The Women of Haxey
Wednesday, 13 August 1628: The First Day of Riots on the Isle of Axholme
In the early afternoon of Wednesday, 13 August 1628, an English labourer named John Kitchen was walking along the road to the village of Haxey. Kitchen worked for Cornelius Vermuyden, the Dutch engineer commissioned two years earlier by King Charles I to drain the great fenlands of Hatfield Chase and the Isle of Axholme. The drainage had never been popular among the local inhabitants. As Kitchen approached Haxey, he met an acquaintance named Vincent Taylor, who gave him a stark warning: if he dared to go any further, Taylor told him, the women of the town would stone him to death.[1]
Kitchen pressed on regardless. He was stoned — exactly as Taylor had predicted — by a company of women, with Taylor himself standing nearby and urging them on.
A Warning Ignored
The warning Kitchen received was not a casual threat. It was the voice of a community that had been building towards this moment for more than a year. Since Vermuyden’s workmen first broke into the carrs and moors of the Isle of Axholme in 1627, the local inhabitants had been pushing back — filling in new-cut drains, breaking down embankments, burning carts and tools, throwing Dutch workers into the very ditches they had just dug.[2] By August 1628, drainage work had reached Haxey Carr, one of the most productive and jealously-guarded stretches of common land on the Isle. The people of Haxey knew it was coming. They were ready.
Vincent Taylor, who passed Kitchen on the road, was himself one of the community’s leading men. He was the surviving son of Richard Taylor, a substantial Haxey yeoman who would shortly be named among the ‘Cheefe Actors’ in the riots by the Privy Council — and whose family was woven, by marriage, into most of the other leading families of the resistance.[3] When Taylor warned Kitchen, he was almost certainly not speaking off his own account. He knew what had been planned.
The Women Take the Field
The attack on Kitchen was the opening act of a coordinated action. At Bickersdyke, Vermuyden’s workers were first approached by women threatening violence, while a company of male commoners crept up from behind and ‘beate them downe.’[4] The tactic was deliberate: women to the front to draw attention; men advancing unseen from behind. Someone had thought carefully about this.
Women’s leading role in the first day’s violence was not simply tactical. In a society where women were assumed by many to enjoy diminished legal liability — a belief that the courts would later, at least partially, bear out — the women of Haxey could take the field openly that Wednesday with some expectation that the law would not fall on them as hard as it would on their husbands, fathers, and brothers. They were right, and they knew it.
Nor were the women passive instruments. They were commoners in their own right. Women grazed cattle on the common, cut peat for fuel, and fished the carr. The old septuagenarian Thomas Taylor later recalled his mother grazing a herd of twenty cows in the Epworth pastures. When those pastures were threatened, the women of Haxey had as much at stake as the men — and they said so, through stones.
A Community in Arms
The scale of what unfolded on Wednesday 13 August was remarkable. Over the course of the day, the records suggest, at least three hundred people from Haxey and the surrounding settlements took part in the violence. One of the injured workers, William Thompson, testified that there were ‘in the said company both horsemen and footmen to the number of five hundred at the least.’[5] The crowd included men of substance — farmers on horseback, not just the landless poor. This was not a riot of the desperate. It was a community acting with collective purpose.
From outside the Isle, Robert Ricke of Gainsborough — ten miles to the south — wrote to Haxey that same day offering eighty men and money to help ‘defy the Dutchmen.’[6] News of what was happening at Haxey Carr was spreading fast, and the sympathy of the wider region was plain.
What came through most clearly in the workers’ testimonies — recorded under oath before JP Robert Portington in the days that followed — was how precisely the rioters understood what was happening to them and who was responsible for it. Several declared openly that ‘they cared not for the kinge for their lands were their owne.’ Others said that ‘if the king did send 2000 men there he should have no common there.’[7] This was not confused anger. It was a targeted political statement, aimed at the 1626 contract between Vermuyden and Charles I that had set the whole process in motion.
A Foundation That Ran Deep
The commoners of Haxey were not defending ignorance or laziness, as the drainage’s apologists would claim. They were defending a sophisticated mixed economy — common pasture, peat-cutting, fishing, fowling, hemp cultivation, small arable farming — that had sustained their communities for generations. Their legal foundation was the Mowbray Deed of 1359, which had guaranteed the commoners of Epworth manor their rights in perpetuity.[8] That foundation was real. The Crown’s legal proceedings against the commoners in the months that followed would sidestep rather than defeat it — there would be no trial of title to the commons. The Exchequer would proceed to enclosure without one.
Wednesday 13 August 1628 was not an explosion of mindless anger. It was a calculated act of collective defence by people who knew their rights, knew who was violating them, and were prepared to act. The women who stoned John Kitchen were the first face of that defence.[9]
The riot did not end on Wednesday. On Friday 15 August, Vermuyden’s men returned to Haxey Carr — this time with muskets. What happened next will be the subject of the next post in this series.
Sources: Eric H. Ash, The Draining of the Fens (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Chapter 5; Eleanor Dezateux Robson, ‘Improvement and environmental conflict in the northern fens, 1560–1665’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018; Joy Lloyd, ‘The Communities of the Manor of Epworth in the Seventeenth Century’, PhD thesis, 1998; TNA SP 16/113/38.I–III (August 1628).
[1]Information of John Kitchen, TNA SP 16/113/38.I (17 August 1628), cited in Eric H. Ash, The Draining of the Fens (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), p. 141.
[2]On anti-drainage sabotage from 1627: Daniel Byford, ‘Agricultural Change in the Lowlands of South Yorkshire’, PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2005, p. 65; axholme.info secondary account, citing contemporary sources. The claim about fifty breakdowns of one embankment appears in multiple secondary accounts deriving from seventeenth-century depositions.
[3]On Vincent Taylor’s identity: he appears in Joy Lloyd, ‘The Communities of the Manor of Epworth in the Seventeenth Century’, PhD thesis, 1998, p. 244, as the surviving child of the first marriage of Richard Taylor (one of the ‘Cheefe Actors’ named in the Privy Council warrant), illustrating the dense kinship ties linking the leading families of the resistance.
[4]TNA SP 16/113 fol. 62, Information of John Linsedge (18 August 1628), cited in Eleanor Dezateux Robson, ‘Improvement and environmental conflict in the northern fens, 1560–1665’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018, p. 228.
[5]TNA SP 16/113/38.I, Information of William Thompson (17 August 1628), cited in Ash, p. 142.
[6]TNA SP 16/113 fol. 63, Information of John Milbourne (18 August 1628); fol. 62, Information of Richard Hayford (18 August 1628), cited in Robson, p. 210. On Robert Ricke of Gainsborough: TNA SP 16/113 fol. 63, Information of Benjamin Brooke (18 August 1628), cited in Robson, p. 229.
[8]For the Mowbray Deed of 1359 and the commoners’ customary case, see Joan Thirsk, ‘The Isle of Axholme before Vermuyden’, Agricultural History Review 1 (1953), pp. 16–28. On commoner defendants’ insistence on rights existing ‘tyme out of mynde before that’: TNA E112/197/43 fol. 2, cited in Robson, p. 211.
[9]On the social composition of the crowd: Ash, p. 142; Lloyd, pp. 244–5. Lloyd identifies the close kinship ties among the eighteen ‘Cheefe Actors’ named in the subsequent Privy Council warrant, demonstrating this was community leadership, not a leaderless mob.
