Newton is a small village in Northamptonshire, England, surrounded by green fields, a few sizable houses and a population barely over a hundred. To all appearances, a quiet and peaceful place, perhaps always so.
And yet, our eyes and our expectations can fool us into false assumptions. As difficult as it is to believe, on a June morning in 1607, Newton and its 14th century church, St Faith's, were the boiling center of a class war between landless peasants and the landlords who had enclosed and seized their common lands.
The Midlands Rebellion, and its final act, the Newton Rebellion, had been building up for several weeks, and that morning more than a thousand rebels, who called themselves 'diggers' and 'levelers' for their actions in digging up and tearing down the enclosures, were gathered at Newton.
St Faith's is now deconsecrated; for a while it was an education center but is now unsafe for use
Despite orders from the King's deputy, Edward Montagu, to disperse, the rebels held their ground, and the local militia refused to attack them. In the end, a mounted army of the landlords' servants was turned loose on the gathering, killing 40 or more, and hunting down many more who were executed: Hung, drawn and quartered. It was, in the words of one writer, "the last time the peasantry of England rose up against the gentry.”
Across the field from the church, a 15th-century dovecote that belonged to the Tresham family. Like the church, it is a listed building
It was an important moment in British history: The common lands were critical to the lives of the landless who worked as agricultural laborers for large landowners and who grazed their few animals on the common land. In the late 16th century, landowners found that with a growing market for wool and meat, they could make more by grazing sheep than by growing grain.
At first, they got royal permission to enclose the lands with the fences, ditches and hedges we see in rural England today, but after several revolts, the permission was withdrawn, but numbers of landlords went ahead anyway, including two in the area surrounding Newton, the Tresham and Montagu families. The two family names persist in the area. The Montagu family is headed by the Duke of Buccleuch who still owns 12,000 acres in the area as well as 217,000 acres in Scotland.
For a more in-depth view of the issues of the time and of the Newton Rebellion, click HERE
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