On 9 May 1553, the magistrates of the city of Norwich heard evidence from a young servant, Johane Swanne, that the recent enclosure of an area of common land called Town Close might lead to a riot. The magistrates most likely had recent events on their mind: four years earlier, in the opening stages of Kett's rebellion, the city's poor had cast down fences on Town Close. In her testimony, Johane Swanne explained that she had been in the Cross Keys alehouse when she overheard John Somerd say to “one Thurston … that if the town close were not put down within thies iiii dayes he wold be one of the viii that wold put it downe.” Swanne explained that she had interrupted the men, exclaiming that she “wold not have suche talke Rehersed here for we had of such matters late ynough” and that she “departed from them.” When Swanne told her mistress what she had overheard, her mistress then told her that “she shuld not kepe it secrete but open it to some other.” Swanne therefore sought out the magistrates.Footnote ¹

This perhaps seems clear enough. But once the magistrates took evidence from John Somerd and John Thurston, responsibility for the issue became more complicated. Thurston explained that Somerd had persuaded him to drink in the Cross Keys and that “by and by came in another yong man what he was he know not.” Claiming that Edward VI had issued a declaration sanctioning the removal of all recent enclosures, Somerd proposed the destruction of the fences on Town Close. Thurston said that he had replied that “thow arte a foole what shuldest thow have any suche communycacon kepe they tong” and that “there were nomoore words in comunycacon betwixte them but this examyna[n]te roose & wente his waye from thens home.” John Somerd was next to be examined. He opened his testimony with the revelation that John Thurston was his uncle, an aspect of their relationship that Thurston had neglected to mention. Somerd then detailed a complicated chain of rumor, explaining that he had told his uncle that James Russell had told him (i.e., Somerd) that a pair of gallows had been erected at the gates of a gentleman who was notorious as an encloser of common land and that when he had been “in a company at James taylours,” he heard tell of the destruction of some unspecified enclosures. By the time of his examination, Somerd had forgotten the name of the man who told him the story, adding that “he doth not know … where he dwellith that told it to him.” In Somerd's version of events, his uncle “made lyte” of the story and they left the alehouse together.Footnote ²

The conversation in the Cross Keys alehouse illuminates some key themes in the reportage of popular political speech in Tudor England. It is significant, for instance, that Johane's mistress advised her to reveal the discussion. We should also note the attribution of the origins of the conversation to anonymous individuals: the mysterious “yong man” whom only John Thurston remembered and the nameless person who told John Somerd about the attacks on enclosures.Footnote ³ It is also important that Thurston claimed to have criticized his nephew as “a foole” for having initiated the discussion. Finally, we can note how, as the investigation developed, the substance of the story dissolved.

Such evidence bears heavily on James C. Scott's influential theorization of power and resistance in highly stratified societies. Scott has argued that, due to the characteristic hostility of traditional elites to open criticism, plebeian dissidence frequently takes place offstage, beyond the “public transcript” of elite domination. According to Scott, an “entire discourse” lies submerged within the concealed subversion of the subordinate; he calls this the “hidden transcript.” Thus, “neither everyday forms of resistance nor the occasional insurrection can be understood without reference to the sequestered social sites at which such resistance can be nurtured and given meaning.” Of special importance to Scott are those “sequestered sites” within which popular criticism can be developed and political action organized. Comparing mid-nineteenth-century French working-class politics with slaves’ resistance in the antebellum Deep South of the United States, he comments that “the working-class cafe, like the hush arbors of the slaves, became the privileged social sites for the hidden transcript even if they were often penetrated by police agents.”Footnote ⁴

Scott's model has some applicability to the circumstances in which plebeian dissidents found themselves in sixteenth-century England. Certainly, lower-class rebels possessed a strong sense of tactics, concealing organization, leadership, and individual protest within the collective common voice.Footnote ⁵ This found its way into popular drama. The anonymous author of the play Thomas of Woodstock mocked the state's inability to pin down rumor. The Bailiff, an absurd character, is obsessed with seditious whistling; he asks another character, “My good fellow, be not pestiferous, but say and tell the truth: who did set you a-work? Or who was the cause of your whistling? Or did any man say to you Go whistle?”Footnote ⁶ Faced by collective silence, real-life magistrates were sometimes as frustrated as the Bailiff. Yet the evidence concerning seditious words suggests that plebeian politics could nonetheless be opened to the magisterial gaze.

It will be argued here that the willingness of some lower-class people to report their neighbors’ and workmates’ political opinions presents some difficulties for the full applicability of James Scott's thesis to sixteenth-century England. Scott's theorization of power relations certainly enables a fuller sense of the partially submerged world of popular politics in Tudor England, locating large-scale rebellions within its wider context of everyday plebeian criticism and action. In particular, Scott enables a fuller comprehension of the ideology of popular politics. However, his work too easily assumes that popular animosity toward authority was not merely constant but also homogeneous, uniform, and maintained at a high pitch. The evidence presented in this piece suggests something of the opposite: that popular criticism of rulers was often fragmented, uneven, and contested. Moreover, Scott fails to account for the willingness of subordinates to inform on one another; for unlike nineteenth-century Paris, there were no police agents at work in Tudor England. Instead, as we saw in the case of the alleged seditious speech in the Cross Keys alehouse, accusations of seditious speech emerged from within communities.

While recognizing the brilliance of Scott's analysis of power relations, the argument pursued in this essay develops a partial critique of his thesis. We will see how the evidence of the repression of plebeian speech illuminates both popular solidarity and betrayal in sixteenth-century England. Most importantly, I argue that state repression of popular political speech crucially depended on the willingness of subordinates to betray one another. In particular, wealthier, office-holding plebeians—a social fraction known contemporaneously as the “honest men”—were essential to surveillance of popular politics. This assertion conflicts with Geoffrey Elton's account of the enforcement of state policy in the 1530s. Elton's analysis drew on his reading of Thomas Cromwell's massively detailed correspondence, which (among many other things) provides extensive information about seditious speech. Elton defended Cromwell from the charge of having created a Henrician police state, showing that Cromwell depended on informal, largely unsolicited, sometimes quite dubious, allegations. The prosecution of sedition was, it seemed, uncoordinated, sometimes even random. Given the local origins of such prosecutions, Elton argued that “concealment was the bane of the government's police work. … The only thing the government could do was to look savagely upon all concealment of treason.”Footnote ⁷

Geoffery Elton's assessment of Cromwell's enforcement of policy obscures the logic of state repression in two important respects. First, Elton failed to locate accurately the social level at which agency was exercised in reporting seditious speech. Second, he understated the importance of fear as a motivating factor in the betrayal of such speech. Elton claimed that, far from demonstrating the existence of a police state, Cromwell's correspondence provides “plentiful evidence of free talking and rash action. … There are occasional remarks to show that people were not without fear but explicit mention is exceedingly rare.”Footnote ⁸ In contrast, it will be argued here that the repression of political speech created genuine fear among subordinates and that these anxieties were exploited in order to regulate popular politics. This represented a remarkably successful intervention, one that depended on the exploitation of internal divisions among the commons, whereby the wealthier honest men were encouraged to monitor the political speech of their poorer neighbors. State authority in Tudor England therefore depended primarily on its hegemonic capacity to call on the loyalty of some of its subjects and only secondarily on its repressive capacities.

This brings me to my second criticism of Geoffrey Elton's assessment of Cromwellian rule. Elton argued that seditious speech found its way to Cromwell thanks to “the patron-client structure of Tudor society.” Especially important in Elton's opinion was the role played by the gentry: “Policy depended on the readiness of the gentlemen of the shires … to co-operate in the universal vigilance against possible dissidents and enemies.” For Elton, therefore, it was the county gentry who initiated the repression of seditious speech.Footnote ⁹ Yet a closer scrutiny of Cromwell's correspondence shows that although an active magistracy was important to the prosecution of seditious speech, the essential element in the persecution of verbal dissidence were the honest men.Footnote ¹⁰ In sixteenth-century England, as in other historical contexts, repressive state apparatuses depended on the active involvement of elements among the “ruled,” combined with the passive consent of the majority, in order to function. This enmeshing of subordinates within the state organization of repression blurs the clear distinction between governor and governed, on which Scott's model depends. Seditious speech prosecutions therefore present the historian with a conundrum, providing evidence of the willingness of some subordinates to criticize the dominant norms of their society, while also highlighting the willingness of their workmates, neighbors, or kin to betray them.Footnote ¹¹ Those denunciations can be read in two ways (they are not mutually exclusive): as proof of genuine popular loyalty to the regime and as evidence of the denouncer's own fear of punishment if she or he failed to reveal critical words to the authorities.Footnote ¹²

On 12 May 1537, just after the uncovering of a planned rebellion in Walsingham (Norfolk), in which local people planned to murder the nearby gentry and restore the dissolved monastic houses, Elizabeth Wood found herself at John Dix's shop in Aylsham (Norfolk).Footnote ¹³ Leaning on the window, she remarked to him that “it was pitie that theis Walsingham men was discovered for we shall have nev[er] good world till we fall together by the earys. And wth Clubbes and Clowted shone shall the dede be done for we had nev[er] good worlde synnes this kinge Rayned it is pitie that he fyled any Clowtes more than one.”Footnote ¹⁴ Couched as it was in seditious prophecy and humorous proverb, Dix recognized the danger of Wood's speech.Footnote ¹⁵ He went to his neighbor Thomas Clomp and “desyered hym of his Cownsaill.” Clomp “comanded the same Dix to … showe it unto the kings Officers.”Footnote ¹⁶ This advice brought him before Thomas Okyen, the constable of Aylsham, who referred the matter to two of the chief men of the town, John Betts and Edmonde Wythe. It was only after Betts and Wythe had meditated on the matter that Wood's words were revealed to the local magistrate, Sir James Boleyn, who proceeded to examine the witnesses and sent the resultant documentation to Cromwell.

Clearly, then, Boleyn formed a significant part in the chain of events that led ultimately to Elizabeth Wood's execution. But he would never have been aware of her words had it not been for the constable and chief men of Aylsham. Despite their pretensions to govern a silent and compliant commons, the Tudor gentry recognized their dependence on what Edmund Dudley called the “chief of theis folke” for information about the political attitudes of the ruled. In 1537, for instance, Sir John Russell believed that he could depend on “the moost discrete and substauncall psons … to know the certaintie of the state of [the] comons herts.”Footnote ¹⁷ The Duke of Norfolk recognized the significance of such subtle divisions as crucial determinants of the reliability of witnesses to seditious speech, observing that “they that herd” a Norwich weaver's proposal for a popular uprising in September 1536 were “very honest psonns and of gode substaunce.”Footnote ¹⁸ In this way, the designation of “honesty” tied together political dependency and social status. Thus, one loyal priest informed Cromwell of his intention to call the “gentilmen and honeste men” of his locality before him in order to assess the “vayne babullyng of the people.”Footnote ¹⁹ The supervisory role of the honest men is significant: it points toward the social depth of governance in Tudor England, while also illuminating the linkage between state formation, allegiance, and structural divisions among the commons.Footnote ²⁰

None of this should be taken to imply that the gentry were unimportant; clearly, they represented an essential point of communication between the honest men and the political center. Rather, my point is that the social frontier of the early modern state lay on a fault line within the plebeian community, that which separated the “vulgar” and “light sort” from the “honest men” and “better sort.” The Duke of Norfolk knew this well enough. He took a hard-headed pride in his establishment of a surveillance network within those parts of East Anglia that lay under his control during the crisis years of 1536–37. Writing in proprietary terms about “my towne of Stoke” and the adjacent area around Hadleigh (Essex), he bragged to Cromwell how he had “set such order and stay” that “it shalbe very hard for one to speke any unfittyng word but that he shalbe … taken and sent to me.” Norfolk proposed that the Earl of Oxford should return to “his town of Lavenham” (Suffolk), in order to ensure that Suffolk and Essex would remain quiet. But even the noble duke condescended to recognize the significance of the honest men, trusting that the “clothyers of Suff[olk]” could be relied on to maintain order.Footnote ²¹ At times, Norfolk seemed almost blithely dismissive of the threat represented by plebeian rebellion. Writing in September 1536 about the discovery of the aforementioned “Insurreccion” within Norwich, the duke assured Cromwell that any rising in Norfolk would be “more difficult to be done In this contre[y] than In any shire In this realme” because “we be to many jentlemen here to suffer any suche besynes.”Footnote ²² Although the events of 1549 were to demonstrate the inaccuracy of this assessment of the Norfolk gentry's control over their county, the duke's remark did not reflect any impractical fantasy of elite dominion; rather, such surveillance impinged tangibly on poorer people's political confidence.

Popular fear of surveillance is very evident in the words of Richard Bishop of Bungay (Suffolk), who in May 1537 began what proved to be a very dangerous conversation with his neighbor Robert Seymon. Bishop's opening proposition mixed social commentary with current affairs. Perceiving that Seymon did not dissent from his observation that “this is an hard world for pore men,” Bishop observed that “ye seme to be an honest man and such on[e] as a man myght open hys mynd unto.” Wrongly assured of his confidant's reliability, Bishop went on to discuss the failed rising in Walsingham and a prophecy that foretold that there would be a great gathering at Mousehold Heath (a large common beside eastern Norwich, which in 1381 and again in 1549 served as the site of a rebel camp), where “the proudest Prince in Christendom should be … subdued.” Bishop went on, “Wee ar so used nowe a days at Bungay as was nev[er] sene afore this; for if ii or iii gud felowys be walking togeder, the constables come to theyme and wolle knowe what communycacon they have or ellys they shalbe stokkyd.” From this, he concluded that “if ii men were to gethe[r] on[e] myght say to anothe[r] what he wold as long as the iiide man was not ther And if iii men were to gether if ii of theyme were absent the iirde myght say what he wolde in safety enoughe.” Upon the conclusion of their conversation, Seymon headed for the bailiff of Bungay, Richard Wharton. After he heard about the matter from Wharton, the Duke of Suffolk ordered the Suffolk magistrates to suppress any gatherings or conversations between “Light psons” and “Idell people” in the county.Footnote ²³ The criminal court archives of Suffolk do not survive from this period, but it is hard to imagine that Richard Bishop survived unscathed.

Such evidence bears heavily on questions of loyalty in Tudor England. To whom did the working people of that society owe their primary allegiance: to their rulers or to their neighbors? How far were social solidarities bisected by loyalty to the monarch? Ethan Shagan has recently argued that the relative success of the English Reformation stemmed from the primacy of loyalty to the crown over religious allegiances. The evidence of seditious speech accusations provides some support for this view. Following the extraction of his confession under torture, Robert Dalyell emphasized that he was a loyal subject of the crown. He claimed that when he was told a seditious prophecy, he exclaimed that those who spread the prophecy “were false traytors yn their so spekyng.”Footnote ²⁴ (But then, given his experience, perhaps it was sensible to do so.) In the accusation of sedition that he leveled against Raphe Addished in 1538, Nicolas Apsley was keen to present himself as an ideal subject. Claiming that Addished had passed on the rumor that a tax was to be levied on horned animals, Apsley admitted that when he returned home he communicated this rumor to his wife and a neighbor but added the loyalist commentary that “all that we have is the kings and at his pleasur. And as for all that I have both my bodye and my goods shalbe the kyngs at his pleasur,” to which his neighbor said “by my trewth ye say lyke a trewe and faithfull subjecte to yor prynce.”Footnote ²⁵ Perhaps Apsley protested too much. Whether truthful or not, however, such remarks suggest something of what subjects felt they were meant to say about the crown. Certainly, both royal injunctions and printed condemnations of rebellion assumed that true subjects would keep their ears open for seditious gossip. Given this, it is important that those who revealed the dissenting words of their neighbors and workmates sometimes mentioned not only their loyalty to the crown but also their offended sense of conscience: Robert Gowche, for instance, reported the dangerous rumors going around Diss (Norfolk) in 1553 concerning the alleged pregnancy of the unmarried Queen Mary, “being moved in consiens” to do so.Footnote ²⁶

Yet a profound sense of fear underlies much of the archival record. Upon hearing the parish clerk of Lakenham (Norfolk) prophesy the return of recently dissolved monastic houses, a Norwich Greyfriar “waggyd his hedde sayeng he wold medle in noo such matters And went his waye.”Footnote ²⁷ Conversation concerning matters of state at Thame (Oxfordshire) was cut short by the warning “lett us speke no mor of this matt[er] for men may be blamed for Spekyng of the trouthe.”Footnote ²⁸ A garrulous parson was reminded of the proverb “letill said is sone amended.”Footnote ²⁹ When rumors of the king's alleged intention to destroy half of the realm's parish churches reached Wigmore (Shropshire), the man who brought that news was warned “to beware gevyng credit to such light talys for … suche talys had byn the occasion of moche displeasure.”Footnote ³⁰ Upon hearing criticism of Henry VIII's fiscal and religious policies, a Northamptonshire man pointed out that the king was head of the Church of England and warned “be ware what thow spekyst for a lyttull worde ys tresson.”Footnote ³¹ Upon being invited to join a plot “to reyse the Comons” of Fincham (Norfolk) against the local gentry, George Hall replied “that he wuld not [h]a[ve] spoken such wordys as he hard hym speke for all the towne of Fyncham.”Footnote ³² Similarly, Thomas Wryght's assessment of the execution of the Walsingham plotters—“that they that dyed for the Comynwelthe wher hangyd uppe”—was interrupted by the warning to “be ware what he sayde.”Footnote ³³

The author of Thomas of Woodstock assumed that the audience would sympathize with the personification of local authority in the character of Nimble, the half-witted constable obsessed with seditious “whisperers.” At one point, Nimble arrests a man for whistling, on the grounds that “he has most erroneously and rebelliously whistled treason.” For all its irreverence, the play displayed a sharp awareness of the seriousness of surveillance. Elsewhere in Thomas of Woodstock, the country was said to be “so full of intelligencers that two men can scarce walk together but they’re attached for whisperers.”Footnote ³⁴ Similar worries afflicted real-life dissidents. In 1586, one would-be Hampshire rebel confessed how his neighbor Robert Hassall had drawn him into a conspiracy against the local farmers, saying “he wolde tell hym more, but before that he wolde tell hym anye thinge he sholde swere unto hym not to utter yt to anye,” and had warned him how “yf yow speake of yt againe, I will denye yt.”Footnote ³⁵ One of the Walsingham plotters of 1537 was rightly worried by the security surrounding the planned rising, requiring of a potential recruit that “he wuld kepe his councell secretly.”Footnote ³⁶ Another of the conspirators stated bluntly that he would murder anyone who disclosed the plot.Footnote ³⁷ Despite such bloodthirsty warnings, in some cases on the utterance of dangerous speech, there was a rush to the door of the magistrate: upon his implication in the 1586 Hampshire plot, Richard Vassinger was advised by his relatives that he should betray the conspirators since they were of no “credytt,” warning him that “you were best to utter yt, for p[er]adventure [the other conspirators] will denye yt, or saye that you tolde yt [them], sythence you have have no wytnesse of yt.”Footnote ³⁸

Fear alone could therefore provide sufficient motive for denunciation. But so too could communal quarrels. Subordinates were well aware of how heavily the prosecution of seditious speech depended on their participation. One critic of Henry VIII's government was warned by his neighbors in Over (Cambridgeshire) that, if questioned by magistrates, he should take more care over his opinions “For and yf thow confesse them or any of them Thow wylt be hanged onleste thy neghbors be good to the[e].”Footnote ³⁹ A reputation as a good neighbor might prevent the disclosure of a man's or a woman's words.Footnote ⁴⁰ Despite the betrayal of his speech by some of his neighbors, for instance, one man remained certain that he could depend on “the substaunce of his … neybors to witness wt hym.”Footnote ⁴¹

In some cases, poor people were denounced to the authorities by their richer neighbors: thus, the “honeste men” of one parish “accused a very powre man” of sedition in 1538.Footnote ⁴² Alternatively, the micropolitics of particular communities might inhibit denunciation. The “poore” of one village explained that they had often heard their vicar articulate seditious opinions but that they “nev[er] durst utter it … for fere of the prest”; finally, when the honest men weighed in against him, the vicar's words were revealed.Footnote ⁴³ The power wielded by employers or priests over the “poore men” of a locality sometimes prevented the revelation of their seditious speech.Footnote ⁴⁴ In such cases, the eventual reportage of dangerous speech might form a kind of social inversion: the initial disclosure of the Walsingham conspiracy came from a beggar and was directed against one of the priests.Footnote ⁴⁵ In another case, the poorer neighbors of “a substauncall ritche priest” and a wealthy farmer were betrayed for being “Joyned together” in treason.Footnote ⁴⁶

Given the intimate but sometimes fraught relationship between master and servant, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that servants were sometimes willing to act as witnesses to the seditious words of their masters.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1550, the Norwich servant Charles Worlington intended to take the most opportune moment at which to betray his master's proposal that Kett's rebellion should be repeated: his fellow servant Robert Branthout told the Norwich magistrates how Worlington had remarked that “he wolde tary tylle the Gentylmen of the countrith were come, and then he wolde shewe them and … he wolde lodge his Maister … in pryson faste as sone as his Maister coulde lodge him.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, the servant of the leader of the 1549 Essex rebellions presented evidence against his master.Footnote ⁴⁹ If power relations between the plebeian master and his servant were rendered fluid by seditious speech legislation, the relationship between the gentry and their servants was consolidated. It was not always wise to voice dissenting opinions in the presence of the servants of the gentry. In 1539, John Brady, a gentleman's servant, entered an alehouse in which the company was discussing premature news of the fall of Thomas Cromwell; after the hostess told Brady the topic of their conversation, he replied “that he was glad that shee had reherst hit to him, for he wolde bringe her before his master for it.”Footnote ⁵⁰

So what does the evidence of popular political speech and its betrayal reveal about early modern loyalties and allegiances? Most obviously, it comprises a body of rich—if problematic—evidence concerning popular political language. Less obviously, it illuminates the willingness of subordinates to betray one another to their rulers. The Tudor state was unable to mobilize the same repressive powers as could the governors of More's Utopia where, when servants and laborers found themselves outside their immediate locality, they were forbidden to “as muche as speake or talke together, or salute one an other.”Footnote ⁵¹ But the atomizing force of betrayal nonetheless enabled the Tudor state to reach deep into popular politics, probing its limits, surveying its content, and monitoring its internal debates. Despite its limited coercive powers, this enabled the state to punch beyond its weight: for much of the time, it proved effective at rooting out popular political dissent.

A fuller reading of seditious speech prosecutions has methodological and interpretive implications for the practice of social history: it ought to force us to think more carefully about space. Having somewhat grumpily incorporated some aspects of the “linguistic turn,” social historians need now to move beyond language. In particular, we need to consider the material and spatial context within which words were uttered and meanings constructed: as James Epstein has put it, “The sites of discourse and conditions governing those sites and injunctions … are crucial to communication.”Footnote ⁵² In the context of sixteenth-century England, the fact that governors were able to overhear, albeit at secondhand, political conversations among those whom they sought to govern meant that they were able to reach into and to influence popular politics. This represented a spatial as well as a political intrusion, enabling the state to monitor conversations in the physical settings of plebeian social life: alehouses, fields, streets, marketplaces, roads, churches, workshops, and houses. Contrary to James Scott's optimistic assessment, then, in Tudor England there seem to have been very few “sequestered social sites” within which plebeian dissidents could feel entirely safe. Epstein quotes Stallybrass and White: “in large part the history of political struggle has been the history of the attempts made to control significant sites of assembly and spaces of discourse.”Footnote ⁵³ Critically, seditious words were performative, spoken in specific places: where certain words were spoken could be as important as what was said. In a world in which the Western state, consumed by its own particular anxieties, seeks to extend its reach ever deeper into the lives of its subject populations, the evidence of seditious speech prosecutions in Tudor England provides a salutary reminder that the intermingling of surveillance and anxiety is not a condition of postmodernity alone.