ABSTRACT
Traditionally the story of the other commotions of 1549 was told about an event in Norfolk, which was portrayed as having echoes elsewhere but was essentially a single tale of a rising called ‘Kett’s Rebellion’ after the leader of the great camp on Mousehold Heath near Norwich, Robert Kett. The story was thus told in isolation, partly because of its dramatic and uniquely tragic outcome outside Norwich, partly because we have a flood of detailed if mostly hostile narrative about it, and partly because, as we will see, there were good reasons deliberately to forget the scale and range of what happened. This, however, hides the real shape of events, which might more properly be called by a name which contemporaries used for them in the immediate aftermath of the turmoil: the ‘rebellions of Commonwealth’. Their most recent historian, Amanda Jones, was the first person since the sixteenth century successfully to take an overview of the whole phenomenon, and what she revealed was an astonishingly widespread crisis which involved twenty-five counties beyond Devon and Cornwall: in effect, all lowland England as far north as Seamer overlooking the valley of the Derwent in the North Riding of Yorkshire, with the interesting exception of the capital, London. Jones has unearthed evidence of no fewer than eighteen other camps besides the great assembly at Mousehold (plus two further camps set up by the Devon and Cornwall rebels), and we know of nine popular petitions drawn up by such assemblies, in addition to the six which survive from the Western Rebellion and the petition from Kett’s assembly at Mousehold. Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, this list of camps and petitions is likely to be far from complete (Jones, 2003: 1-5). It was not surprising that in the wake of such a catastrophe for England’s governors, Protector Somerset was forced to resign power by his infuriated colleagues.
