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“To the high and mighty Prince Edward, Duke of Somerset, governor to the king’s most royal person
and Protector of his majesty’s realms, dominions and subjects and to the lords of the king’s most
honourable council.
In most humble wise complaining unto your grace and good lordships are your poor orators [the
men bringing the petition] Thomas Barwell, Thomas Lightfoot, Thomas Wilkinson, Robert Foster,
John Tryvet and Stephen Barwell, inhabitants of the townships of Middleton in the county of
Norfolk, as well as all other residents there and also the inhabitants of the townships of Roughton,
West Wynche, Setche and Hardwick in the same county.
The chief comfort, support and maintenance of all of your orators and their ancestors with their
poor wives and children has always, time out of mind, been upon a certain common belonging to
them called Middleton Common, alias Salt Fen containing by estimation a hundred acres and a half.
From this land not only were they right able to pay their yearly rents and keep their dwelling houses
and cottages in good repair but also to the utmost of their powers have borne, paid and done all
other taxes and charges like true and faithful subjects. So that by means of this land your poor
supplicants lives competently together. By their honest ability, they made it very commodious for
several crops o hay and grass to grow yearly, trusting like plain and true-meaning people that none
could or would take it from them.
So it is about eight years past that one Thomas Thursby esquire, perceiving your poor orators to be
very poor, ignorant and simple-spirited people without friends or reputation in the country, without
any just cause or with any title but only his great might and extortionate power, wrongfully entered
onto these lands and expelled most cruelly your orators, drove and put strangers’ cattle there to
devour the grass. Immediately after he altered the said common land with hedges and ditches
withholding it by force from your said orators.
From the petition of Thomas Barwell and others to Protector Somerset, 1548
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The memorial - in English and in Cornish - erected at Fenny Bridges in 2000.
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“Their first demand stated: ‘First we will have the general counsel and holy decrees of our
forefathers observed, kept and performed, and who so ever shall speak against them, we hold them
as heretics.’ The second demand stated: ‘Item we will have the Lawes of our Sovereign Lord Kyng
Henry the VIII concerning the Six Articles, to be used as they were in his time.’ The third demand
was: ‘Item we will have the mass in Latin, as was before, and celebrated by the priest without any
man or woman communicating with them’
From the demands of the Western rebels, drawn up outside Exeter in July 1549
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Robert Kett dispensing justice from the ‘Tree of Reformation’ in 1549, as depicted in a nineteenthcentury book.
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“We require you to work by fair means either openly with the whole world or else apart with the
ringleaders by all the best ways you can devise to induce them to retire to their houses, putting
them and especially the chief doers amongst them in no doubt what an unnatural dealing this is of
subjects to rise against their sovereign lord. What unkindness his majesty may in future believe since
these things were done during his minority. What dishonour to the whole realm may grow by these
attempts. What courage hearing about them shall give to the Frenchmen, Scots, our enemies.”
From instructions sent by the government to Justices of the Peace in Devon as the Western
Rebellion grew in scale, 1549
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“How can you keep your own if you keep no order? Your wife and children, how can they be
defended from other men’s violence if you will in other things break all order; and by what means
will you be obeyed of your as servants if you will not obey the king as subjects?”
Sir John Cheke, The Hurt of Sedition, 1549
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“What other fruit or end might ensue but devouring one another and in universal desolation of your
own selves, besides the extreme peril of God’s wrath and indignation, besides the undoubted plague
of mortality which (unless you call for mercy) must descend on you from the severe rod of princely
justice. You do in the meantime neglect your husbandry, which you need to live. Your property and
cattle is not only spoiled and has no way to be fed, but your houses fall to ruin, your wives are
ravished, your daughters deflowered before your own faces, your goods that you have for many long
years laboured is lost in an hour and spent upon vagabonds and idle loiterers. Your meat is
unpleasant, your drink unsavoury, your sleep never sound, never quiet, never is safety. What must
befall your children when your own living is this through your own folly brought to penury and
shame? What shall be said of you a hundred years in the future when chronicles report that a certain
portion of the English people called Devonshire men and Cornishmen rebelled for popery
[Catholicism] against their natural sovereign lord and king, who was most earnestly working to set
out and publish the true word of God and the true religion of Christ to them.”
From a document written by Philip Nichols in response to the Western Rebellion of 1549
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“Your first article is this: ‘we shall have the general councils and holy decrees of our forefathers
observed, kept and performed, and whoever shall gainsay them, we hold them as heretics.’
First to begin with the manner of your phrase. Is this the fashion of subjects speak to their prince:
‘We will have’? Was this the manner of speech at any time used by subjects to their prince since the
beginning of the world? Have not all true subjects ever used to their sovereign lord this form of
speaking: ‘Most humbly beseech your faithful and obedient subjects’? Although the papists have
abused your ignorance in propounding such articles, which you understand not, you should not have
allowed yourselves so much to be led by the nose and bridled by them, that you should clearly
forget your duty of allegiance to your sovereign lord by saying to him “We will have” and saying that
with armour upon your backs and swords in your hands. Would any of your that are householders be
content that your servants should come unto your with harness on their backs and swords in their
hands, and say unto you “This we will have?’
But not, leaving aside your rude and unhandsome manner of speech to your most sovereign lord, I
will come to the point. You say you will have all the holy decrees observed and kept. But do you
know what they are? The holy decrees are the bishop of Rome’s ordinances and laws, which
however holy and godly they are called, are so wicked, so ungodly, so full of tyranny and so partial,
that since the beginning of the world have never seen the like devised or invented.”
From Archbishop Cranmer’s Answer to the Fifteen Articles of the Devon Rebels, 1549
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A portrait of Edward VI, by an unknown artist, painted in 1542 when he was five years old.
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“Woe to thee, O land, where the king is a child.”
Hugh Latimer, Quoting from the Book of Ecclesiastes in 1549