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8 . Hoare, A. and A., Mystery, Drama, Scandal and Ruin – Exploring the Lives of Some Families Whose Coats of Arms Were Found at Number Nine, Town Green Wymondham (2018).

9 . Land, chapter 14. Land is good on the military aspects.

10 . Sotherton, pp. 89–90.

11 . Ibid.

12 . Ibid. The account of the battle is based on Sotherton, pp. 89–91, and Land, chapter 15.

13 . Groves, R., Rebels’ Oak (1947), p. 57.

Growing Isolation: 1–24 August

1 . Sotherton, pp. 91–3.

2 . Jones, pp. 163–4.

The Coming of Warwick’s Army

1 . Miller, G. J., Tudor Mercenaries and Auxiliaries 1485–1547 (1980), esp. p. 44.

2 . Jary, L. R., Part 2, ‘Destruction of the North Wall Gates’, has a very useful discussion of this.

3 . Sotherton, p. 95.

4 . Carter, A., ‘The Site of Dussindale’, Norfolk Archaeology Vol. XXXIX, Part 1 (1984), pp. 54–62.

5 . Sotherton, p. 98.

6 . Jary, L. R., Part 4.

7 . Neville, p. 70.

The Final Battles: 24–27 August

1 . Description of events between 24 and 26 August is based on Sotherton, pp. 92–7.

2 . Somerset to Hoby, 15.9.1549, quoted in Russell, p. 214.

3 . Jary, L. R., Part 3, on which my discussion of the Battle of Dussindale is largely based.

4 . Neville, p. 71.

5 . Sotherton, p. 98.

6 . Russell, p. 144, referencing journal of Edward VI.

7 . Neville, pp. 71–2.

8 . Sotherton, p. 99.

9 . Neville, pp. 73–4.

The Aftermath

1 . Neville, p. 76.

2 . Holinshed Shared texts, Vol. IV, p. 1613, 69.

3 . Neville, pp. 75–6.

4 . Whittle, Part V.

5 . Land, p. 126.

6 . This account based on Loach, J., Edward VI (1999), pp. 105–6.

7 . Skidmore, p. 152.

8 . Wood (2007), p. 77.

9 . Ibid., p. 78.

10 . Ibid., chapter 5.

Until comparatively recently, little was written about the rebellions of 1549 as a whole or about the Western Rebellion; there has been more on Kett’s Rebellion, but not that much.

As Diarmaid MacCulloch has said, much of what was written about Kett’s Rebellion before the 1970s was derived from the only contemporary narrative, The Commoysion in Norfolk by Nicholas Sotherton. Written in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, it is very short, and viscerally opposed to the rebels.

The next narrative to appear was Alexander Neville’s Norfolk Furies (1575), translated from the Latin by Richard Woods in 1615. Neville was secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker, who briefly visited the camp in 1549. Neville’s opposition to the rebels is ferocious, but a lot of useful information can be garnered from his longer account. Holinshed’s Chronicle (1577) discusses the rebellion but adds little to Neville.

Almost two hundred years passed before the next discussion of the rebellion, in Francis Blomefield’s An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk (1739–75) . Again, it adds little.

Almost another century passed until the first ‘stand-alone’ history, F. W. Russell’s Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk , was published in 1859. It is a first-rate work of scholarship, incorporating many new sources unearthed by Russell, though not very readable now. Russell was the first writer to show at least a little sympathy for the rebels.

In the first half of the twentieth century two writers brought a socialist perspective to the rebellion. Joseph Clayton’s Robert Kett and the Norfolk Rising (1912) effectively takes the existing story and turns it on its head, the rebels being good and the landlords bad. It is the first book that is written to be accessible to the general reader. Short, but thoroughly researched and with useful insights, is R. Groves’ Rebels’ Oak (1947).

There is then another gap until 1977, when S. K. Land wrote Kett’s Rebellion: The Norfolk Rising of 1549 . This is a useful introductory book, though dated now given subsequent study, and aims at impartiality. All these books portray Kett’s Rebellion as an independent entity – though other south-eastern camps are mentioned, it is only incidentally.

In the same year came J. Cornwall’s Revolt of the Peasantry , written by an academic but very readable. Paradoxically, this first modern book to discuss the 1549 risings as a whole also portrayed the Western Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion as separate entities, with the ‘commotions’ in between as incidental.