The Battle of Newton-field and the Midland Rising of 1607
             a view by Professor Steve Hindle of the University of Warwick

In early June 1607, a crowd of approximately one thousand men and women gathered at Newton, Northamptonshire to destroy the hedges and fences recently erected there by Thomas Tresham. The protesters, according to the Earl of Shrewsbury, were ‘fellows who term themselves levellers’; and were, allegedly, armed not only with stones, but also with bows and arrows, pikes and long bills. Despite the fact that disorder had been brewing in this part of Northamptonshire for several weeks since the Mayday festivities, the county militia under the command of the Lord Lieutenant Thomas Cecil, the Earl of Exeter, were ill-prepared, some of them probably disaffected out of sympathy to the rebels. The local gentry were therefore obliged to put together a makeshift force, both cavalry and infantry, from their own household servants and clients. This private army was commanded by two local gentlemen, Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton, one of the deputy lieutenants of the county, and Sir Anthony Mildmay of Apethorpe, a veteran of the campaign against the Northern Rising of 1569. It is uncertain how long the protesters had camped themselves at Newton before the final confrontation, for some negotiation appears to have taken place between Montagu and the men of Kettering in particular.

By 8 June, however, Montagu had hanged two of the rebel leaders, and he and Mildmay were ready to proceed. They began by reading the text of King James I’s proclamation of 30 May, which, first, informed the protesters that they were guilty of seditious libel for suggesting that the government had failed to prosecute landlords who had illegally enclosed their estates; and second, threatened to crush them with ‘force of arms’ if they did not return to their homes. Montagu and Mildmay apparently used ‘all the best persuasions’ to encourage the crowd to disperse, and read the proclamation a second time. ‘When nothing would prevail’, however, the gentry force ‘charged them thoroughly with both horse and foot’. The rebels withstood the first charge and ‘fought desperately’, but ‘at the second charge they ran away’, and in the rout ‘some 40 or 50 of them’ were slain ‘and a very great number hurt’. Many more were taken prisoner, and several were subsequently executed, either after due process at a special judicial commission convened at Northampton on 21 June or summarily under martial law according to the terms of a second royal proclamation of 28 June. The quartered carcasses of the guilty men were exhibited at Northampton, Oundle, Thrapston ‘and other places’. Amongst those executed after the Northampton trial was one of the rebel leaders John Reynolds, a pedlar or tinker by trade, who became known as Captain Pouch, so-called because of the leather satchel which, he claimed, contained ‘sufficient matter to defend them against all comers’. On his apprehension, however, Reynold’s pouch was allegedly found to contain only a piece of mouldy cheese. Reynolds had nonetheless played a significant role in co-ordinating anti-enclosure protests across Northamptonshire and Warwickshire in May and early June, and had by virtue of his claim to have authority both from God and the King to destroy hedges and fences, recruited very large assemblies of protesters at significant sites of enclosure. Reynolds himself was not, however, present at Newton, having being apprehended at Withybrook (Warwickshire) in early June. The crowd assembled at Newton was therefore in a very real sense both leaderless and faceless, cloaked in anonymity. But before we can ascertain who they were, we must first explain why they gathered at Newton.

The carnage at Newton represented the culmination of almost six weeks of disorder across the three counties of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, which have collectively come to be known as the Midland revolt. The long-term context of this rebellion was the significant population growth and associated price-inflation of the sixteenth century, which resulted in ever-growing differentials of wealth between rich and poor. The growing problem of poverty created by these pressures was compounded in 1593 when the Tudor regime for the first time relaxed its restrictive laws against the enclosure of the open fields and common lands upon which the livelihood of the landless poor depended. Although the laws were restored in 1597, the gentry of the heavy clay-lands of the midlands seized the opportunity to convert their estates from the growing of grain to the rearing of sheep for wool, with the result that many open- field communities saw rapid and sometimes complete enclosure in the decade or so before 1607. Among these villages were Cotesbach (Leicestershire); Ladbroke, Hillmorton and Chilvers Coton (Warwickshire); and Haselbech, Rushton and Pytchley (Northamptonshire). Each of these places saw the gathering of significant crowds of ‘levellers’ and ‘diggers’, sometimes as numerous as five thousand, protesting against enclosure in May and early June 1607. If Reynolds really was the ‘chiefest leader’ of these protests, he brought to bear both a significant degree of local knowledge in choosing the most appropriate targets and a high level of political skill in disciplining his followers into orderly protest. Even hostile witnesses remarked that the riots of the Midland Rising were essentially orderly: Reynolds instructed his followers ‘not to swear, nor to offer violence to any person, but to ply their business and make fair works’. Just as the low level of violence committed by the participants in the Rising contrasts with the judicial carnage meted out by the Stuart regime in punishing them, the orderliness of the rebel gatherings was intended to throw into greater relief the much more subversive behaviour of those gentlemen who broke the King’s laws against enclosure. It is, accordingly fitting that the Rising should culminate at the site of one of the more notorious episodes of oppressive enclosure in the midlands. Thomas Tresham of Newton had been flouting laws and proclamations against enclosure for at least a generation. As early as 1564, long before the tillage laws were suspended, there were 650 sheep grazing in the parish. By 1597-98, Tresham was prosecuted in the court of Star Chamber for depopulation and sheep farming. By 1607, the whole parish was under grass and had been leased out to graziers, probably having been completely enclosed in the mid-1590s. In about 1599, Tresham had also purchased the estate at Pilton from his cousin, the equally notorious (and catholic) enclosing landlord Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton, and destroyed five farms in the process of converting 135 acres of arable to sheep pasture.

Our knowledge of those who were gathered at Newton is sketchy at best. Sir Edward Montagu recorded the names of 143 persons who sued for pardon under the terms of a royal proclamation of 24 July 1607, and those who appeared at Boughton House probably included several of those who had been present on 8 June as well as many who had not. It is nonetheless significant that six weeks after the pitched battle, and four weeks after the Northampton trials, there were still very significant numbers of rebels at large. Sixty-two (43 percent) of those who sought pardons were labourers and a further fifty-five (28 percent) were craftsmen. The vast majority, then, were landless, and they mainly came from forest communities. Seventy-eight (55 percent) came the larger villages such as Weldon (36 rebels), Corby (29 rebels), and Benefield (9), but there was a significant minority from the town of Kettering (27 rebels), a distribution similar to that found in the Leicestershire part of the Rising where the townsmen had a major role to play in fermenting discontent in the countryside. The motives of these participants can only be conjectured, for those camped and subsequently slaughtered at Newton left behind no manifesto. Their grievances probably echo those of the self-proclaimed ‘poor delvers and day labourers’ whose rallying cry to all the other ‘diggers’ of Warwickshire, circulated in the early summer of 1607 and in which Reynolds himself may have had a hand, bitterly criticised those ‘encroaching tyrants which would grind our flesh on the whetstone of poverty’ so that they ‘may dwell by themselves in the midst of their herds of fat weathers’. Enclosure, they insisted’ was carried out not ‘for the benefit of the Commonalty’ but only for the ‘private gain’ of those who had ‘depopulated and overthrown whole towns and made thereof sheep pastures, nothing profitable for our commonwealth’. Rather than be starved to death for want of the very food which those ‘devouring encroachers’ were now feeding to their ‘fat hogs and sheep’, the ‘diggers’ professed a willingness to ‘manfully dye’ in arms against their landlords. For many of those assembled at Newton, those words proved prophetic. Although there were aftershocks, with rumours of Reynolds activities continuing to circulate even after his execution, Montague was able to report that after the battle and its subsequent hangings the country north of Kettering ‘stands quiet’.

The response of the regime to the Rising was entirely characteristic of its attitude to popular protest in Tudor and Stuart England. The first priority was repression: as King James’ proclamation of 28 June emphasised, ‘we will prefer the safety, quiet and protection of our subjects in general, and of the body of our state, before the compassion of any such offenders, be they more or less, and howsoever misled: and must forget our natural clemency by pursuing them with all severity for their so heinous treasons, as well by our arms as laws’. The trial of the rebels at Northampton accordingly saw three categories of defendants arraigned before the presiding judge Sir Edward Coke: a first group, including Reynolds himself, was indicted for high treason in levying war against the crown; a second for felony in refusing to obey the royal proclamation, read twice to them at Newton, ordering them to disperse; and a third for the misdemeanour of ‘unlawful assembly and throwing down hedges and ditches’. The attitude of judge and jury alike was probably influenced by the sermon preached at the trial by Robert Wilkinson, chaplain to the Earl of Exeter, who rather than rehearsing the expected rigid theological and political defence of the crown’s punitive attitude to traitors, in fact offered a remarkably even-handed critique not only of the ‘rebellion of the many’ but also of the ‘oppression of the mighty’ which had provoked the Rising. Several of those gentlemen assembled to witness, and in some cases to participate in, the proceedings, must have squirmed in their seats as Wilkinson publicly castigated the conduct of those enclosing landlords who had devastated the Northamptonshire countryside and left its people in hunger and despair. The apprehension of these gentlemen was not unfounded, for the crown’s second priority was the redress of grievances which had provoked the Rising. Although the privy council had debated whether or not to wait before initiating proceedings against enclosing landlords, by August 1607 royal commissioners were appointed to gather evidence concerning the scale of illegal enclosure and depopulation across the midlands. Although the returns of the commissions are incomplete, they demonstrate just how severely Northamptonshire had been affected by the behaviour of self-interested landlords: over 27,000 acres (almost a third of the property identified by a commission which had extended through seven counties) had been enclosed, resulting in the destruction of over 350 farms and the eviction of almost 1500 people across eighteen villages. The findings of the commissions were used, in turn, as the basis for prosecutions in the court of Star Chamber of those landlords who had enclosed their lands illegally. Several leading Northamptonshire gentlemen were convicted. Among them was Thomas Tresham of Newton, found guilty of the enclosure of four hundred acres and the destruction of nine farms in Newton. Although the scale of his fine is uncertain, survivors of the battle of Newton-field would doubtless have felt vindicated by his humiliation, even if they did not benefit from the re-conversion of his estates from pasture to arable. The enclosure policy of the crown had by the early seventeenth-century become smeared by the trail of finance, and the fines of 1607 effectively amounted to little more than a tax on enclosure.

The Midland Rising of 1607, and the battle of Newton-field in which it culminated, should therefore give us pause before we too readily assume that the Tudors had successfully pacified the commons of England. There may well have been considerable momentum for obedience in early Stuart society, but the fact that a crowd of poor delvers and day labourers led by a tinker could force the regime into the catastrophe of slaughtering dozens of its own subjects suggests that social relations were more fraught than conventional assumptions about the essential deference of the rural poor might imply. Men like John Reynolds recognised oppression when they saw it, and when they could not count on the local magistracy to enforce the laws against enclosure, they decided to do take those laws into their own hands. Although their protest ended in bloody sacrifice, the crown was subsequently forced to redress their grievances in a series of prosecutions which suggested that enclosing landlords were not only enemies of the people, they were also enemies of the state.

Steve Hindle
Kenilworth
19 September 2006