Abstract
This essay examines a work stoppage that was planned by Norwich’s worsted weaver apprentices in 1610, but that never took place. In depositions taken after the plot was revealed, the apprentices told local authorities that their aim in leaving their work was to call attention to the problem of laborers in the industry that had not served apprenticeships, but were nevertheless hired to work as journeymen. This dramatic and unusual action that the apprentices took was the result of a confluence of particular circumstances in early Stuart Norwich. The combination of a difficult local economy, the impact of nonapprenticed laborers on their future prospects, and the eruption of plague in 1609-1610 drove the apprentices to imagine and try to create a new role for themselves in the weaving trade and in urban society. Their efforts, although ineffective, nevertheless reveal the imaginable limits of social politics between apprentices and their masters.
On Monday, April 23, 1610, Joshua Warden, a worsted weaver’s apprentice, approached Robert Kepas, the master with whom he lived and worked in the Norwich city parish of St. Mary Coslany. Warden asked his master whether he was aware of the “business” that was about to unfold in the city, and when Kepas confessed his ignorance, Warden told him an alarming tale. According to Warden, a large number of apprentices were preparing for a work stoppage. Warden reported to his master that “100 of the apprentices of the worsted weavers in Norwich were determined, on Wednesday morning next being St. Mark’s day [April 25], within a quarter of half an hour’s warning a meeting to strike up a drum at Mr. Thurston’s gate and so go to Mousehold so that neither Mr. Mayor nor their masters should bring them to their work again.” 1
While the walkout did not take place, this was nevertheless the kind of activity that helped to earn apprentices a reputation for unruliness from early modern contemporaries. London apprentices, for example, were notorious for their disorderly behavior. Throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, whatever peace the capital enjoyed was periodically disturbed by apprentice assaults on aliens, brothels, serving men, and the theaters. May Day had become infamous from 1517—remembered thereafter as Evil May Day—when apprentices formed part of an angry mob that gathered and rampaged through alien districts in the city. That attack capped a two-week period of sporadic attacks against foreign residents triggered by a Paul’s Cross sermon in which the preacher had urged “Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal.” The activities of apprentices during Shrovetide appear to have been less threatening, consisting largely of noisy sporting events and games in the later sixteenth century. By the early seventeenth century, however, they added attacks on brothels to their undertakings. It is not surprising, then, that city authorities regularly directed that apprentices be kept indoors on days such as Shrove Tuesday and May Day in an effort to minimize opportunities for disturbances. Those edicts, however, did not keep apprentices from participating in the disorders of the troubled 1590s. One of the best-known incidents involving apprentices during that period occurred in June 1595, when a group of them seized a load of fish from the women who had already purchased it at market. The apprentices paid for the fish, but not the full price. 2
Although recurring outbursts from apprentices might have become more or less regular fare in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the events in Norwich in 1610 nevertheless come as a surprise for at least two reasons. First, the claim that one hundred of them were all to stop their work at a prearranged signal and depart the city en masse suggests a level of organization and planning that was largely absent in most other disturbances involving apprentices during the period. The throng of rioters on Evil May Day, for example, gathered to spontaneous cries of “apprentices and clubs” in the streets of London after a confrontation between an aldermen and a group of young men, not as a result of secret meetings in church yards, as was the case in Norwich. 3 Second, the apprentices’ threat to walk out came at a time when the weaving trade in England’s second largest city was experiencing a significant revival. After a long period of decline, both the numbers of apprentices and the number of freemen admitted to the trade were rising. The so-called new draperies, which had become the stock in trade of worsted weavers, had become quite popular by the beginning of the seventeenth century and their sales were increasing. The weaving trade was well on its way to reclaiming its numerical dominance among Norwich city trades. 4
Yet no matter how strong the recovery for the Norwich worsted trade was in 1610 and how bright its future appeared to be, its apprentices seem to have taken a different view of the situation. Scholars have noted that apprentices were, at the same time, both a privileged and exploited labor force. James Farr has pointed out that apprentices were “and-picked and potential future masters” whose introduction into the “mysteries” of an occupation distinguished them from other, nonapprenticed workers in a master’s household. 5 Completion of an apprenticeship offered such young men the prospect of becoming masters of a trade and citizens of a town, a status that conferred invaluable economic and political privileges. But that prize came only after a lengthy period of subordination. Terms of service typically lasted for seven years, much longer—as everyone knew—than it took to learn any given occupation. 6
These arrangements did not always prove to be comfortable ones, for a variety of reasons. The institution of apprenticeship relied heavily on early modern notions about hierarchy and order. The foundation of a well-ordered society, according to theorists, was the well-ordered household, governed by the father, its male head. When young men enrolled as apprentices, then, they agreed to obey and treat their masters like a father and, in turn, they were considered and treated as children. Not surprisingly, this could lead to strains in these relationships, as apprentices were placed in a position that left them subject to treatment that they sometimes experienced as arbitrary and humiliating. Ilana Ben-Amos has noted that apprentices were sometimes required, particularly early in their careers, to perform tasks that they found not only unpleasant, but also demeaning. The astrologer Simon Forman, for example, recalled in his autobiography how as the youngest apprentice in his master’s shop in the 1560s, he was compelled to do “all the worst” jobs. Paul Griffiths has shown how resentments, too, could erupt when an implicit “pecking order” in a household, where certain tasks were considered appropriate only for certain servants, was violated. When John Nicholson, a London cloth worker’s apprentice, was summoned to brush his master’s cloak, he retorted, “it was as fit for the maid servant and the younger apprentice as for himself to brush it, and therefore refused to do it.” Hours later, Nicholson refused to bring a cloth when asked, declaring “that there were younger apprentices which might be sent for as well as he.” Interactions with other members of a master’s household could also mar an apprentice’s term of service. This was the case for Edward Barlow who, by his own account, had numerous run-ins with his master’s wife with whom he lived in the 1660s when he was not aboard ship serving his master. 7 And, as London’s May Day and Shrovetide directives indicate both local authorities and masters worked together to control the leisure time of apprentices.
Relationships between apprentices and masters soured for other reasons. Sometimes masters neglected to teach their apprentices. This was the reason why the apprentice Richard Smith came to the mayor’s court in Norwich in November 1608. The court found in Smith’s favor, discharged him from his service with Hugh Ward, and placed him with another master, William Tompson. 8 But as the records demonstrate, masters were not always at fault when things went wrong between them and their apprentices. When the London cloth worker’s apprentice Robert Coles confessed to having stolen from his master, he “was openly punished in the hall before divers and sundry householders and apprentices.” In 1627, the Bristol baker John Godman told the court how his apprentice had threatened him with a knife and “behaved himself in very insolent sort,” to say the least. 9 On other occasions, masters failed to provide the material support for their apprentices, as dictated by the contract. In London in 1586, for example, the Carpenters’ court directed John Shambrook to provide food, clothing and bedding to his apprentice, as he was apparently not doing so. In an instance that went even further, the worsted weaver apprentice Henry Dunham told the Norwich mayor’s court in July 1608 that, among other mistreatments he suffered at the hands of his master, Christopher Armested, he was “so ill kept that he is full of vermin.” The court agreed and discharged Dunham from his service with Armested. 10 Sometimes, the record offers no reason why the relationship between an apprentice and master ended. This was the case with Thomas Harrison, who had begun his apprenticeship with the weaver John Meddowe in 1603-1604. However, in 1607, the Norwich mayor’s court decreed that by the agreement of all involved, Harrison would complete the term of his apprenticeship with Nicholas Crotch. 11
While some apprentices were able to seek and receive redress when masters violated the terms of their agreement, the majority was unable to exercise much control over their lives during the terms of their service. 12 Their masters, their masters’ wives, and perhaps even their masters’ servants dictated what tasks apprentices performed, and how and when they performed them. Masters meted out patriarchal discipline. And, as London’s May Day and Shrovetide directives indicate, local authorities and masters worked together to control apprentices’ leisure time and activities.
The fact that apprentices had such limited opportunities for self-determination is what makes the events of April 1610 in Norwich remarkable. By plotting to leave their work and the city on St. Mark’s day, I argue, the apprentices sought a self-government that was customarily denied to them. By leaving work, they sought to establish the terms of service with their masters, not the other way around. And by leaving the city, they would place themselves beyond the jurisdiction of city officials who restricted their movements and activities. In its implicit pursuit of self-government, therefore, the Norwich plot of 1610 stands apart from many of the other disturbances in which early modern apprentices were involved and with which modern observers are more familiar. Norwich’s apprentices did not plan, according to Joshua Warden, to negotiate with, or appeal to their masters or civic officials. Instead, they sought greater control over those relationships by refusing to work and by refusing to remain in the place where the terms of their service had been originally established.
If such efforts at self-determination were rare among early modern apprentices, one must ask why. A closer examination of the planned walkout will show a particular confluence of circumstances in early Stuart Norwich allowed the worsted weavers’ apprentices to imagine, and try to create, a different role for themselves in urban society. First, conditions in early Jacobean Norwich suggest that future prospects for the apprentices were decidedly mixed, despite the fact that conditions inside the worsted weaving industry appeared to be improving. A rapid rise in population during the last decades of the sixteenth century and early ones of the seventeenth had placed considerable strain on local society, increasing both poverty and vagrancy. Second, the apprentices also saw their future prospects jeopardized by the entry of illegal workers into the weaving trade. They charged that master weavers hired journeymen to work in their shops who had not served apprenticeships. These “Creepers,” as they were called, degraded the apprenticeship, which was supposed to be the sole qualification for admission to this next stage of urban employment. Finally, the eruption of plague in 1609-1610 in Norwich took lives and heightened fears across the city, fears from which the apprentices were not immune.
II
If the would-be “strikers” were concerned about their future prospects, they had reason to be. They stood poised to enter a working world whose opportunities were uncertain, despite their status as “hand-picked and potential future masters.” On one hand, as worsted weavers’ apprentices, they belonged to a trade whose overall fortunes were improving. The story of Norwich’s weaving trade is well known. In the earlier-sixteenth century, worsted weavers had been the most populous among the city’s freemen. That soon changed, as the production of textiles in Norwich declined and then stagnated, coinciding with the collapse of the national cloth industry. 13 In the 1560s, local authorities invited Dutch and Walloon Protestants fleeing the war-torn Netherlands to the city, hoping that they would instruct local weavers in the techniques that they used to make newer, lighter, more popular textiles. After some initial difficulties, conditions among Norwich’s worsted weavers improved, as they adopted the new methods. 14 The clearest evidence of an upswing can be found in the proportion of worsted weavers that was admitted to the city’s freedom. During the first quarter of the seventeenth century, that percentage climbed to nearly its early sixteenth-century levels and the proportion of weavers went on to overshadow that of other trades among freemen for at least the next half century. 15 That growth was gradual, with the first sustained rise in freemen occurring during the first decade of the seventeenth century. 16 It was also accompanied by a rise in the number of youths apprenticed to the trade from the early part of the century. 17
But on the other hand, not all of the weaving trade’s members benefitted from the improvement in conditions. Across England, the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed an economic expansion that was fueled largely by a growing domestic demand for goods and services. However, that expansion was blunted by a continuing rise in the country’s population that strained its resources that did not increase at the same rate. In addition, as observers such as Keith Wrightson have pointed out, economic restructuring from this time rendered the customary route to even a modest prosperity increasingly precarious. The establishment of businesses began to require greater amounts of capital than it had in the past, which put it out of reach of larger numbers of workers. More found themselves mired in journeyman or wage labor positions for long periods of time, even permanently in some cases. 18
Developments in Norwich mirrored these larger trends. Like the rest of the nation, the city’s population grew rapidly. Containing no more than eleven thousand people in 1520, according to John Pound, that number began to swell in the 1560s with the arrival of the exiles, but dropped by about one-third when plague swept through in 1579. After that, the city’s population soared, increasing by about 75 percent to about twenty thousand by 1620. Most of that increase came from in-migration, as rural dwellers flocked to the city in search of employment. One consequence was, as both Pound and Paul Griffiths have pointed out, was an increase in prosecutions for vagrancy. Griffiths has also found that city governors paid particular attention to young people “out of service” as they struggled to exert control over a growing population and to maintain order. 19 Difficulties were evident among city workers, as well. Pound’s research has revealed that during the years between 1551 and 1675, among those apprenticeships who did become freemen (many never did) about two-thirds of the textile workers did not enroll as freemen immediately, taking up to ten years to do so. Some took even longer, with a small proportion taking up their freedom as far out as twenty-five years after the completion of their apprenticeships. At the other end of the spectrum, fewer than 10 percent became free of Norwich as soon as their apprenticeships ended. These proportions correspond approximately to those of the entire population of Norwich apprentices who went on to become freemen in the same period. They provide only a rough measure of the situation for weaving apprentices, though, as the category of textile workers includes occupations practiced in Norwich other than weaving, and the long period of time considered by Pound does not allow for a close examination of the conditions of the early seventeenth century. 20 But his figures indicate that apprenticeship was not a guarantee or even a direct route to becoming a master weaver in Norwich. More likely than not, newly minted apprentices faced a potentially long “career” as wage-earning journeymen.
Journeyman status, in its theoretical formulation, was a transitional one. It was a period during which a young man, fresh out of his apprenticeship, worked for a master, salting away his earnings in anticipation of becoming a freeman and opening a shop of his own. Although a necessary step for many, it prolonged a man’s period of economic dependence. But as recent scholarship has shown, economic autonomy, not reliance on others, was considered a crucial component in the complex construction of early modern manhood and masculinity. From the ideals outlined in the works of theorists such as Dodd and Cleaver, to the streets of Cambridge, Alexandra Shepard has persuasively shown that a man’s ability to provide, to pay his debts, and to deal honestly was highly prized. As she has observed, “[to] have the freedom of the town, or to be married, implied the independent status which was the social and economic basis of patriarchal manhood.” 21
As opportunities to gain membership in the community of stable, self-sufficient householders receded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shepard has found that men on the outside of that diminishing population sought “alternative forms of manliness.” Like Merry Wiesner, who has investigated concepts of masculinity among German journeymen in the early modern period, Shepard has found evidence of “collective misrule and daring spectacles, and carefully calculated displays of violence, excess and disorder” among those who could not assert their manhood through creditworthiness or other articulations of economic independence. 22 Examples of such demonstrations included drinking rituals that involved the intake of large amounts of alcohol and violent behavior, whether in an alehouse on the streets. These were some of the ways in which understandings of manliness were reworked by, and for, those whose life-cycle trajectories no longer fit into more traditional formulations of masculinity. An examination of events in Norwich in 1610 suggests that the weaving apprentices there feared that they were about to descend into the ranks of the unstable and the un- or underemployed, where they might be considered less than men, rather than ascend into positions of authority and respect. Perhaps they engaged in alehouse antics and physical contests to proclaim their masculinity; apprentices were known to have done so. But in April of that year, they took much more dramatic action that both articulated their anxieties about their futures and sought to stem the downward spiral in which they saw themselves.
III
That dramatic action was, of course, the work stoppage that did not take place. The “strike” did not happen because, at least, the apprentice Joshua Warden revealed the plot to his master. Robert Kepas was sufficiently disturbed by the disclosure that he shared it with another weaver, Nicholas Dingle, whom he met later on April 23 near Dingle’s home in the neighboring parish of St. George Colegate. Word of the threatened walkout did not end there, however, as someone apparently informed Norwich’s mayor, Sir Thomas Hyrne. Hyrne took action immediately, examining both Joshua Warden and Nicholas Dingle on the day of the apprentice’s admission to his master, to hear what both knew of the conspiracy. 23 Over the next two days, Hyrne examined three others whom Warden named as participants in the scheme and deposed a sixth man almost two weeks later.
Almost everything that is known about the apprentices’ plot comes from the ten examinations and reexaminations that Thomas Hyrne took from those six witnesses between April 23 and May 19. They show that recruitment to the ranks of “strikers” began several days before the projected St. Mark’s day rising, although the witnesses told different tales about the type of action to which they were enlisted. Joshua Warden and two others apprentices, Robert Willis, Jr. and Thomas Harrison, all deposed that efforts had been made to conscript them into the ranks of the protestors during the evenings of Saturday, April 21 and Sunday, April 22. Warden claimed that Harrison approached him after evening prayer on Sunday evening and told him that if all the apprentices agreed, “they would make a resistance against their masters” to protest the employment of those who had not completed an apprenticeship. The protestors, a “company of apprentices and journeymen,” would be called together by the sound of a drum and together they would leave Norwich for Mousehold Heath or the nearby village of Pockthorpe. They would remain there until weaving masters and city magistrates addressed the problem of nonapprenticed labor. 24 On a second day of testimony, however, Warden would identify Willis as the one who introduced him to the conspiracy. 25
Willis told a different story. He claimed Harrison had approached him in the churchyard of St. Mary Coslany on April 21, saying that there had been “speech concerning Creep[er]s into the trade,” using an epithet for nonapprenticed journeymen, but did not elaborate on the nature of, or participants in, those earlier conversations. According to Willis, Harrison did not ask him to participate in a mass departure from the city, as Warden had claimed. Rather, Harrison asked whether Willis would “be sworn to be ready at any time” to confront the Creepers, or “pull them out” of their places of work. Willis claimed to have replied that “he would make Mr. Mayor acquainted” with the problem instead. This response apparently did not satisfy Harrison who, upon running into Willis again the following day “asked him [Willis] if he were not faint hearted, and if he would join with him [and] others to go to div[er]s houses in the city to pull out the Creepers,” first going to the homes of the wardens, or officials, of the worsted weavers’ guild, where presumably some of them worked. Willis said that refused go along with Harrison’s plan. 26
When Thomas Harrison first testified before the mayor, he admitted knowledge of the plot, but denied a leading role. He claimed that it was Joshua Warden who had approached him on the evening of April 22, along with a local journeyman, Nicholas Courtould. The pair spoke to him of “them that have been apprentices with worsted weavers and have served their full time,” but that “cannot be set on work when they come out of their years.” This was a consequence of the fact, Harrison went on to relate, that “others that have not been apprentices are preferred” for journeyman work in the weaving industry. Warden’s solution to this difficulty, according to Harrison, was “to go first to the wardens of the company to complain,” and if they did not receive satisfaction there to join together on St. Mark’s day and go to the mayor. If the mayor refused to help them, “then their purpose was to revenge themselves upon all those that work as journeymen and have not served [seven] years as apprentices.” 27
Although the witnesses differed over exactly what type of action was to be taken on April 25, they all noted that four journeymen weavers would lead the group. When the weaving master Nicholas Dingle appeared before Thomas Hyrne, he said that he had learned that the “4 journeymen wardens” were to accompany the group of apprentices who were to leave their work on that day. In his second day of testimony, Joshua Warden, too mentioned and named four such journeymen. In this account, in which he named Robert Willis as the one who sought to conscript him into the ranks of strikers, Warden said that heard apprentices talking about the plan to resist the Creepers on Sunday, April 22 in the shop where Willis served as apprentice to his father. Warden said “he heard them ta[l]king of iiii warden that should be appointed & these to be chief among those that should make the said resistance against their masters.” He named four men, only one of whom—Thomas Townsend—was ever brought before city authorities in connection with the matter. 28
When Thomas Townsend was brought before the mayor on April 25, he conceded that he was aware of the apprentices’ plans, but disparaged the entire affair and any part he was alleged to have played in it. He reported that about a week before St. Mark’s day, Robert Willis and “the boys in his [i.e., Willis’s] shop” informed Townsend that he had been chosen “one of the wardens for the pulling out of the Cre[e]p[er]s.” Townsend greeted news of his election scornfully, retorting, “what should he do to be warden of a company of boys?” He “made no account of it.” Furthermore, when he returned to the shop a few days later, he said that had there been no more mention of the planned walkout. Townsend only realized that the apprentices had been serious when he learned on April 23 that the mayor had issued a warrant for his arrest. He was apprehended in the nearby village of Pockthorpe the following day by Norwich constables. Townsend insisted that his sudden decision to leave Norwich had nothing to do with the work stoppage. Rather, he feared that the mayor sought to arrest him on a charge of debt. 29
But William Framy, a Pockthorpe weaver with whom Townsend had spent his night on the run, confirmed Townsend’s election when he spoke to Norwich city officials on May 3. It is not clear how local authorities identified Framy as a potential witness to events surrounding the walkout, but his inclusion among those deposed suggests that they expanded their search for participants beyond those mentioned by Dingle, Warden, Willis, and Harrison. Framy testified that Townsend had informed him “that there was a hundred men watching about the city, and further . . . that the apprentices of the worsted weavers had chosen him one of their wardens to pull the Creep[er]s out . . . of their looms.” In addition, Townsend had told Framy that if Joshua Warden did not reveal the plan, the apprentices would gather, “to reform the disorders of the weavers,” a statement Townsend later denied having made. 30
The plot failed because Joshua Warden did, indeed, prove to be a weak link and divulged its details to his master. And while the walkout did not take place, there had been sufficient discontent among some of the worsted weavers’ apprentices that they had begun to plan a large-scale protest against the incursion of the Creepers into the industry. The identities of those who first hatched the scheme never came to light, but it is evident that they gave careful and shrewd thought to the effort to give life to their grievances, beginning with the purported strength of the work stoppage. Warden was said to have told his master that one hundred apprentices stood ready to leave Norwich on St. Mark’s day. In William Framy’s telling, Thomas Townsend, too, had reported that the same number were poised to take action. There is no evidence to show how many had actually been recruited to the “strike.” If the Norwich authorities attempted to uncover tan extensive network of participants they did not get far, as the examination of only six men indicates. But the suggestion that such a large number of apprentices were involved would surely have alarmed city magistrates and served as a powerful demonstration of the extent and depth of the apprentices’ dissatisfaction.
However many were actually prepared to join in, apprentices still occupied the lowest position in the urban occupational hierarchy, and they must have been concerned that those in authority might not give their complaints serious or sufficient attention. That worry was reflected in the would-be “strikers” election of the four journeymen “wardens,” mirroring the structure of the city’s occupational guilds. Despite their quarrel with weavers in Norwich, that structure was deeply imprinted on the consciousness of the apprentices. The election of “wardens” was designed, presumably, to lend some credibility to their enterprise. It also suggests that the apprentices still clung to the hope that they would one day move along the traditional path from apprentice to master and perhaps, even to guild warden, someday. Nevertheless, they were surely correct to worry that their complaints about the Creepers would not be taken seriously. When examined by the mayor about his role in the plot, the journeyman Thomas Harrison, one of those whom they had elected, had asked, “what should he do to be warden of a Company of boys?” His scornful and dismissive question highlighted the inferior status of the apprentices and placed them squarely outside the community of adult men that they feared they might never join.
Having recruited participants and securing—or at least choosing—journeymen leadership for the “strike,” the apprentices raised the stakes of their scheme even higher by having those that were to leave their work on St. Mark’s day assemble on Mousehold Heath after leaving the city. Joshua Warden had contended that the apprentices were to be called to action by the sound of a drum and then they were “to continue together and to go Mousehold and so to Thorpe,” referring to Pockthorpe, the village next to the Heath. Early modern apprentices often advertised their activities with loud noises, such a drumbeats, but the choice of Mousehold Heath as a gathering place held particular significance. 31
Mousehold, which lay just to the east of Norwich, had a long history as a site of local dissident activity. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, rebels gathered there before occupying the city. 32 More infamously it was the site from which, in 1549, Robert Kett and his rebels had overrun Norwich. That rebellion began with an assault on enclosures in rural Norfolk and shortly afterward Kett led a force toward Norwich, stopping at Mousehold. They overran and easily took control of the city, where there was only token resistance from local residents. The rebels not only sacked Norwich, but also took the mayor and two aldermen as prisoners at their Mousehold camp. They held the city for about a month until they were decisively defeated at nearby Dussindale by the Earl of Warwick, who led the second force that had been sent against them, and ended one of the most turbulent periods of the sixteenth century. 33
While there would have been few Norwich residents in 1610 who had witnessed Kett’s rebellion themselves, the memory of the “camping time” had remained very much alive during the intervening six decades. Soon after the rebellion, the Norwich city Assembly required residents to observe the anniversary of the rebel defeat annually at thanksgiving services in city parish churches. The corporation also supported the preaching of a sermon each year for the occasion. There is little extant evidence about these observances—none of the sermon texts survive, for example—but surely Kett and his followers were vilified.
However, the language of the Assembly decree that created the perpetual holiday leaves no doubt about the type of memory that local authorities sought to perpetuate of Kett and his followers. The order rehearsed how the Earl of Warwick had “vanquished Robert Kett and his whole number of adherents of their most wicked rebellion,” and then “delivered this city from the great danger, trouble and peril it was in.” Robert Kett’s name was to be forever linked to “wicked rebellion,” one of the gravest offenses in early modern England. His defeat, therefore, was worthy of perpetual praise. 34
By the early seventeenth century, these official celebrations were an integral part of public culture in Norwich. However, they were not necessarily the only source of information or understanding about Kett’s exploits. Andy Wood has shown that not only did popular recollections of the events of 1549 persist well into the seventeenth century, but that these memories were also often at odds with the official version promulgated by local elites. Fleeting expressions of support, admiration, and sympathy for the rebels and of desires to see the revival of the Mousehold camp appear sporadically in court records. Such sentiments were likely to be prosecuted as seditious when reported to authorities.
Perhaps the intention to congregate on Mousehold Heath represented part of the popular, if often hidden, memory of 1549 that challenged the official interpretation. Mousehold was still a politically charged space in 1610. The annual commemoration of Kett’s defeat was ongoing, for example, and inhabitants of Norwich would surely have heard of its association with the rebellion at those services, as well as at the annual sermon. It is impossible to know what other knowledge the apprentices might have had about the events of 1549. Wood has suggested that oral tradition and access to the growing number of printed accounts of the rebellion might have helped to inform and shape popular opinion on the subject. 35 The apprentices’ effort to link their protest with Kett’s uprising, whose memory was still alive in Norwich in 1610, was a provocative gesture whose significance would not have been lost on anyone, least of all city rulers who were the political heirs of the magistrates who had suffered a humiliating defeat sixty years before. 36
The purpose of these machinations was, of course, to drive nonapprenticed laborers, the so-called Creepers, from the weaving industry. From the very first witness, Nicholas Dingle, who told how the apprentices had planned stay away from work “until such time there were some order taken that such that hath not been apprentice to the trade of worsted weavers as well Strangers as English were suppressed and order taken,” 37 all concurred that they were the targets of animosity. It is worth pointing out here that the apprentices did not seek to target alien workers alone with their action. They sought to eliminate all illegal laborers from the workforce. The problem of illegal workers was a familiar one in early modern European towns. In 1595, according to Steve Rappaport, fifteen weavers in London protested to the elders of the city’s French congregation about those among its members who had set up shop without ever having been apprenticed in the trade. Joseph Ward has also uncovered conflicts among weavers in early Stuart London. In 1610, the same year that Norwich weaving apprentices were planning their protest of the entry of illegal workers into their trade, yeomen of the London Weavers Company drafted a petition to the Lord Mayor decrying the Company’s failure to act on reports of aliens who were working as weavers without having completed the obligatory seven-year apprenticeship. 38 Philip Hoffman has found in his study of seventeenth-century Lubeck that illicit workers posed political problems for the city’s guilds. Guild authorities held that the existence of such workers violated the guilds’ rights to exercise exclusive control over their crafts, as surely all authorities across Europe did. In addition, the guilds’ efforts to search for and eradicate illicit work and production became controversial as they conflicted with civic liberties. 39 However, local records in Norwich offer little direct evidence about illegal workers. The books of the mayor’s court, which oversaw the activities of Norwich’s occupational guilds to a large extent, contain no references to illegal workers prior to the foiled apprentice plot of 1610. No such charges came to light during the periodic searches of goods carried out by the weavers’ guild itself, as found in its own patchily surviving records. 40 It is therefore difficult to assess the scale of the problem, if any, among textile workers in Norwich.
But Joshua Warden, Robert Willis, Thomas Harrison, Thomas Townsend, and William Framy were each quite clear that it was the infiltration of the Creepers into the weaving trade that had prompted the apprentices to take action. Harrison most clearly articulately the danger that they posed with his charge that master weavers in Norwich were employing nonapprenticed laborers as journeymen with the result that those who had served an apprenticeship “cannot be set on work when they come out of their years.” The apprentices thus saw the value of their apprenticeships degraded by such a practice. Their status as “hand-picked and potential future masters” was seriously jeopardized by the Creepers and by those who hired them. The premiums paid to enter an apprenticeship and the long terms of service, sometimes under less than ideal conditions, could ultimately prove worthless and leave them both economically and socially marginalized. In a world where the traditional occupational path seemed increasingly bumpy, the Creepers raised an additional and unwelcome barrier to the apprentices’ goal of becoming masters and householders.
Thus, the Creepers seemed a real enough problem in the minds of the industry’s apprentices that they were willing to take dramatic action against them, even if local records are not especially revealing about the issue. And a survey of the overall conditions in Norwich would only have compounded their pessimism about future prospects. Sickness and scarcity were regular visitors to the early seventeenth-century city. In 1603, a brutal eruption of plague killed perhaps one-quarter of the city’s population. 41 Disease had returned in 1609 and although less virulent than the 1603 outbreak, was no less distressing and unwelcome. Nevertheless, population continued to swell as new migrants arrived to fill the jobs of those who had died. Neither did poverty in the city retreat, as the mayor’s court noted the “hardness of the times” in 1608. Paul Griffiths has found that among city magistrates’ responses to the deteriorating socioeconomic conditions of the period was the intensification of a campaign against “masterless” young people, those designated “vagrant,” “out of service” and “at their own hand.” Prosecutions in the mayor’s court for these offenses climbed in 1609-1610 with the return of plague. 42 The apprentices, therefore, saw considerable misery around them and little hope for improvement in those conditions. The penetration of the Creepers into the weaving industry seemed to threaten their very futures at the same time that deeper poverty and the eruption of plague sharpened anxieties across the city. Their situation likely seemed urgent. So, Norwich’s apprentices planned in secret, mobilized participants, and readied themselves to leave work on St. Mark’s day.
IV
The scant available evidence suggests that local authorities moved quickly after becoming aware of the plot on April 23 and examining, over the next two days, the five witnesses whom they knew to have knowledge of it. On April 28, while news of the conspiracy was still fresh, Thomas Hyrne summoned the city’s Walloon weavers to the mayor’s court. Once there, the Strangers “offered to conform themselves to whatsoev[er] Mr. Mayor with the consent of the rest of the aldermen or the greatest number of them should set down concerning their setting to work of English journeymen that have not been [ap]prentice to the trade of worsted weavers.” 43 Local authorities appear to have implicitly acknowledged the apprentices’ complaint about the intrusion of Creepers into the workforce with this action, although it is worth pointing out that city governors called only the Stranger weavers to appear before them. The apprentices had called for the ejection of all illegal workers “as well Strangers as English,” not only foreign ones. Presumably, city magistrates found it more palatable to single out alien workers. Whatever the reason they called the Walloons into court, the authorities did not set down any specific recommendations or requirements for their future conduct and the matter disappeared from the record.
On May 3, Hyrne and one of his aldermanic colleagues examined the Pockthorpe weaver Framy and they must also have informed the Privy Council of their findings around the same time. No communication between Norwich authorities and the Council survives, but the Council took seriously the threat posed by the apprentices. By the middle of May, four of those involved in the plot were in London for further interrogation, sent with the depositions that had been taken in Norwich. The new examinations, all of which took place on May 19, yielded little additional information. Robert Willis simply asserted that he “cannot declare any thing more th[a]n what is set down in his examination.” Thomas Harrison denied that he had ever spoken to either Willis or Joshua Warden about the conspiracy, “but they two being confronted with him do confirm it to his face.” No separate interrogation, if there was one, survives for Warden. The journeymen Thomas Townsend once again attempted both to trivialize the scheme and minimize any role he might have played in it. He “denyeth that ever he heard of the conspiracy, but by two or three young boys,” again seeking to emphasize the unreliable and inferior status of apprentices. Nor would he “confess that there was any resolution or agreem[en]t to have executed their conspiracy,” or that he ever told Framy about a signal drum beat in relation to the rising. Finally, Townsend reiterated his claim that his flight from Norwich to Pockthorpe, where he was arrested, had nothing to do with the exposure of the plot, but rather with an effort to escape an accusation of debt. 44
News of the peril that such a plot represented was never welcome and the Council was clearly not satisfied by the new testimony. On May 20, its members penned a letter to Thomas Fleming, the lord chief justice, and Edward Coke, chief justice of common pleas. The missive rehearsed the discovery of the recent “combination and conspiracy amongst certain apprentices and others in the city of Norwich,” and the dispatch of four of the conspirators to London at their command. It then directed the justices to pay close attention to the examinations that had already been taken and to consult with authorities in Norwich to help them decide “what course by the law is to be taken with the offenders herein.” Even though there was no longer any danger of an uprising by Norwich apprentices, the Council was anxious that such “attempts and practi[ce]s of this nature should be carefully looked unto and narrowly sifted from where they did rise and to what end they tended so that by preventing of their beginnings danger should be avoided.” 45 To the discovery of such “sedition and tumult” had to be added the prosecution and punishment of the participants.
The evidence does not show exactly what happened next, but a cluster of four cases that came before the Norwich mayor’s court on May 23 seems to suggest both that some of those involved were disciplined for their role in the apprentices’ foiled exploit and that their punishment incensed some. 46 According to the record, on that day, a Dutchman named Abraham Diker “for making the sign of a pair of gallows at an Englishman, and otherwise misbehaving himself was committed.” By itself, Diker’s alleged conduct might simply be regarded as the kind of tension that sometimes erupted between residents of early modern urban communities. But the three following entries in the court book suggest that all four cases were triggered by news concerning the worsted weavers’ apprentices. Robert Browne “for using ill speeches and threatening to pull out [creepers] . . . was also committed.” Next, three men came to court to complain that John Depute, a Dutchman, had “rejoiced at the punishment of those that were whipped last Monday.” Finally, one William Loveland “said openly in court that he had rather live to see 100 of the Dutchmen hanged th[a]n all the [apprentices] of the weavers in Norwich whipped.” No conclusion to any of these four cases was ever recorded in the court books, so the fates of Diker, Browne, Depute, and Loveland are unknown. But these proceedings also indicate that despite the fact that the apprentices had rejected distinctions between English and foreign workers in their planning, such antipathies still simmered in Norwich some four decades after the Strangers’ arrival. Three months after these cases, in August 1610, nearly everyone named in the depositions concerning the conspiracy—eleven people in total—appeared in the Norwich Quarter Sessions. Joshua Warden died during the proceedings, perhaps a victim of the plague that swept through Norwich in that year. In September, the journeyman Thomas Townsend and the apprentice Thomas Harrison were sentenced “to be kept in jail,” the only ones, apparently, to be disciplined by the court. 47 With that judgment, official attention to the apprentices’ plot came to an end.
V
After the mayor’s court cases from the spring of 1610 and the Quarter Sessions judgments against Thomas Harrison and Thomas Townsend later that year, city governors next addressed the issue of apprenticeship in 1615. In that year, city governors sought to enforce existing apprenticeship regulations, an effort that K. J. Allison has described as “unsuccessful.” 48 Nevertheless, the potential rewards of apprenticeship remained appealing, as the later careers of Thomas Harrison and Robert Willis reveal. Both men took the freedom of Norwich in 1617, with Harrison having survived the imprisonment imposed on him by Quarter Sessions. Willis might have been the man who served as a collector of the river and street rate in 1623 and again in 1633. Nothing is known about him after that. 49 Harrison appears to have spent the rest of his life in Norwich. He likely served as a constable in Norwich’s Colegate ward in 1642 and died a resident of the parish of St. George Colegate in 1651, when his will was proved. He divided his modest estate among his wife, three living children, and a grandchild. Harrison also remembered a former apprentice in the document. To Thomas Browne, by then a resident of the parish of St. Savior, Harrison bequeathed his musket and bandoliers. 50
Despite careful planning, the worsted weaver apprentices’ design to leave their work in an effort to compel the dismissal of all nonapprenticed labor in the trade appears to have made little enduring impact. There is no record that city authorities were ever successful in preventing such laborers from entering Norwich’s workforce, and no apprentices there attempted such a protest again. Yet, the failed rising merits attention. The combination of strains and worsening circumstances left worsted weavers’ apprentices in 1610 unwilling to accept the bleak future that appeared to lie before them. By plotting the walkout, they sought to determine their own futures, to make it possible to become a member of the community of masters and householders. Although their effort was unsuccessful, the scheme reveals the imaginable limits of social politics between apprentices and their masters at a signal moment in the history of Norwich.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.