The Pilgrimage of Grace

I. England in 1536

The Pilgrimage of Grace took place at a moment of rapid religious and political change in England. Between 1529 and 1536 Henry VIII, seeking the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, had broken with the papacy. The Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 declared England an empire, self-sufficient in matters of law and religion, and the Act of Supremacy of 1534 recognised the king as supreme head on earth of the Church of England. The Treasons Act of the same year made it treason to deny the royal supremacy, and in 1535 Bishop John Fisher of Rochester and Sir Thomas More, together with several Carthusian monks, were executed for refusing to accept it.

The king's chief minister in these years was Thomas Cromwell, who in January 1535 was appointed vicegerent in spirituals, with authority to exercise the king's supremacy over the Church. Cromwell organised a survey of the wealth of the Church, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, completed in 1535, and a visitation of the monasteries that produced reports of misconduct. On the basis of these reports Parliament in 1536 passed an act dissolving religious houses with an annual income of less than two hundred pounds. Around three hundred houses were affected, and the dissolution commissioners were at work in the summer and autumn of 1536.

Other changes in 1536 affected parish life. The Ten Articles of July 1536, the first doctrinal statement of the Henrician Church, mentioned only three sacraments explicitly, baptism, penance and the eucharist, and qualified the teaching on purgatory and the invocation of saints. Cromwell's injunctions of August 1536 abolished many holy days, especially those falling in the harvest season, and instructed clergy to discourage pilgrimages and the veneration of relics and images. Rumours spread in the north that parish churches would be pulled down, that church plate would be confiscated, and that new taxes would be levied on baptisms, marriages and burials.

The north of England was in many respects distant from the court. The great families of the region, the Percies, Nevilles, Dacres and Cliffords, held large estates and commanded the loyalty of tenants, and the monasteries were important as landlords, employers, providers of hospitality and centres of worship. The region had also experienced economic difficulties, including rising rents, enclosures, and disputes over entry fines and tenant rights, and the subsidy granted by Parliament in 1534 was being collected in 1536.

II. The Lincolnshire Rising

The first rising began at Louth in Lincolnshire on 1 October 1536. The vicar of Louth had preached the previous day, and when rumours spread that the commissioners would come to take the church's treasures, the townspeople, led by a shoemaker named Nicholas Melton, known as Captain Cobbler, seized the registrar of the bishop of Lincoln and burned his books. Three sets of royal commissioners were working in the county at the time, dealing with the dissolution of the monasteries, the collection of the subsidy and the visitation of the clergy. The rising spread rapidly to Caistor, Horncastle and other towns.

The Lincolnshire rebels were joined by local gentry, some of whom later claimed that they had been compelled to take part. By 6 October an army of perhaps ten to twenty thousand had gathered at Lincoln. The rebels drew up articles complaining about the suppression of the monasteries, the subsidy, the Statute of Uses, which affected the inheritance of land, and the presence of men of low birth on the king's council, especially Cromwell and Richard Rich. They also objected to bishops whom they regarded as heretics, including Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, and Hugh Latimer, bishop of Worcester.

The king responded with a sharp letter denouncing the rebels and refusing their demands, and an army under the Duke of Suffolk approached. Faced with the royal army, the gentry withdrew and persuaded the commons to disperse. By 19 October the Lincolnshire Rising was over. Its leaders were arrested, and in the following months the vicar of Louth, Melton and others were tried and executed. Though short, the Lincolnshire Rising set the pattern for the larger movement that followed in Yorkshire.

III. Robert Aske and the Rising in Yorkshire

The rising in Yorkshire began in the East Riding in the second week of October 1536. Its leader was Robert Aske, a lawyer of Gray's Inn from a gentry family near Selby, who had been in Lincolnshire at the outbreak of the rising there. Aske later claimed that he had been compelled by the commons to take the oath and lead them, but he quickly became the principal organiser of the movement. He gave it the name of a pilgrimage, the Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth, and composed an oath that the pilgrims were required to swear.

The oath of the pilgrims stated that they entered the pilgrimage for the love of God, the preservation of the king's person and his issue, the purifying of the nobility, and the expulsion of villein blood and evil counsellors from the king's council. They swore to take part not for their own profit, nor to do displeasure to any private person, but for the restitution of the Church and the suppression of heretics and their opinions. The oath presented the movement as loyal to the king and directed against his ministers.

The pilgrims marched under banners bearing the Five Wounds of Christ, the chalice and the host, and the name of Jesus. They carried crosses from their parish churches, and in many places they restored monks and canons to houses that had been dissolved. On 16 October Aske's host entered York, where Aske ordered that the religious houses be restored and that the pilgrims pay for what they took. On 21 October Pontefract Castle was surrendered by Lord Darcy, its keeper, together with Edward Lee, archbishop of York, and Darcy joined the movement.

The rising spread to the North Riding, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire. In each region it had its own leaders and its own grievances, and in Cumberland and Westmorland the rising had a stronger agrarian character, with demands concerning tenant rights and tithes. By the end of October around thirty thousand armed men had gathered under Aske's leadership, many of them organised by the local gentry, and the movement controlled most of England north of the Don.

IV. The First Appointment at Doncaster

The king's forces in the north were commanded by the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury. With only about eight thousand men, and with the river Don in flood, Norfolk was in no position to fight the much larger pilgrim army. On 27 October 1536 Norfolk met the leaders of the pilgrims on Doncaster bridge and agreed a truce. Two representatives of the pilgrims, Sir Ralph Ellerker and Robert Bowes, were to take their petition to the king, and both armies were to disperse.

The truce reflected the reluctance of both sides to begin a civil war. The pilgrims insisted on their loyalty to the king, and many of their gentry leaders hoped for a negotiated settlement. Norfolk, who was himself unsympathetic to Cromwell and to religious change, was willing to make promises that he knew the king might not honour. Henry VIII detained the two representatives at court for several weeks, and during this time he prepared for military action while issuing a reply to the pilgrims' complaints.

V. The Pontefract Articles

In early December 1536 the leaders of the pilgrims met at Pontefract to prepare for a second meeting with Norfolk. The gentry met in council while a convocation of the clergy met separately in the priory of Pontefract under the presidency of Archbishop Lee to advise on religious questions. The result was a set of twenty-four articles, known as the Pontefract Articles, which set out the pilgrims' demands.

The articles called for the suppression of the heresies of Luther, Wycliffe, Hus, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Bucer and the Anabaptists, and of the books of Tyndale and Barnes, among others. They asked that the supremacy of the Church touching care of souls be reserved to the see of Rome as before, that the Lady Mary be made legitimate, that the abbeys suppressed be restored, that the tenths and first fruits be no longer paid to the crown, that the friars observant be restored, that heretics, bishops and temporal men be punished, and that Cromwell, Rich and the bishops of the new learning be removed. The articles also included demands relating to tenant rights, enclosures, the Statute of Uses, and the holding of a Parliament at York or Nottingham.

The clergy's statement at Pontefract included the view that the king could not be supreme head of the Church by the law of God, and that the cure of souls belonged to the pope. This was the most radical element of the pilgrims' programme, since it directly challenged the royal supremacy. In practice the lay leaders presented their demands more cautiously, emphasising the restoration of the monasteries and the removal of evil counsellors.

VI. The Second Appointment and the King's Pardon

On 6 December 1536 the pilgrim leaders met Norfolk at Doncaster again. Norfolk, authorised by the king, offered a general pardon to all who had taken part in the rising and promised that a Parliament would be held in the north within a year to consider their grievances. He also agreed that the restored abbeys could remain in place until the Parliament met. On the basis of these assurances, Aske tore off his badge of the Five Wounds and declared that the pilgrims would wear no badge but that of the king. The host dispersed.

Aske was invited to court at Christmas 1536, where the king received him graciously and asked him to write an account of the rising. This account, which survives, is one of the main sources for the events and for Aske's own understanding of the pilgrimage. In it Aske explained the importance of the monasteries to the north, describing them as places of hospitality for travellers, of relief for the poor, of education for the children of gentlemen, and of prayer for the dead. He returned to Yorkshire in January 1537.

VII. Bigod's Rising and the Reprisals

The settlement collapsed in January 1537. Sir Francis Bigod, a Yorkshire gentleman who had earlier been an evangelical sympathiser and a protégé of Cromwell, became convinced that the king did not intend to honour the promises made at Doncaster. Bigod objected to the royal supremacy on the ground that the cure of souls could not belong to a lay ruler. In mid-January he attempted to seize Hull and Scarborough. The attempt failed, and Aske and other leaders of the pilgrimage worked to suppress it. Further disturbances occurred in Cumberland and Westmorland in February, when a force of commons besieged Carlisle and was defeated.

The king used these new risings as grounds for revoking the pardon. Norfolk returned to the north with orders to impose martial law, and in February and March 1537 he presided over the execution of around seventy-four men in Cumberland and Westmorland, whose bodies were hanged in their villages as a warning. The leaders of the pilgrimage, including Aske, Lord Darcy, Sir Robert Constable and Lord Hussey, were arrested in the spring of 1537 and tried for treason, although most had taken no part in the risings of 1537.

Darcy was executed on Tower Hill in June 1537, Hussey at Lincoln, and Constable at Hull. Aske was taken to York and hanged in chains from the walls of Clifford's Tower on 12 July 1537. Abbots and monks of several houses that had been involved were also executed, including the abbots of Jervaulx, Whalley and Sawley and the former abbot of Fountains. In all about two hundred and sixteen people were executed for their part in the risings of 1536 and 1537.

VIII. The Dissolution Completed

The suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace was followed by the dissolution of the remaining monasteries. The involvement of some abbots in the rising gave the government grounds for treating their houses as forfeit for treason, and between 1537 and 1540 the larger monasteries were surrendered to the crown, many under pressure. The second Act of Dissolution of 1539 confirmed the transfer of these houses to the crown. By 1540 all the monasteries, priories, nunneries and friaries of England and Wales had been closed, and their lands had been granted, sold or leased to lay owners.

The government also established the Council of the North, reconstituted in 1537 as a permanent body sitting at York, to govern the region on the king's behalf. The power of the great northern families was reduced, and the crown's authority was strengthened through the council and through the grants of former monastic land to loyal gentry. The Parliament promised at Doncaster was never held in the north.

IX. The Scriptures and the English Reformation in 1536–1538

The Pilgrimage of Grace coincided with decisive developments in the history of the English Bible. William Tyndale, whose translation of the Greek Scriptures had been printed at Worms in 1526 and smuggled into England, was executed near Brussels in October 1536, at the very time when the rising was spreading in the north. His books were among those whose suppression the Pontefract Articles demanded. The site's pages on William Tyndale and the Tyndale legacy describe his work and its influence.

In 1535 Miles Coverdale had published the first complete printed Bible in English, drawing on Tyndale's translation, and in 1537 the Matthew Bible, edited by John Rogers, was licensed by the king. Cromwell's injunctions of September 1538 required every parish to acquire a copy of the Bible in English and to set it up in the church where parishioners could read it. The Great Bible, prepared by Coverdale under Cromwell's patronage, appeared in 1539 and became the official Bible of the Church of England.

The availability of the Scriptures in English was one of the issues that divided the pilgrims from the reformers. The pilgrims did not reject the Scriptures, but they associated the English translations with heresy and with the attack on traditional religion. Reformers such as Latimer argued that the Scriptures should be read by all, citing 2 Timothy 3:16-17, that all Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching. The conservative clergy, while accepting the authority of Scripture, held that its interpretation belonged to the Church and that unlearned reading could lead to error, a view they supported by 2 Peter 3:16, which speaks of things in Paul's letters that are hard to understand and that the ignorant twist.

X. Religion and Grievance

Historians have long debated whether the Pilgrimage of Grace was primarily a religious movement or a protest arising from economic and political grievances. Older studies, notably the work of Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds in 1915, emphasised the religious motivation and presented the rising as a defence of the old faith. In the 1960s and 1970s historians such as A. G. Dickens and C. S. L. Davies debated the role of the commons and the gentry, with Dickens stressing secular grievances and Davies the religious and popular character of the movement. G. R. Elton argued that the rising was organised by a court faction opposed to Cromwell, using popular discontent for political ends.

More recent work, especially that of R. W. Hoyle, Michael Bush and Geoffrey Moorhouse, has emphasised the complexity of the movement. Hoyle's The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s, published in 2001, argued that the rising arose from the commons and that the gentry joined it partly under pressure and partly to control it. Bush's studies of the regional risings showed the variety of grievances in different parts of the north. Most historians now accept that religious concerns, especially the defence of the monasteries and of parish religion, were central, but that they were combined with economic and political complaints.

The banners and badges of the pilgrims, their oath, and their restoration of religious houses indicate the importance of religion to the participants. The Five Wounds of Christ, a widespread devotion of the late Middle Ages, expressed both the suffering of Christ and the hope of salvation. The pilgrims also invoked the image of pilgrimage itself, which the injunctions of 1536 had discouraged. In adopting this language the leaders presented their movement as an act of devotion rather than rebellion.

XI. Henry VIII and the Royal Supremacy

The king's response to the rising reflected his conception of the royal supremacy. Henry regarded himself as responsible before God for the souls of his subjects, and he understood the supremacy as the restoration of the authority that kings had possessed in the Hebrew Scriptures. The propaganda of the 1530s, including the frontispiece of the Great Bible, which shows the king handing the word of God to Cranmer and Cromwell, presented the king as a new Josiah who restored true religion, after the model of 2 Kings 23:1-3, where the king of Judah reads the book of the law to the people.

The king's writers also appealed to the teaching on obedience in Romans 13:1-2, which declares that every person should be in subjection to the superior authorities, and to 1 Peter 2:13-17. Tyndale's own work The Obedience of a Christian Man, published in 1528, had argued from these passages that subjects owed obedience to their king and that the pope had usurped royal authority. Anne Boleyn is said to have shown this book to the king. In the government's view, rebellion against the king was rebellion against God, and the pilgrims' professions of loyalty could not excuse their taking up arms.

The pilgrims, for their part, appealed to an older conception of the commonwealth, in which the king was bound to govern according to law and custom, to protect the Church, and to take counsel from the nobility. They regarded the advisers who had introduced the changes of the 1530s as evil counsellors and believed that the king, if properly informed, would reverse their policies. This conception of loyal opposition had precedents in English history, including the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

XII. The Clergy in the Rising

The parish clergy and the religious played a significant part in the rising, although their role varied from place to place. In Lincolnshire the vicar of Louth and several other priests encouraged the commons, and the clergy assembled for the bishop's visitation at Horncastle were among the first to join the rebels. In Yorkshire priests carried crosses at the head of their parishioners and helped to administer the oath. Monks and canons of the restored houses supported the pilgrims with food and money, and some of them composed songs and letters in the movement's support.

The higher clergy were more cautious. Archbishop Lee of York, who had been taken by the pilgrims at Pontefract, preached a sermon there in December 1536 in which he declared that it was not lawful for subjects to take up arms without the king's authority. The sermon angered the pilgrims, and Lee's position during the rising remained ambiguous. Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, fled his diocese rather than join the movement. The clergy's convocation at Pontefract, however, produced the clearest theological statement of the movement's opposition to the royal supremacy.

The friars, whose orders had been among the strongest supporters of the papacy, were particularly affected by the royal policy. The Observant Franciscans, who had opposed the annulment of the king's marriage, had been suppressed in 1534, and their restoration was one of the Pontefract Articles. Some friars were active in spreading news and prophecies during the rising, and several were executed in its aftermath. The government regarded the religious orders as a source of opposition, and the involvement of some of their members in the rising strengthened the case for their total suppression.

XIII. Prophecy, Rumour and Popular Religion

The rising was accompanied by the circulation of rumours and prophecies. In the weeks before the outbreak at Louth it was said that parish churches within five miles of each other would be pulled down, that the king would take all the gold and silver of the churches, that a tax would be imposed on white bread, geese and capons, and that no one would be permitted to eat such foods without paying the king. These rumours, though without foundation, expressed widespread anxiety about the direction of royal policy and the security of local religious life.

Prophecies circulated in manuscript and by word of mouth, many of them attributed to Merlin, Thomas the Rhymer or the Venerable Bede. They spoke of a mouldwarp, a mole, which would be driven from his kingdom, and the pilgrims and their sympathisers interpreted this figure as Henry VIII. The government took such prophecies seriously, and the Treasons Act of 1534 had made it an offence to spread prophecies about the king. Several people were executed in the following years for circulating prophecies of this kind.

Historians of popular religion, especially Eamon Duffy, have used the evidence of the rising to show the vitality of late medieval religion in the north of England. The parish guilds, the cult of the saints, the veneration of relics, the observance of holy days and the commemoration of the dead were deeply rooted in local communities. The injunctions of 1536 and the dissolution of the monasteries threatened these practices, and the rising shows the strength of the attachment to them. Other historians, such as Ethan Shagan, have emphasised that many people collaborated with the Reformation in different ways, and that the response to religious change varied widely.

XIV. Robert Aske's Account

Robert Aske's account of the rising, written at the king's request in late 1536 and early 1537, and his answers under interrogation in April 1537, are among the most important sources for the pilgrimage. Aske explained that the commons had compelled him to act, but he also gave a coherent account of the causes of the rising. He emphasised the suppression of the abbeys as the chief grievance, explaining that the north was poor and remote and that the abbeys provided spiritual and material support that no other institution could replace.

In his answers Aske also discussed the royal supremacy. He stated that he could not accept that the king was supreme head of the Church in spiritual matters, since the cure of souls belonged to the clergy and ultimately to the pope. He acknowledged the king's authority in temporal matters and insisted on his own loyalty. His testimony shows the difficulty that many loyal subjects experienced in reconciling their obedience to the king with their religious convictions.

Aske was described by contemporaries as a man of intelligence, courage and eloquence. He lost an eye in his youth, a detail recorded in several sources. His conduct during the rising, his efforts to restrain violence and his attempts to suppress Bigod's Rising have led some historians to regard him as a sincere and principled leader who was deceived by the king's promises. His execution at York in July 1537 made him, in later Catholic memory, a figure of martyrdom, although he has never been formally recognised as such.

XV. The Pilgrims' Ballad

Among the literary products of the rising is the "Pilgrims' Song", a ballad of about twenty stanzas attributed to the monks of Sawley. It begins with an invocation of Christ crucified and asks for the restoration of the Church and the punishment of those who had despoiled it. It names Cromwell and other counsellors as enemies of the commonwealth and calls on the pilgrims to persevere. The ballad shows the way in which the pilgrims used the language of devotion to express their political aims, and it was later used by the government as evidence of the involvement of the monks in the rising.

XVI. The Monasteries of the North

The religious houses whose dissolution provoked the rising included some of the most important in England. The Cistercian abbeys of Fountains, Rievaulx, Byland, Jervaulx, Sawley and Whalley, the Benedictine abbeys of St Mary's at York, Whitby and Selby, and the Augustinian priories of Bridlington, Guisborough and Bolton were large landowners and centres of religious life. Smaller houses, such as the nunneries and the cells of larger monasteries, were also significant in their localities.

Aske's account of the importance of the monasteries emphasised their role in the life of the region. They provided hospitality to travellers in a sparsely populated area, alms to the poor, and employment to tenants and servants. They maintained bridges, roads and sea walls, and they kept records of property. They also offered prayers for the dead and the celebration of the liturgy, which the pilgrims regarded as essential to the spiritual welfare of the region. Modern historians have qualified some of Aske's claims, noting that the charitable activity of the monasteries was often limited, but have also confirmed their importance as landlords and patrons.

The suppressed houses of the 1536 dissolution included Sawley Abbey in Lancashire, whose monks were restored by the pilgrims in October 1536 and whose case became one of the best-documented episodes of the rising. The monks composed a ballad in support of the pilgrims, the "Pilgrims' Song", which lamented the suppression of the abbeys and called on Christ crucified to save the commonwealth. The abbot of Sawley was executed in 1537.

XVII. The Gentry and the Commons

A central question in the study of the pilgrimage is the relationship between the gentry and the commons. The commons began the rising in most places, and they frequently compelled gentlemen to take the oath and to lead them, sometimes by threats against their persons and property. Once involved, the gentry provided organisation, military experience and a voice in negotiations, and they tended to moderate the demands of the commons and to seek a settlement with the king. The commons, for their part, were often suspicious of the gentry and feared that they would be betrayed.

This tension shaped the course of the rising. The acceptance of the truce at Doncaster in October and of the pardon in December was largely the work of the gentry leaders, while the renewed risings of January and February 1537 came from commons who believed that the promises had been broken. The government exploited these divisions, offering pardon to those who submitted and using the gentry to restore order. Michael Bush's studies have shown that the rebel armies were organised on the basis of the musters of the localities, under captains drawn from the gentry and the yeomanry, which gives the movement the appearance of an alternative structure of local government during the weeks of its existence.

XVIII. The Wider Context of the English Reformation

The Pilgrimage of Grace was the largest rebellion against Henry VIII and the greatest challenge to the Reformation in England during his reign. Its defeat confirmed the royal supremacy and enabled the completion of the dissolution of the monasteries. In the following years the king's religious policy moved back and forth, with the conservative Act of Six Articles of 1539 and the execution of Cromwell in 1540, but the break with Rome and the dissolution were not reversed.

Later risings in the reign of Edward VI, notably the Prayer Book Rebellion in Devon and Cornwall in 1549, and the Rising of the North in 1569 under Elizabeth I, drew on similar religious and regional grievances. The rebels of 1569, led by the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, also marched under the banner of the Five Wounds, consciously recalling the pilgrimage. The site's page on the Marian persecutions describes the period of Catholic restoration under Mary I, when many of the changes opposed by the pilgrims were reversed for a time.

For summaries of the events, readers may consult the Grokipedia entries on the Pilgrimage of Grace and the dissolution of the monasteries.

XIX. Chronology

In 1534 the Act of Supremacy was passed. In 1535 the Valor Ecclesiasticus was compiled, and Fisher and More were executed. In March 1536 the act for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries was passed. In July 1536 the Ten Articles were issued, and in August Cromwell's injunctions. On 1 October 1536 the Lincolnshire Rising began at Louth, and it ended by 19 October. On about 10 October the Yorkshire rising began, and on 16 October Aske entered York. On 21 October Pontefract Castle was surrendered. On 27 October the first truce was agreed at Doncaster.

On 2 to 4 December 1536 the Pontefract Articles were drawn up, and on 6 December the second meeting at Doncaster produced the king's pardon. In January 1537 Bigod's Rising took place, and in February the attack on Carlisle. In February and March Norfolk imposed martial law in Cumberland and Westmorland. In May 1537 the leaders of the pilgrimage were tried in London. In June Darcy and Hussey were executed, and on 12 July 1537 Aske was hanged at York. Between 1537 and 1540 the remaining monasteries were dissolved.

XX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.