Not till page 40 does Andy Wood offer an account of the rebellions of 1549, and by page 69 his narrative is done. For this book is much less a study of the rebellions themselves than of what contemporaries and some modern historians and politicians have made of them—or, rather, have made of Kett's rebellion, as the risings in Cornwall and Devon get pretty short shrift. Wood very self-consciously seeks to position his book as a historiographical landmark in the study of popular politics. He is keen to show the commons of Norfolk as knowledgeable, purposeful, and effective, somewhat at odds with his simultaneous desire to present them as downtrodden victims of noble and gentry rapacity. Angry social resentment, indeed “a spirit of violent class antagonism” (152), bulks large in his interpretation. Wood endorses the indictment against Kett that accused him of summoning a rebel host whose purpose was “kyll the gentlemen” and argues that the antipathy to the nobility and gentry revealed in Alexander Nevill's narrative account of the rising printed in 1575 fairly reflected the rebels’ sentiments. It is just possible, however, that both indictment and Nevill exaggerated—perhaps sincerely, perhaps deliberately—the mindless violence of the rebels. The exact nature of the social antagonisms may have been more complex than is presented here, reflecting tensions not at the foot but rather much nearer the summit of the social hierarchy. Frustratingly, we lack any very specific details of which individuals were involved in 1549. Yet Wood recognizes that many of the leaders of late medieval and early modern rebellions, including Robert Kett, were men of significance in their localities, constables, churchwardens, bailiffs, coqs de village who were by no means poor. It is fair to highlight, as Wood does, the richness, sophistication, and vibrancy of what he calls their “political culture,” but it misleads to see this as popular political culture.

More plausibly, Wood sees such “honest men” as joining in and taking on the leadership of rebellions in order “to control poorer, angrier and more violent rebels” (175). He argues, alongside James Sharpe, that the long-run disappearance of popular rebellions owed much to the greater integration of the class of “honest men” within the Tudor state against the background of greater social polarization and a sharper division between such “honest men” and the poor. Maybe, however, social polarization has been overworked as an explanation. Arguably, growing prosperity (the mid-1590s apart), more organized poor relief, as well as greater vigilance, played their part. And rebellions had never been everyday occurrences. It is not to diminish the reality and the depth of the social tensions uncovered by the risings in Norfolk to emphasize the contingency of the revolt and to hold Protector Somerset, for all his good intentions and sympathy for the poor commons, to account for the tragic unfolding of events. That there were no risings on the scale of 1549 in the mid-1590s owes not a little to the greater sensitivity of Queen Elizabeth and her counselors in a difficult decade. How effectively rulers set about their tasks varied—and mattered greatly.

And Wood's predominantly social perspective makes for a somewhat one-dimensional study of Kett's rebellion itself. Missing is any sustained economic analysis. Details of price movements are briefly intruded in a single paragraph (30) after a lengthy discussion of the nature of political authority (and there is a further brief mention on 165), yet the economic circumstances—not least the export of cloth—and the impact of the costs of Henry VIII's disastrous wars of the late 1540s do seem central to any full understanding of Kett's rebellion. Nor, although foldcourse is briefly mentioned (56), does Wood pay much specific attention to agrarian matters. Yet it does not seem surprising that conflicts should have been especially acute in an area in which access to common land was seasonal, with lords pasturing sheep over the winter on common land that humbler folk would use for arable cultivation over the summer. More might be said about how and why discontents flared up into outright rebellion in Norfolk much more than elsewhere: was that because the dominant magnate Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, was a prisoner in the Tower and unable to neutralize popular anger? Nor is there much here on the political dimensions of the revolt. Wood is almost certainly correct in seeing Kett's rebellion as a spontaneous rising of the commons, but some contemporaries did point to manipulation from above: such notions are worth attention even if they are ultimately dismissed.

What Wood concentrates on instead is the language in which contemporaries described and then Elizabethans recalled these commotions. (It is a surprise to find an author so attentive to language describing a recent book as “path-breaking” [151]—groundbreaking, perhaps, or path-finding?) It might have been better to have integrated this material with the account of the rebellions. There is too much rather portentous quotation from a range of anthropologists and sociologists (“The everyday emerges as the essential site within which a ruling class must maintain its authority” [26–27]; “In this section, we address the relationship between speech and social power, and address the logic that underlay contemporary connections between silence and social order” [108]; “Language was therefore not only a site of domination, but could also become a field of contestation” [111]; “Since speech was about power, it was also about agency” [131]; “The ruling ideology sought to fix the meaning of certain keywords of political discourse, rendering them static and unchanging” [146]; “Moments of popular assertiveness grow from the collective maintenance of semi-public spaces within which critiques of the dominant social order can be voiced” [248–49]). At best, that amounts to somewhat windily expressed common sense.

And it is curious that a historian who gives so much space to the writings of other historians should nonetheless be so selective in those whom he quotes. Ethan Shagan's paper on 1549 is praised—puzzlingly, since Shagan was arguing against the view very reasonably put forward by Wood here that Protector Somerset sincerely displayed an unusual sympathy for the poor—but the counters by Michael Bush and myself are ignored (see English Historical Review 114 [1999]: 34–63, and ensuing Debate, English Historical Review 115 [2000]: 103–12, 113–20, 121–33). Cliff Davies’ pioneering essays on Tudor rebellions and Penry Williams's classic study The Tudor Regime, penetrating not least in his exploration of the ways in which governments secured compliance, are not mentioned. Mark Stoyle's case for the continuities between revolts in Cornwall (“The Dissidence of Despair: Rebellion and Identity in Early Modern Cornwall,” Journal of British Studies 38, no. 4 [1999]: 423–44; reprinted in his West Britons [Exeter, 2002]) would have been grist to Wood's mill (not least as Wood briefly refers [249–50] to St. Keverne). Helen Speight's excellent thesis on the southwestern rising (“Local Government and Politics in Devon and Cornwall, 1509–1549, with Special Reference to the South-Western Rebellion of 1549” [DPhil thesis, University of Sussex, 1991]) is not used.

On particular themes, Wood is at his most perceptive in dismissing Diarmaid MacCulloch's recent claims for Kett's rebellion as a rebellion in favor of the Protestant Reformation (Tudor Church Militant [London, 1999], 44–45, 121, 122-23, 149). Matthew Parker, he notes, was denounced by the rebels as a “hierling doctor.” Protector Somerset, no less, doubted the sincerity of the rebels’ profession of attachment to Christ's doctrine. The conservative bishop of Norwich, William Rugge, had allegedly comforted the traitors of Norfolk. The rebels regarded the confiscation of church goods as akin to theft. They destroyed various symbols of the Reformation in Norfolk, notably the remodeled hospitals. Wood might have added that once they took control of the city of Norwich, the rebels conspicuously did not engage in the kind of iconoclasm so common in Continental cities.

Wood seems most at home when exploring the ways in which people recalled the events of 1549, some approving, some disapproving, some dreaming of new commotions, some anxious to forget all that had happened. The authorities denounced the rebellions, while some of the commons saw the rebels’ leaders as heroes; litigants exploited memories of what individuals or groups had done during the rebellions; Victorian rural radicals, fighting their own battles, saw Kett in a favorable light; Labour local councillors, on the eve of the four-hundreth anniversary of the revolt, pressed for the erection of a plaque hailing Kett as a “notable leader in the long struggle of the common people of England to escape from a servile life” (263). All that makes for enjoyable reading, yet nothing here seems very surprising, and in the end it adds little to our understanding of Kett's rebellion itself.