Abstract
In the early summer of 1607, a large group of perhaps as many as a thousand men, women and children assembled at Newton (Northamptonshire) and began digging up hedges. The hedges surrounded enclosures recently put in place by the local landowner, Thomas Tresham of Newton, a cousin of the much more famous Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton. Arriving at Newton on 8 June, the deputy-lieutenant of Northamptonshire, Sir Edward Montagu, twice read out a royal proclamation demanding the rioters disperse. When they did not, their forces charged the crowd. After initially putting up fierce resistance, the crowd fled as the mounted horsemen charged for the second time. Forty to fifty of the rioters were killed in the field and many more captured, some of whom were later to be executed and have their mutilated bodies displayed at Northampton, Oundle and other local towns. The events at Newton were the culmination of more than a month of unrest in parts of Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire, much of it focused on the issue of agrarian change – specifically the enclosure of common field arable land and its conversion to sheep pasture – and recorded either in government papers and letters or in subsequent court cases, many of them pursued in the court of Star Chamber.
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- 1.
For a summary of the events at Newton, see Steve Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection in seventeenth-century England: Representations of the Midlands Rising of 1607’, History Workshop Journal 66 (2008), 21–61, especially 21–3. For events at Newton, John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of Leicestershire (London: 1795–1815), Vol. VI, part I, 83. For the places of execution, see The History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire. Compiled from the manuscript collections of the late learned antiquary, John Bridges, Esq. By the Rev. Peter Whalley (Oxford: 1791), Vol. II [not I as given in Martin], 206.
- 2.
John Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in Agrarian Development (Palgrave Macmillan: 1983), 161–215; Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Clarendon Press: 1988), 229–46; Steve Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection’. See also John Walter, ‘“The pooremans joy and the gentlemans plague”: a Lincolnshire libel and the politics of sedition in early modern England’, Past and Present 203 (2009), 29–67 on a libel sent in the aftermath of the Rising.
- 3.
Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection’, 23.
- 4.
Readers interested in this work might start with Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan: 2001); idem, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press: 2013); Nicola Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 (Oxford: 2009); Carl J. Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan: 2014); Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester University Press: 2015).
- 5.
Here the work of cultural geographers and anthropologists has been influential in our thinking: see, for example, Tim Ingold, ‘The temporality of the landscape’, World Archaeology 25.2 (1993) and The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (Routledge: 2000); Barbara Bender, Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Berg: 1993), and with Margot Winer (eds) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (Oxford: 2001); Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers of the California Landscape (Bloomsbury: 1996); Doreen Massey, For Space (Sage: 2005); Mitch Rose, ‘The Seductions of Resistance: power, politics, and a performative style of systems’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20.4 (2002), 383–400 and ‘Dwelling as marking and claiming’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012), 757–71.
- 6.
Andy Wood, The Memory of the People, 15.
- 7.
On our reading of landscape, see Briony McDonagh and Stephen Daniels, ‘Enclosure stories: narratives from Northamptonshire’, Cultural Geographies 19.1 (2012), 107–21.
- 8.
For discussions of the Midlands Rising and the commotion time of 1549, see Hindle ‘Imagining insurrection’, 23 and 25; Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 161; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press: 2007), 239. See also L. A. Parker, ‘The agrarian revolution at Cotesbach’, Leicestershire Archaeological Society XXIV (1949), 41–75 on the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century enclosures there which precipitated the Rising, though he says little about events of 1607 themselves; and Steve Hindle, ‘Self-image and public image in the career of a Jacobean magistrate: Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber’, in Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington (eds), Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter (Boydell and Brewer: 2017), 123–44, 128 on ‘simmering tension over common rights’ which existed at Chilvers Coton from the early 1590s.
- 9.
While the sizeable collections of Henrician and Stuart records are well catalogued, the Elizabethan records are not: there is no effective place, county or subject index for the estimated 38,000 documents in STAC 5 and the main catalogue and finding aids list cases by the surnames of the first plaintiff and defendant only.
- 10.
Eric Kerridge, ‘The Returns of the Inquisitions of Depopulation’, English Historical Review 70.125 (1955), 212–228; John Martin, ‘Enclosure and the Inquisitions of 1607: An examination of Dr. Kerridge’s article ‘The Returns of the Inquisitions of Depopulation”, Agricultural History Review 30.1 (1982), 41–8.
- 11.
Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 164. See too Manning, Village Revolts, 82 who argues that the incidence of enclosure riots almost doubled in the 1590s compared to the 1570s and 1580s. Note, however, that only three of his Elizabethan cases came from Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and the other East Midlands counties, once again underlining the need for more research on the Star Chamber records for those counties most affected in 1607.
- 12.
Briony McDonagh, ‘Making and breaking property: negotiating enclosure and common rights in sixteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal 76.1 (2013), 32–56.
- 13.
The National Archives [hereafter TNA], STAC 2/27/111 (Barnack); 2/23/34, 2/23/39, 2/28/111, 2/28/119 and 2/28/126 (Rushton); 2/17/396, 2/26/250, 2/26/359, 2/30/138 and 2/32/70 (Finedon); 2/19/160, 2/17/221 and 2/24/362 (Whitfield); 2/20/364, 2/20/357 (Cold Ashby); 2/23/29, 2/33/66 and 2/19/28 (Papley and Warmington).
- 14.
See, for example, TNA, STAC 2/7/4-14, 2/30/80 and 2/25/299 (Kingsthorpe and Moulton); McDonagh, ‘Making and breaking’, 16–19.
- 15.
TNA, STAC 5/K6/21, 5/K3/16, 5/C51/7, 5/B83/31 and 5/B70/40.
- 16.
TNA, STAC 5/B88/25.
- 17.
TNA, STAC 5/D23/23.
- 18.
TNA, STAC 5/J10/37. This is wrongly catalogued on Discovery as Jenkyns v. Brewer, 28 Eliz.
- 19.
TNA, STAC 5/H6/36, 5/H81/36, 5/H20/12 and 7/23/40 and 41; An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northamptonshire, Volume 6, Architectural Monuments in North Northamptonshire (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1984), 61–3. On the importance of boundary stones in disputes over custom and common rights, see Nicola Whyte, ‘Landscape, memory and custom: parish identities c. 1550–1700’, Social History 32.2 (2007), 166–86; William D Shannon, ‘Adversarial map-making in pre-Reformation Lancashire’, Northern History 47 (2010), 329–42.
- 20.
TNA, STAC 5/H6/36 and 7/23/40.
- 21.
TNA, STAC 5/H13/31.
- 22.
TNA, STAC 5/H48/4; 5/H17/13; 5/D19/13.
- 23.
TNA, STAC 5/K6/19. To ‘leese’ here means to deliver or release (OED.com).
- 24.
TNA, STAC 5/K13/10; Wood, The Memory of the People, 2 and 14.
- 25.
TNA, STAC 5/K1/16 and K13/10.
- 26.
Crowds involving large numbers of women were also noted at Finedon in 1576 (TNA, STAC 5/C51/7) and Braunston in 1571 (STAC 5/J10/37). See too STAC 8/147/19 in which women (and men dressed as women) gathered to block and dig up transport routes at Milton and Cherry Orton in 1614.
- 27.
TNA, STAC 8/94/4 and 8/121/20. See the note above on Finedon.
- 28.
TNA, STAC 5/G38/19. See too STAC 5/F16/2 for riotous entry into a wood in Furtho accompanied by a drummer.
- 29.
TNA, STAC 8/15/21.
- 30.
On women as deponents in the central equity courts, see Nicola Whyte, ‘Custodians of memory: women and custom in rural England c.1550–1700’, Cultural and Social History 2.8 (2011), 153–173. On the ‘male erasure of the memory of women’s words and deeds’, see Wood, The Memory of the People, 305–7.
- 31.
McDonagh, ‘Making and breaking’, 8; Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: 1991), 97; Wood, The Memory of the People, passim.
- 32.
TNA, STAC 2/23/29.
- 33.
TNA, STAC 5/H48/4.
- 34.
Joan Thirsk, ‘Enclosing and Engrossing’, in Joan Thirsk (ed.) The Agrarian History of England and Wales IV 1500–1640 (Cambridge University Press: 1967), 200–55, especially 213–35.
- 35.
John Martin, ‘Sheep and enclosure in sixteenth-century Northamptonshire’, Agricultural History Review 36.1 (1988), 39–54, especially 53.
- 36.
TNA, E 134/1Jas1/Hil1; STAC 8/159/16; STAC 8/145/7.
- 37.
TNA, STAC 8/170/16; 8/231/25; 8/244/14.
- 38.
Martin, ‘Sheep and enclosure’, 53–54.
- 39.
Charles Harding Firth, Stuart Tracts, 1603–1693 (E. P. Dutton: 1903), 40 and 42.
- 40.
Historic Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (London: 1900), 42 [available online https://archive.org/stream/cu31924028044992/cu31924028044992_djvu.txt]; cited in Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection’, fn. 27.
- 41.
British Library [hereafter BL], Lansdowne MSS 90/23.
- 42.
BL, Add MSS 11,402, folio 127 (for Northampton); TNA, STAC 8/198/21 (for Stoke Bruerne and Shutlanger). There was a second hedge-breaking incident at Stoke Bruerne on 9 June (ibid.).
- 43.
TNA, C 205/5/5 (Haselbech, which details the almost total enclosure of the parish and refers to a highway stopped ‘until of late it was throwne down by those that made the late insurrection’); Bridges and Whalley, Northamptonshire, II, 206 (Pytchley, Rushton and Newton); Nichols, Leicestershire, VI.I, 83 (Newton); see Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 164–7 on Warwickshire and Leicestershire. The Earl of Shrewsbury was clear that he considered the disorder to have started in Northamptonshire and later spread to the other counties (BL, Lansdowne MSS, 90/23).
- 44.
TNA, E 134/7JasI/19.
- 45.
List of Buildings of Special Architectural and Historic Interest.
- 46.
See Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 165 for a map showing where the rioters were recruited from. Note too that the rioters in the Shutlanger hedge-breaking riot in mid-May were said to have travelled to Towcester to ‘procure assistance’ (TNA, STAC 8/198/21 esp. the interrogatories).
- 47.
BL, MS Harley 787/11. Note a similar sentiment here to that Knightley attributed to the rioters at Badby: the Warwickshire diggers professed, ‘wee for our partes neither respect life nor lyvinges; for better it were in such case we manfully dye, then hereafter to be pined to death for wante of that which these devouring encroachers doe serve theyr fatt Hogges and Sheep with all’.
- 48.
Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection’, 26.
- 49.
TNA, STAC 8/221/1. Cf. TNA, STAC 8/295/22 where the landowner and plaintiff Daniel Ward claimed that the defendants had broken hedges and ploughed up land ‘saying that they would have soe done wth all inclosures & turne their plowes into pastures, & make all comon for corne, as though they had beene owners or com[m]aunders’.
- 50.
Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 166; BL, Add MS 11,402, folio 127 (29 May 1607) for the general proclamation covering Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.
- 51.
Compare the attitudes to the rioters in BL, Add MS 11,402, folio 127 of 11th May and BL, Lansdowne MSS 90/23 of 2nd June, where the Earl of Shrewsbury commented that ‘his Majestie is nothyinge well pleased with the remiss course that both the sheriff and Justices of peace have taken in that matter, and also the deputy lieutenant… for his Majestie expected, that so soone as suche insolent numbers hadd been gathered together, the sheriff & justoces sholde have prepared them selves with posse comitas to have gon against them, and to have apprehended some of the chefest of them, to have sent some of thos up hither, and to have committed others (in good numbers) to the Gaioles’. Shrewsbury laid out the course of action for dealing with any further unrest: if persuasion failed, they were to assembled 40 or 50 horse to ‘run over, and cutt into peeces a thousand of suche naked roges as thos’ are’.
- 52.
On this, see Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 165 and 201. Shrewsbury’s advice of 2 June (written several days before events at Newton) refers to cutting down a ‘thousand of such… roges’ as a means to end the disorder, perhaps implying his estimate of the numbers assembled there was as much informed by rhetoric as a first-hand estimation of the numbers involved.
- 53.
On this, see McDonagh, ‘Making and breaking’, 6. Parker, ‘Cotesbach’, 74 notes that due to the destruction of fences, common grazing arrangement were temporarily reinstated in Cotesbach for a few years after the Rising, although final enclosure followed before 1612.
- 54.
Large assemblies of 3000 and 5000 individuals were also reported at Hillmorton (Warwickshire) and Cotesbach (Leicestershire), respectively.
- 55.
A note below BL, Add MS 11,402, folio 127 (29 May 1607) suggests it was ‘The middest of June before all… was quieted’. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 167 suggests Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire all ‘remained in a disturbed condition until the end of June’.
- 56.
Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection’, 26; Parker, ‘Cotesbach’, 72–3.
- 57.
BL, Add MS 11,402, folio 128 (23 July 1607); TNA, C 82/1747 (formal order, August 1607) and C 205/5/5.
- 58.
E. F. Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt and the Inquisitions of Depopulation of 1607’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, New Series 18 (1904), 195–244, specifically 218–19 and the letter cited by Gay on 219, n. 2.
- 59.
Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 184.
- 60.
TNA, C 205/5/5; Northamptonshire Record Office [hereafter NRO], WY16/(a) (for the enclosure agreement). Sir Thomas’s son, William, was married to John Read’s daughter, Theodosia (NRO, L(C) 1609).
- 61.
TNA, STAC 2/23/34, 2/23/39, 2/28/111, 2/28/119 and 2/28/126; McDonagh, ‘Making and breaking’, 11–12; Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 185.
- 62.
Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 183–4. See too TNA, E 163/16/19 on a petition the Orton tenants sent to the king about entry fines and Sir Thomas Tresham’s actions in response.
- 63.
TNA, STAC 8/295/22.
- 64.
Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 185.
- 65.
List of Building of Special Architectural and Historic Interest; see also Royal Commission of Historical Monuments England, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northampton (London: 1975), Vol. 1, 72–4.
- 66.
TNA, STAC 5/A13/36 (contained in STAC 5/T8/31-40).
- 67.
TNA, STAC 5/T10/3 and 5/T7/14. The case related to land in (Great) Houghton.
- 68.
STAC 5/A13/36 and 5/A56/24 (for 1597 prosecution and Read’s answer); 5/B88/25 (for the c. 1571 interrogatories and depositions).
- 69.
TNA, STAC 8/18/12; C 205/5/5 (where local husbandmen claimed Osborne had pulled down ‘cottages, barnes and stables… and the number of two hundred persons or thereabouts depopulated’); STAC 5/A13/36.
- 70.
TNA, STAC 5/A13/36.
- 71.
TNA, STAC 5/A11/27 and 5/A13/36; 8/18/12.
- 72.
TNA, STAC 5/B70/40; 5/B83/31.
- 73.
TNA, STAC 8/16/12.
- 74.
VCH Northants III, 177 and 183; IV, 191 and 206.
- 75.
STAC 5/T34/23. The Chancery case is TNA, C 3/175/17. William Humphrey was also involved in a number of Star Chamber cases relating to the tithes and tithe wood of Barton Seagrave, where he was lessee of the rectorial tithes, in the later 1570s (STAC 5/H17/21, 5/H33/27 and 5/H73/35). See too C 3/172/6 for a Chancery case of c. 1563 involving William Humphrey about title to two closes of pasture in Shangdon, Leicestershire.
- 76.
See STAC 5/A13/36 which names Richard Humphrey and 5/A11/30 for the denial in the Swepstone case (dated 11 Feb 1598); for Thomas’s conviction see TNA, C 82/1759 (cited in Martin, ‘Enclosure’, 42).
- 77.
Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 161–3.
- 78.
Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 163 too makes this point. See too the grievances analysed by Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection’, 28–30.
- 79.
Mark Nicholls, ‘Francis Tresham’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27708, accessed 10 March 2017].
- 80.
On the Tresham debt, see Mary Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families 1540–1640 (OUP for Northamptonshire Record Society: 1956), 76–92.
- 81.
Julian Lock, ‘Tresham, Sir Thomas (1543–1605)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press: 2004; online edn, May 2009) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27712, accessed 10 March 2017]. The family’s indebtedness stemmed from both recusancy fines and the large portions paid for the ambitious marriages of Sir Thomas’s daughters.
- 82.
On the posthumous conviction, see Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 185.
- 83.
Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection’, 24; John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester University Press: 2007), 123. On the Diggers’ occupation of common land and its relations to earlier repertoires of protest, see B. McDonagh and C. J. Griffin, ‘Occupy! Historical geographies of property, protest and the commons, 1500–1850’, Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016), 1–10.
- 84.
TNA, STAC 8/295/22.
- 85.
Joint answer in TNA, STAC 8/295/22; 8/18/12 for the prosecution. See too STAC 8/221/1 for another instance of the Rising as an example to be followed.
- 86.
TNA, STAC 8/148/7. Manning, Village Revolts, 83 also discusses this case as an example of a complainant who ‘sought to discredit enclosure rioters’ by associating them with the events of 1607.
- 87.
TNA, STAC 8/121/20. On foot-dragging as a form of protest in itself, we are influenced by James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press: 1987) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press: 1990). See also Jeanette M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure & Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge University Press: 1993).
- 88.
TNA, STAC 8/94/4.
- 89.
TNA, STAC 8/121/15.
- 90.
TNA, STAC 8/61/33.
Acknowledgements
Research for the chapter was undertaken as part of a project entitled ‘Experiencing the landscape: Popular geographical imaginations in the English Midlands, 1450–1650’ and funded by the British Academy (Small Grant no. SG140176). We are especially grateful to Amanda Bevan and staff at The National Archives who were kind enough to make a working database of parts of STAC 5 available. We are also grateful to all those who offered comments on earlier versions of the paper including the audience and speakers at the International Conference of Historical Geographers held in London in July 2015.
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McDonagh, B., Rodda, J. (2018). Landscape, Memory and Protest in the Midlands Rising of 1607. In: Griffin, C., McDonagh, B. (eds) Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74243-4_3
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