The Spider, the Fly, and the Commonwealth: Merrie John Heywood and Agrarian Class Struggle

Abstract

Twentieth-century liberal historians as well as sixteenth-century English peasants have seen Edward Seymour (1506-1552), Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector, as a compassionate friend to the poor—the "Good Duke" who fell prey to John Dudley, the Bad Duke of Northumberland.1 In his revisionist critique of this thesis, M. L. Bush sees Somerset's ostensible radicalism as reactive, contingent, and utterly traditional.2 All the same, in 1547, when he was probably the wealthiest person in England after the king, Somerset threw off the bone-deep reflexes of his class by converting his demesne lands to copyhold, dispossessing his own heirs of these lands, and giving greater security to many of his tenants.3 In 1548, he authorized a roving commission under John Hales to hear complaints about enclosure. It drew the wrath of landlords wherever it went, but he told Hales, "maugre the Devil, private profit, self-love, money and such like Devil's instruments, it shall go forward," and he rechartered it in 1549.4 That same year, he responded sympathetically to the peasant rebels who brought England closer to pitched class warfare than it had come since 1381. These rebellions included the Catholic Western or Prayer Book Rebellion in Cornwall and Devon; the largely Protestant risings of East Anglian peasants and artisans against enclosure and other economic grievances, notably, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk; and a number of other significant rebellions in Surrey, Kent, Cambridgeshire, and elsewhere.5 Somerset conducted an unprecedented dialogue with many of the rebel camps. On 18 July, he promised the campmen of Norfolk that he would "extende in this case our authoritie Royall and absolute" by calling a reform parliament in October, one month early, and by commanding his royal commissioners "to reduce all ffermes and other landes to the same rents the same were leased for xl. yeres past."6 [End Page 53]

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