Enclosures

Question 1

What did Item 13 of the POG articles call for?

Answer 1

‘statutes for enclosures and intakes and enclosures since 1489 to be pulled down except in mountains, forests and parks’

Question 2

What was there much in 1535 and give examples?

Answer 2

Rioting over illegal enclosures

300 people at Giggleswick in Yorkshire pulled down hedges and there were riots at Fressington in Cumberland

Question 3

What did Giggleswick and Fressington do?

Answer 3

Sent rebels to attack the lands of the Earl of Cumberland who had enclosed his tenants’ lands and denied them grazing rights

Question 4

What were husbandmen at Horncastle in Lincolnshire concerned about but what was the reality?

Answer 4

The encroachment of tenants’ rights

Minor grievance among the commons

Question 5

What did Articles 1 and 3 of ‘Kett’s Demands Being in Rebellion’ declare?

Answer 5

‘we pray your grace that no lord of the manor encloses common land’

‘that it not be hurtful to such as have enclosed saffron grounds … and that from henceforth no man shall enclose any more’

Question 6

Who was John Flowerdew?

Answer 6

Norfolk’s feodary who had enclosed his lands and wasn’t popular in Wymondham and Attleborough

Question 7

How was Kett involved?

Answer 7

Dismantled his lands fences and became the spokesman for the rebels

Question 8

What had sparked Kett’s rebellion?

Answer 8

Allegations that landlords had been deliberately obstructing a government commission that was investigating illegal enclosures

Question 9

What did Kett’s rebels believe?

Answer 9

That they would have the backing of the government if they were to take the law into their own hands

Question 10

Where were similar riots in 1549?

Answer 10

Sussex, Kent, Cambridgeshire, the Midlands, and south-west counties

Question 11

What was Norfolk?

Answer 11

A densely populated county where fertile land was scarce

Question 12

What did many tenant farmers favour during Kett’s rebellion?

Answer 12

Their enclosure because it denied their landlords the right of folding their sheep and cattle on the tenants’ fields

Question 13

What was Kett keen to maintain?

Answer 13

Enclosures where saffron was grown (it produced a yellow dye used in the local cloth industry)

Question 14

What was there concern at in 1549?

Answer 14

Landowners who had extensive private estates, pasturing their flocks on common land

Question 15

What did Article 49 of Kett’s demands state?

Answer 15

‘we pray that no lord, knight, esquire nor gentleman do graze nor feed and bullocks or sheep if he may spend £40 a year by his lands only for the provisions of his house’

Question 16

What was a common complaint in 1549?

Answer 16

The overstocking of common land

Question 17

What did Kett’s rebels feel?

Answer 17

That the legal system had let them down

Question 18

What happened in the 1540s?

Answer 18

Norfolk peasants had prosecuted their landlords for grazing animals on common land, but without success as Magistrates were usually landlords

Question 19

How many disturbances occurred in 1549?

Answer 19

27

Question 20

What happened in Somerset and Wilton in Wiltshire in 1549?

Answer 20

Disturbance occurred when open fields were converted into deer parks

Peasants removed Lord Herbert’s hedges that he had put up on common land

Question 21

What happened in Sussex?

Answer 21

Riots were only prevented when the Earl of Arundel forced ‘certain gentleman, and chiefly for enclosures’ to dismantle their hedges

Question 22

Where might enclosure become a disturbance?

Answer 22

In low-lying sheep-corn areas in much of the Midlands, East Anglia, southern, and south-east England

Question 23

What areas consistently experienced disturbances in 1549?

Answer 23

Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, and Buckinghamshire

Question 24

How much land was enclosed in Leicestershire?

Answer 24

30%

Question 25

How much land was enclosed under the Tudors in the most seriously affected counties

Answer 25

3%

Question 26

When were enclosures likely to be accomplished?

Answer 26

If enclosures were achieved by mutual consent

If enclosures posed no threat to livelihoods

Question 27

What happened in the second half of the sixteenth century?

Answer 27

Population levels started to rise and pressure on land for food and work increased

Enclosure on common land was seen as the cause of grief

Question 28

What happened for much of the period?

Answer 28

Grain prices rose ahead of wool prices

Enclosures attracted less critical attention

Question 29

By the 1590s what happened?

Answer 29

Private profit was replacing communal cooperation

Question 30

What lay behind the food riots in 1595 and the Oxfordshire rebellion?

Answer 30

Allegations that common lands had been fenced off, villagers denied rights of pasturage, and land converted from arable to pasture

Question 31

What did the government feel in 1593?

Answer 31

Reasonably confident that restrictions on enclosing open fields could be lifted

Question 32

What happened in the 1590s and what did it see?

Answer 32

A run of good harvests and pressure from landowners to bring more marginal and wasteland under cultivation

New enclosures at Hampton Gay and Hampton Pole

Question 33

What happened in 1596?

Answer 33

Four men gathered at Enslow Hill with the intention of seizing arms and artillery from the home of the Lord Lieutenant of Oxford and marching to London

Question 34

What did the Privy Council fear about the Oxfordshire rebellion but what was the case?

Answer 34

Similar plans existed to seize food supplies and attack the gentry and their farms

No further disturbances occurred

Question 35

What was the Oxfordshire rebellion?

Answer 35

Untypical of the second half of the sixteenth century