Robert Kett and the Commonwealth Rising of 1549
Robert Kett and the Commonwealth Rising of 1549
In the summer of 1549, a prosperous Norfolk tanner tore down his own fences, joined the crowd that had come to punish him, and led sixteen thousand men to the gates of England's second city. Robert Kett's rebellion did not begin as revolution. It began as recognition, that the sheep devouring England's common fields had made landlords of ordinary men, Kett among them, and that a kingdom governed by a boy king and a sympathetic Lord Protector might, at last, be made to listen. What followed was six extraordinary weeks in which the Norfolk commons built, beneath a single oak tree, a functioning alternative government: a representative council, a working court, a philosophy of justice precise enough to specify the size of a bushel and radical enough to demand the end of bondage itself. It could not last. Betrayed by a misread prophecy and broken by professional cavalry at Dussindale, the rebellion ended in slaughter, and Kett's own body was left hanging from the walls of the city he had once controlled. This is the story of that summer, of enclosure, faith, and the fragile line between loyalty and treason, and of a man whose reputation would take four centuries to travel from traitor's gallows to bronze memorial.
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