About this book:

"Roots of Rebellion" chronicles Marta, a peasant woman in the village of Cheddon, who initiates a grassroots uprising against the oppressive manorial system. Initially focused on the unfair tithes and tallies imposed by the lord's steward, Godfrey Cray, Marta resurrects her deceased father's secret ledger, which meticulously records the true agricultural yields and the actual amounts extracted from the villagers. This discovery reveals a systematic pattern of incremental theft that keeps the community in perpetual debt and scarcity.

Marta begins to build a clandestine network of resistance, utilizing seemingly innocuous channels like letters hidden in flour sacks and a whisper network operating out of the local alehouse. She connects with other wronged tenants in neighboring parishes—Thornhallow, Brindleford, and Wren's End—who share similar grievances and their own hidden accounts. The network grows, developing a shared language of songs, symbols, and communal understanding, all centered around a collective commitment to meticulously record and compare their own figures against the lord's. This leads to a coordinated withholding of grain from the lord's mill, a quiet act of defiance that disrupts the steward's expected revenue.

The movement escalates when Cray, unable to suppress the growing dissent, summons Marta and other villagers to the Manorial Court for contumacy. In response, Marta orchestrates a mass march to Averham, the market town, where over seventy peasants present their collective evidence to the lord's treasurer. While the court doesn't immediately rule in their favor, the public display of organized resistance and the sheer volume of their "true accounts" force the treasurer to appoint an independent measurer. However, this measurer is quickly revealed to be compromised, having secretly met with the steward.

Undeterred, the network adapts, moving its hidden grain stores to various cellars and barns, and relying on hand querns for milling when the Brindleford mill is seized by soldiers and a cannon is deployed. The resistance shifts from direct confrontation to an enduring, invisible system of self-sufficiency and mutual aid, symbolized by red threads worn on wrists and new songs that encode messages. This sustained, quiet defiance, coupled with the detailed financial records meticulously kept by the network, eventually forces the steward to concede a small but significant reduction in the tithe, acknowledging the validity of the tenants' numbers without overtly admitting defeat. The book concludes with the understanding that while the struggle is ongoing, the roots of this rebellion—a community bound by shared knowledge and collective action—have taken firm hold.