Over the middle third of the 16th century, between 1536 and 1569, the Tudors' hold on England was shaken by a series of rebellions. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, the northern upheaval that is Geoffrey Moorhouse's subject, was followed in 1549 by the western rising and Kett's rebellion, in 1554 by Sir Thomas Wyatt's rising, in 1569 by the insurrection of the northern earls. There had been baronial revolts in the Middle Ages, and there would be parliamentary and national ones in the 17th century, but the Tudor upheavals were of a different kind. They were regional protests, directed at the metropolitan values of a centralising administration and at the religious and economic grievances imposed or sanctioned by it.

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