures. After holding a celebration in what remained of monastic Wymondham Abbey, they marched over to two nearby villages, intent on removing fencing around common pasture, erected by Sir John Flowerdew, who'd overseen the dissolution at Wymondham. Showing a degree of malevolent cunning, Flowerdew bribed these rioters to go and attack his neighbour Robert Kett's enclosed land, and to leave his alone.

Robert Kett was fifty seven, a man from an old Wymondham farming family. He had been central in the saving of the Abbey Church for use by the town, which had put him in direct conflict with Sir John Flowerdew. To his credit, he recognised the grievances the rebels expressed, joined them and tore down his own fences and those of Flowerdew. Once Kett launched himself into full support of the rebellion, other villages and towns did likewise. They headed in ever great numbers towards Mousehold Heath, that looks down on the River Wensum and the City of Norwich. For the next six weeks the camp on the heath continued growing in size. Forming its own rudimentary council to run the camp and the campaign, beneath what came to be called Kett's Oak of Reformation. 

Here they drew up a petition to deliver to the Protector Somerset, outlining twenty nine demands. Only one of those specifically related to the enclosure of common land. But most of the others were a mixture of semi- related concerns - limiting the interference of the gentry, particularly in relation to the villages, restraining the pace of change, the over exploiting of communal land and resources, reshaping the values of the clergy, a rent reduction and punishing corrupt officials. All the while fences across East Anglia around enclosures were being riotously dismantled. Eventually the rebels moved to take control of Norwich itself. This was the point when armed regiments began to arrive in ever increasing force, to free the city from rebel capture. A battle outside the city walls in August 1549, brought the rebellion to a brutal end. Huge numbers of rebels were hung from an entrance gate to the city.  Kett was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, eventually to return to be hung from the walls of Norwich Castle in December, as an exemplary warning.

Initially the King's ministers made a great deal of negative propaganda out of 'the sins' of this rebellion. But over the subsequent centuries what Kett achieved during this rebellion transformed him into a folk hero. The level of organised opposition to the status quo, is what is most exemplary here. Rebels basically set up their own alternative ruling jurisdiction, with its own codes of behaviour. Nothing like this had been seen before in popular rebellions, which is why the authorities became so rattled. They did nothing to meet or appease the rebel demands, but came down hard upon them. 

What this rebellion demonstrated was that the English countryside was in the midst of huge social changes, after the monasteries were destroyed. All they we're really asking for was for these upheavals to be managed better, the land grab to stop, and the needs of the common people to be taken into account. The entire way society was run needed urgent social, economic and religious reform. Kett's Rebellion was the first indication that the emerging Protestant religious reformation and more radical political ideologies were in the early stages of becoming entwined.

Next Episode - Uncivil & Civil War

PROTEST & PROGRESS - The Pilgrimage of Grace

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it's The Pilgrimage of Grace.

1536 - THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE

For the first twenty years of Henry 8th's reign he was the handsome youthful monarch who charmed his subjects. Though undoubtedly a cultured man, he ebulliently overindulged his extravagant tastes. His desire to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boylen entailed a split with Rome. His ambitions in France led to expensive wars which got him no where. The state of royal finances plummeted, and the country began to look on him less favourably. What turned all these factors into a people's rebellion was the dissolution of the monasteries. 

It's hard for us, in our more secular times, to realise quite what an upheaval to the social fabric of 16th century England the dissolution was. Though the people had their issues with the way the monasteries behaved in relation to the local economy, these were institutions deeply embedded in their spiritual and economic lives. Monasteries provided social support through distributing alms, it's infirmary dispensed medicines and cared for the sick, besides generally ministering to the spiritual needs of the local area. The economy of a village or town undoubtedly thrived through supplying monasteries with goods, and bought bread and ale from them in return. Monasteries often became the site for a local weekly market, usually in its outer courtyard. The dissolution happened incredibly swiftly, within the space of roughly five years all of the monasteries were brought into the state of being ruins. Some buildings were converted into barns, parish churches or cathedrals. It was as though a wrecking ball had been swung through the heart of English society and it's religious culture smashed.

The rebellion,The Pilgrimage of Grace, had hence a multiplicity of economic causes, aggravated by the removal of monasteries from the local economy, without a thought for what the knock on consequences of that would be. The Pilgrimage of Grace became widespread with a rag bag alliance of grievances riding under one spiritual banner. It tapped into a huge amount of suppressed discontent in the country. Thomas Cromwell, as the designer of the dissolution, was the focus of it's ire. But let's be clear here, Henry was no longer that popular, nor held in high esteem by his people. His divorce was widely disapproved of, as was the split with Rome. He was becoming increasingly tyrannical, so it maybe not be deference, but more likely fear that made the rebels resist openly criticising him. 

What had started as a little local difficulty in Lincolnshire, easily suppressed in the October, then broke out in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Northumberland and Durham. Robert Aske a London lawyer from North Yorkshire was chosen to bring leadership to the incipient rebellion. Under his guidance 9,000 rebels marched south and occupied York with relative ease. By the time they'd reached Doncaster the number of rebels was approximately 40,000. This was by far the largest rebellion of the Tudor era. The Duke of Norfolk and Earl of Shrewsbury were despatched to negotiate at Pontefract Castle. Aske helped the rebels compose their requests to the King. A document called 'The Commons Petition'. This contained twenty four demands, and was given to the Duke of Norfolk in December 1536.

It's estimated Norfolk and Shrewsbury's forces together totaled 12,000 men, so with a growing rebel force three times that, they faced being massacred if they were to try suppressing the rebellion. Norfolk attempted to placate the rebels by disingenuously stating the petition would be presented to the King, that there would be a general pardon, and the monastery closures would be halted til Parliament had met to discuss them. With these promises Aske was persuaded to disband the rebellion. Sir Francis Bigod, rightly as it turned out, was not convinced the King would honour Norfolk's promises. Without taking Aske's advice, he led his own minor rebellion in February 1537. This was the opportunity that Norfolk was looking for, brutally suppressing Bigod's rebellion, arresting both him and Robert Aske. Aske was hanged in chains in York. Bigod was hanged at Tyburn in London. A total of 216 rebel activists were executed, many if them nobility. Martial law was imposed across all the regions that had partaken in the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Historians argue about to what degree this was a popular revolt arising out of a genuine disquiet, and how much the involvement of significant nobility gave it more credence and hence popular backing from the common people. I would say choosing Robert Aske, a lawyer, to lead them had significance in this regard. That he was able to help in the formulating of 'The Commons Petition' a properly drawn up document from the people to their King, presenting their demands. It was more likely that Catholic minded nobility were piggy backing on the people's revolt. The more they were seen as instigating the people to rebel, the worse it would be for them. The rebels saw themselves as The Commons, the common people, with a common land, and a common faith, as a remnant of the medieval Catholic society that they saw the dissolution as casually defenestrating  A petition from common people to their King, was the only way  to present their views. 

Sure, this was not the first time rebels had proffered a petition to a King, but there was something distinctly intentional and formal about how this one was being presented as coming from 'the Commons'. What we see in the Pilgrimage of Grace, is that this was not primarily a revolt over unfair taxes, but the beginnings of common people demanding their views be heard and taken into account in how society developed. After all, their lives and belief system had been completely upended, with no thought given to their feelings, wishes or the effect upon their lives.The disquiet here in 1536 amongst ordinary common people, only becomes more frustrated, intemperate and demanding over the next century.

Next episode - 1549 The Kett's Rebellion 

PROTEST & PROGRESS - The Cade & Cornish Rebellions

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it's The Cade's & Cornish Rebellions.

1450 CADE'S REBELLION 

Was Jack Cade his real name?, this is hard to ascertain. He was also referred to as Mortimer, with the swashbuckling nickname of - The Captain of Kent. It was common place for rebel leaders to use an alias. It created a useful anonymity. An elusiveness over who you really were, when the authorities were trying to capture and charge you. Cade became the figurehead of one of the largest rebellions in 15th century England. This rebellion has very self conscious echoes of the Peasants Revolt, nearly eighty years previous.

The Peasants Revolt had moved from living memory, into being an exemplary folk tale. This informed the rebellion about to arise. And where did it arise? In the self same south east of England, as did the Peasants Revolt. And from there too they marched on London, with a series of demands. There were grievances over local corruption, but quickly they began to see their local situation was a symptom of much larger maladministration and corruption coming from the king's ministers. They wanted reform of that administration and the removal of the 'traitors' as they called them. Also the exorbitant cost of that seemingly endless Hundred Years War with France, an aggregating factor in the Peasants Revolt, was still disrupting the economy and increasing the tax burden upon the people.

Rebellion broke out in April, and ran on into the early summer. Once the rebels reached London, Cade's disciplined control over them slipped, and widespread looting broke out. So, rather than garnering the support of Londoners to their cause, they aroused their wrath instead. Londoners quickly formed a militia that cleared the rebel army out, decimating their numbers in a horrendous blood bath at London Bridge. Cade was caught, but died before he could be brought to trial. Popular unease with the nobilities manner of administering the country, made the rebellion feel a precursor to the War of the Roses, which broke out five years later.

1497 THE FIRST CORNISH REBELLION

The War of the Roses ended in 1487, after which medieval Plantagenet England came to an close. A feeling that the economy and in the country, was that England was overdue a period of financial stability, after over a century of wars and perpetually stretched expenditure. Henry 7th, though of royal descent, was of an extremely weak line in terms of right of succession. With years of turbulence between two royal houses fighting over prevalence, Henry needed to avoid causing unnecessary dissent, lest the whole question of his own legitimacy kicked in. Within a year of ascending the throne he'd already had to crush the rebellion of Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne, who is said he was a surviving son of Edward 4th. Having successfully stifled that challenge , Henry adopted a steady safe pare of hands approach. Which appeared to become financially more tight fisted as his reign progressed

However, in 1497, their two Cornish Rebellions broke out, which did exactly what he had most feared. It all started, as ever, over taxes, this time on tin mining. There were privileges and exemptions with regard to tax, that had been granted by Edward 1st to tin mines. Henry wanted to scrap these, a d when he encountering opposition  decided to suspend tin mining licenses indefinitely. This was a serious misjudgment on Henry's part. Tin mining was a major engine of the Cornish economy, and had been so for several centuries. At the same time, there was an increased threat of invasion from Scotland and there was the recent arrival of Perkin Warbeck, yet another pretender to the royal throne. Suddenly Henry needed to mobilise troops in three directions at once. This required money. The double whammy of the suspension of tin mining, plus war loans, taxes and levies, tipped Cornish men from disgruntled into outright revolt.

An army of around 15,000 left Devon, progressed quickly through Somerset and onwards in the direction of London. Henry's attention, primarily focused on preparing for conflict with Scotland, suddenly had to change tack, and deal with this rebellion moving at pace from the southwest. Skirting around London the rebels headed towards Blackheath, where they expected a rebel contingent from Kent to join them. The men of Kent did arrive, but to oppose, not to join them. With the King at their head they vastly outnumbered the rebels. The ensuing battle was a rout in which the rebel leadership were captured. Though a he'd defeated the Cornishmen, this was not enough for Henry. His vindictiveness revealed itself, through not lifting his prohibitions on tin mining for a further eleven years.

A drawing allegedly of Perkin Warbeck

1497  THE SECOND CORNISH REBELLION

This echoed the first rebellion, later that same year. Perkin Warbeck observed the dissent in Cornwall and thought it an ideal base from which to stake his claim to the throne and march on London. He arrived by boat in September. Taking a populist tack. He declared he'd remove all the offending extortionate taxes. Unsurprisingly, he was made very welcome in Cornwall, quickly garnering the backing of local aristocracy and surviving rebels. A Cornish rebel army numbering 6,000 men mustered in Taunton, Henry's response this time was swifter. Sending his chief General Lord Daubeney to staunch the rebellion. Warbeck panicked and found himself arrested, taken to the Tower and quickly hung at Tyburn. Henry arrived in Taunton in time to accept the rebels surrender. They were either executed or compelled to pay cripplingly heavy fines.

All these rebellions seem similar in nature, modelling themselves on the Peasants Revolt template. Always the usual mixture of unfair practices, unpopular wars and extortionate tax regimes. The rebels tended to blamed the corruption on the people around the king, not the king himself. No one risked open criticism of the monarch, nor called for Henry's removal. That would be treasonous and lead to certain death. Perkin Warbeck, however falsely, presented himself as a claimant to the crown. A direct attack on Tudor legitimacy. Once a monarchs divine right to rule becomes questionable, then rebels diplomatically avoiding criticising the king would become a less respected position. And the issue of legitimacy and succession would become the Tudor's neurotic preoccupation for the next century.

As we move into the 16th century, a whole smorgasboard of treachery, rightful succession, religious disputes, wars, taxes and criticism of the monarch, all became easier to hear sotto voce in the backstreets of England - with the arrival of the printing press.

Next Episode - 1536 The Pilgrimage of Grace

THE PAST IN RUINS - Blakeney Guildhall

English Heritage themselves seem unsure about this ruin. What exactly are the origins of it? They call it a 'guildhall', but does this create a mistaken impression that as a building it was much more important than is perhaps appropriate. This could easily be a simple undercroft of a merchants house or a monastic Cellarers Chequer of some kind? The history hasn't really give you an awful lot to go on. 

The Guildhall is sited to one side of Mariner's Hill. a large man made mound, which has served as both a look out and a beacon point for guiding ships into the harbour.  The mound itself is a bit of a local curio, with an unclear sense of when it was constructed. That the 'guildhall' cuts into the side of it might indicate that the hill predates it. And stylistically the building is 15th century. A few hundred yards further to the left is the entrance to the former site of a Carmelite Friary. 

For what was, and still is, a gaggle of small former fisherman's cottages around a narrow tidal port, the 'guildhall' is probably it's most significant surviving medieval construction after the parish church. Tucked behind one of the main streets in Blakeney. The English Heritage signpost directing you to it, was so rusted it's given up it's post. The building hasn't been open to the public on a daily basis since COVID. It is an overlooked and slightly dingy looking building from the outside. Though in 2026, it appears to be regularly accessible again.

You enter down some rough steps, relatively short but steep. You can see, once you are in, that though this is poorly lit, it is a quite impressively built crypt like building. This wasn't knocked up carelessly. It would have been relatively expensive to have constructed, beneath what must have been a substantial building above it. There are indicators in the walls of entrances, staircases and blocked up windows. The floor has been roughly paved with flint and brick cobbles, but a lot of it is compacted with dirt these days. The columns are very typical of the late medieval, octagonal in profile, branching out into simple, but elegant brick arches and transcepts. 

The question that really comes to mind is, did Blakeney really need a 'guidhall '?  You certainly see them in the much larger towns like Kings Lynn and Norwich. I know the North Norfolk coast was once a much more thriving sequence of competing shipping havens in medieval times. Cley just up the road, was by far the wealthier and busiest harbour on this length of coastline. They never had a 'guildhall', which makes the attribution of 'guildhall' to Blakeney somewhat questionable. 

It has traditionally been referred to as a 'guildhall', but that may be a local pretension, or for want of a better term. The strongesr suggestions are that this was originally built in the late 14th century simply as a wealthy local merchant's house. What is certain is that that house by the 15th century thebuilding had been adopted by a local group of Fish Merchants, not a 'guild' as such, but this might explain the 'guild' association. This undercroft was perhaps only ever used as a place for the storage of grain, fish and cloth. The living spaces up above, because they were not needed have not survived. That the undercroft has remained intact may be a testament to its continued usefulness as a place of storage over the past centuries. The building is an interesting anomaly none the less.

PROTEST & PROGRESS - The Peasant's Revolt

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it's The Peasant's Revolt.

1381 - THE PEASANT'S REBELLION

You would not want to have been born into the 14th century. A century where The Great Famine was followed by The Black Plague, and it's estimated half the population of Europe died. If you survived through all of that you were either extraordinarily lucky, a wealthy recluse, or both. The consequences of these disasters upon social cohesion, was devastating. The feudal traditions of deference, the economic contract and hierarchy between lord and peasant, neared the point of collapse. 

For those who survived there were certainly increased opportunities. The pool of skilled workers was much reduced, this meant those with a trade could name the price for employing them. People found they were able to improve their status in life, through their own efforts. The wool and weaving trade in England was in the middle of a huge boom, and a new bourgeois merchant middle class arose. The beginnings of what was to become The Renaissance started at this time. So on the surface at least, Europe and England were on the way to bouncing back better.

However, the aristocracy, monarchy and religious institutions, behaved as if these social changes were immoral, needing to be halted and reversed. They introduced a cap on wage rises, and brought in sumptuary laws to prevent people from lower classes, however rich they were, from buying certain types of goods. Rural workers began exercising their new found economic power by banding together and refusing to do work at their lords bidding. Riots broke out in Bury St Edmunds and Norwich, over the high handed and exploitative nature of the monasteries in their local economy. Hiking up the price of tithes, and land rents. Strips of land that peasants had once farmed, if the family had died out, were often embezzled by other landowners and enclosed into much larger field systems. Some peasants, now without a means to support themselves, were forced into vagrancy. Vagrancy was then criminalised. If you were poor, you really could not win. The cost of the Hundred Years War with France rattled on, and pressure from increasing taxes made the people resentful. Not to mention the cost of living itself constantly rising. England was a tinderbox primed to explode.

What triggered the revolt was high-handed tax collecting. The king had introduced a poll tax, and one man John Bampton was employed to collect unpaid arrears in Essex. A revolt broke out, quickly spreading throughout the south east of England. They burnt county records and set people free from prisons. Wat Tyler decided to lead a contingent of rebels, that gathered ever more people as they marched towards London. They had a number of clear requests - they wanted the taxes upon them reduced, the end of serfdom, and the removal of the King's senior officials and the law courts.

On reaching Blackheath, they were met by royal officials aiming to persuade them to return home. This failed. The protest progressed through the city, destroying palaces, law books, buildings in the Temple and killing any royal officials they by chance encountered. The next day, the fourteen year old King Richard met the rebels at Mile End agreeing to all their demands. This only momentarily placated the peasants, who continued on their path of wanton destruction, taking the Tower of London. So the kings agreement of the previous day, was definitely off. Two days later a militia captured Wat Tyler and other rebel leaders, killing them all. By then the revolt was spreading into East Anglia, the Midlands and North as far as York. What followed was a swift and brutal suppression across the entire country to extinguish any remaining fires of revolt.

On the surface The Peasant's Revolt, achieved none of its stated aims. But what it did do was exemplify to ordinary people the power of collective protest. Also, it gave them a sense for how near traditional economic and social hierarchies were to collapsing. Social class began to feel it was not so rigidly fixed as previously. Deference towards nobility could no longer be assumed. This was of deep concern to the institutions of the establishment. There were now consequences for taking the compliance of their citizens too much for granted. 

As is often the case when those in authority lose public credibility, they never capitulate fully, as this might look weak and set a dangerous precedence. So they do only the absolute minimum to save face. The whole idea of the poll tax was in effect unenforceable, so was quietly dropped. The unpopular expensive foreign war was scaled back momentarily. And whilst serfdom continued, it was actually already in decline, as a knock on consequence of severe famine and plague. By the 15th century serfdom had totally vanished.

For the ordinary folk of England, the Peasant's Revolt, in the future, became the role model for what power, agency and acting collectively in great numbers, looked like. And increasingly over the next century they would return to flexing their right to protest in this way. To actively campaign for things to either cease, be restored or changed. Heads could now roll.

 Next Episode - The Cade's and Cornish Rebellions

PROTEST & PROGRESS - The Magna Carta

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it begins where else but with Magna Carta.

Imagine, you are the younger less handsome, less charismatic brother of the heroic crusader King Richard. You were his Regent. You kept the country running whilst Richard was off committing atrocities (with Papal sanction) in the Holy Land, chivalrously slaughtering Saracens. You can understand why John might have had a chip on his shoulder. 

Once he became King, did he feel unfairly maligned, undervalued, not respected or revered in quite the way his absentee brother had been? Richard was undoubtedly a hard act to follow. But, I mean, what had Richard actually done for his adopted country, except neglect it?  John, however, did appear to be cruel and brutal, with a perverse ability to make any bad situation worse, so his subjects actively feared and loathed him. The issues that really pissed off his barons, however, were very common ones in the history of English protest - war and taxation. 

Plantagenet Kings like Richard and John were not English, they were French. Who ruled at their peak half of France. For them England was an occupied territory, one that increasingly took time and energy away from their home country. Hence John found the need to fight wars in France to retain control of his home feifdom. But with each ensuing battle he was defeated in, he lost control of larger swathes of his territory. Wars were expensive to perpetrate, and royal coffers were emptying fast. So John had to raise finances through imposing taxation on the citizens of England. 

He was not the first king to find himself in this predicament. But in his case,John was losing a war quite shamefully, and would be further humiliated by having to pay his enemies compensation for it. Turning around and asking the citizens of England e.g his own barons, to stump up the cost. Well, this went down like a lead balloon. Had he won, perhaps they might have begrudgingly paid up. But there is nothing like abject failure in a war to foment dissent. The barons having had enough, rose up on mass and captured large areas of southern England, including London. King John was dragooned into signing the Magna Carta on the island of Runnymede. He may have been thinking of this purely as a tactical capitulation, to prevent the wider spread of civil unrest.

This was one hundred and forty nine years after the Norman Conquest. These plucky barons were two generations distant from being French migrants. So don't imagine they were Anglo Saxon Englishmen fighting for their ancestral rights. What they called 'their land' was stolen property, given to their families by William the Conqueror. But England was cash and land rich, that's why the Normans wanted it in the first place.

Charters similar to The Magna Carta were being signed all the time, in order to try establish in law firm legal precedence. The complete lack of a strong legislative making Parliament, made that virtually impossible in 13th century England. But let's be clear here, this charter was concocted entirely for the barons benefit and vested interests. Only by implication does this charter apply to every person in England. As it turned out. King John and the barons both reneged on it pretty quickly and conflict between the King and the barons erupted.

After John's death in 1216, Henry 3rd kept reissuing Magna Carta, using it to try and placate the baronial turbulence he'd inherited in 1216, 1217 and 1225. Under pressure he began to bequeath more power to Parliament. And his son Edward 1st reissued the charter again in 1297, but this time making sure it became Parliamentary statute law, with the intention of it forming the basic foundation for future national law. This was the point at which The Magna Carta began vaguely to resemble the proto-democratic document later generations would laud so highly.

As a piece of law making Magna Carta had a pretty shambolic progress towards enforcement. Only through historical retrospect, roughly from the 16th century onwards, through English Civil War Parliaments, to the Victorians desire to re-write English history with more noble people and principles actively present, has this document gained the significant reputation it now has.

Magna Carta demonstrates the morally compromised approach to law making in English history. Never start from establishing first principles, but give far too much consideration to the short term pressures and vested interests of an era, so end up doing only what could pragmatically be got away with?

However, given time, what this Protest established ( eventually) was the following, and because we once had an Empire these became established more widely in what were our former colonies.

No citizen is above the law, regardless of status.

Everyone has the right to a fair trial

No citizen should be arbitrarily stripped of their rights, without legal process.

No citizen should be taxed without prior Parliamentary agreement.

Judicial process should be impartial and not subject to bribery or corruption 

Any citizen can own and inherit property and not have it unjustly seized by another,

Religious institutions and practices should be free from royal or political interference.

To create the conditions for any change you first have to recognise the collective power that you possess. With Magna Carta the barons certainly grasped that. Over a hundred years later the peasantry of England were to learn what collective power they might have. And in the process encountered the duplicitous nature of the royal house of Plantagenet.

Next Episode - 1381 - The Peasants Revolt 

THE PAST IN RUINS - Creake Abbey

In 13th century Italy there arose a Christian mendicant movement which moved the hermetic and monastic lifestyle directly into engagement with the flourishing renaissance towns and cities. To minister more effectively to the spiritual needs of this growing population shift. It happened in a haphazard and something of a spontaneous way, their was no founding individual who led by example to pre-define its ethos and mission, And so in 1243 a group of Tuscan hermits petitioned Pope Innocent IV to unite them under one coherent organisation. To do so he issued a Papal Bull which instructed they all should adopt the Rule & Way of the Blessed Augustine. This Rule was the simplest and hence the easiest to adhere to amongst the challenging circumstances of lay people and monks closely interacting. The Augustinian Canons founded in the 11th century, consequentially became the umbrella organisation that these semi-monastic institutions became absorbed into. Ministering to the outside world being a central part of their religious duties. 

The progressive development of Creake Abbey does to a degree mirror these wider developments in religious context. A small chapel St Mary of the Marshes was built by the De Nerford family in 1206. The site by the small River Burn was later turned by them into a Hospital dedicated to St Bartholemew  in 1217. This was elevated by Henry III to a Priory in 1225 and to an Abbey in 1231  From relatively early on these institutions were run under the auspices of the Augustinian Canons. Patronage from local wealthy families such as the De Nerford's and from Henry III allowed them to rapidly expand  the abbey's buildings and hence the services it could offer to the local populace. Becoming a vibrant place for a local market distributing fruit, bread, ale, meat and fish to the surrounding area.

By its height in the 14th Century there was still only six full time canons, but these were augmented by many junior canons, novices and lay brethren who essentially formed the practical and administrative wing of the abbey. Unlike many other monastic sites in Norfolk, Creake Abbey continued with its original function as a hospital right up til 1397. Nearly a century later in 1484 there was a catastrophic fire in the Abbey itself. This appears to have completely destroyed the Abbey's nave and left its chancel and side chapels with blocked up windows and arches, in urgent need of repair. The abbot wrote to the king, Richard III asking for financial help in restoring the Abbey. Funds were provided by 1491 and repairs were said to be well advanced and the north side of the quire already completed twelve years later. The nave was completely abandoned as a inviable structure, so the restorations, such as they were, were focused on making the main chancel and side chapels usable spaces again. You can see that some arches have been infilled and windows inserted.

Then in 1506 further tragedy struck. There was an outbreak of the mysterious medieval 'sweating sickness' in the Abbey and this completely wiped out the remaining monastic community. No further push to restore the Abbey appears to have been attempted. And by the following year the abbey site and estates were handed over, as they were, to the Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother, and through her eventually became owned by Christ's College, Cambridge.

Its hard to imagine that all this was going on the periphery, of what is even now a small quiet Norfolk village. But one has to remember that barely a few miles down the road are the Burnham villages. All very closely knit with each other, with a Carmelite Friary in Burnham Norton. This corner of West Norfolk in medieval times was filled with devout religious activity, funded by the many considerably wealthy landowners of the area. Who assured there place in heaven via pious acts of patronage of religious institutions.

Creake Abbey is then quite an unusual monastic ruin, in that it was in ruins and dissolved decades before the Dissolution of the Monasteries began in 1536. Undoubtedly subsequently robbed of some of its dressed stone. It was adapted, as these ruins often were, into becoming barns for storing hay, farm produce, machinery and livestock. Other outbuildings being incorporated into an enlarged manor farm close by. What you see today, is what was left of the abbey church post those two ruinous historical events. With the nave already gone, and the chancel barely half repaired and all the local villages already having their own parish churches well established. There was no local desire to adapt the remaining buildings into a church, as at Binham or Weybourne Priory. It also maybe that locals thought the sacredness of this site was just too tainted by the double disasters that had befallen it. These were both in there own way seen as a sign of God's judgement upon it as an institution.

FEATURE - Oxborough Family Chapel

 

On a recent visit to Oxborough Hall, to see the snowdrops in the wooded dell there, we looked into the Family Chapel. This is not a property owned by the National Trust. The Bedingfield family who originally built the Hall have lived there five centuries. They were, and still are, Roman Catholics, and became reluctant recusants during the Reformation and beyond. Until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 began the reintroduction of Catholicism into British society. This brought about a huge surge of building of Catholic churches and cathedrals. 

In the 1830's, a good twenty years before Catholicism was completely restored, the Bedingfields began to extend and restore the house, with the help of Augustus Pugin, The family built themselves a new Roman Catholic Chapel ( not by Pugin ) where this rather glorious Antwerp triptych can be found. Assembled from various bits of 16th century Dutch carvings and paintings, it rather captivates the attention the moment you arrive. If you have never been to see Oxborough Hall then do, it is the most fabulously eccentric gothic pile in the Trust's possession. You could imagine Mervyn Peakes's Gormenghast taking place within its crenelated walls, grand tower and bailey with a surrounding picturesque moat.

ARTICLE - Moorland Methodism

My surname is Lumb, its a name with ancient origins. Probably first appearing historically in early medieval times. Though I imagine it could well go further back, before names were even set into their formulaic conjunctions. Surnames as we now  know them slowly established how they would be formed, around Anglo Saxon times. Based on parentage, an individual's skill, place of habitation, or the quality of landscape, these were intended as the primary building blocks of an individuals public identity. You came to be known through a group of associations, that told others something about you and your personal and ancestral origins. It's initial fluidity as an individual designation, gradually assumed a stabler structure carried down through the generations as the title for a specific family.

Lumb Bank

Lumb is a name not found much outside of the Pennine region between Lancashire and Yorkshire. There is even a village named Lumb on the borderlands of these two counties. Lumb has other surnames to which it is related, where the silent 'b' at the end has been completely lost. So you will also find Lumm, Lum. One particular variant - Lund, clearly reveals Lumb's linguistic origin as Scandinavian.  So whether Lumb or Lund, it is a word intimately associated with land. It contains within it a designation of a specific place. Lumb means a dwelling or dweller with a clearing by a pool or water source. Once upon a time an ancestor of mine took a piece of land, cleared it of trees and undergrowth with an aim to cultivate it. Its likely the surname Lumb is also linked to the word Lumber, as a term to denote fallen or felled trees. All this information is contained within one simple four letter surname, a word with origins in a time far beyond written history.

The Pennines as a landscape consists of craggy granite outcrops and coarse peaty moorland. Arable cultivation here would have been challenging, if not impossible. It's more likely my ancestor was clearing land in order to raise animals on it. All varieties of livestock, but mostly sheep and goats which coped better with the rugged terrain, the cold wind and torrential wet weather.

X is Uncle Brint taken in a workshop

My family inhabited the moorlands for centuries, either on a small holding or as farm workers. Only moving into the Pennine towns in the late 19th century. Within the living memory of my Father's generation, one wing of the Lumb family still lived on in one of the moorland villages. Everyone in the family referred to them as ' Uncle Brints lot' as though they were this entirely other species of Lumb. Which maybe indeed they were, an anachronistic remnant of a previous way of life. Brinton Lumb waa the brother of David Lumb, my Grandfather. The latter someone I never met because he died in his mid 50's before I was born.

Farm work could never be just the raising of sheep on the moorlands. It also meant butchering, selling meat and taking fleeces into the local market. And over the centuries they'd learned various bits of 'piece-work' - how to spin the wool into yarn, to dye and weave it into cloth, all done in house or within the village. A cottage weaving industry of this kind providing the only real possibility of gainful employment for women in the area. 

Halifax was the nearest large town to where my ancestors lived. In 1779 the town built a cloth hall, where all the local cloth makers, could bring their yarn or 'pieces' of cloth to sell to merchants. The Piece Hall, as it's now known, is a unique Grade 1 listed building. Much larger and unlike any other cloth hall in the West Riding. It is a vast classically colonnaded courtyard with small rooms on three levels that people could hire to trade from or trade too. 

The Piece Hall as it is now

As a building it represents the high point of sheep rearing and weaving in the Halifax District, and of the Agricultural Revolution itself. When new technology such as the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle loom arrived there had been local Luddite riots. Only wealthier farmers were able to afford to upgrade to these newer, faster machinery.  Setting up local weaving halls to make high quality woven fabric for half the cost and manufacturing time. With significantly less man power required. 

Depiction of a 'Luddite' riot

This revolution in the weaving industry however, would not stay in the hills. The next stage of mass manufacturing developed in the industrialised northern towns. This brought about the collapse of an already fragile rural economy. Hand woven cloth could never compete, so moorland women lost their livelihoods. Rearing sheep was not enough on its own to make a living out of.  Farmers lost both their land and workforce, as both automated weaving machines and people moved into the towns. A little over a century after it was built, with the rapid decline of small scale cloth making, the Piece Hall was convert into a wholesale vegetable and fruit market place

Halifax in the late 19th early 20th Century

So my family, as moorland dwellers, were not alone in eventually moving into Halifax to find employment. This migration from moor to town began in the 18th century. ending in a late flourish in the last decades of the 19th. This displacement either to a more hostile urban environment, or poverty and unemployment for those who stayed trying to find work in the moorland hills, had a huge consequence. Increased job insecurity, being matched by harsh alienating living conditions, brought on depressive states of mind. In turn this meant men in particular took to drinking, opioid use and gambling to excess, in order to cope, drown their sorrows, or to numb the psychological pain. Industrial towns and cities became synonymous with drug addled destitution and riotous debauchery. 

That non conformist chapels began to spring up all across the West Riding of Yorkshire from the mid 18th century onward is not coincidental. It was in response to the perceived spiritual needs of an increasingly lost and dissolute generation. Most Christian non conformist movements emerged into prominence in response to this economic and spiritual crisis. 

John Wesley Open Air Preaching

John Wesley came first to the West Riding, and Halifax in particular, around the same time as The Piece Hall opened, the late 1770's. No longer a young man, in his seventies, he nonetheless made repeated preaching tours across the West Riding, until his death in 1791. It would have been quite a feat for a man of his age, to travel around the Pennines, a frequently steep rugged and unforgiving terrain.  The 1780's to 90's were a time where Britain was unsettled by the possibility of the French Revolution spreading across the channel. The West Riding was considered one likely flare point for social unrest.

The Methodism he preached was initially met with suspicion and sometimes hostility. The speaking tours did, however, progress from being held in middle of the street to local homes and meeting halls. Eventually small Methodist chapels, built by local converts, began popping up across the West Riding 

Heptonstall Methodist Chapel up alongside the moors

His message, whilst always a biblically inflected one, also preached prohibitions, of taking personal control of the drug, drinking and gambling habits that were plaguing communities, large or small. That this chimed with the zeitgeist of its time is evident in the growing religious predominance of Methodism across the Pennine moorlands and industrial conurbations.

Both sides of my family were chapel going Methodists. It's hard to establish how far back the Lumb family and Methodism went. Probably much more than the three generations I know of. What is certain is that things generally changed slowly in the moor side hamlets and villages. So once you became a Methodist you generally would stay loyally Methodist.

West End Methodist Chapel that my family attended

When you moved from the moors to an industrialised town, you'd have to initially take work where ever you could. If you had weaving or dyeing skills you might have found it easier to get work in the weaving mills. Otherwise it would be whatever work you could find. If you had initiative you might be taken on as an apprentice to learn an entirely new trade. 

My Grandfather supported his wife and eight sons and daughters, through his trade as a specialist painter and decorator. Applying surface effects such as wood grain onto doors and Anaglypta. I imagine this would have required him to be taken on as an apprentice, in order to lean these skills of the trade. Because through this he would eventually be independent and self employed. 

This desire was informed by the Methodist ethos of self education and improvement, benefits requiring hard work and moral rectitude. Instilling an imperative to take the initiative, to control and drive your own future forward. The firm prohibitions of Methodism's earlier days mellowed over the centuries.The strength of the strictures on alcohol and gambling no longer required to be so severe. The gross consequences of the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution were becoming settled, more bedded in. People began to feel more accustomed to urban life and relatively affluent. Hence this more liberal and tolerant tone emerged, that instilled an 'everything in moderation' principle. 

That life principle and moral prohibitions were certainly still in the air of my parental home during my childhood. Plus a respect and tolerance for difference, another quality that is perhaps of more cutting edge importance when living in an urban context, than when subsisting in small close communities on a moorland edge. Methodist chapels in the Pennines are often simple solidly built, unfussy buildings. There is a part of me still that appreciates the pared back essentialism of a Zen Buddhist interior, because it bears echoes of the Methodist chapels of my youth. Another part reacts against it, by wanting its more extravagant catholic baroque opposite. I love bleak wild countryside, the moorland heaths of my childhood, which has echoes in the broad flat salt marshes of North Norfolk. All of these may be examples of ancestral flashbacks to a landscape and long forgotten lifestyle. One that my ancestors thrived in for countless generations. Until, of course, they no longer could.