The Pilgrims' Complaint: A Study of Popular Thought in the Early Tudor North [Reprint ed.] 0754667855, 9780754667858, 1138382760, 9781138382763

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The Pilgrims’ Complaint

The Pilgrims’ Complaint A Study of Popular Thought in the Early Tudor North

Michael Bush

First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright© 2009 Michael Bush

Michael Bush has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bush, M.L. The pilgrims’ complaint : a study of popular thought in the early Tudor north. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) 1. Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–1537 2. England, Northern – Social conditions – 16th century 3. England, Northern – Politics and government – 16th century 4. England, Northern – Religion – 16th century I. Title 942'.052 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bush, M.L. The pilgrims’ complaint : a study of popular thought in the Early Tudor north / Michael Bush. p. cm.—(Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6785-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–1537. 2. Great Britain—History—Henry VIII, 1509–1547. 3. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491–1547—Adversaries. 4. Insurgency—England, Northern—History—16th century. 5. England, Northern—Social conditions—16th century. 6. Great Britain—History, Military—1485–1603. I. Title. DA339.B873 2009 942.05'2—dc22

ISBN 9780754667858 (hbk)

2008047814

Contents Series Editor’s Preface   Preface   Abbreviations  

vii ix xiii

1

For Faith and Commonwealth  

1

2

In Defence of the Faith  

45

3

‘Intolerable Exactions’  

111

4

The Polity Defended  

143

5

North and South  

167

6

Agrarian Conflict  

189

Conclusion  

245

Appendix: Key Declarations of Pilgrim Complaint and Intent  

251

Bibliography   Index

275 297

Series Editor’s Preface The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. As a result, continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favor of emphasis on radical discontinuities. Further, especially in the later period, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, has been left out of account. In the last few years, an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction. The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It will to the maximum degree possible be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly. The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part,

viii

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had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment. Thomas F. Mayer, Augustana College

Preface The pilgrimage of grace, a formidable uprising of 60,000 northerners against the government of Henry VIII, broke out in the second week of October 1536. Assuming the form of a military pilgrimage (that is, a crusade), it planned a march on London to liberate Christ’s faith from the coils of heresy. Its purpose, however, was not just to wage holy war but also to stage a rising of the commons which, in intent, conceit and organisation, drew on a tradition of revolt that, having emerged in the late middle ages, culminated in a succession of spectacular rebellions under the early Tudors. As a rising of the commons, its aim was to prevent the decay of the commonwealth by ending the misrule of evil ministers, notably Thomas Cromwell. The crusade was called off at Doncaster, temporarily on 27 October and finally on 8 December, but because of the government’s offer of pardon and remedy it would seem that, as a rising of the commons, the rebellion had been a success. The rebels’ triumph, however, soon crumbled as the outbreak of further revolts in January and February 1537 allowed the government to escape the fulfilment of its December pledges. But this did not render the uprising a complete failure since the general pardon granted in December continued to be respected and in the next decade the government implemented a programme of remedy which addressed many of the rebels’ complaints, with the execution of Thomas Cromwell, the establishment of a council of the north and the repeal or amendment of several of the statutes that the rebels had singled out as especially obnoxious. A rich vein of original material exists on the grievances that moved the rebels – such as rebel proclamations, rumour-mongering bills, oaths, manifestos, petitions, songs, prophetic rhymes, eye-witness accounts and confessions – much of it overlooked or superficially considered. This is largely because historians who have worked on the subject (for example, David Knowles, Christopher Haigh, C.S.L. Davies, R.W. Hoyle, G.W. Bernard) have largely sought to discover what precisely drove men to rebel, regarding much of the evidence relating to the commonwealth as dismissible because it fails to reveal what the rebels principally wanted, which they assumed to be the restoration of the old religion. In addition, a great deal of evidence pertinent to the Pilgrims’ religious complaint has been neglected, thanks to an abiding theological and pre-postmodernist approach to the Henrician reformation whereby historians – in seeking to work out the intrinsic meaning of key documents, such as the Act of Supremacy, the Ten Articles, the Royal Injunctions, the New Order



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of Prayer, the Order on Holy Days – proceed by assessing, in the light of textual content and provenance, whether or not these declarations of policy can be truly regarded as anticatholic, irrespective of what was felt at the time. The religious conflicts of the 1530s, along with the grievances that they generated, have also been obscured by the recent tendency to dissociate religious reform in England at this time from protestantism by referring to English reformers as ‘evangelicals’ rather than protestants (for example, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, 1996), p. 2), the effect of which has been to play down the extent to which they were protesting against the catholic system, thereby concealing why contemporary catholics should have had good cause to regard their proposals for reform with extreme horror. Furthermore, an inadequate appreciation of the commonwealth grievances has also stemmed from the view (for example, as made by George Bernard in The King’s Reformation (New Haven, 2005), p. 329) that to value these grievances in their own right rather than as part of the religious complaint is to commit an act of anachronism. The problems raised by these approaches are twofold. On the one hand, since the participants of the pilgrimage of grace were moved by their own impressions of heresy, the meaning that key reformation documents held for them surely has to be interpreted in that light rather than in accordance with an intellectual standard of theological proof. On the other, the accusation of anachronism cannot be taken seriously since it inevitably has to be levelled against the rebel leaders who, in preparing statements of grievance, were constantly aware of the need to distinguish the religious grievances from the grievances affecting the commonwealth in order to emphasise the importance of grievances, such as those relating to taxation, tenancy and contempt for the common law, that were not necessarily connected with matters of religion. This book seeks to employ a wider-focused and less procrustean approach. Its aim is to extract from the surviving evidence not simply the reasons for its occurrence but also some idea of how northerners at the time, especially the common people, thought about state, society and religion. Consequently, its author was bound to consider more fully, closely and systematically than earlier studies of the pilgrimage of grace the whole range of complaint. Much of the book provides an examination of the criticisms the rebels made of government ministers, officials, clerics and landlords. In doing so, it seeks to examine the ideals cherished at the time in the Tudor north. Geographically, it includes the inhabitants of the three Ridings of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Cumberland and the Palatinate of Durham, who not only joined the rebellion in large numbers but also left some record of their complaints. Since the rebellion was, in genre, a rising of the commons, much of the complaint can be said to express the wishes

Preface

xi

of ordinary people. The study is therefore about popular beliefs and the reasoning processes that sustained them. However, the rebellion also received considerable sympathy and support from disaffected gentlemen and clerics. This poses a problem of provenance which the study has to resolve by carefully identifying the complaints that can be attributed to the commons, either because they were peculiar to them or because they were shared by all three orders. More particularly, the rebels’ complaints reveal how northerners reacted to actual and imagined changes in the running of the state, in the practice of religion and in the management of the manor. More generally, they shed light on the complicated nature of what prevailed at the time in the form of social deference, political obedience, regional affiliation and reverence for custom, bearing in mind that such attitudes were not set in stone but could switch to demonstrations of disrespect and disobedience, to appreciations of novelty and to declarations of national concern, notably when the rebels sensed that the crown, the aristocracy and the church were failing to fulfil the duties ideally expected of them. Essentially, the book studies popular behaviour as it operated within the framework of the Tudor north and under the testing pressures of political, religious and economic change, brought about partly by the government’s determination to reform the old religion and to enlarge its political power, and partly by the policies that manorial lords adopted as they sought to prevent an unprecedentedly high rate of inflation from devaluing their landed incomes. The author is not exactly a beginner in the field. In fact, he has been enjoyably toiling there for well over twenty years, along with, but independently of, several other scholars. His Pilgrimage of Grace (Manchester, 1996) studied the formation of a rebel army and its impact upon the government, while his Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace (Hull, 1999) examined the disturbances that breached the December pardon and how they affected the original rebellion. Both inevitably dealt with rebel grievances but for a different purpose and much less systematically than The Pilgrims’ Complaint. Two of the chapters in this book relate to previously published articles: Chapter 3, to ‘Up for the commonweal’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991); Chapter 4, to ‘The Tudor polity and the pilgrimage of grace’, Historical Research, 80 (2007). But, in accordance with the specific subject of this book, the material has been considerably reworked and differently angled, so as to focus on the mentality of the commons. For helping him with his enquiries, the author would like to thank Roger Schofield, Cliff Davies, Angus Winchester, Roy Price, Steve Gunn and Paul Cavill. In addition, he would like to acknowledge with gratitude that it was Cliff Davies who first blazed the trail that this study follows, especially by seeking to link the rebels’ religious grievances with popular

xii

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religion. Otherwise, this study has been especially stimulated by the following works on social thought: Helen White, Social Criticism in the Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth-century (New York, 1944); Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1965); Whitney R.D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529–1559 (London, 1970); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971) and C.J. Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England (Oxford, 1992). Michael Bush Wanstead London

Abbreviations Bateson Bush Bush and Bownes Denton Dodds E.H.R. Hoyle L.P.

Master Oxford D.N.B. Stapleton St. P. Henry VIII Statutes of the Realm

Mary Bateson (ed.), ‘The pilgrimage of grace and Aske’s examination’, E.H.R., 5 (1890): 330–48 and 550–78 Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: a Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536 (Manchester, 1996) The Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace: a Study of the Postpardon Revolts of December 1536 to March 1537 and their Effect (Hull, 1999) Thomas Denton, A Perambulation of Cumberland, 1687–1688, ed. A.J.L. Winchester and Mary Wane, Surtees Society, 207 (2003) Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–7, and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538 (2 vols, Cambridge, 1915) English Historical Review R.W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2001) Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–1547, ed. J.S. Brewer, James Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (21 vols, London, 1862–1910), plus Addenda (2 vols, London, 1929–32) R.W. Hoyle, ‘Thomas Master’s narrative of the pilgrimage of grace’, Northern History, 21 (1985): 64–79 The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) ‘William Stapleton and the pilgrimage of grace’, ed. J.C. Cox, Transactions of the East Riding Antiquarian Society, 10 (1903) State Papers Published under the Authority of His Majesty’s Commission, King Henry VIII (11 vols, London, 1830–52) Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders, T.E. Tomlins, J. Raithby et al. (11 vols, London, 1810–28)

xiv Toller Tudor Royal Proclamations V.C.H.

The Pilgrims’ Complaint

Correspondence of Edward, Third Earl of Derby, ed. T.N. Toller, Chetham Society, new series, 19 (1890) Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin (3 vols, New Haven and London, 1964–9) Victoria County History

Chapter One

For Faith and Commonwealth Supporters of the pilgrimage of grace declared their grievances through a variety of physical acts: for example, by restoring religious houses; by disrupting church services; by refusing to pay taxes, rents and tithes; by pulling down enclosures; by sporting badges and banners; by placing priests carrying crosses at the head of their armies. Yet the uprising was much more than a succession of deeds. Its most distinctive feature is the quantity, elaborateness and explicitness of the Pilgrims’ written complaint. This extensive documentation comprises four types of statement: first, circulars to drum up support, notably muster proclamations, manifestos, rumourmongering bills, justificatory prophecies and rousing rhymes; secondly, the oaths and orders issued to bind and direct this support; thirdly, petitions to declare grievances and to propose remedy to the government; and fourthly, personal accounts of the uprising, the work of participants and other eye-witnesses. Thanks to it, a great deal is revealed about the people of the early Tudor north and their attitude to government, religion, region, landownership and society. Like the risings of the commons in 1381 and 1450, the Pilgrims petitioned the king for redress of grievance. This they sought to do from the very beginning, in conjunction with the mobilisation of a large army whose purpose was to impose upon the government the terms of a petition. Such an approach was adopted from the Lincolnshire uprising which began a week or so earlier on 2 October 1536. However, whereas the Lincolnshire rebels quickly formulated a statement of grievance and swiftly dispatched it to Court – that is, a letter of complaint to the king on 3 October, a day after the outbreak of revolt, and a petition a week later – it took the Pilgrims much longer to communicate with the government. Not until the last week of October was their first petition produced and presented; while a second and final petition was only dispatched in the first week of December. Two reasons accounted for this delay. In the first place, the Pilgrims from the start had the Lincolnshire petition at their disposal. In the second place, the pilgrimage of grace, initially a series of disturbances    See Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace (Manchester, 1996) [hereafter Bush], passim.   Ibid., p. 115.    M.L. Bush, ‘Up for the commonweal: the significance of tax grievances in the English rebellions of 1536’, English Historical Review [hereafter E.H.R.], 106 (1991): 302–4.



The Pilgrims’ Complaint

scattered over the north, was slow to coalesce into one rebellion. Once this had happened – at Pontefract on 22 October – the first petition quickly followed, composed specifically for a meeting with the king’s lieutenants, the duke of Norfolk and the earl of Shrewsbury, in Doncaster. By this time a new statement of grievance was needed because it was known that, having repudiated each article in turn, Henry VIII had completely rejected the petition from Lincolnshire. By 27 October the Pilgrims’ first petition had been submitted to the government. The late submission of the second petition – not until 4 December – simply resulted from the slowness of the government’s response to the first. The Lincolnshire Petitions Initially, the petition the Lincolnshire rebels had sent to the government meant a great deal to the Pilgrims. For this reason, the tendency to question the authenticity of the petitions used by them on the grounds that they were produced only in the later stages of revolt just will not wash. For the Pilgrims, this petition was an inspiration from the very beginning. First composed as a list of articles in Horncastle on 4 October, it was then revised in Lincoln on 7 and 8 October – after the rebels from around Horncastle and Louth had joined forces – and sent to the king a day later. Both versions were put together by gentlemen and then approved by the commons with a ‘yea, yea, yea, we like them [that is, the articles] very well’. Each version consisted of six demands for redress of grievance, plus one for a general pardon, making seven articles in all. Although neither petition has survived in its complete form, both can be reconstructed. Of the six articles of complaint that were contained in the petition presented to the king, two explicitly dealt with spiritual matters: article 1 objecting to the suppression of monasteries because ‘the service of God is … minished by it’, and article 6 opposing the ‘late promotion’ of a number of named bishops, because they had ‘subverted the faith of Christ’. However, placed between these two articles, were four material complaints. According to them, the commonwealth was under threat from various tax measures: thus, the Statute of Uses, enacted in 1536 to    State Papers, King Henry VIIII [hereafter St. P. Henry VIII], vol. I, pp. 463–6. His rejection was dispatched northwards on 19 October. See Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. XI, number 780 [hereafter L.P. XI. 780].    R.W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace (Oxford, 2001) [hereafter Hoyle], pp. 20–21.    L.P. XII(1). 70 (xi); The National Archives, SP1/110, f. 155b [L.P. XI. 971].    For Horncastle articles, see L.P. XII(1). 70 (viii, xi, xii). For Lincoln articles, see L.P. XI. 971.

For Faith and Commonwealth



maximise the crown’s feudal revenues, was regarded as ‘a great hurt and discomfort to the commonwealth’; the fifteenth and tenth, granted in 1534 and due for collection in 1537, was seen as ‘an importunate charge’, and the new clerical taxes of first fruits and tenths, also introduced in 1534, were presented as unsupportable for clerics with incomes of less than £20 p.a. A fourth complaint blamed these fiscal impositions, along with the dissolution of the monasteries, upon persons of low birth and reputation about the king – Thomas Cromwell and Richard Riche were cited – who had ‘procured the premises most especially for their own advantage’. Complaints of a temporal nature, then, were very much to the fore. What is more, even the two articles of spiritual complaint expressed material concerns: thus, the article objecting to the suppression of religious houses did so not only because it offended the Christian faith but also because it left ‘the poorality of your realm … unrelieved, the which, as we think, is a great hurt to the commonwealth’; while the other article of spiritual complaint attributed ‘the beginning of all the trouble’ to the bishop of Lincoln, a man of conservative religious belief. Holding him responsible for ‘the vexation that hath been taken of your subjects’, the petition implies that his offence was not so much heresy as a planned onslaught on parish churches to confiscate their treasures and reduce their number. These plans, it was feared, the bishop was about to implement through his chancellor, Dr Rayne, a man the rebels consequently murdered. Bearing out this interpretation was the letter of 3 October, the first communication the Lincolnshire rebels sent to the government. It is not a list of articles but simply a bill of complaint addressed to the king, on the command of the commons, from a number of captured subsidy commissioners. Seeking to explain why 22,000 men had assembled in protest, it expressed the fear ‘that all the jewels and goods of the churches of the country should be … brought to your grace’s council’ and that they would be ‘put of new to enhancements and other importunate charges which they were not able to bear by reason of extreme poverty’.    The Lincoln articles can be construed from the king’s reply. See St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 463–6. An imperfect copy (minus an article objecting to first fruits and tenths and a request for a pardon) was delivered to the mayor of York. See SP1/108, f. 45 [L.P. XI. 705 (1)]. Reproduced below in Appendix, doc. 1. The complaint about clerical taxation, needless to say, also had spiritual implications, so much so that in the Pilgrims’ December petition it was placed in the category of grievances touching the faith. See below, pp. 121–2. For the differences between the two Lincolnshire petitions, see Bush, ‘Up for the Commonweal’: 303–4. The Horncastle articles seem to have made further fiscal demands: possibly the remission of the subsidy as well as the fifteenth and tenth, possibly a ban on new indirect taxes, possibly an embargo on further taxation for the rest of the reign, possibly an insistence that future direct taxation should only be justified by the defence of the realm. The same petition may also have opposed the suppression of certain parish churches. For letter of 3 October, see SP1/106, f. 350 (L.P. XI. 534).

The Pilgrims’ Complaint



The complaints expressed in the two Lincolnshire petitions, then, strongly suggest that the rebels were acting not only to safeguard the catholic faith but also, as their letter of 3 October put it, ‘in maintenance of the commonwealth’. Their religious aim was to free the king from the control of heretics while their commonwealth aim was to oppose the government’s plans to raise its tax revenues and to confiscate church wealth. Uniting the two categories of complaint was a person and an event. The king’s leading minister, Thomas Cromwell, was detested as both a heretic and an expropriator of the realm’s wealth; while the recent dissolution of lesser monasteries was seen as both a major blow against the old religion and a cause of social impoverishment. The outbreak and early development of the pilgrimage of grace owed a great deal to the Lincolnshire articles. Robert Ledes revealed that, soon after their composition, the Horncastle petition was ‘strewed in the market towns’ of Yorkshire, as part of a deliberate policy, pursued by the gentlemen rebels of Lincolnshire, to enlist support in the north. Robert Kitchen, a glover of Beverley, told of its arrival in the town on Sunday, 8 October. Brought by William Woodmancy, a serving man from the town, a number of leading burghers discussed its terms before attending matins. As a result, the common bell was rung the same day and, in response, the whole township assembled on Market Hill. There the Horncastle articles were read out and, incited by them, everyone took an oath ‘to go forward’ to seek their ‘reformation’.10 A copy of the Lincoln articles, the petition presented to Henry VIII, reached Beverley on 11 October, in reply to a letter from the town requesting information and offering support. Its arrival led to the firing of Hunsley and Tranby Beacons, followed the next day by a muster ‘with horse and harness’ on Hunsley Hill.11 After bringing these articles to Beverley, Anthony Curtis took them into Holderness, with the result that, a day later, ‘all Holderness was up to the seaside’.12 On 11 October the same petition was read to a large assembly held on Hook Moor near Whitgift, attended by the commons of Marshland who had been waiting for the signal to rise since 6 October. Inspired by its content, they became openly committed to armed rebellion.13 Robert Aske, chief captain of the pilgrimage of grace, was probably familiar with the content of both the Lincolnshire petitions. A week before the outbreak of the pilgrimage of grace, he met Thomas Moigne, a leader 

  L.P. XII(1). 70 (xii).   The National Archives, E36/119, f. 35 [L.P. XII(1). 202 (1/vii)]. 11   J.C. Cox (ed.), ‘William Stapleton and the pilgrimage of grace’, Transactions of the East Riding Antiquarian Society, 10 (1903) [hereafter Stapleton]: 88–9. 12  Ibid., pp. 90–91. 10

13

  L.P. XII(1). 852 (ii).

For Faith and Commonwealth



of the Lincolnshire rebels, at a muster close to Caistor. From him he presumably heard about the letter the rebels had dispatched to the king on 3 October and of the Horncastle articles.14 Then, on 7 October, and again on 9 October, he travelled from Yorkshire to Lincoln to see what was happening and especially to learn of the king’s response to this letter, a response which did not reach the rebels until 10 October. At this time, the second petition was being drawn up in Lincoln and was sent south on 9 October. Undoubtedly, Aske must have heard of it, although, according to him, not until 11 October did he have the chance to read the final draft when a copy was intercepted at Whitgift on the Humber as it was being taken into the West Riding.15 Consequently, on 13 October at Weighton Hill in the East Riding, he could truthfully tell Guy Kyme and Thomas Dunne, ambassadors from the Lincolnshire rebels: ‘as for their articles he knew them as well as they’.16 Aske was highly appreciative of these articles. For him they served as an inspiration to rebel, a means of rapport with other rebels, especially the commons, an instrument for raising rebellion and a useful declaration of complaint. A muster proclamation he issued on 11 October revealed his reliance upon them, promising: ‘And ye shall have tomorrow [that is, the day of the muster on Skipwith Moor] the articles and causes of your assembly and petition to the king.’17 Given that the Lincoln articles had been declared at the Hook Moor muster the day before and were announced at the Kexby Moor muster three days later, his proclamation must have been making reference to them.18 Used between 11 and 14 October to justify revolt at the musters held on Hook Moor for Marshland, at Ringstonehurst for Howdenshire, on Skipworth Moor for Ouse and Derwent, and at Kexby Moor for western Harthill, the Lincoln articles played an important part in persuading the commons of south Yorkshire to take up arms. Another of Aske’s early proclamations, one aimed at recruiting the support of the gentlemen, significantly listed the Lincoln articles, in abbreviated form, on the back.19 At this early stage the grievances expressed by the rebels of south Yorkshire bore a close similarity to those formally articulated in Lincolnshire. Both proclamations, for example, followed the Lincolnshire

14   Mary Bateson (ed.), ‘The pilgrimage of grace and Aske’s examination’, E.H.R., 5 (1890) [hereafter Bateson]: 333; L.P. XI. 971. 15   Bateson, p. 333; L.P. XII(1). 852 (ii). 16   L.P. XI. 828 (xii); Stapleton, p. 91. 17   SP1/107, f. 116 [L.P. XI. 622]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 4. 18

  Bateson, p. 558.   With the omission of the article objecting to first fruits and tenths. See St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 466–7 [L.P. XI. 705 (2)]. For complete text, see below Appendix, doc. 5. 19

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articles in emphasising the government’s exploitation of the realm and its contempt for Christ’s faith.20 Yet, while the Lincoln articles were effective in raising revolt in south Yorkshire, they played a much smaller part in raising the rest of the north. As a statement of grievance, they became increasingly inadequate as time went by. Noticeably absent from them were grievances strongly felt in the North Riding, the Palatinate of Durham and the border counties, especially complaints against the government for infringing the constitution and against landlords for maltreating tenants.21 Furthermore, the government’s speedily executed concession to postpone collection of the offending taxes inevitably rendered the fiscal grievances a less pressing issue.22 Such changes in approach and perception, along with the king’s repudiation of the Lincolnshire rebels’ articles, obliged the Pilgrims to compose a petition of their own. Pilgrim Declarations of Complaint By 21 October the Pilgrims had dispensed with the articles from Lincolnshire. This was made evident in a meeting that day between the king’s emissary, Lancaster Herald, and Robert Aske. They met in Pontefract Castle, which the Pilgrims had just taken. When the herald asked him for a copy of their articles, Aske admitted that they did not have one.23 Yet this did not mean that at this time the Pilgrims were totally without written declarations of complaint, and Aske supplied the herald instead with a copy of the Pilgrims’ oath which, he claimed, served just as well as a petition in presenting their cause. By this time Aske had composed several statements of grievance and intent, notably a lengthy oath and an order for religious houses suppressed as well as the two recruitment proclamations already mentioned. In contrast to the brief oral oath to be true to God, the king and the commons – one the Pilgrims had adopted from the Lincolnshire rebellion and employed from the start to bind people, gentlemen and clerics to their cause – Aske’s oath was a substantial piece, comprising several complaints. Presenting the uprising as ‘our pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth’, it opened with the declaration that their aim was to preserve the king’s person and his issue (a reference to the recently bastardised princess Mary), to purify the nobility (by stripping Cromwell of his recently awarded 20

    22   23   21

See below, p. 7. See ‘Up for the Commonweal’: 311. See ibid. St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 486–7 [L.P. XI. 826].

For Faith and Commonwealth



barony) and to expel ‘all villeins’ blood and evil councillors against the commonwealth’ from the king’s side (chiefly by getting rid of Cromwell). The oath closed with the exhortation to ‘take before you the cross of Christ’ and suppress ‘these heretics and heretic opinions’ (that is, the evil councillors who had taken charge of the government), in order to protect the faith and restore the church.24 This elaborate oath had been produced by 17 October. The day before, shortly after his arrival in York, Aske had pinned to the door of the Minster an order for suppressed religious houses.25 Authorised ‘by all the whole consent of the headmen of this our pilgrimage for grace’, it unequivocally stated the Pilgrims’ objection to the recent dissolution. Monks were instructed to re-enter the suppressed houses and to ‘do divine service as the king’s bedemen and bedewomen’. But rather than ejecting the farmers (that is, those whom the government had appointed to administer the suppressed sites and estates), the monks were required to work in cooperation with them ‘to such time our petition be granted’ when the farmers would be dismissed and the lands, goods and buildings would revert to the religious.26 Several days earlier, on 11 October, Aske’s first surviving proclamation, an address to the commons of Howdenshire, Ouse and Derwent and Marshland,27 made similar points to those found in the oath, requiring men ‘to be ready upon pain of death for the commonwealth’ in order to safeguard the king’s issue and ‘the noble blood’, to ‘preserve the church of God from spoiling’ and to protect ‘the commons and their wealths’. A week or so later, and shortly after the publication of the oath, Aske’s second surviving proclamation, this time addressed to lords and gentlemen, made the same points. To begin with, it sought to rebut rumours generated by the adopted title ‘pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth’, stressing that the uprising was not simply for the commonwealth of the realm. Nor, it claimed, did the uprising reject Henry VIII’s kingship since its supporters had no objection to fulfilling their normal service and fiscal obligations to him. So what was the aim and why the action? The aim was to preserve the king, the church, the nobility and the commonalty. Action was required because certain evil persons – presented as heretics and subverters of the law – had misled the king with ‘many sundry new inventions’ which threatened to destroy the church of England ‘and the minsters [collegiate churches, religious 24   T.N. Toller (ed.), Correspondence of Edward, Third Earl of Derby, Chetham Society, new series, 19 (1890) [hereafter Toller], pp. 50–51 [L.P. XI. 892 (1/3)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 2. 25   Bush, pp. 90–91. 26   Toller, p. 51. For a slightly different version, see SP1/108, f. 181 [L.P. XI. 784 (1/ii)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 3. 27   SP1/107, f. 116 [L.P. XI. 622]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 4.



The Pilgrims’ Complaint

houses] of the same’ as well as to rob ‘the whole body of this realm’.28 The meaning of these statements was further clarified when Aske came to Pontefract on 18 October and confronted the lords, gentlemen and clerics who had taken refuge in the castle there, first with a letter and then with an address. Summarising the content of the now missing letter, Aske later said that it ‘rehearsed how the commons were gnawn in their conscience with spreading heresies, suppression of houses of religion and other matters touching the commons’ wealth to their impoverishment’. The following day he made a speech in the castle on ‘the griefs of the commons’, in which he charged the lords spiritual (that is, the bishops) with authorising the acts of sacrilege and greed that the commissioners for the suppression of religious houses had committed by requisitioning church ornaments and relics. He then accused the lords temporal (that is, the peers) with failing to protect the interests of the north. Had they not had a part in authorising the suppression of religious houses and the imposition of new taxes upon the clergy, even though religious houses were a vital source of relief for the northern commons, and their suppression, along with the exaction of these new taxes, were sucking wealth from the region? And was not the resulting impoverishment endangering the security of the realm through weakening the capacity and incentive of northerners to defend the border against the Scots?29 In response to Aske’s advocacy and the presence of a large number of armed rebels at the gates, Pontefract Castle was yielded and its inhabitants were sworn to the pilgrim oath. A day later, when Aske met the king’s herald, he told him, in the presence of the captured archbishop of York, Lord Darcy, Sir Robert Constable and Thomas Magnus, archdeacon of the East Riding, that he ‘and his company’ planned to ‘go to London, of pilgrimage to the king’s highness’ in order to replace vile with noble blood in his council and make ‘full restitution of Christ’s church’. In declaring this point he was largely reciting the oath. He then added something that was absent from the oath although present in the two proclamations: ‘also the commonte [that is, the commonalty] to be used as they should be’.30 These declarations of grievance and intent were very much the work of Aske; but other statements of complaint, all issued independently of him, purveyed a similar message. For example, a letter was dispatched by the town of Beverley to the commons of Lincolnshire on 10 October, which declared that it would only accept Henry VIII’s ‘lawful acts and demands’. Blaming ‘councillors, inventors and procurers’ for seeking ‘utterly to undo both the church and the commonalty of the realm’, it offered to support 28   St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 466–7 [L.P. XI. 705 (2) ]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 5. 29   Bateson, pp. 335–6. For text of Aske’s speech, see below, Appendix, doc. 6. 30   St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 486 [L.P. XI. 826].

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the commons of Lincolnshire and the rest of the realm in opposing all this ‘to the utmost of our power’.31 Also coming from Beverley was a seditious bill composed and spread abroad by Robert Esch, a friar from the Trinitarian house of St Robert’s in Knaresborough. Licensed to preach and beg in Beverley, he therefore resided there. Passed by hand and nailed to church doors, the bill was spread far and wide in the three Ridings of Yorkshire and beyond, with rousing effect upon the commons.32 No copy has survived but its content is discoverable.33 Essentially, it rumoured that the government had plans to remove a number of parish churches as well as to tax the commons in a novel manner with tributes levied on the sacraments of baptism, marriage and burial, on food, on ploughs and on cattle, thus causing the commons – who normally benefited both from the high tax thresholds associated with direct taxation and from the traditional absence of internal indirect taxes – to suffer a fiscal hammering. No matter how fanciful these rumours, they became a genuine source of grievance, as Lancaster Herald discovered on 21 October. Asking a band of armed peasants near Pontefract as to why they rose, he was told: because ‘no man should bury, nor christen, nor wed nor have their beasts unmarked but that the king would have a certain sum of money for every such thing, and the beast unmarked to his own house, which had never been seen’. According to the same band, such tax measures threatened to destroy the commons and the church.34 Esch’s bill was composed in the very early stages of the uprising: for on 10 October he sought licence from William Stapulton, chief captain of the Beverley rebels, to go north and ‘to raise them all’ in the region around Malton, presumably by means of the bill. The mission was successful and returning, he was allowed to do likewise in the West Riding Forest of Knaresborough.35 By 18 October Thomas Wriothesley was reporting to Cromwell that, as a result of its circulation, ‘every man thinketh that they shall be utterly undone for ever’ throughout the north.36 Its spectacular effect in rousing the commons was attested not only by Pilgrims such as Lancelot Collyns, George Lumley and Thomas Percy but also by loyalists such as William Maunsell and Ralph Sadler.37 31

  SP1/107, f. 136 [L.P. XI. 645]. For the complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 7.   Bush, pp. 60–61. 33   SP1/118, f. 267 [L.P. XII(1). 1018]; SP1/111, f. 66 [L.P. XI. 1047]. A list of articles attached to a Captain Poverty muster proclamation (see below, Appendix, doc. 11) may well have related to it. 34   St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 485 [L.P. XI. 826]. 35   Stapleton, pp. 88, 96. 36   St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 482n. [L.P. XI. 768(2)]. 37   For Collyns, see L.P. XII(1). 1018. For Lumley, see L.P. XII(1). 369. For Percy, see L.P. XII(1). 393 (1/2). For Maunsell, see L.P. XI. 1047. For Sadler, see L.P. XII(1). 200. 32

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Also composed independently of Aske was a series of letters written in the name of the commons and signed ‘Captain Poverty’.38 The first was produced by the Richmondshire rebels on 15 October. Disseminated in the upland north between 16 and 21 October, it helped to stir up revolt in Cumberland, Westmorland, north Lancashire, the North Riding, Durham and Northumberland. Although no copy has survived, its content can be construed, especially from accounts of the uprising provided by the Pilgrim clerics, Barnard Townley and Robert Thompson.39 Townley quoted the opening of the letter. Expressing a concern for defending ‘the faith of God, his laws and his church’, it highlighted as a special grievance the suppression of religious houses and the need for their restoration. By this time the Richmondshire rebels had restored Coverham and Easby Abbeys. In their letter they called upon other regions ‘to do the same’. Yet this was not the total content of the letter. Attached to it were some articles which, according to Thompson, were ‘as well concerning the Christian faith as the commonweal’. Townley implied that the ‘commonweal’ matter related to manorial dues and tithes. This particular letter inspired the production of others in the same Captain Poverty idiom, some of which have survived: notably two muster proclamations that were issued by the men of Kendal and Dent to raise the northerly parts of Lancashire.40 Both proclamations condemned the suppression of religious houses, and one extended the condemnation to other ‘holy places’ such as churches and minsters. Both deplored the government’s heretical treatment of the faith and the church, with one specifying how the laws of ‘our Mother Holy Church’ had been ‘vilipended’ and how the saints had been blasphemed. In addition, both stressed a commonwealth concern. One stated that the government had ‘procured and purposed against the commonwealth certain acts of law under the colour of parliament’ which ‘the estate of poverty can no longer bear’. It therefore called upon men to be ready to uphold both the faith of Christ and the commonwealth of the realm.41 The other called for support not only to rescue ‘our faith so sore decayed’ but also to maintain the ‘good and laudable customs of the country’ and to oppose ‘naughty inventions and strange articles now accepted’ which, if allowed to remain, will ‘go forward to the utter undoing of the commonwealth’.42 38   See M.L. Bush, ‘Captain Poverty and the pilgrimage of grace’, Historical Research, 65 (1992): 17–36. 39   For the examinations of Townley and Thompson, see SP1/117, fos 43–7, 49–56 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (1, 2)]. For text of letter, see below, Appendix, doc. 8. 40   Toller, pp. 48–50 [L.P. XI. 892 (1, 2)]. For complete text of the two letters, see below, Appendix, docs 10, 11. 41   Toller, pp. 48–9. 42  Ibid., p. 49.

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Like the first Captain Poverty letter, it had an appendix of articles. In this case the articles were meant to illuminate the objection to ‘naughty inventions’, revealing that it was against new taxes on sacraments, food and ploughland.43 As for the defence of ‘laudable customs of the country’, this referred to the system of tenant right, which conceded to the peasantry of the border counties low manorial dues in return for free and personal military service against the Scots. The point made was that the privileges customarily and justifiably enjoyed by the people of the region – that is, exemption from taxation and lenient rents – were now under threat of termination, and that this would seriously damage the commonwealth in those parts which depended upon the borderers’ capacity to keep out reivers and Scottish troops. Substantiating this point was a proclamation produced by the Captain Poverty movement in Cumberland on 20 October, urging the people to organise resistance ‘when the thieves or Scots would rob or invade us’. Associated with it was a rebel statement declaring that it is ‘our landlords’ and not the king ‘that do take our commonwealth from us’, and that, to contain their greed, landlords should be obliged to seal an agreement to limit the exactions that they made of those holding by tenant right. The same proclamation presented the mustering of a rebel army as necessary not only ‘for the maintenance of this country’ but also ‘for the maintenance of the faith’. The latter, it claimed, relied on ensuring that priests ‘bid holy days and beads after the old custom’: that is, by restoring the holy days which the government had just abolished and by reviving the traditional order of prayer with its acknowledgment of the papal supremacy. A similar proclamation was issued by the Captain Poverty movement in the Barony of Westmorland at the end of October, ordering, upon pain of death, holy days and prayers to be conducted ‘in the old manner’. This was followed by a letter from the commons of the barony to the Pilgrim high command insisting, in the manner of the Cumberland commons, that restrictions should be placed on what lords could demand of lands held under the terms of tenant right, again with a new tenancy agreement sealed by the lords.44 While, then, differences of opinion existed as to what constituted the major threat to religion and the material wellbeing of the north, all engaged in the pilgrimage of grace were agreed that

43

 Ibid., p. 50.   For Cumberland proclamation, see SP1/117, fos 51–51b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 9. For Cumberland statement on tenant right, see Thomas Denton, A Perambulation of Cumberland 1687–1688, ed. A.J.L. Winchester and Mary Wane, Surtees Society, 207 (2003) [hereafter Denton], pp. 479–80. For Westmorland proclamation, see SP1/117, f. 54 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. For letter from Westmorland commons to pilgrim leadership, see L.P. XI. 1080. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 15. 44

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the rebellion was neither simply a struggle for the faith nor just a campaign to maintain the commonwealth but a conjunction of the two. The Pilgrims’ complaint was also expressed in several rhymes which at the time were circulating in the north. Some were exhortations to take action; others were cryptic prophecies. Of the former, two have survived. One is Pickering’s Song, a compilation of rhymes purveyed by minstrels in the East Riding. Collected together by John Hallom, they were, on his request, turned into a song by John Pickering, a dominican friar resident in Bridlington Priory.45 The other is a ballad closely associated with Sawley Abbey in the West Riding and composed, in all likelihood, by one of its monks, although presented as the voice of ‘us commons’. Reflecting its provenance – for Sawley was one of the dissolved monasteries that underwent restoration during the course of the uprising – this ballad objected to the government’s plunder of the church on the grounds that it offended the commandment ‘thou shall not steal’ and the Mosaic order applying it to property, ‘thou shall not remove thy neighbour’s landmark’.46 The complaint was given both a religious and a secular import: claiming that the confiscation of church wealth, on the one hand, reduced the clergy’s capacity to serve the spiritual needs of the people47 and, on the other, seriously impaired the clergy’s ability to care for the material needs of the poor through performing works of charity and hospitality.48 The ballad’s message was clear: God would take action against Cromwell, Cranmer, Riche, Leigh, Layton and Latimer. Equally clear was its proposed means: ‘Commons to mell/To make redress’, under the direction of Robert Aske.49 Pickering’s Song rested upon two biblical stories, one from the Apocryphal book of Maccabees, the other from the Old Testament book of Esther.50 In citing both stories, the song identified the people of the north with the Jews: in Maccabees, oppressed in Israel by King Antiochus; and in Esther, threatened in Persia by Haman, the leading minister of King Ahasuerus. Each story told of attempts to stamp out the practice of 45   SP1/118, f. 284 [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (3)]. For the song, see SP1/118, fos 292–293b [L.P. XII(1).1021 (5)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 12. Pickering appeared to put it together during the Truce that lasted from 27 October to 8 December. 46   Bateson, p. 344, verses I–IV. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 13. The reference to Deuteronomy ‘Decimo nono’ made in verse III and elaborated upon in verse IV appears to relate both to Deuteronomy 5: 19 and to Deuteronomy 19: 14. 47   Bateson, p. 344, verses V–VI. 48   Bateson, p. 345, verses X–XII. 49  Ibid., verse XVI. 50   For Maccabees, see SP1/ 118, fos 292–292b [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (5)]. For Esther, see ibid., fos 292b–293.

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Jewish law: by prohibition in Maccabees and in Esther by an order for the slaughter of all Jews resident in the Persian Empire.51 In relating how Judas Maccabeus successfully resisted King Antiochus, the first story showed how military force against the government could be justified as willed by God; in relating how Esther successfully pleaded with Ahasuerus to get rid of Haman, the second showed how it was possible to dispose of an evil minister by petitioning the king.52 By identifying Haman with Thomas Cromwell and the Jews with the people of the north, the song condemned Cromwell as a tyrant, heretic and upstart and presented his overthrow as the special mission that God had assigned ‘the northern people’ for the safeguard of the true faith, the constitution and the commonwealth. While equating Cromwell with Haman, however, the song took care not to associate Henry VIII with Antiochus, pointing out that the people of the north were ‘not against our prince’ but merely wanted him ‘to reign with equity/That virtue may abound with gracious plenty’ and to banish ‘cursed heresy’ from the realm. Nonetheless, it strongly recommended victory in battle as the most effective means of securing redress.53 The grievances identified in the song were first, the faith assailed by heresy and the need to restore ‘the true Christianity’.54 Heresy was seen as responsible for the spoliation of Christ’s church: witness the recent suppression of religious houses. If poverty had driven the government to dissolve monasteries, it argued, the action taken was excusable in the eyes of God since it did not involve a rejection of the monastic ideal. However, poverty was clearly not the motive. Heresy was to blame; and therefore ‘all abbeys’ were under threat. For this reason the dissolution of the lesser religious houses was utterly deplorable.55 Another of the song’s complaints was the government’s interference with the rights of subjects. ‘Southern Turks’ were accused not only of ‘spoiling Christ’s church’ but also of ‘perverting our law’.56 ‘False injunctions’ were cited in evidence, with Cromwell blamed for their use.57 The threat of tyranny was as much a source of concern as the threat of heresy.58 Another concern of the song was the political dominance of Thomas Cromwell, who, it claimed, resembled Haman partly because, as an upstart, he was extremely sensitive about his honour and partly because he had promised to make 51

  1 Maccabees 1; Esther 3.   1 Maccabees 2; Esther 5–7. 53   SP1/118, f. 293b. 54  Ibid., f. 293. 55  Ibid., f. 292. 56  Ibid., f. 292b. 57  Ibid., f. 293. 58  Ibid., f. 293b. 52

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the king very wealthy. According to the song, background and policy were causally connected. Since ‘the art of a shearman it was his beginning’, the song went, Cromwell, not surprisingly, lacked regard for ‘the wealth of the realm’. Accustomed to fleecing sheep, he was naturally inclined to imposing ‘intolerable exactions’ upon both laity and clergy,59 even more so as he had allegedly declared that his main concern was to enlarge the king’s personal wealth.60 Moreover, his humble beginnings made him resentful of the traditional ruling order. Thanks to his vindictive rule, ‘the nobility of the realm [was] brought to confusion’ and was in danger of being ‘shent’ (that is, disgraced or ruined). The song lamented: ‘that were great pity/ This country to be desolate of so noble progeny’.61 At least eight prophetic rhymes circulated in the north during the course of the uprising.62 Composed long before, they were rendered relevant to the pilgrimage of grace either by a process of textual revision – as with the rhymes ‘Christ’s Cross Row’, ‘The Prophecies of Rhymer, Bede and Merlin’ and ‘The Marvels of Merlin’ – or by a process of reinterpretation.63 But can these prophecies be accepted as trustworthy expressions of Pilgrim complaint? In the first place, none was demonstrably the work of Pilgrims. In the second place, what is known of the meanings that the Pilgrims attached to them was extracted under interrogation and therefore remains questionable. What the government found when examining these prophetic rhymes was exactly what it was looking for: that is, evidence of attempts to overthrow the king. Since many of the prophecies had been composed or reworked in the fifteenth century, a period when a spectacular number of royal depositions had occurred, this was not surprising. Moreover, it was 59

 Ibid., f. 293.  Ibid., f. 292b. 61  Ibid., fos 292, 293b. 62   ‘Christ’s Cross Row’, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings to follow King John’, ‘Cock of the North’, ‘Prophecies of Rhymer, Bede and Merlin’, ‘France and Flanders then Shall Rise’, ‘A Prophecy of a New World Emperor’ ‘The Marvels of Merlin’ and a prophetic roll picturing the waxing and waning moon. They are cited in L.P. XII(1). 534, 841 (3), 1087; L.P. XII(2). 1212. 63   For a history of the prophecies and their relationship with the pilgrimage of grace, see Sharon L. Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991), passim.; Alistair Fox, ‘Prophecies and politics in the reign of Henry VIII’, in A. Fox and John Guy (eds), Reassessing the Henrician Age (Oxford, 1986), ch. 4; Madeleine Hope Dodds, ‘Political prophecies in the reign of Henry VIII’, Modern Languages Review, 11(1916): 276–84. For the text of ‘Christ’s Cross Row’, see below, n. 67. For the texts of the other two rhymes, see Jansen, Political Protest, ch. 3 (1, 2). For the direct references that they make to issues featured in the pilgrimage of grace, see ibid., pp. 37, 90, 97, 155; Fox, ‘Prophecies and politics’, p. 81; and below, pp. 15–16. For the process of reinterpretation, see L.P. XII(1). 841 (3) (monks of Furness Abbey); L.P. XII(2). 1212 (Dobson and others); L.P. XII(1). 534 (Bigod); 1087 (Todde). 60

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the nature of prophecy to foretell the spectacular, such as the overthrow of princes. However, one thing is clear about the pilgrimage of grace: it had no plan to depose Henry VIII. The prophetic rhymes are misleading in a second sense. Old rhymes that had undergone recent revision made the point that, to save the church, the clergy needed to take up arms: that is, to go against the calling assigned to them by the society of orders.64 Yet this was something most clerical pilgrims had no intention of doing; so much so that their refusal to serve as soldiers was a sore point with lay Pilgrims; as was their unwillingness to justify war against the prince by declaring it consonant with the law of God.65 Nonetheless, by appearing to predict the pilgrimage of grace and its success, prophetic rhymes undoubtedly helped to recruit support, inspire confidence and impart a sense of legitimacy. Two of the rhymes foretold a rising in the north. One entitled ‘The Cock of the North’ claimed that When the cock in the north hath builded it nest And gathered his birds and busked him to fly, Then Fortune, his friend, shall the gates up cast, And then shall he have his free entry.

Another, entitled ‘The Prophecies of Rhymer, Bede and Merlin’ predicted: ‘Then shall the north rise against the south’.66 Yet another entitled ‘Christ’s Cross Row’ explicitly blamed Cromwell for all things amiss. Known in Cumbria as well as the three Ridings of Yorkshire, it had a very wide circulation. Having discovered a copy in the southerly parts of the West Riding in February 1537, Norfolk sent it to Cromwell to show him how fiercely he was criticised in the north.67 Like the two revised rhymes, it relayed a prophecy of Merlin foretelling that ‘a little country called Britain’ would be compelled to begin again: in other words, to banish tradition. 64   This point is made clearly in ‘Prophecies of Rhymer, Bede and Merlin’ – see Dodds, ‘Political prophecies’: 276–7; Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 68 and 80 (lines 304–7) – where ‘the holy church’ is called upon to don harness and to mobilise and fight as if they were ‘seculars’. It is made more obscurely in ‘The Marvels of Merlin’ whose final stanza declared: ‘When the child smites the mother/The father shall him destroy’, which was taken to mean that in return for attacking the church the king would ‘die by the hands of priests’. See Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 93–4, 97. 65   For unwillingness to bear arms, see Bush, pp. 133–5, 181, 212–14, 409. For unwillingness to justify war, see below, p. 30. 66   See Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 81, 101. 67   For the wide circulation of ‘Christ’s Cross Row’, see Michael Bush and David Bownes, The Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace (Hull, 1999) [hereafter Bush and Bownes], p. 158. For Norfolk, see L.P. XII(1). 318. For the appended rhyme, see SP1/115, f. 177 [L.P. XII(1). 318 (2)].

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Having expressed his disapproval, Merlin then rode off, leaving Bede to declare that what he had prophesied was now taking place: Much ill cometh of a small note As Cromwell set in a man’s throat That shall put many other to pain, God wote.

The rhyme made its point by a succession of puns: Cromwell was the crumb that sticks in the throat and has to be cleared; while Christ’s cross is a play on the faith of Christ and the alphabet. Certain letters were quoted, A B C and K L M, the former representing Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell and their promotion of heresy; the latter representing Katherine and Princess Mary and the defence of the old religion. Rather than abiding by A B and C men needed to work through the alphabet to K L M: ‘then shall we know news’.68 But this remedy was easier to identify than apply, it claimed, largely because leading noble families had been either excluded from the king’s counsel or threatened with extinction, while others had become the servile agents of the government, thus forsaking their duty to resist tyranny. Bede recommended the removal of Cromwell in order to save the old religion and to restore the nobility to their traditional role as protectors of the commonwealth. In this respect, the rhyme purveyed a similar message to that of Pickering’s Song. The Pilgrims’ Petitions Historians have tended to dismiss the two petitions that the Pilgrims dispatched to the king as spurious declarations of grievance, on the grounds that they were concocted by the leadership for some ulterior purpose. Reacting against the Dodds’ willingness to accept the petitions as ‘trustworthy evidence of the desires of the rebellious body’, G.R. Elton expressed doubts about their authenticity, regarding them as the creation of a political faction bent on exploiting the uprising for its own particular gain. C.S.L. Davies and R.W. Hoyle have been just as sceptical. For Hoyle the petitions were a trick played by gentlemen Pilgrims on the Pilgrim commons to make them abandon a planned march on London.69 Here, in 68

  See Dodds, ‘Political prophecies’: 278; Jansen, Political Protest, p. 5.   For Elton, see his ‘Politics and the pilgrimage of grace’, in B. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation (Manchester, 1980), pp. 27, 39–40, 50. For Hoyle, see Hoyle, pp. 20–21, 353. For Davies, see ‘Popular religion and the pilgrimage of grace’, in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), p. 74. 69

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this study, it is argued that the petitions had the dual purpose of rendering military action unnecessary and of instructing the government on how to reform itself. For both reasons, the petitions have to be appreciated as genuine statements of complaint since, only by expressing what the rank and file wanted, did they stand any chance of preventing military action; and, only if seen as an instruction to the government on the error of its ways, do certain things make sense: notably the nature of their content and the Pilgrims’ determination from the very start of the uprising to dispatch a petition to the king. But this is not to say that the petitions offer a complete statement of grievance or that, as set out in the petitions, the grievances necessarily represented what the Pilgrims actually desired. The first petition was all-inclusive but undetailed; the second, very detailed but far from comprehensive. Attempts to formulate a petition began on 18 October when Aske marched to Pontefract Castle and asked the two lords who had taken refuge there – Lord Darcy and the archbishop of York – ‘to be mean to the king’s highness by way of petition’. After persuading the castle to yield, he then approached the archbishop of York – as did Sir George Darcy and Sir Ralph Ellerker – and asked him to compose some articles because the Pilgrims had as yet none of their own. The archbishop refused; as he was to do again in December.70 The same day, and quite independently of Aske, the Beverley men, who had just succeeded in taking the town of Hull and the gentlemen refugees within its walls, met at Hunsley Beacon with the aim of drawing up a petition composed of ‘articles of our griefs’ which they intended to dispatch to the duke of Suffolk with the request that he should be ‘their petitioner to the king’. For the purpose they appointed a council, but before it could achieve anything they made the decision to respond to a summons from Aske to join him in Pontefract.71 No petition was produced until shortly before the meeting with the duke of Norfolk, the king’s lieutenant, in Doncaster on 27 October. In the field outside Doncaster the leaders of the pilgrimage produced five articles in response to Norfolk’s suggestion that at a meeting with him they should declare ‘the causes of their assembly’. These five articles were committed, in the first instance, to the memory of Robert Bowes whose task was to recite them to the duke. The petition became a document, in fact, only because, at the meeting in Doncaster, Norfolk insisted on a written statement of grievance.72 70

  Bateson, p. 335; SP1/119, f. 6 [L.P. XII(1). 1022].   Stapleton, pp. 98–9. 72   For Norfolk’s proposal of a meeting, see Bateson, p. 337. For the making of this petition, see the archbishop of York’s declaration, SP1/119, f. 6b [L.P. XII(1). 1022]. Hoyle refers to it as the Hampole articles (see Hoyle, p. 348), but there is no certain evidence that 71

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This petition, in the form that was taken to Court, opened with the substantial oath that Aske had composed in York on 16/17 October and which had so far served, in the absence of a petition, as the Pilgrims’ main manifesto of complaint. Those joining this ‘pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth’, it stressed, should do so not for personal gain but to defend the church, to preserve the royal family, to purify the nobility and to expel enemies of the commonwealth from the government. Following the oath came five articles. In the manner of the Lincolnshire petitions, one of the articles required a complete pardon for every participant, in this case ‘by act of parliament or otherwise’. But in contrast to the Lincolnshire petitions, which listed complaints against specific government measures, the other four articles, in the manner of the oath, made points of a general nature, the first calling for the preservation of Christ’s faith; the second calling for the maintenance of the church and its liberties; the third calling for a reversion to the usages of 1509 with regard to ‘the common laws and the commonwealth of this realm’ and to the employment of noblemen rather than commoner upstarts in the running of the state; and the fourth calling for action to be taken against ‘the subverters of God’s laws and the laws of the realm’.73 These generalisations had a double purpose: one was to provide a comprehensive overview of complaint by focusing upon a small number of basic issues; the other was to create broad categories of complaint into which the Pilgrim delegates could set particular grievances when required. One exception was made to this approach since article four required certain councillors of the king – Cromwell, Cranmer and Latimer – to ‘be corrected’ for attacking Christ’s faith and for abusing the constitution, an indication of the strength of feeling in the north against these three men. It also offered a simple solution to the overall problem: their removal from power. Aske and Henry VIII interpreted the petition in the same dual manner, both seeing it as dealing with ‘faith and commonwealth’. What the term ‘commonwealth’ meant for the king is made clear in his response to the petition. It included wealth, peace, indifferent justice to all and protecting the realm through the upkeep of frontier defences: in fact, all things pertinent to preserving the material wealth and physical security of his subjects. Although Aske tended to present the commonwealth as ‘the wealth of the commons’ rather than the wealth of society as a whole, there is no reason to belief that he would

this petition was composed at Hampole. The archbishop claimed that it was composed ‘upon the field’ shortly before Ellerker and Bowes met up with Norfolk in Doncaster. 73   SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, docs 2, 14.

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have dissented from this royal definition which simply set out what the king’s coronation oath had obliged him to observe.74 The shortcomings of this petition, which lay in an unwillingness to cite specific grievances, was eventually remedied by the second petition with its 22 articles of complaint, a fulfilment of the Pilgrim’s plan to await the king’s answer to the first petition before presenting articles of a more particular nature. But this does not mean that, at the time of the first appointment with Norfolk in late October, the Pilgrims’ grievances had yet to be specified. Aske’s Narrative mentions an arrangement made at this first meeting with Norfolk to provide further articles orally, the result of Norfolk insisting not only that the petition should be in writing but also that ‘the intent’ should be ‘declared or disceded into articles’ which the Pilgrim leadership could deliver to him ‘of their own mouth’. In response, on the same day that the petition was submitted to Norfolk, three Pilgrim nobles – Latimer, Lumley and Darcy – along with a number of Pilgrim knights and gentlemen met Norfolk on Doncaster Bridge to explain in detail what the five general articles specifically meant. Arising from this meeting, a list of particular grievances were formulated which, along with the petition, the Pilgrim ambassadors, Robert Bowes and Ralph Ellerker, took to London.75 Aske failed to mention this list both in his Examination and in his Narrative, undoubtedly because he was absent from both of the meetings that the Pilgrims had with Norfolk on 27 October. This was not because he had been deliberately excluded by the Pilgrim gentlemen from negotiations with the government, an allegation made by Hoyle, but because at the time he was fully occupied with the difficult task of commanding the massive Pilgrim host which, standing ‘in perfect array’ within sight of Doncaster, was designed to signal to the king’s representatives the urgent need to respect the Pilgrims’ demands. Although the original list has failed to survive – perhaps because it was not at the time submitted in writing – its content came to light following discussions at Court, notably on 2 November when, as Ellerker and Bowes revealed, they ‘had to declare the particulars’ of the first petition. This list came to be partially recorded in reports made by the imperial ambassadors in London, who claimed that 15 to 20 demands were cited including recognition of the pope as head of the English church; the legitimisation of Princess Mary and her readmission to the succession; the restoration of the recently suppressed religious houses; the repeal of the statutes relating to the subsidy and Uses;

74   L.P. XI. 1064, 1079. For the king’s definition, see St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 507 [L.P. XI. 957]. 75   For Aske’s Examination, see Bateson, p. 568. For Aske’s Narrative, see ibid., pp. 337–8.

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and the tenure of parliament in the traditional free manner: that is, not packed with crown officers and royal pensioners.76 The truce reached on 27 October obliged the government to produce a written answer to the Pilgrims’ five general articles. In fact, the main purpose of the truce was to give it time to do so. The king quickly composed an answer. Although it was in his interest to proceed slowly, given the approach of winter, within a day or two of meeting Bowes and Ellerker he had composed a lengthy and literate reply, apparently without assistance and driven by a terrible rage.77 It was also very much in his interest to proceed diplomatically, given the superiority of the military resources available to the Pilgrims, but, unequivocal and adamant, he dismissed all their complaints as unfounded and rejected their request for a general pardon. In government circles it was feared that, if sent north, the king’s letter would provoke a remobilisation of the Pilgrim host followed by a march on London. But, as this fear could not be openly admitted, the government had to seek other excuses for holding the letter back. A pretext was found in news of further northern disturbances.78 Instead of a written response, by 14 November the government had decided on a second Doncaster appointment, another meeting between the duke of Norfolk and the Pilgrims, this time at the end of the month. The government’s change of policy led to the Pilgrims’ second petition, since, in return for agreeing to it, the Pilgrims insisted on presenting a further written list of articles – a rejoinder to Henry VIII’s claim that the first petition was too general and obscure to be properly understood.79 In preparation for the second appointment, the Pilgrims held two councils: one at York on 21 November; the other at Pontefract on 3 December. The outcome was a petition of 24 articles which complemented the generalities of the first petition with detailed complaints and proposals of parliamentary remedy. In his analysis of the second petition, Hoyle assumed that the nub of it lies in the first eight articles. This caused him to marginalise and downgrade the remaining 16 articles as ‘a mixture of addenda to the first eight [articles] and lobbyists’ enthusiasms’. But such a reading of the second petition ignores its dual purpose.80 Like the first petition, the second consciously subscribed to two main themes: on the one hand, Christ’s faith threatened 76   See Hoyle, p. 299. For Bowes’ and Ellerker’s account, see SP1/111, f. 11b [L.P. XI. 1009]. For imperial ambassadors’ reports of ‘the particulars’, see L.P. XI. 1143, 1204. 77   St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 506–10 [L.P. XI. 957]. 78   L.P. XI. 995. 79   L.P. XI. 1064; SP1/120, f. 36b [L.P. XI1(1). 1175 (ii)]. 80  Hoyle, p. 352. Symptomatic of his misunderstanding is the way he relates articles 3 to article 16 (see ibid., p. 349) whereas the two articles are sharply distinguished from each other: article 3 deals with a matter of faith (i.e. matrimony); article 16 deals with a matter of

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by heresy and, on the other, the commonwealth oppressed by tyranny. On 28 November Aske informed Lord Darcy, who, ailing and elderly, had been unable to attend the York council, of the plan to ‘agree upon articles as well touching faith as the commonwealth’.81 Aske’s Narrative recorded that, to prepare for the second petition, orders were sent to the clergy ‘to study for the articles profitable for the faith of the church and the liberties of the same’ and also to ‘all learned counsel and wise men’ to ‘bring in their learning and mind for remedy of evil laws for the commonwealth for the commodity of this country’.82 In the second petition the complaint against the abuse of the commonwealth comprised an important and substantial part of it.83 But, as in the Lincolnshire petition and in the Pilgrims’ first petition, the spiritual complaint came to be placed at the front. Comprising eight articles, it was given a page all to itself. Categorised in the petition as ‘touching the faith’, these articles objected to the spirituality’s subjection to the temporality – the result of the headship that the king had assumed over the English church and the bastardisation of his daughter Mary – the intrusion of heresy and the threat to religious houses posed by the suppression of the lesser ones and the heavy taxes imposed upon the rest. But just as integral to the petition as a whole were grievances concerning the commonwealth. They objected to the government’s greed in expropriating church property and in reforming the tax system. They also objected to the greed of landlords in raising manorial dues and in denying commoning rights. Another set of commonwealth grievances focused on tyranny, evident in the government’s contempt for the constitution and its trampling on basic rights. Complaints about greed featured in nine articles; complaints about the loss of rights and liberties figured in 18; complaints about matters of faith appeared in 11.84 The second petition differed from the Lincolnshire petitions and the Pilgrims’ first petition in four notable respects. First, it contained an agrarian grievance, a consequence of the fact that the uprising now drew considerable support from the Captain Poverty region: that is, the Yorkshire dales, the Bishopric of Durham and parts of Cumbria. When the rebels of Lincolnshire and south Yorkshire complained of commonwealth (that is, the king’s newly acquired right to override the rule of primogeniture in determining his successor to the throne). 81   E36/122, fos 65–65b [L.P. XI. 1128]. 82   Bateson, p. 339. 83   SP1/112, fos 119–21 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16. 84   While the articles of the petition divide into two categories of faith and commonwealth, several of them fall into both of these categories.

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impoverishment, they mentioned no more than a reduction in poor relief caused by the suppression of religious houses and the added burden of certain tax innovations. Now, under the influence of the upland north, impoverishment was blamed on harsh landlordship as well, with one complaint objecting to enclosure and another objecting to the breach of the custom of tenant right.85 A second distinctive feature of the second petition lay in its failure to charge the government with showing contempt for the nobility. In Aske’s first and second proclamations, in the Pilgrims’ oath, in the conversation he had with Lancaster Herald on 21 October, in the Pilgrims’ first petition, in the prophetic rhyme ‘Christ’s Cross Row’ and in Pickering’s Song, the complaint was made that, contrary to the society of orders, old noble families were being excluded from the government in preference for upstarts of commoner blood. Nonetheless, though absent from the second petition, it remained a prominent Pilgrim grievance, especially among the commons, as was revealed in a letter from Aske to Darcy of 28 November which claimed that the commons’ foremost concern was ‘to have none but the nobility hereto rule’.86 Its omission from the second petition appeared to result from Henry VIII’s response to article 3 of the first petition which had blamed abuse of the common law upon the exclusion of nobles from the counsels of the king. Simply by citing the names of noblemen in the government and by comparing the membership of the privy council now and at the start of the reign, Henry showed that he had not departed from tradition. He was also able to demonstrate that it was not him but the Pilgrims who had offended the society of orders by placing themselves under the leadership of Robert Aske, a ‘mere pedlar in the law’, and by challenging the king’s prerogative right to choose his own councillors.87 The third distinctive feature of the second petition lay in its emphasis on parliamentary remedy. Following the first appointment, the Pilgrims realised that to secure adequate redress it was not enough to seek the king’s grace. Parliament had to be involved in the remedial process 85

  L.P. XI. 1246(1), articles 9 and 13.   For Aske’s proclamations, see SP1/107, f. 116 [L.P. XI. 622]; St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 467 [L.P. XI. 705 (2)]. For Aske’s oath, see Toller, p. 50 [L.P. XI. 892 (1/3)]. For conversation with Lancaster Herald, see St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 486–7 [L.P. XI. 826]; E36/122, fos 65–65b (L.P. XI. 1128). For first petition, see SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]. For Pickering’s Song, see above, pp. 12–14. For ‘Christ’s Cross Row’, see above, pp. 15–16. For the nature of the maltreatment, see Bush, pp. 104–5. 87   For text of the petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 14. For Henry’s response, see St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 507–8 [L.P. XI. 957]. When drafting the petition, the Pilgrims, of course, had not yet seen this written response, but they were familiar with the king’s reaction to such basic issues, thanks to the report brought by Bowes and Ellerker upon their return to the north in mid-November. For their discussions with the king, see L.P. XI. 1009. For the king’s dismissal of Aske, see L.P. XI. 1175. 86

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and this meant a parliament freed of government control. The importance that the Pilgrims attached to parliamentary remedy was evident in the nine times it was specifically required in the petition (that is, in articles 3, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21), in the demand for electoral and procedural reform stated in article 12, and in the requirement of article 15 that a special parliament should be ‘shortly summoned’ in Nottingham or York to consider the many recommendations made in the petition for changes in the law.88 Finally, the second petition made no specific mention of a pardon. Yet this was simply a natural consequence of the procedure the Pilgrims had chosen to follow at the second appointment with Norfolk. How they planned to proceed was formally laid down in the eight articles of instruction appended as a prologue to both surviving drafts of the second petition. These instructions required those deputed to take the petition to Norfolk to insist, prior to its submission, upon a general pardon. And this was to be done before receiving from Norfolk the king’s answer to the first petition which – as they must have suspected from the evidence brought back by Ellerker and Bowes – would reject such a demand. If Norfolk were to allow the general pardon, they were then to receive the king’s answer which they understood would be not in writing but ‘by the declaration of the lords’. Having heard it, they were to ask Norfolk ‘what authority’ he had ‘to enter in promise with us as well of our pardon as otherwise’. Only then, having been assured that the general pardon was a genuine offer, were they to ask ‘if the particulars of our petition be required’ and, if so, to hand over the 24 articles. Given this procedure, and the fact that the second petition was essentially a supplement to the first petition, which had already called for a general pardon ‘by parliament or otherwise’, inclusion of the demand for a pardon must have seemed unnecessary.89 The second petition, an attempt to present to the government the Pilgrims’ complaint in detail, was approved by a council of Pilgrim delegates in Pontefract on 3 December and submitted to Norfolk the following evening. Rather than put together suddenly or hastily – as Aske tended to suggest90 – its drafting marked the culmination of a sustained effort to particularise the grievances, which went back to the first appointment with Norfolk on 27 October. Moreover, it followed several attempts to put the detailed complaints on paper, all made in the course of November. Central to the process of formulating the second petition was the council of Pilgrims convened at York on 21 November to consider Bowes and Ellerker’s account of the first petition’s reception at Court. Prior to this, however, it would seem that, on the command of Aske, a group of learned 88

  Bateson, p. 559.   SP1/112, f. 118 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)]. 90   Bateson, p. 566. 89

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clergymen, led by Dr Cuthbert Marshall, met to formulate in detail the Pilgrims’ complaint ‘touching the faith’, producing nine articles in writing which, somewhat modified, eventually became the first part of the second petition.91 The earliest attempt to draft a detailed petition in full occurred at the York council, in response to the news brought by Bowes and Ellerker that the king had found the first petition too general and obscure.92 Responding to instructions from Aske, the council delegates arrived with bills of grievance, some of which have survived: for example, there is one from the commons of the Barony of Westmorland and another from John Hallom of Watton in the East Riding.93 The former raised the agrarian grievances that appeared in the second petition, along with another complaint against the payment of tithes which was left out. The Hallom bill listed the five articles of the first petition, revising the last one, which had required a general pardon ‘by act of parliament or otherwise’ to take away choice and to insist upon a pardon by parliamentary statute. Expressing the commitment of the commons, both bills declared a willingness to die for the cause: the Westmorland bill being signed by ‘Robert Pulleyn to death, Nicholas Musgrave, the captains of Westmorland, and the commonalty of the same’, the Hallom bill closing with ‘or else we are fully determined to spend our lives and goods in battle, as knoweth our Lord God and St George’. According to Aske, Robert Bowes also submitted a ‘book’ of advice to the York council. One of its recommendations was an article ensuring the Pilgrims’ indemnity from prosecution for breaches of the law committed during the course of the uprising. This surfaced as article 17 in the second petition.94 From the bills submitted to the York council, a list of articles was compiled, as Sir Francis Bigod and the York burgess Richard Bowyer later revealed. Bigod, true, was absent from the York council, having been sent by Aske to Scarborough to prevent it from becoming a counter-insurgency base, but he was made familiar with its business by two men who did attend: his brother Ralph and John Hallom. Ralph showed him that the clergy had submitted to the York council certain 91

  For clerical articles, see SP1/116, fos 163–163b [L.P. XII(1). 533]; Bateson, p. 560.   L.P. XI. 1175. 93   L.P. XI. 1080; R.W. Hoyle (ed.), ‘Thomas Master’s narrative of the pilgrimage of grace’, Northern History, 21 (1985) [hereafter Master], doc. 41, p. 73. For text of former, see below, Appendix, doc. 15. 94   According to Aske, Bowes offered advice on ‘what order should be taken … for spoils, remedy for pulling down of enclosures, and remedy for variances betwixt party and party’ (Bateson, p. 570). This relates to the article ‘that it be enacted by authority of parliament that all recognisances, statutes, penalties new forfeit during the time of this commotion may be pardoned and discharged as well against the king as strangers’ [L.P. XI. 1246 (1), article 17]. 92

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articles which objected to first fruits and tenths (that is, the new tax on the clergy), the execution of priests and Cromwell’s alleged plan to marry the princess of the blood, Margaret Douglas. Contempt for benefit of clergy, associated with the lay authority’s assumption of the right to execute priests, and Cromwell’s marriage plan, which was regarded as furthering his ambition to succeed to the throne, were presented in these articles as heretical because they went contrary to the law of God. Hallom sent Sir Francis ‘a copy of all the articles determined and concluded of at the council at York’ which, according to Bigod, was more than a statement of religious complaint since it contained a demand for the revocation of the recent statute enabling the king to bequeath the crown to whoever he liked in the event of lacking a direct heir. This Hallom saw as a vitally important means of preventing the king from appointing Cromwell as his successor. With the same aim in mind, the articles demanded Mary’s relegitimisation and readmission to the line of succession.95 Confirming that a petition was produced at the York council, Richard Bowyer declared that ‘certain articles and devices [were] made [there] whereof I have a copy’.96 The meeting of delegates at York was termed a ‘general council’ because gentlemen, clergy and commons sat together in the same assembly, and the petition that it produced therefore rested upon deliberations made by the three orders acting all together.97 Besides drawing upon lists of articles compiled in October and early November, the composition of the second petition also relied upon certain bills of complaint submitted after the York council was over. Aske described what happened: ‘every man, as he was disposed, brought in his bill and mind touching the same’. From this material, Aske extracted ‘such articles as he thought convenient’ helped by Darcy, Constable, Chaloner, Babthorpe and Cuthbert Marshall. The aim, as Aske informed Lord Darcy, was to produce an agreed petition that dealt with matters of faith and commonwealth: one, moreover, that should include for ‘every country’ involved in the uprising ‘the necessity of their commonwealth’, and leave the commons ‘stayed and satisfied’. Unlike the first petition, then, which only listed grievances acceptable to every Pilgrim, the second petition contained grievances peculiar to certain areas and certain social groups. This was to rule out the possibility of participants resorting to military action because they felt their complaint had been ignored. A comprehensive presentation of grievance, then, Aske appeared to reason, would best secure a peaceful settlement. But this did not presume a willingness to accept peace at any price, and, following the York council, the Pilgrim leadership made careful 95

  SP1/116, f. 164 [L.P. XII(1). 533].   SP1/115, f. 162b [L.P. XII(1). 306]. 97   L.P. XI. 1128. 96

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preparations to resume war in case of a rejection of their demands for a general pardon and a parliamentary consideration of their grievances.98 Among these late submissions of grievance, especially influential was ‘the book’ compiled by a West Riding lawyer, Robert Chaloner. As described by Aske, it consisted of questions for the clergy on matters of faith along with a file of articles ‘touching remedy in our laws and statutes’. Aske claimed that the book was first made known at Pontefract – in all likelihood on 2 December – when Chaloner read it out to Aske, Robert Constable and other gentlemen.99 Chaloner’s book may well have survived in the form of a nine-leaf petition addressed to the king from the baronage and commonalty. If so, the second petition was largely an abbreviation of its content. Beginning with a series of questions, this petition is largely a list of grievances relating both to religion and to commonwealth. Unfortunately, the surviving copy is far from complete. In fact, each of its leaves has been torn in two with only the lower half now extant. It contains at least 17 articles which made objection, often at considerable length, to the royal supremacy, to heretics in control of the government, to the government’s onslaught upon the ancient liberties of the church, to the government’s growing interference with the common law process, and to recent changes in the tax system, specifically a change in the law enabling the king to exploit his feudal rights for fiscal gain, and the introduction of a peacetime subsidy. The same petition also objected to a new law making words as well as deeds treasonable; to the extortionate practices of Cromwellian officials; and to attempts to control parliament by packing the House of Commons with royal servants and agents.100 For improving our understanding of the second petition, several other lists of articles and statements of advice are at hand. Submitted following the York council, they shed light both on the grievances included in the second petition and on those omitted. One of them is a petition addressed to the king from ‘we your poor [subjects?], your grace’s liege people and commons’. Although its authors claimed to be unlearned and to ‘lack convenient pen men to write in form and compendiously’, it presents a highly literate set of articles which deal at length with Dissolution, Supremacy, Princess Mary and other matters now lost, for it suffered the same fate as the ‘Chaloner book’ with each of its three leaves torn in two, only the lower half surviving. In all likelihood, this petition was a 98   For composition of petition, see E36/122, f. 61b [L.P. XI. 1128, but the letter is misdated: it should be 28 November]; Bateson, pp. 340, 560, 566, 570; L.P. XII(1). 698. According to Aske, there was not enough time for much consultation once they had assembled in Pontefract (Bateson, p. 566). For preparations to resume war, see Bateson, p. 569. 99   Bateson, p. 570. 100   L.P. XI. 1182 (2).

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clerical composition, possibly the nine articles composed by Dr Cuthbert Marshall and other learned clergy in preparation for the York council; or, if not, a statement of religious complaint supplied by clerics in response to the York council.101 Yet another petition, comprising nine articles, has survived. Written in Latin, and undoubtedly the work of clerics, it expressed its belief in the catholic church and the need to maintain and defend the liberties of the church, the supreme authority of Rome, the traditional distinction between temporality and spirituality, and the power of the church to remit sin. The fact that it made no mention of Mary but referred repeatedly to St Peter and the Apostles suggests that, rather than the nine articles of grievance produced by Dr Marshall and other clerics, it could well be the letter, composed by two residents of Watton Priory, the friar Dr William Swinburn and the monk Thomas Asheton, and brought to Pontefract by John Hallom at the start of December – in spite of its mysterious endorsement ‘among the commons of Mr Grice at Pontefract’, which suggests a West Riding as well as a popular provenance.102 Another revealing submission was from a gentleman: a belligerent bill of advice addressed to Aske, the baronage and commonalty in Pontefract and clearly intended to influence proceedings at the second appointment. The most likely candidate for its authorship is Sir Robert Constable.103 Rather than providing a set of articles, it lists instances of harm done to the realm by the ‘lawler [lollard] and traitor’ Thomas Cromwell, whom it accused of causing the king to break his coronation oath: especially by encouraging him to offend the law and rob the realm, the latter with the promise to make him ‘the richest prince in Christendom’. As a result, it claimed, monasteries have been suppressed and acts of perjury committed, with Cromwell and his agents overriding the judicial system in order to impose their will. Thanks to Cromwell, the body politic was sick with tyranny. For remedy, the king needed to follow the example of his own father. In addition, he had to be purged of evil advisers and this was to be realised by driving Cromwell, his disciples and adherents into exile. Instead of from them, the king ought to receive guidance from ‘a council for the commonwealth’, a body of men capable of placing the commonwealth ‘above the prince’s love’: that is, capable of promoting the welfare of subjects even at the expense of the royal interest. Pursuing 101

  SP1/112, f. 29 [L.P. XI. 1182 (3)].   For the petition in Latin, see SP1/112, f. 23 [L.P. XI. 1182 (1)]. For description of the nine Marshall articles, see Bateson, p. 560. For likely Swinburn/Asheton authorship, see L.P. XII(1). 201 (pp. 98, 101–2). 103   L.P. XI. 1244. For the argument that this petition was the work of Constable rather than Sir Thomas Tempest to whom it was formerly attributed, see M.L. Bush, ‘The Tudor polity and the pilgrimage of grace’, Historical Research, 80 (2007): 49, n. 5. 102

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the same argument, the bill charged parliament with having degenerated into ‘councils of the king’s appointment’. Reform was therefore required to ensure that parliament served the needs of the whole realm rather than merely the personal interest of the king. The bill stressed the vital importance of overthrowing Cromwell, after which ‘an open parliament’ ought to be summoned to ensure that ‘the king’s honour and the commonwealth might be preserved’. Without the removal of Cromwell, the bill concluded, it was unwise to place trust in a pardon and better to resort to battle than follow the Lincolnshire example of surrender. From a surviving fragment, it is evident that Constable also wrote in defence of ecclesiastical liberties, thus contributing to article 19 of the second petition.104 Further bills were evidently submitted in preparation for the making of the second petition but failed to survive, probably because of a policy of returning to sender.105 Aske revealed their authors: Richard Bowyer, a burgess of York, William Babthorpe, an East Riding lawyer, and Sir Thomas Tempest, a lawyer from the Palatinate of Durham. Aske also gave some idea of their content, claiming that the lawyers Babthorpe and Tempest called for the repeal of certain statutes – that is, the Acts of Supremacy, Suppression of Religious Houses, Succession, Uses, First Fruits and Tenths, and Treason – while Bowyer named a number of heretical works that needed to be outlawed, and this, according to Aske, became the source for the first article in the second petition.106 Others influenced the content of the second petition by word of mouth, notably Robert Bowes who proposed at Pontefract some modification to article 16 which sought to deny the king the right, conferred by the last Act of Succession, to determine his successor in the absence of a direct heir. Moreover, Darcy was probably responsible for the objection made in article 12 to recent changes of procedure in the House of Lords.107 Rather than deliberating in one general council, as they had at York, the Pilgrim delegates at Pontefract met in three separate assemblies. Respectful of the formal distinctions integral to the society of orders, the lords, knights, esquires and gentlemen – that is, the estate of chivalry – gathered in the castle, while the members of the clerical estate deliberated in the priory, and the third estate, the commons, met on an open space within the town. Aske suggested in his Narrative – an account of the uprising prepared by him specially for the king – that a petition drafted in advance by himself was initially read out to the assembly of gentlemen where it was discussed article by article, with some unspecified argument. Once agreed, 104

    106   107   105

L.P. XII(1). 851. For the practice of returning bills, see Bateson, p. 560. See Bateson, p. 560 for Babthorpe, Bowyer and Tempest. For Bowes, see Bateson, p. 570. For Darcy, see ibid., p. 568.

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each article was marked with the word ‘fiat’. The version approved by the gentlemen was then presented to the commons who, Aske claimed, ‘wholly condescended to every article’. It was then put to the clergy who, according to Aske, responded ‘in like manner’. The impression he gave was that the petition sailed through the three assemblies on Sunday 3 December, when ‘all agreed to the articles and none to the contrary [of] them’.108 Yet in reality the process of approval was less straightforward, speedy or complete than he suggested, since the assembly of clergy did not meet until 4 December and their response to the petition was only made after the latter’s dispatch to Norfolk. Moreover, the original petition underwent some revision as it passed through the three assemblies, causing some alteration of the wording, the addition of at least one further grievance and a reordering of the articles. But how did these changes come about and what difference did they make? All we have to go on is, first, the two surviving drafts, the one a working version with corrections indicative of the Pilgrims’ response, the other the final version delivered to Norfolk on 4 December.109 In addition, although detailed information is lacking on the petition’s reception by the gentlemen and commons and what is known came from Robert Aske alone, a good deal of corroborative evidence shows how the petition was received by the clergy.110 108

  Bateson, p. 340. Also see his Examination: Bateson, pp. 560, 566.   For the surviving working draft, see SP1/112, fos 122–124b [L.P. XI. 1246 (2+3)]. For the final draft, see SP1/112, fos 118–21 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)] and below, Appendix, doc. 16. The order of composition is evident in the interlineal corrections made to L.P. XI. 1246 (2+3) and their incorporation into the text of L.P. XI. 1246 (1) as well as in the fact that in L.P. XI. 1246 (2+3) the written instructions to Hilton, which the Pilgrims would not have wished the government to see, have the opening articles of the petition written on the back, thus proving that this was not the version shown to Norfolk. Yet, not all the corrections made to L.P. XI. 1246 (2+3) are incorporated in L.P. XI. 1246 (1). In fact, the corrections made in the working draft to the eight instructions for Hilton and to the eight articles on faith are mostly ignored in the final version. In contrast, nearly all the corrections made to the remaining 16 articles are incorporated, suggesting that the corrections to the articles on faith were made by the clergy and consequently not followed because they were only made known following the petition’s dispatch to Norfolk. Of the corrections incorporated, the main ones relate to the article on tenant right where ‘two years rent for gressums and no more’ is added; to the article on the reform of parliament where ‘uses’ replaces ‘those’ and thus avoids the implication that membership of the lords is by election; and to the article on enclosures where the erroneous 8 Henry VIII is changed to 4 Henry VII. For changes made to the order of the articles, see below, p. 33. 110  In contrast to the assembly of gentlemen in the castle and of the commons in the town – our knowledge of which is reliant simply upon the details provided in Aske’s Narrative and Aske’s Examination – the proceedings of the clerical assembly is substantially recorded by several eye-witness accounts. Besides the accounts of two men who visited it, see L.P. XII(1). 698 (3) (Aske) and L.P. XII(1). 306 (Bowyer), there are accounts from three members: L.P. XII(1). 786/ii (Dakyn), 1011 (Rokeby), 1021 (Pickering). 109

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The clerical assembly met on the morning of 4 December in Pontefract Priory, sitting throughout the day and into the following morning. Its remit was threefold: to produce a written opinion of what was wrong with the religious settlement, guided by a set of interrogatory instructions from Robert Aske and Robert Chaloner; to examine, amend and approve the petition itself; and to offer a view on the legality of a war waged by subjects against their own prince. To counter a sermon delivered the day before by the archbishop of York to the Pilgrim delegates in Pontefract church, in which he had condemned such conduct as against God’s law, it was hoped that the clergy would sanction a war against the prince in defence of the faith. The clerics spent the morning composing the opinion. In the early afternoon Aske paid them a visit, bringing with him the articles of complaint that the gentlemen and commons had approved the day before. He found the clerics far from cooperative. Claiming lack of time, instruction and reference books, they sought to defer the completion of the opinion until it had been considered at the next convocation. This Aske would not allow.111 As for the petition that he brought with him, they utterly refused to consider the ‘articles concerning the temporality’ – by this they meant all but articles 1 to 8 – on the grounds that, in the words of Friar Pickering, one of the clerics present, ‘such articles did nothing pertain unto us our learning and so we did not intermeddle with them’.112 They also refused, perhaps as a let-out device, to consider the first eight articles of the petition until they had formulated their statement of opinion; and they would offer no assurance that the matter could be legitimately settled by war. In fact, Aske did not receive the opinion until the evening of 4 December and their response to the petition reached him only the following morning.113 Having arrived after the petition’s delivery to Norfolk, neither was able to have any effect upon the version submitted to the government. The clergy’s response to the petition is evident in the working draft. This is probably the copy delivered to them by Aske on the 4 December and returned by them on 5 December. From the amendments made to its text, it would seem that they addressed themselves solely and deliberately 111   SP1/117, f. 80 [L.P. XII(1). 698 (3)]. The clergy’s response is made evident as a point added to their statement of opinion which is repeated in their comments on the second petition. See SP1/112, f. 117 [L.P. XI. 1245 (2)]; SP1/112, f. 124b [L.P. XI. 1246 (3)]. For complete text of the opinion, see below, Appendix, doc. 17. For Chaloner’s involvement, see Bateson, pp. 566, 570. 112   SP1/118, f. 279b [L.P. XII(1). 1021]. The actual copy of the petition that they studied appears to be L.P. XII(1). 1246 (2, 3), in which the articles on faith (3) are separated from the rest of the articles (2). 113   For receipt of the opinion, see SP1/117, f. 80b [L.P. XII(1). 698 (3) ]. If not on the 4th, he received them early on 5th. For receipt of the petition, see Bateson, p. 572.

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to the articles on faith – that is, the first eight articles which are written out on a separate page. Their approval certainly did not go through on the nod. They made a number of verbal modifications, all of them ignored because of the tardiness of their response; as was their wish to add a further article on papal dispensations and their careful reworking of article 5 calling for the discharge of clerical taxes first introduced in 1534. The purpose of the latter was not only to clarify its meaning but also to extend its terms to include remission of the outstanding payments of a clerical tax granted by convocation in 1531.114 The clergy were not alone in wishing to add further articles, as Darcy revealed on 3 December when he angrily told the archbishop of York at dinner: ‘These men have no measure in their hands. They would have me condescend to put in more articles, but I will in no wise.’115 It looks as if that morning, as the petition was presented first to the gentlemen and then to the commons, a group, probably of commoners, declared their unhappiness with the petition as it stood, not so much because of what it included but rather because of what it left out. Darcy, it would seem, was not allowed to have his way completely for another article was added: an objection to the unusual lay taxes granted in 1534. This had featured in earlier declarations of complaint and was omitted from the working draft of the second petition, perhaps through oversight but, in all likelihood, because the king, in responding to the first petition and Ellerker and Bowes’ elaboration of it, had ridiculed the demand for remitting the subsidy of 1534 on the grounds that, compared with other subsidies, it was a very lenient tax.116 The argument for its inclusion must have made the point that the Pilgrim objection to this subsidy was not its current weight but its novelty as a peacetime subsidy and the threat this innovation raised of a radical change in the system of direct taxes, one that would transform the typical subsidy from an irregular device, specifically designed to pay for emergencies such as war, into a regular levy intended to fund everyday government. In this respect, although the present subsidy might be light, 114   SP1/112, fos 124–124b [L.P. XI. 1246 (3)]. The proposed corrections markedly improve the meaning. For example, the article on Supremacy (article 2) is considerably improved by altering ‘to have the consecration of the bishops from him’ to ‘to have the consecration of the bishops to be restored to the clergy from him’. The same could be said for another amendment, appended to the list of articles, which seeks to remedy the unclear article 5 objecting to first fruits and tenths. This article is unsatisfactory as it stands because, to begin with, it misleadingly confines the remission of this tax to religious houses and then, at the end of the article, applies it to the clergy as a whole. For the convocation tax of 1531, see M.L. Bush, ‘Enhancements and importunate charges: an analysis of the tax complaints of October 1536’, Albion, 22 (1990): 413. 115   For the prospect of further articles, see SP1/119, f. 8b [L.P. XII(1). 1022]. 116   See L.P. XI. 956.

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its consequences could be extremely onerous. Nothing is known of the other articles referred to in Darcy’s angry outburst, apart from the fact that they were not included and apart from what can be surmised from the revolts that followed the December agreement. From the latter one can presume that the additional articles had a commoner provenance and dealt with the following matters: restoring the traditional order for bidding the bedes; the payment of tithes, perhaps to make them voluntary or commutable to money payments; fears that the government would spoil parish churches and religious gilds as well as monasteries and impose new taxes on sacraments and food; and some concern that the dissolution of religious houses would impoverish the north.117 Also suggestive of the commons’ role in revising the petition were certain alterations made to the included articles. Commoner pressure led to the amendment of article 15: originally, the working draft had allowed a choice of Nottingham or York as the place for the forthcoming special parliament, but it was corrected to leave York as the only acceptable venue. When this alteration was ignored in the final draft, the commons pressed for the York venue in the days that followed, resulting in a last-minute amendment to restore what they had earlier approved.118 Less clear is who had responsibility for amending article 9 in defence of tenant right. With the insertion of ‘two years rent for gressums and no more’, entry fines (that is, gressums) were to be rendered permanently fixed. Since this represented a major concession on the part of landlords to tenants holding by tenant right, it would seem to be the work of the commons. However, prior to this amendment the article read ‘the lord to have at every change according to the grant now made by the lords to the commons there under their seal’, a reference to a practice applied in the course of the uprising, notably in Westmorland and Cumberland, whereby the tenantry obliged lords of the manor to agree to written definitions of tenant right by adding their seal of approval. Some of these definitions had offered the tenant much more, either the complete abolition of gressums or fixing them at one year’s rent. For this reason the amendment of article 9 could have been the work of gentlemen, seeking to claw back some advantage for lords of the manor.119 117   For objection to subsidy, see below, pp. 111–17. For commoner complaints evident in post-December-agreement revolts, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 289–97. 118   SP1/112, f. 123 [L.P. XI. 1246 (2)] and SP1/112, f. 120 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)]. For pressure to have a York parliament, see Bush, p. 405. 119   For amendment of article 9, see SP1/112, f. 123 [L.P. XI. 1246 (2)] where the point about the gressum being double the rent is added by interlineation; and SP1/112, f. 120 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)] where the same point is incorporated in the text. Also see below, p. 206 and n. 58.

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In addition, a comparison of the working and final drafts of the second petition reveals two major alterations made to the order of the articles. Thus the eight articles on faith were brought to the front of the petition. In the working draft the articles on commonwealth headed the petition, coming immediately after the written instructions for its delivery. The other alteration made to the order of articles was simply achieved by reshuffling the leaves of the working draft. This reshuffle gave the two agrarian grievances much greater prominence: for, thanks to it, the one on tenant right now came immediately after the eight articles touching the faith, allowing it to stand at the head of the grievances touching the commonwealth, while the grievance against enclosures was moved up from twelfth to fifth position in this category of commonwealth complaint.120 In view of what it achieved, this reshuffle appears to have been a response to pressure from the commons. The Grievances Omitted Although the deliberations of the clerical assembly had no effect on the Pilgrims’ petition, the statement of opinion that the Pilgrim clergy produced is, nonetheless, of outstanding importance, not only for revealing the extent of objection to the government’s religious reforms but also for showing how major religious concerns came to be omitted from the second petition, in spite of Aske’s determination to make it an all-embracing declaration of complaint. The second petition made objection to only a small portion of the government’s religious reforms, failing to question its doubts about purgatory, its reduction of the sacraments from seven to three and its disbelief in the power of saints to intercede between man and God. Nor did it specifically criticise the Ten Articles, the Royal Injunctions, the New Order of Prayer or the Order for the Abolition of Holy Days: that is, recently issued official statements declaring where the English church now stood in usage and doctrine. But this did not mean that, apart from the issues of Supremacy and Dissolution, the Pilgrims found Henry’s religious reforms acceptable. In sharp contrast to the petition, the first opinion produced by the clerical assembly explicitly defended the intercessory system, asserting the importance of purgatory, saint-worship, pilgrimages, images and relics. In addition, it condemned all criticism of the seven 120   The reshuffle involved inserting the eight articles on faith, see L.P. XII(1). 1246 (3), between the Hilton instructions and the articles on commonwealth, see L.P. XII(1). 1246 (2); and also placing the six articles on SP1/112, f. 123 before the six articles on SP1/112, f. 122b to create L.P. XI. 1246 (1).

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sacraments, as well as upholding the customary practice of observing holy days, and called for the restoration of the traditional church service. In other words, it squarely and without qualification opposed the principles and practices upon which the Henrician settlement was based.121 Furthermore, the Supremacy – that part of the Henrician settlement to which the second petition openly objected – was so fudgingly presented as to suggest that the Pilgrims found the king’s headship of the church acceptable, subject to allowing the papacy – disparagingly termed, in the government manner, ‘the see [that is, bishopric] of Rome’ – cura animarum in England.122 In contrast, the second opinion of the clerical assembly adopted a firmer, less conciliatory stance, by recognising the papal title and rejecting all claim to a lay supremacy of the church on the grounds that the law of God denied temporal men the right to exercise ‘jurisdiction or powers’ in matters spiritual. Opinions 9 and 10 backed up opinion 2. Opinion 9 laid down the necessity of respecting the pope’s supreme position as head of the church and vicar of Christ since it was well founded on the authority of general councils, the views of ‘approved doctors’ and ‘the consent of Christian people’, while opinion 10 stated that ‘the examination and correction of deadly sins’ was the exclusive right of the clergy and that this agreed with the law of God.123 In addition, opinion 6 offered several constitutional reasons for repealing the clerical taxes enacted in 1534: they had not received the consent of convocation; as perpetual taxes they were totally out of order; and it was against the law of God for temporal men to lay claim to revenues from spiritual offices and promotions. In doing so, it went much further than the second petition which – perhaps due to bad drafting by unsympathetic laymen – confined the objection to tenths and first fruits levied on religious houses. The clerical assembly clearly felt that this article in the petition needed rewording to make it apply to the clergy as a whole, attaching a note to that effect on their copy of the articles touching the faith – a note that went ignored.124 These grievances on faith – highlighted in the clergy’s statement of opinion but omitted from the Pilgrims’ petition – cannot be dismissed as extreme beliefs peculiar to a few clerics. After all, the opinions produced by the clerical assembly were answers to points raised by the lay lawyers Robert Aske and Robert Chaloner; and that they were in keeping with the sentiments of the commons is revealed by a mass of evidence: for example, the local protests made against the removal of certain holy days – particularly St Wilfred’s and St Luke’s – in the early stages of the uprising; the commons’ 121

    123   124   122

For complete text of the Opinion, see below, Appendix, doc. 17. See below, Appendix, doc. 16, article 2. See below, Appendix, doc. 17. SP1/112, f. 124b [L.P. XI. 1246 (3)].

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proclamations issued in Cumberland and Westmorland for treating holy days and prayer ‘after the old custom’ and the demonstrations made in parish churches on several Sundays in December 1536 and January 1537 against attempts to conduct services in accordance with the New Order of Prayer (which in practice meant objecting to the omission of prayers for the pope and his cardinals); and a seditious bill circulating at the time in the north that deplored the government’s blasphemy of saints by accusing ‘that heretic’, Thomas Cromwell, of making the king ‘put down praying and fasting’.125 Yet, if these grievances were so important to the Pilgrims, why were they not specified in the second petition? Partly responsible was the manner in which the second petition was drafted. Driven by the need to secure agreement, the Pilgrim high command, advised by Chaloner, decided to concentrate on condemning specified heretical books and named heretics rather than on identifying the heresies that had infected the government.126 Secondly, the euphoria generated by the first appearance of the petition, coupled with the speed at which it was formulated and approved may well have blinded men initially to its shortcomings, allowing an approval of something that, in retrospect, was found to be inadequate. Thirdly, attempts made to add further articles were blocked by the leadership’s unwillingness to alter substantially what had already been put together, largely because of the need to have it completed by the evening of 4 December so that it could be presented to Norfolk by the agreed deadline.127 This not only ruled out the revisions proposed by the clergy but also worked against the inclusion of several changes proposed by the commons. The shortcomings of the second petition led to further revolts, further statements of complaint, even the summons of yet another assembly to make amendment for what had gone wrong at Pontefract in December.128 At fault with the petition was not simply its defectiveness in matters of faith but also its inadequacy in treating matters of commonwealth, especially agrarian grievances. Originally, the agrarian complaints had been set out in a petition that the Westmorland commons had addressed to Lord Darcy

125   For protest against the removal of holy days, see Bush, p. 34 (Watton), p. 164 (Richmond), pp. 292–3 (Kirkby Stephen). For proclamations, see above, n. 44. For Sunday demonstrations, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 242–4 (Kendal), pp. 149–50 (Craven), pp. 264–5 (Barony of Westmorland), pp. 111–12 (Richmondshire). For seditious bill, see L.P. XII(1). 163 (1). 126   As in articles 1, 7 and 8 of L.P. XI. 1246 (1). For Chaloner’s influence, see Bateson, p. 570. 127   For approval and amendment, see above, pp. 28–33. 128   See Bush and Bownes, pp. 24–8.

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for presentation to the York council.129 They included objections to the raising of manorial dues on tenant-right land, the extension of enclosure, the payment of tithes in kind and the levy of noutgeld and sergeant corn. In response, the second petition included two articles on agrarian matters, each of them, however, so drafted as to deny what the commons really wanted.130 Thus article 13, which dealt with enclosure, proposed remedies applicable to lowland, arable areas where sheep farming was causing depopulation, notably the enforcement of the tillage laws that had been recently updated in the Cromwellian statute 27 Henry VIII c. 22. The Pilgrims’ complaint against enclosure, however, came from upland pastoral areas and concerned the use of intaking to extend settlements. For them article 13 offered no remedy; and the statute whose enforcement it demanded explicitly excluded the north from its field of operation; while the article itself, in exempting mountains and forests and parks from any restriction upon enclosure, perversely excluded from its terms the communities that had made the complaint. The seriousness of the issue resulted in attacks upon new enclosures in Westmorland in January 1537. Article 9 met the upland peasantry’s wish for tenant right to be awarded greater protection from landlord exploitation, especially by proposing the conversion of gressums into fixed payments. It even suggested that customary tenures should be regulated by parliament, which would have transformed their legal status, awarding them for the first time ever cognisance in the common law. Nonetheless, the article allowed landlords to exact in gressums twice the amount required in the Westmorland petition. Dissatisfaction with the article was made clear in early 1537 when seditious bills circulated by disillusioned Pilgrims called for a complete abolition of gressums.131 The petition offended the commons by omission as well as by misrepresentation, making no mention of tithes, noutgeld and sergeant corn. That these were seriously held complaints became clear in December when Robert Pulleyn, a former Pilgrim leader from the Barony of Westmorland, was taken into custody by the commons of Kirkby Stephen for failing to observe a resolution not to pay noutgeld and sergeant corn. Moreover, in December and January tithe barns were raided in the Cockermouth region of Cumberland, Lancashire Oversands and the Barony of Kendal.132 129

  For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 15.   For consideration of this point, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 291–3. 131   For enclosure complaint, see below, pp. 207–17. For gressums, see L.P. XII(1). 163 (1, 2). For complete texts, see below, Appendix, docs 18b and 18e. Also see SP1/119, f. 63b [L.P. XII(1). 1083]. 132   For attack on Pulleyn, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 259–60. For attack on tithe barns, see ibid., pp. 246–7 (Kendal), pp. 234–5 (Lancashire), pp. 274–5 (Cumberland). For 130

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A problem for the drafters of the second petition was that, coming from landlord backgrounds, they had understandable difficulty in appreciating the peasant’s point of view, especially when it challenged the balance of interest between landlord and tenant. Compounding the problem was the radicalism of the reforms demanded since the commons were calling for innovations – fixed or even no gressums – which, if realised, would have seriously disadvantaged the lord of the manor in relation to his customary tenants.133 Also working against the likelihood of any agreement was the variety of agrarian tenancy arrangements found in the north, even within the system of tenant right, rendering it impossible to draft agrarian complaints in such a way as to satisfy all Pilgrim peasants, let alone all Pilgrim lords. Perversely, what created division between gentlemen and peasants was the grievance most likely of all to secure the government’s sympathy, since the system of tenant right was predicated on the belief that those who held land under its terms owed the king free mounted military service for the protection of the northern border, something, tenants reasoned, harsh landlordship was making it increasingly difficult for them to provide. In this respect, both peasant and king had something to gain from the redress of this complaint.134 Thus, although the second petition was meant to please every Pilgrim and to preserve Pilgrim unity, it sowed discontent and division within the Pilgrim ranks. The inadequacy of its agrarian articles sparked off not only enclosure riots, the raiding of tithe barns, demands for the abolition of gressums and refusals to pay rents and tithes but also the summons of a further Pilgrim council at Richmond on 5 February 1537. Like the Pilgrim councils held at York in November and at Pontefract in December, the Richmond council was a meeting of Pilgrim delegates assigned the task of preparing a statement of grievance. Formulated in Richmond on 31 January, the plan was to convene the council on 5 February, attended by two hundred representatives from the North Riding, the Palatinate of Durham, the wapentake of Ewcross in the West Riding, Westmorland and Cumberland. The letters of invitation stated its purpose was to conclude upon matters ‘for the commons’ weal’ and to present them to the duke of Norfolk. Apart from the issue of how tithes should be paid, the specific content of its agenda is unknown. Yet, in all likelihood, the council was meant to consider the range of agrarian matters misrepresented in, or omitted from, the second petition: that is, not only tithes but also gressums, new enclosures, noutgeld and sergeant corn. Meeting on 5 February, the council was dissolved the very same day with nothing achieved. Nonetheless, the complaints about noutgeld, sergeant corn and tithes, see below, Chapter. 6. 133   See below, pp. 197–201. 134   For government’s sympathy, see L.P. XII(1). 302, 478, 881, 1216.

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strength and extent of the response – with delegates attending from at least the Barony of Kendal, north Lancashire, Dent, Sedbergh, Wensleydale and Mashamshire – suggests that in the northern uplands there was widespread dissatisfaction with the second petition over its inadequate representation of commonwealth matters. Significantly, no gentlemen or clerics accepted the invitation to attend.135 Another shortcoming of the second petition lay in the inadequacy of its charge that the government was guilty of extortion. The Pilgrims were deeply suspicious of the government because of its measures of, and its further plans for, expropriation and exaction. The government’s expropriation plans, the Pilgrims feared, would not stop at dissolving lesser monasteries but would extend to all religious houses, colleges, even parish churches: that is, to all ecclesiastical institutions surveyed in the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535. A special fear was that some parish churches would be completely demolished with the remainder robbed of their treasures.136 The government’s exaction plans, they feared, included the introduction of new indirect taxes on sacraments, ploughs, livestock and food, and the conversion of existing direct taxes, traditionally irregular, into regular levies.137 Most of these fears found expression in the very first statement of grievance that was sent to the government by the rebels of October 1536, one that came from Lincolnshire on 3 October in the form of a letter to the king from several subsidy commissioners whom they had captured.138 Thereafter, however, such fears failed to feature in rebel dispatches to the government in spite of the fact that grievances of this sort served to start, spread and sustain insurrection throughout much of the north.139 In other words, their omission from the Pilgrim petitions was not due to a lack of concern. Some of the omitted grievances – such as the removal of parish churches and innovations in indirect taxation – must have appeared to those engaged in framing the petitions as too far-fetched and rumour-engendered to merit inclusion. Moreover, the urgency of some of them was reduced by concessions that the government made in attempts to contain the rebellion. Thus, the grievance against the subsidy became less pressing when the government, in response to the fear that the insurrection would spread to the south, took the precaution of halting its collection throughout the realm.140 Another grievance – one that might have inflamed the cloth-making regions of the West Riding and 135

    137   138   139   136

140

See Bush and Bownes, pp. 105–8, 247–51. See L.P. XI. 768 (2). See Bush, ‘Enhancements and importunate charges’: 403–19. SP1/106, f. 350 [L.P. XI. 534]; and see above, p. 3. See Bush, ‘Up for the commonweal’: 308–9.

  For calling off the collection of the subsidy, see L.P. XII(1). 152 and 594.

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East Anglia – was nipped in the bud by a royal proclamation suspending a recent statute regulating the manufacture of cloth. Yet another royal proclamation, issued on 18 October, dismissed as wild fancy the Pilgrims’ fears of new taxes and the confiscation of church treasures.141 And, as we have seen, Henry VIII successfully rebutted the charge that he was deliberately excluding the old nobility.142 Influencing the content of their petitions, then, was the Pilgrims’ tendency to omit or play down those complaints that the government had already acknowledged by some sort of policy change or had directly repudiated, presumably in the bid to generate a dialogue with the king that might open the way for further concessions. Also absent from the Pilgrims’ petitions was the complaint that the government’s expropriation plans were contrary to the economic well-being of the north. Essentially, this complaint deplored the way the suppression of monasteries was impoverishing northern society through causing their wealth to pass to southerners. The Pilgrims’ concern for the economic and social drawbacks of the Dissolution was first made evident in the opening stages of the revolt when they adopted the petition of the Lincolnshire rebels, with its objection that the suppression of religious houses deprived the poor of relief, causing ‘a great hurt to the commonwealth’.143 The same concern featured in Aske’s address of 19 October to the lords, gentlemen and clerics in Pontefract Castle when he declared that ‘much relief of the commons’ had been ‘by succour of abbeys’. With the revenues from the suppressed abbeys, as well as from first fruits, going ‘out of these parts’, he predicted, ‘no money nor treasure’ would be left ‘in those parts’, thus preventing tenants from paying rents to their lords and leaving lords with insufficient resources for fulfilling their services to the crown. In consequence, the body politic would cease to function properly, compelling impoverished northerners to make alliances with the Scots or commit acts of rebellion. In his April Examination, Aske elaborated further on this point, arguing that the statutes of suppression and first fruits and tenths were damaging the commonwealth in the north by causing a drain of coin to other parts, thus reducing the amount of employment, charity and hospitality disposable within the region. The point was made in a written submission to the Pontefract council in December which argued that a restoration of the suppressed monasteries would be to the relief of ‘your 141   That the cloth-making statute was a grievance, see L.P. XI. 768 (2). For its postponement, see L.P. XI. 603; P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations (London, 1964) [hereafter Tudor Royal Proclamations], vol. I, no. 166. For dismissal of tax rumours, see ibid., no. 168. 142   See above, p. 22. 143

  See Bush and Bownes, pp. 296–7.

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commonalty and poor subjects’.144 Yet nothing of this appeared in the petitions that the Pilgrims sent to the government – partly because of the October petition’s failure to mention the dissolution of religious houses and partly because of the brevity of article 4 in the December petition which simply demanded that ‘the abbeys suppressed’ were ‘to be restored to their houses, lands and goods’.145 In this respect, its omission appeared to be due to the manner in which the petition was drafted rather than to any ulterior motive. The omission, however, became a sore point in the north and led to further protest, in the form of a seditious bill, circulated in the West Riding in January 1537. Complaining that wealth was being siphoned out of the region through the selling off of ex-monastic possessions, it exhorted the commons to ‘proceed with our pilgrimage of grace’ to put the matter right.146 With so much left out of the December petition, parts of the north were driven to plan fresh revolts not simply because they suspected that the government would wriggle out of the December agreement but also because they realised that, even if the agreement were honoured, a great deal of grievance would remain unredressed.147 In the light of these excluded grievances, it is clear that the petitions dispatched to the government fell far short of fully presenting the Pilgrims’ complaint. Moreover, a question mark stands over the sincerity of the included grievances, especially since one important reason for submitting petitions was to rule out the use of military force. Rather than to justify a confrontation with the government, petitioning was designed to make it unnecessary. In all likelihood, then, the content of the petitions was shaped by several acts of contrivance. One was to persuade the Pilgrims to accept a policy of negotiation as a feasible means of achieving their goal; a second was the need to produce a statement acceptable to the whole range of society, given that the uprising had enlisted the support of clerics and gentlemen as well as commoners. Some care was therefore taken not to offend the basic interests of the several strata of society. Certain grievances, especially those held by the commons, accused the rest of society of wrongdoing. To prevent internal divisions from sapping the movement’s strength, these had to be excluded or at least modified; while, to preserve unity, grievances against the government had to be emphasised. A third act of contrivance was to circumnavigate divisions of opinion, for example by steering clear of recent measures of religious reform; a fourth was to focus on things that 144   Bateson, pp. 336, 561–3. For the petition, see SP1/112, fos 29–32, p. I [L.P. XI. 1182 (3)]. 145   L.P. XI. 1246 (1). 146   SP1/114, f. 167 [L.P. XII(1). 138]. For complete text, see below Appendix, doc. 18a. 147

  Bush and Bownes, pp. 26, 289–97.

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stood a chance of securing government acceptance, especially by placing grievances within the framework of a professed loyalty; a fifth was to play down the regional nature of the uprising in order to recruit support in the south. Clearly, all this would work against the production of a complete statement of grievance; just as the need for compromise would produce demands that, fudgingly formulated, could not be exactly true. Yet this did not render the petitions utterly spurious as declarations of complaint. It would have made no sense to submit petitions that did not express key grievances, especially as the main aim of petitioning was to reveal to the king the plight of his subjects. And the petitions’ function of avoiding military conflict made it vitally important to include what the commons wanted. For these basic reasons, the grievances articled in the petitions must have reflected the ideological and cultural causes of the rebellion. The petitions therefore retain great value for identifying the corpus of beliefs and values that drove northerners to rebel in October 1536. If carefully considered and systematically related to the rest of the evidence, then, the petitions provide a useful guide to the nature of the Pilgrims’ complaint. Notably, they reveal that rather than focused upon one particular issue, the pilgrimage of grace, like its predecessor the Lincolnshire rebellion, was moved by a multiplicity of grievance which the Pilgrims simplified as, on the one hand, a defence of the faith and, on the other, a defence of the commonwealth. Many of its complaints objected to departures from tradition; several, however, advocated innovatory remedies.148 Some of its grievances expressed hostility to landlords and clerics, but, true to the society of orders and the old faith, its supporters readily sought and accepted the leadership of gentlemen and clergymen. The rebels regarded themselves, and were seen, as northerners. In this respect, the pilgrimage of grace resembled a regional insurrection.149 But dominating its complaint were concerns not peculiar to the north. Bearing these complexities in mind, to typify the uprising in simple terms – say, as a religious revolt, or as the reaction of tradition, or as an aristocratic conspiracy, or as a popular rebellion, or as a regional conflict between north and south – fails to do it justice. The Pilgrims’ complaint represented a broad spectrum of criticism against royal government, lords of the manor and clerics. By emphasising the failure of those in authority to fulfil their expected duties, it shows how the ideals of the time – the old religion, the body politic, the society of orders, the ancient constitution – were conceived and respected in practice.

148

  See below, pp. 163–4, 191–3, 198–205, 231–5, 238–40.   See below, Chapter 5.

149

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The Pilgrims’ Complaint

Popular Provenance The question remains, however, as to whether it is possible – given the nature of the written evidence – to disentangle the popular complaints from the ones exclusively held by gentlemen and clergy, so as to shed light on the mentality of the commons. The evidence unequivocally presents the pilgrimage of grace as a rising of the commons. Yet its written declarations were frequently the work of non-commoners; and those that purported to be the work of the commons were not necessarily genuine but rather the composition of gentlemen and clerics hiding behind a commoner mask. Furthermore, grievances were declared which clearly did not have a commoner provenance, such as the objection to the Act of Uses – a matter between the king as feudal overlord and landowners who, as tenants-in-chief, owed him feudal dues and services – and the demand made for restoring the privilege of benefit of clergy. How many complaints were peculiar to gentlemen and clergy, and how many were angled in such a way as to suit the upper orders, remains uncertain. All this raises a problem of evidence and the need for some resolution. This can be achieved partly by relating the written declarations of complaint to rebel actions. Commoners identified the grievances that moved them by restoring religious houses; by disrupting church services to force the clergy to recognise abrogated saints’ days and to restore the traditional order of prayer; by refusing to pay taxes, rents and tithes; by removing enclosures; by spoiling and soiling the property of gentlemen; by obliging manorial lords to accept benevolent tenancy agreements; by revering the tinkling, relic-bearing banner of St Cuthbert; and by imposing oaths to be true to God, the king and the commons. Moreover, the continuation of revolt after the December pardon was mainly the work of commoners; and the grievances that caused them to resume arms can therefore be regarded as their own. From these actions, it is clear that the commons were driven to revolt by a variety of grievances, some relating to the faith and concerned with the infection of heresy in high places, the eviction of the papacy and the demotion of the saints; others of equal importance relating to the commonwealth and concerned with fiscal and agrarian change. Another means of identifying the commons’ complaint derives from certain dominant characteristics of the uprising. In the first place, its impetus and momentum, its very strength, its dynamism, depended on the positive willingness of commoners to form federations and to take up arms. They did so not as the loyal tenants, servants and dupes of dissident gentlemen, monks and friars but as an independent and self-willed force. This was vividly illustrated by Harry Sais, a servant of Christopher Askew, in a report that he made to members of the government on 26 October. It related to an incident that six days previously had happened close

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to Pontefract where the Pilgrims were massing to besiege the castle. In returning from Thornton-in-Lonsdale, where his host, William Knevet, had been taken and sworn by the commons, he was subjected to the same treatment in Ferrybridge. The company that captured him, a band of commons with ‘none to be superior over the other’ – that is, undirected by gentlemen or clerics – ordered him to take an oath of allegiance. When Sais stated his willingness to swear loyalty to God and the king, one of the rebels belligerently interposed with the question ‘And not to us?’ Sais was then warned that ‘if ye do not swear thus [that is, to be true to God and to the king and to the commons] thou shalt lose they head’. Rudely challenged by the commons in this manner, and confronted by their self-awareness of being a coherent social group with its own interests and concerns, Sais took the oath ‘upon a little book that one of them brought from his sleeve’.150 In the second place, although keen to organise the revolt in accordance with the hierarchy inherent to the society of orders through offering the leadership to gentlemen, commoners were far from deferential in their attitude to degree. In fact, their willingness to accept gentlemen as captains of the commons was predicated upon the latter’s responsiveness to popular demands. For these two reasons, the various declarations of complaint that the Pilgrims produced – from muster proclamations to petitions – were obliged, in large measure, to subscribe to popular beliefs and aims, in order to attract and retain the support and respect of the commons and in order to exercise control over the rebellions’ rank and file. It can therefore be accepted that, if not all, a high proportion of the Pilgrims’ complaints related to grievances that moved the commons; and that, subject to the exception of agrarian matters, where there was a clear clash of interest between the orders of society, the manner in which complaints were selected, expressed, elaborated upon and warranted bore a close affinity to what the commonalty appeared to want.

150

  SP1/109, fos 203–203b [L.P. XI. 879 (ii)].

Chapter Two

In Defence of the Faith In the eyes of the Pilgrims, the true faith was under threat of destruction from a government deeply infected by heresy. Generating this belief was the recent onslaught on the wealth of the church; the eviction of the papacy; the rejection of purgatory and saintly intercession; the limitations placed on the rights of the clergy and the liberties of the church; and what appeared to be a show of utter contempt for the formal distinctions previously made between soul and body, church and state, clergy and laity, and matters spiritual and temporal. This record of behaviour, the Pilgrims firmly believed, rendered nonsensical the king’s title of ‘Defensor Fidei’. The Pilgrims’ charge of heresy was not difficult to substantiate. Although much of the old religion remained intact, all the various religious declarations that the government had recently issued – for example, the Ten Articles, the Royal Injunctions, the New Order of Prayer and the Order on Saints’ Days – could be seen as infected by dangerous novelty: especially for laying down that, since they lacked scriptural authorisation, purgatory and the associated cult of saintly intercession were contrary to God’s law. By the time of the pilgrimage of grace, the government appeared to think that salvation could only be achieved by faith alone, that the invocation of saints through prayer was little more than an expression of clerical commercialism, and that it was perfectly proper to banish purgatory, to strip saints of their divine powers and to cast doubt on the clergy’s ability to induce miracles. Incensed by heresy’s grip on the English church, the Pilgrims sought to expose heretics and heretical books, ordering the expulsion of the one and the destruction of the other. Cumulatively, then, Christ’s faith was seen to be in grave peril. This the Pilgrims partly blamed upon the government’s greed which drove it, by means of heavy taxation and expropriation, to seize ecclesiastical wealth, the effect of which was to weaken the clergy’s capacity to dispense the services expected of it. However, the gravamen of their defence of the faith was that, directed by heretics such as Cromwell, Cranmer, Hilsey and Latimer, the government was deliberately and systematically hacking away at the roots of the old religion.

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The Eviction of the Pope The Pilgrims’ objection to the king’s headship of the English church derived not so much from Henry’s adoption of this title in 1532 as from the powers he had assumed by 1536, largely the result of the Supremacy Act of 1534. An earlier definition of the headship – one created by convocation’s response to the pardon granted by the king to the clergy in 1531 after its conviction for breaching the statute of praemunire – had qualified Henry’s ecclesiastical authority with the condition ‘only so far as the law of Christ allows’. This definition was officially confirmed in 1534 when convocation accepted the proposition that the pope had ‘no greater jurisdiction in England … than has any other foreign bishop’, thus justifying his exclusion from English affairs without necessarily conferring upon the king authority in matters spiritual. At this stage it seemed as if a central feature of the old religion – the demarcation between temporality and spirituality – would be retained, and that the only victim of the Henrician settlement would be the pope, now accepted as having an authority confined to the distant diocese of Rome. This prospect was shattered in the same year by the Act of Supremacy which, with crushing brevity, laid down that the king, along with his successors, was ‘the only supreme head in earth of the church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia’, enjoying ‘all honours … jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities to the said dignity … belonging’ and possessing ‘full power and authority to reform … all such errors, heresies, abuses … whatsoever they be, which by any manner spiritual authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed … to the pleasure of almighty God’. In other words, the powers formerly exercised by the pope as head of the English church were now the possession of the crown. Somewhat speciously, the Act presented itself as merely corroborating what the clergy had already granted in convocation. Further legislation elaborated upon the subjection of matters spiritual to lay control. Shortly before the Act of Supremacy, the Act for the Submission of the Clergy prevented clerics from promulgating or executing ecclesiastical laws without the king’s consent. It also authorised a 32-man commission, comprising an equal number of clerics and laymen, to revise the canon law applicable in England, employing for the purpose a process of repeal and approval finally subject to the king’s consent. The same Act required appeals from the archbishop’s court to go to Chancery rather



  Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1991), p. 186.



  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, 1996), pp. 121–2.   26 Henry VIII, c. 1.



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than Rome. Finally, the Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome (1536) obliged all subjects in the service of the crown to accept by oath Henry VIII’s right to all the powers formerly exercised by the pope in England, and imposed the penalty of high treason upon all who refused to swear; while the Dispensations Act voided all dispensations of a papal provenance, substituting a new system of dispensation resting not simply on the approval of the archbishop of Canterbury but also upon confirmation in Chancery by the lord chancellor under the great seal. All this legislation emphatically made the point that spiritual matters were no longer the sole province of the clergy. Publicising the royal supremacy in the parishes was the New Order of Prayer of 1535 which totally ignored the pope’s existence. It was quickly applied throughout the north as the archbishop of York dispatched his officials to every deanery to instruct the clergy on how to conduct public prayer, to remove favourable references to the pope from all books and to condemn in their sermons the pope’s ‘feigned authority used in this realm before times’. The new relationship between laity and clergy was bluntly applied with the execution of More and Fisher in 1535, and the banishment of the Friars Observant from the realm – all for refusing to accept the king’s spiritual rule of the English church – and by the appointment of Thomas Cromwell, the king’s secretary, as his vicar general. From a conservative point of view, Henry had placed the English church in the charge of a man who, as a layman and reputed heretic, seemed eminently disqualified for the post. The sanctity surrounding the king by virtue of his divine right, could, by no stretch of the Pilgrim imagination, be extended to Cromwell. Cromwell’s vicegerency arose from the government’s urgent need to conduct a survey of the English church following the break with Rome and the inadequacy of archiepiscopal visitations for this task, as had been made evident in Cranmer’s 1534/35 visitation which was undermined, thwarted and rendered ineffective by the resistance and non-cooperation of conservative bishops. The government’s initial solution was to establish a commission of vicegerentes et vicarios nostros generales, composed of three laymen headed by Cromwell, but in January 1535 it was transformed into the office of vicegerent whose primary task was to conduct a royal visitation of the English church. The vicegerent’s supreme powers over the English church were demonstrated in late 1535 when, on the orders of the two archbishops, the authority of all bishops was suspended during the term of the visitation, obliging them to seek licences from Cromwell, 

  25 Henry VIII, c. 19.   28 Henry VIII, c. 10; 28 Henry VIII, c. 16.    For its transmission in the north, see The National Archives, SP1/93, f. 245 [L.P. VIII. 994]. For the Order, see below, pp. 83–4. 

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even in order to continue their routine work. This suspension lasted from September 1535 until the summer of 1536. By the latter date it was clear that the authority of the new office placed Cromwell in charge not simply of ecclesiastical visitations but also of convocation. Now termed ‘high vicar over the spirituality’, he was privileged to sit in convocation at the head of the bishops alongside Cranmer, even to appoint someone to act in his absence. For this purpose he selected another layman, Dr William Petre. A few months later Cromwell was summoning his own ecclesiatical synod, a merger of the two convocations, to order the affairs of the church. Although this happened shortly after the pilgrimage of grace, it marked the culmination of a development that was well underway when the rebellion broke out. There is no reason to believe that Cromwell dictated the Ten Articles – this was the work of convocation – but, in his capacity as vicegerent, he undoubtedly drew up the Royal Injunctions of August 1536. Ostensibly designed to instruct the clergy on how to apply the Ten Articles, they did much more than that by deliberately emphasising the spuriousness of saintly intercession and explicitly dismissing the worship of images and relics, along with pilgrimages, as pandering to superstition. What the Ten Articles implied or left ambiguous, then, the Royal Injunctions made clear and explicit. Whereas the Ten Articles, a document framed to restore unity, could be claimed by religious conservatives and reformers alike as a victory for their own cause, the Injunctions proved less amenable to broad interpretation, emitting an indisputably reformist signal, especially by asserting the doctrine of justification by faith alone and by impressing that Christ was the only intermediary between man and God. Besides subjecting the church to lay control, the break with Rome generated doubts about the clergy’s power to remit sin. Such scepticism had been central to Luther’s stand. Although hostile to Lutheranism because of Luther’s refusal to recognise Henry’s right to divorce Katherine of Aragon, the Henrician settlement nonetheless followed a similar path. To dissuade people from adhering to Rome, it stressed the inability of papal dispensations to grant redemption. The repudiation of the pope’s redemptive powers swiftly led to a denial of those previously enjoyed by the rest of the clergy, the latter made evident in the Ten Articles which, in reducing the recognised sacraments from seven to three, redefined ordination as merely an admission to a profession rather than a means of conferring the power to obtain grace. Furthermore, characteristic of 

  MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 130, 133–5.   See below, pp. 84–5.    Yet, while failing to include the sacrament of ordination in the category of ‘necessary for salvation’, the Ten Articles appear to contain a contradiction in recognising a special role for priests in connexion with the sacrament of penance which they designate as ‘necessary for 

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the break with Rome was the language of reform that was employed in its justification. Although the original assumption of supremacy resulted from the pope’s refusal to end Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, it was actually justified in reform terms, with the pope’s decision on the divorce presented as contrary to Scripture and, therefore, the law of God. Moreover, by 1536 the pope’s claim to be vicar of Christ was also dismissed as lacking scriptural authentication, while the opinion of church councils and the judgments of canon law were rejected as alternative warranty.10 In this respect, Henry’s assumed headship of the English church appeared to be driven by heresy, thus casting doubt on the claim his government repeatedly made that, apart from its repudiation of the pope, the settlement was orthodox and catholic. Such were the heretical implications raised by the break with Rome. But how was it actually perceived by supporters of the pilgrimage of grace? At his Examination Robert Aske on several occasions remarked on the Pilgrims’ deep concern for the expulsion of the pope, remarking: ‘then all men much murmured at the same and said it could not stand with God’s law’. That the royal supremacy was unprecedented, he said, also made it objectionable: ‘never king of England … claimed any such authority’.11 Yet can Aske’s observations be regarded as typical of what other Pilgrims felt? That he was himself deeply moved by, and committed to, the papal supremacy was demonstrated on the afternoon of 4 December when he paid a visit to the assembly of Pilgrim clergy then convened in Pontefract Priory. Provoked by its refusal to sanction war against the prince, Aske declared his willingness to fight to the death for the preservation of the pope’s headship of the English church and the maintenance of his laws.12 Aske, however, was no undeviating traditionalist. At his Examination he revealed that during the revolt he had objected to the king having cure of souls ‘but none otherwise’: in other words, he was prepared to accept the king’s headship of the English church so long as it did not deny the pope’s right of spiritual jurisdiction within the realm of England. This is borne out by his account of how the article against the exclusion of the pope, as it featured in the second petition, came to be formulated. Apparently the first draft had simply called for the restoration of the pope and the repeal of the Act of Supremacy. Aske, however, inserted the phrase ‘touching cura animarum’ to specify what authority should be ‘reserved unto the see salvation’. For text of Ten Articles, see C.H. Williams (ed.), English Historical Documents, 1485–1558 (London, 1967), pp. 795–805. 10   For example, L.P. XI. 361. 11   Bateson, p. 565. 12   Vouched for by Dakyn, see SP1/117, f. 202b [L.P. XII(1). 786/ii] and by Pickering, see SP1/118, f. 279b [L.P. XII(1). 1021].

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of Rome as before it was accustomed to be’, thus preserving a headship of the church for the king but one without spiritual authority or ultimate supremacy.13 Pilgrims undoubtedly held a variety of opinions on the king’s headship of the church, some even accepting it to the complete exclusion of the pope. This, for example, was true of certain leading clerics: notably Drs Sherwood and Dakyn and the archbishop of York.14 Rejecting the pope’s claim to be vicar of Christ, they saw him as no more than the bishop of Rome. Another group of Pilgrims was prepared to accept the king as supreme head of the English church but not to the complete exclusion of the papacy: a point of view declared in an early attempt at drafting the December petition which requested the king, in his capacity as supreme head of the English church, to admit the pope ‘to be head of the spiritual matters’ but only if he delegated his spiritual authority ‘especially to the archbishops of Canterbury and York’ who would then ‘distribute the same within their province’.15 A third group of Pilgrims wished to retain the pope’s supremacy over the English church while accepting limitations on his former powers and a change of title to ‘bishop of Rome’. As we have seen, this was the view of Aske and of article 2 in the December petition. A fourth group wished to restore the papal supremacy as it stood before the break with Rome – the view of leading clerics such as Drs Marshall and Pickering, Brandsby and Waldby and also, according to Aske, of most gentlemen and commons.16 Groups three and four were alike in accepting the pope as vicar of Christ and in regarding the king as head, rather than supreme head, of the English church. In spite of their differences, all four groups firmly believed that the determination of matters spiritual could not be left to a layman. Thus, of the two groups prepared to accept the royal supremacy, the one found a role for the pope partly because the king ‘is a temporal man and that the cure of souls and ministration of the sacraments … are spiritual’ and partly because there ‘necessarily must be one head only’ of Christendom in order to ensure a spiritual conformity between all its component countries;17 while the other, which dismissed the pope as a foreign usurper, believed

13

  Bateson, pp. 559, 561.   For Sherwood, see L.P. XII(1). 786 (ii). For Dakyn, see below, p. 58. For York, see below, pp. 52–3. 15   SP1/112, fos 24–8, p. II [L.P. XI. 1182 (2)]. 16   For clerics, see SP1/117, f. 201b [L.P. XII(1). 786/ii]. For gentlemen and commons, see Bateson, p. 559. 17   SP1/112, fos 24–8, p. II [L.P. XI. 1182 (2)]. 14

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that the spiritual responsibilities he had traditionally exercised within the realm should be reserved for the clergy rather than awarded to the king.18 The depth of concern aroused by the exclusion of the pope, its centrality to the Pilgrims’ complaint against the government, and the differences of opinion held on how to remedy the matter, became evident in the debate held in Pontefract Priory on 4 December as the assembly of Pilgrim clerics sought to compose a statement of opinion in response to a set of instructive questions received from Robert Aske. A discussion on Supremacy took place that morning; another followed that evening when the completed statement was presented to the archbishop of York.19 In the morning debate certain clerics – Pickering, Brandsby and Waldby – made the point that when convocation granted the king superiority over the English church in 1534 it carried the important qualification ‘in quantum per legem Christi licet’. In other words, convocation had insisted on upholding the formula agreed in connexion with the original submission of the clergy three years earlier. Since this vital clause was now omitted, they argued, the Act of Supremacy was invalid, its claim to rest on the recognition of convocation ruled out by its ignorance of what convocation had agreed to accept.20 Before stopping for dinner the clerical assembly decided that the king could be called caput ecclesiae but ‘might exercise no jurisdiction as visitor or such other in the church’.21 They thus denied the king’s right to be supreme head of the English church and dismissed the vicegerency of Thomas Cromwell as contrary to God’s law. In the statement of opinion that the clergy drafted that day, the issue of Supremacy was given such importance that it figured in six out of a total of eleven articles.22 In contrast to the December petition, it used the title of pope, as opposed to occupant of ‘the see of Rome’, and accepted that his authority extended to the whole of Christendom.23 Thus, article 1 required, among other matters, bedes to be bidden ‘as hath been used by old custom’: that is, to include in the order of service prayers for the pope and his cardinals. Article 2 stated that it was against the law of God for the king ‘ne any temporal man’ to be ‘supreme head of the church’ with ‘any jurisdictions or powers spiritual in the same’ and required ‘all acts of parliament made to the contrary to be revoked’. Article 3, a response to a question about the illegitimacy of Princess Mary, proposed that it 18

  See SP1/117, f. 80b [L.P. XII(1). 698 (3)].   See above, p. 30 and immediately below. 20   SP1/117, f. 201b [L.P. XII(1). 786/ii]. 21  Ibid. 22   See below, Appendix, doc. 17. 23   For petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 16, article 2. 19

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should be referred to ‘the determination of the church to whom it was appealed’. As the archbishop revealed, this meant referring the matter to the pope and so presumed a continuation of the papal supremacy.24 Article 8 declared papal dispensations ‘to be good and to be accepted’ so long as they related to ‘just causes lawfully granted by the pope of Rome’, on the grounds that such pardons were authorised by Lateran Councils and the laws of the church. Article 9 felt that ‘the pope of Rome’ should continue to be regarded as ‘head of the church and vicar of Christ’ because it had been approved ‘by the laws of the church, general councils, interpretations of approved doctors and consent of Christian people’. Finally article 11, in view of the above, proposed that all who had suffered for denying the king’s superiority over the church should be forgiven and that all books respectful of the pope’s supremacy should be freely ‘read and kept’. It also linked the issue of Supremacy to the dissolution of religious houses by asserting that, before monks could legitimately leave their orders, a papal dispensation was required to absolve them of their monastic vows. In the early evening this statement of opinion was taken to the archbishop who, for the purpose of receiving it, had stationed himself close by, in a small chamber. As the opinions were read out and checked against the list of instructions supplied by Aske, the objections made by the archbishop to them provoked another debate, one focused on the statement’s acceptance of the papal primacy. The archbishop took strong exception to it, arguing that the pope ‘neither had primacy nor jurisdiction here by the law of God’. For these reasons he proposed the complete deletion of article 9. According to his own account, ‘I did stick long with them’, but another person present, John Dakyn, claimed that eventually he gave way, allowing its retention on the grounds that the papal primacy commanded the consent of the Christian people.25 Throwing further light upon the archbishop’s view of the royal supremacy was a discussion that he had shortly afterwards with Aske, presumably when the statement of opinion, now approved by the clergy, was handed over. When Aske raised the question of the Supremacy, the archbishop responded by separating cure of souls from the matter of punishment. He argued that while the former was the undoubted preserve of the clergy, the latter, in lying with the temporal arm, was under the command of the king. Accordingly, Henry VIII ‘as king’ had no spiritual authority, but he did possess the right to punish sin and therefore deserved to be supreme head of the English church.26 Aske admitted that he had not 24

  SP1/119, f. 10b [L.P. XII(1). 1022].   For the archbishop’s account of this debate, see ibid. For Dakyn’s account, see SP1/117, f. 203 [L.P. XII(1). 786/ii]. 26   SP1/117, f. 80 [L.P. XII(1). 698 (3)]. 25

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previously encountered this view, and it may well have been peculiar to the archbishop. But it is clear from the above that even the archbishop was not in total agreement with the Act of Supremacy, largely because it gave the king complete command of matters previously exercised by clerics. As a layman, Aske reckoned that he was the exception in wishing the pope to exercise no more than cure of souls. According to him, the gentlemen and commons simply wanted a complete restoration of the papal primacy with all its former powers intact.27 The evidence, however, suggests otherwise; and that, for the laity as well as some clergy, Aske’s own view of the papacy was typical.28 Surviving petitions composed in preparation for the formulation of the December petition proposed limits on the pope’s authority: such as one from the so-called ‘poor commons’ and another, a collection of articles.29 Both, in fact, awarded the king the title of supreme head of the English church, so long as it did not confer upon him cura animarum. Both, moreover, permitted the pope as bishop of Rome a final authority over the English church to determine all matters spiritual but nothing beyond that. This is clearly stated in the collection of articles. There the king as supreme head is excluded from exercising spiritual powers ‘because that he is a temporal man’ while granting them to the pope on the one hand, because he ‘is the most ancient bishop in Christendom’ and, on the other, because he is ‘admitted in all realms of Christendom to have the same cure’ and therefore can impose and maintain a spiritual unity. Yet, apart from being ‘head of the spiritual matters … the said bishops of Rome [should] have no further meddling’.30 As for the petition from the poor commons, this is badly mutilated but its message on the Supremacy issue is clear.31 Proposing that the king’s headship of the church needed to accord with the law of Christ, it reserved for the papacy those matters that divine law prevented the king from exercising.32 In accordance with the collection of articles, it justified the pope’s authority in England, partly on grounds of the laity’s ineligibility to exercise spiritual powers, and partly because of the need to preserve the 27

  Bateson, pp. 559, 561.   Aske’s account of how he imposed his view on the December petition (see above, pp. 49–50) is misleading in that in the wording of article 2 (see below, Appendix, doc. 16), a limitation on the pope’s powers existed prior to Aske’s intervention in requiring a stoppage of the payments formerly received by him for the consecration of bishops. 29   L.P. XI. 1182 (3); ibid., (2). 30   SP1/ 112, fos 24–8, p. II [L.P. XI. 1182 (2)]. For its possible attribution to Robert Chaloner, see above, p. 26. 31   Comprising four pages, the top half of each page is missing. See SP1/112, fos 29–32 [L.P. XI. 1182 (3)]. 32   See ibid., p. I. 28

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unity of Christendom. How could enactments made by English parliaments and convocations annul internationally made laws, it asked, rejoining that it surely went against the law of God for a part of Christendom to abolish rules created by and for the whole.33 The same petition also stressed how the royal supremacy had opened the door to heresy by allowing reformist bishops ‘through flattery and blind fables’ to inveigle the king into using his new authority to demolish the old faith.34 Yet another of its concerns reflected the importance the Pilgrims attached to papal pardons, especially in connexion with the illegitimisation of Mary which, it argued, must surely have breached all legal codes in having been ultimately determined by the king’s commission and had allowed Henry ‘to be both judge in his own court and party’. Nonetheless, while justifying a role for the pope on several grounds, the petition recognised the king as head of the English church.35 The nature of this petition, sophisticated in concept and expression, casts doubt on its claim to be the composition of men who are ‘unlearned’ and lack the means ‘to write in form and compendiously’.36 Aske in his Examination appeared to make reference to it when he stated that, on the subject of Supremacy, he had received two papers, both presented ‘as poor men’s petitions’.37 The second of these papers has also survived. Endorsed ‘among the commons of Mr Grice at Pontefract’, it is in Latin.38 In all likelihood, then, these petitions were deliberately pitched, rather like the Captain Poverty bills and the Sawley Ballad, as coming from ‘the poor commons’ hopefully to give them greater impact. Doubt about their professed provenance, however, does not invalidate their message or render it a misrepresentation of popular opinion. Although Aske claimed that the royal supremacy was a major issue in the pilgrimage of grace, it, nonetheless, failed to feature explicitly in the Pilgrims’ earliest declarations of complaint, appearing neither in the Captain Poverty letters that expressed the grievances of the upland north nor in Aske’s proclamations, oaths and orders that expressed the grievances of the northern lowlands.39 In fact, not until 10 November was it first mentioned as a formal complaint: in an anonymous letter sent from England to Rome that gave an account of the Pilgrims’ first appointment 33

  See ibid., p. II.  Ibid. 35   See ibid., p. III. 36   See ibid., p. IV. 37   Bateson, p. 565. 38   See L.P. XI. 1182 (1). For its possible attribution to William Swinburn, see above, p. 27. 39   Bateson, p. 565. 34

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with Norfolk on 27 October.40 As we have seen, to accompany their first petition to the government – a statement of five articles that declared their grievances in very general terms – Ralph Ellerker and Robert Bowes, the Pilgrims’ ambassadors who took it to Court, were issued with instructions on how to particularise its meaning.41 These instructions, according to Ortiz, ordered Ellerker and Bowes to seek from the king an acknowledgment of the pope as supreme head of the church. In doing so, they reveal that behind the first petition’s demand for ‘the maintenance of the faith of Christ’ and for the punishment of ‘subverters of God’s laws’ lay opposition to the break with Rome. Moreover, because it underpinned the religious complaint and was connected with the illegitimisation of Princess Mary – a complaint featured in Aske’s first proclamation – the royal supremacy must have been a moving issue from the start.42 Rather than a grievance imposed by Pilgrim gentlemen and clerics, the complaint against the royal supremacy appeared to originate with the commons, as several local eruptions of pro-papalism made evident. One was reported by John Dakyn, a leading Pilgrim cleric who had mixed feelings about the Henrician settlement. While keen to preserve monasteries and also the payments and practices associated with intercession, he was willing to accept the presently established system of royal supremacy, at least until a general council had settled the matter.43 On 15 October, when attending a large rebel assembly in the town of Richmond, he was warned that ‘the alteration of the power of the bishop of Rome’ was thought to be ‘not good and should not stand’.44 Another expression of pro-papalism occurred in the town of Appleby when in late October the Appleby council – a body convened by the rebels of the Barony of Westmorland to determine ‘all matters’ and which continued to sit throughout early November – issued a proclamation requiring every curate in the barony to ‘bid the holy days and bedes after the old manner on pain of death’: in other words, a demand for the restoration of not only the abolished holy days but also the old order of service which, in offering prayers for the pope and cardinals, had recognised the papacy’s headship of the English

40   Now lost, its contents were summarised in a letter from Dr Ortiz to Emperor Charles V of 29 November. See L.P. XI. 1204. 41   See above, pp. 19–20. 42  Issued on 11 October, the proclamation failed to mention Mary by name but did call upon men to be ‘true to the king’s issue’. See SP1/107, f. 116 [L.P. XI. 622]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 4. 43   See Bush, pp. 180–81. 44   SP1/117, f. 205b [L.P. XII(1). 786/ii].

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church.45 A similar instance of pro-papalism occurred in Cumberland on 20 October when a rebel proclamation was issued ordering priests ‘to bid holy days and bedes after the old custom’.46 Not surprisingly, certain religious houses contained cadres of papalism, notably Furness Abbey in north Lancashire and Watton Priory in the East Riding, where strong views on the royal supremacy engaged the brethren in the pilgrimage of grace. Although their size and wealth had preserved them from dissolution, both houses had suffered from recent interference at the hands of Thomas Cromwell.47 One of the Furness monks, John Broughton, was alleged to have said: ‘the bishop of Rome was unjustly put down’ and also to have predicted: ‘in three years the bishop would be restored and all the new laws undone’. Another, Henry Salley, was heard to declare when drunk: ‘there should be no lay knave head of the church’.48 Yet another, John Green, declared that abbots should not be appointed by the king but should be selected by the monks themselves.49 Over at Watton, Harry Gyll, the subprior, projected his own concerns and those of his fellow canons when he claimed that the supreme headship was ‘in every man’s mouth’ for it was said that ‘if that [the supreme headship] were not laid down it should not do well’. William Horsekey, a yeoman of Watton, having identified several members of the priory, reported that ‘the canons of Watton be great faulters for he heard them say that it would not be well as long as the king’s grace should be the supreme head of the church’. Encouraging dissent was a resident friar, Dr William Swinburn, who was reputed to follow the traditional practice of offering prayers for the pope and was the author of a tract condemning the royal supremacy.50 Such was the concern and commitment in the priory that when the archbishop in late November summoned the northern clergy to send him their opinions on the faith, in preparation for the composition of the Pilgrims’ December petition, two of its residents responded: that is, Swinburn and a canon 45   For the Appleby proclamation, see SP1/117, f. 54 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. For the Appleby council, see Bush, pp. 302–3. 46   SP1/117, fos 51–51b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 9. 47   Within Furness Abbey Cromwell had lodged a reformist group centred on Friar Robert Legate. See Bush, pp. 269–70. Upon Watton Priory Cromwell had imposed Robert Holgate as its prior. See Bush and Bownes, pp. 41–2. 48   T.A. Beck, Annales Furnesienses (London, 1844), pp. 347–8 [L.P. XII(1). 840]; SP1/117, f. 5b [L.P. XII(1). 652]. 49   L.P. XII(1). 841 (3). 50   For Gyll, see The National Archives, E36/119, f. 39 [L.P. XII(1). 201 (3)]. For Horsekey, see E36/119, f. 23b [L.P. XII(1). 201 (iii)]. For Swinburn, see Claire Cross and Noreen Vickers, Monks, Friars and Nuns in Sixteenth-century Yorkshire, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 150 (1995), p. 447.

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of the house, Thomas Asheton. Both deplored the royal supremacy and called for a return to Rome.51 But the most striking feature of the Pilgrims’ pro-papalism was the weight of support it received from the people; and this appeared to be independent of clerical manipulation. In fact, it declared itself in protests made by congregations against the attempts of parish clergy to conduct services in accordance with the government’s New Order of Prayer, the protesters insisting on including the pope and cardinals in the list of those to whom prayers ought to be formally offered. Protests of this nature occurred in the North Riding, notably around Richmond; in the West Riding, notably in the Percy Fee portion of the wapentake of Craven; and in Westmorland, notably at Kendal and Brough. A remarkable feature of this evidence – the same was true of the pro-papal support at Watton and Furness – was its connexion with incidents that occurred after the December pardon; that is, after the pilgrimage of grace had ended. However, this is no disqualification, since provoking these later protests was a sense of betrayal, held both against the Pilgrim leadership and the government. Men noticed that the pardon provocatively declared that the king had ‘the chief charge of you under God both of your souls and bodies’; and that the December petition omitted to condemn the New Order of Prayer. The postpardon protests – of which the pressure brought upon parish priests to readmit the pope formed a part – were all attempts by ordinary people to highlight grievances that the December petition had inadequately represented.52 For this reason, they undoubtedly expressed complaints dear to the Pilgrim commons. True, the papal cause had not been omitted from the petition: there it stood defended in article two.53 But its presentation was deficient since it made no provision for restoring the old order of prayer. Consequently, a series of Sunday disturbances broke out between 31 December and 4 February, all of them critical of a loyalist clergy for attempting to conduct services in the new manner. The first disturbance occurred on 31 December when 300 men and women urged the curate of Kendal parish church, Robert Applegarth, to pray for the pope and to proclaim him ‘head of the church overall’. They were opposed by William Collyns, bailiff of Kendal and the town’s governors, a body of 60 men termed the twenty-four. Collyns sought to restore order by declaring that the general pardon granted to all supporters of the pilgrimage of grace would be withdrawn unless they remained at peace. He then read out the pardon, principally to reveal what they would lose by persisting with their protest. Incited by the pardon’s claim that the king had supreme 51

  L.P. XII(1). 201 (3 and 4), 370.   Bush and Bownes, pp. 295–6. 53   See below, Appendix, doc. 16. 52

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authority in matters spiritual as well as temporal, the protesters accused Collyns of being false to the commons, one even declaring that they ‘cared for no pardon’. Threats were made to duck the offending curate and the town governors in the river, even to kill Collyns, who fled from the church. Order was only restored by a compromise proposed by the deputy-steward of the Barony of Kendal, Nicholas Layburne. To allow a cooling-off, he suggested an armistice of one month, during which the officiating priest would decide upon the nature of the service, but not thereafter. This was found acceptable and order was restored. Yet, when the armistice ran out, another protest occurred, again in the church. At Sunday service on 4 February the congregation ordered Sir Walter Browne, the parish priest, to name the bishop of Rome as pope and to pray for him in the old manner. Collyns and the twenty-four advised Browne to hold firm and conduct the service ‘as he was wont’, but he gave in saying: ‘commons, I will bid the bedes as ye will have me’.54 Eye-witnesses of the Kendal disturbances presented them as the work of poor commoners. John Dakyn gave the same impression when describing the pro-papal movements that came to a head on 7 January 1537 in Richmond parish church. Four years earlier he had been parson there and consequently was well known to the congregation. After Dakyn had provoked the people of Richmond by urging them not to accept papal authority, ‘lewd fellows of the town’ tried to drag him out of the church until he was rescued by Ralph Gower, bailiff of Richmond, and ‘other honest men’.55 Dakyn also had to face hostility over the issue of Supremacy in the nearby parish of Kirby Ravensworth. He commented: ‘I have heard many ignorant persons of my parish and in the country, as one Cotes, Horton, Henrison and many others whose names I do not remember, especially in this time of trouble, say that the alteration of the power of the bishop of Rome was not good and should not stand’ whereas ‘I have often times exhorted therein in my church openly to consent and accept the king’s highness for the supreme head of the church likewise as I myself do think he is, and so may be taken by the laws of God.’56 Like Collyns, Dakyn was undoubtedly trimming his story to protect himself against government reprisal. But this does not mean that he was misrepresenting what the commons of the area wanted.

54   There are three surviving accounts: one by Collyns, see SP1/118, fos 142–142b [L.P. XII(1). 914 (2)]; one by Sir James Layburne, see SP1/115, f. 244 [L.P. XII(1). 384] and SP1/117, fos 29–29b [L.P. XII(1). 671 (2/iii) ]; and one by Edmund Parker, see SP1/114, f. 5 [L.P. XII(1). 7]. 55   SP1/117, f. 20b [L.P. XII(1). 788]. 56   SP1/117, f. 205b [L.P. XII(1). 786/ii].

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Three further pro-papal protests occurred in January 1537. About 11 January there circulated in the West and East Ridings a rebel bill exhorting: ‘wherefore now is time to arise, or else never, and go proceed with our pilgrimage of grace, or else shall we all be undone. Therefore, forward, now forward, now forward in pain of death, forward now or else never.’ Rejecting the December agreement, it declared that the pardon granted by the king to every Pilgrim was unacceptable because, in its wording it obliged men to take ‘the king for supreme head of the church and to have charge of every man’s body and soul’ and ‘those that take him as king of this realm without cure of men’s body and soul be unpardoned everyone’. Although it failed to revive rebellion, it showed that the Pilgrims’ papal requirements were felt to be misrepresented by the December agreement.57 A further pro-papal protest occurred in Craven. Nailed to the church door of Arncliffe church on Saturday, 13 January, a bill required its vicar, Christopher Elyson, to offer prayers for the pope as ‘head of our mother church’. Copies of the bill appeared on the doors of other parish churches in the same region. As well as bidding the bedes in the old manner, it required the clergy ‘to rehearse the points of cursing in your parish church as hath been accustomed aforetime after the true laws of God … as hath been granted by holy popes’.58 The sentence of the curse – traditionally declared in church on four occasions in the year and suspended in 1534 – related to the royal supremacy since, as Cranmer’s order of suspension had stated in self-justification, its continuation challenged ‘the preeminence and jurisdiction royal of our king’.59 Sentencing was traditionally believed to deny the accursed ‘the bliss of heaven’ and to dispatch them ‘to the devil’.60 Allowing priests to exercise such powers of damnation clearly went counter to the reformist spirit that had infiltrated government circles, making it doctrinally objectionable in its own right as well as because of its papal association. Elyson knuckled under and proclaimed the curse, as well as offering prayers to the pope and the cardinals, allegedly not because it was in keeping with his own beliefs but ‘because he was not of power to resist against a multitude’.61 As the dean of Craven, Elyson was a considerable 57   For the bill, see SP1/114, f. 167 [L.P. XII(1). 138]. For the complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 18a. For a study of its content, provenance and circulation, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 151–4. 58   For the bill, see L.P. XI. 655. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 18d. For the letter reporting on it, see L.P. XII(1). 792. Both are misdated in L.P. See Bush and Bownes, p. 149, n. 16. 59   For form and application, see Brigden, London, p. 150; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992), pp. 356–7. For its removal, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 122. 60   See below, n. 153. 61   SP1/117, f. 215 [L.P. XII(1). 792].

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figure in the region. In all likelihood, other parish priests round about followed his example, all of them encouraged to do so by an extensive slaying of deer the day before in the nearby Forest of Langstrothdale, an event which signalled the people’s willingness and capacity to take violent action.62 The bill addressed to Elyson came ‘by the whole assent of the parishioners and tenants of the Lord of Northumberland’, suggesting that the parishes affected by the protest – described as ‘many’ – were all located in the Honour of Percy Fee: that is, the western half of the large wapentake of Craven which included Giggleswick, Settle, Langstrothdale, Stainforth and Kirkby Malhamdale.63 Yet another pro-papal protest occurred on Sunday, 28 January, in the parish church of Brough in the Barony of Westmorland, 20 miles or so due north of Arncliffe. Again, the parish priest was obliged by his parishioners to revert to the old order of prayer. As in Craven, the protest was repeated ‘in all parishes about’ and was immediately preceded by an act of communal violence, this time against new enclosures.64 In Brough the priest was Robert Thompson, a dynamic promoter of revolt in both Cumberland and Westmorland the previous October.65 According to his account, the churchwardens commanded him ‘in the name of the whole parish’ to pray for the pope. When he refused, on the grounds that the protest was contrary to the December agreement, the churchwardens stuck to their demand for the old service, threatening him with violence at the hands of his local enemy, Nicholas Musgrave, a chief rebel captain for the barony in 1536.66 The levelling of enclosures in Stainmore Forest the day before indicated that this was no idle threat.67 For fear of his life, or so he said, Thompson yielded but, rather than simply complying with his parishioners’ wishes, he followed his own order of prayer which began conservatively with ‘Ye shall pray for the good estate of our mother the holy church for the peace and tranquillity of all Christian realms’ but then called for prayers ‘on this part for the realm of England and our sovereign lord the king, supreme head of the church of the same next under God like as he is proclaimed by act of parliament’. Having acknowledged the king’s headship of the church, the order ended with the statement: ‘as I am commanded by the churchwardens, which said it was the parishioners’ 62

  Bush and Bownes, p. 173.   L.P. XI. 655; SP1/117, f. 215 [L.P. XII(1). 792]. 64   SP1/117, fos 55b–56 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. 65   For Westmorland, see Bush, pp. 300, 323. For Cumberland, see ibid., pp. 345, 357–8. 66   E36/119, f. 79 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (4)]. For Musgrave’s leadership, see Bush and Bownes, p. 266. 67   SP1/117, f. 55b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. 63

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mind ye should also pray for the pope of Rome with his college of cardinals and so forth in the common form’.68 The formulation smacks of an attempt at self-exculpation, but it undoubtedly rested upon a certain event which clearly expressed a popular desire to revere the pope in the traditional manner. The pilgrimage of grace, then, was, at the grass roots, strongly opposed to the royal supremacy. Sustaining the importance of this complaint was its linkage with other grievances. The spread of heresy in England, for example, was blamed upon the royal supremacy since the latter had allowed heretical bishops and ministers to employ the king’s new powers over the church to dispose of old beliefs and practices.69 Furthermore, it was felt that the beliefs now dismissed as superstition – notably that purgatory, saintly intercession and the worship of images and relics were practical instruments of salvation – would have been better protected against scepticism, devaluation and rejection if the pope’s primacy had remained intact. Likewise, it was felt that, because of the break with Rome, the English church and its clergy had lost the principal defender of their rights and liberties. What is more, the concern the Pilgrims showed for Princess Mary was very much a papal matter since her maltreatment was so obviously connected with the rejection of Rome. Moreover, as Cromwell’s alleged plan to seize the throne, a Pilgrim fear in the East Riding, could best be stopped by Mary’s legitimisation, a restoration of papal authority became of double importance.70 According to Aske, the Treasons Act that had extended the crime from deeds to words became a Pilgrim grievance simply because it rendered the advocacy of the papal primacy tantamount to high treason.71 For the Pilgrim commons, then, a return of the English church to the Roman pale represented not simply a sentimental attachment to tradition but a practical means of uprooting the heretical innovations and malpractices that the government had recently implanted. The Dissolution of Religious Houses The suppression of the lesser monasteries – enacted in March 1536 and applied throughout the north in August and September – was deplored by the Pilgrims as part of a government plan, one driven by heresy and greed, to appropriate the wealth of the church. First signalled by schemes to 68

 Ibid., f. 56.   SP1/112, fos 29–32, p. II [L.P. XI. 1182 (3)]. 70   See Bush, pp. 103–4. 71   Bateson, p. 565. 69

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confiscate church property in 1529 and again in 1534, the implementation of this plan seemingly began in 1534 with the imposition of new taxes upon the clergy and was taken a stage further in 1536 with a transfer of monastic property to the crown. This led to fears of a further stage of appropriation that would include the remaining religious houses and even affect parish churches, with some dissolved and the rest deprived of their silver, gold, jewels and relics. The importance of the monastic suppressions of 1536 in generating these greater fears was expressed by John Hallom, a captain of the commons from the East Riding: ‘because people saw many abbeys pulled down, they believed all the rest to be true’.72 Rather than sheer fantasy, such fears were soon shown to be well-founded: by 1540 the government had destroyed all religious houses and the shrines, hospitals and almshouses attached to them, and, by 1552, had scooped up and carted off the treasures and relics of parish churches, as well as having suppressed all chantries, religious gilds and secular colleges.73 The Pilgrims’ concern for the preservation of religious houses was demonstrated in their declarations of complaint, in the attacks they mounted against the government’s suppression officers, and in the assistance they offered evicted monks keen to revive their former convents. Yet certain leading Pilgrims were prone to overstate this concern, especially Robert Aske who, at his Examination, singled out the dissolution of the lesser monasteries as ‘the greatest cause’ of the uprising and what ‘the hearts of the commons most grudged at’.74 The same could be said of John Dakyn who lied to the canons of Cartmel/Conishead in telling them that ‘all religious persons in the north parts had entered their houses by putting in of the commons’.75 In fact, certain regional strands of the uprising showed no concern for religious houses: notably the revolts in the Barony of Westmorland, Cumberland, the Palatinate of Durham, the East Riding wapentake of Holderness and some southerly parts of the West Riding. What is more, a number of houses were restored without the Pilgrims’ direct involvement: notably at Seton in Cumberland, Cartmel and Conishead in north Lancashire, Warter in the East Riding and the Friary in Newcastle. In these cases, the religious seized the opportunity, created by the political disruption that the uprising had caused in the north, to

72   For new taxes on clergy, see below, pp. 117–20. For Hallom’s remark, see E36/119, f. 27b [L.P. XII(1). 201 (iv)]. 73   Described by J.J. Scarisbrick in The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), ch. 5. 74   Bateson, p. 558. 75   E36/118, fos 173–173b [L.P. XII(1). 787].

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re-enter.76 Moreover of the 55 houses suppressed in the north only 15 underwent restoration, two of them following the December agreement.77 In another three cases – Norton, Hexham, Lanercost – the dissolution was stopped by acts of local resistance against the suppression commissioners.78 Of the 18 cases in which suppression was arrested or undone, only nine appear to have been carried out by Pilgrims. Yet certain regional movements within the pilgrimage of grace were deeply moved by the monastic issue, demonstrating their commitment either by restoring religious houses or by defending houses already restored.79 The Richmondshire rebels, for example, revived Coverham Abbey on the very same day that they rose in revolt. Their action followed agitation in Wensleydale over the previous fortnight when men had sworn to support articles condemning the suppression of religious houses. On 13 October the commons of Swaledale and the town of Richmond joined the uprising and immediately re-established St Agatha’s Abbey at Easby.80 The following day a rebel assembly, held in the town of Richmond, objected to ‘the pulling down of abbeys’. At the meeting a recruitment bill was composed condemning the dissolution of the lesser monasteries and proclaiming the rebel cause as the defence of the commonwealth. For publicity, it was nailed to church doors in the surrounding countryside.81 A day later, on 15 October, the rebels at another assembly in Richmond again declared their commitment to religious houses by issuing a second letter, this time addressed to surrounding regions and signed Captain Poverty. It offered the following instruction: ‘where abbeys were suppressed we have restored them again and put the religious men into their houses; wherefore

76   For Cartmel and Conishead, see Bush, pp. 263–7. For Seton, see ibid., p. 334. For Newcastle Friary, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 220–21. For Warter, see ibid., p. 330. 77   See G.W.O. Woodward, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London, 1966), pp. 68 and 94. Two of these restorations, at Warter and the Newcastle Friary, occurred after the December agreement. See Bush and Bownes, p. 330. 78   For Norton, see David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. III (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 324–5. For Hexham, see L.P. XI. 504. For Lanercost, see R.W. Hoyle (ed.), Letters of the Cliffords, Lords Clifford and Earls of Cumberland, in Camden Miscellany, XXI in Camden Society, fourth series, 44 (1992), letter 16 (p. 52) which reveals that Cumberland made such a complaint in a missing letter of 9 October; L.P. XII(1). 479; Bush and Bownes, p. 379. In none of these cases was the counteraction taken the work of participants in the pilgrimage of grace. 79   The houses restored by Pilgrims were Easby and Coverham in the North Riding; Haltemprice, North Ferriby and Nunburnholme in the East Riding; Sawley and Healaugh in the West Riding; and Holy Trinity and St Clements in York. 80   For Coverham, see Bush, p. 137. For Easby, see ibid., p. 145. 81   SP1/117, f. 204b [L.P. XII(1). 786 (ii)].

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we exhort you to do the same’.82 For a large body of men from Swaledale, Wensleydale and the Vale of York, resistance to the Dissolution was a worthy cause to fight for, as a monk from the restored Sawley Abbey on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border learned when, passing through Richmond in December, he was told by its inhabitants: ‘rather than our house of St Agatha should go down, we shall all die’.83 Another centre of Pilgrim resistance to the suppression of religious houses lay in and around Beverley where, on 8 October, the earliest of the northern uprisings broke out. The Beverley men were very much moved by the Lincolnshire uprising which by this time had produced a petition of six articles, the first of which objected to the suppression of religious houses.84 So great was the concern for religious houses in Beverley that, when visited by a legation of rebels from Lincolnshire on 11 October, a spokesman for the Beverley commons put the question: ‘what they did with the suppressed abbeys’.85 In response, the legation admitted that, apart from complaining about it in the petition dispatched to Henry VIII, they had done nothing. This was strictly correct since no restorations had taken place in Lincolnshire; but it concealed the fact that rebels from Louth had put a stop to the dissolution of Legbourne Priory by preventing the suppression commissioners from doing their work.86 In Yorkshire, where the process of suppression was already completed, the Beverley men restored expelled monks to their former homes at the priories of Haltemprice and North Ferriby.87 Furthermore, the dissolution of religious houses became, in these very early stages of revolt, a highly charged issue, not only in Beverley but also for the inhabitants of an extensive region to the north of the town, as the yeoman John Hallom raised the countryside between Watton and Great Driffield with the news that Lincolnshire and Beverley had risen against ‘the plucking down of the abbeys and other things touching the commonweal’.88

82   Bush, pp. 146–7. The text of this letter has only partially survived, thanks to being quoted by Barnard Townley when under government examination. He had seen the copy dispatched into Cumberland. See SP1/117, f. 46 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (1), p. 301]. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 8. 83   L.P. XII(1). 491. 84   L.P. XI. 705 (1). For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 1. For its identification with the Lincolnshire rebellion, see above, pp. 2–3. 85   SP1/109, f. 14 [L.P. XI. 828 (xii)]. 86   See M.H. and R. Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–7, and the Exeter Conspiracy of 1538 (Cambridge, 1915) [hereafter Dodds], vol. 1, p. 95. 87   Bush, p. 43. 88   E36/119, f. 21 [L.P. XII(1). 201].

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A third centre of resistance to the suppression of religious houses lay in the West Riding lordship of Percy Fee where Sawley Abbey – situated on the banks of the Ribble close to the Lancashire border – was restored on 12 October, probably after learning that Coverham Abbey had been restored the day before. The two dissolved houses shared the same proprietor, Sir Arthur Darcy, to whom the king had granted property taken from both in exchange for an estate in Northamptonshire.89 On 8 October, as the Sawley monks later reported to Aske, Darcy had confiscated the tithe corn and church ornaments of Tadcaster parsonage, a former possession of Sawley Abbey, suggesting that, after months of inaction, radical changes to the abbey and its estate were about to occur.90 Yet whereas Coverham’s restoration was achieved by a local rising of the commons that soon became an integral part of the pilgrimage of grace, Sawley was restored a week or so before the Percy Fee commons rose in revolt. This fact casts doubt on the Sawley monks’ account of the restoration, especially the claim that they were ‘admitted and entered into their house’ by virtue of ‘the good and loving commons of the country there’.91 In all likelihood, the house was restored on the monks’ own initiative, the result of three of them returning from Furness Abbey after that convent had refused them a home.92 Nonetheless, the laity of the region became quickly involved in the maintenance of the restored house, with 40 of its former servants immediately re-employed and certain locals, notably Sir Nicholas Tempest, supplying it with provisions.93 In this instance Aske intervened to compose a special oath binding the tenants of the Sawley estate to the principles of the pilgrimage of grace as well as obliging them to ignore Darcy and pay their rents to the monks.94 In the circumstances, however, his intervention appeared to be unnecessary. Once restored, the inhabitants of Percy Fee became dedicated to its preservation. This they made clear in a letter to Aske of 27 October. Having mustered at Monubent to resist the approaching army of the earl of Derby who was seeking to resuppress Sawley Abbey, the Percy Fee rebels declared their determination to withstand him on the grounds that the abbey was useful as a source of ‘charitable relief’ for the people of an isolated and wild region.95 Local landowners shared with the commons a loathing of Darcy who, prior to obtaining the site and lands

89

    91   92   93   94   95   90

Bush, pp. 220–23. L.P. XI. 784. SP1/108, fos 180–180b [L.P. XI. 784]. Bush, p. 221; L.P. XII(1). 841 (3). For servants re-employed, see L.P. XI. 872. For Tempest, see Bush, p. 229. SP1/109, f. 110b [L.P. XI. 872 (ii)]. Bateson, p. 338.

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of Sawley Abbey, had been a complete stranger to Percy Fee.96 Everything about the dissolution of Sawley Abbey smacked of irregularity. In view of its sizable income and the large number of monks in residence, it could hardly be called a lesser monastery. This, coupled with the speed of its suppression and the rapid transfer of its wealth to profane use, inevitably created alarm and objection.97 A fourth movement of Pilgrim resistance to the dissolution of monasteries found support in the Lordship of Dent in the West Riding, in the Barony of Kendal and in north Lancashire. Like the Percy Fee rebels, its supporters did not join Aske at Pontefract but remained in the north-west with the intention of defending three restored houses – Conishead, Cartmel and Sawley – against the designs of the earl of Derby.98 The truce agreed on 27 October between the Pilgrim leadership and the king’s deputies stopped Derby’s army at Preston, but had he marched on Sawley he would have encountered not only a host from Percy Fee but also one from Kendal and Dent which, after reaching Lancaster, disbanded upon learning that, with the truce agreed, the threat to Sawley had been lifted. This particular movement produced two muster proclamations that clearly declared concern for dissolved religious houses, the one claiming that the people rose ‘for reformation of such abbeys and monasteries now dissolved and suppressed without just cause’, the other complaining that ‘certain heretics’ were confounding the faith of Christ through the ‘spoiling and suppression of holy places as abbeys, churches and minsters’.99 The rebel movement with the largest number of restorations to its name was led by Aske and centred upon the East Riding minster town of Howden. By the time his army had taken York on 16 October, it would seem that, thanks to his stand against the government, four religious houses had been revived: St Clements and Holy Trinity in York itself, Healaugh in the Ainsty to the west of the city and Nunburnholme to the east of it. While the earliest of Aske’s surviving manifestos – for example the muster proclamations of 11 October and the oath composed by 17 October – omitted to mention religious houses,100 as we have already 96

  Bush, pp. 222–3.  Ibid., pp. 217–22. 98  Ibid., pp. 232–3, 253–5, 268. 99   Toller, pp. 48–9. 100   For first proclamation, see L.P. XI. 622. For oath, see Toller, pp. 50–51 [L.P. XI. 892]. For second proclamation, see St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 467 [L.P. XI. 705 (2)], although it does use the term ‘minsters’ which may refer to religious houses, and on the back of one copy in abbreviated form are the articles of the Lincolnshire petition which begins with a complaint against the suppression of monasteries. For text of these documents, see below, Appendix, docs 4, 2, 5. 97

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seen, during this first week of revolt, Aske relied heavily on the Lincolnshire petition as a declaration of grievance, the first article of which objected to ‘the suppression of so many religious houses as be this instant time suppressed’.101 Moreover, once in York Aske issued an ‘order for religious houses suppressed’, nailing it to the door of York Minister.102 Its purpose was to call upon all dispossessed religious ‘to enter into their houses again’. In addition, it instructed the religious on how to run their restored houses ‘to such time our petition be granted’. Besides providing ‘divine service’, they were instructed to work with, rather than against, the men [termed farmers] to whom the houses had been assigned at their dissolution. The emphasis of the order was to show respect to the king, while making it clear that the Pilgrims intended to undo the dissolution completely. A few days later Aske claimed to have issued the order ‘because the commons would needs put them [that is, the dispossessed religious] in’, a point made in a letter calling upon the clerics and gentlemen who had taken refuge in Pontefract Castle to join the uprising. The same letter stated that the commons were ‘gnawn in their consciences with ... suppression of houses of religion’.103 Oddly enough, the monastic issue failed to feature not only in Aske’s oath – although its specific function was to state the Pilgrims’ basic grievances – but also in the first petition the Pilgrims dispatched to the government: that is, the one resulting from the truce agreed on 27 October. However, this latter omission arose from the petition’s purpose which was to identify general categories of grievance. When the Pilgrim ambassadors, Bowes and Ellerker, took the petition to London, the instructions that accompanied them included the monastic complaint.104 Moreover, it was present in the second petition, the one associated with the armistice agreed in December, its article 4 stating the intention: ‘To have the abbeys suppressed to be restored unto their houses, lands and goods’ and with article 11 censuring the corrupt misconduct of Leigh and Layton, the government officials responsible for the suppression of religious houses in the north.105 The same petition extended the range of concern shown for the regular clergy by demanding in article 6 the reinstatement of the Friars Observant whose banishment from the realm in 1534 followed their refusal to acknowledge the royal supremacy; while article 5 objected to the new clerical taxes because of the adverse effect that they would have upon religious houses. 101

  For this reliance, see above, pp. 5–6.   Bateson, p. 335; SP1/108, f. 181 [L.P. XI. 784 (ii)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 3. 103   Bateson, p. 335. 104   SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)] and Bush, p. 395. 105   L.P. XI. 1246 (1). For text, see below Appendix, doc. 16. 102

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The dissolution of lesser monasteries, and the accretion of patronage it placed at the crown’s disposal, raised among landowners hopes of a grand opportunity to enlarge their estates and thus to counter, if not to solve, a major problem facing them: that is, of landed revenues relentlessly devalued by the conjunction of fixed customary rents with a high rate of inflation. In view of this and the existence of alternative institutions of intercession such as chantries and religious gilds, catholic landowners were able to adopt a remarkably open-minded attitude to the suppression of monasteries; especially following the government’s assurance that it represented no more than a reform of the monastic system and because it was clearly signalled that the property acquired from the dissolution would not be allocated to serving the public good but, as patronage dispensed by the crown, would pass into private ownership.106 The government’s cautionary approach was evident in two outstanding features of the Suppression Act: the exclusion of the greater houses from its terms, for, as institutions commendably free of vice (although the visitors’ reports had demonstrated otherwise), they were deemed worthy of preservation. What is more, it made no mention of the friars. Yet all this appeared to be a means to an end.107 Differences existed among members of the privy council on what to do with religious houses, but the content of the Act was determined, it would seem, by a compromise reached not between conservatives and reformers but between two parties of reform. Reacting to the disquiet caused by the last suppression of religious houses – the one carried out by Wolsey shortly before his fall and experienced at first hand by himself as one of its administrators – Cromwell wished to proceed gradually: that is, as he put it, ‘by little and little, not suddenly by parliament’. In contrast, Audley and Riche and other councillors advocated suppression by parliamentary sanction. The views of both parties were, to some extent, respected by the policy pursued. Cromwell ensured that the monastic system was terminated in the late 1530s by means of pressing religious houses to dissolve themselves voluntarily, while Audley and Riche had their way with the 1536 Act for the Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries. The party of reform that significantly gained nothing in 1536 was the one represented by Hugh Latimer, the bishop of Worcester. Believing that, since purgatory was now in doubt, so were the institutions created by 106   R.W. Hoyle, ‘The origins of the dissolution of the monasteries’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995): 276–7; Woodward, Dissolution, p. 41. That the monastic lands would be conferred upon loyal servants, rather than reserved for the foundation of educational establishments or for the relief of the poor, was revealed in the very early stages of the bill’s passage through parliament. See L.P. X. 445. 107   Hoyle is arguably somewhat naive in taking the presentation of the Act at face value.

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belief in its existence, he must have advocated, as a privy councillor, a total abolition of religious houses by parliamentary statute. He was also keen to reserve the profits of suppression for the public rather than private good, in order that they should be devoted to the relief and education of the poor. With Latimer’s two wishes denied, conservatives in religion, whether they were abbots in the Lords or gentlemen in the Commons, were given a strong incentive to support the passage of the Suppression Act.108 Yet, no matter what was claimed in the Act, the suppressions of 1536 appeared to offer further evidence of the government’s heretical leanings. That it was driven not simply by financial need but also by a reformist antipathy to saints was revealed in the instructions issued to the monastic visitors of 1535 for collecting information on the relics found in religious houses as well as for reporting on the immorality of monks, canons and nuns. From this information a Black Book was compiled and read out in parliament causing members to cry out ‘down with them’. Another suggestion of heretical intent was found in the injunctions the visitors were obliged to impose on religious houses. They ordered the brethren on pain of punishment to read the Scriptures to each other, forbad them to assume that their status as monks guaranteed salvation, emphasised the importance of relating everything to Christ and warned them against encouraging people to make offerings to saints through the display of images and relics or by claiming ‘feigned miracles’. Instead they had to encourage people to give the poor the money ‘that they thought to offer to their images or relics’. The contemptuous actions of the visitors in removing, as well as in reporting on, saintly objects appeared to confirm the heretical connexion; as did the suppression commissioners’ irreverent treatment of relics, which, moreover, could not be blamed simply upon oafishness because the approach they followed seemed consonant with the critical attitude adopted by the Ten Articles and the Royal Injunctions of 1536 towards 108   These differences in the council are uniquely presented in an anonymous Elizabethan chronicle, printed in D.M. Loades (ed.), The Papers of George Wyatt, Camden Society, fourth series, 5 (1968), pp. 159–60. For Latimer’s position, see an account he gave of the passing of the Act in 1549 in Sermons of Hugh Latimer (Parker Society, 1844), p. 123; and also see his 1537 reasoning that ‘the founding of monasteries argued purgatory to be, so the pulling of them down argueth it not to be’ with its ironical conclusion: ‘What uncharitableness and cruelness seemeth it to be to destroy monasteries, if purgatory be! Now it seemeth not convenient the Act of Parliament [for suppression of lesser monasteries] to preach one thing and the pulpit another clean contrary.’ To which Henry VIII responded: ‘Why then do you?’, which rather suggests that the king did not see the Act as resting on a disbelief in purgatory whereas Latimer did. See Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer (Parker Society, 1845), p. 249. For Latimer’s commitment to using the monastic lands for the public good, see his association with Anne Boleyn as explored by E.W. Ives in ‘Anne Boleyn and the early reformation in England: the contemporary evidence’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994): 398–400.

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the veneration of saints.109 This connexion with heresy helps to explain why there were leading Pilgrims of aristocratic status, background and connexion committed to safeguarding even the lesser monasteries from suppression – notably Sir Nicholas Fairfax, Sir Thomas Percy, Marmaduke Neville, Lord Darcy, Sir Robert Constable, Sir Thomas Hilton, Robert Bowes and Robert Aske. Constable and Aske dismissed the Act as irregular because of the excessive government control that parliament was under at the time and because inadequacies in the drafting had rendered it invalid. Such legal concerns, however, were aired to strengthen an objection that essentially sprang from a concern with matters of faith.110 As for the clergy, regulars might be expected to show more commitment to opposing the dissolution of religious houses than seculars; yet the formers’ attitude towards the Suppression Act was complicated and ambivalent. Many heads of the larger religious houses, in fact, appeared willing to accept the suppression of the lesser religious houses, principally in the hope that, by satisfying the government’s appetite for the acquisition of church wealth, it might safeguard their own establishments from confiscation. For this reason the abbots gave their assent to the Act in the House of Lords; and, to the annoyance of some rebel leaders, were unwilling to let their brethren join the Pilgrim host or to supply it with troops and provisions.111 And yet the religious who supported the uprising were not simply dispossessed monks and canons, but also brethren from the larger houses – notably Bridlington, Whalley, Carlisle Priory, Newburgh, Malton, Watton, 109   See Woodward, Dissolution, p. 33. For the Black Book and its presentation to parliament, see an Elizabethan document entitled ‘The manner of dissolving the abbeys by king Henry VIII’, printed in Thomas Wright (ed.), Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of Monasteries, Camden Society, old series, 26 (1843), p. 114. The Black Book was presumably the Compendium Compertorum, the returns of the visitors which provided accounts of monastic immorality as well as information on the way religious houses promoted saint worship through relics which the public were encouraged to venerate by means of pilgrimages and offerings. For surviving fragments, see L.P. X. 364 (1–3). For parliament’s response to the Black Book, see Latimer’s 1549 sermon, printed in Sermons of Hugh Latimer, p. 123. For visitors’ injunctions, see D. Wilkins (ed.), Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (London, 1737), vol. III, pp. 789–91. For confiscation of relics by visitors, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 384–5. For irreverence of suppression commissioners, see below, n. 132. For Ten Articles and Royal Injunctions, see below, pp. 84–6. 110   For Fairfax, see L.P. XII(1). 369; Bush, p. 200. For Thomas Percy, see SP1/108, f.191 [L.P. XI. 792]. For Marmaduke Neville, see L.P. XI. 1319. For Sir Robert Constable, see L.P. XI. 1244. For identification of the author as Constable, see M.L. Bush, ‘The Tudor polity and the pilgrimage of grace’, Historical Research, 80 (2007): 49, n. 5. For Lord Darcy, see L.P. XII(1). 783. For Thomas Hilton, see Bush and Bownes, p. 323. For Robert Bowes, see ibid., pp. 93–4. For Robert Aske, see Bateson, pp. 335–6; SP1/111, f. 109 [L.P. XI. 1069]. For criticism of the making of the Act, see Bateson, pp. 559, 569. 111   L.P. XII(1). 369; Bush, p. 200.

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Jervaulx, Holm Cultram, Kirkstall, Guisborough, Rievaulx, Fountains, Byland, Whitby, Pontefract and Furness – as well as a number of friars. Within this group several may well have been driven to take part by reasons other than opposition to the Suppression Act: such as allegiance to the papal supremacy, as at Watton and Furness, or objection to Cromwellian interference with the running of religious houses. Not only had Cromwell imposed on all religious houses injunctions of a reformist hue but also on several occasions he had replaced the head with one of his own nominees, as at Watton, Guisborough, Rievaulx, Carlisle and Fountains, or had inserted informers of the new learning into the convent, as at Furness. Yet the larger houses must have been unsettled by the apprehension that the government’s appetite for church wealth and its hostility to saints would not be satisfied by a demolition of the lesser monasteries; and that this was a prelude to their own suppression – a point of view held, for example, at Bridlington, Whalley, Holm Cultram and Jervaulx.112 Objections to the dissolution of religious houses were also held by members of the secular clergy, not necessarily because they were committed to the monastic cause but because they opposed the transfer of church wealth to the laity. As vicar general of the sprawling archdeaconry of Richmond, John Dakyn was undoubtedly riled by the fact that it had suffered so many suppressions. He made the point that ‘what was consecrated by God should not be profaned’.113 This objection was shared even by the archbishop of York. He supported Henry’s supreme headship of the English church and sympathised with the government’s hostility to saint worship, so much so that he found nothing amiss in the Ten Articles; but, firmly convinced that the wealth of the church should be retained for a spiritual purpose, he held grave doubts about the wisdom of dissolving religious houses.114 In this respect both he and Dakyn were in agreement with the Pilgrim clerics who, meeting on 4 December 1536 to formulate 112   For overviews, see Knowles, Religious Orders in England, vol. III, ch. 25 and Woodward, Dissolution, pp. 97–101. A basic source for the involvement of a number of the larger establishments is SP1/115, fos 212b–213 [L.P. XII(1). 369]. For individual houses, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 330–31 (Watton); ibid., pp. 203–5 (Whalley); ibid., pp. 100, 103 (Fountains); ibid., pp. 100, 112–13, 331–2 (Jervaulx); ibid., p. 88 (Guisborough); ibid., pp. 38–9 (Malton); Bush, p. 213 (Bridlington); ibid., pp. 359–60 (Carlisle); ibid., pp. 358–9 (Holm Cultram); ibid., pp. 179–80 (Jervaulx); ibid., pp. 230, 241 (Whalley); ibid., pp. 269–70 (Furness); ibid., p. 213 (Malton). The participating friars included John Pickering, see Bush, pp. 212–13; Robert Esch, see ibid., pp. 60–61; Thomas Johnson, see ibid., p. 60; and John Aske, see ibid., p. 135. 113   L.P. XII(1). 786 (ii). Also see Bush, pp. 180–81. 114   For his views on headship, see L.P. XII(1). 786 (ii/3); on Ten Articles, see SP1/117, fos 7b–8 [L.P. XII(1). 1022] and L.P. XII(1). 1011, p. 454; on dissolution of monasteries, see L.P. XII(1). 786 (ii/2).

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an opinion on what was amiss in the English church, stated: ‘we think that lands given to God, the church or religious men may not be taken away and put to profane use by the laws of God’.115 In making this point, they underlined the novelty of the 1536 Dissolution which differed from previous suppressions – such as those carried out by Wolsey in the 1520s – in the vital sense that, whereas the wealth released by the latter had been earmarked for a religious purpose, namely the foundation of colleges for the training of clergymen and the pursuit of Christian learning, the Suppression Act of 1536 had granted the proceeds to the king’s person to ‘do and use therewith … to the pleasure of Almighty God and to the honour and profit of this realm’. And, as Henry VIII had already demonstrated – by giving Warter to the earl of Rutland and transferring Sawley Abbey along with lands attached to Coverham Priory and Holy Trinity in York to Sir Arthur Darcy – the suppressions of 1536 established the precedent for putting wealth, which for centuries had been devoted to a spiritual and public purpose, to a purely secular and private use. The enormity of what had been done was spotlighted by Aske who in the oath he composed for the tenants of Sawley Abbey required them to pay their rents to ‘God and our blessed lady’ rather than to a gentleman.116 By presenting the suppression of religious houses as ‘the greatest cause’ of the uprising, and by alleging that the instructions he had issued for their restoration was in response to the wishes of the commons, Aske implied that the monastic issue was of deep concern not only to clerics and gentlemen but also to the rest of society.117 This view was supported by those dispossessed monks who excused the restoration of a religious house as something done upon instruction from the commons.118 But how and why were the commons committed to this cause? Undeniable proof of their commitment lies in the direct involvement of the Richmondshire commons in restoring Coverham and St Agatha’s; in the part played by the commons about Beverley in restoring North Ferriby and Haltemprice; in the engagement of the commons of Percy Fee, Kendal and Dent in the defence of Sawley Abbey against the earl of Derby.119 For the north in general, the commitment of the commons was clearly evident in the agitation shown in the first week of December 1536 when it was suspected 115

  SP1/112, f. 116 [L.P. XII(1). 1245].   For previous dissolutions, see Woodward, Dissolution, pp. 48–9; J.A.F. Thomson, The Early Tudor Church and Society 1485–1529 (Harlow, 1993), p. 194. For gift of Warter, see L.P. XI. 519. For Sawley, see Bush, pp. 217–23. For Aske, see SP1/109, f. 110b [L.P. XI. 872 (ii)]. For novelty of Act, see Woodward, Dissolution, p. 66. 117   Bateson, pp. 335, 558. 118   See above, p. 65. 119   See above, pp. 63–6. 116

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that the Pilgrim leaders would comply with the king’s wish to have the restored houses immediately resuppressed. To calm them down Aske gave the assurance that nothing would happen before the promised York parliament. For their further assurance, he introduced a formal procedure, invented and applied by himself, whereby the restored monks were first put out and then put in again, allegedly on the king’s authority.120 The commons’ dedication to undoing the dissolution was also made evident in a seditious bill of early 1537 which, in attempting to revive the Pilgrim march on London, declared: ‘the abbeys which were suppressed are in their houses by the commons and not by the agreement at Doncaster’.121 Such support for religious houses undoubtedly rested on a broad spectrum of complaint, not all of it religious. This was made clear, at the very start of the northern uprisings, in the Lincolnshire petition – a manifesto the Pilgrims adopted as their own – which objected to the suppression of religious houses not only because ‘whereby the service of God is minished’ but also because ‘the poorality of your realm be unrelieved’ to the ‘great hurt for the commonwealth’.122 As Aske revealed in his Examination, the dissolution of the lesser monasteries was opposed for a great variety of reasons. According to him, the Pilgrims deplored its impact on the economy of the north in causing a drain of coin to the south, in creating unemployment, in raising rents, in ending an important source of poor relief, and in terminating the public works freely provided by religious houses for the upkeep of river banks, sea walls, bridges and roads.123 Nonetheless, the same complaint also expressed sincerely held and potent concerns for the safety of the faith; as Aske indicated in his Examination. This was first because the Dissolution was seen as the work of heretics bent on repudiating purgatory and on denying saintly intercession; and secondly because, by reducing the wealth of the church, they felt that it would impair the clergy’s competence to perform God’s service. The first reason stemmed from the part traditionally played by monasteries in preserving relics and in making them accessible to the public in wellappointed shrines; the second reason stemmed from the fact that, unlike earlier dissolutions, this one was clearly intended to divert wealth from a spiritual to a purely temporal use. Yet the government’s confiscation of church property so moved the Pilgrim commons because it represented much more than the suppression of lesser religious houses. For them it was but one stage in an irreligious 120

  Bateson, pp. 341–2; Bush and Bownes, pp. 16–17.   SP1/114, f. 167 [L.P. XII(1). 138]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc.

121

18a. 122

  SP1/108, f. 45 [L.P. XI. 705 (1)]. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 1.   Bateson, pp. 561–2.

123

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plan to transfer the wealth of the church – not only the lands and goods of all monasteries but also the treasures of all parish churches and religious gilds – to the crown. The fear that the suppression of the lesser monasteries placed all abbeys in danger of dissolution first surfaced on the eve of the uprising. In giving evidence to the government of the Lincolnshire uprising, Robert Ledes said it was ‘commonly spoken among the people that many abbeys were put down and more should be’; and a month earlier it was rumoured that all religious houses would be suppressed with the one exception of Westminster Abbey.124 The prevalence of such fears was revealed by William Breyer who had travelled about the country in late September and early October, using the hospitality of religious houses for bed and breakfast. He recorded what he had seen and heard in a confessional report made to the government on 22 October. According to him, ‘every abbot asked him whether any more abbeys should be suppressed and he said nay’.125 Shortly after the Pilgrims’ first appointment with the government on 27 October, John Pickering had composed his stirring song.126 He claimed that it was a compilation of ballads, supplied to him by John Hallom, that minstrels had circulated in the East Riding.127 If so, it would appear to voice the concerns of the commons. The song expressed the view that with heresy and tyranny acting in conjunction Christ’s church very likely is spoiled to be And all abbeys suppressed it is more pity.

The fear that all religious houses would be suppressed, it declared, was fully justified on the grounds that the dissolution of the lesser monasteries had resulted from the application of certain heretical beliefs. As Pickering put it: If poverty had been chief cause of this Then God the less we should offend.

In other words, if the action taken against religious houses had sprung from the government’s need to improve its financial position, the catholic religion 124   L.P. XII(1). 70 (xii, x). For earlier plans to seize church wealth, see Hoyle, ‘Origins’: 284–5, 290–94. 125   SP1/104, f. 41 [L.P. XI. 841 (ii)]. But most of the abbeys he claimed to have visited were not in the north. 126   SP1/118, f. 292 [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (5)]. For full text, see below, Appendix, doc. 12. 127   See above, p. 12.

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would have had nothing to fear; but this was not the case. Since it rather sprang from a heretical antipathy to the very existence of religious houses, two conclusions needed to be drawn: one, that the 1536 Suppression Act had granted the greater houses merely a reprieve; two, that the current Dissolution policy represented something deeply offensive to the faith of Christ, in the sense that a catholic church bereft of religious houses would surely lose something of its basic nature. The complaint that the policy of Dissolution was the work of heretics was not confined to Pickering’s Song. It found expression in a Captain Poverty muster bill that blamed heretics for suppressing abbeys, churches and minsters. It was also made evident in the charge, brought by the Cleveland commons against the captured James Rokeby, that he was a lollard and suppressor of abbeys. This point of view was not confined to the commons. It was expressed, for example, by the gentleman Nicholas Fairfax who presented opposition to the suppression of religious houses as an act ‘in defence of the faith’ against the onslaught of heresy.128 The Pilgrims were keen to make the point that what the dissolution of religious houses placed under threat was not simply a matter of sentimental attachment or of peripheral importance but something integral to the Christian religion, stressing that the benefits conferred by religious houses were not confined to the founders and their lineal descendants, for whose souls the monks had been perpetually commissioned to pray, but applied to the whole of society. Any reduction in the ‘wealth of the church’, they felt, must adversely affect its capacity to serve God. As a commons’ petition that circulated in Richmondshire in early 1537 put it: ‘the profit of Holy Church’ had to be protected for ‘the upholding of the Christian faith’. Dakyn uttered a similar sentiment in claiming that the suppression of religious houses imperilled the ‘estate of the church’; as did Friar Pickering who explained the uprising in terms of defending ‘the wealth of the church’; and as did a proclamation composed in Cumberland which opposed any unlawful act ‘that is against the faith of Christ, the church profit and the commonwealth’.129 To clinch the religious argument for the preservation of religious houses, the Pilgrims also resorted to a more specific defence, asserting that religious houses were of outstanding importance for the following reasons: first, in offering sacramental services and moral guidance in areas where parish churches and secular clergy were 128   For quotes from Pickering’s Song, see SP1/118, f. 292. For Captain Poverty muster bill, see Toller, pp. 48–9 and below, Appendix, doc. 10. For Fairfax, see L.P. XII(1). 369. For Rokeby, see SP1/118, f. 256 [L.P. XII(1). 1011]. 129   For the Richmondshire petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 18b. For Dakyn’s comment, see SP1/117, f. 206 [L.P. XII(1). 786/ii (15)]. For Pickering’s point, see L.P. XII(1). 1019. For the Cumberland proclamation, see Denton, pp. 479–80.

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thin on the ground; secondly, in maintaining a public display of saintly objects through the worship of which not only local inhabitants but also pilgrims from far and wide were given the opportunity to persuade saints to intervene in their favour; and thirdly, in setting forth a worthy example of Christian virtue through the charity and hospitality that they habitually dispensed.130 For the Pilgrim commons, the government’s suppression of religious houses was magnified as a crime against the Christian faith because of the threat it posed to parish churches. In the early stages of the uprising, rumours abounded of the government’s determination to demolish certain churches and to confiscate the treasures of those left standing.131 Rendering these rumours credible was the blasphemous behaviour of government officials in handling the sacred contents of suppressed houses, as well as the connexions known to exist between religious houses and parish churches.132 In parts of the north the chapel attached to a religious house served as the parish church; and since in Lancashire and Yorkshire parishes tended to be very extensive, the problems for communities isolated by difficult terrain, or through living miles away from the local parish church, could sometimes be remedied by the establishment of chapels dependent with services provided by brethren from a nearby monastery. Parish churches, moreover, were frequently in the possession of religious houses, the result of appropriation. Parishioners, understandably, became prone to anxiety when the religious house to which their place of worship was attached suddenly ceased to exist. Parish churches and religious houses, moreover, shared the role of being repositories of sacred objects. For this reason the sight or hearsay of their removal from religious houses – not for transference to other ecclesiastical institutions but because they had been condemned as bogus and merely of material value – gave substance to rumours that as a next step parish churches would be deprived of their images, plate, jewels and relics. 130   See Aske’s summary of religious functions of monasteries: Bateson, p. 561. G.W. Bernard’s The King’s Reformation (New Haven, 2005), ch. 4, does little more than reiterate the undisputed point that the suppression of religious houses was a grievance of central importance to the pilgrimage of grace. He fails to establish why the lesser monasteries should have caused so much concern in the north over the matter of faith. For an attempt to work out the meaning of monasteries in terms of their religious and social benefits for the laity, see Claire Cross, ‘Monasticism and society in the diocese of York, 1520–1540’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 38 (1988): 131–45. Also see Woodward, Dissolution, pp. 19–26, 41; Thomson, Early Tudor Church, pp. 217–18. 131   For rumours that church treasures were to be confiscated, see, for example, Darcy’s letter of 6 October in L.P. XI. 563. 132   For behaviour of commissioners, see comments by Aske in Bateson, p. 355 and by Dakyn in L.P. XII(1). 786 (ii). For connexions between parish churches and religious houses, see Thomson, Early Tudor Church, pp. 214–17.

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Since such objects were regarded as intercessory and sacramental aids, their removal was regarded as detrimental to the spiritual service offered in church as well as an outrageous act of robbery inflicted upon the parochial community to whom, having been donated by grateful parishioners, church treasures were assumed to belong. It could be readily argued that, if the dissolution of religious houses and the contemptuous treatment of their sacred possessions stemmed from heretical beliefs, parish churches would inevitably come under attack. For this reason, the dissolution of religious houses could be seen as a serious threat to spiritual services, even though most people received them not from monks, through the medium of a religious house, but rather from the secular clergy, through the medium of the parish, or from stipendiary priests hired to service religious gilds, most of which operated from private altars in parish churches. The government took the precaution of allowing monastic chapels that had served as parish churches to survive when the attendant house was dissolved, but this did not necessarily pacify the opposition. When Cartmel chapel in Lancashire Oversands was left intact, its parishioners remained concerned about the fate of Cartmel Priory since its suppression had led to the removal of certain relics from the chapel. The same was true of the parishioners of Easby near Richmond whose church had also been the chapel of a suppressed religious house (that is, the abbey of St Agatha).133 Moreover, shortly before the outbreak of the pilgrimage of grace, William Breyer arrived in the West Riding township of Dent and was accosted by a blacksmith who, having noticed that he wore the king’s arms, told him: ‘thy master is a thief for he pulleth down all such churches in the country’.134 The area was understandably sensitive to rumours that the government’s suppression plans would include churches as well as monasteries because the parish church at Sedbergh, along with its chapel at Dent, had belonged to the dissolved abbey of Coverham, while the chapel dependent at Garsdale in the same parish had belonged to the dissolved abbey of St Agatha. Breyer later learned that since the 25 September the men of Dent, along with three other parishes, had formed a federation bound by oath, moved, it would seem, by the belief that the suppression of religious houses would entail the dissolution, or at least the robbery, of parish churches. For this reason, they produced a manifesto in the form of a list of articles laying down – in the words of Lord Darcy who reported the matter – that they would ‘suffer no spoils nor suppressions of abbeys, parish churches nor of their jewels and ornaments’.135 A third instance of the connexion readily made between the dissolution of a religious house and a consequent attack 133

  Bush, pp. 265–6.   SP1/109, f. 37b [L.P. XI. 841]. 135   SP1/106, f. 286 [L.P. XI. 563]. 134

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upon a parish church surfaced on 8 October when Sir Arthur Darcy was reported to have confiscated the jewels and tithe corn of Tadcaster church, by right of having become owner of Sawley Abbey to which the church had belonged.136 In a variety of ways, then, the dissolution of religious houses could be seen as impairing the services that the commons expected to receive from the parish clergy in the form of the ministration of sacraments and sacramentals and through the provision of moral instruction. The dissolution of monasteries further offended the commons because of an association with saint worship. For centuries the monasteries had been responsible for accumulating and protecting saintly images and relics and for maintaining the impressive shrines in which they were publicly displayed and to which people made pilgrimages. In a speech to the inhabitants of Pontefract Castle on 19 October Aske charged the senior clergy, presumably those qualified to be members of convocation and the House of Lords, with failing to defend the ‘ornaments of the churches and abbeys suppressed and the violating of relics by the suppressors’.137 He returned to this theme the following April in his Examination when, among a great range of reasons offered to explain why he and ‘the whole country [that is, the north] grudged against’ the Suppression Act, he claimed it was because they saw ‘the temple of God ruffed [treated harshly] and pulled down’ and ‘the ornaments and relics of the church irreverent used’.138 Under the old religion saintly objects had played a vital part in the practice of religious worship, thanks to the belief in purgatory and the willingness of people to believe that, by venerating saintly images and relics, dead souls could be raised to heaven and God’s grace could be effectively solicited for the living, notably those afflicted by ill-health and infertility. Within this scheme of things the effort and dedication invested in making pilgrimages to the shrines of saints was considered especially efficacious in securing the grace of God. But in July and August 1536 the government issued two policy statements, the Ten Articles and the Royal Injunctions, which, especially when read in conjunction, appeared to challenge the whole practice of appealing to saints for intercessory help – partly by questioning the existence of purgatory, partly by rejecting saints as genuine intercessors between man and God – thus casting doubt on the practice of making offerings to them and of pilgrimaging to their shrines.139 In counteraction, the north rebelled in a protest deliberately called the ‘pilgrimage of grace’, 136

  L.P. XI. 784.   Bateson, p. 355. 138   Bateson, p. 561. 139   For the attachment of religious houses to the promotion of saint worship and the veneration of relics, see Woodward, Dissolution, pp. 32–3, 51–2; R.B. Dobson, Durham Priory 1400–1450 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 11–17, 27–8; G.A.J. Hodgett, Tudor Lincolnshire 137

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a prominent aim of which was to preserve the clerics – monks and canons – responsible for serving pilgrims seeking saintly support. In his speech to the residents of Pontefract Castle on 20 October, Robert Aske dwelt upon a further reason for opposing the suppression of religious houses. Echoing the first article of the Lincolnshire petition, he claimed that, especially in the north, ‘much of the relief of the commons was by succour of abbeys’.140 He elaborated upon the point in his Examination, applying it to those abbeys ‘in the mountains and deserted places’ which dispensed charitable relief not only to the local poor but also, in the form of hospitality, to strangers passing by on business.141 Aske’s point of view appeared to be strongly influenced by his communications with Sawley Abbey, the defenders of which on 28 October informed him that this abbey was worth preserving since it provided ‘the charitable relief of those parts and standing in a mountain country and amongst three forests’.142 The Sawley monks made the same point in a letter to Thomas Percy in December. Presenting the house as founded by the Percy family ‘for prayers, alms and hospitality’, they claimed that the abbey had a vital part to play not only in offering intercessory prayers but also in providing the ‘works of charity and man’s relief’ that its isolation in ‘a barren country betwixt the king’s forests’ made necessary.143 In doing so, they rather suggested that the earlier letter to Aske was their handiwork, although it had been addressed from ‘the men of worship’ who led the Percy Fee commons. The monks’ dedication to this purpose was evident in a surviving ballad, probably the composition of one of them. It proposed that without religious houses the poor would suffer because ‘for there they had/Both ale and bread/At times of need’, receiving ‘succour great/In all distress’. Verse 12 was made to voice the supporting view of the commons: In trouble and care Where that we were In manner all bare Of our substance, We found good bate At churchmen’s gate Without checkmate Or variance. (Lincoln, 1975), p. 35. For a consideration of the Ten Articles and the Royal Injunctions of 1536, see below, pp. 84–7. 140   Bateson, pp. 335–6. 141   Bateson, p. 561. 142   Bateson, p. 338. 143   SP1/108, f. 183 [L.P. XI. 785].

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Awarding this role a religious as well as a commonwealth meaning was the Pilgrim presumption that, once taken out of the hands of the church, the wealth of religious houses would cease to serve as a source of Christian charity and instead be used, as Aske bitterly put it, ‘for lucre’ and self-advantage.144 In itself, the suppression of lesser religious houses would appear not to justify the alarm shown by the Pilgrims or to merit the importance that the commons attached to it. However, because they saw it as the prelude to a much more ambitious project of dissolution – one involving the abolition of all religious houses, the confiscation of church treasures, images and relics, and the impoverishment of the clerical estate – the suppression of the lesser houses appeared to be the spearhead of a major attack by the forces of heresy upon the faith of Christ and to represent a key step towards ending the practice of catholicism in England. With so much resting upon it, the Suppression Act of March 1536 had to be repealed; and of the three orders, the commons had, perhaps, the greatest urge to bring it about. The Demotion of the Saints That the Pilgrims condemned the government’s religious reforms as heretical and contrary to the Christian faith, and did so from the very start of the uprising, was made plainly evident in the oaths they swore and imposed upon their captives. Although the Pilgrim oath came in many variations, a typical form insisted upon the requirement to be true ‘to the faith of the church’, while instructions for its application revealed that this meant maintaining catholicism against heretics whose wish to achieve its subversion was evident in their willingness to offend the law of God.145 The Pilgrims’ petitions made the same general point.146 Nonetheless, the range of religious issues that gave cause for concern was never made clear, mainly because, apart from the break with Rome and the dissolution of 144   For full text of ballad, see below, Appendix, doc. 13. For Aske’s remark, see Bateson, p. 561. 145  On occasions the oath became so abbreviated as to conceal its full meaning: for example, when it became ‘To be true to God, the king and the commons’ [L.P. XI. 879; 1230]. But that it was a defence of the faith against heresy was made clear in a letter of 10 October from the town of Beverley to the Lincolnshire rebels, see below, Appendix, doc. 7; in the lengthy oath composed by Aske about 17 October, see below, Appendix, doc. 2, which resonated in several other oaths such as the one associated with Sawley Abbey [L.P. XI. 872] and another with Clitheroe [L.P. XI. 892]; and in the oath associated with Captain Poverty and his following in the upland north. See SP1/117, f. 54b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. 146   For the references to faith and heresy in the petitions, see below, Appendix, doc. 14, article 4, and doc. 16, articles 1, 7 and 8.

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the monasteries, the Pilgrims chose to substantiate their charge simply by citing certain heretical books and by naming certain heretics, not by identifying the heretical acts that the government had committed.147 Historians have consequently assumed that the Pilgrims found acceptable a great deal of the Henrician religious settlement, especially with regard to the Ten Articles of Religion, an official statement of doctrine and liturgical practice issued the previous July. The Dodds set the prevalent tone, declaring that ‘the Pilgrims were ready to acknowledge the Ten Articles as issued by the king’.148 This has been reaffirmed in recent years by G.R. Elton who declared that the Pilgrims ‘inclined to accepting the Ten Articles’ and by Richard Rex who wrote: ‘Although it is often asserted that the articles were among the grievances of the pilgrimage of grace, there is no evidence for this. On the contrary, the Pilgrims wanted the teaching of the articles enforced.’149 That this view still retains some credibility is evident in recent studies of the uprising. Geoffrey Moorhouse claimed that the Pilgrims ‘were prepared to accept’ the Ten Articles ‘as a proper summary of the faith’: that is, apart from the fact that ‘the articles implicitly ratified Henry’s Supremacy’. Richard Hoyle regarded the Ten Articles as a thorn in the side of the clergy but admitted that ‘there is little sign that the laity as a whole shared the clergy’s anger’.150 Embedded in the historiography of the Henrician reformation is the conviction that catholics at the time did not find the Ten Articles objectionable. This is attributed to the moderation of Henry VIII and his leading part in their composition; to their alleged aim of ending religious discord by establishing a broad-based settlement of religion; and to the process of formulation, especially the compromises that conservatives and reformers made to secure agreement on the content.151 The view that 147

  L.P. XI. 1246 (1), article 1. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16.   Dodds, vol. I, p. 374. 149   G.R. Elton, ‘Politics and the pilgrimage of grace’, in B. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation (Manchester, 1980), p. 43; Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (Basingstoke, 1993), p. 146. 150   Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Pilgrimage of Grace: the Rebellion that Shook Henry VIII’s Throne (London, 2002), pp. 193–4; Hoyle, pp. 87–8. 151   For the various views put forward in recent times, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 392–4; Christopher Haigh, The English Reformations (Oxford, 1993), pp. 128–30, 132; A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964), p. 175; G.W. Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy, 1533–1546’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998): 334–6 and his King’s Reformation, pp. 276–92. For appreciations of the Ten Articles as an attack on the catholic faith, see J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968), p. 337; Susan Brigden, London, pp. 243–4; MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 164; Alan Kreider, English Chantries: the Road to Dissolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 124; Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988), pp. 223–4. 148

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intrinsically the Ten Articles were not against the old religion was put at its most extreme by Rex who wrote: ‘Despite some scholarly claims to the contrary, the articles were, except for their reservations over purgatory and the cult of saints, largely Catholic.’ However, Rex’s assessment is questionable, given the generally accepted importance of purgatory and saints to late medieval catholicism, and his own willingness to admit as much.152 Arguably, the way historians have sought to establish the basic meaning of the Ten Articles by conducting a theological analysis of their content to determine whether, in essence, they were catholic or protestant misses the obvious point that, from a historical perspective, the meaning of the articles depends not upon what scholars now think but upon how they were perceived at the time. In this respect the attitude that the Pilgrims adopted towards them has a special interpretative significance. Rex’s claim that the Ten Articles were absent from the uprising’s grievances is just not true. Although unmentioned in the petitions that the Pilgrims addressed to the king, the Ten Articles, nonetheless, did comprise part of the Pilgrim complaint against heresy: first, because they omitted to mention four of the traditionally recognised seven sacraments; secondly, because, in reassessing the importance of saints, they denied their ability to save souls and work miracles; and thirdly because, in doubting the existence of purgatory, they radically questioned the catholic view of the afterlife. Intensifying the Pilgrims’ hostility to the Ten Articles was the fact that they belonged to a corpus of policy statements, all of them issued by the government between 1534 and 1536, whose application was bound to alter religious practices at the parish level and, therefore, to affect everyone. The first of these policy statements was a circular issued by Cranmer in April 1534 to suspend the liturgical practice of pronouncing the great sentence of excommunication. Enacted four times a year at Sunday service, the practice enabled parish priests, by virtue of the pope’s authority, to place a curse of damnation upon any parishioner found guilty of committing a listed offence. The associated ritual could be spectacular and dramatic, with the priest holding a lighted candle as he identified the offence, pronounced the sentence and named the accursed. In some forms, as the church bells tolled the death knell, the officiating priest would dash the extinguished candle to the ground with a spit of contempt. The sentence of excommunication thus passed was truly awful and, arguably, out of keeping with the relative mildness of some of the listed offences. On the authority of the pope and the saints in Heaven, it condemned the accursed – unless they obtained absolution – not only to ‘dwell in the pains of hell for ever without end’ but also in this life to suffer death of the soul, having 152

  Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, pp. 146, 75.

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been struck down by ‘the sword of holy church’. This meant exclusion from receiving the sacraments, from participation in communal prayer and from burial in Christian ground. While the suspension of the Curse was clearly a by-product of the break with Rome, it could also be seen as having other implications, notably a questioning of the authority of saints and of the church’s power to decide the fate of souls. In effect, suspension meant abolition. To remind priests that cursing had gone, the point was emphatically made in the instructions to the clergy that Cranmer issued in 1535 for regulating preaching and the order of prayer.153 A second major alteration to the church service resulted from two revisions to the official Order of Prayer – that is, the bidding of the bedes – to create a New Order of Prayer. The first revision occurred in June 1535. It not only omitted prayers for the pope and cardinals but also made no mention of purgatory.154 The second revision followed in July 1536. Although occasioned by the fall of Anne Boleyn and her replacement by Jane Seymour, it did much more than substitute the name of one queen for another.155 In ordering prayers for the dead, the first revision had added: ‘specially of such as it shall please the preacher to name’. In other words, it accepted, as an integral part of the church service, the practice of the bede or obit roll – the formal listing of the named dead for the purpose of including them in an anniversary mass.156 In contrast, the second revision simply called for prayers to be offered ‘for the souls that be departed’. Having omitted all reference to the practice of naming beneficiaries, it failed to offer any assurance of the efficacy of prayers for the dead, merely stating that the fate of the dead should be left to the pleasure of God ‘at the contemplation of our prayers’. The New Order of Prayer departed from the traditional order of prayer in a further sense: the latter had specified prayers for those making donations to the church – from payments for lights to gifts of treasures and lands – whereas both revisions were silent on this score.157 153   For forms of the Curse, see William Maskell, Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (London, 1846–7), II, pp. 286–301; John Myrcs’ Instructions for Parish Priests, Early English Texts Society, 31 (1868), pp. 21–4. For termination, see Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer (Parker Society, 1846), p. 461 (misdated). For dating it 1535, see L.P. VIII. 994. 154   Cranmer, Misc. Writings and Letters, p. 460. 155

  Wilkins, Concilia, vol. III, pp. 807–8.   For bede-rolls, see Brigden, London, p. 34; G.H. Cook, Medieval Chantries and Chantry Chapels (London, 1947), pp. 4–5; B.A. Kumin, The Shaping of a Community: the Rise and Reformation of the English Parish, c. 1400–1560 (Aldershot, 1996), p. 207; Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), p. 34. 157   For the traditional order of prayer, see F.E. Brightman, The English Rite (London, 1921), pp. 1032–5. 156

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The service as conducted in parish churches was also affected by a third government reform, one relating to the celebration of saints’ days. Issued by royal proclamation, after receiving the approval of convocation in the same session that passed the Ten Articles, this reform seemed linked to the latters’ downgrading of the saints.158 First, it synchronised the dedication festivals of all parish churches so that rather than scattered throughout the week and the year, every one would now fall on the first Sunday in October. Secondly, it terminated the saints’ days celebrated as religious festivals that fell either within the law terms or during harvest time. In order to determine which should go, the law terms were given, for the first time ever, fixed opening and closing dates as was the harvest period which was now formally defined as stretching from 1 July to 29 September. As a result, only a handful of weekdays were left in the year upon which a saints’ festival could legitimately take place.159 In the case of the saints’ festivals terminated, the sacring bell would no longer announce at Sunday service their imminence and, on the day itself, church bells would no longer summon the congregation to celebrate. In the original Order on Saints’ Days, it remained possible for the priest to offer saints’ days with ‘their accustomed service’ in the presence of anyone who chose to attend. However, this was removed by a royal circular to the bishops of 11 August 1536 commanding them to order their clergy ‘in no wise, either in church or otherwise, to indict or speak of any of the said days and feasts abolished … but to pass over the same with such secret silence as they may have like abrogation by disuse’. The intention, then, was to abolish such holy days entirely rather than simply to end their celebration as festivals.160 The reform of holy days was officially justified as a means of curbing idleness and of elevating the importance of the sabbath; but one of its aims was to discourage saint worship. This was made clear at the time: in the coincidence of its introduction with the issuing of the Ten Articles. Both declarations, moreover, were linked through being presented together in the Royal Injunctions of August 1536. Placed in this context, the reduction in the number of saints’ days appeared to be predicated on the reformist assumption that God’s grace could only be achieved through the intercession of Christ. These official statements on excommunication, public prayers, saints’ days, as with the Ten Articles, had all been passed by convocation (although not the York convocation), undergoing in the process amendment and qualification. In contrast, the Royal Injunctions of August 1536 were

158 159

  Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 394–5.

  Wilkins, Concilia, vol. III, pp. 823–4.  Ibid., p. 824.

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simply drawn up by Cromwell.161 Their purpose was to remove any clerical doubts as to the meaning of the Ten Articles as well as to instruct the clergy on how to present them and the order on saints’ days to their parishioners. For this reason, the Royal Injunctions have a starker, less ambiguous meaning. Especially significant was the fourth injunction which questioned the value of images, relics, miracles and pilgrimages because they encouraged saint worship. It reasoned that, since the powers of saints are extremely limited ‘seeing all goodness, health and grace ought to be asked and looked for only of God, and none other’, priests should seek to dissuade their parishioners from making pilgrimages to images or relics in the hope of miracles and urge them instead to please God partly by keeping his commandments, partly by providing for their families and partly by giving to ‘the poor and needy’. This could be seen as confirming that the reformist inclinations evident in the Ten Articles were deliberate rather than accidental and intrinsic to their main purpose. The Ten Articles sought to distinguish the religious practices necessary for achieving salvation from those deemed unnecessary for achieving it.162 The articles were therefore arranged in two sections, each of five articles, the first limited to what was necessary, the second, to what was unnecessary. The most startling feature of the first section was its concentration on the sacraments of baptism, penance and the Lord’s Supper to the exclusion of the sacraments of ordination, marriage, extreme unction and confirmation. Moreover, none of these excluded sacraments received a mention in the second section; and so appeared to be completely ignored. The second section was dominated by three articles on the saints who, thanks to being placed here, could be regarded as unnecessary to salvation. The text confirmed that this was the intent. These three articles explicitly denied saints what was thought to be their former power of intercession: not only for the benefit of the dead but also, by making miracles, for the living. The first article condemned image worship on the grounds that images should only be esteemed – and so left to stand in church – as representations of virtuous example and reminders of man’s need to lament his sins. The second article conceded in qualification that saints deserve to be honoured because they are now with Christ in Heaven and might ‘be advancers of our prayers and demands unto Christ’, but forbad honouring them for any other reason. What this meant was explained in the third article that concerned itself with praying to saints. It called upon clerics to teach the 161   For text of the Royal Injunctions, see Walter Frere and William McClure Kennedy, Visitation Articles and Injunctions (London, 1910), vol. II, pp. 2–11. For radical significance, see Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, p. 91. 162   For text of the Ten Articles, see Williams, English Historical Documents, 1485– 1558, pp. 795–6.

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people that ‘grace, remission of sin and salvation’ are only obtainable ‘by the mediation of our Saviour Christ’ because Christ is the ‘only sufficient mediator for our sins’. Although it was ‘laudable’ to use prayers for beseeching saints to ‘pray for us and with us’, the article pronounced that only in this limited way could they be regarded as ‘intercessors’. Ruled out was the assumption that ‘any saint is more merciful, or will hear us sooner than Christ’, while the presumption that saints can be specialists in a particular field of remedy was likewise dismissed as ‘vain superstition’. Also placed in the second section, and therefore presented as unnecessary to salvation, was the doctrine of purgatory. This was made the subject of the final article. Using a reformist argument, it cast doubt on the existence of purgatory on the grounds that such a place is not mentioned ‘by Scripture’. Instead, the article suggested, it should be left to God to know the whereabouts of souls in the interim between death and judgment. The benefit of getting rid of purgatory, according to the same article, lay in eradicating the abuses generated by its acceptance. Some of them were identified: not only papal pardons but also masses said ‘before any image’ to deliver souls ‘from all their pain’ and ‘send them straight to Heaven’. Nonetheless, as the same article carefully explained, the unwillingness to countenance purgatory did not rule out prayers for the dead on the grounds that they were acknowledged to be ‘a very good and a charitable deed’ in the apocryphal Book of Maccabees. What is more, they had been practised ‘in the Church … even from the beginning’. For these reasons, it was valid not only to offer such prayers yourself but also to commission others to make them for you, even by means of a payment of alms: that is, by following the tradition of hiring poor men to perform the task.163 As a device for beseeching God’s mercy, prayers for the dead were recognised as part of the ‘due order of charity’ since, thanks to them, departed souls might possibly ‘be relieved … of some part of their pain’. But, having been placed in the second section of the Ten Articles, prayers for the dead were automatically defined as unnecessary to salvation: in other words, whether or not they are offered decides nothing of certainty. Such doctrinal revisions, especially in relation to purgatory and the capacity of saints to intercede with God, must have had a challenging effect upon ordinary people not only as parishioners but also as members of religious gilds since the latter were based, like chantries and religious houses, on enlisting the support of saints to quicken the passage of departed souls from purgatory to Heaven. Moreover, intercessory institutions founded upon privately endowed prayer represented a system of salvation to which northerners were undoubtedly devoted. By 1536 Yorkshire, for example, was blessed with not only an excess of religious houses but also a plenitude 163

  For this particular practice, see Cook, Medieval Chantries, pp. 8–9.

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of chantries, stipendaries, free chapels, colleges, hospitals, gilds and other special provisions for obits and lights, so much so that 68 per cent of its parishes were endowed in this manner against a national county average of 50 per cent. Many of them, especially the altars maintained by gilds, were still flourishing concerns in the 1530s. Not surprisingly, its people were highly sensitive to the criticism of saint worship.164 Although the Ten Articles, and the doubts they raised on four of the sacraments, purgatory and saint worship went unspecified in the grievances presented to the king, the Pilgrims undoubtedly found them objectionable. This was implied in article 4 of the October petition which demanded that ‘such as hath been subverters of God’s laws … may be corrected according to their demerits as Cromwell, Cranmer and Latimer and divers other the maintainers of the same sect [that is, of heretics]’; in article 1 of the December petition which required ‘the heresies of Luther, Wycliffe, Huss, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius [and] Bucer … to be annulled and destroyed’; in article 7 of the same petition which required ‘the heretics, bishops and temporal, and their sect to have condign punishment’; and in article 8 which required ‘condign punishment’ for the king’s ministers, Cromwell and Riche, not only for subverting the law but also for maintaining ‘the false sect of these heretics’. Furthermore, talk among the Pilgrims about restoring the faith of Christ to what had been practised in the days of the king’s father (as reported by Hastings) and ‘for maintaining of old usages and customs’ (as reported by Percy) may well have had in mind the Ten Articles and the desire to protect the religious practices that they questioned.165 Edward Hall, the chronicler and a reformer, identified the Ten Articles as the root cause of both the Lincolnshire uprising and the pilgrimage of grace. In doing so he emphasised two points: that the Ten Articles were found offensive, in particular because they ‘specially treated of no more than three sacraments’ and generally because they aroused popular apprehensions, thanks to the spin put on them by priests, that the ‘Christian religion should be utterly violate, despised and set aside’ and that ‘all manner of prayer and fasting and all God’s service should utterly be destroyed and taken away’. He also indicated that the Pilgrims’ religious complaint was not confined to the Ten Articles but included as

164   Kreider, English Chantries, pp. 15–16. For attachment to saintly intercession, see Robert Whiting, Local Responses to the English Reformation (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 72, 82–3. 165   For Hastings, see L.P. XI. 1059. For Percy, see L.P. XII(1). 393.

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well the reduction of holy days, the suppression of monasteries and the eviction of the pope.166 At first sight, Hall’s impression appears to clash with a surviving fragment of a book of Pilgrim grievances drafted, probably by Robert Chaloner, in preparation for the December appointment. In one passage it dealt with the Pilgrim complaint against heresy by naming certain bishops and ministers ‘which be of the same sect’ and by deploring ‘all those which had preached, teached, and yet preaches and teaches, against Christ’s faith and the sacraments of Christ’s church’. Having defended the sacraments, however, the same passage appeared to recommend the Ten Articles, proposing that ‘the book of articles lately commanded by the King’s Highness by the advice of his catholic bishops and doctors … be taught and preached to his subjects and peoples’. Yet this cannot be its actual meaning. The only surviving copy of the document is badly mutilated, the result of its having been torn latitudinally in two, with one half lost, thus concealing how this particular passage began. Moreover, if its purpose was to commend the Ten Articles, it is flawed by self-contradiction: appearing to offer approval while making objection to any reform of the sacraments. In all likelihood, crucial words have been lost and the reference to ‘catholic bishops and doctors’ may have carried an ironic or sardonic meaning.167 That the book offered a condemnation, not a recommendation, of the Ten Articles is strongly suggested by a great deal of other evidence. On 18 December, shortly after an agreement was reached at Doncaster between the Pilgrims and the king’s representative, the duke of Norfolk, the Pilgrim leader, Lord Darcy, sent to the archbishop of York a copy of a letter that Henry VIII had written a month earlier to his bishops, following discussions with the Pilgrim delegates, Ralph Ellerker and Robert Bowes, on the rebels’ grievances: a letter the archbishop had failed to receive because, at the time, he lay in Pilgrim custody.168 Norfolk produced the letter in the course of the Doncaster negotiations, presumably to demonstrate that the king was no heretic and to persuade the Pilgrims to accept a settlement rather than march on London. Darcy’s accompanying comment to the 166   Edward Halle, The Triumphant Reign of King Henry VIII (Grafton, 1550), fos 228–228b. 167   SP1/112, fos 24–8, page III [L.P. XI. 1182 (2)]. It needs to be considered in comparison with the instruction issued to Lord Scrope when sent in November to offer the commons’ oath to the resistant earl of Cumberland (see Chatsworth Trustees, Clifford Letter Book, f. 14). He was told to report to the earl that the Pilgrims rose ‘for the maintenance of the faith of God and the right and liberty of his church militant and the doctrines of heretics and their opinions’, which could be read as expressing support for heretical doctrines whereas just the opposite was intended. 168   E36/122, f. 30 [L.P. XI. 1336]. For Henry’s letter, see Wilkins, Concilia, vol. III, pp. 825–6 [L.P. XI. 1110].

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archbishop proposed that, in the light of the enclosed letter, ‘all true catholics may joy’ and that clerics could take comfort that, in setting forth the ‘true learning’ (as opposed to the new learning), they would enjoy the king’s favour. The enclosed letter threatened severe punishment for bishops and other clerics found practising and preaching heresy, with loss of office and further penalties ‘as justice shall require’. It provided two examples of heresies thought to merit such punishment: one was clerical marriage, an embarrassment for bishops such as Cranmer, Browne and Barlow, who had already taken that step; the other was to interpret the Ten Articles in a reformist manner. As the objection to clerical marriage was very much an afterthought slipped in at the end, the letter primarily expressed Henry’s attitude towards the Ten Articles. It focused mostly upon the second section that dealt with ‘matters indifferent which be [not] necessary to our salvation’. These matters – they included the honouring of saints, images, relics, pilgrimages and the question of purgatory – were presented as ‘honest, laudable and tolerable ceremonies, usages and customs of the church’, which therefore deserved neither to be eliminated nor to be treated with contempt since ‘they be incitements and motions to virtue and allurements to devotion’. In subscribing to this point of view, the letter presented the Ten Articles ‘as catholic, meet and necessary to be’ which, as such, had received the approval of ‘all you bishops and the whole clergy in convocation’. To repudiate them or to twist their meaning, the king wrote, was therefore totally unworthy of a bishop of the church of England. The letter, in Pilgrim eyes, offered the comfort of certain supportive readings: one, that the bishops identified as heretics now faced dismissal; another, that, in keeping with what appeared to be the conservatism of the king’s actual religious beliefs, the Ten Articles were about to undergo revision to root out all sectarian ambiguity and to ensure that they upheld, in the true catholic manner, the intercessory institutions, practices and beliefs associated with saint worship. For these reasons, Darcy thought that the contents of the king’s letter gave catholics good cause to celebrate, even the archbishop of York who claimed to approve of the Ten Articles. Darcy felt that, in the light of this letter, it was possible to hope that the perilous drift towards reform was over. As we have seen, on 4 December the Pilgrim clergy produced ‘the opinion of the clergy of the north parties’, in response to questions set by Aske. Its first article totally rejected the reforms proposed in the Ten Articles stating: ‘we think that preaching against purgatory, worshipping of saints, pilgrimage, images and all books set forth against the same or sacraments or sacramentals of the church be worthy to be reproved and condemned by convocation’: in other words, having approved the Ten Articles as recently as July, the clergy now desired their repeal. The same article presented the Ten Articles as heretical by proposing that, in order

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to punish the beliefs that they licensed, the laws against heresy had to be strengthened. It also indicated that the Pilgrim clergy opposed not only the Ten Articles but the government policies relating to them: that is, the reform of the holy days and the abandonment of customary practices in the ‘bidding of bedes and preaching’.169 Further evidence of Pilgrim opposition to the Ten Articles, this time coming from the commons, was revealed by the archbishop of York in a letter to the king of 10 December. Having submitted to the Pilgrims on 21 October with the taking of Pontefract Castle where he and many gentlemen had sought refuge, the archbishop claimed that, when the Pilgrims called upon him to deliver his opinion ‘in some points of religion’, he ‘showed them’ the Ten Articles, claiming them to be a statement of religion that he could readily accept. In response, ‘they took it ill that it made mention but of three sacraments and no purgatory’.170 According to the archbishop, this happened ‘at the beginning’, presumably on 21 October when the Pilgrim command asked him to compose a petition to the king, a request he turned down. Yet there was a second occasion upon which he recommended the Ten Articles to the Pilgrims: on 3 December, a Sunday, when he delivered a sermon in Pontefract parish church to the Pilgrim delegates assembled in the town for the second appointment with the king’s representative, the duke of Norfolk. The text of the sermon has not survived but several eye-witnesses, such as Dakyn, Rokeby and Pickering as well as the archbishop himself, left accounts both of its content and of the commons’ furious reaction to it.171 Two matters deeply offended the commons: one was the archbishop’s dismissal of the pilgrimage of grace as a true pilgrimage, on the grounds that it took the form of an army of rebels threatening war against their own prince; the second was his approval of the Ten Articles, the substance of which he ‘declared’ to the congregation, perhaps by recitation or perhaps by commenting on specific issues. His point was that the Ten Articles gave the Pilgrims no cause to charge the government with heresy since what they offered was 169   For the complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 17. For the clerical assembly that met in Pontefract on 4/5 December to present the view of the clergy engaged in the uprising, see Dodds, vol. I, pp. 382–7. Elton is misleading in saying that ‘the curious Rump Convocation that met at Pontefract broke up without a usable answer to the question [of whether or not to accept the Ten Articles]’. See his ‘Politics and the pilgrimage of grace’, p. 43. Article 1 of the Opinion clearly rejects the Ten Articles. It was unusable only because the Opinion was not handed over to Aske until after the Pilgrim delegation had left for Doncaster to present their grievances to Norfolk. See above, p. 30. 170   Master, doc. 53, p. 76. 171   For Dakyn, see SP1/117, f. 203 [L.P. XII(1), 786 (ii)]. For Rokeby, see L.P. XII(1). 1011. For Pickering, see SP1/118, f. 279 [L.P. XII(1). 1021]. For the archbishop, see SP1/119, fos 7b–8 [L.P. XII(1). 1022].

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an acceptable statement of catholic doctrine and what they proposed was good Christian practice. In this respect, he dismissed as totally invalid both the Pilgrims’ complaint ‘touching the faith’ and their willingness to take military action if peaceful remedy failed. That the commons of the north were deeply disturbed by attacks on purgatory, and on the intercessory system to which it was linked, became evident in late 1535 when the archbishop of York complained to Cromwell that preaching against purgatory and related matters was annoying the people. He made the same point in January 1536, arguing that the people tended to be reverential of royal matters but ‘at such novelties they grudge much’.172 In view of such remarks one would expect them to deplore the Ten Articles, with their doubts about purgatory and saints. This is borne out by a study of local movements in the pilgrimage of grace. Although the Pilgrim commons made no mention of the Ten Articles in their petitions to the government, they did voice a good deal of complaint against one of its main features: the rejection of saint worship. This was true, for example, of the revolt centred upon Beverley, of the rising in Richmondshire that also spread to the Palatinate of Durham and Cleveland, and of the uprisings that occurred in the baronies of Kendal and Westmorland and the county of Cumberland. In each instance the commons expressed criticism of recent changes in the church service, especially those connected with the celebration of holy days and the order of prayers. Such complaints, moreover, did not emerge in the course of the uprising but were expressed at the very start, perhaps contracted from the Lincolnshire uprising whose supporters had objected on several occasions to the reduction of holy days and the repudiation of purgatory.173 These complaints therefore need to be regarded as having compelled the commons to rise in the first instance, not as grievances that were grafted onto the uprising as a result of the involvement of other social groups. William Stapulton, a gentleman leader of the Beverley uprising, claimed, under government examination, that ‘the abrogation of holy days’ incited the people to rebellion.174 A snapshot of how this happened occurred in the parish church of Watton, a township close to Watton Priory to which its church belonged. On 8 October, the day the men of Beverley rose, the parish priest of Watton, in accordance with government instructions, 172

  L.P. IX. 704; L.P. X. 172.  In support of saints’ days, see L.P. XI. 553, 970; L.P. XII(1). 70 (XI). In support of purgatory, see L.P. XII(1). 70 (I and XI). This is very much played down in Margaret Bowker’s ‘Lincolnshire in 1536: heresy, schism or religious discontent?’, Studies in Church History, 9 (1972): 207–11 where she states that it is ‘still very difficult to be sure whether religious faith was in question’ in the Lincolnshire uprising. 174   See Stapleton, p. 82. 173

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broke with tradition when at Sunday service he omitted to announce the forthcoming St Wilfred’s Day, customarily celebrated on 12 October and now abolished as a festival. As a result, he found himself in conflict with the congregation who, resolving to have holy days bidden ‘as before’, joined the pilgrimage of grace.175 The blasphemous treatment of the saints was a prominent issue in the Richmondshire uprising. Originating at the Ripon horsefair, an event which, like Ripon Minster, was closely associated with St Wilfred, the uprising spread in a northerly direction as men from Masham and Kirby Malzeard organised assemblies in Richmond for the men of Wensleydale, Swaledale and the Vale of York, some of whom were agitated by the cause of St Agatha, another victim of the Order on Saints’ Days as well as a victim of the suppression commissioners who had recently dissolved Easby Abbey, which was dedicated to her name. Her feast day did not fall due until February, and so, as yet, no opportunity had arisen to protest against its abrogation, but the commons did proceed to restore the abbey.176 Forming an army, they then marched up into the Palatinate of Durham to enlist the support of St Cuthbert, another saint of great import in the north, whose September holy day had been ruled out because it fell due in harvest time. At the Richmond assemblies saints were a matter of popular concern as the cleric, John Dakyn, revealed, having been charged by a certain Thomlynson of Bedale with being a ‘maker of the new laws’ and a ‘putter down of the holy days’. Indicating that the concern was not confined to Thomlynson, Dakyn remarked that it was something ‘the people did also murmur at’.177 Once they had enlisted the Durham men and the men of Cleveland, the Richmondshire rebels marched south accompanied by the banner of St Cuthbert and adopting his distinctive equilateral, black cross as their badge. The Pilgrim army arrayed itself in sight of the king’s representatives on 26 and 27 October with this banner to the fore. Standing five yards high and one yard wide, made of crimson velvet embroidered with flowers in green and gold silk, and ornamented with tinkling bells, it was an imposing and thrilling sight. St Cuthbert’s banner stood for everything the government’s recent pronouncements on religion had dismissed as superstition. The banner, in fact, had many miracles to its credit, especially the military victories awarded the army that marched behind it. Attached to it were two potent relics, both of them held in a white velvet pocket half a yard square and surmounted by a red cross. One of these relics was a piece of cloth that had come into bodily contact with the saint, either because he had used it to cover the chalice at mass or 175

  Bush, pp. 34–5.  Ibid., pp. 245, 148. 177   SP1/117, f. 216 [L.P. XII(1). 789]. 176

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because it was a remnant of his winding sheet. The other relic was a silver cross, confiscated from the king of Scotland in 1346 by the Durham men following his capture at the battle of Neville’s Cross. Both were reputed to work miracles. Prior to the December appointment when the christocentric image of the five wounds became the Pilgrims’ main emblem, it was the Cuthbert banner – as displayed before the Pilgrim host at the October appointment – that declared their cause, with its unambiguous affirmation of the miraculous powers of saints.178 A third saint, St Luke, also became a source of concern in the early stages of the uprising, notably in the parish church of Kirkby Stephen, Westmorland. St Luke’s Day was 18 October. Like St Wilfred’s Day, it fell within Michaelmas Term and therefore had been abrogated. Matters came to a head at Sunday service on 15 October when the curate, acting in accordance with the Order on Saints’ Days, made no mention of it. Yet faced by a ‘great murmur’ among the congregation, he reverted to tradition, rang the sacring bell and recognised St Luke’s Day as a forthcoming festival by announcing when it was due. This was not enough to appease the people of Kirkby Stephen who became ringleaders in raising the Barony of Westmorland and the southern parts of Cumberland and later provided the vital link between the rebels of the north-west and the pilgrimage of grace led by Aske. That they wanted, among other things, an official restoration of the abrogated saints’ days was made clear in the deliberations of the Appleby council, a standing committee formed in late October to keep the Pilgrim cause alive in the barony. When shown a copy of the First Five Articles – the first petition dispatched by the Pilgrims to the government – at the end of October, the council was especially moved by the article requiring the laws of the realm and of the church to revert to how they had stood on Henry VIII’s accession. In response, it decided to order every curate in those parts to ‘bid the holy days and bedes after the old manner on pain of death’.179 This phrase had a certain resonance: when Cumberland rose in revolt, it issued a rallying proclamation ordering clerics to ‘bid holy days and bedes after the old custom’.180 A general concern for saints also featured in a muster bill eventually picked up by the loyalist earl of Derby in Lancashire. Its complaint was against the ‘blaspheming [of] our lady and all other saints in Heaven’. Its provenance was either the uprising in Percy Fee which rose to defend the newly restored Sawley

178   See Michael Bush, Durham and the Pilgrimage of Grace (Durham County Local History Society, 2000), pp. 11–15. For the badge, see Bateson, pp. 571–2. 179   See Bush, pp. 292–3, 302. 180  Ibid., pp. 334–5. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 9.

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Abbey, or, and this was more likely, the joint uprising of the men of Dent and Kendal who marched on and took Lancaster.181 Such concern for the saints, a moving force in the upland north during the early stages of the uprising, did not die away. It re-emerged following the December armistice, probably aroused by the absence of direct reference to it in the December petition. It featured, for example, in a bill composed in the North Riding that was picked up in Richmond. Calling upon Pilgrims to rise again ‘to put down Cromwell, that heretic and all his sect, which made the king put down praying and fasting’, it not only explicitly attributed changes in the order of prayer and of holy days to heresy but also implied that the complaint against heretics and heresy in the December petition may well have included a concern for the preservation of saint worship.182 On the other hand, the local protests made after the December settlement against changes in the church service focused not specifically upon saints’ days but upon the bidding of bedes, with congregations in several churches – for example, Kendal, Brough, Arncliffe in Craven and Richmond – ordering their priests to restore the old order of prayer.183 These protests had several aims, including a reinstatement of a system of prayer that presumed the existence of purgatory and the capacity of saints to save souls and to cure illness and infertility. To appreciate fully the Pilgrims’ abhorrence of the Ten Articles, it has to be related to the recent elevation of suspected heretics to the episcopacy and privy council: promotions which appeared to give heretics free rein to attack the central tenets of the catholic religion. This awareness of heresy in high places persuaded men to regard the religious changes imposed by the government in 1535 and 1536 not as the fruit of rational humanism but as the dreadful canker of an alien faith, not as an attempt at Erastian purification but as a radical onslaught on catholicism itself. The Lincolnshire petition, a statement of grievance that the Pilgrims adopted as their own, first made the point, identifying Cranmer, Hilsey, Latimer, Shaxton, Barlow and Browne as bishops ‘of your grace’s late promotion’ who ‘hath subverted the faith of Christ’.184 Apart from Cranmer, all had been raised into the episcopacy in the last year and a half; while Cranmer – promoted from nothing to the primacy of Canterbury – had been a bishop only since 1533. The Pilgrims’ October petition named Cranmer and Latimer as heretics.185 In their December petition they simply 181

  Toller, pp. 47–9. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 10.   SP1/114, f. 201 [L.P. XII(1). 163 (1)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 18b. 183   See above, pp. 57–61. 184   See below, Appendix, doc. 1, article 5. 182

185

  See below, Appendix, doc. 14, article 4.

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required heretical bishops to be punished, mentioning no names, but having in mind, according to Aske, the bishops identified in the Lincolnshire petition.186 This was confirmed by the Pilgrim Marmaduke Neville who, shortly after the December agreement, told some men in Colchester that the commons of the north were against certain bishops whom he named as Cranmer, Latimer, Barlow and Hilsey.187 The heresy attributed to these bishops was not confined to their support for the breach with Rome, the dissolution of religious houses and Henry’s divorce. Its coverage was spelled out in a surviving draft of the December petition which accused them of persuading the king ‘through flattery and blind fable to grant them commissions and authorities to exercise all manner of injunctions as well against the laws of God as the authority of those councils [i.e. general councils of the catholic church] and so to make acts in your parliaments and convocations to annul all laws … that by the laws of God, of the church and of those councils should be good throughout all the world approved and admitted for law’.188 That the charge against them had in mind the campaign against saint worship and the devices, doctrines and practices connected with it, notably images, pilgrimages and purgatory, was evident in the content of public sermons recently delivered by these bishops and in their patronage of reformist preachers and writers. The connexion between preaching, heresy and the episcopacy was made by the Pilgrim leader, Lord Darcy, when he declared that ‘he would be none heretic in consenting to opinions’ expressed in ‘the new preaching of certain new bishops’. Aske confirmed the point when, under examination, he reckoned that ‘the grudge’ that compelled the north to rebel arose not simply from the suppression of abbeys but ‘the new sort of preaching and learning’ which caused men to suspect that ‘certain bishops of the new learning’ were promoting heresy.189 The Pilgrims must have had Hugh Latimer very much in mind. According to Aske, they were well aware of his reputation as a heretical preacher, for word passed among them that Latimer had saved himself from the stake only by an act of abjuration.190 Yet, in spite of his well-known heretical affiliations – a commission had concluded in 1533 that schismatically he had preached against prayers to release souls from purgatory, the honouring of saints and the making of pilgrimages – he was given the bishopric of Worcester in 1535.191 What is 186

    188   189   190   187

See below, Appendix, doc. 16, article 7; Bateson, p. 567. SP1/112, fos 206–7 [L.P. XI. 1319]. SP1/112, fos 29–32, page II [L.P. XI. 1182 (3)]. For Darcy, see Bateson, p. 572. For Aske, see Bateson, pp. 342–3. Bateson, p. 567.

191   Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, pp. 168–72; Martha C. Skeeters, Community and Clergy: Bristol and the Reformation, c. 1530–c.1570 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 43–4.

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more, he was allowed in July 1536 to deliver to convocation both morning and afternoon sermons on the first day of the session that approved the Ten Articles and enacted the Order on Saints’ Days. In the morning sermon, characteristically blunt and abrasive, he poured scorn on the use of ‘dead images’ to purchase redemption and questioned the doctrine of purgatory on the grounds that it was ‘if not false, yet at the least … ambiguous, uncertain, doubtful and counterfeit’, especially in its presumption that the dead are reliant upon the living to achieve salvation.192 In the afternoon sermon he resumed the onslaught on purgatory with greater vigour, certainty and contumely, dismissing it as a ‘pickpurse’, as ‘a pleasant fiction’, even as ‘this monster’. In the same sermon he charged holy days with serving the devil and called for the prohibition of pilgrimages because they drove people to commit acts of ungodliness, notably by worshipping images and believing in false miracles.193 Latimer had also signified himself a dangerous heretic through the patronage he had dispensed to notorious reformers, such as Thomas Benet, his chaplain, who openly denied the existence of purgatory and the efficacy of prayers for the dead, and his disciple Thomas Garret who, equipped with the king’s licence to preach, had gone on a lecture tour of Lincolnshire in 1536, publicly rejecting, as ungodly superstitions, purgatory, saint worship and the associated practices of making oblations to saintly images and pilgrimages to saintly shrines.194 As primate of the church of England, Cranmer was inevitably held responsible, along with Cromwell, for permitting Latimer to address convocation in July 1536. Rather than a hidden hand operating discreetly through the agency of others, Cranmer had already become an open advocate of heretical ideas, especially in the arguments he had employed in his sermons to justify the rejection of papal overlordship. In October 1535 he delivered two long sermons at Canterbury in which, having presented the pope as no more than bishop of the see of Rome, he dismissed the laws and church ceremonies associated with the papacy as merely man-made and contrary to God’s laws because they lacked scriptural proof. He also made the point that the ceremonies of the catholic church should not be thought to ‘make men holy’ or to remit sin. In fact, ‘to impute the remission of our sins to any laws or ceremonies of man’s making’ was to commit ‘too much injury to Christ’ whose death alone provided its only guarantee. This sense that the beliefs and practices of the catholic church could be contrary to Christ was powerfully presented in a two-hour sermon delivered at St Paul’s Cross on 6 February 1536. In it, following the original example of 192 193

  Sermons of Hugh Latimer (Parker Society, 1844), pp. 33–40.

 Ibid., pp. 41–57. 194   L.P. X. 1099; Kreider, English Chantries, pp. 111–12.

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William Tyndale, he portrayed the pope as Antichrist. In March of the same year he gave a Lenten sermon aimed at justifying the suppression of religious houses. On the evidence of such sermons, it could be taken that he was condemning not just the papal supremacy but the doctrines and usages associated with it: that is, intercessory institutions, the worship of saints and purgatory.195 Two years earlier the imperial ambassador in London had reported to Charles V that the archbishop of Canterbury was considering ‘whether there be any purgatory, whether to pray to saints or worship them, whether priests can marry, whether pilgrimages be meritorious’ with a view to declaring his opinion on the matter during the coming year.196 That the Pilgrims were fully aware that Cranmer had made up his mind by late 1536 was revealed in Aske’s remark that they regarded him as a heretic not simply because he had brought about the divorce – in spite of the fact that it had been ‘appealed to the church’ – but ‘for other his opinions’ which were derived from Luther and Tyndale.197 Like Latimer, Cranmer’s reformist inclinations were also made evident by the way he maintained heretics in his service, employing, for example, Richard Champion, Thomas Lawney and Thomas Garret as his preaching chaplains.198 John Hilsey, another bishop targeted by the Pilgrims, was first consecrated in the summer of 1535, receiving the diocese of Rochester. It coincided with the elevation of Latimer, whose religious beliefs he had shared since 1533 and whose abilities as a preacher he came close to matching.199 Hilsey was also connected with Thomas Cromwell, having served him as a counterweight to John Stokesley, the conservative bishop of London. In July 1535 Stokesley had forbidden Hilsey from preaching at St Paul’s Cross because of his professed rejection of prayers for the dead as a means of salvation. But then in December 1535 Cromwell, by 195   Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 172; Brigden, London, pp. 258–9; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 149–52. For the October 1535 sermon, the text of which has not survived, consult Cranmer’s account of it in a letter to Henry VIII of the following August in which he probably toned down its content to make it consonant with the Ten Articles and the king’s more conservative view of purgatory. See his Misc. Writings and Letters, pp. 326–7. For the response to his cited sermons of 1536, neither of which has textually survived, see L.P. X. 282; ibid., 462; Martin Sharp Hume (ed.), Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England (London, 1889), pp. 87–8. 196   L.P. VII. 871. This found an echo in Cranmer’s Order for Preaching of 1535 which forbad preaching ‘neither with nor against’ purgatory, saints, clerical marriage, pilgrimages, miracles and justification by faith alone. See his Misc. Writings and Letters, p. 460. 197   Bateson, p. 567. 198   Brigden, London, p. 235. 199   MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 139. For Hilsey’s preaching reputation, see Joseph Bloch, Factional Politics and the English Reformation, 1520–1540 (Woodbridge, 1993), p. 98.

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virtue of his powers as vicegerent in spirituals, had overridden Stokesley’s prohibition, authorising Hilsey not only to preach at St Paul’s Cross but also to organise a programme of public sermons to be given there. These sermons were delivered in early 1536, some by conservatives but several by reformers, notably five of the bishops termed heretics by the October rebels: that is, Hilsey, Browne, Shaxton, Latimer and Cranmer. In the sermons the issues of purgatory, prayers for the dead and the intercession of saints were considered.200 Hilsey, like Cranmer, Latimer and Barlow, was regarded by the Pilgrims as ‘moved’ by Luther and Tyndale.201 They objected to his preaching against monks and his promotion of the Act for the Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries. They also objected to his preaching ‘against the common orders and rules before used in the universal church’. Given its wording and the fact that all these bishops were accused of destroying the unity of the church, this latter charge must have included the break with Rome.202 But, because of the part Hilsey had played in the London disputes between conservatives and reformers and the connexion the Pilgrims made between his beliefs and those of Luther and Tyndale, the charge undoubtedly included the heresy of justification by faith alone and its corollaries: disbelief in the intercessory powers of saints, doubts about the efficacy of prayers for the dead, and the repudiation of purgatory as a place where departed souls were cleansed. In view of Aske’s admission that the Pilgrims saw the two men as linked in their heresy, the same could be said of William Barlow.203 Like Hilsey, he came of a regular background and his promotion to the episcopal bench, as bishop of St David’s, was very recent. Like Cranmer and also Browne, he had firmly nailed himself to the mast of reform by taking a wife. Missing from Aske’s list of heretical bishops were Nicholas Shaxton, who had been consecrated bishop of Salisbury in 1535, and the ex-friar George Browne who was made archbishop of Dublin in 1536, even though both were cited as heretics in the Lincolnshire petition. Browne’s recent promotion to the bench of bishops had followed the charge, brought against him the previous April by the abbot of Coggeshall in Essex, that he was a maintainer of heretics, presumably a consequence of the St Paul’s Cross sermon he had delivered that year on the invitation of Hilsey. Moreover, the previous year he had proved himself a powerful and persuasive anti-papal preacher in a sermon delivered at Court that called upon bishops to destroy all papal bulls in their custody and reasoned that 200   MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 139; Brigden, London, pp. 234–5; Kreider, English Chantries, pp. 109, 112. 201   Bateson, p. 567. 202   Bateson, p. 567; SP1/112, fos 29–32, page II [L.P. XI. 1182 (3)]. 203   Bateson, p. 567.

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the king’s authorisation was sufficient warranty for doing so. As a friend of Cromwell and of Cranmer, and having worked with Hilsey on a general visitation of the friars in 1534, it was easy to conclude in October 1536, even without knowledge of his marriage, that Shaxton was of heretical inclination.204 Shaxton was a committed reformer by reputation. He had been obliged to recant in 1531 after declaring that ‘to believe that there is no purgatory is by no means damnable’.205 Then, in 1535, he came into conflict with Stokesley after appointing the reformer John Cardmaker to a post in the church of the Crutched Friars.206 His opposition to the worship of saints remained firm throughout the 1530s, clearly revealed in frequent expressions of contempt for the veneration of images and relics.207 Along with Latimer, he confirmed his commitment to reform by resigning his bishopric in 1539 following the enactment of the anti-heretical Act of Six Articles.208 Given the reforming reputations of these newly appointed bishops, and their well-known antipathy to saint worship and purgatory, it was not difficult at the time to interpret the Ten Articles as something other than it claimed to be: to see it, in fact, as an attempt not to re-establish unity in the English church but to replace catholicism with something akin to lollardy, the dominant heresy of late medieval England which had likewise combined rejection of papal authority with a repudiation of saint worship, a reverence for Scripture and a disbelief in purgatory.209 On several occasions the Pilgrims, gentlemen and commoners, branded as lollards those involved in the new settlement of religion.210 And this was in spite of the fact that these reformers would have vehemently denied any connexion with lollardy: partly in order to escape the force of the heresy laws which had been enacted with lollardy in mind, and partly because the lollards had rejected transubstantiation, in the belief that the eucharist was an act of commemoration, not an encounter with the real presence of Christ. In none of the religious policy statements issued by the government in the mid-1530s, and in none of the public sermons given with its authorisation, 204   For the charge of maintaining heresy, see L.P. X. 774. Also see Bloch, Factional Politics, p. 97; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘George Browne, archbishop of Dublin, 1536–1554’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970): 305–9; Oxford D.N.B., vol. 8, pp. 161–2. 205   Kreider, English Chantries, p. 100. 206  Lacy Baldwin Smith, Tudor Prelates and Politics 1536–1558 (Princeton, 1953), p. 187; L.P. X. 462. 207   Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, pp. 232–3; Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, p. 94. 208   Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, p. 155. 209   Brigden, London, pp. 91–5, 122. 210   See L.P. XI. 1244; SP1/118, fos 255–256b [L.P. XII(1). 1011].

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was the Lord’s Supper subjected to sacramentarianism. In fact, the Ten Articles presented it in a form perfectly acceptable to catholics. Yet in most other respects the religious ideas that characterised the Henrician settlement at the time of the pilgrimage of grace appeared remarkably resonant of lollardy. Confirmation that the English church was gripped by heresy lay in the political ascendancy of Thomas Cromwell, a man the Pilgrim commons heartily detested. Their extreme hatred of him was expressed repeatedly in reports to the government not only from leading Pilgrims (such as by Robert Aske, Lord Latimer, Marmaduke Neville and the archbishop of York) but also from loyalists such as the earl of Cumberland and the duke of Norfolk. The same point was made in rebel songs: for example, in the Sawley Ballad, Pickering’s Song and ‘Crummock’; in seditious bills and prophetic rhymes; in submissions made to rebel councils (for example, the Westmorland letter to the York council in November and the Constable letter to the Pontefract council in December); as well as in the petitions themselves.211 This detestation of Cromwell had two defining characteristics: first, it was equally felt by gentlemen, clerics and commons; secondly, it took the form of a multi-faceted complaint: against a tyrant contemptuous of the constitution and its social framework; against a man of greed bent on ruthlessly appropriating the wealth of the realm for the benefit of the king, himself and his cronies; against a heretic intent on destroying the faith of Christ. Linking these anti-Cromwellian complaints together was the conception of him as a parvenu. For the Pilgrims Cromwell was the man who did not know how to behave virtuously in high office on account of his commoner background. The same charge was made against Cranmer. This theme conjured up the terrible realisation that, thanks to allowing men of base blood to hold the highest ecclesiastical positions – with Cromwell, the alleged son of a shearman, serving as the king’s vicegerent in spirituals and Cranmer, the alleged son of an ostler, acting as archbishop of Canterbury – a late medieval heresy which had thrived,

211   See C.S.L. Davies, ‘Popular religion and the pilgrimage of grace’, in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 72–4; Bush, pp. 104–5; Bush and Bownes, p. 307. For reports from Pilgrims, see Bateson, pp. 340, 342–3; L.P. XII(1). 67 (Aske); ibid., 131 (Latimer); L.P. XI. 1319 (Neville); Master, doc. 49, p. 75 (York). For Reports from loyalists, see L.P. XII(1). 72 (Cumberland); ibid., 318 (Norfolk). For rebel songs, see below, Appendix, doc. 12, verses xi–xxii and doc. 13, verse xvi. Also see L.P. XIII(1). 1346. For seditious bills, see below, Appendix, docs 18a and 18b. For example of prophetic rhyme, see L.P. XII(1). 318 (2). For rebel petitions, see below, Appendix, docs. 1, 14 and 16. For submissions made to Pilgrim councils, see L.P. XI. 1244; below, Appendix, doc. 15. For Pickering on Haman, see above, pp. 12–14.

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if at all, only as a popular movement and outside the pale, had suddenly managed to take control of church and state.212 Regarded as a lollard, Cromwell was not surprisingly seen by Pilgrims as an opponent of saint worship and purgatory. For them, his heretical aims were starkly declared in the destruction of relics seized from religious houses in 1535 at the time of the monastic visitation, and in another destruction of saintly objects in 1536, in conjunction with the suppression of the lesser monasteries.213 They were also made evident in the Royal Injunctions of 1536, Cromwell’s personal and public interpretation of the Ten Articles, and in the Order on Saints’ Days. Another indication of his heretical inclinations lay in the obnoxious work of his publicists and agents who in sermons, parliamentary bills and books scoffed at saints, purgatory, images, relics and pilgrimages, on the grounds that, by raising bogus hopes of salvation and miracle, they enabled fat clerics to filch the wealth of the laity. The Pilgrims’ awareness of some of these Cromwellian associates was declared in the very first article of the December petition, the details of which were supplied by the commoner Robert Bowyer, a burgess of the city of York. The article attempted to define heresy first by naming well-known reformers such as Huss, Wycliffe, Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer and Oecolampadius and then by identifying certain contemporary English reformers of prominence, predictably Tyndale, Barnes and Frith. In addition, it listed certain lesser known reformers, namely William Marshall, John Rastell and Christopher St German. All three were connected with Cromwell, but that was not the sole reason for their inclusion.214 This owed something to their religious beliefs, coupled with the determination that all three shared to spread these beliefs among the people. William Marshall publicised himself as a heretic partly by translating a well-known reformist work into English and partly by compiling a religious primer.215 His goal was to attack saint worship, especially by condemning idolatry. In 1535 he produced an English version of Martin Bucer’s Das einigerlei Bild under the explanatory title A Treatise … that Images which were Wont to be Worshipped are in no Wise to be Suffered in the Temples 212   For Cromwell, see Pickering’s Song (see below Appendix, doc. 12) which went: ‘The art of a shearman it was his beginning/ But late of favour promoted by our king’ (SP1/118, f. 292b). For Cranmer, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 169–70. The complaint about councillors regarded as ‘base’ or ‘vile’ or ‘simple’ or ‘of low birth’ or of ‘villein’s blood’ was present in many of the declarations of complaint. See L.P. XI. 705 (1), (2) and (4), 826, 872, 892; SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]. 213   See above, pp. 69–70. 214   For Bowyer’s part in making article 1, see Bateson, p., 560. For Cromwellian associates, see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 218. 215   See Oxford D.N.B., vol. 36, pp. 878–9.

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or Churches of Christian Men. Marshall republished it in the following year with an extension of the title to include ‘pictures’ as well as ‘images’, adding a postscript of his own which, in self-defence against critics of the first edition, asserted that, although not against the mass or ‘the blessed sacrament’ – in other words he was no lollard – he was against a papal abuse of the Lord’s Supper which, through the practice of votive masses, allowed Christ’s sacrifice to be repeatedly bought and sold. The striking message of Bucer’s book was the need to exclude saintly images from places of worship. The new edition caused a stir, so much so that Thomas Audley, the lord chancellor, urged its prohibition on the grounds that it might cause disorder, presumably through inciting attacks upon images. Cromwell, however, did nothing to suppress the work.216 In addition, Marshall produced a primer in English, the first edition appearing in 1534. This work pressed the cause against images by adopting a revision of the Ten Commandments, along the lines set out by William Tyndale in his 1530 translation of the Pentateuch.217 Essentially, the revision separated the ban on the worship of graven images from the first commandment against the worship of other gods, thus creating a new second commandment. In addition, Marshall’s primer served up lengthy passages from the Scriptures in the vernacular, the first book printed in England ever to do so. Moreover, by omitting the Dirige and by providing no alternative prayer for the dead, it appeared to question the catholic doctrine of intercession.218 Not surprisingly, convocation in late 1534 condemned this primer as heretical and not fit for public use.219 Nonetheless, it came to enjoy official approval. The ‘newly corrected’ second edition of 1535 – now containing the Dirige but dismissing psalm-singing for dead souls as a pointless exercise – bore the royal coat of arms on the title page, having received the licence to be reprinted over the next six years.220 Marshall played a key part in the government’s campaign against the veneration of saints, both by dismissing the images of saints as merely artifacts and by popularising the new orthodoxy as it was first declared

216   Duffy, Stripping of Altars, p. 386. For Marshall’s connexion with Cromwell, see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, pp. 418, 421; G.R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972), p. 186; Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge, 1974), II, pp. 151–4; G.R. Elton, Reform and Renewal (Cambridge, 1973), p. 26. 217   Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, pp. 413–14. Also see William Tyndale, Five Books of Moses (New York, 1884), p. 224. 218

  Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 417; Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 66.   S.E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 214. 220   Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 421. 219

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in the Ten Articles and the Royal Injunctions of 1536.221 In this respect, the inclusion of Marshall’s name in article 1 of the December petition was another way of presenting the Ten Articles as infected by heresy. Moves were afoot in the mid-1530s to press the case against purgatory and the saint worship it promoted, not only in convocation but also in parliament. In 1534 and 1536 attempts were made to enact the rejection of purgatory and the rituals of saint worship, so that their prohibition could be enforced in the courts of common law. Thus, in 1534 someone proposed ‘things necessary … to be remembered before the breaking up of parliament’, suggesting that a number of contentious religious matters should be considered by parliament in order to ensure that they were either ‘plainly confirmed’ or ‘wholly prohibit’.222 A list of such matters was then appended in the form of articles, most of them relating to the cult of saints. One of the articles declared that ‘the blood of martyrs’ was of no effect in mediating between God and man and that, for this purpose, Christ’s blood was sufficient. Another declared that the Scriptures offered no proof that purgatory exists and went on to say that if it did exist ‘there is neither pain of fire nor heat nor sight of devils’: in other words, it was simply a place where souls awaited the judgment of God, not a place of torment from which the dead needed to be speedily released by the efforts of the living. Another article declared that it was more necessary and charitable ‘to pray for them that be alive than for them that be dead’. Yet another declared that God ‘never gave power to men to forgive sin’ and a final article stated that ‘images are not to be worshipped’. A parliamentary bill of 1536 pointed in the same direction.223 Presented as ‘an act against pilgrimages and the superstitious worshipping of relics’, this bill, like the Act for the Suppression of Lesser Monasteries, rested its case on the findings made by the 1535 commission for the visitation of religious houses. Alarmed by the vices exposed, and seeking to establish ‘the true religion of Christ’, it forbad ‘religious persons’ from luring ‘any man to run about on pilgrimages’ or from persuading ‘the people to give any peculiar office to any saint’, calling upon them rather ‘to recognise all goodness to come of God’. Nor were they to use the images and relics in their possession to make money. The bill laid down a system of enforcement which threatened offenders, who could not be punished under existing legislation, with deprivation 221   The same orthodoxy was then authorised in the Bishops’ Book of 1537 (which adopted the new practice of regarding the second commandment as totally devoted to the condemnation of image worship); applied by the Royal Injunctions of 1538 (which ordered the large-scale removal of saintly images from places of public worship); and was finally confirmed in the King’s Book of 1543 which dismissed purgatory as a fiction. 222   British Library, Cottonian MS Cleo E. VI, fos 330–330b [L.P. VII. 1383]. 223

  The National Archives, SP6/I/25 [L.P. X. 246 (16)].

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of ‘dignity, benefice, stipend and expulsion from that place’ where ‘such crime or offence’ had been committed. In this respect, the proposed bill was meant to complement the Suppression Act by allowing action to be taken against brethren in the surviving religious houses, notably for the offence of encouraging the veneration of saints. Involved in this attempt to ban saint worship by parliamentary act was one, possibly two, of the heretics named in the Pilgrims’ December petition. John Rastell was from 1529 MP for the Cornish seat of Dunheved.224 As a client of Thomas Cromwell (who nominated his son for the constituency of Tavistock following the death of William Honychurch in 1531), he was in Pilgrim eyes a suspect figure. But how did the Pilgrims come to identify him as a dangerous heretic? Rastell was a lawyer and printer from a lollard background, having been brought up in Coventry, a centre of the sect. Yet by 1530 he was securely ensconced in the circle of Sir Thomas More whose sister he had married, whose works he was printing and whose public defence of the cult of saints he had openly supported with a book of his own entitled A New Book of Purgatory. Both More and Rastell came under attack in John Frith’s A Disputation of Purgatory (1531), a fierce and thorough repudiation of the doctrine of purgatory, which earned for Frith a book-burning by the Lincolnshire rebels and inclusion as a named heretic in one draft of the Pilgrims’ December petition. The first third of Frith’s book dealt with Rastell and aimed to disprove his theory that the existence of purgatory could be demonstrated by natural philosophy; the second third sought to demolish More’s claim that proof of purgatory lay in the Scriptures; while the final third tackled Fisher’s reliance on canon law to uphold purgatorial doctrine. Frith described Rastell as of ‘Master More’s alliance’ and anyone reading Frith’s book can be left in no doubt that Rastell was a supporter of saint worship. So how did the Pilgrims come to regard him as its enemy? The answer partly lies in Rastell’s activities in the reformation parliament, in which he sat until 1534. Frith’s book presented Rastell as a conservative in religion but, by virtue of reading Frith’s attack upon him, he was transformed into a committed reformer and thereupon transferred his allegiance from More to Cromwell. In 1535 he was placed in the Tower, on the authority of Cranmer, for questioning the obligation of Londoners to pay tithes on a compulsory rather than voluntary basis, and there he died early in 1536. Yet in late 1534 he was clearly very active, preparing for the second parliamentary session of that year by submitting to the government a package of proposals entitled 224   For biographical details, see S.T. Bindoff (ed.), The House of Commons, 1509– 1558 (London, 1982), vol. III, pp. 176–9; Oxford D.N.B., vol. 46, pp. 80–82; A.J. Geritz (ed.), The Pastyme of the People and a New Booke of Purgatory, by J. Rastell (New York, 1985), introduction.

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‘How the false heresies which the bishop of Rome hath taught the people should be brought out of their conscience and hearts’.225 Essentially, he was seeking to turn the tables on catholicism by having certain catholic doctrines, such as the papal primacy, saint worship and clerical chastity, placed in the same heretical category as sacramentarianism and rebaptism. This was to be achieved by compiling a list of articles entitled ‘the book of the charge’, whose purpose was to provide an authoritative statement of what constituted heresy within the English church. Rastell, with the help of two or three other reformers – notably Sir Francis Bigod, probably Christopher St German and possibly William Marshall or Clement Armstrong or Thomas Gibson – set about compiling the book and Rastell proposed to Cromwell that it should be published in the king’s name, after it had been vetted by a committee of bishops and doctors and approved by parliament.226 Rastell also put suggestions to Cromwell for its publicity: recommending that free copies should be distributed to the people, that custos rotulorum and justices of the peace should arrange to have it read out at county sessions and in courts leet, and that checks should be placed on parish clergy to ensure that they abided by its ‘charge’ when instructing their flock. Enforcement, he proposed, should be in Chancery with the appointment of six or seven masters ‘some spiritual and some temporal’ to hear and determine heresy cases.227 ‘The book of the charge’ was certainly compiled. Read by Cromwell, it was returned to Rastell for amendment. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that it went any further.228 An idea of its content can be gathered from the suggestions that Rastell appended to the original proposal, some under the heading ‘These things be intended shortly to be made and printed’, and others under the heading ‘Bills to be drawn against the next parliament’.229 Both sets of suggestions proposed that priests should have the liberty to get married and to work for their living. They also called for a prohibition on offerings to images, whether ‘money, candle or any other thing’, with a fine of £10 for infringing the ban. In addition the list of matter to be printed included a denial of the efficacy of prayers for the dead, arguing that ‘the prayers of men that be here living for the souls of them that be dead are in no wise profitable to them that be dead nor cannot help them’. Its publication proposals were distinguished by a plan for a series

225

  SP1/85, fos 83b–84 [L.P. VII. 1043].   For the book, see L.P. VII. 1071. For proposed clerical committee, see L.P. VII. 1043. For proposed parliamentary sanction, see L.P. VII. 1071. 227   L.P. VII. 1043. 228   SP1/85, f. 113 [L.P. VII. 1073]. 226

229

  SP1/85, f. 84 [L.P. VII. 1043].

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of little books, each one ‘not past one sheet of paper’ and clearly aimed at popularising the reformist cause. Rastell followed Marshall in publishing a primer in English which, in his case, contained several prayers of his own composition. His intentions were evangelical: that is, to ‘bring the people from the belief of the pope’s naughty doctrine’.230 He suggested to Cromwell that the king should meet the cost of printing four to five thousand copies and that, like ‘the book of the charge’, the primer ought to be distributed freely to the people who should be encouraged to take it to church and receive direction on its use from the parish priest. According to his calculation, for a cost of no more than £100, the people might, in this way, have their minds turned ‘to the right belief’. In his opinion such a scheme would ‘do as much good as the preachings do’. There is nothing to suggest that Rastell’s scheme was ever implemented. Nevertheless, his efforts to convert the people – by publishing short anti-catholic tracts for free distribution, by advocating that certain principal catholic beliefs be designated heresies and by agitating in parliament for legislative prohibition of image worship – must have presented him to catholics as a very dangerous man. The third and final government adviser named as a heretic in the Pilgrims’ December petition was Christopher St German.231 He and Rastell had a great deal in common; and, in all likelihood, they had worked together to promote religious reform. Many years before, both had come to London from Warwickshire to join the Middle Temple, qualifying as utterbarristers by 1502. Although, by the mid-1530s, both were elderly – Rastell in his early sixties and St German in his early seventies – they remained very active men. Unlike Rastell, St German never entered parliament, yet, like Rastell, he was much engaged with parliamentary business, drafting bills and printing statutes. Both, moreover, were keen to extend the scope of statute to enable an enforcement of religious change in the courts of common law and in Chancery.232 What is more, it was Rastell who in 1528 printed St German’s first book, a work entitled Dialogus de fundamentis legum Angliae et de conscientia. Known as Doctor and Student, it sought to elevate the status of the common law by arguing that it rested on justice as well as statute and precedent. His purpose was to place it on parity with the equity of Chancery and the conscience of canon law. Yet the charge the Pilgrims brought against St German was for publishing heretical works in English – in other words, works that might infect the minds 230

  SP1/85, f. 114 [L.P. VII. 1073].   For his association with the government, see J.A. Guy, Christopher St German on Chancery and Statute, Selden Society, supplementary series, 6 (1985), pp. 54–5. 232   For biographical details, see Oxford D.N.B., vol. 48, pp. 609–11; Guy, Christopher St German in Chancery, pp. 3–14 and ch. 4. 231

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of ordinary people – whereas Doctor and Student was first published in Latin and was essentially a treatise on the law. Nonetheless, a third part to this work was published in English in 1531. Entitled A Little Treatise called the New Additions, it focused on the powers of the clergy and the need to restrict them. This was soon followed by A Treatise concerning the Division between the Spirituality and Temporality. First published in 1532, it criticised the clergy for failing to abide by the traditional ideals of the clerical estate but did so by setting out a series of opinions along the lines of ‘some say this and some say that’, thus avoiding an admission of personal belief. In this ambivalent manner, he publicised the view that the doctrine of purgatory was no more than a cunning device to enrich the church, arguing that offerings, obits, pardons, pilgrimages, chantries and religious gilds ‘profiteth not the people’ since, contrary to expectations, they could not achieve salvation or work miracles.233 Thomas More gave the treatise a good deal of publicity in his Apology of Sir Thomas More, emphasising its opposition to saint worship and branding it as heretical. In 1533 the two men became engaged in public debate, through the publication of a number of books. This made two things clear: one, that the author of A Treatise Concerning the Division was a keen advocate of religious reform, and two, that his work enjoyed the government’s support. St German’s Salem and Bizance (1533) was printed by the king’s printer, Thomas Berthelet, and published ‘cum privilegio regali’.234 Although, like all St German’s earlier work, it appeared anonymously, it may well have been this small book that led the Pilgrims to brand him as a heretic. Not only did it confirm More’s charge that the author of Division was on the side of religious reform, but also, as an attack on More, it received a great deal of notice. Inflating St German’s reputation for heresy was the fact that his publications became the target of two large works by More: first, his Apology, an attack on Division, and second, The Debellacion of Salem and Bizance. The debate closed with a further work by St German entitled Additions of Salem and Bizance which, rather than attacking More, chose to ‘devise some means how’ the abuses of the clergy identified in Division ‘might be reformed’, stressing that lay people could best please God by giving the money that they normally bestowed on saints to their poor neighbours. In the same work an explicit criticism of pilgrimages preceded an attack on St Thomas Becket.235 St German’s reformist views on saint worship were further revealed in An Answer to a Letter (1535), chapter three of which is entitled ‘Of praying to saints and worshipping of them’. Declaring that ‘saints of themselves 233

  See fos 3b, 4–4b.

234

  New Additions and Division had also been printed by Berthelet.   See fos 67–8. For battle of the books, see Guy, St German, pp. 35–7.

235

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nor by their own power cannot hear our complaints nor know the honour that we do to them’, the author admitted how he marvelled that people should pray to saints rather than Christ since praying to the former is a ‘much lower degree of prayers’ than praying to the latter. The chapter closed by making a distinction between, on the one hand, ‘saints canonised by Scripture’ and those who had suffered martyrdom in the early days of the church and, on the other, those ‘canonised … at Rome for money’, thus connecting the repudiation of Rome with doubts held of sainthood. Since Salem and Bizance was a defence of Division against More’s Apology, it inevitably revealed St German’s sympathy for religious reform, notably when he rebutted More’s charge that men denied purgatory in order to seize church wealth by arguing that such men did it ‘not for politic reasons’ but for reasons ‘of policy’: in other words, out of conviction.236 Helpfully, it also discussed why Division should have been composed in English. Responding to More’s opinion that published criticisms of the clergy ought to be addressed exclusively to them and therefore composed in Latin, St German argued that, as this book had been exclusively written for the people of England, it was ‘most convenient to express it in the English tongue’. He also reasoned that, as previous criticisms of the clergy in Latin had failed to persuade clerics to mend their ways, a work in English might encourage ‘some good men’ to remind the clergy of their shortcomings in such a way as to cause ‘some good reformation’.237 In neither of his attacks on St German’s work did More actually name him.238 With an ironic twist, he simply presented him as a country priest, calling him ‘Sir John Somesay the pacifier’ or ‘the pacifier’. Yet, thanks to the debacle with More, St German’s identity as a dangerous heretic must have slipped out, leading to his inclusion in article 1 of the December petition. In the early 1530s St German was very much to the fore in questioning the liberties of the clergy and in advocating that matters of religion should be settled by king in parliament. His work in this field culminated in his Treatise concerning the Power of the Clergy and the Laws of the Realm (1534), a further development of ideas that had dominated his writings since the publication of New Additions in 1531. His persistent and radical anticlericalism had much in common with that of Marshall and Rastell. Yet, as with them, he was not content simply to achieve a change in the relationship between church and state, or in the relationship between clergy and laity, but was also determined to repudiate other prominent features of the catholic church, notably the corpus of beliefs and practices associated with purgatory. Compounding the offence in Pilgrim eyes, moreover, was 236

  F. xxxvii.   Fos x–xb. 238   See Guy, St German, pp. 35–6. 237

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the missionary zeal of all three men, especially their desire to reach out and convert the people. At the time, the religious reforms projected and realised expressed not so much popular opinion as the needs of the king, the calculations of his leading ministers and the beliefs of some of his bishops. It was this great divide between what the government wanted and what the people mostly believed that Marshall, Rastell and St German were intent on eliminating. To popularise the reformation all three aimed to make their ideas as accessible as possible: by publishing works in English rather than in Latin, by producing small books critical of the cult of saints and by compiling new primers that, in offering instruction on how to pray, insisted on Christ as the only mediator between man and God. As a result, all three came to be seen as dangerous heretics, fit for inclusion in a list of famous reformers who shared the belief that the rituals and doctrines associated with saintly intercession were no more than the invention of a greedy priesthood.239 The Danger of Subversion The religious grievances that moved the Pilgrim commons covered a wide range of matters, not all of them issues of faith. Among them were agrarian complaints against the system of tithes and the raising of manorial rents and dues; constitutional complaints against the loss of ecclesiastical liberties and clerical rights; fiscal complaints against new taxes; and regional complaints against the transference of clerical wealth in the north to laymen in the south. Nonetheless, at the heart of the commons’ religious grievance was the conviction that the true faith was in danger of subversion, largely because of the government’s rejection of two central tenets of the catholic church, the papal supremacy and saint worship. In this respect, their struggle for the faith against the infection of heresy was integral to the rebellion as a rising of the commons, not something imposed upon it by participating gentlemen or clerics. Sustaining it was the reaction of the commons to what they saw as an attempt to extinguish a vitally important means of obtaining salvation for the dead and relief for the living. In this respect, it is wrong to regard the issue of purgatory as above the theological understanding of ordinary people; or to think 239  Hoyle states (see Hoyle, p. 350) that article 1 contained the names not only of heretics but also of others, and that, for this latter reason, Rastell and St German came to be included. But this lacks credibility (a) because of the clear declaration made in the article that it is only dealing with matters ‘touching the faith’ and (b) because of the close association the two men had with heretical ideas and their dissemination. In view of (b) Guy is, in all likelihood, mistaken when he attributes St German’s inclusion in the petition to accident. See his St German, pp. 45–6.

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that a comprehension of heresy as a religious concept was quite beyond their ken.240 It is also misleading to designate either the suppression of religious houses or the parish under threat as the basic religious cause of the uprising, since both essentially depended on the northern commons’ objection to the repudiation of the pope and the unseating of the saints as intercessories between man and God. And it is equally misleading to explain the religious complaint in terms of a commitment to traditionalism.241 The Pilgrims fought to defend a means of spiritual benefit which, as far as ordinary people were concerned, had only come to full fruition over the previous two centuries and which remained highly appreciated in the 1530s because its rites (masses and prayers for the dead, oblations, lights, pilgrimages), beliefs (in purgatory, in saintly intercession, in priestly powers of redemption and in miracles) and institutions (religious houses, chantries, religious gilds) offered a positive, practical and comforting solution to the problems recurrently set by adversity and death.

240   See Davies, ‘Popular religion and the pilgrimage of grace’, pp. 74–80; Bowker, ‘Lincolnshire in 1536’: 207–12. 241   The case for the uprising as principally motivated by the suppression of monasteries was made by Christopher Haigh in his two books on Lancashire: The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace, Chetham Society, third series, 17 (1969) and Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975). In spite of its dubiousness, the thesis has been revived of late by Bernard in his King’s Reformation. Hoyle will have none of this thesis. Dismissing the defence of monasteries as a cause of the uprising (see Hoyle, pp. 48–50), he substituted fear for ‘dismemberment of parochial religion’ as its primary cause, made evident in rumours relating to the removal of churches and church goods and to a tax on baptisms (ibid., p. 17).

Chapter Three

‘Intolerable Exactions’ The Pilgrims made complaint against an extensive range of taxes, some real, some rumoured. The real taxes came of recent legislation, notably two statutes enacted in 1534 – one granting the levy of a lay subsidy, the other imposing first fruits and tenths upon the clergy – and a third statute enacted in 1536 for the purpose of preventing evasion in the payment of feudal dues. The rumoured taxes sprang from seditious bills that suddenly appeared in late September and early October 1536, nailed to church doors and trees over much of the north. These bills raised the imminent prospect of government impositions on baptisms, food, cattle, ploughs and gold. Irrespective of whether they were real or imagined, these taxes had in common an air of radical and menacing novelty that made them appear not just oppressive but constitutionally improper. Together, they were seen as threatening to sweep away the time-honoured customs that had traditionally protected the wealth of subjects, rich and poor, against government greed. This perceived threat was central to the Pilgrims’ complaint that the policies currently pursued by the government would not only subvert the faith of Christ but also seriously impair the commonwealth. Moreover, it keenly affected the commons of the north, even though the border counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland and the Palatinate of Durham were exempt from direct taxation and, elsewhere, the threshold of liability for the subsidy in question was so high as to free large numbers of commoners from having to make payment. The Peacetime Subsidy The lay subsidy granted in 1534 comprised a quindime (or fifteenth and tenth) supplemented by a subsidy, the latter to be paid in two installments, one in 1535, the other in 1536, while the quindime was not to be collected

   This chapter represents a reworking of three articles of mine published in the early 1990s: ‘Enhancements and importunate charges: an analysis of the tax complaints of October 1536’, Albion, 22 (1990): 403–19; ‘Up for the commonweal: the significance of tax grievances in the English rebellions of 1536’, E.H.R., 106 (1991): 299–318; ‘Tax reform and rebellion in early Tudor England’, History, 76 (1991): 379–400.

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until 1537. Payment was compliantly made in 1535 but resisted in 1536, by both the Lincolnshire rebels and the Pilgrims, partly because of the unusual heaviness of the forthcoming quindime, partly because the peacetime levy of direct taxes was regarded as highly irregular and a dangerous precedent. The oppressiveness of the quindime was a source of complaint in the petition that the Lincolnshire rebels dispatched to the government on 10 October and which Robert Aske relied upon in the early stages to declare the cause of the pilgrimage of grace. Its third article complained that it was currently an onerous imposition, the result of each local community always being required to pay the same amount irrespective of prevailing economic conditions, and because in those parts the tax was levied on sheep and cattle. Recent losses of livestock from disease meant that men ‘shall be distrained to pay 4d. for one beast and 12d. for 20 sheep’. This was presented as ‘an importunate charge to them considering the poverty that they be in already and loss which they have sustained these two years bypassed’. The quindime granted in 1534 was novel in a second sense, a novelty it shared with the attached subsidy. Traditionally, both taxes had been irregular exactions, awarded to raise extraordinary revenues to meet special emergencies, notably those caused by war. But this was not the case in 1534 when no emergency was cited to justify the grant, raising the fearful possibility that, resting on this novel precedent, such taxes would, in the not so distant future, come to be regarded as a source of ordinary revenue and therefore exactable on a regular basis. This fear was not made explicitly in any surviving rebel manifesto or petition but it was undoubtedly a cause of complaint. This can be inferred from a letter the captured subsidy commissioners in Lincolnshire sent on 3 October to the king. Having made it clear that the Lincolnshire rebels were annoyed at the government for imposing ‘enhancements and importunate charges’, it ended with a loyal and pointed declaration that they ‘be yours, bodies, lands and goods at all times’ but only ‘where your grace shall command



  26 Henry VIII, c. 19.   The National Archives, SP1/108, f. 45 [L.P. XI. 705 (1)]. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 1.    For the novelty of 26 Henry VIII, c. 19, see G.R. Elton, ‘Taxation for war and peace in early Tudor England’, in J.M. Winter (ed.), War and Economic Development (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 33–48; J.D. Alsop, ‘The theory and practice of Tudor taxation’, E.H.R., 97 (1982): 1–30, and his ‘Innovation in Tudor taxation’, E.H.R., 99 (1984): 83–93; Roger Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, 1485–1547 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 12–13. For the counterview, see R.W. Hoyle, ‘The crown, parliament and taxation in sixteenth-century England’, E.H.R., 109 (1994): 1174–96. 

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for the defence of your person and of your realm’. Confirmation that this was making critical reference to the 1534 tax grant came four days later, when an unidentifiable JP from the Lincolnshire Fens, in reporting the rebels’ grievances, stressed their demand ‘that the king shall not now nor at any time hereafter take nor demand no money of his subjects but only for the defence of the realm in time of war’. That the Pilgrims held the same objection to the 1534 lay subsidy became clear in November after Robert Bowes and Ralph Ellerker had taken the Pilgrims’ first petition to Court. This petition simply made a series of general points none of which mentioned taxation, but the two Pilgrim ambassadors were provided with a list of specific grievances to raise when the occasion arose, one of which demanded that ‘the king should not take money from his people except to make war on France and Scotland’. Yet if the objection to the additional subsidy had rested simply on the fact that it was, contrary to custom, a peacetime levy, why was the first installment paid without protest in 1535? This remains a mystery but the answer probably lies in the fact that in 1535 men escaped their fiscal obligations by making underassessments of their wealth, thus finding shelter in the high £20 minimum assessment threshold, whereas in 1536 they found themselves faced by a further novelty apparently designed to expose the deceit of the previous year and to prevent its repetition. Since the levy of the additional subsidy was spread over two years, it was to be expected that there would be but one assessment of wealth and, on the basis of it, half the tax would be collected in the first year and the remainder in the second year. In reality, two separate assessments of wealth were planned, one carried out in 1535, the other attempted in October 1536, a consequence of Cromwell’s belief that underassessment had been extensively practised in 1535, and a reflexion of his anger that the king’s gentleness in imposing such a lenient tax should be treated with such disloyalty and contempt. Interrupted by the uprisings in Lincolnshire and the north, the 1536 assessment was eventually carried out in 1537 when the suspicion of underassessment in 1535 was borne out by an 8 per cent increase in revenue. The arrival of assessors rather than collectors on the local scene in October 1536, then, aroused the fear that their appointed task was to track down cases of underassessment. Intensifying this fear was a rumour current that false declarations of wealth made under oath would be severely punished, with those found guilty suffering confiscation of all their goods and chattels, or at least forfeiture of the difference between what they were actually worth and what they had  

  SP1/106, f. 45 [L.P. XI. 534].

  The National Archives, E36/121, f. 116 [L.P. XI. 585].    L.P. XI. 1143.

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claimed themselves to be worth. To allay this fear Thomas Moigne, one of the subsidy commissioners in Lincolnshire, informed the rebels that, in accordance with the subsidy act of 1534, men could clear themselves of charges of assessment deceit without the need to take an oath: simply by making a declaration of the true value of their income or wealth to the subsidy commissioners. In terms of actual weight neither the quindime nor the additional subsidy of 1534 could be regarded as intolerably heavy. After all, the total yield of the quindime had been frozen two centuries earlier at about £36,000. Thereafter this amount was levied locally in permanently fixed allocations. Because of the long economic recession of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a massive reduction in the size of the population, a long-term consequence of the Black Death, the tax had become progressively heavier to bear as communities became poorer and less populous while the revenue the government expected from it remained the same. In compensation a rebate of £6,000 became a fixed feature of the tax from the mid-fifteenth century. Nonetheless, under the early Tudors the recovery of the economy, population growth and inflation combined to devalue the fixed amounts collected from individual wards and vills. As a result, the need arose to reform the tax, at least by removing the £6,000 rebate. The latter was first attempted in the grant of 1534 and realised in the levy of 1537. Thereafter, however, the rebate was restored, presumably because of the protest made in October 1536 in Lincolnshire and the north. In other words, the objection made by the Pilgrims to the quindime was to a tax that had become generally benign yet relatively heavy in the particular conditions of the mid-1530s, partly because of the effects of sheep and cattle disease, partly because of the inflexibility of the tax which prevented adaptation to this misfortune, and partly because of the government’s insensitivity in seeking to remove the rebate at a time when it appeared to be badly needed.

   For reassessment in 1536–7, see SP1/106, f. 183 [L.P. XI. 470]; SP1/119, f. 55 [L.P. XII(1). 1070]. For Cromwell’s suspicion of ‘deceit of the king in his subsidy’ in connexion with the levy of 1535, and his concern for ‘the true assessing of the subsidy’ in connexion with the levy of 1536, see SP1/102, f. 5 [L.P. X. 254]; British Library, Cottonian MS Titus B. I, f. 160 [L.P. IX. 725]. Also see R.S. Schofield, ‘Parliamentary lay taxation, 1489–1547’ (Cambridge Ph.D., 1963), pp. 327–9, 426–7. For the circulation of rumours threatening confiscation of goods for making false declarations of wealth, see SP1/106, f. 291 [L.P. XI. 567]; St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 482 (n. 1) [L.P. XI. 768 (2)]. For Moigne’s encounter with Lincolnshire rebels, see SP1/110, f. 150b [L.P. XI. 971]. For that part of the statute to which he was referring, see Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders, T.E. Tomlins, J. Raithby et al. (11 vols, London, 1810–28), vol. III, p. 518. 

  See Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, ch. 3.

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The purpose of the additional subsidy granted in 1534 was to make up for the shortcomings of the quindime, yet it was another benign measure, raising only £45,000 in two years, a relatively small sum compared with the previous subsidy granted, the one enacted in 1523, which raised £136,000 in two years, or compared with the subsidy that followed the 1534 grant, the one enacted in 1540, which raised £95,000 in two years.10 Three sources of alleviation rendered the 1534 subsidy remarkably light: a very high tax threshold; provision for payment in two annual installments; and a staggered levy to prevent the payment of the subsidy and the quindime from occurring in the same year. It had a very high threshold at £20, the threshold norm being in the region of £1 for assessments based on incomes and between £2 and £5 for assessments based on the value of goods and chattels. According to the government’s calculations, its threshold of £20 confined payment to between one-tenth and one-twentieth of the population. Another source of alleviation lay in its intrinsic character.11 The Tudor subsidy came in several basic forms: the single subsidy payable within one year (as in 1514) or in several annual installments (as in 1534, 1543, 1558, 1566); the repeater subsidy, essentially a grant of a single tax which could be repeatedly levied for several years (as in 1489, 1513, 1514, 1515, 1523, 1540, 1545, 1549, 1553, 1555); the multiple subsidy, essentially a compound of several subsidies simultaneously granted and consecutively levied (as in 1588, 1592, 1597, 1601).12 Of these forms, the 10

 Ibid., table 7.1(b). Figures have been rounded out.   For Act, see 26 Henry VIII, c. 19. For government emphasis on lightness of tax, see SP1/106, f. 301b [L.P. XI. 569]; St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 475 [L.P. XI. 956]. Henry VIII informed the Lincolnshire rebels [L.P. XI. 569] that only one-tenth were ‘within the limit or burden of the same’, and the Yorkshire rebels that only one-twentieth were liable to it [L.P. XI. 956]. Historians tend to agree with the second calculation: see C.S.L. Davies, ‘The pilgrimage of grace reconsidered’, Past and Present, 41 (1968): 60; R.S. Schofield, ‘Taxation and the political limits of the Tudor state’, in Claire Cross, David Loades and John Scarisbrick (eds), Law and Government under the Tudors (Cambridge, 1988), p. 235, n. 25. In doing so, they rely upon the calculations of R.B. Smith, given in ch. 3 of Land and Politics in the England of Henry VIII (Oxford, 1970), which are confined to the West Riding and based on the returns for 1546. In table XII (p. 110) Smith showed that, thanks to the £20 minimum threshold, only 7.4 per cent of taxpayers in the Riding were accounted for. Such a high threshold and low catchment must have tempted the assessors in 1535 and 1536 to overassess at the lower end in order to reduce the number of those exempted, perhaps causing offence by doing so, while tempting taxpayers at the lower end to underassess themselves in order to escape the tax net. 12   For 1514 subsidy, see 5 Henry VIII, c. 17. For single subsidies paid in annual installments, see 26 Henry VIII, c. 19; 34/35 Henry VIII, c. 27; 1 Elizabeth, c. 21; 8 Elizabeth, c. 18. For repeater subsidies, see 14/15 Henry VIII, c. 16; 32 Henry VIII, c. 50; 37 Henry VIII, c. 25; 2/3 Edward VI, c. 36; 7 Edward VI, c. 12; 2/3 Philip and Mary, c. 23. For multiple subsidies, see 31 Elizabeth, c. 15; 35 Elizabeth, c. 13; 39 Elizabeth, c. 27; 43 Elizabeth, c. 18. 11

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single subsidy payable in several annual installments was easily the most favourable to the taxpayer, for it ensured that the annual rate at which the tax was actually levied was a division of the number of years over which its collection was spread. The 1534 enacted rate of one shilling in the pound was quite normal but the phasing of its collection over two years meant that, at sixpence, its annual rate was half that of most subsidies granted in the sixteenth century. Yet a further source of alleviation lay in the relationship between its two components, the subsidy and the quindime. Often subsidies and quindimes were payable within the same year: as in 1513, 1541, 1542, 1543, 1546 and 1547. In contrast the 1534 grant, following a precedent established in 1515, staggered the payment to allow the subsidy to be levied in 1535–6 followed by the quindime in 1537.13 In assessing the weight of the 1534 grant, it needs to be noted that it was the first subsidy to be enacted since 1523; and the first quindime to be enacted since 1516. In fact, prior to 1535, the previous year in which a lay subsidy had been collected was 1527; and prior to 1537 the previous year in which the quindime had been collected was 1517. Yet the amount exacted in lay taxation in the 1520s – a combination of a very large subsidy and a huge unpaid loan – had been unprecedentedly high at £411,000. Moreover, the direct taxes levied by Henry VIII upon the laity prior to 1535 had been more than twice as heavy as those levied by his father although collected over the same length of time: raising £645,000 against £281,000.14 And because of the taxes Henry VIII had levied in the early part of his reign, in 1536 the view was abroad that the king had extracted enough money from the realm, making further taxes unjustified. This view was reflected in Aske’s second proclamation which stated that ‘the said council hath spoiled and robbed and further intendeth to spoil and rob the whole body of this realm’.15 The same view was declared in a letter submitted to the Pilgrims’ December assembly, probably the work of Sir Robert Constable. Elaborating on the proverb ‘a man can have no more of the cat but the skin’ he added: ‘that is to say, the king can have no more of us than we have which he hath already and yet not satisfied’.16 Several reports of the Lincolnshire uprising and the pilgrimage of grace 13   For coincidence, see 3 Henry VIII, c. 22; 4 Henry VIII, c. 19; 32 Henry VIII, c. 50; 34/35 Henry VIII, c. 27; 37 Henry VIII, c. 25. For non-coincidence, see 7 Henry VIII, c. 9; 26 Henry VIII, c. 19. 14   Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, table 7.1(a and b). For the loan, see L.P. III(2). 2483 (3), p. 1050. For repayment excused, see 21 Henry VIII, c. 24. 15   SP1/106, f. 286 [L.P. XI. 563 (2)]; SP1/108, f. 10 [L.P. XI. 678]; St. P.Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 466 [L.P. XI. 705 (2)]. 16   SP1/112, f. 114b [L.P. XI. 1244].

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claimed that, burdened with the weight of taxation already imposed by Henry VIII upon his subjects, the rebels wished to be free of taxation for the rest of the reign.17 Such points about past and future tax practices, however, were absent from the petitions that the rebels submitted to the government. Although the Lincolnshire rebels had objections to the subsidy, their petition to the government merely required something to be done about the quindime, which was interpreted to mean cancellation; while the petition from the Pilgrims, less ambiguous and more demanding, required the discharge of ‘taxes now granted by parliament’: that is, an abandonment of the second installment of the subsidy and a cancellation of the quindime.18 First Fruits and Tenths The parliament of 1534 also granted a tax on the clergy. It partly comprised a first fruits tax on clerical offices, an adaption of a traditional papal tax that the crown had assumed. It fell due upon every change of occupant and amounted to one year’s income of the vacated office. At the same time parliament granted an annual tax upon the clergy, discreetly termed an annual pension or rent, of one-tenth of the yearly income of each clerical office. This tax lacked papal origins and was completely novel: in the sense that it was additional to the tenth that the clergy had traditionally paid as part of the parliamentary subsidy and differed markedly from any direct tax ever levied upon the English church. To ensure that the king received his due from these clerical taxes, a fresh evaluation of clerical wealth was ordered. By 1536 this survey, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, had been completed and first fruits and tenths had come into operation.19 First fruits and tenths introduced some startling changes to the system of royal finance. Having been granted to Henry VIII and his successors for ever, their future levy was entirely free of further parliamentary approval.20 Within the fiscal system of the time, there was nothing quite like them. True, tonnage and poundage had escaped the basic constraint placed upon subsidies and quindimes in becoming a tax granted to the monarch 17

  For example, see L.P. XI. 533, 553, 853.   For the Lincolnshire petition, see SP1/108, f. 45 [L.P. XI. 705 (1)] and below, Appendix, doc. 1. An earlier petition had complained of the subsidy as well. See L.P. XII(1). 70 (xi). That the Lincolnshire rebels were alarmed at the subsidy, see L.P. XI. 971. For the Pilgrim petition, see L.P. XI. 1246 (1) and below, Appendix, doc. 16. 19   26 Henry VIII, c. 3. The first payment of the tenth had fallen due in December 1535, with first fruits exactable on all clerical promotions made after 1 January 1535. 20   See Statutes of the Realm, vol. III, p. 495 (viii). 18

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for life, but its continuation in the long term remained dependent upon parliamentary consent. In total contrast, the clerical taxes enacted in 1534 were granted to the crown in perpetuity. The regularity of the clerical tenth represented another startling innovation. Established as an annual levy to meet the costs of everyday government, it differed profoundly from the other direct taxes at the crown’s disposal which were, characteristically, irregular in levy and appropriated to extraordinary needs. A third novelty lay in the manner that first fruits were taxed. Under the pope, the tax had exacted no more than a half-a-year’s income and only offices valued at more than £5. 6s. 8d. were liable. Now, under the king, it took one year’s income and applied to all clerical offices.21 Preparing the way for these reforms of 1534 were changes made to the clerical subsidy by Cardinal Wolsey. In 1523 Wolsey extended the range of liability, by bringing the unbeneficed clergy within the fiscal net and by removing the threshold of five marks established in 1291. He also conducted a fresh assessment of clerical wealth instead of relying, in the traditional manner, upon a valuation last revised for the north in 1318.22 Nonetheless, the 1534 grant did much more than simply adopt the reforms of 1523. The latter had provided some compensation for poverty by rating clergy with incomes of less than £8 at one-fifteenth rather than one-tenth. This was swept away in 1534, with all clergy taxed at onetenth.23 Moreover, the new valuation of clerical wealth compiled in 1535 produced a thorough survey of spiritual possessions and their value which thereafter replaced the Taxatio of 1291 as the basis of clerical assessment. Between them the new assessments of the 1520s and 1530s ended the relief that clerical taxpayers had naturally derived from the use of dated and frozen valuations of wealth – at least for a time, since the failure to revise the valuation of 1535 eventually restored to the clergy the benefit of underassessment. Whereas the innovations in the lay taxes granted in 1534 were found objectionable because they were potentially oppressive, those associated with the clerical taxes of that year were found objectionable on grounds of actual oppressiveness. This was especially true of the lower clergy who 21   J.J. Scarisbrick, ‘Clerical taxation in England, 1485 to 1547’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 11 (1960): 51. 22   A.K. McHardy, ‘Clerical taxation in fifteenth-century England: the clergy as agents of the crown’, in R.B. Dobson (ed.), The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester, 1984), p. 170. For the break with the old assessments, see P. Heath, The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the Reformation (London, 1969), p. 146; H.E. Salter, A Subsidy Collected in the Diocese of Lincoln in 1526, Oxford Historical Society, 63 (1909), pp. iv–v and ix. 23   Margaret Bowker, The Henrician Reformation in the Diocese of Lincoln under John Longland (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 43–4; Salter, Subsidy, p. 5.

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previously had been protected by high tax thresholds, complete exemption or graduated rates. But it was also evident in a general increase of the clergy’s tax burden. For example, the pre-reformation clergy had paid an average of £8,000 per annum to pope and crown; whereas in the late 1530s the clergy was paying £18,000 to the crown alone.24 The clerical subsidies exacted under Wolsey had been unusually heavy, raising £24,000 per annum from 1523 to 1528; but they were relatively light compared with the tenth introduced in 1534 which, over the next five years, averaged £31,000 per annum.25 Equipped with the Valor Ecclesiasticus and clerical taxes freed of future consent, the government found itself better placed than ever before to exploit ecclesiastical wealth. And this is exactly what happened: in the five years from 1535 to 1540, clerical taxation raised £246,000, exceeding by £6,000 the return from clerical taxation in the 15-year period from 1512 to 1529.26 To sugar the pill of first fruits and tenths, the king had made several concessions to the clergy, one of which was to excuse them liability to the subsidy of 1534.27 Another was to relieve them of outstanding payments of a tax granted by convocation in 1531.28 The clerical Pilgrims found the Act of First Fruits and Tenths extremely distasteful. In objecting to it, they laid stress on its infringement of their constitutional rights: for neither tax had received the consent of convocation. When called upon to comment on the December petition, the Pilgrim clerical assembly in Pontefract made three objections to the new taxes, complaining, first, that ‘the clergy of the north parts hath not granted nor consented to the payment of the tenths or first fruits of benefices in the convocation’; secondly, that ‘no temporal man hath authority by the laws of God to claim any such’ taxes; and thirdly, that by granting the tenth in perpetuity, the 1534 Act was quite out of order. For these reasons, the assembly required ‘that all sums of money as tenths, first fruits and other arrearages granted unto the king’s highness by parliament or convocation

24   Scarisbrick, ‘Clerical taxation’: 49; G.R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953), p. 198. 25   For clerical subsidies under Wolsey, see John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), p. 98. For weight of clerical tenth under Cromwell, see Elton, Tudor Revolution, p. 198. Its heaviness can be measured against the annual average for 1485 to 1534, which amounted to £9,000. See Scarisbrick, ‘Clerical taxation’: 50. 26   Elton, Tudor Revolution, p. 198; Guy, Tudor England, p. 98; Scarisbrick, ‘Clerical taxation’: 52. 27   Statutes of the Realm, vol. III, p. 524 (xvi). 28   The original plan was to remit the two remaining payments (see L.P. VII. 1490) but in the Act only one payment was excused. See Statutes of the Realm, vol. III, p. 499 (xxiv).

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… may be remitted and forgiven’.29 The reference to arrearages related to the five-year tax granted by convocation in 1531, which, as we have seen, had been rebated in 1534 as a concession to make the first fruits and tenth tax more acceptable. The clerical assembly seemed to fear that, with the first fruits and tenths tax terminated, the convocation tax would be revived: hence their request for the cancellation of the sums still due. The clerical objection to first fruits and tenths was not confined to the learned doctors and higher clerics of the Pontefract assembly. It also extended to the parish priesthood, who feared that the imminent visitation to test their suitability for office would be prejudiced by the opportunity to raise revenue from first fruits, tempting the visitors to make dismissals from office in order to obtain the one-year’s revenue claimable from the new appointment.30 But throughout the clerical estate there must have been deep concern for the weight of taxation now falling upon the church, bearing in mind that the new tenth tax was an annual levy and that the new first fruits tax would extract one whole year’s income whenever a clerical office changed hands. Yet the demands put to the government for reforming these taxes, both in the Lincolnshire petition and in the Pilgrims’ petitions, were not as root and branch as the clerical assembly in Pontefract had wanted, perhaps because of the part played by laymen in their formulation. Rather than calling for the abolition of first fruits and tenths, the Lincolnshire articles demanded exemption for benefices of less than £20 income, a device that would have freed 89 per cent of Lincolnshire benefices from contribution, thus quelling the fears of the parish priesthood.31 The Pilgrims also failed to demand a complete abolition of first fruits and tenths, although what they actually wanted was obscured by poor drafting. Taken literally, their demand, in article 5, for the removal of first fruits and tenths was 29   See SP1/112, fos 116–17 [L.P. XI. 1245 (2)]. This original version, probably made by John Dakyn, refers to the tax as a ‘perpetual grant’ (f. 116), whereas a mid-seventeenthcentury copy mistranscribes the phrase as ‘personal grant’. See British Library, Cottonian MS Cleopatra E. V, f. 413 [L.P. XI. 1245 (1)]. Thanks to Strype (see his Memorials, I (2), p. 266), the Cottonian manuscript has unfortunately become accepted as the true version: see D. Wilkins (ed.), Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (London, 1737), vol. III, p. 812; The Records of the Northern Convocation, Surtees Society, 113 (1907), p. 236; Dodds, vol. I, p. 384 and Hoyle, p. 463. 30   See E36/119, f. 72 [L.P. XII(1). 481]. 31   The exact wording of this particular article is unknown since it was omitted from the only surviving copy of the Lincolnshire petition: that is, L.P. XI. 705 (1). That it was present in the copy sent to Court is evident in the king’s reply (see St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 465). Its formulation is revealed in the description provided by Aske under examination (see Bateson, p. 558). For the effect the exemption would have had on the Lincolnshire clergy, see Margaret Bowker, The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1495–1520 (Cambridge, 1968), p. 140.

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restricted to religious houses. Yet this cannot have been the case since the same article proposed for the rest of the clergy an alternative in the form of ‘a rent charge in generality to the augmentation of the Crown’ that ‘the clergy will of themselves grant’.32 In other words, whatever tax was paid by the secular clergy, the Pilgrims insisted on the principle of convocational consent. How did the laity appreciate this particular grievance? At the start of the Lincolnshire uprising John Porman, a gentleman, claimed that one of the causes of revolt was that the king ‘shall have the first fruits and the tenths of every benefice’, suggesting that for him the bone of contention was the 1534 grant’s failure to exempt the poorer livings.33 In his Examination, Robert Aske distinguished between first fruits and tenths on the grounds that the former in Pilgrims’ eyes was ‘a decay to all religious’ (that is, the regular clergy) whereas the latter was something that could ‘be borne well enough’.34 Later in the same Examination, however, and earlier in his Narrative, he condemned both tenths and first fruits as a source of harm, but continued to confine the problem to religious houses. Essentially he was deploring these taxes for their adverse effect on the monastic system and in turn upon the commonwealth. He predicted that ‘the whole destruction of religious’ would result as they caused the houses to close that had survived the 1536 suppression. He showed how this might well happen: ‘in some one year – by death, deprivation or resignation – the king’s highness may be entitled to [first fruits] two or three times or more’, an amount a religious house would be unable to pay especially as ‘the tenths yearly by them paid’ would have already driven it into debt, obliging a sell-off of assets such as plate and corn. Pressed by these tax demands, the house would be forced either to reduce its expenses – by laying off household servants, by curtailing its dispensation of charity and hospitality and by maintaining fewer monks – or to surrender itself completely to the crown. The new clerical taxes would therefore complement the dissolution of the lesser monasteries by causing the downfall of the larger houses. By doing so, they would inflict damage not only upon the faith but also upon the commonwealth, especially by withdrawing to southern parts the monastic wealth which previously had

32   For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16. The clerical assembly sought to revise this article by making it clear that the objection was to these taxes falling upon the secular as well as the regular clergy, but it reached Aske too late for incorporation in the final draft. See SP1/112, f. 124b [L.P. XI. 1246 (3)] and below, Appendix, doc. 17. 33   L.P. XI. 853. 34   Bateson, p. 559.

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been ‘current among the people’ of the north.35 This view was reflected in the December petition, a document Aske was largely responsible for drafting, where, in a sequence of three articles, the demand concerning first fruits and tenths (article 5) was sandwiched between the demand for restoring suppressed monasteries (article 4) and the demand for restoring the banished Friars Observant (article 6); while the first two demands were linked as a result of the article on first fruits and tenths making reference to the previous article on monasteries with the phrase ‘the same’.36 Two things are indisputable: one is that the article against the 1534 clerical taxes appeared in the section of articles touching the faith, suggesting that, in eating up the wealth of the church, these taxes, like the suppression of religious houses, were thought to affect adversely the ministration of the faith: in other words, for religious reasons, everyone had cause to deplore them. Secondly, it is clear from his Examination that Aske conceived the issue of clerical taxation as ‘to great detriment of the commonwealth’ in the north. In his opinion, by impoverishing and eventually destroying religious houses, such taxes would materially, as well as spiritually, harm the communities that they had for centuries succoured.37 That other laymen besides Aske were aggrieved by these clerical taxes – particularly commoners – was revealed in late December when the government sought to press ahead with collecting the clerical tenth, instead of awaiting the promised parliament at York to determine the future of this tax, and provoked agitation among the commons in the Liberty of Ripon, Richmondshire, Holderness and Yorkswold. As Lord Darcy reported to the earl of Shrewsbury in January 1537: ‘tenths, first fruits nor other money to be paid to the parliament be ended, they will none thereof’; while John Hallom, a yeoman leader of these new revolts, explained to his examiners following his capture: ‘if the king did ask any payment either of spiritual men or temporal … they would rise again, for they thought then that the parliament men would not obtain those things that they rose for’.38 Perhaps, the tenth, at this point in time, acquired a heightened importance simply because the attempt to collect it was taken to indicate the government’s unwillingness to abide by the December settlement. On the other hand, the surviving evidence suggests that the laity had several reasons for objecting to these clerical taxes: one was that they might be seen as indicative of a general government plan to convert 35   For Examination, see Bateson, pp. 562–3. For Narrative, see Bateson, pp. 337, 342–3. 36   For complete text, see below Appendix, doc. 16. 37   Bateson, pp. 562–3. 38   SP1/114, f. 189 [L.P. XII(1)]. 154]; E36/119, f. 24b [L.P. XII(1). 201 (1/iii)]. Also see L.P. XII(1). 64, 67.

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all direct taxes into regular levies, thus confirming the suspicions raised by the peacetime levy of the subsidy. Another objection stemmed from the belief that the resulting impoverishment of the church would impair the provision of religious services. A further objection lay in the belief that the regional economy would suffer as these taxes, along with other fiscal exactions, sucked coin out of the north, transferring it to the royal coffers at Westminster and into the southerner pockets of Cromwell, Lord Audley and other corrupt officials.39 Fiscal Feudalism Yet another source of tax complaint was the Act of Uses of 1536. The petitions of both the Lincolnshire rebels and the Pilgrims demanded its repeal.40 The statute related to the financial exactions the king was entitled to make as feudal overlord of those holding knights’ fees of him. It sprang from the fact that, since the thirteenth century, feudalism had become a system of taxation rather than a means of providing military service. By the 1530s the crown was keen to improve the system as a source of revenue. Blocking its way was the Use, a legal device employed by fiefholders to avoid paying a range of feudal dues, most of them liable upon death.41 By establishing a self-perpetuating trust or Use to serve as the legal proprietor, fiefholders removed the occasion upon which these dues would fall due. Uses were doubly advantageous not only for avoiding feudal dues, but also for escaping the law of indivisibility. In spite of the law that feudal property should be transmitted wholly to the eldest son, the terms of a Use made it possible to bequeath parts of the estate to his brothers. The Act of Uses swept these advantages away by enacting that, in the law, individual fiefholders remained both subjected to feudal dues and under obligation of primogeniture irrespective of any arrangements previously made to escape liability. In other words, it rendered the Use useless.42 In an attempt to deflate this grievance, Henry VIII in one of his replies to the rebels pointed out that a so-called uprising of the commons could 39

  SP1/112, fos 24–8 (p. VII) [L.P. XI. 1182 (2)].   See below, Appendix, doc. 1, article 2; and below, Appendix, doc. 16, article 20. It was first proposed by the gentlemen for inclusion in the Horncastle petition, see L.P. XII(1). 70 (x, xi, xii). 41   J.M.W. Bean, The Decline of English Feudalism (Manchester, 1968), pp. 6, 8–11; A.W.B. Simpson, An Introduction to the History of the Land Law (Reprint, London, 1973), pp. 173–5, 186. The incidents were the aid, relief, wardship and marriage, primer seisin, alienation fines and escheat to the crown in absence of an heir or for felony and treason. 42   27 Henry VIII, c. 10. 40

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hardly propose a complaint which only affected ‘the nobles, knights and gentlemen’.43 Yet, while there can be no doubt that it originated with the gentlemen Pilgrims, there is no reason to believe that it lacked commons’ support. Objection to the Act of Uses was made by the Pilgrims from the start of their uprising, thanks to their attachment to the Lincolnshire petition, which declared it prominently, as the second of six articles. The same objection was also made at the very end when it featured as article 20 in the December petition. In evaluating its importance to the Pilgrims, Robert Aske appeared to contradict himself, singling it out in his Examination as one of the parliamentary Acts especially begrudged by the Pilgrims but dismissively admitting that it was only included in the December petition because it had appeared in the Lincolnshire petition. He then went on to declare it ‘prejudicial to the commonwealth’ because it prevented fiefholders from using parts of their estate to acquit debts, or to set up their children in marriage, or as security for raising loans, thus curtailing the resources at their disposal for serving the king.44 Rather than committing an inconsistency, however, Aske may have been explaining the form that the complaint assumed in the December petition: that is, it was drafted in imitation of the Lincolnshire petition. Both petitions emphasised how the Act curtailed the landowner’s right of bequest while making no mention of it as a tax device. Thus the Lincolnshire petition, at some length, called for the suppression of the Act because ‘we, your true subjects, be clearly restrained of our liberties in the declaration of our will concerning our lands, as well for payment of our debts … the which … is a great hurt … to the commonwealth’.45 Appearing to be a brief summary of this statement, the Pilgrims’ December petition simply stated that they wanted ‘to have the statute that no man shall will his lands to be repealed’.46 The Pilgrims were undoubtedly concerned about the right of bequest to landed property; and perhaps it is significant that those who cited the Act of Uses as an important grievance were younger sons of fiefholders – notably, Aske, Thomas Percy and Marmaduke Neville.47 At the same time, it could not be said that this constituted the only objection to the Act. Bearing in mind the Act’s purpose of enlarging the crown’s feudal revenues, another reason for objection was undoubtedly the landowners’ newly acquired exposure to the government’s policy of fiscal feudalism, a direct and deliberate consequence of the Act of Uses. Over the centuries 43

  St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 464.   Bateson, pp. 563, 559. 45   For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 1, article 2. 46   For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16, article 20. 47   For Aske, see Bateson, p. 559. For Percy, see SP1/115, fos 255–255b [L.P. XII(1). 393 (2)]. For Neville, see L.P. XI. 1319. 44

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fiefholders had created for themselves a protective carapace against fiscal demands arising from the king’s feudal prerogative, partly by ensuring that the various feudal dues became permanently fixed but mainly by adopting the Use, thus ensuring that the fiefholder’s death escaped legal notice. In addition, the same device was a means of avoiding wardship in the event of a minority, thus denying the crown its right to take possession until the heir came of age and to exploit the estate in its own interest or in that of the client to whom it was granted.48 With the Act of Uses, much of this protection was suddenly torn away. That the landowners were resistant to the Act of Uses on fiscal grounds was demonstrated by the parliamentary opposition of the early 1530s to various government attempts to increase the crown’s feudal revenues.49 Placed in this context, the sympathy of gentlemen for the uprisings of October 1536 would appear to have partly sprung from the government’s eventual success in neutralising the Use, a success which touched them in the pocket through limiting their access to credit, through rendering their feudal tenures liable to wardship and through making them accountable for the other feudal incidents payable upon death. In view of this, why did the rebels fail to make a fiscal case against the Act? They had two good reasons for not doing so. First, they needed to make the grievance meaningful to the commons. Hence the emphasis placed upon testament: essentially an attempt to present the Act of Uses as adverse to all subjects with proprietary landed interests, irrespective of whether they were gentlemen or commoners. Secondly, they could hardly admit publicly that the Use had developed principally to deprive the crown of the financial perquisites of feudal overlordship. They were undoubtedly treading on delicate ground in wishing to restore the Use. This the king made clear when he told the Lincolnshire rebels that the advantages landowners derived from the Use were not grounded upon any law but had been ‘usurped upon the prince’, a charge they could not deny, so much so that in their petition they admitted that the benefits conferred by the Use were obtained ‘by the sufferance of your laws by a long continuance’: in other words, they rested upon no more than the law’s tolerance of custom.50 The Pilgrims made objection to the crown’s policy of fiscal feudalism not only by demanding the repeal of the Act of Uses but also by censuring the conduct of escheators – those officials responsible for enforcing the king’s feudal rights. Complaint was made against them in the final article of the Pilgrims’ December petition which required ‘a remedy 48

  Bean, Decline of English Feudalism, p. 15; Simpson, History of Land Law, p. 172.   E.W. Ives, ‘The genesis of the statute of uses’, E.H.R., 82 (1967): 683ff. 50   St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 464; SP1/108, f. 45 [L.P. XI. 705 (1)]. 49

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against escheators for finding of false offices and extortious fees-taking [on lands] which be not holden of the king and against the promoters thereof’.51 The specific grievance here was that escheators – with official encouragement – were seeking improperly to increase the royal revenue by making feudal demands upon lands that were not enfeoffed. Essentially, this was an accusation levelled against royal officials for seeking to extend the amount of land held in feudal tenure at the expense of non-military tenures held in socage, with the purpose of increasing the crown’s feudal earnings. The fate of the holders of socage land was subjection to feudal exactions or to the bribes that escheators exacted to let them remain as socagers. One solution proposed was that lands held in fief and those held in socage should be clearly indicated in the records of Exchequer ‘to the intent that every man may know which they be’.52 Whereas the complaint against the Act of Uses had to be given a certain twist to make it applicable to the commonalty, the complaint against escheators could be directly stated, representing, as it did, the interests of wealthy commoners whose freehold lands were under threat of enfeoffment at a time when the customary safeguards for fiefs were being removed by the Act of Uses. In this respect, wealthy commoners and gentlemen had a shared interest in opposing the crown’s attempt to improve its feudal income. As for the rest of the tenantry, the Act of Uses may have created some apprehension, in the sense that the fiscal demands consequently imposed upon a lord might cause him to seek an increase in manorial dues; or they may have feared exposure to the asset-stripping that was likely to occur when an estate fell into wardship and its administration was put up for sale. Tales of New Taxes It would seem, then, that the commons had good reason to support complaints against recently enacted reforms in the tax system. Yet they were also moved, especially in the early stages of rebellion, by rumours of fiscal reform. Such rumours told of taxes that were imminent rather than already in operation, and of taxes that were completely novel rather than adaptations of long-standing levies. Prevalent at the start of both the Lincolnshire uprising and the pilgrimage of grace were rumours of new taxes, all of them indirect and most of them bearing heavily upon the poor. Particularly disturbing was news of a forthcoming tax on sacraments, a payment to the government of 51

  L.P. XI. 1246 (1), article 24. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16.   This point is elucidated in a draft petition. See SP1/112, fos 24–8 (p. V) [L.P. XI. 1182 (2)]. 52

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6s. 8d. for every christening, burial and marriage. There was also mention of a food tax falling upon subjects valued at less than £20: in other words, upon those exempted from the 1534 subsidy. This tax would be levied on the consumption of foods such as white bread, pigs, geese and capons. In addition, the rumour of a groat tax on cattle was circulating in the north, to be enforced by a compulsory marking of animals, with unmarked beasts confiscated for the king’s use. A plough tax was also feared, at 6s. 8d. per plough, as well as a levy on all chimneys. Finally, rumour had it that all gold would have to be ‘touched’, with a fee charged for a registration mark.53 Such indirect taxes seemed far removed from reality; and were strongly denied by the government. Its dismissal of them as seditious rumour must have had some effect since none of the petitions submitted to the government gave them a mention.54 However, at the very start of the October insurrections these rumours were widely current and highly emotive. The letter of 3 October from the captured subsidy commissioners in Lincolnshire mentioned ‘importunate charges’ which the king took to refer to the rumoured new taxes and dismissed as neither ‘devised nor intended by us or any of our council’.55 News of the same new taxes agitated the Yorkshire commons. On 18 October ‘a report made in the north country’ listed these rumoured taxes, concluding that because of them ‘every man thinketh that they shall be utterly undone for ever’.56 On 21 October, Lancaster Herald was making his way across the West Riding to Pontefract to present the Pilgrims with a royal proclamation. As he approached the town, according to his report, he overtook ‘certain companies of the rebellious’ whom he indentified as ‘common people of the husbandry’. Recognising the king’s coat of arms on his clothing, they ‘saluted me gently’. A conversation followed in which he asked them why they had taken up arms. They answered that ‘it was for the commonwealth’, claiming that, unless they took action, ‘the commonty [that is, the commons] and the church [that is, the clergy] should be destroyed’. When the herald demanded some clarification of this point, the armed husbandmen referred to the new taxes, saying ‘that no man should bury, nor christen, nor wed, nor have their beast unmarked but 53   See Bush, pp. 34, 36, 61, 110–11. For rumoured taxes, see, for example, L.P. XI. 650, 828 (vi), 854, 1047; St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 482, n. 1 [L.P. XI. 768 (2)]; St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 485 [L.P. XI. 826]; SP1/109, f. 38 [L.P. XI. 841]; Toller, pp. 49–50 [L.P. XI. 892]; L.P. XII(1). 70 (vi, vii, ix, x, xi); SP1/115, f. 210 [L.P. XII(1). 369]; L.P. XII(1). 393; ibid., 1018. 54   For government denials, see L.P. XI. 569, 598; SP1/107, f. 93b [L.P. XI. 611]; L.P. XI. 826, 956; Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. I, no. 168. 55   SP1/106, f. 350 [L.P. XI. 534]; SP1/106, f. 301b [L.P. XI. 569]. 56   St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 482, note 1 [L.P. XI. 768 (2)].

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that the king would have a certain sum of money for every such thing, and the beast unmarked to his own house, which had never been seen’. The herald repudiated such taxes, stating that neither the king nor his council had any plans for exactions of that sort. According to him, this news was so assuring that it caused three to four hundred of them ‘to go gladly home to their houses’.57 The same rumours moved the commons in other parts of the north. John Hallom, at his examination, implied that they were a cause of revolt in the Yorkswold region of the East Riding, mentioning among the basic grievances ‘divers other payments’ along with the quindime and first fruits and tenths; and for the North Riding George Lumley declared at his examination that the region rose because, in addition to the suppression of religious houses, ‘tales went about that there should be money paid for every child that should be christened and for every wedding and that no poor men should eat white bread’.58 Similar rumours were at work across the Pennines. Towards the close of October, a rebel proclamation ordering men to muster at Hawkshead church in the Lake District referred not only to ‘our faith sore decayed’ and the need to defend local customs of land tenure, but also to ‘strange articles’ which, if ‘like to go forward’, would be ‘to the utter undoing of the commonwealth’. The ‘strange articles’ were set out in an attached list. They included taxes on baptism, tributes payable by poor men for eating certain foods, and a levy on ploughlands.59 With the resurgence of revolt in 1537 a similar rumour reached Manchester, delivered by a tanner from Craven.60 The government sought to identify the rumour-mongers, accusing the friars of St Robert’s Knaresborough and other clerics, as well as Aske, of using seditious bills to spread such tales in Yorkshire. Of these bills, only one has survived: the list associated with the muster in Hawkshead.61 As a device to inflame the commons, these rumours succeeded through playing upon a basic fear. Often the tax rumours were combined with another set, also spread by disaffected clerics, that purported to reveal government plans to reduce the number of parish churches and confiscate parish treasures.62 The two sets of rumour combined to create the impression that, through fiscal exactions and the appropriation of ecclesiastical 57

  St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 485 [L.P. XI. 826].   L.P. XII(1). 201 (1/iv); SP1/115, f. 210 [L.P. XII(1). 369]. 59   Toller, pp. 49–50 [L.P. XI. 892 (2)]. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 11. 60   SP1/107, f. 141 [L.P. XII(1). 520]. 61   SP1/107 [L.P. XI. 650]; L.P. XII(1). 1018; SP1/111, f. 66 [L.P. XI. 1047]; St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 527 [L.P. XII(1). 200]. 62   St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 482, note 1 [L.P. XI. 768 (2)]; L.P. XI. 975; E36/119, f. 72 [L.P. XII(1). 481]; L.P. XII(1). 1018. 58

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wealth, the government was bent on exploiting the people of the north as never before. But was the objection to the rumoured taxes simply a fiscal complaint? After all, the sacramental taxes could be taken in two ways: on the one hand, as an annexation of wealth by the government and, on the other, as a denial of religious service, with all the awful consequences that failure to receive the sacraments would inevitably bring. Thus, one implication of the tax on baptism was that it would fall disproportionately on the poor; another was that the inability to pay would deny infants the right of baptism, leaving them, in the event of a sudden death, to suffer the fate of being lodged eternally in limbo. In this sense, the religious implications of the sacramental taxes could seem, at the parish level, as momentous as the plan to pull down churches. Richard Birch, a glover of Southwark, was alleged to have said, when travelling by river from London to Greenwich, that the king ‘had sent down proclamation into the north parts that there should no children be christened unless there was a tribute paid to the king … and that there were many children that lay unchristened by the space of a fortnight or three weeks because their fathers and mothers were not able to pay the said tribute’. But this was the voice of a southerner – out of stupidity or gullibility or guile – misinterpreting a royal proclamation which, instead of announcing a baptism tax, had actually denied its existence.63 In the north there is no evidence to suggest that the sacramental taxes were objected to on religious grounds. In fact, the surviving evidence suggests that the objection to the tax on sacraments was the same as that voiced against the tax on cattle, food and ploughs. It represented a protest against taxes especially oppressive of the poor. Alleviating the 1534 subsidy grant were certain fiscal concessions: notably the exemption of all subjects worth less than £20 from payment of the subsidy and the exemption of all inhabitants in Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland and the Palatinate of Durham from both subsidy and fifteenth and tenth. In contrast, the rumoured taxes allowed no immunity but fell upon everyone. In addition, with the subsidy and quindime a tax payment was related to wealth. As fixed payments, however, the rumoured taxes were regressive, taxing the poor more severely than the rich. It was not surprising that they were found so objectionable.

63   SP1/114, f. 62 [L.P. XII(1). 62]. For the royal proclamation, see Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. I, no. 168.

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The Tradition of Tax Resistance The commons of the north, then, had several good reasons for opposing the tax reforms of the early 1530s: notably, the novelty associated with recently granted and rumoured taxes; the survival of a tax system whose primitiveness cried out for reform; the general awareness of a long struggle between a government bent on fiscal reform and a commons prepared to resort to rebellion or non-cooperation in the bid to prevent it. As a tax revolt, the pilgrimage of grace formed part of a long tradition of insurrection in which so-called risings of the commons reacted against innovations in the tax system. The tradition had its origins in the peasants’ revolt of 1381 and Jack Cade’s uprising of 1450, but came to a head under the early Tudors when large-scale rebellions happened in 1489, 1497, 1525, 1536 and 1549, all of them driven by popular initiative and directed by popular leadership, thus living up to their claim and reputation of being risings of the commons.64 In addition, tax reform was resisted in the early Tudor period by large-scale tax strikes as in 1513, by smaller revolts such as those of 1492 and 1528, as well as by rashes of rioting to reclaim goods impounded by tax collectors. Within this tradition of fiscal protest, the north figured prominently not only because of what happened in 1536 but also because of the Yorkshire uprising of 1489, the spectacular tax strike of 1513, which affected the North and West Ridings, and the West Riding revolts of 1492 and 1541. Moreover, by 1536 sections of the north, notably the northerly parts of Yorkshire, had a long history of fiscal intractability and incompliancy, made evident in delayed payments of taxes and a chronic failure to meet assessment targets. This may have reflected upon two distinctive features of the region: its relative poverty, which perhaps created for taxpayers the problem of a shortage of coin, and the presence of the Scottish frontier which conferred upon northerners the belief that, because of their military obligation to furnish its defence, they deserved to be free from taxation: a belief sustained by the exemption usually extended to the border counties but rarely to other parts of the north.65 64   For a study of this tradition, see Michael Bush, ‘The risings of the commons in England, 1381–1549’, in Jeffrey Denton (ed.), Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, 1999), ch. 7; and Bush, ‘Tax reform and rebellion’: 379–400. 65   See R.W. Hoyle, ‘Resistance and manipulation in early Tudor taxation: some evidence from the north’, Archives, 20 (1993): 171–2. For relative poverty of the north, see R.S. Schofield, ‘The geographical distribution of wealth in England, 1334–1649’, Economic History Review, second series, 18 (1965): 483–510, especially table 2 and the maps on p. 506; John Sheail, ‘The distribution of taxable population and wealth in England during the early sixteenth century’, in John Patten (ed.), Pre-industrial England (Folkestone, 1979), p. 120.

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Yet the tradition of tax resistance also extended to regions in the south which were relatively wealthy and without obligations of military defence. Moreover, much of the protest, irrespective of where it occurred, specifically expressed objection to government attempts to reform an extremely backward tax system rather than an unwillingness to furnish the government with revenue. In 1485 the English tax system was remarkably underdeveloped for a western monarchy. In the first place, it lacked regular direct taxation. There was no equivalent of the French taille and the Castilian servicio. Rather than levied automatically on an annual basis, direct taxation in England was an emergency measure requiring parliamentary authorisation whenever exacted. In the second place, its indirect taxation was also very limited. Both France and Castile had sales taxes, in the form of the aides and the alcabala, but the only indirect taxes of any substance that the English government could call upon were customs dues, granted for the life of the monarch in the first parliament of the reign, and seriously reduced in the late middle ages by declining wool exports, a decline still underway in the reign of Henry VIII.66 Besides these parliamentary levies, the English government had resort to various prerogative taxes. All of them, however, were severely constrained in some way or other. As already mentioned, there were feudal incidents, restricted both by the customary fixing of what could be exacted and by the widespread practice of placing fiefs under the protection of the Use. Otherwise, the government could demand interest-free loans but normally they had to be repaid. A new prerogative tax was created in 1475, a compulsory gift called the benevolence, but the amounts leviable were normally restricted by each contributor’s right to determine how much to pay. Moreover, with the exception of the benevolence and forced loans that remained unpaid, these prerogative taxes tended to make only marginal additions to the government’s total revenue. At the very heart of the government’s fiscal problems in the early sixteenth century was the inadequacy of what was still regarded as its main direct tax, the quindime. When first developed in the late thirteenth/ early fourteenth centuries it was a highly sophisticated device, allowing the government through revisable assessments conducted by centrally appointed officials to exploit the real wealth of a population. This could be effectively tapped only by means of a levy upon personal property, in view of the predominantly agrarian nature of society, with most of its component families living by subsistence farming. Confining its assessment of wealth 66   For late middle ages, see J.R. Lander, ‘The Hundred Years War and Edward IV’s campaigns in France’, in A.J. Slavin (ed.), Tudor Men and Institutions (Baton Rouge, 1972), pp. 72–3. For reign of Henry VIII, see F.C. Dietz, English Government Finance, 1485–1558, University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, 9 (1920), pp. 103–4.

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to the value of goods and chattels, this is what the quindime had allowed. However, by 1336 the tax had ossified, remaining unchanged until its termination in 1624.67 As we have seen, its yield became fixed at roughly £30,000, as did its local apportionment, with each ward and vill making the same contribution as the one paid in 1334. Moreover, from the 1330s the assessment of individual wealth was placed beyond the competence of centrally appointed officials and in the hands of each local community, reducing the government’s role in levying the tax to authorisation and collection. In performing these two functions, however, the government did not have a free hand since both were under parliamentary control, with all levies subjected to statutory authorisation. Moreover, for the period 1485 to 1537, no collection was valid unless carried out by commissioners whom the House of Commons had appointed.68 For the government, the advantages of this fixed system lay in its administrative simplicity and the specific revenue that it guaranteed to furnish. The drawbacks, however, were considerable since the yield could not be readily revised in accordance with changes in current wealth. Reductions could only be achieved by conceding rebates, but once granted they were difficult to retract. Increases could only be achieved by persuading parliament to grant multiple quindimes, but such requests were never welcome. Another serious drawback stemmed from the tax’s confinement to one type of wealth: that is, goods and chattels. In this respect, the tax normally exempted wealth in the form of landed, fee-based or waged income. Also restricting the value of the tax was its definition as an extraordinary aid, not a regular levy: a point powerfully made by the rebellion of Jack Cade in 1450 which, in reacting against the practice of the previous decade of collecting quindimes on an annual basis, formally protested that the king should not ‘live upon his commons’ and objected to the ‘great payments of the people now late to the king granted in his parliaments’, the result of evil ministers advising him to squander the ‘revenues of the crown’.69 Furthermore, the character of the quindime left the true wealth of the realm not only untaxed but also unrecorded since it prevented the government from keeping a register of taxpayers and their individual resources.

67   J.R. Lander, Government and Community: England, 1540–1509 (London, 1980), pp. 79–80. 68   Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, p. 29. 69   See I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 187, 189. Quindimes fell due in every year between 1436 and 1450. See Roger Virgoe, ‘The parliamentary subsidy of 1450’, Bulletin of Institute of Historical Research, 55 (1982): 128.

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From the government’s point of view, the fiscal system was badly in need of reform, especially as, in the late middle ages, its finances became increasingly dependent upon direct taxation, on account of the falling value of customs dues. The solution was self-evident: to replace the procedure of working down from a fixed yield through a perpetually set community allocation by one of working up from revisable assessments of individual wealth through a nationally set rate of so much in the pound. Only in this manner could a system of direct taxation properly tap the true wealth of the realm. The means of achieving this solution was likewise self-evident: either to substitute for the quindime a direct tax freed from its limitations, or to release the quindime from its fourteenth-century straitjacket. Both courses of reform were attempted in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, to a rough accompaniment of parliamentary protests, tax strikes and rebellion. The attempt to develop an alternative tax to the quindime featured the introduction of several experimental taxes, some of them not requiring an assessment of wealth, such as poll and household levies, others, like the subsidy, resting upon a fresh assessment of wealth for each levy. Stunting the employment of poll taxes as a major source of revenue was the rebellion of 1381.70 As for the subsidy, this was tentatively developed in the course of the fifteenth century and then established as a major source of revenue under the early Tudors. Although failing at the time to raise the revenue expected, the subsidy of 1489 marked a major breakthrough in the development of an effective tax system. Prior to it, subsidies had tended to be taxes levied on incomes from land, fees or wages in accordance with the principles of direct assessment and a statutory rate. As such they complemented the quindime, allowing the government to tax forms of wealth well beyond the quindime’s reach.71 In contrast, and in a manner that became normal under the early Tudors, the subsidy of 1489 directly assessed both incomes and moveable property by means of a national rate and, in the case of moveables, with a national threshold of liability. It also created the precedent for a tax which, once granted, could be repeatedly levied over a succession of years.72 In this way a tax was fashioned which overcame most of the drawbacks associated 70   For the groat tallages of 1377, 1379 and 1380, see Virgoe, ‘Parlimentary subsidy of 1450’: 126. 71   See Bush, ‘Tax reform and rebellion’: 382–5; Virgoe, ‘Parliamentary subsidy of 1450’: 126–30. 72   4 Henry VII, c. 20. Its failure is stressed by Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, pp. 74–9. For an appreciation of its importance in the long-term development of the subsidy, see Gillian Bailey, ‘An Examination of the Development of the Directly Assessed Subsidy’ (Manchester B.A. thesis, 1988).

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with the quindime, allowing, within the same levy, both landed income and personal property to be taxed in accordance with their current value. The 1489 subsidy was steeped in novelty: the Act granting it admitted as much by declaring that there was ‘nothing like it hitherto’. To quell fears of constitutional infringement, it laid down that it was ‘not to be taken for precedent’ and required its revenue to be withheld from the king until he actually went to war. The realm gave it a negative reception, so much so that, instead of the expected £75,000, the tax raised no more than £27,000: that is, much less than one quindime. In fact, the government had to resort to a further quindime in compensation for the shortfall.73 As for the north, in April and May 1489 it opposed the tax with a major revolt of the commons, an uprising of at least 5,000 armed men who murdered the earl of Northumberland, marched from Cleveland to Doncaster and briefly occupied York.74 The subsidy, as fashioned by the Act of 1489 was not used again until 1513 when it met with further resistance in the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire, notably in Richmondshire, Claro and Craven.75 It only came into its own under the Wolsey regime, a period in which the quindime was dispensed with altogether and, by means of the subsidy alone, large sums of money were raised: for example, £150,000 between 1523 and 1527.76 But this was not to be the way forward. The 1534 Act confirmed the form – first evident in 1497 and used again in 1513 – that direct taxation would take: that is, a quindime with an additional subsidy. By the late sixteenth century this combination was perfectly acceptable, but under the early Tudors it encountered considerable resistance: notably in 1489, 1497, 1513, 1536 and 1541. Not until 1542 did conjunctions of the two occur without disturbance.77

73

  Rotuli Parliamentorum, vol. VI, pp. 422–3, 438.   M.A. Hicks, ‘The Yorkshire rebellion of 1489 reconsidered’, Northern History, 22 (1986): 39–61. 75   See L.P. X. 745 (misdated); SP1/233, fos 282–283b [L.P. Add. 380 (misdated)]; L.P. IV. 377–8 (misdated). All belong to 1513. Also see below, p. 140. 76   7 Henry VIII, c. 9; Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, table 7.1(b). 77   For 1489: the second of the quindimes granted in 1487 was due in 1489, along with the subsidy (Rotuli Parliamentorum, vol. VI, p. 401). For 1497, see 12 Henry VII, c. 12 and 13. For 1513, see 3 Henry VIII, c. 22 and 4 Henry VIII, c. 19. Between 1541 and 1547 coincidental levies of quindime and subsidy occurred in every year except 1545. For late sixteenth-century pattern, see G.R. Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559–1581 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 154–5. The West Riding commotion of 1541, which appeared to be provoked by government exactions, may well have been the last protest against a levy of subsidy and quindime in the same year. See A.G. Dickens, ‘Sedition and conspiracy in Yorkshire during the later years of Henry VIII’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 34 (1939): 391–3, although he does not consider this particular point. 74

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This use of the subsidy as a supplement to the quindime marked the culmination of another strand of tax reform, one that sought to improve the quindime in a number of ways, principally by abolishing the rebate for poverty, by doubling its value through levying it twice in the same year; and by creating a hybrid tax which crossed the fixed yield of the quindime with a directly assessed, open yield subsidy. Such attempts at reform contributed to three major rebellions, the Cornish uprising of 1497, the Lincolnshire uprising of 1536 and the pilgrimage of grace; to the Yorkshire tax-strikes of 1513; to a revolt near Pontefract in 1492; and, especially in the 1490s, to a large number of disturbances aimed at reclaiming goods confiscated for the non-payment of tax. Reform of the quindime began under the Yorkists with the parliamentary levy of 1463 which tried to end the rebate for poverty and to restore the original practice of fresh assessments of personal property made by government-appointed commissioners. Although it was quickly converted into a normal quindime, what it proposed resurfaced in three early Tudor tax grants.78 Thus, in 1497 two normal quindimes were granted supplemented by an aid consisting of two directly assessed levies which, in amount and local allocation, were each the equivalent of one quindime.79 The response to this unusual tax was a massive revolt in Cornwall which, as the rebel army marched on London, picked up support from the counties of Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Dorset, Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex.80 The 1497 tax was highly unusual, not only because it introduced a novel aid – combining the direct assessment of the subsidy with the guaranteed yield of the quindime – but also because it sought to levy two quindimes in one year.81 Prior to Henry VII’s reign this was a very infrequent occurrence. Henry VII, however, ordered it in 1492 as well as in 1497.82 The outcome was a large number of disturbances. On at least 53 occasions during these two years communities whose goods had been impounded by quindime collectors for non-payment of tax committed a rescue of distraint to reclaim their confiscated possessions. Another 22 rescues occurred in reaction to the three quindimes consecutively levied 78   3 Edward IV, c. 8. For the rebate and its removal, see Lander, Government and Community, p. 80. For conversion to a normal quindime, see Stephen Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes in England (London, 1884), vol. I, p. 121. 79   12 Henry VII, c. 12. 80   A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley (eds), The Great Chronicle of London (London, 1938), p. 276; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1494–1509, p. 115. 81   See Bush, ‘Tax reform and rebellion’: 387–9. 82   For 1492, see 7 Henry VII, c. 11, with first due on 1 April and second on 11 November.

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in 1488, 1489 and 1490. In such cases, the collectors had been obliged to target whole communities rather than individuals, a consequence of the nature of the tax, and a factor increasing the likelihood of riot. In addition, in April 1492 there was a mysterious uprising near Pontefract which was suppressed by royal troops at Ackworth. Its timing – immediately after the deadline for paying the first of the quindimes granted in 1491 – and the absence of any Yorkist association suggest that the north was again resisting fiscal innovation: on this occasion the double quindime levied in that year.83 The government attempted one further revision. Because of its fixed national yield and its fixed allocation between the local wards and vills, an anomalous feature of the quindime was that a decline in regional wealth necessitated a raising of the local rate for individual families. The depopulation and recession of the late middle ages caused this to happen on a national scale. The extreme hardship that economic and demographic decline caused for those paying the quindime was evident in the parliament of 1380 which, on these grounds, ruled out multiple quindimes and declared its preference for a poll tax. The parliament of 1450 made the same point when refusing to grant the quindime.84 To provide relief in the fifteenth century a poverty allowance was introduced, at £4,000 in 1433 and fixed at £6,000 in 1446.85 Nonetheless, with the general recovery in the early years of the sixteenth century, relief from the quindime became less easy to justify. By removing it, the government stood to raise the revenue from the tax by 20 per cent.86 It seemed an obvious reform to make, especially in view of the disruptions caused by all other attempts to improve the tax. Nothing was done until the early 1530s; perhaps because no quindime was levied between 1516 and 1537. But, when the rebate was removed, protests were made against the weight of the tax in the midlands, in connexion with the Lincolnshire uprising, and in Yorkshire, in connexion with the pilgrimage of grace, the issue being a recent loss of sheep and cattle which allegedly had raised the levy on each animal to unacceptable levels.87 In 1537 the tax without the rebate was 83   Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, table 3.4. For Ackworth revolt, see T. Stapleton (ed.), Plumpton Correspondence, Camden Society, old series, 4 (1839), p. 81; A.F. Pollard (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources (London, 1913–14), vol. I, p. 81. 84   For 1380, see G. Edwards, The Second Century of the English Parliament (Oxford, 1979), pp. 29–30. For 1450, see Dowell, History of Taxation, vol. I, p. 116. 85   Schofield, ‘Geographical distribution of wealth’: 488; Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, p. 28. 86   From £30,000 to £36,000. 87   See above, p. 112.

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levied yielding about £36,000. But by the 1540s the rebate was restored and thereafter preserved as an unalterable feature of the tax.88 A third and final reform of the tax system related to the prerogative taxes at the crown’s disposal – that is, the benevolence, the forced loan and feudal dues – and this became another source of revolt: in 1525, in 1528 and 1536. Although outlawed in 1484, the benevolence was revived in 1491 and imposed in 1525, 1545 and 1546. Like the forced loan, it was a contribution the monarch could demand of his subjects to meet the needs of defensive war. Originally, it differed from the forced loan in not being refundable and in relying upon the benevolence of each subject to determine how much to pay.89 But under the early Tudors it underwent two important changes. The first was a parliamentary underpropping, presumably a consequence of the prohibition of the benevolence by the statute of 1484.90 Thus, the benevolences of 1491 and 1545 were, retrospectively, enacted. In addition, the three benevolences of Henry VIII’s reign were, in the manner of the loan or the subsidy, government-rated. Rather than allowing the subject to decide how much to pay, commissioners made a specific demand determined by an official assessment of the subject’s wealth and a national rate of so much in the pound that was set out in their instructions. In this respect, the benevolences of Henry VIII’s reign were hardly benevolent.91 The first time that the rated benevolence was used rebellion ensued. The so-called amicable grant of 1525 caused a great deal of protest in the south-east and large-scale revolt in Suffolk and Essex. With no assurance of repayment and authorised simply by royal commission, it smacked of novelty and illegitimacy. What is more, it was alarmingly heavy, with a very low threshold and a very high rate of assessment. Its expected yield was £333,000 – 11 times more than a single quindime. Adding insult to injury, its levy coincided with the collection of a heavy, repeater subsidy, which yielded £136,000 in 1524–5. Moreover, it followed the exaction, in 1522 and 1523, of a huge, and as yet unrepaid, forced loan, amounting to £260,000.92 The point made by the protesters was that they were not against assisting the king but wished, in the normal manner of a 88

  Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, table 7.1(a).   See R. Virgoe, ‘The benevolence of 1481’, E.H.R., 104 (1989): 25–45; G.L. Harriss, ‘Aids, loans and benevolences’, Historical Journal, 6 (1963): 1–19. 90   11 Henry VII, c. 10; 37 Henry VIII, c. 25 (xxxii). 91   For 1525, see commissioners’ instructions in L.P. IV. App. 34 and G.W. Bernard and R.W. Hoyle, ‘The instructions for the levying of the Amicable Grant, March 1525’, Historical Research, 67 (1994): 195ff. For 1545, see commissioners’ instructions in L.P. XX(2). App. 4. For 1546, see commissioners’ instructions in L.P. XXI(1). 844. 92   G.W. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England (Sussex, 1986), pp. 117–21. Bernard, however, fails to recognise that this tax rested on a compulsory rate set by the government and for this very reason was a highly unusual benevolence. 89

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benevolence, to decide for themselves how much to pay, especially in view of the other fiscal demands recently made of them by the forced loan and the subsidy.93 Thanks to the protests made, the government backed off, initially by halving the rate, then by replacing a rated tax with one which, true to the benevolence, permitted levels of payment to be determined by the goodwill of payees. Finally, faced by continued protest, it abandoned the tax altogether.94 When rated benevolences were reimposed in 1545 and 1546 – on these occasions with a much lower assessment rate and a much higher threshold than in 1525 – no revolt occurred and large sums of money were realised, even though the collectors encountered yet again a great deal of non-cooperation.95 Forced loans met with much less opposition, especially when repaid. However, Henry VIII’s government was inclined to break its promise of repayment, converting a mere anticipation of revenue into additional income. This happened in 1522–3 and again in 1542: to the tune of £260,000 and £112,000.96 As a revenue-raiser, the individual forced loan thus became an important tax, easily outdoing one subsidy or quindime. To settle the constitutional issue of a breach of promise, the government on each occasion secured its exemption from repayment by act of parliament.97 Yet on the first occasion six years passed before parliamentary consent was sought. In that period the issue of the unrepaid loan of 1522–3 remained a sore point not only in the amicable grant furore of 1525 but also in the Kent and Norfolk protests of April 1528.98 In fact, thanks to the coexistence of the unrepaid loan, the amicable grant of 1525 and the repeater subsidy of 1524–7, the laity in the 1520s were subjected to direct taxation on an unheard-of scale. As a result of the fiscal demands made at this time, and the protests they occasioned, the government shied away from requesting further tax grants for several years; and, when it sought one in 1532, parliament was prepared to offer no more than one quindime which the king rejected.99 The demands made by Wolsey remained in the public mind 93   See Henry Ellis, Original Letters Illustrative of English History (third series, London, 1846), vol. I, pp. 372–3 [L.P. IV. 1243]. 94   Edward Halle, The Triumphant Reign of King Henry VIII (London, 1550), fos 141–2; L.P. IV. 1323; A.L. Bridge, ‘The Amicable Grant Revolt of 1525’ (Manchester B.A. thesis, 1984), pp. 2–3, 53–7. 95   L.P. XX(1). 604, 641, 674, 799, 999; L.P. XXI(2). 19, 134, 631. 96   For 1522, see Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, p. 119. For 1542, see Dietz, English Government Finance, pp. 164–5. 97   21 Henry VIII, c. 29; 35 Henry VIII, c. 12. 98   For 1525, see Ellis, Original Letters, vol. I, p. 372 [L.P. IV. 1243]. For 1528, see L.P. IV. 4173, 4188 (Kent); L.P. IV. 4190–92 (Norfolk). 99   S.E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 133. Also see Dietz, English Government Finance, pp. 107–8.

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in the 1530s. This was evident in the complaints of the Pilgrims and their objection to a tax grant that was remarkably light. They did so partly on grounds of novelty and partly because of the weight of taxation exacted earlier in the reign. In this respect a history of fiscal reform and the protests associated with it helped to generate the tax complaints of October 1536. The Pilgrims, however, were moved not only by past reforms in the tax system but also by what had yet to be reformed. Sustaining belief in the rumours of novel indirect taxes was the government’s earlier failure to address this aspect of the tax system. Because of its underdevelopment and potential profit, indirect taxation offered the greatest opportunities for raising additional revenue; yet nothing had been done, leaving customs as the only indirect tax at the government’s disposal. It was readily believed that Cromwell was planning reforms of this sort; especially because of his reputation as a political reformer and because it was well known that he had promised Henry VIII to make him the richest king in English history.100 Over the past two years, moreover, he had been engaged in developing new taxes as well as in improving the old ones: new taxes which, apart from the original enactment, would be free of parliamentary consent. Of the projected new taxes, only one came into being: the clerical tenth – an annual levy for ever more – but also planned, and known about, were two other regular levies: a hearth tax to provide revenue for the construction of fortresses ‘throughout the realm’, payable ‘yearly unto the king for ever’, and a graduated income tax earmarked for public works manned by the unemployed, also to be exacted each and every year. Both measures became linked to fiscal complaints associated with the pilgrimage of grace, the hearth tax figuring as the rumoured chimney tax that agitated the southerly parts of the West Riding, the graduated income tax giving garbled credence to the rumour of a sacramental tax which first surfaced in March 1536 when the public works bill came before parliament. Cromwell’s plans to make the traditional taxes – notably the subsidy, the customs and feudal revenues – more profitable was declared in his remembrances for 1535–7 and surfaced in parliament and council, producing more evidence of fiscal novelty, especially in the form of peacetime subsidies and the threat of severe penalties for making deceitful declarations of wealth to the tax commissioners.101 Placed in the context of the government’s fiscal concerns 100   For Cromwell’s promise, see Dietz, English Government Finance, p. 103; R.B. Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (Oxford, 1902), vol. I, pp. 17–18. One of the Pilgrims referred to a Cromwellian promise to make Henry ‘the richest prince in Christendom’ (SP1/112, f. 114b [L.P. XI. 1244]). For Cromwell as a political reformer, see G.R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1973), passim. 101   For the hearth tax, see British Library, Cottonian MS Titus B. I, f. 160 [L.P. IX. 725] and for the rumoured chimney tax, see L.P. XI. 841. For the graduated income tax,

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and its search for novel solutions to the tax problem, the rumours of sacramental, smoke, food and plough taxes, all to be found circulating in October 1536 in the midlands and the north, were readily received not as false tales but as announcements of innovations imminent. Finally, the tradition of tax protest helped to promote the Pilgrims’ cause by demonstrating how effective such protests could be, thanks to the concessions the government had formerly made in the bid either to restore order or to secure cooperation. It was in this field of political activity that the government had a proven record of bending to popular pressure.102 For example, although the revolt in Yorkshire against the subsidy of 1489 was crushed by military force, the government felt obliged to make a number of concessions, notably relieving Yorkshire of the quindime in 1492.103 It also took the precaution of waiving its enacted right to repeat the levy in 1490 and 1491 and steered clear of this type of subsidy for the next 24 years. When one was next levied, in 1513, it caused a commotion in Richmondshire and the adjacent wapentake of Claro. It also met with non-cooperation in the north-westerly Yorkshire wapentakes of Ewcross and Staincliffe, as a result of which the assessment of the subsidy was postponed in these parts until 1515 and the tax was never collected in full; while in the wapentake of Ewcross there was no assessment for the subsidy in 1515, 1516, 1523 and 1524. Moreover, the quindime due in February 1513 remained unpaid 15 years later in 18 townships of the same two wapentakes, and then was formally abandoned.104 And, after the troubles of 1513, 28 years passed before the government next attempted to collect a subsidy and a quindime in the same year. During the pilgrimage of grace hopes were raised that the government would react in the traditional concessive manner when it stopped the levy of the second installment of the subsidy, and when, to scotch the rumours of new taxes, it issued royal proclamations to suspend the recently enacted regulations on the cloth industry and to dismiss novel taxes as the invention of trouble-makers. Such hopes were dashed when the following April, thanks to the suppression of the pilgrimage of grace, see G.R. Elton, ‘An early Tudor poor law’, in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge, 1974), vol. II, pp. 142–3. Its ‘for ever’ nature was challenged at the planning stage (see Elton, Reform and Renewal, p. 123) with the proposal that it should stop in 1540. Its fiscal novelty appeared to cause the bill’s parliamentary rejection (see ibid., p. 125). For the tax’s public emergence as a rumoured sacrament tax, see L.P. X. 494. For government attempts to improve traditional taxes, see Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, p. 12; L.P. IX. 725; L.P. X. 254; L.P. XI. 1433. 102   For a study of government concessions made in response to tax protests, see Bush, ‘Tax reform and rebellion’: 396–9. 103   See Hoyle, ‘Resistance and manipulation’: 164. Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, p. 272, n. 17. 104   Smith, Land and Politics, pp. 198–9; Hoyle, ‘Resistance and manipulation’: 166.

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the government resumed the collection of the second part of the 1534 subsidy; and, the following November, proceeded to collect the quindime without making any allowance for poverty. Moreover, the clerical taxes, annual and perpetual, remained in existence, as did the government’s policy of fiscal feudalism. Yet the Pilgrims’ tax protest was not without effect. The attempt to reform the quindime by abolishing the rebate was stopped for good. Moreover, the attempt to establish a peacetime subsidy was nipped in the bud. Direct taxation remained in principle an irregular device, its frequency determined by the threat of war. In this respect the government’s fiscal practice in the late sixteenth century resembled that of the early sixteenth century when the periods of regularity coincided with times of military activity. Furthermore, the pilgrimage of grace not only curbed the development of direct lay taxation but also helped to preserve the system of indirect taxation in a backward state. Finally, measures of alleviation came to be granted in relation to both first fruits and tenths and feudal incidents. For the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 was not revised, so much so that, in a period of rapid inflation, its assessments became based on gross undervaluations of clerical wealth; while the rigour of the Act of Uses was relieved in 1540 by the Act of Wills which granted fiefholders the valuable right to bequeath up to two-thirds of their estate, thus avoiding on all but one-third of it the exactions consequent upon the rule of primogeniture.105 The Pilgrims, then, were moved to make fiscal complaints by a broad range of innovations, all of them introduced between 1534 and 1536 in the bid to reform an extremely primitive tax system. Such innovations served to annoy all three orders of society, with the first fruits and tenths tax especially alienating the clergy, the issue of fiscal feudalism especially alienating the gentlemen and the rumour of new indirect taxes especially alienating the commons. In addition, there was the peacetime subsidy of 1534, which in conjunction with the perpetual and annual levy recently imposed upon the clergy, opened up the awful prospect of a system of direct taxation that would break all the rules established by custom and precedent. Defusing the Pilgrims’ tax complaint were concessions the government made during the course of the rebellion. Yet the tax complaint remained a prominent concern, largely because the commons were of the firm belief that any innovations in the tax system – even those relating to the taxation of the clergy and attempts to make feudal dues more profitable – would inflict severe damage upon the commonwealth.

105   For the impact of pilgrimage of grace on development of tax system, see Bush, ‘Up for the commonweal’: 314–16. For government concessions made during the course of the uprising, see Hoyle, ‘Resistance and manipulation’: 170; Bush, p. 386.

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There was nothing new about this conflict between society and state. The attempt to reform the tax system had, by this time, gone on for at least 50 years, with governments proposing modest innovations and subjects reacting strongly against them, fearful that the benefits integral to the traditional system were to be swept away. To the forefront in this struggle had been the commons of the north, making their mark by insurrection and non-cooperation. In this respect, the behaviour of the Pilgrims, and their confidence in resisting fiscal innovation, owed much to the folk memory of a ‘good old cause’.

Chapter Four

The Polity Defended Rights and Liberties at Stake A striking feature of the pilgrimage of grace was its concern for lost or threatened rights. The extent of this concern was revealed in the two petitions sent by the Pilgrims to Henry VIII. Of the four grievances specified in the October petition, three raised constitutional issues: article 2 defending the liberties of the church; article 3 requiring restoration of the common law to what it had been on Henry VIII’s accession; and article 4 demanding the punishment of named ministers for subverting the law. Of the 22 grievances listed in the December petition, 16 charged the government with constitutional impropriety. Eleven of them did so explicitly, accusing the government of repudiating the rights of the church and clergy (articles 2, 18 and 19); of sanctioning the misconduct of officials (articles 8, 11, 22, 23, 24); and of abusing the practices and powers of parliament, on the one hand, by asserting greater control over it than ever before (article 12), on the other, by extending the scope of statute to make words treason (article 21) and to grant the king, in the absence of direct heirs, the right to determine his successor (article 16). Another five grievances implied a constitutional complaint in demanding the relegitimisation of Princess Mary (article 3); in calling for the repeal of irregular fiscal statutes (articles 5, 14 and 20); and in requiring removal of a recent ban upon the use of crossbows and handguns (article 10). The theme threading these complaints together was that, aided by a managed parliament and convocation, the government had committed tyrannical deeds. Yet, for many Pilgrims, the fault did not simply lie with the government. As the December petition showed in articles 9 and 13, it also lay with lords of the manor for overriding the customary rights of the tenantry, principally by raising gressums (entry fines) and curtailing commoning on the waste. For this reason their defence of rights presumed a polity based not simply on the organisation of the state as defined by law but also on the structure of the manor as defined by custom. Clarifying, confirming and elaborating upon the constitutional grievances found in the two Pilgrim petitions is a great deal of other    The National Archives, SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 14.    L.P. XI. 1246 (1). For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16.

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evidence, including the oaths, orders and accounts of the uprising produced by Robert Aske; rebel rhymes such as the Sawley Ballad and Pickering’s Song; and several declarations of grievance associated with the making of the December petition. This evidence details the nature of the Pilgrims’ charge of tyranny, citing the government’s contempt for the society of orders and the rights and duties that held it together; its deliberate ignorance of certain procedures, thought vital to the proper functioning of parliament, to facilitate the enactment of laws that unduly favoured the crown at the expense of the realm and the church; and its unprecedented interference with local and regional matters. In this respect, the Pilgrims charged the government with trampling on the rights and liberties of subjects as defined by the law of God, the common law, laudable custom and the principles of the society of orders. The Pilgrims levelled the charge of tyranny not explicitly at the king but at his leading minister, Thomas Cromwell, whom Pickering’s Song presented as bent on ‘subverting our laws and spoiling Christ’s church’. As we have seen, the case made against him was that, as a commoner by birth and upbringing, he could not possibly know how to govern the state; and that, as a layman, he could not possibly know how to oversee the church; and yet, as lord privy seal and vicegerent in spirituals, he was in charge of both. For this reason, the Pilgrims blamed the king for appointing him to high office, while holding Cromwell directly responsible for the government’s transgression of the constitution. By leading the king astray, it was claimed, Cromwell had caused him to break his coronation oath. Nonetheless, the statutes that the Pilgrims regarded as unconstitutional had all received parliamentary assent. What is more, Cromwell, unlike Wolsey, had proved himself a dedicated and scrupulous parliamentarian and legist. To escape this predicament, the Pilgrims adopted the belief that these statutes had been enacted only because of pressures the government had brought upon parliament. As Aske put it under examination in April 1537, ‘generally it was thought divers acts at the last parliament [were] passed by favour’: that is, when the Pilgrims had first assembled at Pontefract in October 1536. This the government had achieved, they felt, partly by packing the Commons, partly by altering procedure in the Lords, as was made evident in article 12 of the December petition which required ‘reformation for the election of knights of shire and burgesses’ and that ‘uses among the Lords in the parliament house’ be ‘after their    See M.L. Bush, ‘The Tudor polity and the pilgrimage of grace’, Historical Research, 80 (2007): 49, n. 5.    SP1/118, f. 292b [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (5)].    See below, p. 160. Also see L.P. XI. 1244.    Bateson, p. 569.

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ancient custom’. What this actually meant was revealed in two statements of grievance submitted to the Pilgrim leadership when it was finalising the December petition: the one probably the work of Robert Chaloner, the other, probably the work of Sir Robert Constable. The Chaloner statement complained that those elected to the last parliament – the sixth parliament of the reign summoned in June 1536 – had been nominated, having been ‘named in the king’s letters’. It went on to complain that many burgesses in the Commons did not reside in their constituencies: in other words, they were carpetbaggers. Furthermore, the custom of disallowing the king’s servants from sitting in the Lower House – a safeguard against undue royal influence – was nowadays ignored. The Chaloner statement also protested against by-elections – an innovation of Cromwell’s – as another means of creating placemen. Giving substance to this charge of parliamentary packing was Cromwell’s use of by-elections to improve his control of the Reformation parliament and the measures he had taken to pack the sixth parliament with his cronies. Such attempts at manipulation were understandable. After all, the elections to the Reformation parliament had long preceded Cromwell’s rise to power; and the sixth parliament of June 1536, the first general election to be held since 1529, offered a golden opportunity to improve his control of the Commons. Because Cromwell needed parliamentary sanction for a string of highly contentious matters, it was not surprising that he should seek to make the Lower House more manageable. The Constable statement complained that, on account of their membership, these parliaments of the early 1530s were more aptly termed ‘councils of the king’s appointment’. It claimed that members of parliament should surely represent their constituencies and protect their interests, whereas this was ruled out if they were nominees of the crown. Packed in this way, it concluded, parliaments were ‘of neither authority nor virtue’: that is, whatever they enacted was bound to be illicit.10 The complaint against procedural alterations in the Lords was elaborated upon by Lord Darcy, another member of the Pilgrim high command. He believed that the government had seriously breached custom in ceasing to allow the House of Lords a preview of any bill touching the royal prerogative, thus denying the Lords the opportunity, prior to the bill’s formal presentation, to consult legal opinion on whether 

  SP1/112, f. 120 [L.P. XI 1246 (1)]. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16.   L.P. XI. 1182 (2), articles 14–17. For the suggestion that Chaloner was the compiler, see Bateson, p. 570 and above, p. 26.    See S.E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 3–7; J. Loach, Parliament under the Tudors (Oxford, 1991), pp. 26–7, 33, 36, 75. 

10

  SP1/112, f. 114 [L.P. XI. 1244].

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the bill was detrimental to crown or commonwealth. Other alterations in parliamentary procedure worried him, notably the abandonment in the sixth parliament of the traditional practice of starting proceedings with an affirmation of the first chapter of Magna Carta, which specifically upheld the rights and liberties of the church, and the switch recently made to allow the determination of issues of faith in parliament rather than in convocation.11 The complaint against a managed parliament found expression in the Pilgrims’ proposals for reform: namely a ‘free and frank’ parliament to be held at York to consider the December petition. The meaning of this terse phrase was made clear in late December when Aske advised the king to proclaim his willingness to grant northerners ‘free election of knights and burgesses’ and to allow members of the York parliament to speak freely without incurring his displeasure.12 Connected with this demand was another requiring a free and frank convocation to meet alongside the York parliament.13 Convocation had authorized the royal supremacy, the Ten Articles and the abrogation of holy days,14 but the Pilgrims’ point was that this had only happened under government pressure and thanks to the supreme power that Cromwell exercised over the church as vicegerent in spirituals. The Pilgrims also blamed the government for failing to consult the northern convocation in certain important matters, notably the grant of new clerical taxes in 1534. This complaint was made in the statement of opinion produced by the Pilgrim clergy at Pontefract: ‘the clergy of the north’, it declared, had not ‘consented to the payment of the tenths or first fruits of benefices in their convocation’.15 The Pilgrims related their complaint of misrepresentation not only to parliament and convocation but also to the privy council. The Constable statement complained that ‘whatsoever Cromwell sayeth is right and none but that’, and that, consequently, the privy council had become a body that simply served the interest of the king.16 It added that, having become ‘a council for his person at his pleasure’, the privy council required a counterbalance in the form of a ‘council for the commonwealth’ comprising ‘such virtuous men as would regard the commonwealth above the prince’s love’. Otherwise, it argued, the subjects of the realm were justified in exercising the right of resistance conferred upon them by Scripture and 11

  Bateson, p. 568.   Bateson, p. 343. 13  Ibid.; L.P. XII(1). 45. 14   S.E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 202, 214; Lehmberg, Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, pp. 37–9. 12

15

  See below, Appendix, doc. 17, opinion 6; Bateson, p. 563.   SP1/112, f. 114 [L.P. XI. 1244].

16

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the precedents set by the opposition to Edward II and Richard II: witness the ‘jeopardy he [Edward II] was in for Piers de Gaveston, Spenser and such like councillors’; and was not Richard II ‘deposed for following the counsel of such like’? The Pilgrims demanded on several occasions radical alterations in the privy council’s membership, principally to free it of heretics and ‘the subverters of the good laws of this realm’.17 They also objected to its domination by parvenus who were seen as naturally intent on self-promotion and self-enrichment. The Pilgrim preference was for a membership drawn from nobles of ancient lineage whose blood would bless them naturally with a strong sense of public duty.18 When the king’s interest was placed before that of the realm, it licensed evil ministers to act tyrannically. This was the general import of the Constable statement.19 The Pilgrims accused Cromwell not only of forcing bad laws through parliament and convocation but also of abusing the king’s prerogative right to dispense justice.20 Injustice, they claimed, resulted partly from the government’s interference with the common law and partly from the use of subpoenas to summon northerners to London to make answer in the courts of equity. The objection to government interference found general expression in article 3 of the October petition which commanded ‘that the common laws and the commonwealth of this realm may be used as it hath been since time of the beginning of his highness’ reign when his nobles did order under his highness’21 and also in the Pilgrims’ citation of recent cases, such as Wycliffe’s case and Dakyn’s case, in which Cromwell had blatantly sought to override the common law process. The previous March an arraignment jury in York had acquitted William Wycliffe of murder. For refusing to alter its verdict, the jury members were summoned in May before Star Chamber at Westminster and heavily fined. According to Aske, ‘for the extreme punishment of the great jury of Yorkshire for Wycliffe’s cause and for the extreme assessment of their fines’, Cromwell was ‘in such error and hatred with the people in those parts that in manner they would eat him’.22 The previous August, George Dakyn, a servant of Cromwell’s nephew, had been indicted for murder and was about to be tried at York when Cromwell ordered his release.23 The Constable statement cited this 17

  SP1/112, f. 119 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1), article 8].   L.P. XI. 705 (1,2,4); L.P. XI. 826 (p. 319); SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]; L.P. XI. 1059 (ii). 19   L.P. XI. 1244. 20   SP1/112, f. 114b [L.P. XI. 1244]. 18

21

  SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 14.   Bateson, p. 340; L.P. VIII. 457 (misdated); L.P. X. 1257 (xii). Also see The National Archives, KB9/976, membranes 129–32. For an account of the affair, see Bush, pp. 166–7. 23   L.P. XI. 237; L.P. XII(1). 788. 22

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case as proof that Cromwell and his minions required everything to be done ‘at their pleasure, be their matter never so false’.24 Compelling the government to intervene was the belief that the common law process was failing in the north because magistrates and jurors lacked impartiality. However, by such intervention Cromwell was not initiating a new policy but following in the footsteps of Wolsey.25 The objection to the government’s misuse of the system of equity found expression in articles 22 and 23 of the December petition. Focusing on its two basic instruments, the injunction and the subpoena, the petition accused the former of being improperly processed and charged the latter with being improperly employed to deny northerners a right of trial in York. Such grievances were very much a concern of the Chaloner statement. Extending the complaint to letters of privy seal, it demanded that all three instruments – injunctions, subpoenas and privy seals – ‘be not granted so commonly … as of late time they have’, nor ‘specially for such small or feigned causes’, nor ‘unto countries and shires far distant from London’.26 Again, there was evidence to support the charge: for example, an instance of the government breaching the sanctuary of St Cuthbert. After several servants of Sir Francis Bigod had taken refuge in Durham cathedral to escape prosecution for murder, the lord chancellor issued an injunction to remove them from the sanctuary; and, as a result, they were awaiting trial at York just as the pilgrimage of grace broke out.27 Another instance of government intervention had riled the inhabitants of Beverley, the first community in Yorkshire to provide military support for the uprising. It concerned Cromwell’s involvement in a dispute between them and the lord of the manor of Beverley, the archbishop of York, over elections to municipal office. Following a star chamber decree which had involved a summons of Beverley citizens to London and which found in favour of the archbishop, two injunctions were issued to stop the townsmen from pursuing the matter further.28 Yet another instance of Cromwellian intervention concerned a star chamber action brought in late 1535 by John Lambert against the tenants of Airton in Craven for attacking his newly erected enclosures. Cromwell intervened in Lambert’s favour by writing 24

  L.P. XI. 1244 (p. 505).   For Wolsey, see R.R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North (1921, reprinted 1975), pp. 97–9, 160–61; J.A. Guy, The Cardinal’s Court: the Impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (Brighton, 1977), pp. 56–7; John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 172–3. 26   SP1/112, f. 121 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)], and see below, Appendix, doc. 16; SP/112, p. IV, article 7 [L.P. XI. 1182 (2)]. 27   A.G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York (Oxford, 1959), pp. 88–9. 28   Bush, pp. 50–53. 25

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a supportive letter to the earl of Cumberland who, although a victim of related riots and therefore compromised, was appointed head of the commission to hear and determine the matter.29 At the centre of this complaint against the misuse of equity was Cromwell who since 1534 had served as master of the rolls in Chancery, and then became the king’s principal secretary in March 1534 and lord privy seal in July 1536, although Aske also blamed lord chancellor Audley ‘for so general granting of injunctions and for playing of ambi-dexter [that is, angling for bribes] in granting and dissolving of injunctions’.30 The Constable statement blamed Cromwell and his servants who ‘think to have the law in every place ordered at their commandment’ and proceed to ‘command sheriffs [and] justices of peace, coram and of session in their master’s name at their pleasure’.31 Pickering’s Song branded Cromwell a tyrant because of his ‘false injunctions’, a charge reflected in article 22 of the December petition requiring ‘all injunctions [to be] clearly decided’ and ‘not to be granted unless the matter be heard and determined in the chancery’.32 The Pilgrim complaint against the improper behaviour of officials was not confined to those at Westminster. Article 11 of the December petition objected to bribes taken by commissioners for the dissolution of northern monasteries, notably Thomas Leigh and Richard Layton: payments that had, the Pilgrims alleged, determined which houses should be suppressed and which should survive. Article 24 complained of the conduct of county escheators in administering the king’s feudal rights, charging them, on the one hand, with seeking to extend feudal obligations to lands held in socage and, on the other, with allowing bribes to influence their judgment on whether or not land was held in capite. The same article blamed not only escheators for corrupt practices but also ‘the promoters thereof’, implying that the formers’ attempts to enlarge the extent of land held of the king in fee were part of a government plan to increase the king’s feudal revenue.33 A theme running through the Pilgrims’ complaints, as we saw in the last chapter, was the suspicion that the government was seeking to sweep away rights offering subjects protection against heavy taxation, especially by making direct taxes a regular annual levy and by extending the range of indirect taxes, which traditionally had applied to little more than customs, 29

  Bush and Bownes, pp. 164–6.   Bateson, p. 343. 31   SP1/112, f. 114b [L.P. XI. 1244]. 32   SP1/118, f. 293 [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (5)]; SP1/112, f. 121 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)] and for text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16. 33   SP1/112, f. 121 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)]. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16. Elaborating on the issue is SP1/112, fos 24–8, pp. V, VI [L.P. XI. 1182 (2)]. 30

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so as to include levies on sales and services. The Constable statement attributed these designs to Cromwell because he had been heard to boast that ‘he shall make the king the richest prince in Christendom’.34 For a variety of reasons, then, Cromwell – the king’s principal secretary, master of the rolls, lord privy seal and vicegerent in spirituals – was detested as a tyrant. Linked with him, as was made clear in article 8 of the December petition, were Thomas Audley, who as lord chancellor was considered too permissive and corrupt in issuing injunctions, and Richard Riche, who until 1536 had served as solicitor-general and was now chancellor of the court of augmentations, the institution responsible for administering the lands of the dissolved monasteries. All three were branded subverters of good laws and maintainers of heresy.35 Yet, as Aske admitted under examination, ‘the commons never blamed [some councillors] but took [them] for honourable and good catholic men and willers of the commonwealth’.36 The Constitution and the Commons Notably in his very first proclamation and in the oath he composed at York, Robert Aske was keen to show that constitutional grievances moved all Pilgrims irrespective of degree.37 But gentlemen, clerics and commoners were not affected in exactly the same way, for some of these grievances were peculiar to no more than one order and, of the grievances shared by all three, each order had its own perception of what was at stake. Constitutionally, the clergy were especially disturbed by the government’s maltreatment of convocation, by its imposition in perpetuity of an annual tenth on all clerical offices, by its attacks on ecclesiastical sanctuaries and the right of benefit of clergy, and by its subjection of the church to a man who was not only a layman but also a heretic.38 Likewise, the gentlemen Pilgrims had their own constitutional complaints: notably against the Act of Uses which had swept away a means of avoiding the payment of feudal dues and of bequeathing property held in fief to younger sons, in spite of the rule of primogeniture. The Pilgrim gentlemen were also aggrieved by the high-handed manner in which the government was interfering with the work of gentlemen jurors and officials.39 Associated with this particular 34

  L.P. XI. 1244.   See below, Appendix, doc. 16, article 8. 36   Bateson, p. 571. 37   See below, Appendix, docs 2, 4. 38   Bush, ‘Tudor polity’: 59–61. 39  Ibid.: 61–2. 35

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grievance was alarm at the government’s apparent contempt for the society of orders: evident in Cromwell’s recent elevation to the peerage, in spite of his commoner birth, and the recent maltreatment of certain leading families of the north, with Lord Dacre deprived of office and only saved from extinction in the blood by the favourable judgment of his peers, and with the deranged, childless earl of Northumberland persuaded by Cromwell to make the king heir to the Percy patrimony. The Pilgrim gentlemen were also deeply troubled by the government’s attempts to manage parliament, which appeared to undermine the principle of consent. Finally, they were concerned about the peacetime subsidy enacted in 1534, the collection of which was halted by the outbreak of the rebellion. Although a remarkably light levy, they suspected it of having a sinister purpose: that is, to convert direct taxation of the laity from being an extraordinary measure to deal with the emergency of war into a regular, perhaps annual levy, designed to fund everyday government, rather like the tenth imposed upon the clergy in the same year.40 The large number of Pilgrim captains – for example, Robert Aske, William Stapulton, Robert Bowes, Thomas Tempest, William Babthorpe, Robert Chaloner and Thomas Gryce – who worked as professional lawyers, as well as being attached by birth to the gentry, must have intensified the concern for lost, infringed or threatened rights, and, by virtue of their role in drafting Pilgrim petitions, they undoubtedly played a part in bringing constitutional grievances so much to the fore.41 Clerics and gentlemen not surprisingly took the lead in formulating the Pilgrims’ constitutional complaints, using the advantages conferred upon them by literacy, knowledge of precedent and command of legal niceties to provide a form of expression that best served the interests of their order. But rather than simply following their lead, the commons appeared to hold constitutional complaints of their very own. In the early stages of the uprising they were incensed by the prospect of new indirect taxes which were capable of making exactions of those who were normally exempt from government taxation either because they resided in the border counties or by virtue of their poverty. Anxiety in the matter was vividly revealed by Lancaster Herald who encountered south of Pontefract in late October ‘certain companies’ of peasant rebels who told him that they had taken up arms in order to oppose the introduction of new taxes on weddings, births, burials and cattle.42 The constitutional concerns peculiar to the commons also extended to landholding customs: notably the tenurial and free commoning rights enjoyed by customary tenants which were felt to be under threat from 40

  See above, Chapter 3.   Bush, ‘Tudor polity’: 61–2. 42   See above, pp. 127–8. 41

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lords of the manor who, in a bid to increase their landed revenues, were seeking to replace fixed by revisable rents and dues as well as to exploit the waste through creating upon it, by means of enclosure, new farms or rented pastures.43 The commons’ concern for threatened customary rights also applied to tithes which, having been commuted to a fixed sum of money during the long recession of the late middle ages were now undergoing reconversion to payment in kind, as tithe-farmers preferred to receive produce rather than cash in order to market it themselves and so benefit from the long-term rise in grain prices.44 To defend customary rights, which had no cognisance in common law, commoners were answerable to the courts of equity.45 But for the northern commons this involved the long trip to London, since personal appearance at Westminster was the normal practice, with special permission required for alternative arrangement, such as a local commission to receive answer or representation by attorney at Westminster. Wolsey in the 1520s had sought to provide remedy for the disadvantages this procedure placed upon poor northerners by allowing equity cases to be tried at York before a council of the north, and Sir Thomas More, as lord chancellor, had sought to extend to equity the common law practice of representation by attorney.46 By the mid-1530s, these attempted reforms had lapsed, leaving, however, as the pilgrimage of grace revealed, a residual belief that, in the interest of justice – after all, this was what the equity courts were meant to dispense – they deserved to be not only revived but also turned into a regional privilege that was exclusively enjoyed in the north. Accordingly, the December petition demanded that ‘no man upon subpoena is from Trent north to appear but at York or [if at Westminster] by attorney’, unless ‘it be directed upon pain of allegiance and for like matters concerning the king’. The exception related to procedure in Star Chamber where actions were started by bills of complaint or by informations presented, the former alleging riot and featuring overbearing behaviour by one party against another, the latter concerned with complaints against royal officials. In separating the two forms of action, the article was demanding that ordinary northerners should be entitled to appear in person at York when summoned to answer a bill of complaint whereas northerners brought before Star Chamber in 43

  See below, Chapter 6.   See below, pp. 228–39. 45   See C.M. Gray, Copyhold, Equity and the Common Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), ch. 1; Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (London, 1969), ch. 2; A.W.B. Simpson, An Introduction to the History of the Land Law (Oxford, 1961), pp. 153–5. 46   Guy, Cardinal’s Court, pp. 38–41; J.A. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Brighton, 1980), p. 90. 44

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an official capacity should be obliged to make answer at Westminster. This particular constitutional demand would appear to have had agrarian roots, given that the courts of equity were the recognised means of settling claims of tenurial custom. In the previous five years several actions had occurred, especially in Star Chamber, brought by lords against tenants for acts of violence in bills of complaint which required an answer in person at Westminster; and, obliged to comply by writ of subpoena, they had consequently suffered considerable cost and inconvenience. For example, in early 1536 Sir Thomas Curwen and Sir Thomas Wharton, stewards of Galtres Forest to the north of York, had exhibited a complaint to the court of star chamber against the inhabitants of Easingwold and Huby who, on a perambulation of the bounds of the forest, had allegedly taken exception to, and action against, a newly built house and attendant enclosures because, as a settlement in the forest, it encroached upon their free commoning. A year earlier, as we have seen, the tenantry of the manor of Airton in Craven had been similarly prosecuted for the same reason, as were ‘the poor tenantry of the Barony of Kendal’ by certain landlords of the region, such as Sir Roger Bellingham, Walter Strickland, Sir Richard Weston, Geoffrey Middleton and Richard Redman, in connexion with some unknown agrarian issue. In all three cases a gentleman entered a plea to excuse the defendants from appearing at Westminster. Thus, Sir Arthur Darcy – in defence of the 80 men whom Curwen and Wharton were requiring to make answer personally at Westminster – pleaded with Cromwell that ‘these poor men are half undone because the barley seed time is near passed unless your mastership discharge them’, and proposed that the matter should be dealt with at the next, locally held, forest court. Sir Richard Tempest intervened on behalf of the tenants of Airton when they were subpoenaed to appear before Star Chamber, arguing that the defendants ‘had neither gentlemen nor men of lands or substance with them’ at the time of committing their riotous act and, if summoned to London, would not be able to work the harvest and, as a result, would fall behind with the rent. William Parr, steward of the Barony of Kendal, made the same plea on behalf of its tenantry. Complaining of Cumberland’s shrieval role in issuing writs of subpoena summoning poor men to make answer personally at Westminster, he argued that it was in breach of the ancient custom of the barony which reserved to the steward the right to settle in the locality its inhabitants’ ‘discords … between party and party’. Parr presented the custom as based on reason and justice in the sense that many tenants would have neither ‘power nor ability to resort to London’ and so would be denied the right to make answer. If the custom was overridden in this way, he thought, the ‘wealth of those parts’ would be quickly ‘subverted and destroyed’ and the impoverished tenantry would be rendered incapable of fulfilling their military duties to the king.

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Two years before that, the tenantry on the manor of Rothwell near Leeds were in dispute with the Pilgrim leader, Lord Darcy. The issue was commoning rights denied by Darcy’s enclosing. Finding no benefactor, they suffered the tribulation of attendance at Westminster, this time to answer before the court of the Duchy of Lancaster. This particular case had opened four years earlier when Wolsey’s council of the north was exercising an equitable jurisdiction from York and the Rothwell tenants had been able to present a bill of complaint at York. When they did so with a large and intimidating turn-out, Darcy was driven to mount a counterattack by presenting bills of complaint that required answer at Westminster. The case neatly encapsulated how commons and manorial lords divided over the issue of making answer, suggesting that this particular grievance as it appeared in article 23 of the December petition was, in all probability, a commoner demand. But this does not mean that it totally lacked the support of Pilgrim gentlemen. As a member of the duke of Richmond’s council of the north, and having served as its master of requests, the Pilgrim leader Robert Bowes had been a key figure in applying Wolsey’s equitable reform programme for the north and therefore, in all likelihood, was committed in 1536 to reviving the practice of hearing suits against poor northerners at York.47 Not all the constitutional complaints made by the Pilgrim commons came to be presented to the government. The Pilgrim petitions, for example, said nothing about new indirect taxes or tithes. And when such grievances were included – as with those that sought to defend the custom of tenant right and free commoning on the waste – they tended to be given a special twist so that, although offering certain concessions, they failed to grant what the commons exactly wanted.48 For this reason, an article in the December petition opposing recent restrictions on the use of handguns and crossbows is difficult to interpret as a Pilgrim complaint, although it would appear to be a demand from the commons for the restoration of a recently confiscated constitutional right. Article 10 of the Pilgrims’ December petition made reference to ‘statutes of handguns and crossbows’, calling for their repeal and requiring no penalties to be imposed for the use of such weapons ‘unless it be in the 47   For equity procedure, see Guy, Cardinal’s Court, p. 38. For December petition, see SP1/112, f. 121 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1), article 23]. For Galtres Forest, see SP1/103, f. 180 [L.P. X. 733] and below, p. 210. For Airton in Craven, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 162–4. For Barony of Kendal, see SP1/69, fos 232–33b [L.P. V. 951, misdated] and Bush, pp. 258–60. For Rothwell, see R.W. Hoyle, ‘Thomas Lord Darcy and the Rothwell tenants, c. 1526–1534’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 63 (1991): 91–2. For Bowes, see Christine M. Newman, Robert Bowes and the Pilgrimage of Grace, Papers in North Eastern History, 7 (1997), pp. 14–15; Michael Bush, Durham and the Pilgrimage of Grace (Durham, 2000), pp. 39–40. 48   See below, pp. 212–13.

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king’s forests or parks for the killing of his grace’s deer red and fallow’.49 Several statutes of this sort had been enacted in the early sixteenth century – in 1506, 1512, 1515, 1523 and 1534 – with the aim partly of promoting the use of the long bow, especially for the purpose of improving the realm’s capacity to defend itself, and partly to prevent subjects from using crossbows and guns to commit murder and robbery or to kill game.50 Unfortunately, very little evidence has survived directly relating to this particular Pilgrim complaint: in fact, little more than what appears in article 10. Nonetheless, something of its nature and purpose can be extracted from a study of the crossbow and handgun statutes themselves. The most important statute in this body of legislation was the one enacted in 1515.51 Earlier Acts had been confined to the crossbow, allowing every subject the right to possess one for the defence of his own home and person but not for any other purpose unless, that is, he was a lord or happened to be a freeholder with a yearly landed income of at least 200 marks, or unless he had been granted the king’s special licence freeing him from the restrictive terms of the Act. In these cases the crossbow could also be used for hunting game. The Act of 1515 was much more extreme: first, by restricting the use of handguns as well as crossbows and, secondly, by prohibiting possession for personal and home defence. Such a ban appeared to infringe a basic constitutional right. The Act also made changes to the terms under which those specially qualified to use the weapons could exercise their right. Instead of a yearly income of at least 200 marks, an income of at least 300 marks was required; and those granted licences by the king could only use the weapons for home defence. On the other hand, the Act extended the right of usage to the inhabitants of walled towns on, or close to, the coast or the northern frontier, but only for use in the defence of the realm. The legislation of 1523 and 1534 made no significant change to the legal position established by the 1515 Act, since the 1523 statute (14/15 Henry VIII, c. 7) merely amended it, allowing the general qualification for usage to stand at £100, instead of £200 (300 marks), while the 1534 statute (25 Henry VIII, c. 17), although repealing the 1515 Act, replaced it with something very similar.52 The focus of the Pilgrims’ complaint was, not surprisingly, the Act of 1534. However, as its repeal would have automatically revived the 1515 Act,

49

  For text of article 10, see below, Appendix, doc. 16.   19 Henry VII, c. 4; 3 Henry VIII, c. 13; 6 Henry VIII, c. 13; 14/15 Henry VIII, c. 7; 25 Henry VIII, c. 17. 51   6 Henry VIII, c. 13. 52   14/15 Henry VIII, c. 7; 25 Henry VIII, c. 17. 50

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their objection needed to include this earlier piece of legislation as well.53 The 1534 Act incorporated the 1523 amendment, making an income of at least £100 p.a. the special qualification for general usage. Otherwise, it abided by the constitutionally dubious 1515 Act in banning most subjects from possessing crossbows and guns and in confining the king’s special licence to usage for home defence. A distinctive feature of the 1534 Act was its large number of provisos, some of which were probably enabling concessions added as it passed through parliament. Several, however, must have been in the original draft, suggesting that the purpose was not to change the law substantially but to resolve problems that had arisen from the operation of the 1515 Act. For throwing light on the Pilgrims’ attitude to the Act, especially relevant is the proviso making it lawful for the inhabitants of Northumberland, Durham, Westmorland and Cumberland to keep crossbows and handguns in order to defend themselves against ‘thieves [presumably border reivers], Scots and other the king’s enemies’. This rather suggests that the grievance may have originated well away from the border: in all likelihood in Yorkshire. Furthermore, the terms of the Act suggest that it was very much a complaint of the commons whose right to keep and use crossbows and guns had been swept away completely, even for the defence of the home: initially in 1515 and again in 1534. In this respect, the complaint must have expressed a constitutional grievance that had a strong popular appeal. But it was unlikely that the Pilgrims’ hostility to the Act simply stemmed from its refusal to permit such weapons to be used for the protection of person and property. Another distinctive feature of the 1534 Act lies in its concern with the hunting of game: thus servants of gentlemen were permitted to use guns and crossbows on condition that they ‘do not shoot at any fowl, deer or other game’; while gunners in receipt of the king’s wages were banned from shooting ‘any beast or fowl’. The same restriction was placed upon borderers whose right to use these weapons was ‘for none other purpose’ than defending the frontier; while those receiving special licences from the crown to own such weapons could only use them for self-defence. That the Pilgrims had the hunting of game in mind lies in their wish, stated in article 10, to preserve the current penalties for the use of crossbows and guns in hunting the king’s deer. Since the venison that did not belong to the crown was the exclusive hunting right of seigneurial lords whose deer ran free in their forests and chases, it would appear that the Pilgrims sought the right to use crossbows and guns not only to protect homes and persons against intruders but also, in the extensive forest regions of the upland north, to safeguard farms against the depredations of free-range deer. Their antagonism to the latter led, during the course of the 53

  Article 10 refers to a plurality of statutes.

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uprising, to several instances of deer-slaughtering and of threats issued to kill deer, especially the deer kept by the earl of Cumberland in the Forests of Barden, Skipton and Langstrothdale. The gaming implications of the 1534 Act were underlined eight years later when, in partial accordance with the Pilgrims’ demand, it was repealed along with ‘all other statutes heretofore made for restraining in shooting of crossbows and handguns’. The preamble of this repealer stated the need to protect the deer ‘as well the kings as other his nobles’. It therefore enacted that no one had the right to command his servants to shoot with crossbow or gun ‘at any deer, fowl or other’ and required shooting licences to specify the beasts and fowl that the licensee was authorised to kill. As for everyone else, a distinction was made between handguns and crossbows. Crossbows were confined to those on incomes of £100 or more, with no restriction on usage; whereas handguns could be used by anyone but only for the defence of person or house, or for target practice against butts and banks. To use them for killing game the qualification of an annual income of £100 was required. Underlying the Pilgrim grievance against the legislative restrictions placed on the use of these weapons was the major curtailment of hunting rights that had occurred in the late middle ages, a consequence of a change in the law made in 1390 when the rights of subjects to hunt game freely outside areas designated as forest, chase or park were terminated by Act of parliament. As a result, the legitimate hunting of game came to be restricted to the crown and to the owners of areas specified as forest, chase or park. In this respect, the Pilgrim objection to legislative restrictions upon guns and crossbows could also be seen as part of a movement, constitutional in aim, to reclaim lost hunting rights.54 Besides the constitutional grievances peculiar to the commons were those that they shared with the Pilgrim gentlemen and Pilgrim clerics. These grievances sprang from the belief that the ideal framework for the body politic was the society of orders and the conviction that the government’s contempt for its basic principles would create a political system injurious to the commonwealth. The theory of orders proposed an organic society of complementary parts which, under the rule of the crown, was directed by the leadership and learning of gentlemen and clergy and sustained by the productivity and 54   For Pilgrim hostility to deer, see L.P. XI. 1088; Bush, pp. 154–6; Bush and Bownes, pp. 169–74. For the repealer, see 33 Henry VIII, c. 6. For the extent of forest in the upland north, and the rights appertaining, see A.J.L. Winchester ‘Moorland forests of medieval England’, in Ian Whyte and A.J.L. Winchester (eds), Society, Landscape and Environment in Upland Britain, Society for Landscape Studies, supplementary series 2 (2004), pp. 21–32. For constitutional implications of 1390 Act, see Charles R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Leicester, 1979), p. 169; Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers (Oxford, 1993), pp. 61–2.

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subservience of the commonalty.55 Its three orders of gentlemen, clergy and commons were placed in a formal hierarchy, separated by degree, defined by differential rights and determined by differential functions. Because the orders were seen as complementing each other – with the religious function of the clergy, the political function of the gentlemen and the economic function of the commonalty interlocking – it was thought that, because of it, social harmony would prevail and a true commonwealth would therefore flourish. Such a notion was recommended as the ideal relationship between state and society in treatises, sermons and poems. In practice the society of orders was much more complex, as the pilgrimage of grace made evident. In the first place, the three orders behaved not simply as complementary parts but as competing interests. This derived partly from the fact that, as landowners, the upper orders were dependent for much of their wealth upon extracting it from the commonalty. Moreover, commoners were aware not simply of their place in the hierarchy but also of their affiliation to an order whose members needed to defend what they had in common. Countering the vertical belief in hierarchy, then, was a horizontal belief of belonging to ‘the commonalty of the realm’. Bills urged the commons to ‘stick ye together’ and to make a pact with the commons throughout the kingdom to put matters right.56 This awareness of a shared identity and interest meant that a sense of commonalty was a social force that could transcend ‘feudal’ and local allegiances. It found expression in the various meanings attached by the Pilgrims to the term commonwealth, the maintenance of which was the final goal of the society of orders and so central to the northern uprisings of 1536 that their full title was ‘the pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth’. On the one hand, the term was interpreted to mean the wealth of the realm, or a region, as opposed to the personal wealth of the crown: that is, ‘the weal of all’ or the wealth of all subjects. On the other hand, it could be seen as meaning the wealth of the commons.57 Used in this latter sense, it implied the exploitation of the commons – by the government through unjust taxation and by landlords through unjust rents – and proposed that, in counteraction, the commonalty needed to look after its own rather than to wait for social justice to emanate from the virtue of kingship and the benevolence of gentlemen. In addition, each order had slightly different interpretations 55   See M.L. Bush, ‘The risings of the commons in England, 1381–1549’, in J. Denton (ed.), Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, 1999), pp. 114–16. 56   See below, Appendix, docs 7, 18e. 57   For ‘weal of all’, see L.P. XI. 1244; L.P. XII(1). 44, 393.For wealth of a region, see Bush, pp. 335–6. For wealth of the commons, see below, Appendix, doc. 4 and Bush, p. 396.

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of what constituted proper conduct, the gentlemen and clergy tending to stress the value of obedience and subordination: that is, the obligations the commonalty owed them; the commonalty inclining to stress the value of charity and hospitality: that is, the duties the upper orders owed the rest of society. These differing perceptions and interests thus produced conflicting views of society. The higher orders tended to see popular disobedience as, by its very nature, a rejection of the society of orders, a point of view that imparted a third meaning to the term commonwealth, with clerics and gentlemen accusing the Pilgrim commons of wishing to establish a levelled society bereft of hierarchy, its wealth equally shared.58 In contrast, the view of the commons proposed that if the higher orders were abusing the status conferred upon them by the society of orders – that is, if kings behaved tyrannically or if gentlemen and clerics neglected to care for the commons – then the commons were entitled to call them to order. This view found expression not only in the sentiments infusing the Vision of Piers Ploughman and the legends of Robin Hood but also in a succession of risings of the commons which, beginning in 1381, reached a climax under the early Tudors with the Yorkshire uprising of 1489, the Cornish uprising of 1497, the Amicable Grant uprising of 1525, the October uprisings of 1536 and the uprisings of East Anglia and the West Country in 1549.59 Nonetheless, although contrary to the principles of the society of orders in being expressions of popular disobedience and social disharmony, risings of the commons were in no way a repudiation of them. In fact, they were quintessentially a defence of the society of orders, along with the blood right to political rule that it conferred upon kings and gentlemen, and the vocational and institutional rights that it conferred upon clergy and church. From the commons’ point of view, a rising of the commons was not a revolutionary coup, as the establishment would have it, but a legitimate emergency measure to be made operational when the higher orders proved incapable of resisting tyranny. Usually, such risings alleged that bad governance arose from replacing the true nobility in the councils of the king by men of commoner birth; recommending that the personnel of government should accord with the notion of orders and that gentlemen should remain true to the commons, especially by ensuring their protection against heavy taxation and harsh landlordship. The Pilgrim commons were therefore intent not only on preserving their own order but also on maintaining the hierarchy of orders, with all the differential rights and duties that formally existed to distinguish royalty, the clergy, the gentility and the commons. This rendered them as sensitive 58   SP1/117, f. 46 [L.P. XII(1). 687]; SP1/118, f. 213 [L.P. XII(1). 965]. Also see L.P. XII(1). 193. 59   Bush, ‘Risings of the commons’, pp. 109–14, 116–18.

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as the gentlemen to maltreatment of the royal family, which they blamed upon one Act of Succession that had declared Princess Mary illegitimate, and another that had enabled the king to determine his successor, the commons of the East Riding interpreting the two as a device for allowing the throne to pass to Thomas Cromwell.60 Respectful of the society of orders, the Pilgrim commons were also keen to declare their reverence for the king’s person and his lawful prerogative. In characterising their essential attitude to royal authority, William Maunsell reported from York in early November that the commons ‘say they will fight all the world with the king’s person, and yet his laws is daily broken’. The Pilgrims had no wish to revive the dynastic struggles of the fifteenth century and ‘meant no harm to the king’s person’ but merely sought to restore the polity to its true self by insisting on changes in the membership of the privy council – that is, of those responsible for advising the king – and on the repeal of recently made laws, with the aim of bringing government policies back in line with the pledges made by the king in his coronation oath, namely to dispense justice and to cherish the commonwealth.61 Such plans were voiced by a group of commoners in the township of Dent who, having defended the king against the charge of theft for seeking to appropriate their parish church, said ‘it is not the king’s deed but the deed of Cromwell’, adding that, if they could lay hands on Cromwell, ‘we would crum him that he was never as crummed’, but if they could take charge of the king they would do no more than ‘new crown him’: that is, remind him of his coronation oath. The same plan of action was declared in Pickering’s Song, an exhortation to the people of the north ‘to make reformation’ which closed with the following words: Wherefore faithful commons be of good cheer Your intent to pursue, now take upon hand […] Not against our prince, this may he well espy But faith to maintain and rights of this land […] And if we do offend, pardon we do crave God send him long time to reign with equity […] God save our king.62

60

  L.P. XII(1). 533.   SP1/111, f. 66 [L.P. XI. 1047]; St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 486–7. 62   SP1/109, f. 37b [L.P. XI. 841]; SP1/118, f. 293b [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (5)]. 61

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Respect for the society of orders also made them keen supporters of the idea that the king should rule with and through men of noble blood. At the start of the uprising the commons of Howden marched to nearby Wressel castle and declared their objection to the crown’s plan to annex the patrimony of the sixth earl of Northumberland by shouting ‘Thousands for a Percy’.63 Later when Sir Thomas Percy came to York he was welcomed by the commons as ‘Lord Percy’, that is, the heir to the sixth earl; and disgust at the way the latter had yielded to the government’s wishes caused them to say: ‘strike off the head of the earl and make Sir Thomas earl’.64 In early November 1536 a report was made by a government agent, Percival Cresswell, of a meeting between himself and a band of commoners who had been assigned to ‘mind’ Lord Darcy during the Truce. It took place at Temple Hirst, Darcy’s family seat in Yorkshire. When the agent informed them that Cromwell was no longer at Court and that the king was well attended by nobles of ancient lineage, the commons were unable to contain their elation, crying out ‘God save the king and them all’ on the grounds that ‘as long as such noblemen of the true noble blood may reign and rule about the king, all shall be well’.65 That this sentiment of respect was not fortuitously invented on the spur of the moment was revealed at the Pilgrims’ York council, held in the middle of November.66 At this meeting the commons placed a certain order of priority on their demands, claiming that first of all they wanted the king to grant a general pardon, then to give assurance that ‘the nobility [were] here to rule’, and then to make provision for considering their other grievances. Furthermore, although critical of tithes, they appeared to accept that the clergy deserved their wealth and privileges because without them their capacity to care for souls and to fulfil their duty of dispensing hospitality and charity would be seriously impaired.67 In this respect, they were at one with the call for ‘the maintenance of the church and the liberties of the same’ that was reiterated in the petitions dispatched to the government and in the various manifestos composed by Aske whose oath, for example, urged men to follow the cross of Christ ‘to the restitution of his church and to the suppression of heretic opinions’.68 Their commitment to defending the rights of the church and clergy were made evident in several statements of grievance issued not through the filter of clerical or genteel draftsmanship but directly by the commons. Thus the band of armed peasants that Lancaster Herald met 63

    65   66   67   68   64

SP1/115, f. 253 [L.P. XI(1). 393 (2)]. SP1/115, f. 256 [L.P. XII(1). 393 (2)]; Stapleton, p. 102. Dodds, vol. I, p. 290. The National Archives, E36/122, fos 65–65b [L.P. XI. 1128]. Bush, ‘Risings of the commons’, pp. 120–21. See below, Appendix, doc. 2.

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near Pontefract told him that they were duty bound to take up arms because otherwise not only the commonalty but also the church would be destroyed.69 Eleven days earlier the commons of Beverley had issued a similar statement. In a letter of support for the Lincolnshire uprising they declared their opposition to ‘councillors, inventors and procurers’ for seeking ‘utterly to undo both the church and the commonalty of the realm’.70 In late October a Captain Poverty proclamation which sought to muster the commons in the north-west complained of the government’s contempt for ‘the laws and ordinances of our Mother Holy Church’.71 Disturbances in church services in January 1537, the work of Pilgrims disappointed with the inadequate way in which their grievances had been set out in the December petition, revealed that a special concern among the commons was the changes brought about in the relationship between church and state by the royal supremacy, with popular demands made in Yorkshire and Cumbria for the pope to be readmitted as ‘head of our mother church’, the implication of which was that the final control of matters spiritual should be restored to the clerical order.72 During the course of the uprising the clergy was criticised and threatened but not because of any deep animus against the clerical order; rather, because certain clerics were suspected of insufficient commitment to the Pilgrim cause and others were seen as offending the ideals attributed to the clergy by the society of orders. The constitutional complaints that the commons shared with the gentlemen and clergy also stemmed from antipathy to the king’s leading minister, Thomas Cromwell. Robert Aske reported on the commons’ detestation of him and their belief that ‘their grieves [did] only to arise by him and his counsel’.73 That he was not grafting upon them a point of view peculiar to gentlemen and clerics was evident in several popular outbursts of anti-Cromwell sentiment: the men of Dent declaring a wish to ‘crum’ him for threatening to dissolve their parish church; the men of Beverley declaring hatred of him as a heretic and an aspirant to the throne; the men of Westmorland declaring a hostility to ‘Cromwell’s chaplains’; the men of the North Riding objecting to ‘that heretic’ and the tyrant who had fined a grand jury in the court of star chamber for not complying with his wishes; the men of the East Riding – as indicated in Pickering’s Song that had originated in popular rhymes collected together by the yeoman John Hallom – regarding him as like the Old Testament tyrant Haman, 69

    71   72   73   70

St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 485 [L.P. XI. 826]. See below, Appendix, doc. 7. See below, Appendix, doc. 10. See above, pp. 57–61. Bateson, pp. 340, 342–3.

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executed for seeking the destruction of the Jews in the Persian empire. They charged him with favouring heretics, with plundering the church and the commons and with planning to destroy the northern nobility.74 For the commons, Cromwell was the archetypal evil minister whose despotic designs, heretical beliefs and base blood made him responsible for the bad governance that currently afflicted the kingdom: a point made in a prophetic rhyme that circulated widely in the north at the time called ‘Christ’s Cross Row’ and in a song circulated by minstrels in the northwest entitled ‘Crummock’.75 With both the commonwealth and Christ’s faith placed under dire threat by his misrule, the commons regarded his removal from power as a matter of urgent necessity. For the Pilgrims generally, the removal of Cromwell was not regarded as sufficient in itself to provide remedy, since it was their belief that a special parliament was required to repeal the statutes that had awarded his tyrannical plans the sanctity and force of law. Furthermore, it was not simply a matter of putting the clock back to 1509. To remedy matters, certain innovations needed to be made to the relationship between church, state and society, in the achievement of which they expected parliament to play an important part. How far did this particular policy of remedy express the wishes of commoners and reflect their view of the polity? As is well known, the commons were keen on military action, with petitions from commoners making the point that they were prepared to fight to the death for the Pilgrim cause.76 Nonetheless, they readily gave up the initial plan to march on London and willingly negotiated a settlement with the government in Doncaster, the first stage of which occurred in the last week of October and the second and final stage in the first week of December. In the formulation of this settlement the commons were insistent on the use of parliament: first to sanction a general pardon and second to consider the grievances set out in their petitions. Moreover, it was the commons who demanded that the parliament summoned to consider the December petition should meet at York.77 One of the Captain Poverty letters circulating in the north-west had claimed that the ‘estate of poverty’ (that is, the order of commonalty) was oppressed by recent statutes passed ‘under the colour of parliament’: in other words, a parliament seen as illicit 74   For Dent, see above, p. 160. For Beverley, see Bush, pp. 49–50. For Westmorland, see L.P. XI. 1080. For North Riding, see L.P. XII(1). 163 (1); Bush, p. 166. For East Riding, see SP1/118, fos 292b–93b [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (5)] and also see above, pp. 13–14. 75   For ‘Christ’s Cross Row’, see SP1/115, f. 177 [L.P. XII(1). 318 (2)]. For ‘Crummock’ see L.P. XIII(1). 1346. 76   See Bush, pp. 403–4. For commons petitions, see Master, doc. 41, p. 73; and below, Appendix, doc. 15. 77   See Bush, pp. 401–2, 404–5.

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because it had been packed by government agents and officials; and at the start of the uprising a letter from the Beverley commons had declared that their willingness to remain true to the king depended upon the lawfulness of his ‘acts and demands’.78 All this would suggest that central to the political awareness of the commons was not only the importance of parliament but also the need to make it ‘frank and free’, a point repeatedly made by Aske and other gentlemen. The Pilgrims desired the summons of a special parliament not just to repeal obnoxious acts but also to create new laws. This was made clear in the frequent call for statutory remedy in the Pilgrims’ December petition. It would seem that, in resisting the innovations imposed by a reforming government and by improving landlords, the Pilgrims were keen to promote novelties of their own. That this policy of novelty was agreeable to the commons was made evident notably in the attempt to place the custom of tenant right within the cognisance of the common law by giving it statutory sanction; in the attempt to reform the tithe system so that voluntary payments in cash replaced compulsory payments in kind; and in the attempt to create a new privilege for northerners by granting them the right, when summoned by subpoena, to make a court appearance at York rather than Westminster. None of these innovations could have been concocted or promoted by the gentlemen and clergy since what they proposed went so contrary to their interests. They therefore have to be regarded as the work of the commons. The constitutional complaint made by the Pilgrims casts doubt on recent accounts of the basic nature of the Tudor state. Firmly repudiating the concept of a Tudor despotism, G.R. Elton declared that the issue of constitutional rights had been grafted onto Tudor politics anachronistically and that, at the time, it carried little political weight and had virtually no meaning.79 As the government abided by the law, he argued, the constitution could not be said to have been in contention and political rights needed no defence other than against foreign powers. In Elton’s opinion, apart from its legislative work, parliament was an informative and advisory body, acting as a conciliar adjunct of government and a medium for reporting the grievances of subjects. Rather than serving as an arena in which the rights of subjects were pitted against the royal prerogative, its proceedings floated upon a raft of shared values. Elton held a similar view of Tudor rebellion. His trenchant essay on the pilgrimage of grace dismissed its complaints against a loss of rights and liberties as lacking 78

  See below, Appendix, docs 7 and 10.   G.R. Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559–1581 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. ix, 16–17, 23–5. See also Elton, ‘The rule of law in sixteenth-century England’, in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge, 1974), vol. I, ch. 14. 79

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in authenticity and significance. According to him, the defeated Court faction, which masterminded the uprising, raised the north by exploiting grievances of a non-constitutional nature.80 Nonetheless, as the pilgrimage of grace revealed, constitutional friction certainly existed at the time. To overlook a concern for lost or threatened rights is to ignore an important source of social division and political conflict in Tudor England. Such concern, moreover, infiltrated the whole of society. Underlying it was a complex consciousness of ‘the true constitution’ sustained by a sense of legality resting upon the common law, the royal prerogative to dispense justice, a belief in the sanctity of laudable customs and an acceptance of the society of orders. Its range of reference extended not only to national institutions such as parliament, the machinery of common law and equity, the church and the crown but also to provincial rights and local customs. The rebellion demonstrated that, founded upon revered rights, boundaries existed within both the manor and the state which, if infringed, could cause deep offence. The charge of tyranny served as a useful ideology of revolt in establishing one coherent programme out of the multifarious grievances – religious, political and economic – that the Pilgrims held. However, since rights were seen as under threat from lords of the manor as well as from the government, and as suspicions developed between gentlemen and clerics and between gentlemen and commons because of differences in the way they perceived the ideals appertaining to the notion of orders, the concern for the constitution generated social division and, by undermining the rebellion’s solidarity, prepared the way for its eventual defeat.

80   G.R. Elton, ‘Politics and the pilgrimage of grace’, in B. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation (Manchester, 1980), pp. 41–52.

Chapter Five

North and South A Sense of the North The pilgrimage of grace was a play on three conceits, all serving to confer upon the uprising a sense of coherence and direction. In the first place, the rebels saw themselves as pilgrims, seeking the king’s grace. In the second place, they saw themselves as an upsurgence of the commons, obliged to take extraordinary action to correct what the gentlemen and clergy had failed to put right. In the third place, they were moved by a conceit of the north, driven to throw off the domination of greedy, tyrannical and heretical southerners. In this latter respect, the documentation of the pilgrimage of grace helps to show how, and with what effect, the distinction between north and south imparted a sense of regional identity to early Tudor England. On the other hand, could the uprising be regarded as, quintessentially, a regional rebellion? The sense of northern-ness that moved the October rebels was vividly illustrated by two incidents. After the December agreement, Marmaduke Neville, brother of Lord Latimer and a committed Pilgrim, travelled to London – as did other northern gentlemen – stopping for the night at Colchester, Essex. There, in the tavern, he was provoked by the question ‘how do the traitors in the north?’ In response, he issued the threat: ‘If you call us traitors we will call you heretics.’ Neville then proceeded to give an account of the rebellion and its achievements, causing one of the locals to comment: ‘I marvel how the northern men durst … enterprise so high things against their prince’, to which Neville rejoined: ‘We are plain fellows and have showed our minds.’ He then added that though ‘ye southern men thought as much as we … you durst not utter your minds’ and ‘if it had come to battle, you would have fought faintly’. His point was that southerners were just as aggrieved against the government as the northerners but lacked the courage to take action; and therefore what had confined the uprising to the north was partly the greater commitment of northerners to the beliefs that they held dear and partly the superiority of their military prowess. This tavern talk was reported to Cromwell. Placed in his archive, which the government confiscated in 1540 when it tried him for treason, it consequently came to be conserved in the state papers. 

The National Archives, SP1/112, fos 206–206b [L.P. XI. 1319].

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A second revealing instance of the distinction made between north and south featured in another report to Cromwell. It concerned a conversation in the village of Broughton in north Lincolnshire – a region that rose in revolt a week or so prior to the outbreak of the pilgrimage of grace. The conversation took place shortly after Yorkshire had risen, an event which coincided with the Lincolnshire rebels’ decision to disband. In this critical and complex situation a weaver of Broughton, Christopher Norman, was visited by his kinsman, Stephen Norman, who declared to him as he sat at his loom: ‘the northern men be up and we all cast away’. Christopher was so upset by the news that he threw his shuttle down. The two men then went to the vicarage in search of further news. There they met not only the vicar, Edward Sponer, but also Ralph Elderton, ‘a northern man born’. Elderton was buckling on his harness in preparation for war. As the four men discussed the matter, the question arose as to whether Elderton would side with the northerners, to whom he was affiliated by birth, or with the people of Lincolnshire, to whom he was attached by long residence. Elderton was in such a state of agitation that he could hardly talk sense exclaiming: ‘Hogh, I am here!’; then leaping sideways: ‘Hogh, I am here now!’ Seeking some clarification of Elderton’s intentions, Stephen Norman asked: ‘[But] will thou fight against us?’ (that is, the Lincolnshire men who had by this time ended their revolt). Before Elderton could reply the vicar intervened. In his opinion, they had little choice but to join the northerners because ‘if [it] so be that all ye do not turn to their [the northerners’] part … all we be cast away’. In response, Christopher Norman flared up in a rage. For him joining up with the northern rebels was totally unacceptable. ‘By God’s soul’, he threatened, ‘I will tussle with some of the northern knaves.’ This brought a reproof from the vicar: ‘There is ten men against one, and when you have a rap upon the pate and shake your leg, how tussle you then’, adding that the northern rebels were ‘great men and mighty men of war’, whereas, in comparison, Christopher Newman and his ilk were ‘but children’. These two incidents – the one in Colchester, the other in Broughton – imparted an awareness of two separate worlds, the people of the north regarded as a different species from people living in other parts of the kingdom, whether it be in Lincolnshire or Essex. A north/south distinction featured frequently, both in the Pilgrims’ declarations of complaint and in the government’s responses to them. Pickering’s Song, in an exhortation to the Pilgrims, called upon the ‘faithful people of the boreal [northern] region’ to ‘go ye forward valiantly in your peregrination’. It claimed that



  SP1/120, f. 250b [L.P. XII(1). 1318].

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The northern people in time long past Hath little been regarded of the austral [southern] nation’, But now I do trust, even at the last, Renown we shall win to our whole congregation Of these southern heretics, devoid of all virtue, And them overthrow: their faith is untrue.

To indicate that Cromwell was both tyrant and devotee of an alien faith, the song presented him not just as a Turk but as one of those ‘southern Turks’; and to emphasise the oppression of the north, it likened it to the persecution of the Jews as recorded in the Book of Esther, by the evil minister Haman, whom the song equated with Cromwell. Another song associated with the uprising, the Sawley Ballad, made a similar exhortation to the people of the north, declaring how redress would come By this voyage And pilgrimage Of young and sage In this country [that is, in the north].

Central to the narrative of the two songs was the march of northerners upon London to confront the government in its southern lair and to flush out evil ministers – all of them seen as men from the south – who, driven by greed and heresy, were spoiling the commonwealth and destroying Christ’s faith. Purveying the same message of remedy by means of a rising of the north were two prophetic rhymes which at this time were circulating in the three Ridings of Yorkshire. On several occasions, the Pilgrim leadership appealed to a sense of northern-ness, composing, for example, a number of letters authorised ‘by the consent of the barons and commonalty of the north’. This device was used extensively when the Pilgrims held a council at York from 21 to 24 November to which 800 delegates from all the regions involved in the uprising were invited. Moreover, when the Pilgrim delegates reassembled in the first week of December to produce a detailed petition for presentation

   For the song, see below, Appendix, doc. 12. For its composition, see above, p. 12. Its purpose was to advocate military action rather than a peaceful solution.    See below, Appendix, doc. 13, verse XIII.    For prophetic rhymes, see above, p. 15.    L.P. XI. 1079; Chatsworth Trustees, Clifford Letter Book, f. 14; L.P. XI. 1135 (2); L.P. XI. 1155 (2).

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to the king, the clerical delegates addressed their views as ‘the opinion of the clergy of the north parties’. In expressing the Pilgrim’s complaints, Robert Aske was inclined to present them as a northern matter. For example, he framed the objection to the new clerical tax on first fruits and tenths, along with the objection to the suppression of religious houses, as a protest against the impoverishment of the north. Previously, he claimed, the king’s revenues from the north were spent there – he cited those from Yorkshire being used to finance the garrison at Berwick – whereas these new measures would draw wealth ‘out of these parts’, so much so that ‘within short space of years … there should be no money nor treasure’ in the north, leaving the tenant with nothing ‘to pay his rents to the lord’ who would therefore lack the financial resources ‘to do royal service’. The outcome would be horrendous for ‘the said country’ (the north), presumably because an inadequately defended border against Scotland would allow reivers and Scots to loot and pillage with impunity. In this situation the inhabitants of the north would be driven to ally with the Scots. Alternatively, their poverty would force them to ‘make commotions or rebellions’. In presenting the dissolution of monasteries as a special concern for northerners, Aske stressed two features characteristic of the region: the isolated remoteness of many northern communities and the ingrained poverty of the north. For him religious houses had a crucial part to play not only in providing religious services in wild upland and forest areas but also in combating the poverty of the region through dispensing alms; through providing waged employment; through promoting trade by offering night shelter to merchants travelling in desolate parts; through maintaining sea walls, dykes, bridges and highways; through upholding the families of poor gentlemen with loans of money, an education for their younger sons and a retreat for their daughters. At least six other complaints were presented as special concerns of the north. They related to recent Succession Acts; to alleged interference by the government in the judicial process; to the unjust practice in the courts of equity of summoning northerners to London; to the restrictions recently placed on the rights of sanctuaries; to tenant right tenure; and to recent designs against the region’s nobility. The Succession Act that had made Mary illegitimate was deplored from a northern point of view because, in leaving the king without direct legitimate heirs, it prepared the way for the accession of a Scottish king to the English throne – a prospect deeply offensive to the north because of its long engagement in 

  See below, Appendix, doc. 17.



  Bateson, pp. 336, 562–3.  Ibid., pp. 561–2.



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defending the northern border and because of the suffering that invading Scots had inflicted upon northern communities over several centuries.10 The objection to government intrusion in judicial matters stemmed from, among other incidents, the Wycliffe case in which a northern jury was pressed by Cromwell to change its verdict of not guilty and was heavily fined for refusing to do so. The objection to making answer at Westminster reflected upon attempts, initiated by Cardinal Wolsey in the previous decade, to have the equity suits concerning poor northerners tried in York. Stimulated by this short-lived reform was the feeling that the division between north and south that had long existed in the common law should also apply to matters of equity; hence the Pilgrim demand that northerners under summons of subpoena should have the right to appear in person at York rather than make the long journey to London. The dominance of Westminster also featured in a northern complaint against a recent proclamation reducing the number of holy days entitled to special celebration. In laying down that the law terms for the northern assize circuit should be the same as for the southern one, it overrode the northern custom whereby judges conducting the York assizes could only sit during the period of Lent with special permission from the archbishop of York. In other words, the complaint argued that, as Hilary term in the north did not normally extend into Lent, therefore the holy festivals occurring during Lent within the northern circuit – that is above the Trent – should be preserved because the new ruling against their celebration in term time would not apply.11 The complaint against the government’s antipathy to permanent sanctuaries was a northern concern because of their location in the north.12 The same was true of tenant right, a tenure involving military service on the northern border and totally unknown in southern parts.13 The complaint against the government’s antipathy to the northern nobility, a point made in Pickering’s Song, must have referred both to the recent dismissal of Lord Dacre from the king’s service and to the government’s plans for acquiring the Percy patrimony. As Pickering’s Song put it when exhorting the commons ‘in this noble region’ to take action:

10   SP1/112, f. 119 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1), article 3]. For the text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16. 11   For the Wycliffe case, see above, p. 147. For poor men’s suits and subpoenas, see above, pp. 152–4. For law terms/holy days, see SP1/117, f. 204 [L.P. XII(1). 786 (ii/6)]. Further light is thrown on the matter by Cranmer (see L.P. XII(1). 977) and by Lord Darcy (see L.P. IV. 5749, p. 2553). 12   See M.L. Bush, ‘The Tudor polity and the pilgrimage of grace’, Historical Research, 80 (2007): 59–60; Michael Bush, Durham and the Pilgrimage of Grace (Durham, 2000), pp. 25–31. 13   See below, pp. 191–3.

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Our nobles for their boldness shortly should be shent [ruined] Their heads to be lost and that were great pity This country to be desolate of so noble progeny.14

It was not only the Pilgrims who made a distinction between north and south; so did the government, with both sides resorting to a number of terms – such as ‘north country’ or ‘north countries’, ‘north parts’ or ‘north parties’, ‘this northland’, ‘northernmen’, ‘commons [or ‘commonalty’] of the north’.15 Government reports on the uprising soon switched from perceiving the rebels as Yorkshiremen to regarding them as northerners.16 This followed news that the pilgrimage of grace had also found support in Durham, Northumberland, Westmorland, Cumberland and Lancashire. It also made the point that the revolt in Lincolnshire had ended and the south remained loyal. A royal proclamation was addressed to ‘ye commons of the north’. What is more, the commanders whom the king appointed to combat the rebels were termed ‘lieutenants general from the Trent northward’. One of them, the duke of Norfolk, addressed the Pilgrims shortly before the truce of 27 October when they had rejected his terms for negotiation and appeared resolved on battle: ‘Alas! That ever it should be said that ye northern men that have so well served their prince in our companies [that is, militarily] … should now come to fight against us.’17 14   SP1/118, f. 293b [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (5)]. Yet there was also a tendency to present the issue as a national one. In the same song mention was made of ‘the nobility of the realm brought to confusion’ (ibid., f. 292). Aske in referring to the nobility complaint, as in his first proclamation, called upon men ‘to be true to … the noble blood’ (SP1/107, f. 116 [L.P. XI. 622]). He also presented it as a national matter in his second proclamation which called upon men to join the uprising to preserve ‘the nobility and commons of the realm’ (St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 467) as well as in his oath which obliged men to commit themselves to ‘the purifying of the true noble blood’ (SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]. And in the October articles the demand was made to return to a time ‘when his nobles did order under his highness’ (ibid.). Such variations in presentation sprang from the fact that Pilgrim concern for the nobility covered several issues: not just the treatment of the Dacres and Percys but also the contempt for nobility expressed in the recent elevation of Cromwell to the baronage and the placing of top government positions in the hands of men from commoner backgrounds. See Bush, pp. 104–5. 15   For north country/countries, see L.P. 768 (2), 972, 841 (iii), 1045. For north parts/ parties, see L.P. XI. 765, 946 (3), 1046 (3), 1135 (2), 1162, 1206, 1211, 1224, 1217 (19), 1236, 1245; St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I. p. 498 [L.P. XI. 1064]; Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. I, no. 167 (p. 243). For northland, see L.P. XII(12). 892 (3). For northern men, see L.P. XI. 887, 1061; Master, doc. 49, p. 75; L.P. XII(1). 1083. For commons/commonalty of the north, see L.P. XI. 826 (2), 929, 1079; Chatsworth Trustees, Clifford Letter Book, f. 14. 16   For the Yorkshire perception, see L.P. 817, 821. For the northern perception, see L.P. XI. 826 (2), 883, 955, 1206, 1217 (19), 1224. 17   For the royal proclamation, see L.P. XI. 826 (2). For the lieutenancy title, see St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, p. 485 [L.P. XI. 826]. For Norfolk’s address, see L.P. X. 887.

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Yet rather than suddenly invented to distinguish the pilgrimage of grace from the Lincolnshire uprising or to convey its geographical extent, the sense of the north, as it was employed by both the Pilgrim leadership and the government, had a very long history. A definition of the north as a region bounded to the south by the line of the Trent preceded the Norman Conquest when it represented the southern border of the kingdom of Northumbria. Determining its northern boundary over the centuries was the shifting frontier that lay between the two traditionally hostile kingdoms of England and Scotland, although it tended to be seen as the line of the Tweed. Furthermore, offices and institutions had developed in such a way as to give meaning to the north as a region separated from the south by the river Trent. Thus, for centuries the Trent had divided the English church into two provinces, the former centred upon York, the latter upon Canterbury, each with its own archbishop and its own convocation. As a result, a sense of north and south was imparted by the distinction officially made between ‘the northern clergy’ and ‘the southern clergy’. The administration of the law was similarly divided, the line of the Trent determining the northern circuit for justices of assize; as were heraldic matters, with Norroy king of arms taking charge of the region north of the Trent and with Clarenceux king of arms taking charge of the region south of it. The Trent also separated the administration of the royal forests into a northern and southern division. From the thirteenth century there existed a chief justice of the forests beyond the Trent. The same boundary was also used administratively to distinguish between the crown lands in the south and those in the north. From the fourteenth century, moreover, the office of lieutenant-general north of the Trent came into being, usually in connexion with the Scottish wars. Although its existence was intermittent, the office helped to give meaning to a sense of the north on account of its authority to call upon commissions of array above the Trent to provide troops for the defence of the northern frontier or the invasion of Scotland.18 From the late fifteenth century there developed a king’s council in the north, originally associated with the king’s lieutenant in the north and eventually chaired by its own president, with an area of jurisdiction extending to all areas in which the king’s writ ran above the line of the Trent. Those within the definable north were allowed access to the common law and equity facilities exercised by the council of the north; while the actions brought before this council by those deemed to live outside the region were dismissible as suits foreign.19 18   R.R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North (London, 1921), p. 3, n. 3. For the administrative division of crown lands, see the offices cited in ibid., pp. 490, 493. Also see Helen M. Jewell, The North-South Divide (Manchester, 1994), pp. 23–4. 19   Reid, King’s Council, pp. 102–8, 114, 121, 147.

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That the Pilgrims’ sense of the north attached the same importance to the line of the Trent is suggested by article 15 of the December petition which, in requesting a special parliament to consider the Pilgrims’ complaint, required it to be held in the north, either at Nottingham or York, and by article 23 which demanded for the inhabitants of the region north of the Trent the right, when summoned by subpoena, to appear at York rather than Westminster. That the government conceived the north in the same way is suggested not only by the title of lieutenant-general from the Trent northward that it conferred upon Norfolk and Shrewsbury but also by its acceptance of the so-called ‘politic device’, concocted by Norfolk on 18 October. This involved using the Trent as the main line of defence against the rebels, with troops chiefly employed to guard the bridges across that river at Newark and Nottingham: a plan undone by Shrewsbury’s rash decision to march on Doncaster. Both sides, it is true, were capable of using the term ‘north of Doncaster’, but, by doing so, they were not proposing an alternative definition of the north but were simply denoting the region from which the uprising had mostly recruited its support.20 Emphasising the distinction between north and south were several other political factors: one was the frequency of war with Scotland coupled with the king’s dependence upon the military power of northerners to provide a protective shield against this alien kingdom as well as a speedy means of counterattack. Another was the tendency of government to locate itself in the far south-east. In response to the persistent Scottish wars of the early fourteenth century, central government had acquired a base in York; but involvement from the late fourteenth century in a very long war with France had caused its return to London.21 These factors had combined to create the suspicion at Court that northern magistrates and jurors were more prone to partiality than southerners, rendering the north less easy to control in the cause of good government. It lay behind Wolsey’s approach to the north and was still there in the mid-1530s, as was made evident by Cromwell’s interventions in northern affairs. William Maunsell, deputy sheriff of Yorkshire and one of his agents, gave expression to it, reporting from York, probably in 1536, that ‘commissions and enquiries of the truth oft times have small place in these parts by reason of affinities and confederacies which no doubt ye are like to break … if ye call them unto your presence’.22 Another consequence of the removal of central government to the far south-east was a feeling of neglect in the north. This was intensified by the 20   For ‘politic device’, see Bush, pp. 384–5. For December petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 16. For term ‘north of Doncaster’, see L.P. XI. 955, 1155 (2). 21   See F.W. Brooks, The Council of the North (London, 1953), p. 4. 22   SP1/91, f. 187 [L.P. VIII.515, misdated].

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massive amount of land in the north that came to accrue to the crown as the dynastic wars of the late middle ages brought a succession of northern magnates to the throne. The outcome was a northern antagonism towards southerners who were seen as the beneficiaries of this development. The same dynastic wars also helped to stoke up a southern antagonism towards northerners, the result of the engagement of northern troops in the south and the reputation that they acquired there as ruthless plunderers.23 Long aware of the distinctiveness of the Tudor north, historians have encapsulated it in a concept of ‘the problem of the north’. This was seen to stem from the fact that the north was more difficult to rule than the south, a consequence of the concessions the crown was obliged to grant northerners in order to retain their active support in the Scottish wars. The problem of the north was also thought to have a social dimension. Society, it was felt, was differently structured in the north. Lacking was an independent middle class of merchants and small landowners to provide an alternative means of local influence to that of the great landlords. For this reason, it was reckoned, royal control in the north was bound to be relatively weak.24 Much of this thesis is self-evidently questionable: not only because it anachronistically relies on a rising middle class but also because it simplistically assumes that the north was socially and politically coherent whereas, in fact, marked differences separated both the border shires from the rest of the north and the northern uplands from the northern lowlands.25 Nonetheless, although probably owing little to ‘the problem of the north’, a sense of the north existed on account of the administrative dependence of church and state upon a north/south divide located at the Trent. It also rested upon a difference in military reputation. The superior fighting capacity of northerners when compared with southerners – asserted in late 1536 both by Marmaduke Neville and by the vicar of Broughton – was acknowledged by the duke of Norfolk who, in a dispatch to the Court on 20 October, saw fit to distinguish Yorkshiremen from Lincolnshiremen on the grounds that the former ‘are more considerable’ whereas the latter were ‘the worst of the realm’. This was because ‘the one [the men of Lincolnshire] never saw wars, the other [the men of Yorkshire] often’.26 On account of this difference, he thought it dangerous to assume that, because the Lincolnshire rebels had submitted without a fight, the Pilgrims would do likewise. He was proved right when, a week 23

  Jewell, North-South Divide, pp. 45–7, 57–8.   See Reid, King’s Council, ch. 1, esp. pp. 7–13, 56; Brooks, Council of the North,

24

p. 9. 25   See M.L. Bush, ‘The problem of the far north: a study of the crisis of 1537 and its consequences’, Northern History, 6 (1971): 40–63; Brooks, Council of the North, pp. 6–7. 26   Master, doc. 18, p. 68.

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later, he found himself grossly outnumbered at Doncaster by a formidable, well-horsed and well-equipped Pilgrim army recruited from Yorkshire and Durham.27 True, the whole of English society was a military one, thanks to the militia system, which placed the defence of the realm upon the obligation of male subjects between the ages of 16 and 60 to serve appropriately armed when summoned, and also thanks to the government’s practice of raising troops for wars abroad by requiring gentlemen to provide armed retinues recruited from their own servants, tenants and clients. A military system of this nature had developed in the absence of a standing army and because of the government’s unwillingness to employ mercenaries in large numbers.28 Yet the view prevailed – and is substantiated in muster rolls and muster books which carefully recorded the numbers of troops that communities could provide, along with the weaponry and harness available to them – that the north possessed a greater military capacity than the south: a consequence of the persistence of discord with Scotland and the enduring incentive that northerners thus acquired to remain prepared for war. A Regional Rebellion? A strong sense of northern-ness, then, certainly existed. But what part did it play in the pilgrimage of grace, an uprising that can be readily conceived as a rebellion of the north because of the northern issues that moved it and because of the notable fact that all participants were northerners. As we have seen, northern concerns undoubtedly moved the Pilgrims. Take the December petition, with article 3 expressing the north’s hatred of Scotland by calling for the legitimisation of Princess Mary on the grounds that, by declaring her a bastard, a Succession Act had improved the claims of Scottish kings to the English throne.29 Article 9, moreover, specifically related to the north in requiring land held in a number of cited parts to have their tenant right confirmed by act of parliament. Article 15 had a clear northern provenance in requiring a parliament to be held at York or Nottingham to consider the Pilgrims’ grievances and to provide statutory 27

  See Bush, ch. 10.   For military capacity of the north in 1535–6, see ibid., appendix 1, pp. 418–24. For Tudor military system, see J.J. Goring, ‘The Military Obligations of the English People, 1511–1558’ (London Ph.D. thesis, 1955); Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford, 1965), pp. 203–4; L. Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia (London, 1967), pp. 31–3; M.C. Fissel, English Warfare, 1511–1642 (London, 2001), pp. 8–13. 29   For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16. 28

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redress. In addition, there was article 19 which required a number of ecclesiastical liberties – all specified were located in the north – to have their ‘old customs’ upheld by parliamentary statute. Finally, article 23 expressed a clear northern concern in requiring all ‘from Trent north’ to have the right of appearance in York rather than London when summoned by writ of subpoena before a court of equity. Yet this amounted to only five articles out of 24. In fact, the uprising appeared for two reasons to be only marginally moved by a sense of northern-ness: first, because the Pilgrims were principally aggrieved by national issues; secondly, because their regional complaints mostly appertained to particular parts of the north rather than the north as a whole. As we have seen, the national issues that moved the Pilgrims related to defending faith and commonwealth by freeing the English church from the infection of heresy and by protecting the commonwealth – variously interpreted as the wealth of all or as the wealth of the commons – against the greed of landlords and state officials. The Pilgrims’ plan of reform centred upon persuading or forcing the king to favour their cause by supporting the repeal of offensive statutes and by disposing of ministers whose heretical beliefs, overbearing natures, covetousness and base blood disqualified them from office.30 In their concern with blood and political function, the Pilgrims were showing respect for the society of orders, a notion far removed from any sense of regionalism since it presumed that, no matter where it was to be found in the realm, society was similarly organised as a formal hierarchy of gentlemen, clerics and commons, with each order separated by degree and distinguished by function.31 Furthermore, in the earliest declarations of grievance, no northern complaints were to be found. Originally, the Pilgrims used a set of articles formulated not in the north but in the midlands, the work of the Lincolnshire uprising.32 When the Pilgrims produced their own petition, it made no mention of the north. Instead it listed a number of general grievances appertaining to the faith of Christ, the church and its liberties, the common law and commonwealth, declaring the Pilgrims’ goal to be ‘reformation of the church militant, 30   The charge of baseness first appeared in the Lincolnshire petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 1. It featured in Aske’s oath that became attached to the October petition. See below, Appendix, docs 2 and 14. It was also found in the remarks Aske made to Lancaster Herald on 21 October in Pontefract Castle. See St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 466–7 [L.P. XI. 705 (2)]. ‘Base’ was variously interpreted as ‘of low birth and small reputation’; of ‘villein/ vile blood’; ‘simple and evil disposed’. 31   See Michael Bush, ‘The risings of the commons in England, 1381–1549’, in Jeffrey H. Denton (ed.), Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, 1999), pp. 114–19. 32   That is, L.P. XI. 705 (1). For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 1. For its usage by the Pilgrims, see above, pp. 4–6.

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preservation of the king and his issue, for the honour and surety of the baronage and commonwealth of this realm’.33 Attached to the petition when it was taken to the king was the Pilgrims’ oath – variously called the oath of the honourable men or the oath of the commons – which also made no mention of the north, or any part of it, but criticised the government for the bad policies it had imposed upon the whole kingdom. Moreover, the detailed instructions, drawn up for the Pilgrim delegates who took the petition to Court to help them elaborate upon it, again failed to specify the north.34 The same could be said of Robert Aske’s earliest proclamations – although all were designed to drum up northern support. Even when he touched upon the threat to the nobility, no specific reference was made to the northern nobility. Instead, he presented it as a national issue, caused by the government’s contempt for the society of orders.35 The one exception was the address Aske delivered on 19 October to the high-ranking clerics and gentlemen, all northerners, who had taken refuge in Pontefract Castle. In it he accused them of failing to protect the interests of the north by accepting and applying governmental policies detrimental to the region. But, in doing so, his intention was to show how they had grievously neglected their duties as leaders of the north. He was not suggesting that northerners had greater cause than southerners to begrudge what the government had done.36 Failure to make reference to the north in the opening stages was probably a consequence of the rebellion’s original strategy: which was to link up with non-northerners – the Lincolnshiremen in particular and southerners in general – on a march to London.37 Such a strategy was abandoned when the Lincolnshire uprising, with similar plans ‘to go forward’, suddenly collapsed and because the Pilgrim army chose to negotiate a truce at Doncaster. Finding that, in place of the Lincolnshiremen, it could call upon the support of much of the north, the pilgrimage of grace, originally a movement confined to the southerly parts of Yorkshire, resorted to a sense of northern-ness for the purpose of publicising the form that the uprising had now assumed. It has long been accepted that any sense of the north was complicated by regional divisions of interest: divisions that essentially distinguished the counties taking the brunt of Scottish attacks and of border raiding – that is, Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland and Durham – from the

33

    35   36   37   34

SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]. For text, see below, Appendix, doc. 14. L.P. XI. 1143, 1204. See below, Appendix, docs 4, 5. See below, Appendix, doc. 6. See L.P. XI. 826, 841, 879 (1/ii); L.P. XII(1). 393 (2).

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rest of the north.38 Furthermore, these counties were themselves fiercely divided between the warrior clans of the border uplands and moors and the farming communities of the adjacent lowlands, upon whom the clans lived by looting and pillage.39 Such divisions in the far north impressed themselves upon the pilgrimage of grace in two ways. In the first place, the border clans retained their loyalty to the crown. Refusing to take the Pilgrim oath, they remained ever alert to the opportunities for reiving that the uprising created on the English side.40 In the second place, the motivation of the rebels in the far north differed somewhat from that of rebels inhabiting the southerly parts of the north.41 Bringing them together was not concern for the north as a region but a national concern for the commonwealth and Christ’s faith. Whereas the southerly parts of Yorkshire, a lowland region, fell under the spell of Robert Aske and submitted to his proclamations and plans, the far north, a predominantly upland region, succumbled to Captain Poverty, a mythical figure who, redolent of Piers Ploughman, personified Christ and the commons.42 In the name of Captain Poverty, as we have seen, a series of letters were circulated which inspired revolt in the border counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland and the Palatinate of Durham, in the North Riding, in the northerly parts of the West Riding and in northern Lancashire. Associated with this Captain Poverty movement were potent agrarian grievances, none of which was evident in the movement led by Aske. The Captain Poverty movement also had a much greater concern for the defence of the northern frontier. Like the Aske movement, it identified the commonwealth in decay as a major grievance but explained it in terms of, first, the exploitation of the peasantry by landlords and, secondly, the damage that reivers and invading Scots were able to inflict, thanks to a weakening in the border defences. The one was connected with the other because the complaint against landlords related to the system of tenant right in which customary tenants paid no more than low rents and lenient dues in return for having to provide the lord warden of the marches with unpaid mounted military service. The point made was that the landlord’s failure to respect tenant right impoverished the tenantry, making it less capable of fulfilling this military obligation. 38

  See Bush, ‘Problem of the far north’: 40–63.   See Bush, Durham and the Pilgrimage of Grace, p. 51; Bush, pp. 335–7; Bush and Bownes, pp. 214–15, 228–9, 258–60. 40   L.P. XI. 993. 41   See below. 42   See M.L. Bush, ‘Captain Poverty and the pilgrimage of grace’, Historical Research, 65 (1992): 17. Also see above for Captain Poverty movement, pp. 10–12; and see below, for texts of some Captain Poverty letters, Appendix, docs 8, 10, 11. 39

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The issue of tenant right came vividly to light in the Barony of Kendal when rebels from Dentdale in the West Riding went there to stir up revolt and were told by the Kendal men that their principal concern was ‘our old ancient customs’. In response, the two Dentdalers reappeared the following day with a specially adapted oath. Whereas the typical oath was ‘to be true to God, the king and the commons’, this one was ‘to be true to God and the king and their ancient laudable customs’.43 It did the trick, the men of Kendal promptly forming a host which willingly marched, with a force from Dentdale, to occupy Lancaster. The ancient custom to which the Kendalmen were so attached was tenant right which, within the Barony of Kendal, subjected their manorial dues to a consideration of reasonableness that had to take into account their military service. Alleging that landlords were failing to honour the custom, the Kendalmen rose to impress on them the obligation to respect it. This they did by forcing them to take the new oath and to sanction with their signature and seal statements upholding tenant right.44 Because of these concerns, a fair part of the Captain Poverty movement chose not to join the Pilgrim army when in late October it marched on Doncaster. Instead, it concentrated on defending the northern frontier, with Ingram Percy remaining on guard in Northumberland against the likelihood of Scottish or reiver incursions, and with the rebels of Cumberland and the Barony of Westmorland marching on Carlisle.45 In contrast, the Kendal host marched southwards, but not beyond Lancaster, to resist a threat of military action from the loyalist earl of Derby based at Preston. When this threat came to nothing it returned home to defend the barony. Underlying the northern revolts of October 1536 was a host of grievances that were peculiar to certain communities rather than pertinent to the whole north. Linking them to the Pilgrim cause was not a sense of the north but the ability to blame them on the government, especially Cromwell. For example, certain saints were closely associated with the north, notably St Cuthbert and St Wilfred, and both featured in the pilgrimage of grace. Yet Pilgrims did not appear to see them as icons of the north. In fact, their concern for saints was expressed in terms of an interacting national and local issue. At fault was the government’s recent reduction in the number of holy days that could be legitimately celebrated as festivals. Both St Cuthbert and St Wilfred had suffered, as had St Luke. In the cases of St Wilfred (12 October) and St Luke (18 October), the date of the banned 43   SP1/118, f. 138b [L.P. XII(1). 914 (2)]. For a discussion of tenant right, see below, pp. 192–5. 44   Bush, pp. 255–7; L.P. XII(1). 163 (2) (see below, Appendix, doc. 18e); L.P. XI. 1246 (1), article 9 (see below, Appendix, doc. 16). 45   See Bush, pp. 150, 187.

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festival had occurred in the early stages of the uprising. Congregational protests were made, at Watton, Kirkby Stephen and probably Ripon, when at Sunday service the officiating priest failed to announce, in the customary manner, that the forthcoming holy day dedicated to these saints fell within that week. In this respect, a local event brought home to people the charge that, driven by heresy, the government was against the worship of the saints. The dissolution of a local religious house, the repository of saintly images and relics, had the same effect, inciting local people to take action to rescue saintly objects from desecration and blasphemy. Another source of saintly dishonour was the recent legislation against ecclesiastical liberties, the curtailment of their franchisal rights having caused offence because it marked a callow rejection of the saintly protection signified and guaranteed by their existence. Thus, the inhabitants of the Palatinate of Durham were moved to join the uprising in the hope of regaining the sanctum of St Cuthbert.46 Local grievances activated the men of Beverley against the government at the start of the pilgrimage of grace, notably because of their feud with the lord of the manor, the archbishop of York, over an issue of municipal government. This became connected with hostility to Cromwell after he had intervened in the archbishop’s favour.47 The Pilgrims of Richmondshire were moved by a local incident in which Cromwell tried to secure the conviction for murder of William Wycliffe, a local man, after a jury at the York assize had granted him an acquittal.48 For the Pilgrims in the vicinity of Howden a compelling local issue was the government’s designs upon the Percy patrimony. Complicating the issue were the perceived irresponsibility of the sixth earl of Northumberland in dissipating his inheritance and doubts recently cast upon the family’s reputation for goodlordship. The latter resulted from a change in estate management that had subjected the Percy’s Yorkshire estate to the custom of the Honour of Cockermouth, thus introducing to it the practice of exacting an entry fine on change of lord as well as on change of tenant. Yet, along with other parts of the north where Percy estates or family seats were situated, a government plan to dispossess the House of Percy of its patrimony helped to incite Pilgrim hostility; and a key figure in the events leading up to the truce of 27 October was Sir Thomas Percy, the childless earl’s heir but recently disinherited by an agreement, reached between Northumberland and the crown and brokered by Cromwell, to transfer the Percy estate to the king. In recognition of Sir Thomas Percy’s importance to the cause, Aske – who had earlier taken a party from Howden to 46

  See above, pp. 91–3. Also see Bush, Durham and Pilgrimage of Grace, pp. 25–31.   Bush, pp. 50–53. 48  Ibid., pp. 166–7. Also, see above, p. 147. 47

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Wressel Castle to shout ‘Thousands for a Percy’ and, at the same time, had dispatched Thomas Franke to Seamer, the Percy seat near Scarborough, to seek Thomas’ support – raced back from Pontefract to give him a special welcome when he entered York at the head of a large force recruited from the North and East Ridings. Thereupon, Percy’s troops were positioned to the fore in the Pilgrim army when it stood arrayed on 26 and 27 October within sight of the royal army at Doncaster.49 Another local source of complaint, which likewise moved several parts of the north to oppose the government, was hostility to the earl of Cumberland. It sparked in Craven and the Barony of Westmorland because of his harsh landlordship; in Nidderdale Chase and Skipton Forest because of his ill-management of deer parks; in Cumberland and Westmorland because of his inadequate service as warden of the west march, which caused a rebel proclamation to complain that ‘the rulers of this country do not come among us and defend us from robbing of the thieves [that is, border clans] and Scots’. Inflaming this hostility was the part played by the House of Clifford in the reprisals the government had recently taken against the House of Dacre, with the earl of Cumberland raised to the wardenship following Dacre’s disgrace. Contributing to anti-Clifford sentiment were the favours the earl had received from Cromwell in the disputes he was having with his tenantry. In this respect, animus against the earl of Cumberland, both as landlord and office-holder, represented another expression of anti-government sentiment.50 Also questioning the importance of a sense of northern-ness to the pilgrimage of grace was the resistance that a considerable part of the north showed towards the uprising. The warrior clans on the northern border – in Eskdale, Tyndale, Redesdale and Hexhamshire – were very much against it.51 Moreover, the Palatinate of Chester and the southerly parts of the Duchy of Lancaster – that is, Cheshire and Lancashire south of Lancaster – offered little support. Instead, they furnished the earl of Derby with a force of 7,000 men when he was organising military counteraction in the last week of October.52 And there was little support for the pilgrimage of grace from the extensive southerly region of the north: that is, the parts 49   For government designs on Percy patrimony, see R.W. Hoyle, ‘Henry Percy, sixth earl of Northumberland, and the fall of the House of Percy’, in G.W. Bernard (ed.), The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, 1992), pp. 192–7. For Percy participation in uprising, see Bush, Durham and the Pilgrimage of Grace, pp. 22–3; Bush, pp. 83–5, 104–5, 195–6, 205–7. For Percy estate-management in Yorkshire, see below, p. 194. For Aske meeting up with Thomas Percy in York, see L.P. XII(1). 1018. 50   See Bush, pp. 154–5, 309–20, 335–6, 368–70; Bush and Bownes, pp. 158–74, 257–62. 51   L.P. XI. 993, 1228, 1293. 52   L.P. XI. 947, 1251.

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situated between the Trent and the old Don, namely from Nottinghamshire, from Derbyshire and from the southern wapentakes of the West Riding, especially Staincross and Upper Strafforth.53 The importance of a sense of northern-ness to the uprising is further questioned by the sympathy shown towards the pilgrimage of grace by people living south of the Trent. After all, the pilgrimage of grace was originally inspired by a rebellion in Lincolnshire. Although the latter quickly petered out, unrest continued in that county leaving the government fearful that, if the Pilgrim host rejected negotiation and persisted with the plan to march on London, the Lincolnshire men would come to its aid.54 Furthermore, in the very early stages of revolt, trouble was reported in Norfolk and Suffolk, and apprehension of trouble was reported in Essex and Kent, regions with an insurrectionary reputation earned in the commons’ rebellions of the late middle ages, the peasants’ revolt of 1381 and Jack Cade’s uprising of 1450, and in the recent and highly successful Amicable Grant uprising of 1525.55 The fear that these cloth-working regions would link up with the rebels of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire caused the government to suspend a recent statute placing restrictions upon the manufacture of cloth.56 Persuaded by a conviction that southern parts were infected by the Pilgrims’ cause, the duke of Norfolk, commander of the king’s army, proposed the truce of 27 October, whereby, in return for the disbanding of the Pilgrim army, he agreed to take the rebels’ petition to the king. In justifying this humiliating climb-down, he pointed out to the king that few of his troops – all recruited in the south – were reliable, with many of them believing the Pilgrims’ ‘quarrels to be good and godly’.57 A month later he advised the king that, if he wanted to end the rebellion by military force, he should quickly recruit from the south an army of gentlemen and household servants, but ‘not trusting commons’ whom, he felt, might switch sides.58 The concessions made by the government, then, rested on its understanding that the pilgrimage of grace was something more than a revolt of the north, and on its realisation that complete trust could not be placed on the loyalty of the south.

53   L.P. XI. 846; R.B. Smith, Land and Politics in the England of Henry VIII (Oxford, 1970), pp. 197–8. 54   See Darcy’s view, L.P. XI. 1086. For Aske’s view, see ibid., 1128; L.P. XII(1). 946 (3). 55   L.P. XI. 603, 625, 714. 56   Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. I, no. 175; L.P. XI. 520, 545, 559, 576 (p. 230), 603, 625. 57   L.P. XI. 909. 58   Master, doc. 45, p. 74.

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A sense of northern-ness also appeared to play little part in the organisation of the pilgrimage of grace. Much more important in this respect was a sense of local allegiance, extending from individual vills and parishes to wapentakes, lordships and liberties, as was the communality imparted by distinctive terrains and by the followings of great lords who had fallen foul of the government – notably the Dacres and Percies. Since the uprising resembled a pilgrimage only in that it took the form of a crusade, vital to its existence and success was the mobilisation of a large force of well-armed men. In this respect, it owed much to a military system already in existence: one, in fact, used to raise the militia. For this purpose the shires of the north, like those of the south, were divided into hundreds. In the north they were called either wapentakes or wards. Within each wapentake or ward lay an ancient meeting place where the armed menfolk assembled when summoned to serve. Although a function of the militia was to resist insurgency, the Pilgrims turned the tables, managing to use its organisation to promote insurrection. In the mobilisation of the rebel hosts a major part was played by the local identity that these administrative divisions and their focal points had established. Thus, in the early stages, the men of the wapentake of Howdenshire responded to a summons to attend a meeting at Ringstone Hurst; as did the men of West Craven summoned to Neals Ing; or the men of Langbaurgh in Cleveland summoned to Carling Howe; or the men of Durham summoned to Oxen-le-Fields and then Spennymoor; or the men of the East Ward in the Barony of Westmorland summoned to Sandford Moor; or the men of Kendal summoned to Tarneybank; or the men of East Osgoldcross summoned to Hook Moor; or the men of the wapentake of Betwixt Ouse and Derwent summoned to Skipwith Moor; or the men of Inglewood in Cumberland summoned to Cartlogan Thorns.59 Another source of identity that played a vital part in the mobilisation of the Pilgrim host lay in the affiliation shared by the inhabitants of enclaves of exclusive privilege, such as honours, baronies, lordships and liberties. Prominent in the uprising was the banding together of the inhabitants of such regions: for example, of the honours of Richmond, Cockermouth, Holderness and Percy Fee; the baronies of Kendal, Westmorland, Greystoke and Burgh; the lordships of Kirbyshire, Mashamshire, Penrith, Cartmel and Dent; the liberties of Durham, Beverley, Ripon and Furness. Yet another source of local identity that drew men together was geographical distinctiveness: such as that of 59   For Ringstone Hurst, see Bush, p. 82. For Neals Ing, see ibid., pp. 223–4. For Carling Howe, see ibid., p. 159. For Oxen-le-Fields, see ibid., pp. 146, 149. For Spennymoor, see ibid., p. 150. For Sandford Moor, see ibid., p. 298. For Tarneybank, see ibid, p. 252. For Hook Moor, see ibid., p. 82. For Skipwith Moor, see ibid., p. 83. For Cartlogan Thorns, see ibid., p. 347.

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Marshland or Blackamore, or the Dales, or the Wolds, or the forests of Inglewood, Mallerstang, Stainmore, Bowland and Langstrothdale.60 And, in view of the Pilgrims’ concern for the recent exclusion of the Dacre family from royal office and the government’s evident plans to take possession of the Percy patrimony, the conduct of these two families could influence the attitude of their tenantry towards the uprising: with the presence of Lord Dacre in Naworth castle ensuring the neutrality of his baronies of Burgh and Gilsland, and with Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram Percy’s positive and open support for the uprising encouraging the participation of lordships under Percy rule, such as Percy Fee, Topcliffe, Nafferton, Spofforth and Cockermouth.61 Yet while wapentakes, large lordships, liberties, distinctive terrain and patrimony allowed local communities to rebel together, the basic building block of each rebel force was the manor, village, township or parish: since, for the purpose of manning the Pilgrim host, each of these grassroots communities tended to supply a limited number of soldiers paid for and provisioned by a system of self-imposed local taxation.62 If local identity was so important, how was it possible to mobilise the huge Pilgrim army that assembled outside Doncaster on 26 and 27 October; and how did so many different regions manage to cooperate so readily in one military operation? The answer lies in the overriding hostility of all Pilgrims towards the government. While northern-ness helped to generate this hostility, it played a secondary role to issues of national concern. Nonetheless, a world of difference exists between holding a grudge against the government and opposing it with armed force. The massive military mobilisation that occurred in October 1536 owed a great deal to the pressure brought upon northern communities by circulated letters of indoctrination, by the collapse of local government as gentlemen and clerics fled the scene, and by the roving bands of armed men that the Pilgrims deliberately used to impress support.

60   For Marshland, see Bush, pp. 80–82. For Blackamore, see ibid., p. 194. For Inglewood Forest, see ibid., p. 347. For Mallerstang and Stainmore Forests, see ibid., pp. 312–14. For Bowland Forest, see ibid., p. 254. For Langstrothdale Forest, see ibid., p. 224. 61   For Pilgrim commitment to Houses of Dacre and Percy, see Bush, p. 84. For Dacre neutrality, see ibid., pp. 364–8; S.G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power (Oxford, 1995), pp. 240–42. That the Dacre tenantry were keen to take part, notwithstanding their lord’s non-involvement, is evident in the participation of the inhabitants first of the Dacre barony of Greystoke (Bush, pp. 347–9) and eventually of the Dacre barony of Burgh. The latter happened in the first week of November, immediately after Lord Dacre had removed himself from the area. See ibid., p. 368, and also the newly discovered muster summons (Bodleian MS, James 27, pp. 117–18, printed by Hoyle (see Hoyle, p. 250)), in which ‘B’ stands for Burgh. For engagement of Percy interest, see above, pp. 181–2. 62   See Bush, pp. 104, 117, 178, 407–8.

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Connecting the regions together were rousing letters from Robert Aske, the Friar of Knaresborough and Captain Poverty, with Aske and the Friar stirring the more southerly lowland parts of the north, and Captain Poverty electrifying the far northern uplands.63 Such letters could threaten ‘pain of death’ or the destruction of property to those failing to comply, a threat made real by the presence of armed bands instructed to attack the property and persons of the non-cooperative. Initially, these military cadres were very small groups of armed and mounted men: for instance, the band of 60 led by Acklam and Edwyn, which travelled up the Ouse into the Ainsty raising support by virtue of its military presence; or the band of 20 led by Thomas Maunsell, vicar of Brayton, which enforced support for the uprising in the West Riding wapentakes of Barkston, Osgoldcross, Agbrigg and Strafforth; or the two bands of 300 men, one led by Fawcett and Jacks and operating in the Ribble valley, the other by Aske in the vicinity of Howden; or the troop of Dentdalers led by Gilpin that recruited support in Lancashire Oversands, notably from the Liberty of Furness. Eventually, local communities were intimidated into compliance by large rebel armies as they marched considerable distances to appointed destinations: such as the one formed in Richmondshire which first went up into Durham on a recruitment mission and then divided into two forces, one passing into the West Riding to besiege Skipton Castle and the other marching to join Aske in Pontefract; or the two rebel armies raised in Westmorland, one of which marched up into Cumberland and the other down into North Lancashire, each of them extending the region of revolt by military compulsion.64 A sense of the north, then, undoubtedly existed in the mid-1530s, sustained by the political factors of a warring frontier and the considerable distance that separated the region above the Trent from a government centred in the far south-east, as well as by a defined boundary preserved by ancient political and ecclesiastical practice. Giving recognition to this northern-ness was the language used by the Pilgrims and the government, both of whom had good reason to exploit the concept, the one to announce the extensiveness of the uprising, the other to emphasise the loyalty of the south. However, in essence the pilgrimage of grace was simply an uprising that, as things worked out, managed to recruit its support exclusively from the north. For this reason, a sense of the north cannot be regarded as 63   For Aske’s letters, see ibid., pp. 28–9, 94, 190–91, 197, 225–7. For Friar of Knaresborough’s letters, see ibid., pp. 34–5, 60–61, 198. For Captain Poverty letters, see above, pp. 10–11. 64   For Maunsell’s band, see Bush, p. 94. For Aske’s band, see ibid., pp. 94–5. For Acklam and Edwyn’s band, see ibid., pp. 114–15. For Fawcett and Jack’s band, see ibid., pp. 237–8. For Gilpin’s band, see ibid., pp. 271–2. For the Richmondshire army, see ibid., pp. 149–53. For Westmorland armies, see ibid., pp. 252–4, 299–300.

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an important cause of the uprising. Nor does it readily account for what it achieved. But could it have contributed to its eventual demise? Did a recognition of northern-ness play a part in dissuading the south from taking part? In other words, did anti-northern sentiments cause southerners to remain loyal to the crown? Probably not. The failure of the pilgrimage of grace, it would seem, principally resulted from the ineffectual revolts that broke out in the north after the December agreement and the fissures that they created among its supporters.65 Moreover, the willingness of the Pilgrims to accept first the October Truce and then the December Agreement meant that the strength of anti-northern sentiment in southern parts was never put to the test. At Doncaster, both in October and December, the Pilgrim peace party had its way over Pilgrims advocating an invasion of the south.66 As a result, the originally planned pilgrimage to London did not take place, and, since the Pilgrim host failed to cross the Trent, southerners were not called upon to choose between following a northern lead and remaining true to the king. For this reason, a recognition of northern-ness, although real, could not be said to have played much part in determining the uprising’s fate.

65 66

  See Bush and Bownes, ch. 10.   See Bush, ch. 10.

Chapter Six

Agrarian Conflict The Custom of Tenant Right In 1919 Rachel Reid boldly asserted that the pilgrimage of grace ‘was at bottom just the first of the great agrarian risings that marked the transition out of the Middle Ages in England’. For her it represented a reaction against the ‘steady progress of enclosures’, as well as against the ‘rapid rise of prices, especially rents and fines’, and showed that ‘capitalism was already dividing master from man’. No other historian has awarded agrarian grievances such a central place in the uprising; but others have stressed how decisively they influenced its overall character. Ruth and Madeleine Dodds claimed that ‘in Cumberland and Westmorland the rising was almost entirely directed against enclosures and unpopular landlords’, adding: ‘In the Yorkshire dales, as in Cumberland and Westmorland, the movement was chiefly social and was directed against the earl of Cumberland.’ The Dodds contrasted these upland regions of revolt, where the complaint rested principally upon an antipathy to landlords, with the lowland regions of revolt, located in south Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, where the complaint was exclusively against the government. This overview of the pilgrimage of grace is reflected in R.W. Hoyle’s opinion that the October uprisings essentially comprised two revolts: one with ‘no sign of an agrarian agitation’ and confined to Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire; the other driven by ‘agrarian discontents, with tenures, fines and tithes’ and located in the northern uplands. Unlike the Dodds, however, he sought to explain the Pilgrims’ hostility to the earl of Cumberland as provoked not by harsh landlordship but by his loyalty to the government. Nonetheless, in spite of attributing so much importance to agrarian complaints, none of these accounts provides a careful examination of their real nature. Scott M. Harrison’s The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties attempted to redress this omission, but his study was necessarily confined to Westmorland and Cumberland. Moreover, while usefully mapping out the range of grievance by means of a substantial analysis of the objection to entry fines, tithes, enclosures, noutgeld and sergeant corn, it has serious 

  R.R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North (London, 1921), pp. 124, 126.   Dodds, vol. I, p. 192.    Hoyle, p. 424. For his view of Cumberland, see his article ‘The first earl of Cumberland: a reputation reassessed’, Northern History, 22 (1986): 87–91. 

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shortcomings, with regard to his interpretation of tenant right and the reasons he offered for the contentiousness of tithes and enclosures. Agrarian grievances featured in at least six of the Pilgrims’ December articles. They were explicitly made in article 9 and 13, the former focusing upon tenant right, the latter requiring a proper enforcement of the laws against enclosure. In addition, agrarian grievances can be inferred in article 4 which objected to the dissolution of religious houses; in article 10 which called for the removal of a statutory ban on the use of crossbows and handguns; in article 23 which demanded for northerners the right to appear in York rather than at Westminster when summoned by writ of subpoena; and in article 24 which complained of corrupt escheators. The suppression of religious houses raised an agrarian complaint in arousing the fear of the monastic tenantry that they might suffer materially from the transference of land to lay ownership. The demand for the repeal of recent legislation restricting the use of handguns and crossbows associated itself with the hunting of deer in stating that men should have free use of such weapons except ‘in the king’s forests or parks for the killing of his grace’s deer red and fallow’. In all likelihood, it partly related to agrarian problems caused by seigneurial hunting rights and the damage done by free-ranging deer. The demand that northerners should, when subpoenaed, have the right to appear at York rather than Westminster was undoubtedly connected with litigation in the courts of equity between lords and tenants over manorial customs relating to tenure and commoning, and was inspired by recently attempted, but lapsed, reforms to allow poor men’s suits from the north a trial closer to home, on the grounds that in disputes before the equity courts of chancery, star chamber and requests settlement in London was likely to favour the landlord. And finally, the complaint against corrupt escheators seemed partly to express the apprehension of peasant freeholders that their socage land was in danger of conversion to the less advantageous military tenure of cornage.

  Harrison, The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, 1536–1537 (London, 1981), pp. 47ff. In this study entry fines and gressums are regarded as synonymous. Within the manorial terminology they are placed in the category of dues as opposed to rents.    L.P. XI. 1246 (1). For the complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 16.    See below, pp. 193–4. 

  See above, pp. 156–7.   See above, pp. 152–3.    See below, pp. 219–20. Equivalent to the fear of the gentlemen that land held in socage would become registered as fiefs and so become subject to heavier demands, especially because of the government’s policy of fiscal feudalism, was a peasant fear that the land they held in socage would become registered as cornage tenures and therefore more open to exploitation. Relating fiefs and cornage was the fact that both were military tenures. 

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Yet, in spite of attempting to provide a comprehensive and detailed listing of the Pilgrims’ grievances, the December petition fell far short of this aim in accounting for the scope and nature of the agrarian complaint. In the first place, the regions affected by agrarian issues were much more extensive than the petition specified. Besides Westmorland, Cumberland, the Liberty of Furness in Lancashire Oversands, the West Riding lordships of Dent and Kirkby Malzeard with Nidderdale – all cited in article 9 – agrarian issues moved the rebels of Northumberland, the county palatinate of Durham, the North Riding generally, Craven in the West Riding and, if William Stapulton’s comments about gressums and enclosures applied to the uprising that he himself led, parts of the East Riding.10 In the second place, the agrarian grievances held by the rebels were much more wide-ranging than those specified in the December petition. This became clear in early 1537 when the commons of the northern uplands held a council in Richmond to consider grievances omitted from the December petition, notably the complaint against tithes.11 In the third place, the complaint against gressums and enclosures, as it is made in the December petition, misrepresented what the commons wanted, having been given at the drafting stage a subtle twist to favour the landlord interest.12 The Pilgrims’ agrarian complaint had several distinctive features. First, gressums were the foremost concern: that is, the due each customary tenure had to pay on change of tenant or lord. Secondly, the regions where agrarian grievances were most prominent enjoyed the custom of border service tenant right: a custom resting on the tenant’s obligation to provide the crown with unpaid military service when summoned by the wardens of the marches to resist reivers and invading Scots.13 For this reason the agrarian complaint could be framed in terms of a threat to national security on the grounds that exorbitant gressums and enclosing were weakening the frontier against Scotland by reducing the capacity of the tenantry in the far north to fulfil their military obligations. It was the one Pilgrim grievance with which the government could readily concur.14 The third distinctive feature of the Pilgrims’ agrarian complaint lay with the remedies that they sought. Under cover of a defence of custom, their strategy was to counter innovation with innovation. Thus whereas the rebels’ stand on political and religious issues was staunchly conservative, their solution to much of the agrarian problem was to demand something 10

  Stapleton, p. 82.   Bush and Bownes, pp. 105–8. 12   See above, pp. 32 and 36. 13   M.L. Bush, ‘Tenant right under the Tudors: a revision revised’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 77 (1995): 161–88. 11

14

  See below, pp. 206–7.

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new: notably that tenant right should apply to all customary tenures and that the custom of tenant right, with gressums fixed rather than revisable, should receive parliamentary sanction, a change which would have placed the relationship between lord and tenant very much in the latter’s favour, as well as awarding customary tenures the protection of common law. Likewise, with the noutgeld payments of cornage tenure, the demand was for abolition rather than to respect tradition, and with tithes the demand was to outlaw payments in kind and to insist upon a fixed money payment. Moreover, although the right of trial at York in equity matters related to recent practice, its formulation in the December petition lay claim to a new regional privilege. At the heart of the agrarian problem that the Pilgrims raised and the solutions that they proposed was the recent emergence of tenant right. Like copyhold, tenant right originated as a servile tenure and, as such, remained, in the law, a tenancy-at-will. However, by the early sixteenth century it was held in practice, and thanks to custom, by hereditary right, on condition that the tenant paid the required rents and dues and performed the required services. The rights appertaining to the tenure, as with copyhold, had emerged in the late middle ages, following a catastrophic contraction of the population caused by plague. Thanks to consequent competition between lords to retain or attract tenants, personal and tenurial servitude faded away. The rights thus obtained were confirmed and extended in association with developments in the obligation of military service on the frontier against Scotland, the result of certain changes made by Henry VII to its defence and policing, especially his termination of the late medieval practice of placing large sums of public money at the lord warden of the marches’ disposal and his decision to keep the wardenship within the royal family rather than to grant the office to a border magnate.15 To make this system work, it was important that the crown had the ability to summon northerners to provide its deputy wardens with military support. Already, through the ancient obligation of cornage, the crown could call upon certain freeholders to provide military service for the defence of the border in the form of endemot (service specifically in the border defences) and utware (attendance of military expeditions into Scotland).16 It seems as if, consonant with the development of tenant right, this obligation was extended to customary tenures in the border shires, the North Riding, 15

  Bush, ‘Tenant right’: 162–7.   J.E.A. Jolliffe, ‘Northumbrian institutions’, E.H.R., 41 (1926): 29–30; C.M.L. Bouch and G.P. Jones, An Economic and Social History of the Lake Counties, 1500–1830 (Manchester, 1961), pp. 11–12; T.H.B. Graham, ‘Cornage and drengage’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, new series, 28 (1928): 86. 16

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North Lancashire and the far northern tip of the West Riding which, in compensation for accepting this additional obligation, gained – although in the law remaining as no more than tenements-at-will – recognition as estates of inheritance with an expectation, based upon the concept of reasonableness, of receiving lenient treatment from the landlords. The military service associated with tenant right required men to serve the lord warden with horse and harness at the tenant’s own charge for the purpose not of manning an army royal for the invasion of Scotland but of policing and defending the frontier. In this manner warden service by tenant right evolved. It was by no means an ancient custom and hardly evident in the fifteenth century, but, having emerged by the time of Henry VIII’s accession in 1509, it was widely established in the upland north by the early 1530s.17 Judged by article 9 in the December petition, it was this development that the Pilgrim commons wished to confirm, define and extend. The agrarian problem arose from the handicap suffered by lords of the manor who, constrained in their estate management by custom, found themselves challenged by a high rate of inflation from which they could not directly benefit since they had largely withdrawn from commercial farming to become solely rentiers. Population growth, on the other hand, awarded them the opportunity to abandon a system of manorial management which, driven by a paucity of tenants, had conceded rights to deter them from migrating to the estates of other lords, which included rents and dues fixed by custom. With a growing abundance of would-be tenants, lords now had the chance to raise landed revenues. This they might do by claiming that the dues owed by customary tenures were not fixed but arbitrarily revisable, a policy fraught with conflict. Another device was not to offend custom but to get round it by expanding the demesne – once directly farmed by the lord and now leased out – at the expense of the parts of the manor recognised as waste or allocated to freehold and customary tenures. In this manner lords were able to increase the number of tenements that were beyond the restraint of custom and therefore rack-rentable. Demesne expansion was achieved by a process of conversion or a process of extension, the former realised by turning customary tenures into leaseholds, the latter realised by intaking portions of the waste to create new farmsteads and rented pastures. Unless carried out with tenant consent, such estate improvements could provoke agrarian conflicts, in the form of suits brought before the equity courts and, notably in 1535, of local riots.18 Another source of concern for the northern tenantry was a very recent event, the dissolution of the lesser monasteries in 1536 coupled with the 17

  Bush, ‘Tenant right’: 167, 186.   For 1535 disturbances, see below, pp. 209–10.

18

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fear that the monastic system as a whole was about to be suppressed. This generated social as well as religious alarm simply because of the enormous amount of land owned by the monasteries in the north and because of the impact their suppression was likely to have upon the customary rights of the tenantry. Because of the way in which tenant right had developed, the gressums payable to ecclesiastical and lay landlords differed from each other, with ecclesiastical estates tending to exact a gressum (termed a ‘dropping fine’) only upon change of tenant whereas lay estates exacted a gressum (termed a ‘general fine’ because it simultaneously fell on all customary tenants) on change of lord as well. A particular concern at the time of the pilgrimage of grace was the prospect of becoming subjected to general as well as dropping fines, as monastic estates passed into lay ownership.19 The concerns of the northern tenantry also stemmed from recent changes in estate management for which the largest landowners in the north, the Percy and Clifford families, were responsible. In the 1520s the Percies had applied the custom of Cockermouth to their estates in the East Riding.20 This had sinister implications. In Cumberland it represented a typically lenient system of tenant right, the lord possessing the right to receive general and dropping fines but with the exactable amounts limited by a concept of reason dependent upon the unpaid border services the crown required of the tenantry. In the East Riding, however, this constraint did not apply because the tenantry were too distant from the northern frontier to provide military service on the warden’s summons, thus giving the landlord a freer hand to increase the level at which gressums were charged, as well as increasing the frequency with which gressums could be exacted, thanks to the introduction of the general fine. The concern this caused, however, was defused during the course of the uprising when, to please his tenants and to restore their love, the sixth earl of Northumberland granted his tenantry in Yorkshire and Northumberland a 21-year demission allowing them, in return for the payment of one gressum, 21 years of freedom from any other, whether it be a dropping or a general fine.21 As for the Clifford family they caused concern among their 19

  For absence of general fines on monastic estates, see Bush, ‘Tenant right’: 168–70.   J.M.W. Bean, The Estates of the Percy Family, 1416–1537 (Oxford, 1958), p. 63; Anthony Knowles, ‘Customary Tenure on the Northern Estates of the Percy Earls of Northumberland during the Sixteenth Century’ (Manchester M.A. thesis, 1983), p. 55; The National Archives, E164/37, fos 249b and 260b. 21   The matter was reported upon by the surveyor Robert Southwell in August 1537 following the sixth earl’s death. See The National Archives, SP1/124, f. 67b [L.P. XII(2). 548 (1)]. In December 1536, the sixth earl referred in a letter to Cromwell to ‘what love I have among my own tenants since my repair into the country [since early October] as well in Yorkshire as in Northumberland’. See SP1/113, f. 28 [L.P. XI. 1368]. 20

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tenantry by making, as in Westmorland, arbitrary enclosures of the waste, the purpose of which was to create new tenancies and leased pastures, and also by introducing to their West Riding estates the life warrant. This form of tenure converted costumary tenants into holders of a lease held for the joint lives of lord and tenant which expired on the death of either but was renewable in both cases upon the payment of a gressum. The tenants were therefore obliged to pay a general as well as a dropping fine, again without the restraining consideration of border service. In this case the concerns of the tenantry underwent no defusion, and during the course of the uprising the family not only was besieged in Skipton Castle but also suffered attacks upon their new enclosures, the killing of their deer and the destruction of their estate records.22 A third great northern landowner whom the Pilgrim commons regarded as setting an evil example was the bishopric of Durham which had been making commercial improvements to its Palatinate estates by unilaterally converting customary tenures into leaseholds, thereby rendering the rents revisable rather than fixed by custom. In response, following the flight of Cuthbert Tunstall, the current bishop, to Norham Castle, the commons attacked the palace at Bishop Auckland, destroying the estate records stored there.23 Manorial Rents and Dues Between November 1536 and February 1537 non-payment of rents and dues was reported in much of the north.24 There were various reasons for it: in some cases to bring pressure upon gentlemen to support the Pilgrim cause; in others, to punish gentlemen for failing to join the rebellion. In the uplands, however, it represented a protest against recent changes in estate management. Three types of rent were found objectionable. One was the annual money rent, or rent of assize, as paid by customary tenants. Regarded as ‘old’ and ‘certain’ – that is, fixed for ever more by custom – any increase without their consent was taken by tenants as an infringement of manorial 22   For life warrants, see R.T. Spence, ‘The Estates of the Clifford Earls of Cumberland’ (London Ph.D. thesis, 1957), pp. 114–15. For first earl’s reputation as a harsh landlord at the time of the uprising and the hostility it caused in West Riding, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 159–74 and Bush, pp. 154 and 156. For the hostility he faced in Westmorland, see Bush, pp. 310–15. For the destruction of Clifford estate records, see L.P. XI. 927. 23   Michael Bush, Durham and the Pilgrimage of Grace (Durham, 2000), pp. 6, 31–2. For destruction of records, see SP1/124, f. 59 [L.P. XII(2). 536]. 24   For example, L.P. XI. 1038, 1059, 1232, 1253, 1293, 1294; L.P. XII(1). 39, 98, 154, 218, 362; A.G. Dickens (ed.), Clifford Letters of the Sixteenth Century, Surtees Society, 172 (1962), pp. 77–8.

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law. In response to complaints made by the Pilgrim commons in Lonsdale, Cromwell ordered that ‘only accustomed ordinary rents’ should be exacted; and two rebel bills from the north-west objected to the ‘heightening’ and ‘improvement’ of rents.25 Another objectionable payment was the ‘old’ customary rent in kind, because of the enhancement in value it naturally underwent in periods of dearth. Thus, at this time of scarcity – the result of poor harvests and the demand for fodder created by the mobilisation of armies – the rebels in Cumberland demanded its conversion into a money rent, the sum to be determined by the tenant.26 Otherwise, the objection was to ‘new rents’ – that is, rents paid for leaseholds on the lord’s demesne – which differed from ‘old rents’ in being revisable. The nature of the ‘new rents’ complaint was revealed by the duke of Norfolk when he attributed rebellion in the north-west to ‘increasing of lords’ rents by enclosing’.27 Robert Southwell, a surveyor of crown lands in 1537, also threw light on the same complaint when reporting on the forfeited estates of Furness Abbey. He cited the case of the 72 tall fellows – that is, men suitable for border service – who had leased Beaumont Grange from the abbey and now feared, following its transfer to the crown, either eviction or a rent ‘so increased as the poor men shall very hardly live thereon’.28 The Pilgrim leader for the Beverley area, William Stapulton, made the same point. In listing the causes of revolt, he mentioned ‘raising of farms’ (that is, the increase in leasehold rents) as well as ‘sore-taking of gressums’ and ‘intakes of the common’.29 Yet increases in rent were only part of the agrarian problem. This was because of the structural complexity of the manor, thanks to its tripartite separation of demesne, tenures and waste, and the distinction made between the rights of customary tenants and the privileges enjoyed by the lord of the manor, the former upheld by manorial custom, the latter, by common law. Since on the tenures – as opposed to the demesne and the portions of waste added to it by intaking – rents tended, as we have seen, to be fixed by custom, lords became increasingly reliant upon revenue drawn from manorial dues in order to secure a worthwhile return from them. This was because, in contrast to the ordinary rent, dues were often regarded as ‘arbitrary’ (that is, within the lord’s right to alter).30 Moreover, it was in the lord’s profitable interest to curtail the customary tenants’ 25   For Cromwell, see L.P. XII(1). 881. For rebel bills, see L.P. XII(1). 163 (2) and below, Appendix, doc. 18e; Denton, pp. 479–80. 26   SP1/117, f. 46 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (1)]. 27   L.P. XII(1). 478. 28   T.A. Beck, Annales Furnesienses (London, 1844), p. 359 [L.P. XII(2). 205]. 29   Stapleton, p. 82. 30   Bush, ‘Tenant right’: 182.

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right of free commoning on the waste by using enclosures to create areas of rented pasture. Essentially the agrarian frictions of the time stemmed not so much from rent increases as from the prevalence of fixed customary rents and the consequent need of lords to adopt other devices for enlarging their landed income, the more so since newly created holdings, initially founded as leaseholds on demesne or intaken waste and therefore with revisable rents, tended to undergo conversion, in the course of time, to customary holdings on fixed rents.31 In the long run, lords would completely transform their estates by freeing them of the complexities of the manorial system, turning them instead into simple compositions of leasehold farms and pastures on revisable rents and untrammelled by rights of common. This they eventually achieved by incorporating within the demesne all the former tenures and the waste. However, at this time in the upland north they looked for a less radical solution. In search of compensation for the fixed rent on the tenures, lords resorted to increasing gressums and establishing intakes on the waste. Consequently, gressums and enclosures became major sources of tenant complaint. In protection, tenants demanded limits on gressums, especially to make them fixed, and stoutly resisted attempts to enclose the waste. To strengthen their case, tenants, predominantly in the midlands and south, sought to convert tenures-at-will into copyholds, their rights and obligations set out in writing and copied in the records of the manor court. Thanks to the frontier against Scotland and the customs appertaining to its defence, the solution for tenants in the north was to claim tenant right. In this case, what the landlord could reasonably demand of his customary tenants had to take into account what these tenants owed the crown in unpaid border service. The point was graphically made in a letter composed by the Westmorland commons and dispatched to Robert Aske during the course of the pilgrimage of grace, which stated their readiness to serve under his command and expressed their complaint as concerning ‘tenants and tenant rights and gressums to be laid down’ since ‘by reason whereof we are not able to do the king service’.32 Supporters of the pilgrimage of grace complained of gressums in petitions and bills. As we have seen, article 9 of the December petition proposed that all customary land in certain specified regions should be held by tenant right, paying ‘on every change’ no more than ‘two years’ rent for gressum’: in other words, in return for the obligation to provide border 31   R.W. Hoyle, ‘An ancient and laudable custom: the definition and development of tenant right in north-western England in the sixteenth century’, Past and Present, 116 (1987): 27, 34–5, 37. For a critical examination of the connexion between leasehold and tenant right, see Bush, ‘Tenant right’: 171–4. 32   Denton, p. 478.

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service, the tenantry ought to be permitted to pay a gressum amounting to no more than twice the annual rent, whenever a change of lord or tenant occurred.33 Radically, the article closed by proposing that tenant right, as defined in the article, should be sanctioned by parliamentary statute. What the commons basically wanted, in the words of the rebel leader William Stapulton, was remedy for the ‘sore taking of gressums or incomes’;34 and this was something article 9 of the December petition went a long way towards granting. But, given the variety of manorial customs, the specific requirement inevitably differed from manor to manor and therefore could not be satisfactorily expressed within the scope of one brief article. Some tenants, it would seem, wanted no gressums at all, while others insisted upon no more than dropping fines: that is, the abolition of the gressum that fell due upon a change of lord. Some tenants wanted gressums fixed at one year’s rent rather than the two proposed in the article, while others were prepared to accept arbitrary gressums if the increases determined by the lord abided by a concept of reasonableness based upon their obligation of border service.35 The demand for the abolition of the gressum proposed that tenants should either pay rent only or replace the gressum with a God’s penny: that is, no more than one penny. A radical demand along the former lines was made by the Richmondshire rebels. It came to be incorporated in the Captain Poverty letter that in late October 1536 was dispatched northwards into Durham and Northumberland and westwards into Westmorland and Cumberland. The text of the letter has failed to survive, but its content can be pieced together from the comments of recipients. The Percy family, which received a copy in Alnwick, implied that it was critical of gressums, while Barnard Townley, who came across a copy in Cumberland, reckoned that it required ‘no man shall have paid any ingressums to his landlord and [only] a small rent for his tenement’.36 By January 1537 a manifesto and a set of articles were circulating in the north. Both were opposed to gressums, the manifesto requiring the payment of a God’s penny instead

33   The article (see below, Appendix, doc. 16) actually states that ‘the lands’ in specified areas ‘may be by tenant right’. Did this mean ‘all land’ held by tenants in those areas? In all likelihood not, since it would be obliterating the distinction between the parts of the manor regarded as demesne and the parts regarded as freehold or customary tenures. Moreover, it would be absurd to think that the Pilgrims were calling for the conversion of freehold to tenant-right tenure. It would therefore seem that what article 9 was calling for was the application of the custom of tenant right to all recognised customary tenures. 34   Stapleton, p. 82. 35   For the variety of rebel demands as to tenant right, see immediately below. 36   See M.L. Bush, ‘Captain Poverty and the pilgrimage of grace’, Historical Research, 156 (1992): 18–19.

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of a gressum; the articles requiring tenants to pay just the rent.37 Thus, the manifesto exhorted the commons to ‘stick ye together’ and ‘claim ye old customs and tenant right to take your farms by a God’s penny, all gressums and heightenings to be laid down’. With this achieved, it promised that then ‘may we serve our sovereign lord king Henry VIII … with horse and harness as custom will demand’ and proposed that, untroubled by a discontented tenantry, lords would be free to go on a pilgrimage ‘to maintain the faith of holy church’. In other words, to enable the tenantry, in accordance with their tenurial obligations, to serve the king with armed horsemen for the defence of the northern border, and also to give the lords a free hand to protect the old religion, a particular and very lenient form of tenant right was required – one that banned gressums and rent increases and permitted a right of inheritance on payment of a God’s penny. In addition, the manifesto instructed the commons on how to impose this system of tenant right: having set out the custom in writing, ‘everyone [was] to take his landlord’ and ‘command [him] to apply to it his seal’. This procedure had already been employed the previous October in Westmorland and Cumberland, the commons obliging lords to swear their support for the rebellion and to seal their approval of written declarations appertaining to tenant right. And reference was made to it in article 9 of the December petition.38 The manifesto made reference to ‘Kendal land’; but this did not mean it was necessarily a Kendal composition. In the barony of Kendal, and the same was true of the barony of Westmorland, the arbitrary gressum was well established by this time.39 If they were proposing its replacement with a God’s penny, the commons of the two baronies would not have been upholding their own custom but adopting one from another region. Bearing in mind the commons’ need to defend custom, the manifesto, in all likelihood, originated in a region where the custom of tenant right bore some resemblance to what it was proposing. One possible provenance was the parts of Wensleydale and Swaledale which enjoyed, thanks to the custom of the Honours of Middleham and Richmond, the right to pay the God’s penny instead of a gressum. But a more likely provenance was the adjacent West Riding wapentake of Ewcross where a similar custom was found, notably in Dentdale and upper Lonsdale.40 After all, it was rebels

37   For manifesto, see L.P. XII(1). 163 (2). For articles, see L.P. XII(1). 163 (1). For the text, see below, Appendix, docs 18b and 18e. 38   For Westmorland, see L.P. XII(1). 687 (2), p. 304; L.P. XII(1). 914, p. 415. For Cumberland, see Denton, pp. 128–9. For the December petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 16, article 9. 39   Bush, ‘Captain Poverty’: 23, 25. 40   See Bush, ‘Tenant right’: 170–71; Hoyle, ‘Ancient and laudable custom’: 32–3.

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from these parts who initially pressured the men of Kendal to rebel and whom the Kendalers joined on the march to Lancaster.41 Also circulating in the north in January 1537 was a list of articles, a copy of which was picked up by Sir Thomas Curwen in Richmond, although it appeared to originate in Bilsdale on the Yorkshire Moors.42 Another copy surfaced in Cleveland. According to Curwen the articles were attached to a bill. The articles were much more extreme than the manifesto, urging the commons to execute lords who refused the oath to abide by their terms, among which was the requirement that lords should ‘take nothing of their tenants but only their rents’. Further light is thrown on the articles by Sir John Bulmer of Cleveland.43 A copy was delivered to him in Wilton castle by a certain Priestman who claimed to have come on the commons’ behalf to find out if the articles were to Bulmer’s liking. Bulmer took the articles to mean that ‘men should pay no gressums’ and that ‘they should ever have with them the old lord or the new’. Normally, as we have seen, the custom of tenant right required an acknowledgment of admission, in the form of a gressum or a God’s penny, upon each change of lord or tenant. The payment underlined the fact that tenant-right tenures were legally tenancies-at-will and that, for tenants to continue in possession, they required the lord’s personal consent, which his acceptance of the gressum or God’s penny automatically granted.44 If Bulmer’s account of the bill is correct, it suggests that a movement was afoot in late 1536 and early 1537 to confirm the hereditary status of tenures held by tenant right. In view of the heavy reliance of manorial lords upon gressums to compensate for the fixed rent, the agrarian demands made in the Captain Poverty letter of October 1536 and in the manifesto and articles of 1537 asked a great deal of them; as was made evident in the dire interpretations placed upon these demands by clerics and gentlemen. For example, Barnard Townley in Cumberland thought the purpose of the agrarian demands made in the Captain Poverty letter was, by depriving lords of a financial means of existence, to bring ‘all to common’.45 James Braithwait of Windermere thought that the aim of the Richmond council of February 1537 – summoned to produce a more adequate statement of agrarian grievances than those in the December petition – was to establish ‘a commonwealth’: that is, to end the society of orders.46 Bulmer in Cleveland 41

  Bush and Bownes, pp. 245–6.   SP1/114, f. 201 [L.P. XII(1). 163 (1)]; L.P. XII(1). 185. For place of origin, see Bush and Bownes, p. 101. For complete text, see below, Appendix, doc. 18b. 43   SP1/119, f. 63b [L.P. XII(1). 1083]. 44   Bush, ‘Tenant right’: 168–9. 45   SP1/117, f. 46 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (1)]. 46   SP1/118, fos 213–213b [L.P. XII(1). 965]. 42

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suggested, on the evidence of the Bilsdale bill, that the commons were bent on excluding gentlemen from living in those parts.47 There is no reason to believe that these fears were justified. In fact, it is possible that the objection to paying gressums, as it was made in early 1537, was in reaction to the way tenant right was defined in article 9 of the December petition, perhaps to prevent it from gaining acceptance as the standard form. Thus, provoked by the December petition which had proposed that gressums should fall due upon every change of lord or tenant, the agrarian complaint of January 1537 demanded a system of payment confined to rent, with the possible exception of a God’s penny due at every change of tenant. Not surprisingly, the initiative for this reform came from regions where the payment of gressums was ruled out by the custom of tenant right. In contrast to the agrarian demands of January 1537, those made in October 1536, notably in Westmorland and Cumberland, accepted the payment of gressums on condition that they were subjected to some restriction. As we have seen, tenant right was so central to the rebellion in the Barony of Kendal that its oath obliged the sworn to be true not only to God and the king but also to the ‘ancient laudable customs’ of the barony; and William Collyns, bailiff of Kendal, was led to declare in the opening stages of revolt: ‘if we may enjoy our old ancient customs here we have no cause to rise’. That the reference was to tenant right and that the principal concern related to gressums was clearly indicated in the rebels’ dealings with Sir James Layburne, deputy steward of the barony and owner of two manors situated near the town of Kendal. Before and during the uprising the people of the barony petitioned Layburne ‘to be good unto them for their ancient customs’. This was to be done by exacting gressums deemed to be reasonable. To make the point, they quoted to Layburne an instance of the unreasonable: a gressum of £2. 13s. 4d. (four marks) increased to £40. Such an increase, they argued, could not be justified on grounds of reason ‘seeing they were bound there to the marches without wages upon the warden’s proclamation, beacon or letter’.48 The commons of Kendal, then, were not only accepting gressums but also permitting lords the right to raise them, so long as the increases were not extreme. Clearly, an enormous difference in the latitude commons were prepared to allow lords separated the demands presented to Layburne from the demands made in 1537. The same could be said of the December petition which, in demanding gressums to be fixed, was calling for much more than what the Kendalers had actually required.

47 48

  L.P. XII(1). 1083.   SP1/118, fos 138b–39 [L.P. XII(1). 914 (2)].

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In contrast, the commons of the Barony of Westmorland, like most of the other tenant-right regions, wanted much more than the December petition had to offer. In keeping with the custom of the country, they were prepared to pay gressums but not in the customary form. The prevalent custom, both in Westmorland and Cumberland, was the one cited by the Kendalers: a revisable gressum that had to be reasonable, bearing in mind the customary tenants’ obligation to provide free military service on the northern border.49 Whereas the Kendalers simply called for the preservation of this custom, the Westmorlanders demanded a basic alteration, with the revisable fine converted into a fine certain. The commons of the Barony of Westmorland first set out their agrarian concerns in a reply to a letter from Aske enquiring after the whereabouts of Lord Clifford and Lord Dacre and declaring a wish to know their grievances and plans. Agrarian grievances figure prominently in this reply, which was addressed from Robert Pulleyn and Nicholas Musgrave, their captains, ‘by the consent of the commonalty of Westmorland’ and was written in late October and delivered on 28 October.50 Apart from responding to points made by Aske, it mainly consisted of demands for ending gressums, for stopping new intakes, for abolishing cornage payments and for allowing tithe-payers to have the right voluntarily to decide on how much to give. Their concern, it stated, was the ‘great disprofit’ that these exactions imposed upon tenants and tenant right. Following the truce of 27 October, the commons of the Barony of Westmorland established a council at Appleby, directed by Pulleyn and Musgrave, aided by 24 quests, and attended by the village constables and ‘such commons as they commanded’. Excluded were gentlemen ‘because we be afraid of them as yet’. After many meetings in early November, the council made ‘new laws concerning their gressums’. Set out in a petition addressed to the Pilgrim leader Lord Darcy, they elaborated upon the reforms proposed in the earlier letter. In doing so, they indicated that gressums were not to be entirely abolished, but that ‘the gressums for poor men to be laid apart but only penny farm, penny gressum’.51 There is no good reason to believe that, as it is used here, the term ‘poor men’ denoted any other than the commons; and the phrase ‘penny farm, penny gressum’ simply meant that each gressum should not exceed one year’s rent. What they required, then, was a gressum fixed in amount for ever more – a consequence of the fact that the rent, which it was intended to equal, was regarded as 49

  See Bush, pp. 309–11(for barony of Westmorland); pp. 337–8 (for Cumberland).   Denton, p. 478. The content indicates that it could not have been written on the given date of 15 October. In all likelihood, it was written ten days later. 51   SP1/117, fos 54–54b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. For text of petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 15. For Pulleyn’s associations with Aske, see Bush, pp. 300–303. 50

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unrevisable. The demands made in this petition from the commons of the Barony of Westmorland were undoubtedly influential in determining the content of article 9 in the December petition, even though the latter doubled the required gressum, thus justifying the Westmorlander’s fear of the tricks gentlemen would play on them if admitted to their deliberations. Robert Pulleyn went on three occasions to consult with Aske, once in Pontefract a day after the October appointment, once, with Musgrave and six others, to attend the Pilgrims’ York council in November, and once to attend the Pilgrims’ Pontefract assembly in December. He left with him the October letter and the November petition in which the agrarian complaint of the Westmorland commons and their proposed remedy were set out. According to Robert Thompson, who served on the Westmorland deputation, Aske ‘allowed the most part’ of their agrarian grievances.52 The Cumberland commons also produced a statement of agrarian grievance, incorporating a declaration of custom which they expected lords to endorse with their seal.53 Rather than dispatching it to the Pilgrim high command, they simply added this statement to the back of a proclamation which, in the very early stages of revolt, was used to urge people to support their defence of the faith and commonwealth. The proclamation presented the commonwealth as under threat from local causes, notably the raiding opportunities the poorly defended border offered to marauding Scots and reivers. The statement on the back elaborated on this point, nailing the blame on ‘our landlords … and not our prince nor our king’ and accusing them of ‘unlawful courses’ such as the ‘taking of gressums’, ‘improvements of rents’ and the ‘pulling out [of] poor men from their tenant rights’. Throwing light on these agrarian complaints were two reports on the region, the one by the duke of Norfolk, the other by Robert Southwell, both made after the two men had visited the county early in 1537.54 The reports show how the border defences on the West March had been weakened by landlord greed and its corrosive effect on the system of tenant right. Norfolk stressed the damage done by ‘gressing’. He also revealed how lords were establishing additional farms on the waste, by means of enclosure, charging a level of rent well above that exacted of the customary tenures. Southwell made a similar diagnosis. His specific term of reference was the Honour of Cockermouth, which had just passed into the king’s hands upon the earl of Northumberland’s death. In fact, his remit was to survey this honour in order to levy the general fine due to the king as its new lord. In setting out the tenantry’s obligations he revealed 52

  SP1/117, f. 54b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)].   Denton, pp. 479–80. 54   For Norfolk’s report, see L.P. XII(1). 478. For Southwell’s report, see L.P. XII(2). 548. 53

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how, besides the annual rent, they had to pay gressums that fell due upon every change of lord and tenant as well as serve the king ‘at their own charge’ with horse and harness when the warden of the marches issued his summons to arms. In setting out the obligations of manorial lords, Southwell ordered them not to exact gressums too frequently or to raise them excessively: in other words, a concept of reasonableness should rule which, bearing in mind the tenant’s military service, called for leniency. According to Southwell, the value of the gressum had to be determined not just by the lord but with the consent of the tenants – making it revisable but not arbitrary – and had to be closely related in amount to the annual rent. Undermining the tenant-right system in the honour, he reckoned, was the frequency with which general fines were imposed, the result of conveyances of land by sale or gift, and the inclination of ‘the more part’ of the landlords to exact high gressums, often in return for concealing the fact that the tenant owed the king a military service. It also seemed that tenants were being evicted from their holdings to allow gressums to be exacted of the new occupant. The statement on the back of the Cumberland proclamation condemned this practice as unlawful since it involved evictions from tenant-right tenements ‘without any forfeiture making’: in other words, without adopting the proper procedure for eviction which, the statement explained, required ‘twelve men [to] find [the person to be evicted] not lawful to remain there’. To defend the system of tenant right, the recommended remedy in Cumberland, as in Westmorland, was to oblige lords to take the rebel oath and to seal a ‘bill indented’ binding them not to commit ‘unlawful’ acts, specifically against ‘the faith of Christ’, ‘the church profit’ and the customs associated with tenant right; ending with the order reminiscent of the Bilsdale bill ‘to see you that he suffer death at that present time’ in the event of any ‘lord that denieth the lawful oath’. And, moved by such a strong animus against landlords, the Cumberland rebels, in a manner reminiscent of the Westmorland commons’ unwillingness to admit gentlemen to their council, ‘would have no gentlemen to be their captains’.55 In addition, the commons of Cumberland followed the Westmorland practice of holding a council to provide remedy. The one surviving document on this practice relates to the north-westerly parts of Cumberland: specifically the lordship of Holm Cultram and the baronies of Wigton with the Forest of Westward, Burgh and Dalston. Since this council included Burgh, which did not join the uprising until the first week of November, it must have sat between then and the meeting of the Pilgrims’ York council on 21 November. Its membership

55   For Bilsdale bill, see below, Appendix, doc. 18b. For Cumberland/Westmorland, see Denton, pp. 479–80; The National Archives, E36/119, f. 81 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (4)].

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was composed of questmen elected by the commons.56 The regulations it produced did not simply restate custom but revised it in order to enhance the benefits of tenant right. Although the commons of Cumberland had required lords not to act against ‘the church profit’, this council did just that, laying down that clerical landowners – specifically bishop, abbot, prior, parson and vicar – or their lessees should have no right to demand gressums but could only exact a God’s penny upon the tenant’s entry to the holding, which, when paid, automatically acknowledged his tenant right. For customary land owned by temporal men – and this specifically included peers, knights, esquires, gentlemen and freeholders – the exaction of gressums was permitted but should not exceed one year’s rent and should only happen once during the tenant’s lifetime. In other words, general fines were ruled out: presumably to prevent lords from contriving alienations for the purpose of increasing the frequency of their exaction. In addition, the quests ordered that no landowner could deprive any man of his tenant right. They also outlawed compulsory labour services on the grounds that tenants fulfilled labour services not out of duty but out of ‘benevolence and for love and favour’ – that is, not as an obligation but as a gift – proposing that in future none should be ‘paid’ within the county of Cumberland. Like the commons of the Barony of Westmorland, the Cumberland commons sought to reshape the custom of tenant right partly to stop lords from exploiting it, partly to maximise their own proprietorial rights. And like the commons of the Barony of Westmorland, they must have found the representation of tenant right in the December petition far removed from what they actually desired, and were therefore incited to repudiate the December settlement and resort to further rebellion in 1537.57 Given the variations in the custom of tenant right, the Pilgrim leadership clearly had a major problem on its hands in drafting an article which would present satisfactorily the grievance on gressums and quell the conflict it caused between gentlemen and commons. Any proposal for the abolition of gressums was unacceptable to the Pilgrims lords just as any proposal to introduce gressums into regions which were customarily free of them would incense the commons of those parts. The form the article took, then, was not simply a reflection of what the commons required but sought to accommodate opposed interests. The adopted solution was to define a standard form of tenant right and to specify the regions in which this form was to be comprehensively applied, presumably the tenant-right regions where gressums were common practice. Needless to say, interests on both sides were offended by the article as it was finally formulated. Clear losers 56 57

  Denton, p. 480. For dating Burgh’s involvement, see Bush, p. 368.   See Bush and Bownes, ch. 6.

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were the lords of the manor who had formerly enjoyed arbitrary gressums and who were now required to accept that, on all customary tenancies, they would be fixed. Other losers were certain tenants in the wapentake of Ewcross who, as a result of Dent and Sedbergh’s inclusion in the article, were threatened for the first time with the imposition of gressums; as were the customary tenants of Cumberland and the Barony of Westmorland who had wanted gressums to be equal to, not twice the amount of, the rent, and, in Cumberland’s case, had also called for the abolition of general fines. Also left dissatisfied must have been the abbey tenants of Furness and of Mashamshire, Kirkbyshire and Nidderdale, along with the tenants on ecclesiastical estates in Westmorland and Cumberland, whose fears of subjection to gressums on change of lord the wording of the article – which vaguely proposed that a gressum would fall due ‘at every change’ – did nothing to assuage. Moreover, the grievances of the tenant-right tenants in regions unmentioned in the article remained unaddressed. What is more their tenurial position stood to be undermined by the definition of tenant right contained in the article, even though it did not apply specifically to them, especially in view of the article’s demand that it should be ensconced in an act of parliament. Central to the article was the hint of a contradiction between the precise definition of tenant right as constituting a gressum fixed at twice the rent and the phrase that followed which presented tenant right as determined ‘according to the grant now made by the lords to the commons there under their seal’, a reference, it would seem, to the practice in Westmorland and Cumberland whereby the rebels, having formulated declarations of tenant right, had required lords to seal their agreement, creating terms which must have differed from the definition given in the article. Allowing this anomaly to exist was a late amendment of the article, probably under lordly pressure, to add the crucial defining phrase ‘and the lord to now have, at every change, two years rent for gressum and no more’.58 The unsatisfactory nature of the article on tenant right led to the agitations and extreme demands of 1537, the effect of which released the king from the humiliating promises he had made in December and persuaded Pilgrim lords and clerics that it was more in their interest to trust the crown than to be ruled by the commons. The government was far more sympathetic than the Pilgrim leadership towards the grievance on gressums. This stemmed from its concern that 58   If what the commons pressed upon gentlemen for sealing simply required their respect for the custom of the country, a contradiction would have been avoided, but, if it had specified its nature in terms of respective rights, a contradiction would have occurred. The survival of a detailed Cumberland commons’ declaration of the custom tenant right (see Denton, pp. 479–80) would suggest a contradiction. For the making of article 9 see above, p. 32.

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increases in gressums were weakening the defences against Scotland. Accepting that a serious agrarian problem existed and one that required speedy remedy, it proposed, early in 1537, schemes of tenant relief in various parts of the north. For Northumberland a rents-only policy was advocated – ‘the tenants of the said lands [to] be put in comfort no more to be exacted with gressums’ – in return for unpaid military service on the border.59 In Lonsdale Cromwell instructed the commissioners administering the estates of the dissolved Furness Abbey to continue the manorial practices of the monks, ruling out ‘extraordinary gressums’ (presumably general fines) and insisting upon the exaction of no more than ‘such ordinary rents and duties as they have been accustomed heretofore to pay to the abbots of Furness’.60 In both instances the government was keen to maintain the military capacity of the peasants holding farms by tenant right. Besides banning gressums, for other parts of the north it advocated a moderate exaction, instructing its commissioners, the duke of Norfolk and the earl of Sussex, to ensure that lords no longer made excessive demands of their tenants.61 The Pilgrim commons and the government, then, were both agreed that the exaction of gressums was responsible for an unacceptable agrarian problem. At the same time both identified enclosure as an accompanying source of difficulty, for, like exorbitant gressums, the extension of enclosure at the expense of the waste was also seen as a threat to the system of tenant right and the border defences dependent upon it. Intaking the Waste A complaint against enclosure featured in the petition the Westmorland rebels dispatched to the Pilgrim leadership in November: it required ‘all intakes [that is, enclosures of the waste] … noisome for poor men to be laid down’.62 Moreover, article 13 of the December petition demanded that ‘the statute for enclosures and intakes to be put in execution and that all intakes and enclosures since 4 Henry VII [1489] to be pulled down except [those in] mountains, forests and parks’.63 The same grievance led to anti-enclosure riots, notably in the Barony of Westmorland, in

59

    61   62   63   60

SP1/116, f. 217b [L.P. XII(1). 595]. SP1/118, fos 96–7 [L.P. XII(1). 881]. L.P. XII(1). 98; SP1/115, f. 155 [L.P. XII(1). 302]. See below, Appendix, doc. 15. SP1/112, f. 120 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)].

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January 1537.64 Contemporaries were well aware of its importance to the pilgrimage of grace. William Stapulton, a Pilgrim captain from the the East Riding, claimed in his confession that ‘enclosures, intakes of the common’ had stirred ‘the people to such rebellion’.65 Moved by article 13 in the December petition, the government in February 1537 instructed the earl of Sussex, whom it commissioned to survey Lancashire, to see if ‘lately any commons [had been] taken into several [that is, enclosed]’ in view of the fact that enclosed commons, along with high gressums, ‘have been thought a great occasion of the late rebellions’. It issued a similar instruction for the duke of Norfolk whose remit was the rest of the north.66 Having visited Cumbria in early 1537, Norfolk, along with Robert Southwell, reported that current enclosing was troubling that region. Commenting on the Percies’ estates in Cumberland, Southwell remarked that ‘the approvement [enclosure] of the commons accustomably used here … hath done much more hurt than good’. Following the defeat of the Cumbrian uprising in February 1537, Norfolk judged that the people of the north-west had been ‘sore handled in times past’ by the extension of enclosure as well as by raised gressums. This led him to conclude that agrarian exploitation was ‘the only cause’ of their late rebellion.67 In the preceding decade enclosure had caused frequent conflict in the north, chiefly because lords of the manor had used it to deny the tenantry free commoning on the waste. Since such enclosures were regarded as a device to increase the lord’s income by reducing the tenantry’s rights, the complaints against new enclosures and raised gressums were interconnected. Both were deplored as breaches of custom that, through creating impoverishment, impaired the local commonwealth. The complaint against them came from townsmen as well as from village communities. Thus, around 1530, the townsmen of Richmond fought in the courts to preserve their access to Aske Moor when excluded by the enclosures of Richard Bowes. As with the tenant-right complaint against raised gressums, their claim for preserving customary access to the waste was justified in terms of the obligation to provide troops for the defence of the border. In the late 1520s and early 1530s the tenantry of nearby 64   See below, pp. 214–16. That anti-enclosure actions occurred during the course of the uprising in October/November 1536 is evident, but with a tantalising lack of detail, in a proposal made by Robert Bowes at the Pilgrims’ York council for ‘remedy for pulling down of enclosures’ (Bateson, p. 570). 65   Stapleton, p. 82. 66   For Sussex, see SP1/115, f. 155 [L.P. XII(1). 302]. For Norfolk, see SP1/114, fos 112b–113b [L.P. XII(1). 478]. 67   For Southwell, see SP1/124, f. 67b [L.P. XII(2). 548 (1)]. For Norfolk, see SP1/116, f. 89 [L.P. XII(1). 478].

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Arkengarthdale were engaged in a bitter struggle with the Conyers family to regain access to ‘their common’ where they claimed an immemorial right of free grazing for their cattle and for themselves, the right to mine lead in return for a one-ninth royalty.68 In 1533 the tenants of Brandsby, Stearsby and Skewsby in Galtres Forest, north of York, broke down the enclosures surrounding 10 acres of waste and 20 acres of cultivated land to reclaim their right to graze cattle on that site, arguing that these enclosures were ‘contrary to their ancient custom’ and ‘to the destruction of the commonwealth’ because, by curtailing the number of cattle they could keep, they were less able ‘to manure their ground’ adequately.69 In 1534 and 1536 the townsmen of York took physical action in defence of their commoning rights to pastures close to the city, casting down hedges and driving in their livestock. In 1534 the cause of complaint was Tristram Teshe who had leased the herbage of Bishops Fields from the archbishop of York, enclosing them in the belief that they were for his own exclusive use. In 1536 the townsmen made complaint against the mayor’s council for denying them free grazing land in Knavesmire, the result of enclosing Knavesmire common and exacting a gist (that is, a licence fee) for each animal admitted to its pastures.70 Between 1526 and 1533, tenants who claimed free commoning rights to Rothwell Park near Leeds took action against Lord Darcy, both in the courts and by anti-enclosure action, in reaction to the changes he had made to increase his income from the park. After deforestation, he had created, by means of enclosure, new farms and cottages and rented pasturage. To reclaim their commoning rights, the tenantry pulled down the new enclosures and drove in their livestock, both in 1532 and 1533.71 The most spectacular anti-enclosure protests of the early 1530s occurred in 1535, affecting the West and North Ridings, Westmorland and Cumberland. Again, the bone of contention was commoning rights 68   For Aske Moor, see Monastic Chancery Proceedings, pp. 34–6 in Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, 88 (1934). The bill was exhibited between 1529 and 1532. For Arkengarthdale, see Yorkshire Star Chamber Proceedings, vol. II, p. 178 in Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, 45 (1911). The dispute is impossible to date with any precision but it must have been underway between 1525, since it named the earl of Cumberland, and 1536, since its leader, Anthony Peacock, was executed for his part in the pilgrimage of grace. 69   Yorkshire Star Chamber Proceedings, vol. III, pp. 41–7 in Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 51 (1913). 70   For 1534, see Yorkshire Star Chamber Proceedings, vol. IV, pp. 103–4, in Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, 70 (1927). For 1536, see Angelo Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. IV, p. 1 in Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 108 (1943). 71   R.W. Hoyle, ‘Thomas Lord Darcy and the Rothwell tenants’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 63 (1991): 85–94.

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denied by enclosure of the waste. In commenting on the West Riding riots, Richard Tempest informed Cromwell that the rioters’ aim was ‘only to pull down divers enclosures which hath been taken and enclosed of moors and wastes and for none other purpose’.72 And again, it was not simply a matter of regaining free access to the waste but also of opposing the new farmsteads and cottages that lords had founded upon it. Antienclosure rioters therefore demolished not just fences and dykes but also recently constructed houses. In the vicinity of the townships of Skipton and Giggleswick, three to four hundred rioters, including many women and children, had cast down, it was reported, ‘as well houses as dikes and hedges of pasture and meadow and arable ground sown with corn’.73 And at Airton in Craven the villagers removed not only the new enclosures erected by John Lambert but also a house situated within one of them.74 Likewise, in Galtres Forest, the inhabitants of Easingwold and Huby pulled down a newly constructed house and enclosure, the home, they claimed, of a weaver, allegedly to protect the king’s forest and its deer from settlement, in reality to keep its commoning rights for themselves.75 In the same year similar action was taken by enclosure rioters in Westmorland on the manor of Orton, jointly owned by John Warcop and Lord Dacre. Both had made improvements on the waste at the tenantry’s expense. The action began with Dacre’s tenants proceeding against Warcop’s new enclosures and assaulting the occupying tenant.76 In the same year, enclosure rioters in Cumberland were moved by similar concerns. Thus the townsfolk of Cleator, men, women and children, went in a body to a newly made enclosure on a moor between Cleator and Frizington. Pulling down both the enclosure and a recently constructed house, they claimed ‘the rightful inheritance to have entry and commons and pasture there’.77 In all three regions a peasant tenantry had challenged lords of the manor who, in their search for profit, were encouraging outsiders to settle by establishing on the waste new farmsteads as well as cottages for landless artisans. In this respect, the problem differed from the one that a succession of antienclosure acts had addressed. Rather than a problem of depopulation, the result of large farms replacing small ones, with a consequent abandonment 72

  SP1/93, f. 198 [L.P. VIII. 992].   SP1/93, f. 69 [L.P. VIII. 863]; L.P. VIII. 992. 74   The National Archives, KB9/534/77; SP1/93, f. 196 [L.P. VIII. 991]. 75   The mention of a riot made in L.P. X. 77 and 733 is supported by a surviving replication in Star Chamber. See Yorkshire Star Chamber Proceedings, vol. I, pp. 87–9 in Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, 41 (1908). 76   SP1/94, fos 50–50A [L.P. VIII. 1046]. Also see The National Archives, STAC2/28/124. 77   SP1/94, f. 191 [L.P. VIII. 1133]; STAC2/1/44–5; ibid., 21/218; ibid., 31/181. 73

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of yeoman homesteads – a problem deplored by More and Latimer and by the tillage laws – enclosure in the north was seen as creating a problem of overpopulation; and the threat to rights of common was thought to come from a reduction of the area to which free commoning applied and from overuse of the remaining waste, as a growing population became dependent upon its vital resources: not just fodder for livestock but the firewood, peat, turf, cowpats, bracken, heather, berries and gorse that could be collected there to supply the home with fuel, building materials and floor covering.78 The enclosure complaint associated with the pilgrimage of grace marked a continuation of the type of protest evident in 1535, although the violence committed was less extensive and, judged on the surviving evidence, largely confined to Clifford estates in the Barony of Westmorland. There, objection to the construction of new homesteads on the waste was present from the very start for, within a fortnight of the outbreak of revolt, John Lowther had informed the earl of Cumberland that, in the vicinity of Kirkby Stephen, two men and three women had demolished a house.79 That this was probably done to defend commoning rights to the waste is suggested in the two formal statements of complaint known to have been made by the Westmorland rebels: their October letter to Aske and their November petition.80 These two communications, like the December petition, specifically objected to ‘intakes’: that is, encroachments on the waste made by means of enclosure. However, neither appeared to propose that the waste should be totally freed from intakes. The Westmorland petition defined the offending intakes as those that were ‘noisome to poor men’. In doing so – the phrase ‘poor men’ was also used in its objection to gressums – it was not making a special case for poverty. In fact, some of the intakes that were found objectionable, notably those associated with the setting up of new homesteads, had been especially beneficial to the poor.81 In the language of the time, the term ‘poor men’ was a synonym for ‘commoners’. In this context, it was clearly a reference to peasants: that is, smallholders practising subsistence farming largely with family labour. What the petition required was the removal of all intakes judged not to be in their interest. Its presumption was that intakes of the waste needed the consent of the tenantry to be properly authorised. This was perfectly in keeping with convention since, in spite of the statute of Merton, lords

78

    80   81   79

See A.J.L. Winchester, Harvest of the Hills (Edinburgh, 2000), chs 5 and 6. British Library, Althorp MS B. I, f. 53. Denton, p. 478; and see below, Appendix, doc. 15. See below, pp. 216–17.

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bent on making improvement to the waste normally needed to obtain the consent of those with commoning rights to it.82 The December petition confined the offending enclosures to those constructed since 1489 and, perversely, excepted from destruction enclosures located in mountains, forests and parks. In both respects it was quoting from the Act that it required ‘to be put in execution’, with the difference that the Act did not exempt all enclosures in mountains, forests and parks but only enclosures in any marsh and fen or in any forest, park and chase ‘wherein be deer’.83 What the petition demanded was in keeping with the enclosure problem identified by the gentleman Pilgrim William Stapulton, who misleadingly related it to ‘the pulling down of towns and husbandries’, but not with the wishes of the hill-farming commons in the upland north. The statute cited in the petition was the recently enacted 27 Henry VIII c. 22. Following the example of a succession of tillage statutes enacted under the early Tudors, its chief concern was not curtailment of the waste but stopping the conversion of arable to pasture. It therefore condemned enclosures not for intaking the waste but for causing, through ‘the decay of houses’, desettlement in the countryside. It was officially entitled ‘concerning the decay of houses and enclosures’, although called by the Pilgrims ‘the statute of enclosures and intakes’. These tillage laws were appropriate for the fielden lowlands of the midlands and the south but not for the upland north where enclosure had been, and remained, a vital means of promoting settlement.84 The irrelevance of 27 Henry VIII c. 22 to much of the north was recognised in a proviso to the Act which, by naming the counties to which it extended, all of them in the south, made it clear that it had no force in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmorland, Cumberland, the Durham Palatinate or Northumberland.85 In other words, the statute was without application in the regions from which the pilgrimage of grace drew its support. Why then did article 13 base itself on this Act? Perhaps because the Pilgrims sincerely believed in amending it to include the north. However, the article did not make this point. Rather than calling for the Act’s extension, it merely demanded its execution; and the one revision it appeared to make – by referring to mountains as well as fens, marshes, forests and parks 82   A.W.B. Simpson, An Introduction to the History of the Land Law (Oxford, 1961), p. 107. 83   Statutes of the Realm, vol. III, p. 554. 84   For Stapulton, see above, n. 65. For tillage legislation, see Joan Thirsk, ‘Enclosing and engrossing’, in her The Agrarian History of England and Wales (Cambridge, 1967), vol. IV, ch. 4. For value of enclosure to hill-farming communities, see Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 62–3, 68–9, 73, 146. 85   Statutes of the Realm, vol. III, p. 554.

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– actually accepted that enclosing in upland areas should be permitted. Although stemming from a popular complaint against enclosure, the article as formulated cannot be taken to express with any exactitude the wishes of the northern peasantry. Their concern was for enclosures that threatened grazing not tillage, that caused repopulation not depopulation. How else can the article be explained? Either as a ploy or as an oversight: on the one hand, perhaps a device employed by the rebel high command, a party of landlords, to avoid complying with the anti-enclosure demands of the commons; on the other, perhaps an expression of ignorance at rebel headquarters of the terms of the Act and the enclosure problems troubling the upland north. The former is the more likely. While the Westmorland petition’s anti-enclosure demand was very brief, it did specify intaking as the grievance and recommended the removal of intakes proving to be ‘noisome’, which must have meant new enclosures that limited free commoning. Moreover, the same petition was read and mostly allowed by Aske86 who was well placed to understand the agrarian problems current in the Barony of Westmorland since his brother had served there as receiver to the earl of Cumberland; and because, in late October and mid-November, several deputations from the barony had crossed to Pontefract and York to explain to the Pilgrim leadership the nature of their grievances.87 Also suggesting a ploy was the improbability that the Pilgrim leadership was ignorant of the terms of the latest enclosure Act, bearing in mind its domination by lawyers and landlords, such as the Bowes and Conyers families and Lord Darcy, who had recently created offence by enclosing waste.88 It was very much in their interest to know that the Act did not apply to the north and to keep it that way. It was also very much in their interest to exclude the Westmorlanders’ proposal for banning new intakes since, if this had carried the day, it would have deprived them of a major compensation for the handicap that tenant right was placing upon their estate management in a period of high inflation. It would seem, then, that, tinkering and jiggery-pokery shaped the presentation of the two agrarian grievances specified in the December petition. However, whereas in article 9 a compromise was evidently reached over gressums, offering some compensatory gain to both lord and tenant, the anti-enclosure complaint was completely misrepresented in article 13, a requirement to protect the waste against enclosure turned into a licence for lords in the northern uplands to intake at will.89

86

    88   89   87

SP1/117, f. 54b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. See Bush, pp. 300–301. See above, pp. 208–9. For compromise over gressums, see above, pp. 205–6.

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The true nature of the complaint against enclosures was revealed by the enclosure riots of January 1537, especially their targeting of new intakes.90 Although triggered by a report that Sir Thomas Clifford and a troop of armed borderers had ridden down from Carlisle into Westmorland to apprehend its rebel leaders, these riots expressed, nonetheless, an underlying hostility to enclosures recently constructed by the earl of Cumberland. They also showed that the complaint against enclosures, which appeared in the Westmorland petition of November 1536, had the earl very much in mind. Since half the 80 rioters indicted for anti-enclosure actions in Craven in 1535 had been tenants of the earl of Cumberland, it would seem that a major cause of enclosure protest in the mid-1530s lay in his keenness to develop the waste.91 The only surviving reports of the enclosure riots of January 1537 were made by Thomas Curwen, sheriff of Cumberland, and Robert Thompson, vicar of Brough. Curwen informed the duke of Norfolk: ‘a great number of people were up and have thrown down many enclosures of my lord of Cumberland’. He was well placed to know, having in the course of January fled the Honour of Cockermouth to Richmond, crossing en route the troubled barony.92 A fuller account was given by Thompson. Under examination by government officials, he made no mention of the earl of Cumberland but told of an uprising against ‘new intakes’ in a part of the barony dominated by the Clifford estate. According to Thompson, the riots occurred in two phases. About 6 January, and provoked by the news that Sir Thomas Clifford was descending upon the barony, the parishioners of Kirkby Stephen pulled down all the new intakes in the parish, notably in the Forest of Mallerstang. The action followed accusations brought against Robert Pulleyn, the man who had led the 1536 uprising in the barony, for siding with the earl of Cumberland and for admitting – in return for bribes – men to certain lands: in all likelihood farmholds created by the new intakes. Then, on 27 January, the parishioners of Brough responded to a call from the men of Kirkby Stephen and pulled down the new enclosures in the Forest of Stainmore.93 Yet, while informative about the riots in the parishes of Kirkby Stephen and Brough, Thompson failed to reveal the full extent of the anti-enclosure action taken at this time in the barony. Other Clifford estates appeared to come under attack, notably Whinfell Forest in the parish of Brougham and Flakebridge Forest 90

  Bush and Bownes, pp. 259–60.   SP1/93, f. 196 [L.P. VIII. 991]. 92   SP1/115, f. 178b [L.P. XII(1). 319]; L.P. XII(1). 185. 93   Thompson provides two accounts, one in his so-called answer (see E36/119, f. 79 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (4)], the other in his confession (see SP1/117, fos 55–55b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. 91

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in the parish of Appleby, perhaps in connexion with the actual arrival of Sir Thomas Clifford and his troop of borderers in mid-February and their expulsion from the barony by the men of Westmorland.94 In the four forests of Stainmore, Mallerstang, Whinfell and Flakebridge, the Cliffords were active at the time, intaking waste to establish new leasehold tenements and rented pastures (that is, leases of herbage or agistment grounds).95 It would seem that none of this improvement was carried out with the consent of the tenantry, perhaps because Cumberland had thought that the forest status of these areas awarded him right of demesne to them.96 In Mallerstang and Stainmore Forests Cumberland’s intaking was for the purpose of establishing new homesteads. In Whinfell Forest the outpark was enclosed to establish an agistment and leasehold farms. Another agistment was created in Flakebridge Forest, close to Langton. It would seem that the inhabitants of Nateby, Hartley, Kirkby Stephen and Hanging Lund proceeded against the enclosures in Mallerstang Forest; with the inhabitants of Brough, Sowerby, Stainmore, Winton and Newhall throwing down the new enclosures in Stainmore Forest; with the inhabitants of Penrith, Carleton, Brougham and Moorhouses removing the new enclosures in Whinfell Forest; while the new enclosures in Flakebridge Forest were probably destroyed by the inhabitants of Dufton, Bondgate and Appleby.97 Inciting the rioters was antipathy to the Cliffords not only for opposing the pilgrimage of grace but also for impairing their commoning rights by converting free grazing into rented pasture, and by imposing additional demands upon the region’s natural resources through the increased population caused by the new tenements. Plenty of common remained, but what was taken away – only to be made available for a rent or fee, and a revisable one at that – was offensive to communities whose system of farming and way of life was heavily dependent upon the waste – for grazing livestock in summer and for collecting fuel and building 94   See Clifford Account Roll for 1540–41 (Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 45) which mentions the costs incurred ‘at the commotion time’ in the repair of enclosures in these two areas. For Clifford’s expulsion from the barony, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 257–9. 95   Made evident in two surviving Clifford estate accounts, one for 1533/4, the other for 1540/1: see for first, Chatsworth Trustees, Bolton Abbey MS, vol. 10; and for second, Kendal Record Office WD/Hoth, box 45. Both are incomplete, having lost the section dealing with Kirkby Stephen and Mallerstang. But there is a surviving fragment of an account for 1543, attached to a receiver’s survey for 1528 (see Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48), suggesting that new tenements had been created at Mallerstang and Stainmore by the first earl. 96   See Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, p. 27. 97   Surmised from a list of executed Westmorlanders (see Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, Appendix II) and the proximity of their places of residence to sites of enclosure attacked.

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material all the year round – and who appreciated their free commoning, as they did their hereditary, under-rented tenures and exemption from government taxation, as privileges granted them in return for military service on the northern border.98 Moreover, by creating new tenements, intaking also established new levels of rent and, within the community, enlarged the proportion of rents considered to be revisable rather than fixed. Norfolk’s point about an ‘increasing of lords’ rents by enclosing’ in the north-west must have referred to the use of enclosure to create new leaseholds, both of tenement and pasture.99 Opposition to the new enclosures, then, was driven not only by a curtailment of free commoning but also by a raising of rents in societies which expected them to remain fixed. Without a doubt, the new enclosures were designed to increase the lord’s share of the peasant’s surplus, since the tenements that they created were leaseholds on an economic rent. Moreover, the enclosures associated with farming of the herbage and agistment allowed landlords to exploit more efficiently a peasantry protected by customary and freehold tenures.100 What is more, by enlarging the number of tenements under new rents, enclosures played a part in exposing the old rents as unreasonably low, thereby rendering the customary tenures vulnerable to the raising of gressums. Finally, the action taken by the rioters had rested on a difference of opinion between them and lords over what the bylaws of the manor permitted: with lords regarding the enclosed areas as private property akin to demesne and therefore totally in their control; with the tenants claiming that these areas were typical waste and therefore requiring their consent to justify any change in its management. From the tenants’ point of view, the action taken was a means of charging the lord with a lack of ‘good neighbourhood’ and of undermining the local ‘commonwealth’.101 Yet, in the Barony of Westmorland and other upland parts of the north, intaking was nothing new but rather a traditional device for extending settlement. Although presented as a source of deprivation, it had much to offer rural communities – in a period of population growth and at a time when peasant ideals remained a dominant social aspiration – notably through the creation of new farms. The gains to be made within a peasant community from enclosing the waste were indicated by Robert Thompson, vicar of Brough. When the parishioners of Brough pulled down the new 98

  See Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, p. 78, 103, 123.   L.P. XII(1). 478. 100   The account for 1533/4 reveals that the new intakes in Stainmore raised an annual income of £43: that is, almost half the normal income from this manor. See Chatsworth Trustees, Bolton Abbey MS, vol. 10, f. 22. 101   For conflicting interpretations of manorial rights, see Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 27–8, 32–3. For concept of ‘good neighbourhood’, see ibid., pp. 45–7. 99

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Stainmore intakes on 27 January 1537, he publicly questioned their action the following day at Sunday service, on the grounds that, of its victims, ‘some of them had no other living’: in other words, he was making the point that intaking provided opportunities for the landless to become peasant farmers.102 However, there was no mistaking the hostility to new intakes, not only among the villagers and townsmen of the Eden valley but also among the inhabitants of isolated hillside settlements created by earlier enclosure of the waste. Glaringly evident in the lists of those executed for their part in the January anti-enclosure riots were residents of the minute settlements of Hanging Lund in Mallerstang Forest and of Newhall in Stainmore Forest. The tally for Hanging Lund was nine, a figure only exceeded in the barony by the township of Appleby with 11. In fact, the numbers executed from Hanging Lund was almost twice the number for Kirkby Stephen (5) and one more than for Penrith, both of them substantial townships, whereas the settlement at Hanging Lund was no more than a handful of tenements on the edge of the waste. Newhall was another tiny, intaken settlement, close to the newly enclosed High Ewbank, its five executions exceeding those individually suffered by the substantial communities of Brough (1), Stainmore (2) and Sowerby (4).103 Enraging these minute communities at Hanging Lund and Newhall was the fact that the gains they had made from an earlier phase of intaking were now being challenged by a further phase which would restrict their free grazing, threaten with overuse what remained of the waste, and question the reasonableness of their rents and dues. Rather than representing peasant communities fighting for their very existence, the enclosure rioters in Westmorland consisted of established peasants objecting to the new farms, dwellings and pasturage created for the benefit of landless families. As well as a conflict between landlord and tenant, then, the riots gave expression to the friction that sparked between landed and landless families in rural communities subjected to the pressures of rapid population growth.104 Noutgeld and Sergeant Corn In their November petition, the commons of the Barony of Westmorland objected not only to raised gressums and new enclosures but also to certain annual payments termed noutgeld and sergeant corn. The abolition of these charges, they declared, would offer ‘great wealth for all the country’ – a somewhat exaggerated claim since the two together extracted no 102

  E36/119, f. 79 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (4)].  Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, Appendix II. 104   Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 47–8, 124–5, 132. 103

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more than £50 per annum from the barony as a whole.105 This particular grievance went unspecified in the December petition, perhaps because it was so localised. The surviving evidence suggests its confinement mostly to people living in the East Ward: that is, the wapentake through which the river Eden flowed on its way from Kirkby Stephen to Appleby and on to Penrith. The complaint against these two charges was first aired in a letter from Robert Pulleyn and Nicholas Musgrave to ‘the Captain of Yorkshire’. Authorised ‘by the consent of the commonalty of Westmorland’, it was delivered by Pulleyn in person to Aske in Pontefract on 28 October. After demanding the ‘laying apart [of] noutgeld and sergeant corn’, the letter argued that these charges were ‘a great disprofit to all the commons’, in consequence of which ‘we are not able to do the king service’.106 Other than what can be learnt from the Westmorlanders’ November petition, which makes a similar point, our knowledge of the complaint is wholly reliant upon Robert Thompson, the vicar of Brough, a leading figure in, and eye-witness of, the uprisings in the Barony of Westmorland and Cumberland. Under government examination, he made two pertinent points: one was that, after the Truce was made in late October, a council held at Appleby formulated new laws on noutgeld and sergeant corn as well as on gressums, enclosures and tithes, all of which were conveyed to the Pilgrim command at York in the Westmorlander’s November petition.107 His other point was that the complaint against noutgeld was keenly felt by the commons of the barony. This he illustrated by noting the distress caused at Christmas time when Robert Pulleyn broke his promise to ‘help put down the same’ by suddenly paying his due to the earl of Cumberland. According to Thompson, the enraged ‘young men about Kirkby Stephen’ attacked Pulleyn’s house. Taking him into custody, they only permitted his release upon receiving the ‘sureties and entreaties of certain men’.108 105   For the petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 15. The amounts raised in 1528, 1534 and 1541 are to be found in Kendal County Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48; Chatsworth Trustees, Bolton Abbey MS, vol.10, fos 14, 16–17b and WD/Hoth, box 45 respectively. For 1528 £16. 16s. was received in sergeant corn and £28. 16s. 11d. in noutgeld. For 1534 £16. 11s. was received in sergeant corn. In this account a sum of £36. 5s. 10d. is given but includes both noutgeld and white farm (that is, the quitrent paid by socagers). Since the precise receipt for the white farm is not given, it is impossible to work out the exact amount received in noutgeld. However, the receipt in white farm is known for both 1528 and 1541: £7. 11s. 4d. in the one; £6.18s. 11d. in the other. Thus, the amount received in noutgeld in 1534 must have been about £29. For 1541 £16.10s. was received in sergeant corn and £29. 7s. in noutgeld. 106   See Denton, p. 478. 107   SP1/117, f. 54 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. 108  Ibid., f. 55.

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Noutgeld was associated with tenure by cornage, a form of freehold peculiar to the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland and Durham. Attached to the tenure was the obligation of military service on the northern border. In this respect, cornage complemented the system of tenant right, ensuring that certain freeholders, as well as all customary tenants, were tenurially bound, at their own charge, to aid the king with mounted armed service in defence of the northern frontier.109 Originally a royal tax paid in cattle, by the early sixteenth century noutgeld had become a payment in coin. Moreover, thanks to the crown’s alienation of its regalian rights – notably in the Baronies of Westmorland and Gilsland – it had partly fallen into the hands of leading subjects.110 Cornage status did not apply to all freeholds in the border counties: for there were also fiefholders whose obligations were likewise military but free of noutgeld, and freeholders in socage who paid white rents instead of noutgeld and had no tenurial obligation to provide military service. In addition and exceptionally, cornage status could apply to customary tenants as well as to freeholders: significantly on the Clifford manors of Brough and Winton in the Barony of Westmorland.111 The system of cornage operated at two levels: at one level obliging lords of the manor to render border service and noutgeld to the crown or its delegate; at another level obliging their freehold tenants to assist them in fulfilling these obligations. The fact that such services and payments were passed on to the tenantry meant that, at that lower level, cornage tenure could be quite onerous, especially in comparison with the non-military freehold in socage. Since they were held by military service, cornage tenures were, in the manner of fiefs, subjected to relief, wardship and marriage, their superior lord having the right to take temporary possession in the event of a minority, and to charge a succession fee, but unlike fiefholders, who had escaped not only the tenurial obligation of military service but 109   For cornage and military service, see above, pp. 192–3. For the nature of noutgeld and cornage, see Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn, The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland (London, 1777), vol. I, p. 268; Graham, ‘Cornage and drengage’: 78–9; V.C.H. Cumberland, vol. I, pp. 313, 318–21; Jolliffe, ‘Northumbrian institutions’: 10, 29–30; F.W. Maitland, ‘Northumbrian tenures’, E.H.R., 5 (1890): 629; W. Ragg, ‘The feoffees of the Cliffords from 1283 to 1482’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, new series, 13 (1908): 265–6; Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, pp. 67–8. The tendency – see Ragg and Harrison (p. 66) – to present it as intrinsically a feudal tenure is misleading, although fiefs and cornage tenures had much in common. Those holding by cornage were mostly described as ‘holding freely’ (libere tenuit), not as ‘holding in capite’. 110   For commutation to cash, see V.C.H. Cumberland, vol. I, pp. 315–17. For alienation by crown, see ibid., pp. 287, 319, 320. 111   See below, pp. 225–6.

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also the payment (scutage) to which it had been commuted, holders of cornage tenures remained subjected to military service as well as the annual payment of noutgeld. Viewed as a freehold, cornage in the early sixteenth century could be a distinctly unfavourable tenure. Nonetheless, its articulation as a Pilgrim complaint appeared to stem solely from the Barony of Westmorland. There the complaint was inevitably bound up with the Cliffords, the result of an act of alienation made centuries earlier in which the crown had granted the family a hereditary right to the office of sheriff and its perquisites.112 No mention was made of the complaint in any rebel bills other than in those composed by the commons of the Barony of Westmorland: not even in the surviving statements of agrarian grievance produced in Cumberland which confined complaint to gressums and labour services, even though it would seem, as John Leigh reported to Cromwell in 1532, that cornage was a contentious issue in that county. The implication of Leigh’s remarks, however, was that its freeholders were moved by the fear of royal officials proceeding to exercise again the king’s right of cornage, suggesting that in those parts the system had lapsed. It may be that, in the early 1530s, the crown’s concern to improve its income from fiefholders led cornage tenants to think that, since they were also holders of military tenures, they would fall victim to the same policy. Probably exacerbating resentment against noutgeld in the Barony of Westmorland was the fact that the other half of the county, the Barony of Kendal, which was likewise subjected to the hereditary shrievalty of the Clifford family, had been exempted from its payment. Perhaps, then, the commons of the Barony of Westmorland were exceptionally driven to make the complaint because cornage was still applied there, whereas elsewhere it had fallen into decay. On the other hand, especially in regions like Cumberland where cornage mostly remained with the crown, the issue of a revived cornage system would have been linked with the issue of a revived feudal system, the fears engendered by both issues finding expression in the Pilgrims’ complaint against the Act of Uses.113 Likewise, the Pilgrims’ grievance against sergeant corn also appeared to come from the Barony of Westmorland and was again directed against the Clifford family, its one and only recipient in that region. Sergeant corn was originally a perquisite of the land sergeant, a royal official 112   See V.C.H. Cumberland, vol. I, p. 320; Nicolson and Burn, History of Westmorland and Cumberland, vol. I, pp. 292; Ragg, ‘Feoffees of the Cliffords’: 295–6. For receipt of noutgeld, see above, n. 105. 113   Denton, pp. 479–80. For the 1532 report on cornage concern in Cumberland, see L.P. V. 1447. For this interpretation of it, see Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, pp. 69–70.

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appointed in each ward to carry out the sheriff’s orders for keeping the peace, executing writs and making attachments.114 Like noutgeld, it was paid to the Cliffords because of their hereditary ownership of the office of sheriff of Westmorland but, bizarrely, only by the Barony of Westmorland, not by the Barony of Kendal.115 By the 1530s sergeant corn differed from noutgeld in several notable respects. It was still paid in kind: as the name suggests it was a measure of corn, usually oats. Its original purpose had been to feed the sergeant’s horses but now it was collected and sold off by the earl’s officials who paid him a fixed amount in money and pocketed the remainder. Related to it was another annual payment, the puture of hens – originally food for the sergeant himself – which also remained exactable in kind.116 Whereas the payment of noutgeld was normally confined to freeholds in cornage, sergeant corn was typically paid by all customary and freehold tenants.117 Yet its payment in the barony was much less widespread than that of noutgeld, with only 15 communities paying sergeant corn against 48 communities paying noutgeld. Futhermore, for the Cliffords it realised a relatively small revenue of about £16, some £12 less than the income from noutgeld.118 Nonetheless, in certain parts of the barony and under certain conditions it could become an oppressive levy. Eight of the 15 communities liable to sergeant corn were situated in the East Ward, six of them concentrated in the parishes of Kirkby Stephen and Brough, with the other two located in the adjacent parish of Crosby Garrett.119 These three parishes contributed nine-sixteenths of the oats paid by the barony as a whole.120 In this region, the epicentre of the complaint, 114  Helen Cam, The Hundred and the Hundred Rolls (London, 1930), p. 153; Elizabeth G. Kimball, Sergeanty Tenure in Medieval England (New Haven, 1936), pp. 87–8; Jolliffe, ‘Northumbrian institutions’: 37; R. Stewart-Brown, The Sergeants of the Peace in Medieval England and Wales (Manchester, 1936), p. 73. 115   For its receipt, see above, n. 105. 116  In the absence of earlier documentary evidence, this has to be presumed from receipts for the early seventeenth century. See Nicolson and Burn, History of Westmorland and Cumberland, vol. I, pp. 292–4. 117   See Stewart-Brown, Sergeants of the Peace, p. 48. An early seventeenth-century list of those paying sergeant corn reveals that the liability was not confined to freeholders. See Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48. 118   For incidence, see above, n. 116. For revenue, see above, n. 105. 119   In the parish of Kirkby Stephen: Kaber, Nateby, Smardale, Soulby, Waitby. In the parish of Brough: Brough. In the parish of Crosby Garrett: Little Musgrave and Crosby. 120   Calculated from the fact that in 1527 the Cliffords received £9. 11s. 9d. for sergeant corn paid by the East Ward; £1. 12s. 5d. for sergeant corn paid by the West Ward and £5. 6s. 10d. for sergeant corn paid by the Middle Ward. See Christopher Aske’s cornage survey in Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48. There was a very similar breakdown in contributions from the three Wards for 1534. See Chatsworth Trustees, Bolton Abbey MS, vol. 10, f. 14.

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sergeant corn and noutgeld frequently coincided: of the 13 communities paying noutgeld, eight paid sergeant corn. Unlike tithe corn, sergeant corn was not exacted as a proportion of the actual crop but levied at the rate of one bushel per oxgang. It therefore appeared especially heavy in times of dearth: even more so as the Cliffords were empowered to distrain goods for non-payment.121 That a shortage of grain was a basic cause of complaint against this exaction in October 1536 is suggested by the rebels’ failure to object to the puture of hens, the other payment that the Cliffords’ right of sergeanty entitled them to exact.122 A safety valve existed within the barony whereby if sergeant corn or noutgeld had not been demanded between 30 November and 2 February, the Clifford entitlement to collect would lapse for that one year. Perhaps intensifying the anger against these payments was not only their survival in the barony but also the unwillingness of the Cliffords to dispense benevolence by putting this let-out mechanism into operation.123 Yet, why did the commons of the East Ward demand the complete abolition of these two payments, rather than simply require their alleviation or temporary suspension or, in the case of sergeant corn, its commutation to cash? In explanation Harrison proposed that it ‘reflected the grievance of a small interest group’ which he identified as certain inhabitants in the town of Kirkby Stephen who were chiefly influenced by Robert Pulleyn and who wished, as freeholders by cornage, to become freeholders by socage and also to escape the payment of sergeant corn.124 The problem with this explanation is that the town of Kirkby Stephen paid neither cornage nor sergeant corn. On the other hand, several communities within the parish of Kirkby Stephen were liable to both; and it was from them, as we shall see, that the grievance most likely came.125 As for Robert Pulleyn’s prominence in promoting this grievance, Harrison saw it as stemming from his liability to sergeant corn, but this view rests on a misreading of the evidence: the payment Harrison reckoned Pulleyn made to the Cliffords in 1534, by virtue of his obligation to pay sergeant corn, was a sum of money that the Cliffords actually paid to him, in recompense for provisions he 121   For the system of exaction and the power of destraint, see a complaint brought by the people of Soulby, Waitby, Smardale and Brough against the Clifford family in the early seventeenth century: Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48. 122   For the grain shortage in 1536, see below, n. 141. Unlike the two communications from the Westmorland commons, Thompson used the term ‘sergeant food’ (see SP1/117, f. 54) but there is no good reason to believe that this was not a synonym for ‘sergeant corn’. 123   For the system of alleviation, see ‘A note on cornage’ in Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48. 124  Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, p. 70. 125   See below, p. 227.

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had supplied to William Butterfield, warrener of Ketland in Sandford.126 Pulleyn lived not in Kirkby Stephen but in the Ormside and Sandford area: that is close to the river Eden about half way between Appleby and Kirkby Stephen. Socially, he stood on the threshold of gentility. As a freeholder in cornage, he was liable to noutgeld, making his payment, however, not directly to the earl of Cumberland but to a mesne lord as a contribution towards what the latter owed the earl. If a resident of Great Ormside he would have contributed to a total noutgeld charge of 13s. 6d., a little over the average of 12 shillings, but would not have paid sergeant corn; if a resident of Little Ormside he would have been subjected to sergeant corn as well as noutgeld, but the total charge upon that community of noutgeld was only 3s. 4d., and the total charge upon that community for sergeant corn amounted to only 12 bushels, well below the average of 32 bushels; and if a resident of Sandford he would have contributed to a low noutgeld of 3s. 4d. and would have been free of sergeant corn. The demand made of him must have been relatively light; and rather than initiating the protest against such payments, he was, in all likelihood, persuaded by others to support it.127 The grievance against the two payments therefore appeared to have a more extensive appeal than Harrison suggested, and seemed to be proposed from below rather than from above. The grievance was undoubtedly an expression of hostility towards the House of Clifford. At this time the Cliffords were detested in the northwest on several accounts: because of their loyalty to the crown during the Pilgrimage, because of their conduct as sheriffs of Westmorland, especially in serving writs of subpoena on poor men to make answer in London, and because of their inadequacy as wardens of the West March.128 The call for abolition rather than suspension of payment, however, and the fact that it appeared to come in part from the Clifford tenantry, would suggest that the complaint was not simply a reprisal for political allegiance or official shortcomings but part of a campaign both to stop the family from exploiting the region for its own particular profit and to remind it of its obligation to dispense goodlordship. In other words, this particular complaint was related to the Westmorlanders’ grievances against raised gressums and new enclosures. Like them it expressed a protest against the unbenevolent, money-grabbing manner in which the Clifford family was

126  Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, p. 70. For 1534 account, see Chatsworth Trustees, Bolton Abbey MS, vol. 10, f. 24b. 127   For noutgeld payments, see Aske’s cornage survey of 1828 in Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48. For sergeant corn payments, see Nicolson and Burn, History of Westmorland and Cumberland, vol. I, pp. 292–4. 128   See Bush, pp. 258–9 (as sheriff); ibid., pp. 335–6, 366–9 (as warden).

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currently managing its estates and the bad example its behaviour set for other landlords in the region. For most of the barony – all of West Ward and Middle Ward and a fair portion of East Ward – cornage was the Cliffords’ principal means of raising revenue: partly because rents, dues and demesne profits from much of the land went to intervening (that is, mesne) lords; and partly because the other perquisites of the sheriff’s office (that is, profits of the sheriff’s tourn, the quitrent of socagers and sergeant corn) yielded relatively small amounts of revenue.129 In the course of the sixteenth century the Cliffords sought to increase the profit from noutgeld, largely by converting socage tenures to cornage tenures.130 Yet little had changed by 1536. In the period 1482 to 1540 no conversions from socage to cornage occurred, and the regular annual revenue received in noutgeld remained in the region of £29.131 Nonetheless, the socagers of the barony may have become apprehensive of something in prospect. If so, their anxiety found reflection in article 24 of the December petition which objected to the false practices of corrupt officials bent on converting non-military (that is, socage) into military freeholds (that is, fiefs or cornage tenures) for financial gain.132 The Cliffords may also have alarmed the existing cornage tenants by exploiting the perquisites of cornage: perhaps through distraints, the imposition of reliefs and the exercise of wardship and marriage. For nonpayment of noutgeld or sergeant corn within one month of the demand being made, the Cliffords were entitled to confiscate goods and chattels. They acted upon this right as a consequence of the refusal to pay in late 1536; but there is no evidence to suggest that it was used prior to the uprising.133 In the early seventeenth century conflict arose between the Cliffords and their tenantry as some inhabitants purchased their immunity from making 129   The parts of the barony directly held by the Cliffords – as evident in the surviving rentals for 1533/4 and 1540/1 – were largely confined to the Eden valley, with a cluster of manors in the vicinity of Kirkby Stephen (Mallerstang, Kirkby Stephen, Winter, Sowerby, Stanemore, Bleatarn and Brough); another, in the vicinity of Appleby (Langton, Bondgate, Scattergate, Burrells, King’s Meaburn, Burton, Milburnfell, and Knock) and a third, within the vicinity of Penrith (Brougham, Moorhouses, Whynfell). The sheriff’s tourn was worth £4. 4s. 1d. in 1533/4 and £4. 16s. 1d. in 1540/1; white farm was worth between £7 and £8; and sergeant corn was worth between £16 and £17. 130   Between 1528 and 1572 Melkinthorpe, Asby Grange, Milburn, Tebay, Bretherdale and Wharton ceased to be registered in the Clifford records as freeholds in socage and instead were listed as cornage tenures: evident in a comparison of the freehold survey of 1528 (see Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48) with the cornage account of 1572 (see ibid.). 131   See above, n. 105. For 1482, see Ragg, ‘Feoffees of the Cliffords’: 269–91. 132   See below, Appendix, doc. 16. 133   For right of destraint, see Lord Keeper Coventry’s decree of 1634 in Nicolson and Burn, History of Westmorland and Cumberland, vol. I, p. 292. For distraints following the uprising, see 1540/1 account in Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 45.

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these payments, leaving those who remained liable without any clear idea of how much to pay and consequently susceptible to distraint; but whether this was a factor in the discord of 1536 is without proof.134 The Cliffords prior to 1536 were clearly interested in profiting from the right of wardship and relief that cornage conferred, both in relation to the mesne lords and to the free and customary tenants on their own estates. This is evident in the evaluations of wardship made in the surveys of 1482 and 1528, the former stating, with regard to ‘the tenants-at-will and other freeholders’ in the directly held manor of Brough, that ‘the aforesaid tenants owe wardship, marriage and relief because they hold by military service’.135 Moreover, the cornage survey of 1528 revealed rights of wardship exercised in three instances: in each case it applied to a mesne lordship rather than a tenancy on the Clifford estate and in each case the wardship was alienated rather than directly exploited: with the administration of Nateby sold for 200 marks; that of Rokeby, for £20 and that of Maulds Meaburn, for £120. Nonetheless, such sales may still have generated anti-Clifford sentiment, especially if the purchaser had sought to exploit the estate to secure a good return on his investment. The existence of such concerns, of course, presumes that the rebels wanted to end cornage tenure itself rather than simply to stop the payment of noutgeld. Although uncertain – the letter and the petition simply referred to laying down noutgeld – this is more than likely. Essentially, it meant bringing the Barony of Westmorland in line with the other half of the county, the Barony of Kendal. Those with an interest in disposing of cornage in the barony were as follows: freeholders in socage fearful of suffering subjection to cornage; freeholders in cornage fearful that the Cliffords might exercise more rigorously their shrieval rights; and customary tenants who had anomalously undergone subjection to its various obligations. How widespread the latter group was remains unknown but they certainly existed on the Clifford manors of Brough and Winton, having done so for many years, as the cornage survey of 1482 made evident.136 On these two manors, then, the issue of cornage was a concern for both free and customary tenants, its abolition appealing to freeholders desiring either to remain socagers or to become socagers, and to customary tenants aspiring 134   For conflict created by distraint, see complaint, answer and decree in Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48. 135   For 1482, see Ragg, ‘Feoffees of the Cliffords’: 268–91. For 1528, see Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48. 136   See Ragg, ‘Feoffees of the Cliffords’: 291. The practice first appeared in a cornage account for 1292 (that is, it was not declared in a cornage account for 1283) when it was recognised that the tenentes ad voluntatem paid 10s. 8d. in noutgeld on the manor of Burgh and 20s. 9d. on the manor of Winton. See ibid., p. 316.

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to hold by tenant right. In Brough 10 shillings was owed annually in noutgeld and 27 bushels of oats in sergeant corn; in Winton, £1. 0s. 9d. was the annual due for noutgeld, a relatively heavy payment, but alleviated by the absence of sergeant corn. Of these three groups, the customary tenants holding by cornage would, in the circumstances of 1536, appear to have the strongest motivation: in view of the fact that no conversions from socage to cornage had as yet occurred, and in the light of the behaviour of the freeholder, Robert Pulleyn, who, to the fury of the commons, broke rank by paying his noutgeld in December.137 Such evidence would suggest that much of the drive to abolish noutgeld came from the earl of Cumberland’s customary tenants. In these communities, where landlord and seigneur happened to be the same person, noutgeld easily appeared as part and parcel of landlordism, the demand for abolition constituting an act of resistance to the earl’s aggressive estate management. A distinctive feature of the uprising in the Barony of Westmorland was the leading part played in it by the Clifford estate, its inhabitants providing five of the eight known captains and 39 of the 53 victims.138 Moreover, the three centres of the uprising – Kirkby Stephen, Brough and Appleby – were all situated on Clifford properties.139 For this reason, it is only to be expected that the rebel grievances would mirror those of the Clifford tenantry, and this was undoubtedly as true of noutgeld as it was of gressums and enclosure. But to limit the protest against noutgeld to the Clifford tenantry would overlook the prevalence of cornage throughout the barony and the fact that the new law made for its abolition was determined by a council held at Appleby which consisted of 24 quests, presumably representatives from a broad spectrum of communities – including, perhaps, those with very high noutgeld payments such as Askham (£2. 10s. 9d.) in West Ward, Kirkby Thore (£1. 12s. 6d.) and Milburn (£1. 1s. 8d.), both in the northerly part of East Ward – rather than simply drawn from Kirkby Stephen and its vicinity. Furthermore, the Clifford estate itself was very lightly burdened by noutgeld: in the critical region – Thompson defined it as ‘about Kirkby Stephen’ – only Winton and Brough had to pay noutgeld, the burden of cornage falling upon Hartley (12s. 4d.), Little Musgrave (11s. 4d.), Nateby (13s. 4d.), Smardale (13s. 8d.), Soulby (13s. 8d.), Kaber (17s. 8d.), Crosby (8s. 6d.) and Waitby (14s. 10d.), all of them outside the Clifford estate but within the parish of Kirkby Stephen and the adjoining parish of Crosby Garrett. In some cases noutgeld was relatively heavy, notably in 137

  See above, p. 218.   The leaders from the Clifford estate were Musgrave, Tibby, Thompson, Blenkinsop and Taylor. For account of this uprising and its leadership, see Bush, ch. 8. For victims, see ibid., p. 319 and Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, Appendix II. 139   See above, n. 129. 138

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Kaber and Waitby and in several others (Nateby, Smardale, Soulby) it was above average.140 This would suggest that the angry young men who attacked Robert Pulleyn’s house in December were recruited not simply from the Clifford estate but also from the manors of other lords. Substantiating this point is the role played in the uprising by the accompanying complaint against sergeant corn. The objection to sergeant corn was based on somewhat different grounds to the one against noutgeld. Rather than aroused by fears of future plans, it was a reaction to current conditions, largely because it was still paid in kind. In times of plenty, with the price of corn low, it was not a heavy exaction, but this changed dramatically when poor harvests raised its price. It would have been a different matter if the payment had become, like noutgeld, a fixed sum of money. At the root of the objection is the fact that sergeant corn was a fixed amount of oats, the fact that the harvests in 1535 and 1536 were poor, and the fact that the scarcity was intensified by the rebel mobilisations of October 1536 when the formation of large mounted hosts created an excessive demand for oats. Another type of community, then, with cause for complaint was the one subjected to heavy impositions of sergeant corn. Such communities were to be found within the vicinity of Kirkby Stephen but, again, beyond the bounds of the Clifford estate. Soulby, Kaber and Crosby were all heavily charged, two of them paying 63 bushels each and the third, 44 bushels. The same three manors were also subjected to the relatively high noutgeld payments of 13s. 8d., 17s. 8d. and 10s. 2d. In these manors the conjunction of sergeant corn with noutgeld that mesne lords had passed down to their tenants may well have aroused opposition to the existence of both. In the vicinity were three other manors – Little Musgrave, Nateby and Smardale – whose liability to both payments may have provoked their inhabitants to follow suit.141 The objection to sergeant corn and noutgeld, then, was very much a complaint against the earl of Cumberland but not simply an act of reprisal 140   For Thompson, see SP1/117, f. 55 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. For noutgeld payments, see cornage account for 1528 in Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth, box 48. For sergeant corn payments, see Nicolson and Burn, History of Westmorland and Cumberland, vol. I, pp. 292–4. 141  Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, p. 68; Nicolson and Burn, History of Westmorland and Cumberland, vol. I, pp. 292–4. For poor harvests, see W.G. Hoskins, ‘Harvest fluctuations and English economic history, 1480–1619’, Agricultural History Review, 12 (1964): 39 (figure II), 45 (appendix II). The year 1535 had an especially bad harvest, while the harvest of 1536 was mediocre. A succession of abundant harvests followed in the late 1530s. Hoskins study is based on west country evidence. For an attempt to apply the findings to evidence from the north, see C.S.L. Davies, ‘The pilgrimage of grace reconsidered’, Past and Present, 41 (1968): 57–8.

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for his refusal to join the pilgrimage of grace. Essentially, it stemmed from the mean manner in which he was apparently exercising his seigneurial rights as hereditary sheriff of the barony – instead of letting them lapse, he seemed to be looking for opportunities to increase their financial value – coupled, possibly, with criticism of his conduct as sheriff in serving writs of subpoena for attendance at Westminster and in favouring the landlord interest generally: conduct which might have suggested that Cumberland no longer deserved to receive such payments. For this reason, the complaint could have been voiced not only by his own tenants, already aggrieved at his policy of raising fines and intaking waste, but also by the tenants of mesne lords holding in cornage and by freeholders in socage. The complaint was highly localised – much more so than any of the other agrarian complaints – being mostly confined to the East Ward of the Barony of Westmorland and, in all probability, to its southerly part: the parishes of Kirkby Stephen, Brough and Crosby Garrett. Yet no matter how localised, the complaint had a broader resonance, having connexions with the Pilgrims’ complaint against the crown’s policy of fiscal feudalism. In this respect, the December petition, while making no mention of cornage or sergeant corn, contained three articles with which the men of the East Ward, by virtue of their objection to making these payments, could have sympathised: that is, the demand for the repeal of the Act of Uses (article 20), the requirement that northerners summoned to appear before a court of equity should be allowed to do so at York rather than in London (article 23), and that escheators should be prevented from converting non-military into military tenures (article 24).142 Essentially, the grievance was the work of peasants seeking to protect their resources from an unjust lord. In this respect, their intent was not so different from their wish to ensure that rents of assize and gressums should remain fixed for ever more, or to reduce payments of the tithe to a nominal sum of money. Tithes That the pilgrimage of grace was, in part, a reaction to the failed harvest of 1535 and the poor harvest of 1536 is evident in the rebels’ hostility to making payments in kind: whether in the form of sergeant corn, rents or tithes. Between October 1536 and February 1537, tithe protests surfaced in Lancashire Oversands, Westmorland, Cumberland, the North Riding, Durham and Northumberland. They led to refusals to pay, reclamation of tithes already paid and radical proposals to convert compulsory payments 142   For Act of Uses, see above, pp. 123–6. For court appearance in York, see above, pp. 152–4. For escheators, see above, pp. 125–6.

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in kind into voluntary payments in cash. As a tithe protest, it was far from conventional since the aim was to transform the traditional relationship between the payers of tithes, the ordinary parishioners, and the recipients of tithes, the clergy and gentlemen. Like the demand for the abolition of gressums, the proposed tithe reform was too extreme to merit inclusion in the Pilgrims’ December articles. Yet underlining its importance to the commons was the serious consideration accorded it by the Appleby council, its mention in the Westmorlander’s letter to Aske of October and also in their November petition, the raiding of tithe barns in January 1537 to reclaim the tithe in Cumberland and the Barony of Kendal, and its designation as the main item on the agenda of the Richmond council that met in February 1537. The Westmorland petition stated: ‘all the tithes to remain to every man his own doing therefore according to his duty’, proposing that, along with the restrictions placed on gressums, this reform would benefit ‘the wealth of our country and the profit of the commonalty’. What was intended was made clearer in the earlier letter to Aske which required ‘every man to have own own tithes, paying therefore to the church their duties’.143 The phrasing of this demand both reflected and rebutted the statute on tithes enacted earlier in the year which accused those refusing to pay tithes as ‘having no respect of their duties to Almighty God’.144 Essentially, the petition proposed, in a radical departure from tradition, that each parishioner should keep the corn that was normally exacted and then decide himself on how much to pay, presumably in cash if he so wished. While accepting that payment of the tithe was a duty, this reform would allow the individual to determine its value. Robert Thompson, vicar of Brough, clarified the reform as meaning ‘that anyone might have his own tithe corn’. He also declared it to be ‘a new law’, as undoubtedly it was.145 The 1536 tithe statute had laid down that payment was to be determined by the ecclesiastical laws of the church of England and ‘the laudable usages and customs of the parish or other place’. But the terms of tithe reform, as they were proposed in Cumberland and the Barony of Westmorland, could be justified on neither of these grounds. The Westmorland petition not only set out a reform of the tithe system but also revealed how it was connected with an objection to benefices held by absentees, laymen or heretics. The absentees were regarded as unsuitable because they were unlikely ‘to keep hospitality’ in the parish; while disqualifying laymen and heretics was the belief that they were

143

  For petition, see below, Appendix, doc. 15. For letter, see Denton, p. 478.

144

  27 Henry VIII, c. 20.   E36/119, f. 81b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (4)].

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ill-equipped ‘to serve God’.146 In this respect, the tithe complaint sprang from recent discord in the barony over several appointments to benefices, all of them made in the East Ward. One cause of contention had been the appointment of John Knolles as rector of St Theobald’s in Great Musgrave. In January 1536 the parishioners had refused to place the tithe in Knolles’ hands, presumably because, reputed to be a chaplain in Cromwell’s service, he was considered to be a heretic.147 This incident helps to explain the explicit objection in the Westmorland petition to clerics who were ‘my lord Cromwell’s chaplains’.148 Another cause of offence happened in 1535 when Cromwell persuaded the abbot of York St Mary to use his right of presentation to grant the vicarage of Kirkby Stephen to a layman: that is, Sir Thomas Wharton, a landowner in the parish and agent of the earl of Cumberland. This grant was countermanded by royal order which named the humanist cleric Peter Vannes for the post. Vannes, however, was a pluralist, diplomat and courtier, with no intention of residing in Kirkby Stephen – hence the objection in the Westmorland petition to benefices held by absentees.149 A further source of concern was the abiding custom in the barony of paying tithes in kind, some of which, in going to the unpopular earl of Cumberland, provided another instance of lay possession of clerical office and exposed yet another invidious opportunity for the earl and his officials to draw benefit in time of dearth.150 To the problem of unworthy benefice-holders, the Westmorland petition offered two solutions: one, to establish a right for parishioners to depose those vicars who failed to offer a satisfactory service; the other, to confer upon parishioners, by allowing them to determine how much to pay, some leverage to make priests mend their ways. In addition, the proposed reforms, it seems, would have allowed individual parishioners to decide not only how much to pay, but whether to pay in produce or money.151 In Cumberland the complaint against tithes was, according to Barnard Townley, the rector of Caldbeck, voiced at various rebel assemblies in October 1536. It was done in connection with a letter, written in the name of Captain Poverty and dispatched into Cumbria from the commons of Richmondshire. At each assembly the letter was read out and, in accordance with it, the commons resolved ‘to have paid no rent nor tithes but in money

146

  SP1/111, f. 118 [L.P. XI.1080].   SP1/101, f. 77 [L.P. X. 96]. 148   SP1/111, f. 118. 149   L.P. VIII. 167; Oxford D.N.B., vol. 56, p. 124. 150   For the tithes paid directly in kind to the earl, see Chatsworth Trustees, Bolton Abbey MS, vol. 10, fos 18–18b. 147

151

  See below, Appendix, doc. 15.

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at their pleasure’.152 In addition, the Cumberlanders protested against tithe payments by acts of reclamation. An extensive spoiling of tithe barns began on 30 December 1536 in the vicinity of Cockermouth, affecting the extensive parishes of Bridekirk and Camerton to the north of the river Derwent and Brigham and Dean to the south of the river. It began in the townships of Broughton, Tallentire, Camerton and Eaglesfield when, after the collection of the corn tithe, community leaders cleared out the threshers appointed by the tithe farmers and fitted their own locks to the tithe barn doors, alongside those belonging to the tithe owners. The aim was to establish a 14-day truce so that new terms could be negotiated between payers and recipients. But the truce had been broken by 4 January 1537 as the tithe barns came under renewed attack. Breaking the locks on the barn doors, the rioters seized the corn and shared it among themselves.153 A further spate of tithe barn raiding occurred from 18 January, involving, it was said, 800 rioters. According to Thomas Curwen, sheriff of Cumberland, who decided to flee into Yorkshire rather than take on the task of restoring order, the commons ‘did assemble in townships in every quarter’ and ‘spoiled all the tithe barns on the west side of Derwent’. The communities concerned are evident from the surviving lists of Cumberlanders who were executed for participating in the 1537 riots: Branthwaite and Pardshaw in the parish of Dean; the parish of Dearham; and Embleton, Wythop, Eaglesfield, Cockermouth and Brigham, all in the parish of Brigham.154 Some of this rioting was incited by local animus against Sir Thomas Wharton, farmer of the tithe in Broughton as well as impropriator of the tithe in the parish of Dean, and against Peter Middleton, farmer of the tithe in Tallentire. Both men were held in contempt for refusing to join the pilgrimage of grace as well as for being harsh landlords.155 But other communities engaged in the rioting – notably those in the parish of Brigham – owed tithes to neither of these men. Moreover, the rioters were asserting a principle: that the corn tithe should be paid not as a literal tenth in kind but as a sum of money, the amount to be determined by the payer. This is made evident not only in Barnard Townley’s account of the October uprising but also in a bill of complaint exhibited in Chancery within the period 1533 and 1537 by those who farmed the tithe in the 152   SP1/117, f. 46 [L.P. XII(1). 687(1)]. For Captain Poverty letter, see Bush ‘Captain Poverty’: 18–19. 153   SP1/114, f. 16 [L.P. XII(1). 18]. 154   L.P. XII(1). 319; SP1/114, f. 228 [L.P. XII(1). 185]; Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, Appendix II. 155   For tithe farming, see L.P. XII(1). 18. For Wharton and Dean, see Nicolson and Burn, History of Westmorland and Cumberland, vol. II, p. 57. For the charge of harsh landlordship, see Bush, pp. 338–41.

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parish of Brigham.156 It alleged that, contrary to former practice, the parishioners had refused to deliver their tithe corn, proposing instead to ‘pay … money for the same at their own pleasure’. Confirmation of this desire for commutation lay in a report made by Sir Thomas Curwen to the duke of Norfolk at the end of January 1537.157 Commenting on the recent tithe protest in the parishes of Brigham and Dean, Curwen claimed that the protesters ‘made their quarrel to take every man his corn that he had tilled and would have the same for their money’: in other words, their abiding preference was to pay a tithe in money and to have the right to decide themselves on how much to pay. Yet another part of the north-west that was troubled by the tithe at the time was the Barony of Kendal and the adjacent region of Lancashire Oversands. In the case of Lancashire Oversands, the objection to the payment of tithes appeared to have nothing to do with the issue of tithes per se but rather the terms of the December agreement. Those who came under attack for collecting tithes were the farmers placed in charge of the dissolved priories of Cartmel and Conishead, both of them restored during the course of the pilgrimage of grace. The attempt of these farmers to collect the tithe corn due to the two houses was seen as offending the agreement that religious houses restored by the rebels should be left as they were until a special parliament had settled their fate.158 In contrast, the tithe protest in the Barony of Kendal asserted the principle – already declared in Cumberland and the Barony of Westmorland – that payment of tithes should be in cash rather than in kind. But whereas the commons of Cumberland and the Barony of Westmorland were demanding something new, the commons of the Barony of Kendal were calling for the maintenance of what they claimed to be a customary right. The rebels of the Barony of Kendal justified their disobedience over the payment of tithes in terms remaining true to their ‘ancient laudable customs’. At the start of the uprising the custom appeared to relate to the tenure of tenant right and the restrictions that it placed upon landlords in charging gressums and in developing the waste. But the custom of Kendal, as it was cited in the 1520s and 1530s, also applied to tithes. This was made evident in several actions brought before the courts of equity which claimed that ‘a laudable and prescribed custom’, used ‘time out of mind’, permitted ‘all persons holding land’ in the barony to pay tithes in 156   The National Archives, C1/943/70. The date of this bill can be determined from its address to Sir Thomas Audley who became lord chancellor in 1533 and from its naming as defendant John Wilson who was executed in early 1537. See Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, p. 140. 157   L.P. XII(1). 319. 158

  Bush and Bownes, pp. 234–5.

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cash.159 By the later stages of the uprising this aspect of the custom was very much in mind, as was seen in January and February 1537 when the parishioners of Heversham first forced Richard Redman, a gentleman of the parish, to swear the oath to be true ‘to the custom of Kendal’; and then, in exemplification, a fortnight later, they ‘did take the tithe unto themselves’ – whether by reclamation or by resisting collection is not made clear – from the farmers who had leased the collection from the abbey of York St Mary. The parishioners appeared to act on the grounds that, as their tithe was customarily commuted to a money rent, its collection in kind was totally out of order.160 The Barony of Kendal’s commitment to the issue of tithes was also evident in its keenness to send delegates to the Richmond council in February 1537, the purpose of which was to arrange yet another meeting with the duke of Norfolk to deal with matters omitted from, or misrepresented in, the December petition. The council’s remit was undoubtedly to deal with a wide range of matters, but that it included the payment of tithes was revealed by delegates from the barony. Miles Hutton of Whasset in the parish of Beetham said he was sent to Richmond ‘to the duke’s council there about tithes’; John Hudisson of Hale in the same parish admitted that he took a message to the constable of Holme announcing a meeting at Richmond ‘to meet the duke of Norfolk about their tithes’. This message was the work of John Stanes, also of Beetham parish, who in mid-January led the parishioners of Heversham to seize Richard Redman and force upon him the oath to be true to the custom of Kendal. And it was Stanes who accompanied Miles Hutton to Richmond, the two of them receiving 6s. 8d. from the other parishioners to cover the cost of their journey. Beetham was not alone in sending delegates. They also came from the parishes of Kendal, Burton, Kirkby Lonsdale and probably from Warton and Heversham: in fact, a large part of the barony.161 The prominence given to tithes in the accounts that the Kendalers provided of the Richmond council suggests that, in this region, tithes and the nature of their payment had become a major concern, in all probability because, in spite of its importance to the commons, the issue had been brushed aside by the Pilgrim leadership earlier, suffering total exclusion from the December petition. In and around Richmond in the North Riding, the tithe issue had featured in the revolts of October 1536. The demand that tithes should be in money and at pleasure appeared to be made in an article attached to the already mentioned Captain Poverty letter that the Richmondshire rebels 159   For example, C1/845/16–17; C1/856/16. For the custom of Kendal, see Bush, pp. 257–8. 160   SP1/117, f. 29 [L.P. XII(1). 671 (2/II and iii)]. 161   Bush and Bownes, pp. 105–7.

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had composed and circulated. According to the cleric John Dakyn, an eye-witness of this uprising, in the parishes around Richmond the clergy were having ‘the profits of the benefice’ reduced, some by half, some by a third. The willingness to host a council in February 1537 with tithes foremost in an agenda of matters ‘for the commons’ weal’ would also suggest a strong commitment to that issue.162 Elsewhere in the north-east, notably Northumberland and the Palatinate of Durham, men were also aggrieved by tithe payments. Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, who had fled from his palace at Bishop Auckland to Norham Castle to escape from the Richmondshire rebels, revealed as much. Looking back on the pilgrimage of grace in March 1537, he told Cromwell that ‘many priests have been at this commotion spoiled and their corn by force taken out of their barns’. As well as reclaiming tithe corn, parishioners, according to Tunstall, were withholding further payments ‘by reason of losses that they have sustained at this commotion’, notably in Northumberland at the hands of reivers from Tyndale and Redesdale.163 None of this protest actually called for the complete abolition of tithes. The objection specifically focused upon the great tithe: that is, the tithes conceived as products of the earth. These the commons remained willing to pay, but neither in kind nor as a literal tenth. What was especially annoying to them were tithes which had not undergone commutation to cash. By this time tithe payments were commonly made in money not only for earnings from labour or trade and for perishable produce such as milk and eggs but also for hay and pasture.164 Thus, in requiring a money payment, the rebels were essentially calling for the commutation of the corn tithe.165 Nonetheless, while proposing no more than the completion of a process that had been long underway, the rebels were in fact insisting upon a major change in the tithe system. This was because the commutation of all payments in kind to cash would have altered the balance of advantage very much in the payer’s favour: in the first place, by denying the recipient the profit of marketing produce in an economy which, because of population growth and frequent harvest failure, was notably prone to inflation in the price of farm produce; and, in the second place, by awarding the payer all the advantages of the market, especially because payments in money were inclined to become fixed, as was already evident with rents of assize and 162

  Bush, p. 173.   SP1/116, f. 188 [L.P. XII(1). 568]. 164   R. Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation (Oxford, 1979), pp. 129–31; J.S. Purvis, Select Sixteenth-century Causes in Tithes, p. vii in Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, 114 (1947). 165   For its tendency to endure as a payment in kind, see Houlbrooke, Church Courts, pp. 126–8, 148. 163

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tithes that had already undergone commutation.166 The rebels challenged the traditional system in a further sense by demanding that tithes should be paid at pleasure, a demand which represented a complete repudiation of the tithe as a literal tenth. In awarding payers the right to decide how much to pay, it gave them the opportunity to evaluate, when estimating their payment, what the church deserved and what the harvest allowed. Earlier in 1536 a statute in defence of tithes had been enacted (27 Henry VIII c. 20), its preamble stating in self-justification that the contempt recently shown for clerical authority by the widespread refusal to pay tithes was unprecedented.167 This general antipathy to tithes stemmed, in all likelihood, from certain preconditions, one of which was the government’s recent ill-treatment of the clergy – by subjecting them to lay control, by annexing their wealth, by repudiating their rights and by doubting their spiritual efficacy – and the disrespect it had generated among the laity towards the church. Another precondition was the tendency, associated with the practice of tithe-farming and impropriation, to place tithes in the pockets of laymen, thus denying them their original function of making financial provision for church services. A third precondition was the dearths caused by periodic harvest failures which overnight intensified the burden of the tithe when paid in kind. Finally there was the long-term rise in food prices which created conflicting attitudes towards the tithe by persuading payers to prefer payments in money and recipients to payments in kind.168 But how applicable are these preconditions to the tithe movement connected with the pilgrimage of grace? Without a doubt, the government’s inclination to question clerical authority eventually inspired anti-tithe sentiments among the people. But since, in their defence of both the old religion and the society of orders, the Pilgrims were deeply concerned about the government’s demotion of the clergy, it is highly improbable that this consideration played any part in shaping their attitude to tithes. Rather, the Pilgrims were encouraged to criticise tithe payments because of the clergy’s willingness to accept the religious policies of the government, no matter how heretical. As it was shown in Westmorland, catholic communities were against paying tithes to heretics. For this reason, the tithe protest of the rebels, in so far as it rested on anti-clericalism, was not simply making 166   See Felicity Heal and Rosemary O’Day (eds), Church and Society in England (London, 1977), p. 109. 167   Statutes of the Realm, vol. III, pp. 551–2. For general antipathy to tithes, see Purvis, Select Sixteenth-century Causes in Tithes, pp. vii–viii; Houlbrooke, Church Courts, ch. 5 and Appendix 1. 168   For these general preconditions, see Houlbrooke, Church Courts, p. 119–20, 146–8.

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an agrarian complaint, as A.G. Dickens and Scott Harrison seemed to think, but expressing discontent with the new religion.169 As we have seen, the Westmorlanders’ concern that clerical offices be used ‘to serve God’ caused them to object to benefices going not only to heretics but also to those who ‘are no priests’.170 But to what extent did the protest against tithes stem from their acquisition by laymen, whether it be by tithe farming or by impropriation? After all, such practices had been going on for a very long time. Moreover, they could not be said to impair religious services since provision for them continued to be made irrespective of who owned the tithe. Thomas Wharton was opposed by tithe protesters, in the capacity of both impropriator of a benefice and tithe farmer, but probably not for being either. In all likelihood, the opposition he had to face from parishioners in late 1536 and early 1537 stemmed from his reputation as a harsh landlord and his Cromwellian and Clifford connexions.171 Moreover, when a choice arose between paying tithes to a layman and paying them to a heretical priest, as it did in the Westmorland parish of Great Musgrave in early 1536, the parishioners preferred to pay them to the Musgrave family rather than to the incumbent, a heretical priest and crony of Cromwell.172 What principally concerned the commons in the matter of tithes was, first, an inappropriate return for what was paid and, secondly, extortionate exaction. In this general sense their protest was part of a long tradition. The complaint about inappropriate returns had traditionally centred upon the inhospitality and uncharitableness of those who received the tithe. Now with the Henrician reformation well underway, it centred upon the phenomenon of Cromwell’s chaplains: that is, certain beneficiaries of the tithe who, as Cromwell’s agents, were thought to be bent on destroying the old religion. The complaint against extortion centred upon tithe-farming. Like lay impropriation, farming out the tithe was an ancient and familiar practice. In fact, when the tithe was levied in kind and conjoined with pluralism or appropriation to a distant religious house or college, tithefarming was the inevitable outcome. Although there is nothing to suggest that the tithe protest of 1536 and 1537 was an objection to tithe-farming in principle, the practices associated with it were a major source of

169   A.G. Dickens, ‘Secular and religious motivation in the pilgrimage of grace’, Studies in Church History, 4 (1967): 51; Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, p. 60. 170   See above, pp. 229–30. 171   See Harrison, Pilgimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, p. 58; SP1/124, f. 67b [L.P. XII(2). 548].For Wharton’s Cromwell connexions, see below, n. 179. 172   Bush, p. 308.

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grievance and, if implemented, the reforms proposed by the rebels would have caused its termination. The practice of appropriating parochial tithes to distant religious institutions had created problems of collection. To overcome them, these institutions resorted to either commutation or a leasing out of the right to collect (that is, tithe farming). In the fifteenth century, with falling or static farm prices, such institutions had opted increasingly for commutation to cash.173 In contrast, in the early sixteenth century, with inflation resulting from the sluggish response of production to population growth, the preference was to receive tithes in kind. Although more profitable in this inflationary situation, however, tithes in kind were difficult to collect, setting the recipients considerable problems in relation to storage, security from pilfering, transport and sale. The well-tried answer was to farm out the collection of the tithe, receiving in return a cash rent. By allowing tithe farmers to gather the tithe in kind and to enjoy all the profit from marketing this produce, tithe owners were well placed not only to find men willing to serve as collectors but also to charge high rents for the right to collect. The need to recoup the high rent, however, encouraged tithe farmers to collect the tithe with maximum rigour. Setting the scene for tithe protests, then, in the early sixteenth century was a change in policy on the part of appropriating institutions as they came to prefer tithe-farming to commutation. Since this change of policy marked a reversion from exacting tithes in money to exacting them in kind, tithe protesters were obliged to justify their proposals for cash payment in terms of restoring custom and tradition. The tithe protests of late 1536 and early 1537 in Westmorland and Cumberland happened in areas where the tithe had been appropriated to faraway religious houses and colleges. In Cumberland, much of the troubled area west of the Derwent lay within the parish of Brigham which owed its tithe to the college of Staindrop in Durham, whereas the troubled areas north of the Derwent, situated in the parishes of Bridekirk and Dearham, owed their tithe to the Yorkshire abbey of Guisborough; while those in the parish of Bromfield owed it to the abbey of York St Mary. Likewise in Westmorland the affected parishes of Morland, Kirkby Stephen, Appleby and Kendal had been appropriated to York St Mary while the appropriator of the parish of Brough was Queen’s College Oxford.174 173   R.N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1993), p. 211. 174   See Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, p. 59. For appropriation to Staindrop College, see Valor Ecclesiasticus, vol. V, p. 267. For appropriation to Guisborough Abbey, see ibid., p. 285. For appropriation to York St Mary Abbey, see ibid., pp. 5 and 284, 296–7, 267–8. For appropriation to Queen’s College Oxford, see ibid., p. 296.

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The protest appeared to be principally against payments in corn, the tithe which appropriators normally reserved for themselves and which, if they did not commute to cash, they farmed out. In demanding commutation to cash and payments at pleasure, the commons were directly opposing the tithe-farming system in the sense that commutation and payment at pleasure would have deprived the tithe farmer of any guarantee of profit and therefore all incentive to invest in tithe collection. Moreover, with tithes commuted completely to money the tithe farmer would have become redundant. The connexion between tithe protests and harvest failure is clearly evident, not only in 1535–6 but also in the periods 1549–51 and 1555–6.175 The significance of the tithe protests associated with the pilgrimage of grace is that they did not feature merely refusals to pay or reclamations of tithes already paid but also sophisticated proposals for a radical reform of the tithe system. In calling for the commutation of all tithes and their payment at pleasure, they were the work of peasants advocating innovations designed not only to protect themselves against exploitation but also to ensure that they, not the clergy or their tithe farmers, benefited from the price rise. In this respect, the tithe issue was conceived in similar terms to landlord exactions; and in all likelihood the objection to the tithe was generated by coincident increases in the weight of fixed rents in kind and in raised dues in cash. No matter whether the exaction was a tithe or a rent, or a seigneurial tax like cornage and sergeant corn, the peasantry’s aim was to maximise the retained surplus by minimising what the landlord could extract. In this respect, their basic aim was a partial transference of wealth within the society of orders from the lords and clergy to the commons. Enabling it was inflation and the natural inclination of regular payments in cash to become fixed by custom. In addition to these preconditions, the tithe protest was promoted by the pilgrimage of grace itself. In October 1536, as the Cumbrian and Richmondshire rebellions got underway, the commons in those parts became deeply suspicious of both gentlemen and clerics. Moved by the belief that insurrection was best organised through the mutuality of the society of orders, they were inclined to react strongly when clerics and gentlemen failed to take part, in the conviction that gentlemen and clerics were duty bound to serve the cause of the commons and that the obligations owed them by the commonalty depended upon a proper performance of this service. In these circumstances the at-pleasure concept developed, as a means of persuading clerics to participate. Tithes, moreover, along with other payments, were withheld or reclaimed to punish so-called traitors to the commons. The animus shown towards the tithe farmers 175

  See Houlbrooke, Church Courts, p. 150.

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in the first stage of the tithe barn riots of 1537 in Cumberland must have owed something to the fact that among them were Thomas Wharton and Peter Middleton, two well-known gentlemen who refused to join the uprising and were reputed to be harsh landlords. The second stage of tithe barn riots in Cumberland coincided with attempts to revive rebellion in the Honour of Cockermouth and the Barony of Copeland:176 one motive for raiding the barns was to provision the rebel army, especially to feed its vital ingredient, the horses, at a time of year when grass was not readily available as fodder. Furthermore, the tithe farmers were dispossessed at Cartmel and Conishead because they were thought to be in breach of the December agreement; while the tithe agitation in early 1537 stemmed from the failure of the December petition to recognise this complaint. Yet, although precipitated by the pilgrimage of grace, the grievance against tithes could not be regarded as simply its by-product. The innovatory proposals on tithes produced by the Appleby council in November 1536, and the plans associated with the Richmond council of February 1537, suggested that the tithe complaint was a grievance in its own right and bent on conserving the peasant surplus. On the other hand, to see it as exclusively an agrarian matter overlooks the parishioner’s need to use tithes as a means of pressuring the clergy to resist the Henrician reformation and to stand by the old religion. In this respect, the tithe protest made by those engaged in the pilgrimage of grace would appear to be – notwithstanding A.G. Dickens’ counterclaim – ‘a crusade for the rights of the Holy Church’.177 Agrarian Grievances: their Meaning and Impact The agrarian grievances associated with the pilgrimage of grace were thought at the time to express a desperate struggle between impoverished peasants and harsh landlords. This impression was imparted not only by the upland allegiance to Captain Poverty but also by governmentsponsored reports, made shortly after the end of the uprising, on agrarian conditions in the upland north.178 In actual fact, at issue was not economic survival but a struggle over manorial rights: that is, between those claimed by lords of the manor and those claimed by a fairly well-off peasantry. Furthermore, the demands made by this peasantry required not simply the conservation of custom but also a measure of novelty. Conflict between 176

  Bush and Bownes, pp. 272–4.   Dickens, ‘Secular and religious motivation’: 51. 178   For Captain Poverty movements, see Bush, ‘Captain Poverty’: 19, 24. For reports to the government, see L.P. XII(1). 478; L.P. XII(2). 205, 548. 177

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lord and peasant – quintessentially a constitutional struggle within the bounds of the manor – stemmed from the disadvantages created for lords by the emergence of tenant right, which drove them to seek its amendment and to resist its extension. It also arose from the legal fragility of customary tenures, which their holders sought to strengthen not only by insisting on respect for custom but also by laying claim to new rights. In this regard, the conflict represented a clash of innovatory claims, with tenants using the defence of custom to withstand the attempts of lords to raise rents and dues and to improve the waste, while making, at the same time, novel claims for tenant right, especially by calling for fixed gressums and by seeking to obtain for their customary tenures recognition in common law. As we have seen, this stood alongside several other innovations proposed by the peasantry during the course of the pilgrimage of grace – such as the complete abolition of noutgeld and sergeant corn, the conversion of the tithe to a sum of money, the amount determined by the payer, the commutation of rents in kind to a perpetually fixed cash payment, and immunity from a summons to Westminster to answer complaints exhibited in a court of equity – all of them having the same goal: to safeguard as much of the peasant surplus as possible. In this respect, such a struggle over rights had a social and economic purpose. Socially, peasants sought to protect themselves from the domination of manorial lords, especially by gaining greater security of tenure. Economically, peasants sought to protect themselves by minimising the exactions made of them by lords and receivers of the tithe. The peasants leading this struggle were already considerably advantaged, paying little in regular rents and, in the border counties, enjoying exemption from government taxes. Their essential aim was to preserve this privileged position no matter at what cost either to their social superiors, the gentlemen and clergy, or to their social inferiors, the cottagers and labourers, to whom they sublet on economic rents, whom they exploited through low wages and whose peasant aspirations they thwarted by opposing the creation of new tenements on the waste. Provoking conflict between these privileged tenants and their lords in late 1536 was a certain set of economic and political circumstances. Economically, there was the effect of long-term inflation. Lumbered with rents fixed by custom, and needing to prevent the devaluation of their landed incomes, lords became increasingly reliant on raising gressums and enclosing waste. Then there was the impact of short-term inflation upon the peasantry, the result of poor harvests, which increased the burden of payments in kind, such as tithes, sergeant corn and uncommuted rents of assize, and incited demands for commutation or complete abolition. A process of politicisation enabled agrarian movements to escalate from local riots into regional rebellions, the result of communities finding

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common cause in a shared hatred of the government and its agents. The pilgrimage of grace was clearly a major politicising force in its own right, but not the only one. Another was the suppression of the lesser monasteries, an act of government with sinister agrarian implications for the peasantry, partly because of the changes in landownership that it was bringing about, and partly because of the fear that the greater, as well as the lesser, houses were lined up for dissolution, which, if true, would cause a massive and disruptive transference of land and livestock. Yet another source of politicisation was the association of harsh landlordship with government officialdom. Thus, the agrarian grievances against the earl of Cumberland owed something to the fact that he was regarded as an ineffectual warden of the West March as well as an undeserving sheriff of Westmorland. Moreover, encouraging peasants to take militant action was the knowledge that certain landlords – for example Cumberland, Wharton, John Leigh, Middleton – had connexions with detested ministers such as Cromwell, Cranmer and the hated suppression commissioner, Thomas Leigh.179 Aided by such political factors, the agrarian revolts of 1536 and 1537 became substantial movements – rather in the manner of the peasants’ revolt of 1381 or Ket’s rebellion of 1549. Scott Harrison regarded the agrarian grievances as simply a matter of economic hardship, overlooking the fact that they represented a constitutional struggle within the framework of the manor between lord and peasant. And he played them down by proposing that their essential contribution to the pilgrimage of grace was ‘to create a general background of dissatisfaction which made people more willing to join a rising in which other issues also bulked large’.180 But the agrarian revolts of 1536 and 1537 were remarkable in their own right, representing a peasant uprising on a scale not seen in England since 1381 or 1451 and only rivalled in the Tudor period by Ket’s rebellion. Moreover, since these other peasant rebellions were largely confined to southern England, the agrarian movement associated with the pilgrimage of grace stands out as a singular and spectacular event in the history of the north. Yet it did not feature much in the heartland of the pilgrimage of grace. It only directly affected, in Lord Darcy’s words, ‘the high and wilder countries’ of the upland north.181 Furthermore, none of the revolts of 1536–7 were simply agrarian movements, for all were also reactions against the Henrician 179   For Middleton and Cranmer, see C1/878/7. For Wharton and Cromwell, see, for example, L.P. VIII. 167; L.P. XI. 666; L.P. XI. 1339. Thomas Leigh came of the Cumberland gentry family to which John Leigh belonged. For Cumberland, see Bush and Bownes, pp. 163, 167. 180  Harrison, Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, p. 71. 181

  L.P. XI. 1337.

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reformation, especially its repudiation of the papacy and its disapproval of saint worship. Nonetheless, agrarian complaint played an important part in the pilgrimage of grace. This was for two reasons, one relating to aim, the other to organisation. Besides offering a defence of the old religion, the pilgrimage of grace presented itself as against the decay of the commonwealth, the result, the Pilgrims felt, of expropriation and exaction. Just as they saw the government harming the commonwealth by annexing a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth through the confiscation of church property and tax reform, so they thought that landlords were compounding this offence, both by appropriating lands to which rights of common had customarily appertained and by raising rents and gressums in contempt of custom. In southern Yorkshire, the region where the uprising was initiated by Robert Aske, under the inspiration of the Lincolnshire uprising, the threat to the commonwealth was seen exclusively in terms of the suppression of religious houses and exorbitant taxation; but in the upland north, the region linked by Captain Poverty and his letters, the threat to the commonwealth was repeatedly attributed to harsh landlordship, notably in the border counties, where changes in estate management, implemented by lords without tenant agreement, were charged with undermining the capacity of the commons to defend the northern frontier against the rampages of reivers and invading Scots. Finally, agrarian grievances had significant effect upon the organisation of the pilgrimage of grace. Central to the early success of the uprising was the formation of the Richmondshire and Durham rebel armies and their willingness to march south and join up with Aske. The rapport achieved between the armies which coalesced to form the Pilgrim host, and overawed the duke of Norfolk outside Doncaster on 27 October, relied partly upon shared grievances and partly upon replicating the society of orders by assigning a leadership role to gentlemen. For south Yorkshire the latter was easily achieved because the rebels’ grievances were in no way socially divisive; for north Yorkshire, however, the presence of agrarian grievances created a problem. Yet this was overcome as lords and commons found a common cause in their objections to the government and because lords were prepared to assure the commons that the custom of the country would be preserved. Such an assurance was acceptable to the peasantry of the north-east in view of their wish to preserve the custom as it then stood, but not to the peasantry of the north-west since the latter were demanding a revision of custom, one that, in the context of the time, proved unacceptable to lords. As a result, the Cumbrian revolts, although not against the principle of the society of orders, could not be organised in accordance with its assumptions and beliefs. Undoubtedly there were gentlemen in the region with as powerful a grievance against the government as gentlemen in other parts of the north; but because of

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the agrarian differences dividing lord and peasant, leadership was placed beyond their grasp. Consequently, whereas in much of the north the pilgrimage of grace was a so-called rising of the commons led by gentlemen, in the north-west it was essentially a peasant rebellion. The north-east only followed suit in 1537 after the rapport between Pilgrim lord and tenant had fallen apart. At the Richmond council the gentlemen failed to attend and, with peasant grievances against landlords firmly displayed, they had no difficulty in deciding to remain true to the December agreement. In this respect, the agrarian issue settled the fate of the pilgrimage of grace, allowing the government the opportunity to put it down. The success of the uprising lay, then, in its ability, between October and December 1536, to operate through the medium of the society of orders; but triumph turned to failure in early 1537 when a modus operandi of this nature was ruled out by further outbreaks of agrarian conflict.

Conclusion Thanks to its character as a rising of the commons, and because so much documentary evidence has survived on the subject, the pilgrimage of grace offers a unique insight into how the people of the north, on the eve of the reformation, thought about religion, social relations and politics. In this respect, it offers a much more satisfactory means of exploring the popular mentality of the time than by relying upon the social, political and religious views set out in government statements, treatises and sermons, which essentially sought to define and advocate the ideals, standards and duties by which good subjects and virtuous Christians should live, rather than to offer informed comment on what people actually believed and felt. Basically, this latter evidence emphasised a duty of obedience to a formal hierarchy of orders, a duty requiring the people deferentially to accept their humble but important lot of complementing the rule of princes and lords and the religious ministrations of priests with a productive and commercial function, which provided, through a revenue drawn from rents and taxes, the wealth needed to maintain degree – the backbone of church and state – and to uphold the realm’s military strength, the vital ingredient for achieving an honourable future. Since it expressed disrespect and hostility not only to the government but also to lords and clerics, the pilgrimage of grace appeared to reject all of this, as government apologists were keen and quick to point out. Commenting on its radical and feckless nature, Richard Morison in his Remedy for Sedition exclaimed: O lightness of commons … I am ashamed to rehearse the blind folly that the commons of England have so oft run into. There can come no traitor, no rebel of so base condition, of so little wit but if he be bold enough to take upon him to be their captain, they are foolish enough to follow him … Whom can they [that is, the rebellious commons] refuse when smiths, cobblers, tilers, carters and such other gay Greeks seem worthy to be their governors?

Morison had no doubt about how society should behave: ‘To my purpose, lords must be lords, commons must be commons, everyone accepting his    See W.R.D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529–1559 (London, 1970), chs 1, 2, 6; and his The Tree of Commonwealth, 1450–1793 (London, 2000), chs 1 and 2. Also see Michael Bush, ‘The risings of the commons in England, 1381–1549’, in Jeffrey H. Denton (ed.), Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, 1999), pp. 114–16. Also see Bush and Bownes, pp. 336ff.

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degree, every man content to have that he may lawfully come by’. Since it was driven by the commons – so much so that the duke of Norfolk had to admit that ‘the people bear the rule and not the nobility’, and with rebels dismissively saying of gentlemen that ‘they have ruled us, now we will rule them’ and declaring that ‘the commons would have no gentlemen to be their captains’ – the pilgrimage of grace appeared to be an act of topsy-turvydom, which, in a temporary sense, it was. But the process of turning the world upside down was no more than a way of treating the illness that currently plagued the body politic. Rather than an attempt to dispose of the body, the Pilgrims’ aim was to restore it to good health. Because lords and clerics had failed to put matters right, the commons, it was felt, were justified in temporarily taking over, not to create a new world but simply to realign the old one with its founding principles. Conservation, then, was the abiding goal and reversionary change the basic means of achieving it. Only in this way could they prevent the subversion of Christ’s faith and the decay of the commonwealth. In each case, the basic remedy lay in ensuring that the society of orders was treated with proper respect and its codes of conduct were duly honoured. Central to the commons’ complaint was the manner in which religious reform was transforming the clergy from a self-governing order to a state-controlled profession. Just as objectionable was the displacement of the old nobility by a government of new men who, ignorant or contemptuous of the obligations of rulership on account of their commoner birth, would, it was feared, proceed to impoverish the people rather than nurture its wealth. For the Pilgrim commons, the society of orders was under threat in all its branches. Therefore, what had to be defended was the basic interests of all three orders as well as the complementarity that had traditionally bound them together. And yet, as the pilgrimage of grace made clear, the people had their own distinctive interpretation of how the society of orders should operate. On the one hand, they were inclined to play down the commons’ duty of obedience; on the other, to emphasise the duties that the clergy and gentlemen owed the commons, reasoning that their failure to fulfil these duties authorised the people to cast off their subservience in order to make protest and to seek correction. What they expected of lords and clerics was hospitality and charity – the means by which some of the wealth extracted from the commonalty in rents, dues and tithes could be restored to it. They also expected lords and clerics to provide good governance by exercising a    Remedy for Sedition is printed in D.S. Berkowitz (ed.), Humanist Scholarship and Public Order (London, 1984), p. 119.    The National Archives, SP1/112, f. 96 [L.P. XI. 1234]; L.P. XII(1). 914 (p. 415); The National Archives, E36/119, f. 81 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (4)].

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leniency of landownership, by justly performing their appointed manorial and official tasks and by maintaining a stern, unbending commitment to guarding Christ’s faith and the ancient polity against evil ministers bent on making the king forsake the duties assigned to him in his coronation oath: that is, to rule with benevolence and justice, to defend the realm against foreign powers, to protect the faith against heresy, and to maintain the commonwealth in a flourishing and peaceful state. The commons’ view on how the society of orders should work was revealed in the meaning that they attached to certain terms. For them ‘the subversion of Christ’s faith’ had to be undone. This meant two things: first, a restoration of the papal supremacy which would restore a linchpin of catholicism by returning overall control of matters spiritual to the clergy. Secondly, they wished to restore to saints their former recognition as effective intercedents between God and man, thus justifying the intercessory practices (pilgrimages, masses, prayers, offerings) and institutions (monasteries, chantries, religious gilds, private altars) that, in the previous three centuries, had developed to release dead souls from the terrifying confines of purgatory and to relieve the living miraculously by curing illness and infertility and by bringing good weather and bumper harvests. With this much restored, all that the society of orders could expect of the church would be realised and Christ’s faith would be freed from peril. Likewise, for the commons the term ‘commonwealth’ had a distinctive meaning. By the 1530s it was widely used in government circles to mean the material well-being of the king’s subjects. The Pilgrims gave it the same meaning, partly to show that the government’s measures of political reform were achieving the very opposite of what was intended since, rather than benefiting the commonwealth, were they not causing its decay? But the Pilgrims were also capable of using the term to refer to the wealth of the commons. Employed in the sense of ‘the commons’ wealth’, the term implied that, at the hands of the government, through recent changes in the tax system, and, at the hands of landlords, through recent changes in estate management, the people were being oppressed as never before, so much so that they were being deprived of the capacity to fulfil the obligations expected of loyal subjects, whether it be in the form of military service, keeping the peace or respecting their social betters. By compelling gentlemen to be true not only to the king and the faith but also to ‘the commons’, with threats to kill gentlemen who refused to take this oath, they were making the same point. Associated with using the term in the sense of ‘the commons’ wealth’ was the rebel inclination to present the commons as ‘the poor’, to refer to the commonalty as ‘the estate of poverty’, to see themselves as led by Captain Poverty, and to think that their best means of redress lay in establishing a close and uncomplicated

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relationship between the commons and the king which would allow the latter sufficient freedom from aristocratic or clerical constraint to care for his people. The term ‘commonwealth’ was also given a special northern interpretation since the decay of the commonwealth was explained in terms of a drainage of wealth to the south, the result of the suppression of religious houses and the damage liable to be inflicted upon northerners because of a poorly defended frontier against Scotland. ‘Custom of the country’ was a third term that distinguished the commons’ view on how the society of orders should function. It took on a particular northern slant because of its association with tenantright tenures. The term related partly to the prevalent system of tenancy which, rooted in villeinage, still lacked protection in the common law. It had a poignant meaning for the majority of the commons engaged in the pilgrimage of grace since, whether craftsmen in the towns or peasants in the countryside, they lived in worlds similarly subjected to the regulations of the manor. These regulations rested upon a conjunction of the privileges belonging to the lord of the manor and the rights possessed by the tenantry, the latter dependent upon the lord’s respect for custom. Yet, as it was used in the pilgrimage of grace, the term could also refer to the system of tithes, especially where a fixed payment of cash had replaced the literal tenth in kind. From the peasant’s point of view the reference to custom was a device for extending rights as well as for defending them. In view of the insecurity that peasants would otherwise have possessed as tenants-at-will, and given the value of enjoying free grazing and collection on the waste, and because of the advantage in a period of inflation of paying tithes as a fixed sum of money, customary rights were of great importance to them, and, by the same token, a major encumbrance for lords of the manor and recipients of the tithe. In fact, the relationship between lord and tenant was essentially determined by the power and extent of custom. Pushed to the limit, custom became a priceless benefit, awarding tenants, who in the law held merely at the will of the lord, the security of hereditary possession and the right to pay no more than a minimal rent and a notional tithe. For this reason, peasants involved in the pilgrimage of grace were found using custom not only to resist the innovations of lords but also to swing the tenant/lord relationship in their favour by extending their manorial rights. Not surprisingly, custom – a vital safeguard against lordly and clerical greed – was a major concern of the commons as they sought to translate the ideals of the society of orders into an acceptable code of conduct. All this would suggest that the commons’ attitude to change, at least as indicated by the pilgrimage of grace, requires careful qualification. While much of their complaint called for reversionary change, it would be misleading to regard them as ideologically traditionalist or socially and politically passive. Rather than rooted in naive belief, their complaints were

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conditioned by a process of pragmatic and manipulative consideration that constantly assessed change in the light of what its implementation would yield or forfeit. In this respect a claim for the defence of custom could even express a demand for innovation. Changes imposed from above, at their expense and with no evident benefit to the commons – such as new taxes, the confiscation of church property and the raising of rents or dues – were, not surprisingly, found to be extremely objectionable and constitutionally unsound. The same could be said for government-imposed changes in religious practice and belief which offered in return nothing of certainty or substance while threatening to take much away, notably devotional aids – such as images, jewelled or silver crosses, chalices, plate and candlesticks, relics, altar dressings and priestly apparel – and the right to seek the divine help of saints for the sake of the living and the dead. This is to be contrasted with their attitude to changes promoted by themselves and for their own benefit, which, innovatory rather than reversionary, essentially involved abolishing payments in kind, converting them to fixed or voluntary payments in cash, and extending the scope of customary rights to secure greater protection against predatory lords. While the changes countenanced by the Pilgrim commons all lay within the framework of the society of orders, it was a society strictly interpreted to serve the commons’ interest and therefore, from their point of view, worth abiding by and fighting for. The commons, then, had their own programme of reform which, although couched in terms of the society of orders, was extremely challenging to king, lord and priest, so much so that the three of them eventually closed rank in order to bring the uprising to an end.

Appendix

Key Declarations of Pilgrim Complaint and Intent 1. The Lincolnshire rebels’ petition to the king: SP1/108, f. 45 [L.P. XI. 705 (1). This is the only surviving copy of the petition. It can be identified as such from the king’s reply to it: St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 463–6. It is evidently not complete. Lacking is a complaint against the clerical tax, first fruits and tenths, and a request for a pardon. To the King Our Sovereign Lord, First, for the suppression of so many religious houses as be this instant time suppressed whereby the service of God is not only minished but also the poorality of your realm be unrelieved, the which as we think is a great hurt to the commonwealth and many parsons [or persons?] be put from their livings and left at large. The second article is that we humbly beseech your grace that the Act of Uses may be suppressed because we think by the said Act that we your true subjects be clearly restrained of our liberties in the declaration of our will concerning our lands, as well for payment of our debts for doing of your grace’s service as for helping and relieving of our children, the which we had by the sufferance of your laws by a long continuance, the which as we think is a great hurt and discomfort to the commonwealth. The third article is that where your grace hath a tax or a quindime granted unto you by act of parliament payable the next year, the which is and hath been ever leviable of sheep and cattle, and the sheep and cattle of your subjects within the said shire are now at this instant time in manner utterly decayed and gone, whereby your grace to take the said tax or quindime, your said subjects shall be distrained to pay 4d. for one beast and 12d. for 20 sheep, the which would be an importunate charge to them considering the poverty that they be in already and loss which they have sustained these two years bypassed. The fourth article is that we, your true subjects, think that your grace takes of your council and being about you such persons as be of low birth and small reputation which hath procured the premises most especially for their own advantage, the which we suspect to be the Lord Cromwell and Sir Richard Riche, chancellor of the augmentations. The fifth article is that we, your true subjects, find us grieved that there be divers bishops of England of your grace’s late promotion that hath subverted the faith of Christ, as we think, which is the bishop of Canterbury, the bishop

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of Rochester, the bishop of Worcester, the bishop of Salisbury, the bishop of St Davids and the bishop of Dublin, and, in especial – as we think that the beginnings of all the trouble of this [???] and the vexation that hath been taken of your subjects – the bishop of Lincoln.

2. The Pilgrims’ oath, as composed by Robert Aske: SP1/108, f. 48 [L.P. XI. 705 (4)]. For a slightly different version entitled ‘the oath of the honourable men’, see Toller, pp. 50–51. The principal variations are indicated in parentheses. Ye shall not enter to this, our pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth, but only for the love ye bear to God’s faith and (to holy) church militant and the maintenance thereof, the preservation of the king’s person [and] his issue and the purifying of the nobility and to expulse all villeins’ blood and evil councillors against the commonwealth (from his grace and his privy council) of the same. And that ye shall not enter into our said pilgrimage for no particular profit to ourselves (yourselves) nor to do no displeasure to no private person but by counsel of the commonwealth, nor slay nor murder for no envy, but in your hearts to put away all fear (and dread) for the commonwealth and to take before you the cross of Christ and your heart’s faith (in your heart his faith) to the restitution of his church and to the suppression of (these heretics and) heretic opinions by the holy contents of this book.

3. The order for religious houses suppressed: SP1/108, f. 181 [L.P. XI. 784 (ii)]. For a slightly different version, see Toller, p. 51. The principal variations are given in parentheses. That is to say the religious persons to enter into their houses again and to view all the goods there or elsewhere to them adjoining, and thereof a bill indented to be made, the one part thereof to be delivered to the farmer, and the other part to be kept by the convent, and they to do divine service as the king’s bedemen and bedewomen to such time our petition be granted, and to have both victual and corn by delivery of the farmer by bill indented during the time of our petition, or else to take record what they do take for the very necessity of their living during (the time of our pilgrimage and) the time they do the divine service of God. And we trust in God they shall have shortly their right and their prayer (the right intent of our prayer) granted of our most dread sovereign lord, plenteously and mercifully. And that no person nor persons do embezzle or take any goods of the suppressed houses (move no farmer nor alienate nor take away any manner of goods of the aforesaid houses) in the meantime of this petition upon pain of death. By all the whole consent of the headmen of this our pilgrimage for grace.

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4. Aske’s muster proclamation to the commons of Howden, Ouse and Derwent and Marshland: SP1/107, f. 116 [L.P. XI. 622]. Composed in preparation for a muster on Skipwith Moor on 12 October, its date must be 11 October. By me Robert Aske, chief captain of Marshland, the Isle and Howdenshire, Thomas Metham, Robert Aske younger, Thomas Saltmarsh, William Monkton, Mr Franke and Mr Cawood, captains of the same: Masters, all men to be ready tomorrow and this night and in the morning to ring your bells in every town and there appoint your captains, Mr Hussey, Mr Babthorpe and Mr Gascoigne and other gentlemen and to give warning beyond the water [that is, across the Ouse] to be ready upon pain of death for the commonwealth and make your proclamation every man to be true to the king’s issue and the noble blood, to preserve the church of God from spoiling and to be true to the commons and their wealths. And ye shall have tomorrow the articles and causes of your assembly and petition to the king and place of our meeting and all other of poor and commonwealth in haste.

5. Aske’s recruitment proclamation addressed to the gentlemen. Two copies have survived with slightly different readings: SP1/108, f. 47 [L.P. XI. 705 (3)] and St. P. Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 466–7 [L.P. XI. 705 (2)]. Lords, knights, masters, kinsmen and friends: We perceived that ye be informed that this assembly or pilgrimage that we by the favour of Almighty God intend to proceed in is because the king our sovereign lord hath had many impositions of us. We doubt not you do know and remember that, to our power, we have been always ready in payment and services as his subjects to his highness. And therefore to ascertain you of the cause of this our assembly and pilgrimage is this: for as much that such simple and evil-disposed persons, being of the king’s council, hath not only incensed his grace with many and sundry new inventions, which be contrary to the faith of God and honour to the king’s majesty and the commonwealth of this realm, and thereby intendeth to destroy the church of England and the minsters [ministers?] of the same, as ye do well know as well as we; but also the said council hath spoiled and robbed, and further intending utterly to spoil and rob, the whole body of this realm; and that as well you as us, if God of his infinite mercy had not caused such as hath taken, or hereafter shall take, this pilgrimage upon them, to proceed in the same; and whether all this aforesaid be true or not, we put it to your conscience. And if ye think it be true [that we are simply objecting to making payments and services to the king], and do fight against us that intendeth the commonwealth of this realm, and nothing else, we trust, by the grace of God, ye shall have small speed. For this pilgrimage we have taken, it is for the preservation of Christ’s Church, of this realm of England, the king our sovereign lord, the nobility

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and commonalty of the same, and to the intent to make petition to the king’s highness for the reformation of that which is amiss within this his realm and for the punishment of the heretics and subverters of the laws – and we neither for money, malice, displeasure to no persons but such as be not worthy to remain nigh about the king. And further you know: if you shall obtain [succeed in opposing us] as we trust in God ye shall not, ye put both us and you and your heirs and ours in bondage for ever; and further ye are sure of intention of Christ’s curse and we clear out of the same. And if we overcome you, then you shall be in our wills. Wherefore for a conclusion, if you will not come with us for reformation of the premises, we certify you, by this our writing, that we will fight and die against both you and all those that shall be about towards to stop us in the said pilgrimage; and God shall be judge which shall have his grace and mercy therein, and then you shall be judged hereafter to be shedders of Christ’s blood and destroyers of your even Christian. From Robert Aske, chief captain of the said convential assembly or pilgrimage, for the barony and commonalty of the same.

[On the back] Per me Robertum Asken in the name of all the baronage and commonalty of the same. The articles: first, for the suppression of religious houses; the second for the Act of Uses; the third for the first fruits; the fourth for the payment of money of the temporality; the fifth is for the base councillors about the king; the sixth is for the new bishops.

6. Aske’s account of his letter and address to the lords and clerics in Pontefract Castle on ‘the griefs of the commons’: Bateson, pp. 335–6. And in the same letter the said Aske rehearsed how the commons were gnawn in their conscience with spreading heresies, suppression of houses of religion and other matters touching the commons’ wealth to their impoverishment, wherein they prayed the said lords so to be [a] mean to the king’s highness by way of petition so that their griefs the rather might be declared to the king’s said highness. And, for so much as the hand of the said Robert Aske was not at the said letter, the said lords and worshipful men prayed upon pledges to speak with the said Aske, and so did where the said Aske so declared to the said lords, as well spiritual as temporal, the griefs of the commons: and how first that the lords spiritual had not done their duty in that they had not been plain with the king’s highness for the speedy remedy and quenching of the said heresies and the preachers thereof, and for the suffering of the same, and for the ornaments of the churches and abbeys suppressed, and the violating of relics by the suppressors, with the unreverent demeanour of the doers thereof, with abuse of the visitors, and their impositions taken extraordinary, and other

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their negligences in not doing their duty, as well to their sufferance as to the commons. And to the lords temporal the said Aske declared they had misused themselves in that they, semblably, had not so providently ordered and declared to his said highness the poverty of his realm and that part specially, and wherein their griefs might ensue, whereby all danger might have been avoided; for in so much as in the north parts much of the relief of the commons was by succour of abbeys, and that before this last statute thereof made [the Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries] the king’s highness had no money out of that shire, in a manner yearly, for his grace’s revenues there yearly went to the finding of Berwick. And that now the profits of abbeys suppressed, tenths and first fruits went out of those parts, by occasion whereof, within short space of years, there should be no money nor treasure in those parts, neither the tenant to have to pay his rents to the lord, nor the lord to have money to do the king service with all, for so much as in those parts was neither the presence of his grace, execution of his laws nor yet but little recourse of merchandise, so that of necessity the said country should either ‘patyshe’ [ally] with the Scots or for very poverty enforced to make commotions or rebellions; and that the lords knew the same to be true and had not done their duty, for that they had not declared the said poverty of the said country to the king’s highness, and the dangers that would otherwise to his grace ensue, alleging the whole blame to them, the nobility, therein, with other like reasons.

7. The commons of Beverley to the commons of Lincolnshire: SP1/107, f. 136 [L.P. XI. 645]. Our duty promised, please it you to understand and know that we the commonalty of the town of Beverley in the county of York with the country thereabout are risen and sworn the oath that we shall be true to God and our prince and his lawful acts and demands, and that we shall be true and faithful to you and other the commons of the realm, and you and them to aid and maintain to the utmost of our power, both with body and goods, against all them that be councillors, inventors and procurers utterly to undo both the church and the commonalty of the realm so help us God; and wherein we desire you both captains and commons to have your knowledge, if ye have need of our aid and help, to send us knowledge by the bringers hereof, our messengers, which we have sworn truly to present these our letters unto you, to whom we desire you to give further credence in like manner that it will please you to let us have your counsel as we shall proceed and in like manner of your good speed, the which we daily pray for as knoweth the holy trinity who preserve you now and ever to the pleasure of God and our prince. The comfort of you and us from Beverley, 10 October, by yours the commonalty aforesaid and sealed with the common seal. God Save the King, the Church and the Commonalty.

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8. The Captain Poverty letter, composed in Richmond on 15 October. It only survives in a summary provided of its opening by Barnard Townley, rector of Caldbeck, Cumberland: SP1/117, f. 46 [L.P. XII(1). 687 (1)]. Wellbeloved brethren in God, we greet you well, signifying unto you that we your brethren in Christ have assembled us together and put us in readiness for the maintenance of the faith of God, his laws and his church. And where abbeys was suppressed we have restored them again and put the religious men into their houses, wherefore we exhort you to do the same.

9. The Cumberlanders’ proclamation of 20 October: SP1/117, fos 51–51b [L.P. XII(1). 687 (2)]. All true Christian people which be here assembled for maintenance of the faith and of this country, we let you know because the rulers of this country do not come among us and defend us from robbing of the thieves and Scots, that four captains be chosen which are called charity, faith, poverty and pity, which command you to keep your charity and peace and that no man do steal, rob nor reive nor meddle with other men’s goods and make no fray on pain of death but be ready one to help another and follow the Skaw [a mobilisation of borderers summoned by the warden of the marches] when the thieves or Scots would rob or invade us either by night or day; and that every one of you say five pater nosters and a creed and that the priests do go with daily processions desiring God that we may have quietness and peace; and that they bid the holy days and bedes after the old custom. God save the king and the commonwealth.

10. A Captain Poverty muster proclamation from the north-west: Toller, pp. 48–9 [L.P. XI. 892 (1)]. Master Poverty, the conductor, protector and maintainer of the whole commonalty, sendeth you all greeting in our Lord everlasting. And forsomuch as we intend the defence principally of the faith of our saviour Christ Jesu, under licence of our most noble, sovereign lord, King Henry VIII, whose honour is entitled to be Defender of the said faith, and yet notwithstanding, by certain heretics in our time we see it piteously and abominably confounded, not ashaming in open preaching to blaspheme the honour of our lord God, working most cruelly by spoiling and suppression of holy places as abbeys, churches and minsters of the same, but also rageously [outrageously] vilipending and despising the laws and ordinances of our Mother Holy Church; blaspheming also our Lady and all other saints in Heaven, whereby we are ‘rune’ [lamented] in shameful slander throughout all realms Christian, to the utter confusion of all English people. Further, the said malefactors have procured and purposed against the commonwealth certain acts of law under the colour of parliament

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which, put in execution, the estate of poverty can no longer hear nor suffer these premises. Wherefore, I command you all in general from 16 years and above, in pain of death and forfeiting of your goods, to be in areadiness to aid us in maintaining of the said Faith of Christ and his church, of the most high honour of our sovereign lord the king and of the commonwealth of this his most noble realm of England. And ever God save the king and send him good counsel.

11. Another Captain Poverty muster proclamation from the north-west, addressed to bailiffs and constables: Toller, pp. 49–50 [L.P. XI. 892 (2)]. Wellbeloved, we greet you well. And where our brother Poverty and our brother Rogers [that is, Roger Pyle, abbot of Furness] goeth forward openly for the aid and assistance of your faith and holy church, and for the reformation of such abbeys and monasteries now dissolved and suppressed without any just cause: wherefore, good brethren, forasmuch as our said brotherhood hath sent to us for aid and help, we, under pain of deadly sin, command you and every of you to be at the Stoke Green besides Hawkshead church on Saturday next [that is, 28 October] by eleven o’clock in your best array, as ye will make answer before the high judge at the dreadful day of doom, and on the pain of pulling down your houses and losing of your goods, and your bodies to be at the Captain’s will. For at the place aforesaid then and there ye and we shall take further direction concerning our faith so sore decayed; and for good and laudable customs of the country; and for such naughty inventions and strange articles now accepted and admitted so that, if your said brethren be subdued, they are like to go forward to the utter undoing of the commonwealth. Articles sent with the same letter. First, that no infant shall receive the blessed sacrament of baptism unless a tribute to be paid to the king. The second, that no man under £20 lands shall eat no bread made of wheat, no capon, chicken, goose nor pig, unless to pay a tribute to the king. The third is that every ploughland shall pay a tribute, with other extreme and urgent causes. And heartily fare ye well.

12. Pickering’s Song: an exhortation to the nobles and commons of the north: SP1/118, fos 292–293b [L.P. XII(1). 1021 (5)]. I O faithfull people of the boreal region, Chief bellicose champions, by divine providence, Of God hic electo to make reformation Of great mischief and horrible offence, Go ye forward valiantly in your peregrination, It is Christ’s pleasure and to your salvation.

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II The northern people in time long past Hath little been regarded of the austral nation; But now I do trust, even at the last, Renown we shall win to our whole congregation Of these southern heretics, devoid of all virtue, And them overthrow: their faith is untrue. III Desist not of your purpose, both good and commendable, Prosecute your intent with power and main Inspired of God, by motion celestial, These heretics to suppress and tyranny restrain It is written in the Maccabees – look well the story – Accingemini potentes qui estote filii. IV For as it is better in battle for to die And of our mortal life to make a conclusion Than heresies extremely to join with tyranny, The nobility of the realm brought to confusion, Christ’s church very like is spoiled to be, And all abbeys suppressed: it is more pity. V Abbeys to suppress we have little need, The which of charity good men did found, To them it was thought it was great need; But boldly now down, straight to the ground. Many are busy them to decay And them profaneth, none dare say nay. VI If poverty had been chief cause of this, Then God the less we should offend; But these false heretics procureth this amiss; They reign too long: God send an end Of all the mischiefs that we may see, These naughty heretics deprived of their dignity.

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VII These enormities to recover, now let us take pain, Things amiss to redress we ourselves must enforce, Although in battle many should be slain, Regard not the pleasure of our mortal course, But call to our memory where God sayeth thus: Confortamini in bello, nam vobiscum domino. VIII Our cause it is lawful, I dare well report, More surely our enemies we may assay, Not doubting of them to make great mort, Or else very soon to break their array, Through help of him that lightly may Give strength unto few, ut fiat victoria. IX The Maccabees being few in the comparison Of their enemies that in number were many more, But trusting in God, they had corroboration, And many of them they did overthrow, Maintaining their law with rights manifold And fought right manly as warriors most bold. X We being therefore in like distress, These southern Turks perverting our law, Spoiling Christ’s church to our great heaviness, The wealth of the realm not regarding one straw, Therefore to fight now my counsel it is: Nam deus non decrit pugnatibus nobis. XI The authors of all ill to rehearse by name Methink it no need, many doth them know, For their cursed counsel God send them much shame: Both naughty Cromwell and the chancellors two [Riche and Audley]. The heretical bishops causeth our desolation, Christ’s curse on them alight, small having devotion.

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XII Their properties to describe, me think it right necessary, For the truth once known of their generation Will move us to abhor that cursed company Of Cromwell, the captain, and all his subtle reason: The art of a shearman it was his beginning, But late of favour promoted by our king. XIII Another Haman he is, as is made mention In the book of Esther, it doth there appear, Whom Ahasuerus exalted to high promotion, Making him chief ruler of all his empire. This Haman in mind replete with vainglory Of every man did covet honoured to be. XIV This for to do, none durst it recuse [show disobedience to] Better ne worse through all the country, Save only Mordecai who did refuse Him for to honour in any degree. This known to Haman, replete with fury, In mind did imagine how Mordecai should die. XV And with that not content, his malice put in ure Against the true Jews, of his propagation, Sent writing abroad with his busy cure, All his people to be brought to great desolation; But that notwithstanding, God did so provide He missed of his purpose, God was their guide. XVI The chance fortuned so (this is no fable) The gallows upon, prepared for Mordecai, Hanged he was as a thief notable, Ahasuerus commanding that so it should be; And his rooms royal, no further delay, Were given unto Mordecai in that same day.

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XVII This story for to mark, who hath good affection, Now truly verified in part may he see, This cruel Haman by his false injunctions In the north doth pursue the faithful commonty, By his great expenses intending utterly Us to destroy and bring in captivity. XVIII But great God above, that ever doth procure For his faithful people all that is necessary And ever provide, I you do ensure His falsehood to be known, and eke his policy. No fair words we shall trust, after my opinion, But boldly to go forward in our peregrination. XIX If this Haman were hanged, then dare I well say This realm then redressed full so should be, And the bishops reformed in a new array, Then established should be our true Christianity. But until this be done, we may be well sure These grievous offences we cannot recure [remedy]. XX The intolerable exactions that long he did use The laity among and also the spirituality, Is worthy of death, who can this excuse? I see blood by him shed with great credulity: For him a shameful death by right doth it claim With utter confusion and extreme shame. XXI This cursed Cromwell by his great policy In this realm hath caused great exaction, Them highly promoting that sets out heresy By the aid of the chancellors, using exhortation. Against them all for to fight, I think that convenient, And not for to cease till your lives be spent.

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XXII If longer they should reign in this noble region, Christ’s laws to destroy, it is their intent; Then shortly would they bring us to utter confusion, Our nobles for their boldness shortly should be shent, Their heads to be lost, and that were great pity This country to be desolate of so noble progeny. XXIII Wherefore, faithful commoners, be of good cheer Your intent to pursue now take upon hand; Defer not your matters till a new year I fear aid will come out of a strange land. The English commonty, now may ye be sure, Your purpose will aid these wrongs to recure [be remedied]. XXIV Now God, in whose cause we take upon hand, Not against our prince, this may he well espy, But faith to maintain and rights of this land, The authors suppressing of cursed heresy. Valiantly to speed he grant us by grace, That finally we may see his joyful face. XXV In all our distress let us not refrain Diligently for to pray our king for to save, And his undoubted wife queen lady Jane; And if we do offend, pardon we do crave, God send him long time to reign with equity, That virtue may abound with gracious plenty, God save our king! Nam hoc cupit auctor Finis.

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13. The Sawley Ballad: Bateson, pp. 344–5. I Christ crucified! For thy wounds wide Us commons guide! Which pilgrims be Through God’s grace, For to purchase Old wealth and peace Of the spirituality. II Great God’s fame Doth Church proclaim Now to be lame And fast in bounds, Robbed, spoiled and shorn From cattle and corn, And clean forth born Of houses and lands. III Which things is clear Against God’s law As doth appear In Deuteronomy, God’s law book. Open and look, as Moses spoke Decimo nono. IV There may be found The limit ground May not lay down, Caesar nor king, Which old fathers And their right heirs For their welfares At their ending

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V Gave to relief Whom for amice [almuce] grieve Both day and evening, And can no work; Yet this they may, Both night and day, Resort and pray Unto God’s kirk. VI Thus interlie Peace and pity, Love and mercy For to purchase For man’s misdeed And wrongful creed Most far mislead Through lack of grace. VII Such folly is fallen And wise outblown That grace is gone And all goodness; Then no marvel That it thus befell Commons to mell To make redress. VIII Right well minding The foresaying And prophesising Of Isaiah: That princes should Remove fixed mould Which fathers ‘colde’[?] To found compass.[?]

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IX But on kings Isaiah’s sayings Like rain down brings God’s woeful ire, Harrying the subject Their duties to forget, And princes let Of such desire. X Alack! Alack! For the church’s sake Poor commons wake And more marvel; For clear it is The decay of this, How the poor shall miss No tongue can tell. XI For there they had Both ale and bread At time of need, And succour great In all distress And heaviness, And well intreat. XII In trouble and care Where that we were In manner all bare Of our substance, We found good bait At churchmen’s gate, Without checkmate Or variance.

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XIII God that rights all Redress now shall, And that is [in] thrall Again make free By this voyage And pilgrimage Of young and sage In this country. XIV Whom God grant grace And for this space Of this their trace Send them good speed With wealth, health and speed Of sins release And joy endless When they be dead. XV Churchmen for ever So you remember, Both first and later In your memento These pilgrims poor That take such cure To establish sure Which did undo. XVI Crim, Cram and Riche With three ell [that is Ls – Latimer, Leigh and Layton] and the like As some men teach, God them amend! And that Aske may, Without delay, Here make a stay And well to end.

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14. The Pilgrim petition submitted to the king in October: SP1/109, f. 248 [L.P. XI. 902 (2)]. It consists of the oath (see Appendix, doc. 2) with the following addition plus five articles: … and subverters of the just laws of God. And that ye shall not depart from this devout pilgrimage without the licence in writing of the captain [mutilated] and counsel of the battle and ward that ye lead or go under [mutilated] nor messages but that ye shall disclose to them, nor for pardon [mutilated], or return without the assent of the grand captain and [mutilated] by the holy contents of this book. For the maintenance of the faith of Christ. For the maintenance of the Church and liberties of the same. That the common laws and the commonwealth of this realm may be used as it hath been used since time of the beginning of his highness[’s reign] when his nobles did order under his highness. That such as hath been the subverters of God’s laws and the laws of the realm may be corrected according to their demerits as the Lord Cromwell, the archbishop of Canterbury, [the bishop of Rochester?], the bishop of Worcester and divers other the maintainers of the same sect. And finally a general pardon for us all who have done or said anything against the laws by insurrections or otherwise, by act of parliament or otherwise, as surely as can be devised for all manner offences done before. [We present?] these articles to the honour of God and his faith, reformation of the church militant, preservation of the king and his issue, for the honour and surety of the baronage and commonwealth of this realm.

15. Bill sent from the Westmorland commons to the Pilgrim council at York: SP1/111, f. 118 [L.P. XI. 1080]. Right honorable Lord Darcy, in our most humble wise please your lordship to be advertised that all we the commonality of Westmorland are in a readiness to do you service according to your tenor and commandment at all times, wherefore it would please your good lordship upon your nobleness to show some favour unto us concerning the wealth of our country and the profit of the commonalty, the which we think is the best for us by your better advice, wherein is all our trust therein: that is to say, concerning the gressums for poor men to be laid apart but only penny farm, penny gressum, with all the tithes to remain to every man his own doing therefore according to their duty. Also taxes casten amongst the beneficed men, as well them in abed within us as they that is not incumbent, for the commonwealth, which we desire of your lordship to know your pleasure therein what we may do in all these causes, for we think in our opinions that we may put in their rooms to serve God other that would be

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glad to keep hospitality, for some of them are no priests that hath the benefice in hand and other of them is my Lord Cromwell’s chaplains. Moreover, we do accept no gentleman of our council because we be afraid of them as yet, and to have neat geld [that is, noutgeld] and sergeant corn laid down which we think were a great wealth for all the country; and all the intakes that [are] noisome for poor men to be laid down. For all these premises aforesaid we beseech your noble lordship of your goodness and discreet counsel what we may do in the said premises for the commonwealth to have knowledge in writing by this bearer, for we have more trust in your lordship than in any other, and so we shall daily pray to God to maintain your good lordship to God’s pleasure and your heart’s desire. From Kirkby Stephen, 19 November, by your servants Robert Pulleyn to death, Nicholas Musgrave, the captains of Westmorland, and the commonality of the same.

16. The Pilgrim petition submitted to the king in December: SP1/112, fos 119–21 [L.P. XI. 1246 (1)]. The first touching our faith to have the heresies of Luther, Wycliffe, Huss, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Bucer, Confessio Germaniae, Apologia Melancthionis, the works of Tyndale, of Barnes, of Marshall, Rastell, St German and such other heresies of Anabaptist, clearly within this realm to be annulled and destroyed. The second to have the supreme head of the church touching cura animarum to be reserved unto the see of Rome as before it was accustomed to be, and to have the consecration of the bishops from him without any first fruits or pension to him to be paid out of this realm or else a pension reasonable for the outward defence of our faith. Item [3], we humbly beseech our most dread sovereign lord that the Lady Mary may be made legitimate and the former statute therein annulled, for the danger of the title that might incur to the crown of Scotland, that to be by parliament. Item [4] to have the abbeys suppressed to be restored unto their houses, lands and goods. Item [5] to have the tenth and first fruits clearly discharged of the same, unless the clergy will of themselves grant a rent charge in generality to the augmentation of the crown. Item [6] to have the Friar Observants restored unto their houses again. Item [7] to have the heretics, bishops and temporal of their sect, to have condign punishment by fire or such other, or else to try their quarrel with us and our party takers in battle. Item [8] to have the Lord Cromwell, the lord chancellor and Sir Richard Riche, knight, to have condign punishment as the subverters of the good laws

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of this realm and maintainers of the false sect of these heretics and the first inventors and bringers in of them. Item [9] that the lands in Westmorland, Cumberland, Kendal, Dent, Sedbergh, Furness and the abbey lands in Mashamshire, Kirbyshire, Nidderdale may be by tenant right, and the lord to now have, at every change, two years rent for gressum and no more, according to the grant now made by the lords to the commons there under their seal; and this to be done by act of parliament. Item [10] the statutes of handguns and crossbows to be repealed and the penalties thereof, unless it be in the king’s forests or parks for the killing of his grace’s deer red and fallow. Item [11] that doctors Leigh and Layton may have condign punishment for their extortions in their time of visitations as in bribes of some religious houses, £40, £20 and so to major sums, horses, advowsons, leases under convent seal, bribes by them taken and other their abominable acts by them done and committed. Item [12] reformation for the election of knights of shire and burgesses, and for the uses among the Lords in the parliament house after their ancient custom. Item [13] statute for enclosures and intakes to be put in execution and that all intakes and enclosures since 4 Henry VII to be pulled down except mountains, forest and parks. Item [14] to be discharged of the quindime and taxes now granted by act of parliament. Item [15] to have the parliament in a convenient place at Nottingham or York and the same shortly summoned. Item [16] the statute of the declaration of the crown by will, that the same may be annulled and repealed. Item [17] that it be enacted by authority of parliament that all recognisances, statutes, penalties new forfeit during the time of this commotion may be pardoned and discharged as well against the king as strangers. Item [18] the privileges and rights of the church to be confirmed by act of parliament and priests not to suffer by sword unless he be disgraced, a man to be saved by his book, sanctuary to save a man for all causes in extreme need, and the church for 40 days and further according to the laws as they were used in the beginning of this king’s days. Item [19] the liberties of the church to have their old customs as the county palatine at Durham, Beverley, Ripon, Saint Peter of York and such other by act of parliament. Item [20] to have the statute that no man shall will his lands to be repealed.

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Item [21] that the statutes of treasons for words and such like made since 21 Henry VIII in likewise be repealed. Item [22] that the common laws may have place as was used in the beginning of your grace’s reign and that all injunctions may be clearly decided and not to be granted unless the matter be heard and determined in the chancery. Item [23] that no man upon subpoena is from Trent north to appear but at York or by attorney unless it be directed upon pain of allegiance and for like matters concerning the king. Item [24] a remedy against escheators for finding of false offices and extortious fees-taking which be not holden of the king and against the promoters thereof.

17. The opinion of the clergy of the north parties: SP1/112, fos 116–17 [L.P. XI. 1245 (2)]. This omits the fifth opinion which is provided in British Library, Harleian MS Cleo. E. V, f. 413 [L.P. XI. 1245 (1)]. The Opinion, compiled on 4 December in Pontefract Priory, was a response, article by article, to ten propositions put to the Pilgrim clergy by Robert Aske. To the first article, we think that preaching against purgatory, worshipping of saints, pilgrimage, images and all books set forth against the same or sacraments or sacramentals of the church be worthy to be reproved and condemned by convocation, and the pain to be executed that is devised for the doers to the contrary and process to be made hereafter in heresy as was in the days of King Henry IV, and the new statutes whereby heresies now lately have been greatly nourished to be annulled and abrogated, and that the holy days may be observed according to the laws and laudable customs and that the bidding of bedes and preaching may be observed as hath been used by old custom. To the second we think the king’s highness ne any temporal man may not be supreme head of the church by the laws of God to have or exercise any jurisdictions or powers spiritual in the same, and all acts of parliaments made to the contrary to be revoked. To the third we say we be not sufficiently instructed in the facts ne in the process therein made but we refer it to the determination of the church to whom it was appealed. To the fourth we think no clerk ought to be put to death without degradation by the laws of the church. To the fifth we think that no man ought to be drawn out of sanctuary unless in certain causes expressed in the laws of the church. To the sixth we say that the clergy of the north hath not granted nor consented to the payment of the tenths or first fruits of benefices in their convocation, and also we may make no such perpetual grant by the laws of the

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church, and we think that no temporal men hath authority by the laws of God to claim any such tenths or first fruits of any benefice or spiritual promotion. To the seventh we think that lands given to God, the church or religious men may not be taken away and put to profane uses by the laws of God. To the eighth we think that dispensations upon just causes lawfully granted by the pope of Rome to be good and to be accepted, and pardons have been allowed by general councils of Lateran and Vienne and by laws of the church. To the ninth we think that by the laws of the church, general councils, interpretations of approved doctors and consent of Christian people, the pope of Rome hath been taken for the head of the church and vicar of Christ and so ought to be taken. To the tenth we think that the examination and correction of deadly sins belongeth to the ministers of the church and by the laws of the same which be consonant to God’s laws. [Additional observations were made on a separate page] First, we think it convenient that the laws of the church may be openly read in the universities as hath been used heretofore, and that such clerks as be in prison, or fled out of the realm for withstanding of the king’s superiority in the church, may be set at liberty and restored without danger, and that such books and works as do entreat of the primacy of the church of Rome may be freely kept and read notwithstanding any prohibition to the contrary, and that the articles of praemunire may be declared by acts of parliament to the intent no man be in danger thereof without a prohibition first awarded. And that such apostates as be gone from religion without sufficient and lawful dispensation of the see of Rome may be compelled to return to their houses, and that all sums of money as tenths, first fruits and other arrearages granted unto the king’s highness by parliament or convocation and due to be paid before the first day of the next parliament may be remitted and forgiven for the causes above rehearsed. And we the said clergy say that for lack of time and instruction in these articles and want of books, we declare this our opinion for this time, referring our further determination in the premises to the next convocation. Also we desire that the statute demanding the clergy to exhibit the dispensations granted by the pope before the feast of Michaelmas next coming may be revoked at the next parliament.

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18. Postpardon declarations of complaint. (a) The West Riding ‘Forward’ bill: SP1/114, f. 167 [L.P. XII(1). 138]. These be articles that men may perceive that this entreaty is but feigned policy to subdue the commoners with all:– The abbeys which were suppressed are in their houses by the commoners and not by the agreement at Doncaster. That we should have had a parliament at York the 20th day and had none. That Cromwell and other evil councillors should have been banished the court and they are now in higher favour than ever they were before. Fourth is the great error which is in the pardon, that is that no man is pardoned but those which taketh the king for supreme head of the church and to have charge of every man’s body and soul, and those that take him as king of this realm without cure of man’s body and soul be unpardoned, everyone. They which have made entry of abbeys’ grounds and sold their goods and withdrawn themself forth of the country, as Mr Lister, Sir Thomas Johnson with divers other more, which caused the people to draw to counsel for fear of their goods and kines which shall be made a great offence than any that was before. Captain Aske was at London and had great rewards to betray the commoners. And since that he came home they have used Hull against the commons, ready to receive ships by the sea to destroy all in north parts. Wherefore now is time to arise or else never, and go proceed with your pilgrimage for grace or else shall we all be undone. Therefore, forward! forward! now forward in pain of death, forward now or else never! And ye shall have captains just and true and be not stayed by no gentlemen in no wise.

(b) The North Riding commons’ oath sent from Bilsdale to Richmond, 19 January: SP1/114, f. 201 [L.P. XII(1). 163 (1)]; and also see L.P. XII(1). 185. First that all the commons in every township should rise on pain of death and take all lords and gentlemen and make them swear on the mass book to these articles following: To maintain the profit of Holy Church, which was the upholding of the Christian faith. That no lord nor gentlemen take nothing of their tenants but only their rents. To put down the Lord Cromwell, that heretic, and all his sect, which made the king put down praying and fasting. That no lord nor gentlemen shall not go to London.

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If any lord or gentleman do deny to take this oath then to put him to death and put the next of his blood in his place, and, if he deny it, put him to death in like case, and so on after another til one of the blood will take the oath.

(c) A bill attached to the door of Gargrave church and of other churches in Craven: SP1/112, f. 188 [L.P. XI. 1299 (ii)]. Wellbeloved brethren in God, we commons of Craven desireth and straightly commandeth you upon God’s behalf that you incontinently, upon the sight hereof, go to the constable of Gargrave and show him that we commons of Craven charge him to charge of every house one within his parishing to be at Rylstone upon Tuesday next [12 December] at nine of the clock to kill and destroy all the deer that they can find. And that they fail not upon pain of death and taking of their goods. To the priests of Gargrave this bill be sent by the said commons.

(d) A bill attached to the door of Arncliffe church on 13January, 1537: SP1/107, f. 143 [L.P. XI. 655, misdated]. To Master Dean [that is, Christopher Elyson, vicar of Arncliffe and dean of Craven] Master Dean, we recommend us unto you, desiring you that ye bid bedes and rehearse the points of cursing in your parish church as hath been accustomed aforetime after the true laws of God, as prayer for the pope of Rome, the head of our mother church, and laws as hath been granted by holy popes. And thus in this cause of Almighty God fail not to do, and we shall die and live with you as ye intend to have the favour of God and ours, and intendeth to have any duty with us, and, if ye will not, send us word the contrary. By the whole assent of all the parishioners and tenants of my lord of Northumberland.

(e) Proclamation for the commons: L.P. XI. 892 (3) (misdated); L.P. XII(1). 163 (2). The original manuscript is lost. All commons stick ye together, rise with no great man to [until] ye know his intent. Keep your harness in your hands and ye shall obtain your purpose in all this north land. Claim ye old customs and tenant right to take your farms by a God’s penny, all gressums and heightenings to be laid down, then may we serve our sovereign lord King Henry VIII, God save his noble grace [and] we shall serve our land’s lords in every righteous cause with horse and harness as custom will demand. Gentle commons have this in your mind: every man take his land’s lord, and ye have need, as we did in Kendal land, then ye shall speed. Make your writing, command them to seal to grant you your petitions

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at your desire. Lords spiritual and temporal, have it in your mind the world as it wavereth, and to your tenants be ye kind, then may ye go a pilgrimage nothing you withstand, and commons to you be true, through all Christian lands, to maintain the faith of holy church as ye have taken on hand. Adieu! gentle commons, thus I make an end, maker of this letter pray Jesu be his speed, he shall be your captain when that ye have need.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources British Library Cottonian MSS, Caligula B. I, II, III, VII, VIII; Vespasian F. XIII; Cleopatra E. IV, V, VI; Titus B. I; and in Appendix L Harleian MSS, 282; 283; 289; 442; 604; 6989 Additional MSS, 8,715; 12,097; 25,114; 28,589 Althorp MSS [now printed, see R.W. Hoyle in Camden Society, fourth series, 44 (1992)] Bodleian Library, Oxford MS, James 27 MS, Jesus College 74 [now printed, see R.W. Hoyle, in Northern History, 21 (1985)] Chatsworth House, Derbyshire Clifford Letter Book [now printed, see R.W. Hoyle in Camden Society, fourth series, 44 (1992) Bolton Abbey MS, vol. 10 Cumbria Record Office (Kendal) WD/Hoth, box 45 WD/Hoth, box 48 Humberside Record Office (Beverley) BC/I/53–5 Lancashire Record Office (Preston) DDMa, Box 27

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The National Archives at Kew Most of the manuscript material directly relating to the pilgrimage of grace lies in the State Papers of the reign of Henry VIII [SP1, SP2, SP6] – especially in volumes 106–25 of SP1 (with a little also in SP1/127, 131, 133 and 240) – and in Exchequer Treasury of Receipt, Miscellaneous Books [E36], notably in volumes 118–22, and in King’s Bench, Ancient Indictments, notably KB9/976 (Trial of Wycliffe) and in King’s Bench, Baga de Secretis, notably KB8/10 (Trial of Pilgrim leaders). Nearly all of this material has been printed in Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII yet only in summary. The summaries are competent but inevitably contain errors of misdating, misreading, misattribution and omission. For these reasons, a great deal of additional information can be acquired from consulting the original documents. Here, unfortunately, there lies a problem, created by the Record Office’s policy of insisting, in the cause of conservation, that the State Papers should normally be consulted only on microfilm, in spite of the latter’s poor quality. The National Archives also hold a great deal of material that sheds light on the background to the pilgrimage of grace. This relates to: a. the suppression of northern monasteries: in Special Collections, Ministers’ and Receivers’ Accounts, notably SC6/Henry VIII/4460 (Holy Trinity, York), 4466 (St Clement’s, York), 4471 (Healaugh), 4505 (Haltemprice), 4509 (North Ferriby), 4513 (Nunburnholme), 4641 (Healaugh, Haltemprice, North Ferriby, St Clement’s, Sawley), 7346 (Newminster, Lanercost, Armathwaite), 7348 (Lanercost, Armathwaite), 7454 (dissolved houses in archdeaconry of Richmond); in Duchy of Lancaster, Accounts of Auditors, Receivers, Feodaries and Ministers, notably DL29/143/2273 (Conishead); in Duchy of Lancaster, Miscellanea, notably DL41/11/49–50, 59 (Cartmel, Conishead); in Chancery, Early Proceedings, especially C1/881/31 (Healaugh); in Chancery Enrolments, notably the Close Rolls, especially C54/407 (Sawley); and in Exchequer, Augmentations office, Deeds of Purchase and Exchange, especially E305/7/D62 (Sawley). b. agrarian matters: in Chancery, Early Proceedings [C1]; Requests, Proceedings [Req 2]; Star Chamber, Proceedings [STAC 2]. The Star Chamber material for Yorkshire is printed but with omissions in Yorkshire Star Chamber Proceedings. Also useful are Duchy of Lancaster, Court of Duchy Chamber, Pleadings [DL1], Pleadings, Depositions and Examinations [DL3] and Entry Books of Decrees and Orders, Court of King’s Bench [DL5]; KB9/534 (Craven), KB9/516 (Nidderdale); State Papers, Henry VIII: SP1/85, 93, 94, 99 (Craven); Special Collections, Rentals and Surveys [SC11, SC12]

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and Special Collections, Court Rolls [SC2]. c. fiscal matters: in Exchequer, King’s Remembrancer, Memoranda Rolls [E159] and Subsidy Rolls [E179]. d. military matters: northern musters for 1535 are to be found in Exchequer, King’s Remembrancer, Various Accounts, see E101/58 [West Riding – Birdforth, Skyrack], 62 [West Riding – Agbrigg, Morley], 549 [North Riding – Langbaurgh, Ryedale]; in Exchequer Treasury of Receipt, Miscellaneous Books, see E36/32 [West Riding – York, Ainsty], 37 [West Riding – Claro], 44 [North Riding – Gilling East, Gilling West, Hang East, Hang West, Hallikeld, Allertonshire]. Northern musters for 1539 are to be found in E36/23 [North Riding – Gilling West, Pickering, Hang East, Hallikeld, Birdforth], 30 [East Riding – Ouse and Derwent, Dickering, Holderness, Buckrose, Howdenshire], 37 [West Riding – Claro with Knaresborough Forest], 38 [Liberties of Claro – Kirkby Malzeard, Ripon, Knaresborough Soke], 39 [East Riding – Harthill], 41 [North Riding – Hang West, Rydedale, Langbaurgh]; E101/61 [Cumberland] and 549 [Allertonshire in North Riding, Cumberland]; SP1/145 [Skyrack in West Riding] and 146 [West Riding – Osgoldcross, Ewcross, Barkston]; and SP2/S [East Riding – Ouse and Derwent, Dickering, Holderness, Buckrose and Howdenshire]. Yorkshire Archaeological Society (Leeds) DD121/67/23 Printed Primary Sources Bateson, Mary (ed.), ‘The pilgrimage of grace and Aske’s examination’, English Historical Review, 5 (1908): 330–48 and 550–78. Bernard, G.W. and R.W. Hoyle, ‘The instructions for the levying of the Amicable Grant, March 1525’, Historical Research, 67 (1994): 189–202. Brewer, J.S., James Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–1547 (21 vols, London, 1862–1910), plus Addenda (2 vols, London, 1929–32). Brightman, F.E., The English Rite (London, 1921). Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry VII (2 vols, London, 1914–16). Caley, John and Joseph Hunter (eds), Valor Ecclesiasticus (6 vols, London, 1810–34). Cox, J.C. (ed.), ‘William Stapleton and the pilgrimage of grace’, Transactions of the East Riding Antiquarian Society, 10 (1903): 82–106.

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Index E.R., N.R., W.R. – East, North and West Ridings of Yorkshire;  Cumb. – Cumberland;  Lancs. – Lancashire; Lincs. – Lincolnshire; Northumb. – Northumberland;  Westm. K. –  Barony of Kendal;  Westm. – Barony of Westmorland. Acklam, William, of Moreby Hall (E.R.)  186 Ackworth, battle of (1492)  136; see also Pontefract uprising agistments  209,  215 Agreement of 8 Dec.  88, 163, 187, 232, 239, 243 Airton in Craven (W.R.)  148–9, 153, 210 amicable grant tax  137 uprising (1525)  137–8, 159, 183 Appleby council  55–6, 93, 202, 226, 229 Appleby, Westm.  215, 217, 226, 237 Applegarth, Robert, curate of Kendal church  57–8 Appointments with Norfolk, the Doncaster first (Oct.)  17–20, 23 second (Dec.)  20, 23, 88, 90 Arkengarthdale (N.R.)  209 Armstrong, Clement  105 ‘Arncliffe bill’  59 Arncliffe in Craven (W.R.)  59–60 Asheton, Thomas, of Watton Priory  27, 56–7 Aske, Robert appreciation of Lincolnshire petition  4–5 on clerical taxes  121–2 concern with constitutional complaints  151 his declarations of grievance  5–8 on heretical bishops  95 his leadership  12, 179, 186 on northern issues 170–71 on papacy 49–50, 53, 61 Percy interest and  181–2 role in first Pilgrim petition 17–19

role in second Pilgrim petition 21, 23–31 on suppression of religious houses  39, 62, 65–7, 70, 72–3, 78–9 on Uses  124 Westmorland commons and  202–3, 213 Askham, Westm.  226 Audley, Thomas, lord chancellor  68, 102, 123, 149–50 Babthorpe, William, of Osgodby (E.R.)  25, 28, 151 Barden Forest (W.R.)  157 Barlow, William, bishop of St. David’s  89, 94–5, 98 Barnes, Robert  101 bedes, bidding of  7, 11, 32, 51, 83, 93–4; see also Order of Prayer Beetham, Westm. K.  233 Bellingham, Sir Roger  153 benefit of clergy  25, 42, 150 Benet, Thomas, chaplain to Latimer  96 benevolence, the  131, 137–8 Berthelet, Thomas, king’s printer  107 Beverley (E.R.) commons of  4, 8–9, 17, 64, 72, 91–2, 148, 162, 181 Liberty of  184 ‘Beverley bill’  9 Beverley council, at Hunsley Beacon (18 Oct.)  17 Bigod, Sir Francis, of Mulgrave Castle (N.R.)  24–5, 105 Bigod, Ralph  24–5 ‘Bilsdale bill’  35, 75, 94, 200–201 Birch, Richard, of Southwark  129

298

The Pilgrims’ Complaint

Bishop Auckland, Durham  195 Black Book  69, 70 n. 109 Blackamore (N.R.)  185 Boleyn, Queen Anne  16, 83 Bondgate, Westm.  215 ‘Book of the Charge’  105–6;  see also Rastell borderers, northern  179, 182, 214, 234 Bowes, Richard  208 Bowes, Robert, of East Cowton (N.R.)  17, 19–20, 23–4, 28, 31, 70, 113, 151, 154 Bowland Forest  185 Bowyer, Richard, burgess of York  24–5, 28, 101 Braithwait, James, of Windermere, Westm. K.  200 Brandsby, Dr John  51 Branthwaite, Cumb.  231 Breyer, William  74, 77 Bridekirk, Cumb.  231, 237 Bridlington Priory (N.R.)  12, 70 Brigham, Cumb.  231–2, 237 Bromfield, Cumb.  237 Brough, Westm.  60–61, 214–15, 217, 221, 225–6, 237 Brougham,  Westm.  214–15 Broughton, Cumb. 231 Broughton, Lincs.  168 Browne, George, archbishop of Dublin  89, 94, 98–9 Browne, Walter, parish priest of Kendal  58 Bucer, Martin  101–2 Bulmer, Sir John, of Wilton Castle (N.R.)  200–201 Burgh, Cumb., Barony of  184–5, 204–5 Burton in Lonsdale, Westm. K.  233 Byland Abbey (N.R.)  70–71 Cade’s uprising, see Jack Cade’s uprising Camerton, Cumb.  231 canon law  46, 49, 106 Captain Poverty  10–11, 21, 54, 63–4, 128, 179–80, 186, 198, 200, 230–31 Cardmaker, John  99

Carleton, Cumb.  215 Carling Howe (N.R.)  184 Carlisle, commons march on  180 Carlisle Priory  70–71 Cartlogan Thorns, Cumb.  184 Cartmel Priory, Lancs.  62–3, 66, 77, 184, 239 Chaloner, Robert, of Wakefield (W.R.)  25–6, 30, 34–5, 88, 145, 151 Champion, Richard, chaplain to Cranmer  97 chancery, court of  46–7, 105–6, 149, 190,  231–2 chantries  62, 68, 107, 110 Cheshire disloyalty in, see Norton Abbey loyalism in  182 chimney tax, see hearth tax church ornaments , fears for  3, 8, 39, 62, 65, 74, 76–8, 129 Cleator, Cumb.  210 clerical assembly at Pontefract (4–5 Dec.)  30–31, 33–4, 51–2 clerical subsidy 117–18 clergy, commons attitude to concern for  11, 63–7, 72–80, 122–3, 143, 159, 161–2, 246 critical of  15, 30, 57–8,  90–91, 162,  235–6, 238, 245–7 Cleveland, commons of  75, 134, 184, 200–201 Clifford family estate management  194–5,  214–15, 220–22, 224–7 commons’ opposition to, 211, 220, 223–4, 226; see also  Cumberland, Henry Clifford, earl of Clifford, Lord Henry  202 Clifford, Sir Thomas  214–5 cloth manufacture, regulation of  38–9, 140, 183 Cockermouth, Cumberland  36, 231 Cockermouth, Honour of  184–5, 194, 203–4 coin, shortage of in north  39, 72, 123, 130, 170

Index

Colchester, Essex  167 Collyns, Lancelot, treasurer of York See  9 Collyns, William, bailiff of Kendal  57–8 common law  18, 26–7, 103, 106, 143, 147–8, 165, 173–4, 192, 196 commoning  208–13, 215–16 commons, risings of, see risings of the commons commonwealth, meanings attached to  4, 6–7, 10–11, 18–19, 21–2, 27, 35–40, 158–9, 247–8 Compendium Compertorum, see Black Book Conishead Priory, Lancs.  62–3, 66, 239 Constable, Sir Robert, of Flamborough (E.R.)  8, 25–8, 70, 116, 145 convocation  46, 48, 51, 84, 89, 96, 102, 119, 143, 146, 171 convocation tax (1531)  119–20 Conyers family  209 copyhold, tenure of  192, 197 cornage, tenure of  192, 219–20, 224–6, 228 Cornish uprising (1497)  130, 135, 159 coronation oath  19, 27, 144, 160, 247 Cotes, of Kirby Ravensworth (N.R.)  58 councils of the north duke of Richmond’s  152, 154 king’s  173 Coverham Abbey (N.R.)  10, 63, 65, 72, 77 Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury  12, 18, 45, 47, 83–4, 87, 89, 94–8, 100 Cresswell, Percival  161 Cromwell, Lord Thomas, lord privy seal agrarian intervention  196 authority over the church  47–8, 84–5 commons’ complaint against  3–4, 6–7, 12–16, 18, 25, 27, 35, 45, 51, 56, 71, 87, 100–101, 113, 123, 139, 144, 147–51, 160, 162–3, 169, 180–82, 230, 236 connexions with reformers  97–8, 104–6 Dissolution policy  68 overthrow advocated  27–8 Crosby Garrett, Westm.  221, 226–7

299

crossbows,  see handguns and crossbows, statutes of ‘Crummock’  100, 163 Cumberland commons  10–12, 56, 62, 75, 93, 180, 196, 203–5, 230–32, 237 Cumberland commons’ proclamation  11,  203–5 Cumberland council  204–5 Cumberland, Henry Clifford,  earl of  149, 157, 182, 189, 214–15, 227–8, 230, 241;  see also Clifford family Curse, sentence of the  59, 82–3 Curwen, Sir Thomas, sheriff of Cumberland  153, 200, 214, 232 customs dues, see tonnage and poundage customs of the country  10–11, 153, 165, 180, 193, 201, 232–3, 242, 248 customs, tenurial, see manorial system Dacre, Lord William  151, 182, 185, 202, 210 Dakyn, George  147–8 Dakyn, Dr John, acting archdeacon of Richmond  50, 52, 55, 58, 62, 71–2, 75 Dalston, Barony of, Cumb.  204–5 Darcy, Sir Arthur  65–6, 153 Darcy, Sir George, of Gateforth (W.R.)  17 Darcy, Lord Thomas  8, 17, 19, 21, 25, 28, 31–2, 70, 88–9, 95, 122, 145–6, 154, 161, 202, 209 Davies, C.S.L.  16 Dean, Cumb.  231–2 Dearham, Cumb. 237 deer, hunting of  60, 155–7, 182, 190, 195 demissions  195; see also Percy family Dent (W.R.), commons of  10, 38, 66, 72, 77, 93–4, 160, 162, 180, 184, 199–100, 206 Derby, Edward Stanley, earl of  65–6, 72, 180, 182 Dickens, A.G.  236, 239 dispensations, papal  31, 47–8, 52 dissolution, see suppression of monasteries, opposition to Dodds, Madeleine Hope and Ruth  16, 81, 189

300

The Pilgrims’ Complaint

Doncaster (W.R.)  17, 19–20, 88, 174, 176, 182, 187 Doncaster appointments, see Appointments Douglas, Margaret  25 dropping fines  194, 198; see also gressums Dufton, Westm.  215 Dunne, Thomas, Lincs. rebel  5 Durham, commons of  6, 10, 62, 92, 179, 181, 184, 191, 234 Durham, bishops of  195; see also Tunstall, Cuthbert Eaglesfield, Cumb. 231 Easby Abbey (N.R.)  10, 63, 77; see also St Agatha Edward II  147 Edwyn, William, of Yokefleet (E.R.)  186 Elderton, Ralph  168 Ellerker, Sir Ralph  17, 19–20, 23–4, 31, 113 Elton, G.R.  16, 18, 164–5 Elyson, Christopher, dean of Craven  59–60 Embleton, Cumb.  231 Enclosure Act (1536)  212–13 enclosures  36, 60, 148, 153–4, 195, 197, 207–17 entry fines,  see gressums equity, courts of  147–9, 152–4, 171, 173, 190, 240; see also chancery; requests; star chamber Esch, Robert, friar of St. Robert’s Knaresborough (W.R.)  9, 128, 186 escheators, county  125–6, 149, 228 Eskdale, Cumb., warrior clans of  182 Essex, unrest in  137, 183 Esther, Book of  12–13 excommunication, see Curse Fairfax, Sir Nicholas, of Gilling Castle (N.R.)  70, 75 Fawcett, Richard, of Litton (W.R.)  186 fiefs, holders of  123–6, 131, 141, 219–20; see also Uses

fifteenth and tenth tax  3, 111–14, 131–3, 134–7, 140–41, 170 first fruits and tenths taxes  3, 15, 28, 31, 34, 117–23, 141 fiscal feudalism,  see Uses; escheators Fisher, John, cardinal  47, 104 Flakebridge Forest, Westm.  214–15 forced loans  131, 137–8 ‘Forward bill’  40, 59 Fountains Abbey (W.R.)  70–71 fowl, hunting of  156–7 Franke, Thomas, rector of Loftus (N.R.)  182 Friar of Knaresborough, see Esch friars  68, 71 and n. 112, 99 Friars Observant  47, 67 Friary, Newcastle–upon–Tyne  62–3 Frith, John  101, 104 Frizington, Cumb.  210 Furness Abbey, Lancs.  56, 70–71, 184, 186, 191, 196, 206–7 Galtres Forest (N.R.)  153, 209–10 Garret, Thomas, chaplain to Cranmer  96–7 Garsdale chapel (N.R.)  77 general fines  194, 203–5; see also gressums general pardon, the  2, 18, 23, 57–9, 161, 163 gentlemen, commons attitude to as landlords  193–205, 239–40, 242–3; see also commoning as a ruling elite,  see nobility; society of orders as traitors to the commons, 238–9 Gibson, Thomas 105 Giggleswick (W.R.)  60, 210 gilds, see religious gilds Gilpin, of Dent (W.R.)  186 Gilsland, Cumb., Barony of  185 God’s penny  198–9, 201, 205 Gower, Ralph, bailiff of Richmond (N.R.)  58 Great Musgrave, Westm.  230, 236 gressums  32, 36, 191, 194–5, 197–207 Greystoke, Honour of, Cumb. 184

Index

Gryce, Thomas, of Wakefield (W.R.)  27(Grice), 151 Guisborough Priory(N.R.)  70–71, 237 Hall, Edward, chronicler  87–8 Hallom, John, of Cawkeld in Watton (E.R.)  12, 24–5, 27, 62, 64, 122, 128 Haltemprice Abbey (E.R.)  64 Haman  12–13 handguns and crossbows, statutes of  143, 154–7 Hanging Lund, Westm. 215, 217 Harrison, Scott Michael 189–90, 222–3, 236, 241 Hartley, Westm. 215, 226 harvests, failure of  227–8, 234–5, 238, 240 Hawkshead church, Lancs.  128 Healaugh Park Priory (W.R.)  66 hearth tax  139 Henrison, of Kirby Ravensworth (N.R.)  58 Henry VII  27, 116, 133–7, 155, 192–3, 207, 212 Henry VIII  2, 6, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22, 31, 46–9, 81, 88–9, 123–5, 144, 160;  see also kingship herbage, leases of  215–16 Heversham, Westm. K.  233 Hexham Priory, Northumb.  63 Hexhamshire, reivers of  182 Hilsey, John, bishop of Rochester  45, 94–5, 97–8 Hilton, Sir Thomas, of Hilton Castle, Durham  70 Holderness, commons of  4, 62, 122, 184 Holm Cultram Abbey, Cumb. 70–71 Holm Cultram, Lordship of  204–5 holy days  11, 34–5, 55–6, 84, 91–3, 96, 171, 180–81; see also Order for Abrogation Holy Trinity Priory, York  66, 72 Hook Moor  4–5, 184 Horncastle articles  2, 4–5 Horton, of Kirby Ravensworth (N.R.)  58 Howden (E.R.)  7, 66, 161, 181, 184 Hoyle, R.W.  16, 19–20, 81, 189

301

Hudisson, John, of Beetham, West. K. 233 hunting rights,  curtailment of, see deer Huss, Jan  101 Hutton, Miles, of Beetham, Westm. K.  233 images, attitudes towards  33, 48, 69, 76, 78, 85–6, 89, 96, 99, 101–3, 105 inflation, impact of  68, 193, 213, 227, 234–5, 237, 240, 248 Inglewood Forest, Cumb.  184–5 injunctions  13, 148–9 innovations, Pilgrim  37, 41, 163–4, 191–3, 198–205, 229, 231–2, 234–5, 238–40, 248–9 intakes, see enclosures Jack Cade’s uprising (1450)  1, 130, 132, 183; see also risings of the commons Jacks, John, of Buckden (W.R.)  186 Jervaulx Abbey (N.R.)  70–71 Jews, Pilgrims identify with  12–13, 163 Kaber, Westm.  226–7 Katherine of Aragon, Queen  16 Kendal, commons of  10, 36, 38, 57–8, 66, 72, 93–4, 180, 184, 201, 232–3 Kent, unrest in 137–8, 183 Ket’s rebellion (1549)  159, 241 Kexby Moor (E.R.)  5 kingship, commons attitude to  28, 159–60, 248 Kirby Ravensworth (N.R.) 58 Kirbyshire (N.R.)  92, 184, 191 Kirkby Lonsdale, Westm. K.  233 Kirkby Malhamdale (W.R.)  60 Kirkby Malzeard, Lordship of, see Kirbyshire Kirkby Stephen, commons of  93, 181, 214–15, 217, 221–2, 226, 230 Kirkby Thore, Westm.  226 Kirkstall Abbey (W.R.)  70–71 Kitchen, Robert, of Beverley  4 Knaresborough Forest (W.R.)  9 Knavesmire, York  209 knights’ fees, see fiefs

302

The Pilgrims’ Complaint

Knolles, John, rector of St Theobald’s, Great Musgrave, Westm.  230 Kyme, Guy, Lincs. rebel  5 Lambert, John  210 Lancashire commons of  10–11, 38, 66, 77, 179,  186, 191, 208, 232 loyalism in  182 Lancaster march on  66, 180, 200 Duchy court of  154 Lancaster Herald  6, 9, 127–8 Lanercost Priory, Cumb.  63 Langland, John, see Piers Ploughman Langstrothdale (W.R.)  60, 157, 185 Latimer, Hugh, bishop of Worcester  12, 18, 45, 68–9, 87, 94–6, 98–9, 211 Latimer, John Neville, Lord  19 Lawney, Thomas, chaplain to Cranmer  97 Layburne, Sir James, of Cunswick, Westm. K.  201 Layburne, Nicholas  58 Layton, Dr Richard, suppression commissioner  12, 149 Lee, Edward, see York, archbishop of Legbourne Priory, Lincs.  64 Leigh, John, of Isel, Cumb.  220, 241 Leigh, Dr Thomas, suppression commissioner  12, 149, 241 liberties of church, Pilgrim commitment to  18, 21, 26–8, 45, 61, 143, 146, 161–2, 177, 181 life warranties  195 lights  87, 105, 110; see also oblations Lincoln, John Longland, bishop of  3 Lincolnshire rebel petitions  1–6, 18, 21–2, 73, 94, 112, 120, 123–4 Lincolnshire uprising (1536)  1, 9, 21–2, 64, 74, 91, 104, 112–13, 126–7, 175, 183; see also Lincolnshire rebel petitions Little Musgrave, Westm.  226–7 lollardy  75, 99, 100–101, 104 London, Pilgrims’ planned march to  8, 16–17, 20, 88, 163, 169, 178, 183, 187

Lonsdale, Westm. K. and W.R.  199, 207 Lord’s Supper, views upon  99–100, 102 Lumley, George, of Thwing (E.R.)  9, 19, 128 Luther, Martin  48, 97–8, 101 Maccabees, Book of  12–13, 86 Maccabeus, Judas  13 Magna Carta  146 Magnus, Thomas, archdeacon of East Riding  8 Mallerstang Forest, Westm. 185, 214–15 Malton Priory (N.R.) 70–71 manorial system  10–11, 36, 151–2, 196–7, 239–41, 248; see also gressums; sealing; tenant right marriage, clerical  89, 97–8, 105 Marshall, Dr Cuthbert  24–5, 27, 50 Marshall, William  101–3, 105, 108–9 Marshland (W.R.), commons of  4, 7, 185 Mary Tudor, see Princess Mary Masham, Lordship of, see Mashamshire Mashamshire (N.R.), commons of  38, 92, 184, 206 Maulds Meaburn, Westm.  225 Maunsell, Thomas, vicar of Brayton (W.R.)  186 Maunsell, William, deputy sheriff of Yorkshire  9, 174 Melanchthon, Philipp  101 Middleton, Sir Geoffrey, of Middleton, Westm. K.  153 Middleton, Peter, of Derwentwater, Cumb. 231, 241 Milburn, Westm. 226 militia system  176, 184 minsters, under threat  7–8, 10, 66 miracles, questioned  45, 69, 82, 85, 92–3, 107 Moigne, Thomas, Lincs. rebel  4–5, 114 Moorhouse, Geoffrey  81 Moorhouses, Westm.  215 More, Sir Thomas, lord chancellor  47, 104, 107–8, 152, 211 Morison, Richard  245–6 Morland, Westm. 237

Index

Musgrave, Nicholas, rebel captain in Westm.  24, 60, 202, 218 Nafferton (E.R.), Lordship of  185 Nateby, Westm.  215, 225–7 Neals Ing (W.R.)  184 Neville, Marmaduke  95, 124, 167, 175 New Order of Prayer, see Order of Prayer Newburgh Priory (N.R.)  70–71 Newhall, Westm.  215, 217 Nidderdale Chase (W.R.)  182, 206 nobility, commons’ attitudes towards  6–8, 14, 16, 18, 22, 147, 151, 161, 171–2, 181–2, 185 Norfolk, Thomas Howard, duke of  17, 19, 22, 35, 172, 174–6, 183, 203, 208, 233 Norfolk, unrest in  138, 183 Norman, Christopher and Stephen, of Broughton, Lincs.  168 North Ferriby Priory (E.R.)  64 northern border, see Scottish border Northumberland, commons of  179, 191, 207, 234 Northumberland, Henry Percy, earl of fourth earl  134 sixth earl  60, 151, 161, 181, 194, 203 Norton Abbey, Cheshire  63 Nottingham  23, 32, 174 noutgeld  36, 217–18, 221–4, 226–8 Nunburnholme Priory (E.R.)  66 obits, 87, 107; see also oblations oblations  96, 105, 107, 110 Oecolampadius, Johannes  101 Opinion of the northern clergy  30, 33–4, 51–2, 71–2, 89 Order for Abrogation of Holy Days  33, 45, 84, 91–4, 171 Order of Prayer  33, 35, 42, 45, 47, 55–61, 83, 94 Ormside, Westm.  223 Orton, Westm. 210 Oxen–le–Fields, Durham  184 Pardshaw, Cumb. 231 parish churches, fears for  3, 9–10, 38,

303

57–62, 66, 76–8, 128–9 parliament Pilgrim appreciation of  10, 18, 20, 22–3, 26, 28, 32, 70, 143–6, 163–4, 192 function of  103–6, 117–18, 125, 131–2, 138 Parr, William, steward of Kendal Barony  153 peacetime subsidy(1534)  26, 31–2, 38, 111–17, 141, 151 peasants revolt(1381) 1,  130, 133, 183, 241 Penrith, Cumb.  184, 215, 217 Percy family  181–2, 194, 198, 208 Percy, Sir Ingram, of Alnwick, Northumb.  180, 185 Percy, Sir Thomas, of Prudhoe Castle, Northumb.  9, 70, 79, 87, 124, 161, 181–2, 185 Percy, Henry, see Northumberland, earl of Percy Fee, Pilgrim rebels  of 65–6, 72, 79, 93, 184–5 Petre, Dr William  48 Pickering, Dr John 12, 30, 50–51, 74 Pickering’s Song  12–14, 74–5, 160, 168–9, 171–2 Piers Ploughman  159, 179 Pilgrim councils, see rebel councils Pilgrim oaths  6–7, 18, 43, 67, 80, 150, 178, 180 Pilgrim Order for Religious Houses  6–7, 67 Pilgrim songs, see ‘Crummock’; Pickering’s Song; Sawley Ballad Pilgrims’ badges and banners  92–3 Pilgrims’ petitions  16–17, 40–41 first petition (October)  2, 17–19, 67, 143, 177–8 second petition (December) authorisation  28–30 distinctive features  20–23 Pilgrim dissatisfaction with  33–9 presentation of grievances  49–50, 67, 120–22, 124, 143, 148–9, 152–5, 176–7, 190–91, 193, 201, 203, 212–13, 228

304

The Pilgrims’ Complaint

process of composition  23–8, 31–2, 35, 37, 40–41  pilgrimages, attitudes to  33, 48, 78–9, 85, 89–90, 95–6, 103, 107, 110, 199 poll taxes  133, 136 Pontefract Castle (W.R.) Aske’s address to captured lords and clerics  8, 178 Aske’s encounter with royal herald  6 gentlemen Pilgrims assemble in  28 taken by Aske  6, 8, 17, 43 Pontefract council (3–4 Dec.)  20, 22–3, 28–9;  see also clerical assembly Pontefract Priory  28, 30–31, 70–71 Pontefract uprising (1492)  135–6 pope,  attitudes towards against  46–50, 52, 82–3 for  11, 19, 49–61, 247 Prayer Book uprising (1549)  159 prayers for the dead, doubts about  83, 86, 96, 98, 102–3, 105, 110 Princess Mary, Pilgrim support for  6, 16, 19, 21, 25–6, 51–2, 54, 61, 143, 159–60, 170 privy council, attitudes to membership of  22, 146–7, 160 privy seal, letters of  148 prophecies, rhyming  12, 14–16, 163, 169 public works tax  139 Pulleyn, Robert, rebel captain in Westm.  24, 36, 202–3, 214, 218, 222–3, 227 purgatory against  45, 68–9, 82–3, 86, 95–7, 99, 103–4, 107–8 for  33, 89, 90–91, 94, 109–10 puture of hens  221–2 Queen’s College, Oxford  237 quindime, see fifteenth and tenth tax Rastell, John, M.P.  104–6, 108–9 rebaptism, antipathy to  105 rebel councils, see Appleby council; Beverley council; Cumberland council;  Pontefract council; Richmond council; York council

Redesdale, reivers of  182, 234 Redman, Richard, of Over Levens, Westm. K.  153, 233 Reid, Rachel  189 relics, views on  8, 33, 48, 62, 69, 73, 76–7, 85, 89, 92–3, 99, 101, 103 religious gilds  62, 68, 77, 86–7, 107, 110 religious houses  63, 170, 121–2; see also suppression of monasteries rents, issue of  73, 152, 195–6, 202–3, 216, 237 requests, court of  190 rescues of distraint  135–6 Rex, Richard  81–2 Richard II, 147 Riche, Sir Richard, chancellor of court of augmentations  3, 12, 68, 87, 150 ‘Richmond bill’ (14 Oct.)  63 Richmond council (5 Feb. 1537)  37–8, 191, 200, 233–4 Richmondshire commons  10, 58, 63, 67, 72, 92–3, 172, 181, 186, 198, 233–4 Rievaulx Abbey (N.R.)  70–71 Ringstone Hurst (E.R.)  5, 184 Ripon horsefair  92 Ripon (W.R.), Liberty of  122, 181, 184 risings of the commons  1, 42, 130, 159 Robin Hood, legends of  159 Rokeby, Westm.  225 Rokeby, James  75 Rothwell manor and park (W.R.)  154, 209 Royal Injunctions (1536)  33, 45, 48, 84–5 royal supremacy government view of  46–8, 49 Pilgrim objection to  26, 34, 50–53, 54–6, 61 see also pope sacramentarianism, antipathy to  100, 105 sacraments, reduction of  33–4, 48, 82, 85, 87–8, 90 Sadler, Sir Ralph  9 St Agatha, holy day abrogated, religious house dissolved  92; see also Easby Abbey St Clement’s Priory, York  66

Index

St Cuthbert banner of  42, 92–3 holy day abrogated  92 Pilgrim appreciation of  180–81 sanctuary breached  148 St George  24 St  German, Christopher  106–9 St Luke, holy day abrogated  34, 93, 180–81 St Paul’s Cross sermons  96–8 St Robert’s Friary, Knaresborough (W.R.)  9 St Thomas Becket  107 St Wilfred, holy day abrogated  34, 92–3, 180–81 saints, the worship of Henry VIII on  89 monasteries and promotion of  76 opposition to  48, 69–70, 78–9, 84–6,  95, 97–9, 101–4, 107–8 Pilgrim approval of  10, 34–5,  91–4, 109–10, 180–81, 247 saints’ days, see holy days Sais, Harry  42–3 sanctuaries, Pilgrim concern for  148, 150, 171, 177, 181, 184 Sandford, Westm.  223 Sandford Moor, Westm.  184 Sawley Abbey (W.R.)  12, 65–6, 72, 79 Sawley Ballad 12, 169 Scotland, Pilgrim fear of  8, 11, 170–71, 179–80 Scottish border defence of  8, 11, 130, 155–6, 173–4, 178–9, 191, 192–5, 197, 203, 219, 242 impact upon north of  173–6, 178–9, 182; see also tenant right sealing, as imposed by tenants upon landlords  32, 180, 199, 203–4, 206 Sedbergh (W.R.), commons of  38, 77, 206 seditious bills  36, 100–111, 128;  see also ‘Arncliffe bill’; ‘Beverley bill’; ‘Bilsdale bill’; Captain Poverty; Cumberland commons’ proclamation; Esch, Robert; ‘Forward bill’; ‘Richmond bill’; ‘stick ye together bill’

305

sergeant corn  36, 217–18, 220–23, 226–8 Seton Priory, Cumb.  62–3 Settle (W.R.)  60 Seymour, Queen Jane  83 Shaxton, Nicholas, bishop of Salisbury  94, 98–9 Sherwood, Dr, chancellor of Beverley minster  50 Shrewsbury, George Talbot, earl of  122, 174 Skipton (W.R.)  210 Skipton Castle, siege of  186 Skipton Forest, 157, 182 Skipwith Moor (E.R.)  5, 184 Smardale, Westm.  226–7 smoke tax, see hearth tax socage, tenure in  126, 149, 219, 222, 224–6, 228 society of orders, notion of  15, 22, 41, 43, 144, 151, 157–62, 165, 177–8, 238, 242–3, 245–9 Soulby, Westm.  226–7 Southwell, Robert  203–4, 208 Sowerby, Westm.  215, 217 Spennymoor, Durham  184 Spofforth (E.R.), Lordship of  185 Sponer, Edward, vicar of Broughton, Lincs.  168, 175 Staindrop College, Durham  237 Stainforth (W.R.)  60 Stainmore Forest, Westm.  60, 185, 214–17 Stanes, John, of Beetham, Westm. K. 233 Stapleton, William  9, 91, 151, 191, 196, 208, 212 star chamber, court of  148, 152–3, 190 ‘stick ye together bill’  158, 198–9 Stokesley, John, bishop of London  97–9 Strickland, Walter, of Sizergh, Westm. K. 153 subpoenas, alleged misuse of  147–8, 152–3, 223, 228 subsidy, development of  133–4, 137; see also clerical subsidy; peacetime subsidy Succession Acts (1534, 1536), Pilgrim opposition to  28, 143, 160, 170–71

306

The Pilgrims’ Complaint

Suffolk, Charles Brandon, duke of  17 Suffolk, unrest in  137, 183 suppression of monasteries, opposition to  2, 7–8, 10, 13, 19, 21, 26, 28, 39–40, 61–80, 170, 193–4, 241 Supremacy Act (1534)  28, 46, 51 Swaledale, commons of  63–4, 92, 199 Swinburn, Dr William  27, 56–7 Tadcaster church (W.R.)  65 Tallentire, Cumb.  231 Tarneybank, Westm. K.  184 taxation, English system of  115–119, 131–41; see also tonnage and poundage taxes, rumours of new  9, 38–9, 126–9, 139–40, 151 Tempest, Sir Nicholas, of Bashall-inBowland (W.R.)  65 Tempest, Sir Richard, of Bolling (W.R.)  153, 210 Tempest, Sir Thomas, of Holmside, Northumb.  28, 151 Ten Articles nature of  48, 85–7 approval of  48, 88–89 opposition to  33, 45 81–2, 87–91, 99–100 Ten Commandments, revision of  102 tenant right, tenure of  11, 22, 32, 171, 179–80, 191–4, 197–206, 208, 219, 240 Teshe, Tristram, of York  209 Thomlynson, of Bedale (N.R.)  92 Thompson, Robert, vicar of Brough, Westm.  10, 60–61, 214, 216–18, 229 tillage laws  210–13 Tithe Act (1536)  235 tithes, commons’ protests against  10, 24, 36–7, 65, 152, 228–239 tonnage and poundage  117–18, 131, 133, 139 Topcliffe (N.R.), Lordship of  185 Townley, Barnard, rector of Caldbeck, Cumb.  10, 198, 200, 230–31 transubstantiation  99–100

Treason Act (1534)  26, 28, 61, 143 Truce of 27 Oct., the  20, 172, 178, 183, 187, 202 Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of Durham  195, 234;  see also Durham, bishops of; Bishop Auckland Tyndale, reivers of  182, 234 Tyndale, William 97–8, 101 Uses Act(1536) complaint against  2–3, 19, 26, 28, 42, 123–6, 220, 228 compromises of 1540  141 Valor Ecclesiasticus  38, 117–18, 141 Vannes, Peter, absentee vicar of Kirkby Stephen, Westm.  230 Waitby, Westm.  226–7 Waldby, Marmaduke, vicar of Kirk Deighton(W.R.)  50–51 Warcop, John, of Smardale, Westm.  210 wardship  125, 219,  224–5 Warter Priory (E.R.)  62–3, 72 Watton church (E.R.)  91–2, 181 Watton Priory (E.R.)  27, 56–7, 70–71 Wensleydale (N.R.),  commons of  38, 63–4, 92, 199 Westmorland, Barony of, commons’ protests in  10–11, 24, 35–6, 55–6, 62, 93, 162, 180, 182, 184, 197, 202–3, 207, 214–17, 220, 229–30, 236–7 Weston, Sir Richard, of Kendal  153 Whalley Abbey (Lancs.)  70–71 Wharton, Sir  Thomas, of Wharton Hall, Westm.  153, 230–31, 236, 241 Whinfell Forest, Westm. 214–15 Whitby Abbey (N.R.)  70–71 Wigton, Cumb., Barony of  204–5 Winton, Westm. 215, 225–6 Wolsey, Thomas, cardinal and lord chancellor attitude to north  174 reform of equity  148, 152, 154 suppression of religious houses  68, 72

Index

tax reforms  118–19, 134, 138–9 Woodmancy, William, of Beverley (E.R.)  4 Wressel Castle (E.R.)  161, 182 Wriothesley, Thomas, clerk of the signet  9 Wycliffe, William, trial of  101, 147, 171 York Aske at  6–7, 18, 66 a centre of government 152, 154, 174

307

commoning rights  209 special parliament to be held in  23, 32, 73, 146, 174 York, archbishop of  8, 17, 30, 47, 50, 52–3, 71–2, 90–91 York council (21 Nov.)  20–21, 23–5, 161, 169, 203 York St Mary, Abbey of  230, 233, 237 Yorkshire uprising (1489)  130, 134, 140, 159