‘Remembering Rebellion in the Tudor South West’, In-Person RHS Lecture

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About the Lecture

Between 1497 and 1554, a succession of more or less serious rebellions broke out in the far South West of the kingdom of England: a succession of rebellions, which - although they were ultimately defeated - left an enduring emotional resonance in their wake.

In recent years, historians of popular protest have begun to probe the mental scars which the insurrections of the Tudor and early Stuart periods left behind them. Yet, so far, much of this research has focused on the ways in which the disturbances which broke out in the Midlands and the South-East - and, most especially, the great popular rising in East Anglia which has come to be known as ‘Kett’s Rebellion’ - were remembered.

In this lecture, Mark Stoyle will turn to explore, instead, how local people looked back on the two major risings which broke out against Henry VII in Cornwall in 1497, the short-lived revolt against Edward VI’s religious changes which flared up in West Cornwall in 1548, the full-blooded protest against those same changes which convulsed the whole of Devon and Cornwall in 1549, and, finally, the abortive attempt to stir up a rebellion in Devon against Mary I’s impending marriage to Philip of Spain in 1554.

The lecture will consider both elite and popular memories of the rebellions which occurred in the Tudor South West and will argue that those memories proved surprisingly long-lived. More particularly, it will argue that the Western Rising of 1549 - ‘the Commotion Time’, as that protest was termed by contemporaries, ‘the Prayer Book Rebellion’ as it is popularly known today - was remembered by local people as a key caesura in the region’s history, and that it remained a live issue in West Country society right up until the eve of the English Civil War.

Speaker Biography

Mark Stoyle grew up in rural mid-Devon, and, after leaving school, worked for a time as a field archaeologist in Exeter. He is currently Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton and has particular research interests in the British crisis of the 1640s; in witchcraft; in urban society; and in Tudor rebellions.

Mark has written many monographs and scholarly articles and his most recent book - A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 - was published by Yale University Press in 2022. He is currently one of the co-investigators on the major AHRC-funded research project, ‘Conflict, Welfare and Memory: Maimed Soldiers and War Widows of the English Civil Wars, 1642-1700’. Mark has served on the Council of the Royal Historical Society, on the advisory board of the Victoria County History, and on the editorial advisory panel of BBC History Magazine. He has also appeared on more than 60 radio and TV programmes in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia.

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