Registration is now open for the next lecture in the Royal Historical Society’s 2025 programme. On Friday 2 May, we welcome Professor Mark Stoyle (University of Southampton) to speak on ‘Remembering Rebellion in the Tudor South West’.
This event is open to all with booking now available for in-person attendance (Mary Ward House, London) and online. Please use one of these links to register for a place.
In this lecture, Mark Stoyle explores how those in the English South-West looked back on two major risings which broke out against Henry VII in Cornwall in 1497; the short-lived revolt against Edward VI’s religious changes in West Cornwall in 1548; the full-blooded protest against those same changes which convulsed Devon and Cornwall in 1549, and, finally, the abortive attempt to stir up a rebellion in Devon against Mary I’s impending marriage to Philip of Spain in 1554.
Mark’s lecture studies both elite and popular memories of the rebellions which occurred in the Tudor South West and will argue that those memories proved surprisingly long-lived.
More particularly, it will argue that the Western Rising of 1549 — ‘the Commotion Time’, as that protest was termed by contemporaries, ‘the Prayer Book Rebellion’ as it is popularly known today — was remembered by local people as a key caesura in the region’s history, and that it remained a live issue in West Country society right up until the eve of the English Civil War.
Mark Stoyle is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton and has particular research interests in the British crisis of the 1640s; in witchcraft; in urban society; and in Tudor rebellions. Mark has written many monographs and scholarly articles and his most recent book — The Western Rising of 1549 –– was published in paperback by Yale University Press in 2024.
Previous Society Lectures in the Events Archive
Video and audio recordings are available for many of the Society’s events, including our lectures. The RHS Events Archive includes recent lectures by, among others, Lucy Noakes, Natasha Hodgson, Janina Ramirez, Julia Laite, Tom Holland, Brenda Stephenson, Caroline Dodds Pennock and Levi Roach.