share in the rising, when Henry VI. and
his justices visited Kent in January, 1451.

The revolt failed to amend the wretched misrule. It remained for civil war
to drive Henry VI. from the throne, and make Edward IV. of York his
successor.

THE NORFOLK RISING UNDER ROBERT KET, 1549

A century after the rising of the commons of Kent came the last great
popular rebellion--the Norfolk Rising, led by Ket. This insurrection was
agrarian and social, concerned neither with the fierce theological
differences of the time, nor with the political rivalries of Protector
Somerset and his enemies in Edward VI.'s Council.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century England was in the main a nation
of small farmers, but radical changes were taking place, and these changes
meant ruin to thousands of yeomen and peasants.

The enclosure, by many large landowners, of the fields which for ages past
had been cultivated by the country people, the turning of arable land into
pasture, were the main causes of the distress.[45] Whole parishes were
evicted in some places and dwelling houses destroyed, and contemporary
writers are full of the miseries caused by these clearances.

Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515, prohibiting the "pulling
down of towns," and ordering the reversion of pasture lands to tillage, but
the legislation was ignored. Sir Thomas More, in his "Utopia" (1516),
described very vividly what the enclosures were doing to rural England; and
a royal commission, appointed by Cardinal Wolsey, reported in the following
year that more than 36,000 acres had been enclosed in seven Midland
counties. In some cases, waste lands only were enclosed, but landowners
were ordered to make restitution within forty days where small occupiers
had been dispossessed. Royal commissions and royal proclamations were no
more effective than Acts of Parliament. Bad harvests drove the Norfolk
peasantry to riot for food in 1527 and 1529. The dissolution of the
monasteries in 1536 and 1539 abolished a great source of charity for the
needy, and increased the social disorder. Finally, in 1547, came the
confiscation by the Crown of the property of the guilds and brotherhoods,
and the result of this enactment can only be realised by supposing the
funds of friendly societies, trade unions, and co-operative societies taken
by Government to-day without compensation.

All that Parliament would do in the face of the starvation and unemployment
that bro