Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

This was an issue where one man’s profitable weir or mill-race was an infuriating obstruction to many more people’s community fishing, or the free flow of water to keep river silting at bay, or to boats at a time when water transport was the easiest way to move bulky goods, grain and agricultural produce included. Tudor people were more ready to judge problems in terms of morality than economics. Just like enclosure for sheep-farming, the matter of weirs took on moral dimensions: it demonstrated human greed and selfishness, which threatened to damage a frail social fabric by endangering food supplies. In Tudor society, famine still loomed, with all its capacity to poison human relations and cause very public suffering, let alone riot and rebellion; the moral outrage was not some academic debate. Weirs had been the subject of moral outrage long before Cromwell’s years of power, when he was just a boy living in a Thames-side village (with a father who owned a mill); there was repeated agitation in the Parliaments of Henry VII about them, resulting in one or two pieces of legislation with a local focus and not much effect.