From April to September, Somerset's troubles thickened. Formidable insurrections took place both in the western and eastern counties, and the hostilities with France, not yet openly at war, were assuming an aggravated form. The one piece of good fortune for England was that the antagonism between Charles and the French King in other fields still prevented any rapprochement between them. [Sidenote: The Western Rising] In the country districts there were two exciting causes of disturbance --one, the general agricultural distress due to the selfish policy of the landowners, the extension of sheep-farming and consequent displacement of labour, the enclosure of common lands and evictions from small holdings; the other, the innovations in religion and interference with immemorial practices to which the people were attached with the persistent conservatism of rural folk. The two types of grievance were associated by the recent abolition of the monasteries, and the transfer of their lands to the most obnoxious class of landlord--a class in the nature of the circumstances popularly identified with the enemies of the old ecclesiastical system, since it was they who conspicuously profited by the change. The North and the West, then and for more than a century to come, were the strongholds of traditional faiths and traditional ideals, as Yorkshire had shown by the Pilgrimage of Grace. Now the main trouble arose in the West. The introduction of the new Service Book at Whitsuntide was met with violent opposition; the men of Cornwall and Devon rose, and demanded the redress of grievances. They would have the religious houses reinstated, and at least half their lands restored. They would have the old services, not the new one which was "like a Christmas play". They would not have it in English which the Cornishmen "did not understand". Elsewhere there had already been disturbances, the peasants anticipating Somerset's efforts to remedy the agricultural grievances by a commission to enforce what was actually the law, and assembling in mobs to level fences and enclosures; whereat the Council was wrath, but the Protector as Friend of the People was disposed to applaud them. A religious revolt however was an attack on the Protector's own policy, and must be put down. Foreign mercenaries were called in, to embitter the quarrel. The insurgents besieged Exeter, and had been for some months in arms before they were at last crushed by the Government forces, in August, after desperate fighting. [Sidenote: Ket's insurrection]