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On 24 April 1648 a rioting crowd in the centre of the city of Norwich accidentally unleashed the largest explosion recorded in seventeenth century England. Ninety-eight barrels of gunpowder were detonated; about three times as much as was hidden in cellars under Parliament by the notorious Gunpowder Plotters of 1605.
Norwich magistrates’ subsequent investigation made the ‘mutiny’, ‘blow’ or ‘crack’, as contemporaries variously called it, the best documented riot of the century through the survival of 281 remarkable witness depositions.
In this podcast, Professor Andrew Hopper of Oxford Lifelong Learning, investigates how these legal records can advance our understanding of popular politics, royalism and urban culture in a city on the threshold of the Second Civil War.
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When students consider the local impacts of the British Civil Wars, the city of Norwich is often considered a peaceful backwater, or place of safety far from the bloodshed of armed hostilities. Yet on 24 April 1648, a rioting crowd in Norwich’s marketplace accidentally unleashed the largest explosion recorded in seventeenth century England. Ninety-eight barrels of gunpowder were detonated. By way of comparison, this was about three times as many barrels as were hidden in the cellars under the Parliament House by the notorious Gunpowder Plotters of 1605. Despite this being such a dramatic moment in Norwich’s history, the episode is often overlooked by many national narratives of the Civil Wars.
One onlooker, a gentleman called Joseph Paine, estimated that eighty people perished in the blast and many more were left wounded by it. He noted later that day: ‘
“They are now pulling the mangled bodies out of the rubbish”.
Forty houses were destroyed and the glass was blown out of the windows in the houses on the marketplace, as well as from the windows of the nearby parish churches of St Peter Mancroft and St Stephen. The total damage to the city was estimated at a colossal £20,000. The blast occurred in the house rented out for meetings of the Parliamentarian regime’s local representatives, the Norfolk County committee. The site is occupied today by the Bethel Hospital.
The city of Norwich’s Justices of the Peace launched a subsequent investigation into the ‘mutiny’, ‘blow’ or ‘crack’, as contemporaries variously called it. Among the treasures preserved inside the Norfolk Record Office today are no fewer than 278 testimonies of evidence taken in the wake of what became known as the ‘Great Blow’. They survive among the Norwich City Records collection and show the determination of Norwich’s Parliamentarian magistrates to uncover and punish whoever they could find responsible. These testimonies, together with indictments and other records drawn from the city’s Quarter Sessions and assembly books, form the most substantial archival collection covering popular Royalist insurgency in England during the entire Civil War period. Together, they comprise over 55,000 words of testimony, and they were edited for publication as the Norfolk Record Society’s volume for 2018.
Since soon after the outbreak of War in 1642, Norwich had been held securely for Parliament. It was England’s most populous provincial city. With a population of about 20,000 people, its city walls enclosed an area of similar size to the city of London. Although it was distanced from the worst of the fighting, Norwich’s inhabitants were still deeply affected. Some citizens volunteered for Parliament’s armies, but others were pressed to serve by their parish officers. The inhabitants endured vastly increased taxation and were drawn into a series of loyalty oaths that supported the Parliamentarian war effort. Aldermen, common councillors and clergymen sympathetic to the Royalists were ousted and replaced. Iconoclasm occurred in Norwich Cathedral and in some of the parish churches too, as part of Parliament’s Godly Reformation in the city. There were attacks on guild days and festivals, while a stricter Puritan observation of the Sabbath was demanded.
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Despite having shown strong support for Parliament, Norwich suffered from deep-rooted political and religious divisions. From 1646, a backlash against Parliament’s rule gathered strength among a population troubled by plague, floods, snows and thunderstorms. By December that year, riots occurred amongst the city’s butchers in opposition to the Excise, a tax levied on groceries and foodstuffs. Royalist sympathisers were chosen as the new Sheriff and alderman for the Mancroft ward of the city. In 1647, apprentices gathered in the castle yard to petition John Utting, the mayor, that Christmas day might be celebrated, while Utting allowed a bonfire and feasts to mark Charles I’s birthday. In response, Utting’s Parliamentarian enemies in the corporation sought to orchestrate his removal; they accused him of allowing Royalist clergy to preach, and wrongfully permitting Royalists to vote in city elections.
On Saturday 22 April 1648, a messenger from Parliament arrived to conduct Utting to face interrogation at Westminster. That day, Utting’s friends, including six city aldermen, approved a counter-petition to keep Utting in Norwich, testifying to his good government. Further signatures were solicited in the streets, houses, taverns and inns, as well as in city churches after divine worship on Sunday 23 April. Support for Utting grew riotous. Papers inciting the inhabitants to arm themselves to protect the mayor were set upon walls and posts during the night of 23/24 April. Those attempting to remove such papers faced violent intimidation.
That night, Christopher Bransby led a company around the city gates, demanding that the watchmen keep them locked so that the mayor could not be taken out of the city during the night. That Bransby managed to obtain the keys to several of the city’s gates, items of huge symbolic importance, suggests there was strong support for Mayor Utting among the city’s social elite and the officers of the watch.
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In the early hours of 24 April, two gunshots were let off as signals. By 9 a.m. a large crowd, estimated by onlookers at up to a thousand strong, gathered at the Market Cross, overlooking the gate of the King’s Head Inn. Concerned to prevent Mayor Utting’s departure, the crowd pressed to get inside the inn, where Utting and Parliament’s messenger were lodged. But the crowds were inhibited by the narrow, guarded gateway into the yard. Further crowds converged on Sheriff Thomas Ashwell’s house. This had been used for meetings by Norwich’s Independents (or Congregationalists) and stood opposite the churchyard of St Michael at Plea. Ashwell’s house was thoroughly looted. A drum and weaponry taken inside were distributed among the rioters.
The next target of the rioters was Alderman Adrian Parmenter’s house on Hogg Hill, which hosted the Excise office. Around noon, William True was heard to say in the White Lion,
“come boys let us drink & be merry for we will have £1000 out of Mr Parmenter’s house which he have had for excise.”
Another informant added that True had proposed to use this money to “pay his soldiers”.
The striking of drums, and military passwords, such as ‘for God & King Charles’, rang out along Ber Street. At around 2 p.m., crowds converged on the Committee House, a symbol of Parliament’s power over the city, where the arsenal containing the 3,000 weapons of the county’s magazine was located. Bursting through bolted doors, the rioters ascended to the armoury, where they assaulted the armourer for having shot a boy in the scuffle. The crowd destroyed Sequestration and taxation records. In scenes reminiscent of the commotions in the city caused by Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, the rioters threw out great bundles of writings from the Committee House windows. This was intended to render inoperable the normal functioning of the Parliamentarian government over the city.
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Thomas Garret, a shopkeeper whose house had been attacked, carried word of the riot to East Dereham, eighteen miles west of Norwich, where part of Colonel Charles Fleetwood’s Parliamentarian Cavalry regiment was quartered. Elements from three of Fleetwood’s troops converged on Norwich later that day, from 4 p.m., entering through several gates that had been left unsecured by the rioters. They charged their horses through the streets into the crowds, sending many citizens scurrying indoors. Under pouring rain, an exchange of musketry rang out as the rioters inside the Committee House sought to defend it from the troopers.
In the excitement, the rioters were careless with the gunpowder stored inside. One swept it from the stairs. Another took a hatful home. The precise cause of the massive explosion that followed remains unknown, but it seems most probable that a smouldering match cord dropped from a matchlock musket ignited spilt gunpowder close to the barrel store. The flint-and-brick rubble, mixed masonry and timber-framed buildings typical of the city did little to stifle the blast.
The explosion was heard throughout the county of Norfolk as timbers, tiles, plaster and severed human limbs were scattered in grisly scenes throughout the city’s streets. In response to this terrible shock, the crowds melted away to seek shelter indoors. Parliamentarian newsbooks reported that the explosion was a providential deliverance and God’s judgement against the rioters. They proposed that not one trooper was killed, although several lay injured. The following day, three men were buried in St Peter Mancroft church, ‘slain by gunpowder’, four in St Lawrence’s, three in St John’s, Timberhill, including one ‘killed by a trooper’, and seven more in St Stephen’s. One hundred and twenty citizens were reported missing in the wake of the explosion.
News of the blast reached London two days later, on 26 April 1648. Parliament ordered a special Commission of Oyer and Terminer be issued for a trial to hear and determine evidence about the culprits.
A thorough investigation by Norwich’s Justices of the Peace followed. A new deputy mayor, Christopher Baret, replaced Utting. This provided an opportunity relished by the corporation’s Parliamentarians to implicate their resurgent political enemies in the rioting. Baret wrote to William Lenthall, Speaker of the House of Commons, that the supporters of the petition to keep Utting in Norwich were all “disaffected persons, not one that I can hear of otherwise”, and that these men were “birds of the same feather” as the rioters.
William Bridge, the Independent minister at Great Yarmouth preached a thanksgiving sermon to the House of Commons on 17 May 1648 that two or three Godly families emerged from the Committee House, miraculously unscathed, “not a bone of them broken’” despite the demise of 200 or 300 rioters
“who flew up into the air, as spectacles of divine anger, as if God should speak from Heaven.”
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A purge of Royalist sympathisers followed among the aldermen, councillors and clergy of Norwich. In seeking to establish culpability, the Norwich Justices in 1648 were more interested in recording inflammatory words, gestures, oaths and the signing of documents than they were in the acts of violence. Their purpose was to identify the insurgents and establish how they had mobilised support, in order that steps could be taken to prevent any future recurrence. Norwich’s busy magistrates took 123 depositions within a week of the explosion, without pausing work for the Sabbath. Over 250 had been gathered by 30 May 1648. This makes the episode the most documented riot of the century.
This enabled a mass trial of 108 suspects to take place in Norwich’s Guildhall eight months later, on 18 December 1648. Eight men, including William True, were convicted for murder and the instigation of events that had occasioned the explosion. To impugn them further, they were hanged in Norwich’s castle ditches alongside two witches on 2 January 1649. A further 26 people were convicted for riot and imprisoned until they had paid a fine of £30. Those executed were drawn from among the poorer sorts of people. Local gentlemen who had instigated the rioters such as Christopher Bransby, Thomas Palgrave and Leonard Spurgeon, escaped unpunished.
The investigation located the riots in Mancroft and Conesford wards, south and west of the castle, largely in the parishes of St Stephen and St Peter Mancroft. The crowds assembled in the open spaces of Chapel Field and the marketplace. Many joined from outlying parishes to the south and west, which had higher concentrations of poor quality housing. The rioters were butchers, lesser tradesmen, labourers and apprentices drawn from the Mancroft and Conesford wards in the western and southern parts of the city. These were the more Royalist-inclined districts in the city, away from the Parliamentarian sympathising wards of Wymer and Over the Water to the north, where the cloth-making industry was long established.
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The testimonies provide a strong sense of those locations, down to specific streets, alleys and alehouses, where the magistrates were most anxious about disaffection. They show also that some drinking establishments already held reputations for hosting Royalist or anti-Puritan drinkers, foreshadowing how the alehouse became a venue for Tory and Jacobite sympathies in subsequent generations.
The investigation also revealed that Mayor Utting’s supporters mobilised crowds through an array of colourful means, all staples of seventeenth century popular politics. These included coercive petitioning, subscription, preaching, rumour-mongering, intimidation, health-drinking, seditious words, pasting papers on posts and threatening gestures.
The rioters had assaulted and threatened the lives of reputed Parliamentarians, and those who interfered with their control of Chapel Field and the marketplace. Municipal politics had moved outdoors from its usual arenas such as the Common Hall and the Guildhall.
In many ways, the dangerous words noted in the testimonies illuminate how popular Royalism was reviving in the city. They also indicate how Civil War divisions had corroded neighbourly relations, with the insurgents using violence to threaten and intimidate local enemies.
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Thomas Turner was accused of taunting one trooper to “have a care this night for all your throats will be cut’” before calling for beer to “drink a health to King Charles and to the confusion of all the roundheads”.
Mrs Warnes was standing in her shop door in Tombland, when Edmund Corby approached her armed with a sword and cudgel, crying “you roundheads go dig, go dig, such as you I will knock down.”
Alice Hansell complained that she and Mary Burman fled after having been traduced in the market place as ‘independent bitches, whores & jades’. Another onlooker had supposedly said of these women that ‘it were a blessed turn to knock them on the head’.
Norwich’s corporation ordered a thanksgiving for their deliverance from the rioters on 2 May 1648. Sermons by Puritan ministers echoed through the cathedral and the bells of St Peter Mancroft rang out in thanksgiving. Artillery was discharged from the walls, and churchwardens arranged a city-wide collection for the poor.
The following year, on 6 April 1649, the city corporation ordered that these activities should continue as an annual event, the first such occasion since the first anniversary thanksgivings ordered for the defeat of Kett’s Rebellion in 1550. Royalist sympathisers challenged the Parliamentarian narrative of these events from the outset, scorning “the pretended high court of justice”, and even blaming Puritans for causing the explosion in the first place as a pretext to persecute their enemies.
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The events of 24 April 1648 brought the long-delayed fatal violence of Civil War to the streets of Norwich, costing many lives in the process. But for the accident of the explosion, this episode might well have developed into a full-blown uprising. Like cities elsewhere in England, Norwich was deeply divided by its Civil War experiences, even if East Anglia as a whole remained the principal heartland of the Parliamentarian cause.
While armed activism outdoors was left to those of lower social status, the cautious Royalist elite were involved in more underhand ways. The seizure and deployment of arms, the beating of drums to articulate commands, the military watchwords, along with talk of ‘captains’ and pay, reveal how wartime practices and experiences blurred the boundaries between riot and insurrection. Influenced by the religious identities of their home parishes, the middling and poorer sorts of people acted on their own understandings of national and local politics.
Historians have long rightly studied how everyday people engaged with Parliamentarian politics during the 1640s, but Norwich’s experience of the ‘Great Blow’ is a reminder that street politics could mobilise urban citizens in Royalist directions too. This is important because the Second Civil War of 1648 was marked by pro-Royalist urban insurgencies, during which bloody street fighting in London, Maidstone and Norwich proved decisive. Therefore, episodes such as these suggest that historians might pay closer attention in future to how the wars were physically fought out in urban settings, far removed from the more famous battlefields such as Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby.
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