Subjects
Commotion Time: The English Risings of 1549
Amanda Jones
Political and Popular Culture in the Early Modern Period
978 1 85196 943 2: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 575 5
In July and August 1549, rebels gathered in camps across twenty-five English counties, stretching from Yorkshire to Cornwall. They produced sixteen petitions expressing a variety of discontents. The geographical scale of the disorder across England eventually led to Protector Somerset’s fall.
Kett’s Rebellion in East Anglia and the South-Western Rebellion have traditionally been treated as isolated episodes. The former was concerned primarily with the enclosure of common grazings, and the latter with the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer to the Church of England’s liturgy. However, Jones shows how these rebellions were part of a broader movement, also comprising lesser revolts in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Contemporaries called this the ‘commotion time’.
Jones contextualises local uprisings within an overarching pattern of protest. This continuum model of disorder allows a comparative approach to different geographical areas, and demonstrates the longer-term consequences of the events of 1549 for the development of the Tudor state.
Readership
Early Modern Studies, History of Popular Politics, Historical Geography
Contents
Chapter 1: Kett’s Rebellion and the South-Western Rebellion: Paradigms of Protest?
Chapter 2: The Nature, Scale and Experience of Rebellion in 1549
Chapter 3: Prologue: ‘Insurrection for the Comens’ at Northaw, Hertfordshire, 1548
Chapter 4: ‘A General Plage of Rebelling’: the Stirs in the South
Chapter 5: The ‘Rebellion of Comenwelthe’ in the East
Chapter 6: ‘By Instigacion of Sundery Preists for These Matyers of Religion’?: The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Rising
Chapter 7: ‘All the Parts Near London’
Chapter 8: ‘A Wonderfull Hate Against Gentilmen’: The Midlands and the North
Chapter 9: Toward a Typology of Revolt for 1549
Chapter 10: Epilogue: Aftermaths