King's
commissary was stabbed by a priest. The troubles extended to
Devonshire, where men forced the priests to celebrate the mass after
the old ritual, and then took the field with crosses and tapers, and
carrying the Host before them. When their numbers became so large as
to embolden them to put forth a manifesto, they demanded before
all--incredible as it may seem--the restoration of the Six Articles
and the Latin Mass, the customary reverence to the Sacrament and to
images. They did not go so far as to demand the restoration of the
authority of the Roman See, like the rebels under Henry VIII; but they
pressed for a fresh recognition of the General Councils, and of the
old church laws as a whole. At least half of the confiscated church
property was to be given back, two abbeys at least were to remain in
each county. But this movement owed its peculiar character to yet
another motive. The enclosures of the arable land for purposes of
pasture, of which the peasantry had been long complaining, did not
merely continue; the nobility, which took part in the secularisation
of the church-lands in an increasing degree, extended its grasp also
to the newly-gained estates. So it came to pass that a rising of the
peasants against the nobles was now united with tendencies towards
church restoration, as in previous times with ideas of quite a
different kind. East and West were in revolt at one and the same time
and for different reasons. On a hill near Norwich, the chief leader, a
tanner by trade, called Ket, took his seat under a great oak which he
called the Oak of Reformation; he had the mass read daily after the
old use: but he also planned a remodeling of the realm to suit the
views of the people. The wildest expectations were aroused. A prophecy
found belief according to which monarchy and nobility were to be
destroyed simultaneously, and a new government set up under four
Governors elected by the common people. And woe to him who wished to
reason with the peasants against their design. They were already
bending their bows against a preacher who attempted to do so, he was
only saved with difficulty. But they were still less capable this
time of withstanding the organised power of the State than they had
been under Henry VIII. In Devonshire they were beaten by Lord Russel,
the ancestor of the Dukes of Bedford; in Norfolk, where they had risen
in the greatest force, by John Dudley Earl of Warwick. Under his
banners we find Ger