Roger B. Manning

Violence and Social Conflict In Mid-Tudor Rebellions

Two of the most common manifestations of social tension in Tudor England were the enclosure riot and the seditious rumor. Both are essentially pre-political forms of social protest, but the first must be viewed as more primitive than the second. Enclosure riots, at least prior to the riots and rebellions of 1548-49, were not particularly directed against the governing elite, but rather were aimed at innovations which threatened the traditional agrarian routine within the manorial or village economy. Thus, enclosure riots, which were procured as frequently by gentry as by peasants and often were calculatingly combined with litigation, did not especially menace the social order. On the other hand, seditious rumors — particularly those that were threatening and anonymous — raised the possibility of social polarization and violent protest on a larger scale than that of the enclosure riot. Before the rebellions and riots of 1548-49, enclosure riots were almost invariably confined within a single village community or between two neighboring communities, but during those troubled years the wide-spread circulation of rumors threatening the gentry resulted in the destruction over a widely-scattered area of enclosing hedges which had stood unchallenged for generations. The rumor as a vehicle of social protest could either express the collective fear that some supposedly hostile group such as the rural aristocracy had put together a conspiracy to harm the peasantry, or could, conversely, convey the desire of peasants and artisans for social levelling or even social inversion.

II. Elizabethan Recusancy Commissions

The Elizabethan religious settlement was meant to secure the unity of England by means of religious uniformity. As a political compromise it brought eighty years of relative peace and prosperity, but as a religious compromise it failed to satisfy either Catholic or Puritan. The problem of enforcing the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1559 was complicated by the lack of adequate administrative machinery. The delay in purging the commissions of the peace, the failure to promote sufficient zeal among the justices of the peace, coupled with the decline of episcopal power and disenchantment with the High Commission and the various diocesan ecclesiastical commissions, led the government in the late 1580s and early 1590s to issue special royal commissions to carefully selected magistrates for dealing with seminary priests and recusant affairs. Thus, the Elizabethan governments policy towards recusants at any given period of time was a reflection not only of the degree of tension in the international situation, but also of the need to devise effective ways of enforcing die penal laws.

The Crisis of Episcopal Authority During the Reign of Elizabeth I

The theory behind the Henrician religious settlement was that certain papal and episcopal powers of jurisdiction were vested in the Crown by parliamentary enactments because the Pope and the English bishops had failed to reform abuses in the Church. In the absence of an alternative administrative system, the bishops continued to govern the Church as agents of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy. Although some episcopal powers of jurisdiction were returned to the Elizabethan bishops, the actual authority allowed them did not suffice to effect a reformation or to enforce conformity to the established church. In order to resolve this crisis of episcopal authority the seventeenth-century prelates and divines elaborated theories of divine-right episcopacy, but the Elizabethan bishops found it more expedient to fall back upon extraordinary grants of royal authority contained in ecclesiastical commissions. I The Henrician and Edwardian alienations of episcopal jurisdiction are spectacular and dramatic, yet the erosion of episcopal authority began long before the Henrician Reformation. For over two centuries English bishops had been primarily royal servants. They were, by temperament and training canonists and diplomats rather than pastors; like the Renaissance popes they had grown accustomed to compromise rather than providing spiritual leadership. Not only in England, but throughout Western Europe, bishops rarely sat as judges in their own courts. Much of their authority had been permanently delegated to commissaries, who tended to become independent agents. They were, moreover, hard put to resist encroachments upon their ordinary authority by archdeacons and cathedral chapters, while ecclesiastical corporations devoted considerable effort to securing exemption from episcopal visitations.

Patterns of Violence in Early Tudor Enclosure Riots

Enclosure riots were a prominent manifestation of social tension in England in the 1530s and 1540s. Although enclosures of land for pasturage and tillage had been undertaken since the beginning of English agriculture and did not usually cause social conflict, the rapid increase in population of the sixteenth century pressed hard on the available supply of land. The necessity of increasing the food supply speeded up the process of enclosure. The supplies of corn and meat could not be increased significantly without the year-round use of enclosed and consolidated plots of land, which was inconsistent with communal access to common and waste land and the stubble remaining after the harvest on arable lands. Other causes of friction in agrarian society included the greater fluidity in the land market resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries together with revolutionary methods of exploiting the land. The social relationships existing among great landlords, small holders and tenants could not remain unaffected. The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the early Tudor enclosure riot as a primitive or pre-political form of social protest. This will necessitate: (1) describing the forms and extent of violence employed; (2) distinguishing between those riots that accompany the Pilgrimage of Grace and the rebellions of 1548-49 and those riots that occur outside of the years of rebellion; and (3) modifying the assumption that the typical enclosure riot was perpetrated by an exasperated peasantry venting their rage upon the hedges and ditches of a commercially-minded, grasping gentry.