Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607

Summary

In May 1607 a spark of revolt fell in Northamptonshire. The area, as Sir Edward Montague, one of the county members, had warned Parliament in 1604, was tinder; and, blazing up, the flames ran swiftly over Northamptonshire into the adjacent counties. But, after some hesitant half-measures on the part of the local justices, the fire was rapidly and effectively beaten down. It was the old story—a doomed outburst of desperate, ill-organized peasants, so badly equipped that they were short even of spades and shovels to set about their task of laying open enclosures and filling up ditches, so poorly armed that a handful of mounted gentry, with their retainers, was enough to rout a thousand of them. And the aftermath was the familiar one—executions, a Royal Commission of Inquiry, some vague promises of redress.

Most history books ignore the revolt or dismiss it in a line or two. It was, wrote E. F. Gay, "weak and ineffective". Yet this same historian also states that the outbreak "had something more than the dimensions of the ordinary local riot", and that there had been nothing on the same scale since the northern rebellion of 1569. Moreover, most of us, in our alarm, have a habit of magnifying any sort of civil disturbance; and, however insignificant this revolt may appear from the remote distance of three hundred and fifty years, it is reasonable to suppose that many Englishmen of the time were profoundly disturbed by it.