The Lincolnshire Rising, or dissolving the monasteries part 2

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Last week we slogged through the dissolution of England’s monasteries (and nunneries and friaries and so-fortharies) under Henry VIII, and it might’ve looked, to the casual reader, like everything fell neatly into place for ol’ Henry: the order went out, the courts assessed the money and the goodies and handed them over to the treasury, and the nuns, monks, and friars were sent out into the world to manage as best they could with the pensions they were given. A couple of hundred people were executed for opposing the changes, but in the great scheme of things that hardly counts as major opposition, especially after a few hundred years.

It didn’t all fall into place that easily, though. Henry faced some widespread opposition, starting in October 1536 and centered on Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. If you don’t know your English geography, what matters is that they’re both up north, because the center of English politics has long been in London and more generally in the south. So think of this as happening in No-one-ever-pays-attention-to-usLand. 

 

Irrelevant photo: a geranium

 

The spark

There were two uprisings, and I won’t get as far as the second one this week. Sorry–it’s been that kind of week.

The first started in the town of Louth. Some royal commissioners showed up–those folks who went through a monastery’s belongings and claimed them for the crown–and one made a comment that may have been seen as a threat by the less-educated among the clergy. “Look to your books or there will be consequences.” In addition, new regulations had been introduced that affected the clergy, and taxes that affected secular folk. And people were looking not just at the closing of the religious houses but at the confiscation of  of all that expensive church-ware, some of which had been donated by local families, who therefor had a proprietary feeling about it. 

It’s worth noting that it was only the well-to-do who could donate, say, silver to a church or monastery, but ordinary people participated in grassroots fundraising that might touch up a saint’s statue that was looking weary or do something along those lines, so they too would have a sense of ownership.

As a result, three things happened. the vicar of Louth preached what one website calls an inflammatory sermon; a cobbler, Nicholas Melton, who came to be known as Captain Cobbler, seized a registrar and burned his papers; and a larger group of people held the commissioners hostage at a nunnery.

If you want to know the aim of these early uprisings, look at the documents they destroyed. Literacy was growing but still limited, and committing things to paper was a form of control. Destroy the list of what a monastery owned and it was easy to believe that you might just stop it from being confiscated.

 

But before I go on

I try not to use Wikipedia, because its entries change and it’s subject to the occasional fit of madness before the editors swoop in to correct it, but I couldn’t find articles with any depth to them anywhere else. So I’m leaning on it heavily here. I believe we’re on safe ground. 

Fair enough? Lets go on.

 

The rebellion

Before long, a full-scale revolt had broken out. The rebels came from several towns and converged on the city of Lincoln, where they dragged the diocese’s chancellor from his bed and beat him to death. We can probably take this as an indication that they weren’t in a good mood.

They sent a list of complaints to the king, and these focused on both taxes and religion. They objected to at least one of  Henry’s tax strategies, the Statute of Uses, and they demanded an end to taxation in peacetime. They also objected to the dissolution of the monasteries and to the Church of England’s first statement of its doctrine, the Ten Articles, and demanded that heretics be purged from the government, that the treasures in local churches be protected, and that they have the right to continue worshipping as Catholics. 

Henry dismissed the rebels as “rude and ignorant common people” and their entire county as “one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm,” so we can safely guess he wasn’t in a good mood either.

Who took part? Some 40,000 people, with the support of the gentry. Their opposition to the Statute of Uses  speaks to the gentry’s involvement, since it involved tax on the inheritance of land, but the number of people up in arms says the rebellion had support from people well below the level of the gentry.  

The protest–or rebellion, or whatever you want to call it–lasted from October 1 to October 4, when the king warned the rebels to go home or face the Duke of Suffolk and however many armed men he’d mobilized by then. By October 14, most of them had left Lincoln.

Why do they date the end of the protest to October 4, then? Sorry, you’re on your own there. I have no idea. What I can tell you is that after the protest broke up, the vicar of Louth and Captain Cobbler were captured and hanged, and over the next 12 days other leaders were executed, including a lawyer and a former monk–although he might not have considered himself former. An MP–that’s a member of parliament; you’re welcome–was not only hanged but also drawn and quartered for his involvement. The Tudors were nothing if not over the top about executing people.

Did that end of the tale? It did not. It led to a larger rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace. But for that, tune in next week.

30 thoughts on “The Lincolnshire Rising, or dissolving the monasteries part 2”

  3. It’s extraordinary, given the sweeping use of such horrific punishments, that people took such risks as rebelling or, at least, protesting against the king (or queen). It wasn’t just this particular Henry who was guilty of it. All the Tudors, along with their forerunners and successors, were pretty ruthless towards any form of defiance or dissent. I suppose that the penal system was so skewed towards extreme penalties that, to quote the saying, “You might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb”.

    I suppose that if someone is convinced that heaven is the next, guaranteed, stop they might be more inclined to take a chance.

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    • I expect it was partly that but also religious terror: if I follow these people out of the Catholic Church, I’ll burn in hell forever. That would be another powerful motivation.

      It’s interesting, though, that more clearly economic rebellions (I’m thinking particularly of the Peasants Revolt) took the same gamble. All of them swore they were loyal to the king (or queen, or what have you), and maybe they really believed that would save them. Or maybe they were desperate enough that they didn’t feel they had much to lose.

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  6. On some level this reminds me of Philip of France and whichever Pope it was dong in the Templars. Which was mostly about getting the royal hands on some other group’s money and possessions.

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  8. Some peasants in the Northern nothing … They came away fairly easy with only a few heads rolling, especially if you compare it with the cost of the “Bauernkrieg” in the Reich (chop, chop, burn … you get the idea).
    There have been a few insurrections at the beginning of the 16th century in different parts of Europe, but in your version the emphasis is more on religious, or better : ecclesiastical matters. What unites them is that all the rebellious people wanted something back, usually the “gute alte Recht”, the good, old law ; these movements were conservative, not revolutionary motivated.

    Bringing things out of this world by burning the written evidence happened here too. Maybe this is the veneration of the written word by the innocent child of nature, turned sour.
    (Just in case : This is an ironic comment. Them unwashed peasants were surely no innocent children of nature, nor the unwashed noblemen who restored order, and deep, gravely silence on the countryside, especially here in Franconia. The mud grubbers did not forget, even without written history.)

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    • Papers were where people’s debts and un-freedoms were recorded, so burning them was, I think, a deeply practical act, right up there with my a few activists of my generation in the US burning draft office records, only more so since the draft records could, I believe, be recreated. Evidence of people’s existence was still paper-based but on a wider swath of paper and so harder to make evidence disappear.

      Were these rebellions conservative or radical? You’re certainly right that they wanted to reinstate something from the past, but history’s seldom unmixed. The common people were also rising against rising food prices, against poverty. I’d look for radical threads among the conservatism.

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  9. ?
    Like in : “Either conservative or radical ?”
    That’s a trap. They are no opposites and not mutually exclusive.
    (There was a movement in Germany, first third 20th century, later called “Konservative Revolution”, very conservative, very radical, up to murderous terrorists.)
    The opposition would imho be progressive and non-fundamental.

    The peasants wrote down what they wanted in 12 Articles. They were not revolutionary in the sense that they would destroy “the system” (replacing it with what ?), they wanted changes, a return to the good old times when things were easier etcetcpp.
    In the end their opposition was not against the King,the form of rule, their own role in the society – that would be radical – but against the new rulers, the domini terrae / Landesherren, who turned the screw, and demanded always more : They opposed abuse, and hence wanted to return to the older, better customs.

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    • In a time when new taxes and new restrictions are being imposed, returning to the past has a radical element, although people have a habit of remembering the good old times as a lot better than they were. I agree that the line between conservative and radical can be complicated, and you’re leading (conveniently) right into an issue I’ll get into next week: the impossibility, at the time, or opposing the form of rule.

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  10. Super. I look forward to the next installment! We’re a feisty lot here oop north. Guy Fawkes lived just round the corner from me – the Gunpowder Plot was a few decades on from the current tale – and I happen to work at Mother Shipton’s Cave and Dropping Well in Knaresborough, the birthplace of Ursula Sontheil, as legend has it, later Ursula Shipton, who gained a reputation as a “witch”. She’s famous for prophesying that Thomas Wolsey would never reach York when he was demoted from Cardinal to Archbishop of York.

    A lot of nonsense has been put in the mouth of Mother Shipton by later writers, notably a Charles Hindley in 1862 (and an American religious sect in the 1930s), but it’s likely this part of the story is true. Wolsey heard of the rumour that a Yorkshire witch was speaking against him and sent men to warn her off, or he’d burn her when he reached York, and of course, he got about eight miles from York when he was called back to London to face treason charges by Henry VIII, and then died on the return journey.

    It also seems likely that she predicted the Great Fire of London and the Plague, although if you say a large city mostly made of wood is going to burn, or there’ll be a plague, around that time, you’re probably playing fairly good odds.

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    • I’ll use living in Cornwall instead of oop north as my excuse for never having heard of Mother Shipton. Sounds like she had a good track record, although (cynic that I am) I can’t help wondering what she predicted that didn’t happen.

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      • Ah yes, she’s just a minor celeb in the prophecy pantheon. It’s a bit ironic that I work there, welcoming visitors and selling tickets at the gate, when I’m a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic. I hold myself back when I hear colleagues recount the things she’s supposed to have prophesied that we know were posthumously attributed to her, everything from cars, aeroplanes and submarines. They rarely mention the one about the end of the world in 1881.

        The place is full of those useful deceptions, but if I get into conversation with any curious visitors about it, I tell them most of the famous parts are bunk. It’s a pity – I think the business could have developed as an educational museum to encourage critical thinking, and still attracted lots of visitors, but it’s gone more for the entertainment end of things.

        The other famous bit of nonsense is that High Bridge, right outside the entrance, will fall down three times, and the third time will herald the end of the world (again), and it has fallen down twice. Opposite, the pub is called The World’s End. I’ll barricade myself in there if there’s a zombie apocalypse, like Sean of the Dead.

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