A protest by peasants against land enclosures turns deadly
8 JUNE 1607
For centuries, England’s gentry had been accustomed to obedience and deference from the ordinary folk who lived – and worked – on their land. So when Sir Edward Montagu, a deputy-lieutenant of Northamptonshire, ordered crowds near the village of Newton to stop destroying the fences and hedges erected by local landowner Thomas Tresham, he might have expected them to disperse. Instead, the episode quickly turned into a pitched battle – the climax of a wider uprising by Midlanders campaigning against unjust land enclosures.
Much of the English countryside today is a patchwork of fields bounded by hedges and fences. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, though, enclosure of agricultural land was a controversial practice employed by landowners keen to boost profits. Lowland areas – particularly in central regions – long grazed by peasants’ livestock as common land, or farmed in open fields, were leased to the highest bidders.
This had dire consequences for poor tenant farmers and the peasantry. Excluded from the very land on which they depended for food, displaced from their homes and at the mercy of rising unemployment, these people suffered badly. And in the first decade of the 17th century, these growing grievances sparked a major social rebellion that became known as the Midland Revolt.
The historian Edmund Howes, writing shortly afterwards, provides an account of the events that unfolded
