Introduction

The pilgrimage of Grace began in Lincolnshire in October 1536 as a rising of the peasants provoked by a variety of causes of which the most immediate were taxes and hostility to the dissolution of the monasteries. Less frequently, in periods of acute, prolonged economic crisis and social stress, peasant grievances erupt in formidable, well-organised mass movements which challenge the existing social order and the authority of the state which underpins it; rebellion is born. Such a crisis hit England in the sixteenth century, appearing to threaten the traditional way of life of the peasants by breaking up rural institutions and in many cases destroying their livelihood. The rebellion which Robert Kett organised and led in Norfolk belongs, in a manner of speaking, to every economic historian’s folk-lore, marking as it does the climax of peasant discontent, the tragic dénouement of the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century.