Some Documents Relating to Riots

Summary

Bedfordshire has not been a county prone to violent outbreaks or apt to support lost causes. Its risings or riots have been small and sporadic. After the Conquest, though some villages resisted the Conqueror on his march, there was nothing comparable with Hereward the Wake’s venture. The peasants’ revolt scarcely touched the county, and that is true also of the incipient Lollard rising of 1414. The disorder at Bedford in 1439 was trifling compared with the large-scale fighting elsewhere by armies of baronial retainers in the Wars of the Roses. Bedfordshire did not rise to support the old religion at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace. There was no large-scale resistance to enclosure, such as was a factor in Ket’s rising of 1549, though in 1607 some disturbance spread from Northamptonshire. In the Civil War there was effective organisation in the county on the parliamentary side, but the Civil War is in a class by itself.

Partly this seems due to the fact that in Bedfordshire everything is on a small scale. No Bedfordshire baron was important enough to be a major factor in a baronial rising (by the 18th century when the 4th Duke of Bedford was powerful enough to be a national figure, parliament was the amphitheatre). The 14th century manors were many and small; hence labour problems were less pressing. Something may be due to the Bedfordshire character, if one may postulate such a thing; slow but stoical, it is not apt to flare up; yet it can endure under stress, as 17th century nonconformity shows.

No people are perfectly peaceable all the time. What then has caused such outbreaks as have occurred? The main occasions have been: common rights; the militia act; distress; and the poor law.

Common rights

This question is a very complicated one, and no attempt is here made to unravel the rights in each case quoted; but the incidents are given as examples of the kind of violence that could occur.

The first is at Blunham, probably in 1604. The Earl of Kent of Wrest (he alleges it was by agreement with “the better sort”) had enclosed 10 acres near the manorhouse where he sometimes stayed, and as recompense had relinquished his common right.