The Pilgrims' Complaint

A Study of Popular Thought in the Early Tudor North

Michael Bush

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138382763
• eBook ISBN: 9781351884235
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular uprising in the north of England against Henry VIII's religious policies, has long been recognised as a crucial point in the fortunes of the English Reformation. Historians have long debated the motives of the rebels and what effects they had on government policy. In this new study, however, Michael Bush takes a fresh approach, examining the wealth of textual evidence left by the pilgrimage of grace to reconstruct the wider social, political and religious attitudes of northern society in the early Tudor period. More than simply a reassessment of the events of October 1536, the book examines the mass of surviving evidence - the rebels' proclamations, rumour-mongering bills, oaths, manifestos, petitions, songs, prophetic rhymes, eye-witness accounts and confessions - in order to illuminate and explore the kind of grass-roots feelings that are often so hard to pin down. He concludes that the evidence points to a much more complex situation than has often been assumed, revealing much more than simply a desire for the country to return to the old religion and familiar ways. Rather, this book demonstrates how the rebels sought to use the language of custom and tradition to bolster their own political and economic positions in a rapidly changing world. It reveals a populace at once conservative and radical, able to judge innovation and change in relation to its own benefit and ultimately able to advance a coherent programme of reform. Whilst this programme was carefully couched in language supportive of the traditional orderly society, it nevertheless carried within it more radical proposals, which proved extremely challenging to the monarchy, government and church, who eventually closed ranks to bring the uprising to an end. As both an exploration of the causes and aims of the pilgrimage of grace, and the wider religious, social and political attitudes of northern England, this book has much to offer the student of the period.

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.¹ 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, rumour-mongering 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.² 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.³ 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 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. ⁴ 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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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’.⁷ 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 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’.⁸

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.⁹ 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 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 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 gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 For Faith and Commonwealth
• 2 In Defence of the Faith
• 3 'Intolerable Exactions'
• 4 The Polity Defended
• 5 North and South
• 6 Agrarian Conflict
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Key Declarations of Pilgrim Complaint and Intent
• Bibliography
• Index