RYSTON STATION, between Ryston Park and Fordham, marks the neighbourhood of a very interesting spot, for Ryston, though a place of the smallest size and really but a woodland hamlet, is of some historic note, with "Kett's Oak," or the Oak of Reformation, standing in the Park, as a visible point of contact with stirring deeds and ancient times. It is a gigantic tree with hollow trunk and limbs carefully chained and bound together, and marks one of the encampments of the Norfolk peasantry in Kett's Rebellion of 1549. This was a popular outbreak caused by the lawless action of the Norfolk gentry of that time in enclosing wastes and common lands. "The peasant whose pigs and cow and poultry had been sold, or had died because the commons where they had once fed were gone; the yeoman dispossessed of his farm; the farm-servant out of employ because where once ten ploughs had turned the soil, one shepherd watched the grazing of the flocks; the artisan smarting under the famine prices the change of culture had brought--all these were united in suffering, while the gentlemen were doubling, trebling, quadrupling their incomes, and adorning their persons and their houses with splendour hitherto unknown." The outbreak began at Attleborough in June 1549, and a fortnight later there was fighting at Wymondham, where the country-folk, led by Robert Kett, a tanner, of that place, destroyed many illegal fences. Thence, headed by Kett and his brother William, an army of sixteen thousand peasants marched to Mousehold Heath, overlooking Norwich, where their greatest camp was pitched. Under some venerable tree in these camps Robert Kett was wont to sit and administer justice, and Conyers, chaplain to the rebel host, preached beneath their shade while the rising of that memorable summer lasted. Never were the demands of rebellion more reasonable than those put forward on this occasion. They were, that all bondsmen should be made free, "for God made all free with His precious bloodshedding"; that all rivers should be made free and common to all men for fishing and passage; that the clergy should be resident, instead of benefices being held by absentees; and, in the interest of tenants' crops, that no one under a certain degree should keep rabbits unless they were paled in, and that no new dove-houses should be allowed. That last stipulation sounds mysterious, but it referred to a very cruel grievance of olden times, when only the Lord of the Manor might keep pigeons and doves, and did so at the expense of his tenants. The manorial pigeon-houses often seen adjoining ancient Hall or old-world Grange are, in fact, relics of that time when the feudal landowner's pigeons fattened on the peasants' crops. [Illustration: KETT'S OAK.]