The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England

Andy Wood0521832063, 9780521832069

This is a major study of the 1549 rebellions, the largest and most important risings in Tudor England. Based upon extensive archival evidence, the book sheds fresh light on the causes, course and long-term consequences of the insurrections. Andy Wood focuses on key themes in the social history of politics, concerning the end of medieval popular rebellion; the Reformation and popular politics; popular political language; early modern state formation; speech, silence and social relations; and social memory and the historical representation of the rebellions. He examines the long-term significance of the rebellions for the development of English society, arguing that the rebellions represent an important moment of discontinuity between the late medieval and the early modern periods. This compelling history of Tudor politics from the bottom up will be essential reading for late medieval and early modern historians as well as early modern literary critics.

---

Table of contents :
Cover……Page 1
Half-title……Page 3
Series-title……Page 4
Title……Page 5
Copyright……Page 6
Contents……Page 9
Acknowledgements……Page 10
Abbreviations……Page 12
Preface……Page 15
I 1549: The last medieval popular rebellions……Page 23
II Social conflict and the origins of capitalism in mid-Tudor England……Page 33
Part I Context……Page 41
I ‘Commyns is become a king’: legitimation crisis in mid-Tudor England……Page 43
II Policy and ideology under the Duke of Somerset’s Protectorate……Page 52
III The origins of the commotion time: the disturbances of 1548 and the Western rising of 1549……Page 62
IV The commotion time……Page 69
V Bondmen made free: the risings in East Anglia……Page 77
I Cleansing the body politic……Page 92
II Resistance and popular conspiracy, 1549–1553……Page 99
III The intermingling of elite and popular politics: October 1549 and July 1553……Page 105
Part II Political language……Page 111
I Speaking for the commons in Tudor England……Page 113
II Speech, silence and social relations in early modern England……Page 130
III Speech acts, popular agency and social power……Page 144
IV Social solidarities and speech communities……Page 156
I Of commonwealths and commotioners……Page 165
II Ordering disorder: popular monarchism, and rebel attitudes to state formation……Page 173
III The spirit of the camping time: disorder, rebel divisions and class conflict……Page 186
IV The religious politics of the 1549 rebellions……Page 199
Part III Consequences……Page 207
I ‘Base excrements of the commonwealth’: social and cultural change in southern and eastern England……Page 209
II State formation, office-holding and the law……Page 217
III ‘Yf poore men rise and hold toguither’: changing patterns of social conflict in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries……Page 224
I ‘When we were yonder eating of mutton’: immediate recollections of the 1549 rebellions……Page 230
II ‘To see the thing in order’: imposing ideology on Kett’s rebellion……Page 238
III ‘Rebels, in hell, with Satan’: propaganda, patriarchy and persuasion……Page 243
IV ‘Soe many Cades and Ketts’: the invention of Kett’s rebellion……Page 249
V ‘The more was an hawlter’: remembering rebellion in early modern England……Page 263
VI Under another name: radicalism, socialism and the reinvention of Kett’s rebellion……Page 279
Essex Record Office, Chelmsford……Page 287
National Archives, Public Record Office, London……Page 288
Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge……Page 289
Editions of manuscripts and contemporary printed works and calendars……Page 290
Secondary works……Page 294
Unpublished dissertations……Page 305
Index……Page 306