ABSTRACT
The history of agrarian disputes in Norfolk has been intensively studied; they had been occurring with some regularity for many years, and not infrequently culminated in violence. But their number could undoubtedly be matched in other counties as well. To gentlemen and landowners, the natural governors of a predominantly agricultural society, it was inconceivable that anything could be so seriously amiss as to create among those whom they ruled a genuine grievance which stood in such urgent need of redress that the normal processes of law and administration were hopelessly inadequate to satisfy it. The agrarian problem comprised several distinct grievances of which the most inflammatory was enclosure, so much so that it had become the omnibus term for the lot. Government during a royal minority invariably posed a problem under a constitution which concentrated all power in person of the monarch, and the autocratic Henry VIII’s final legacy to his kingdom had been to make it very much worse.
