The Pilgrimage of Grace

"With the Sacred Banner of The Five Wounds of Christ floating before them, and the picks bourne under a huge canopy, with crosses, banners, swinging censers and Holy Bread and Water to defend them from Devils and The Adverse Power, the procession of Devon and Cornish farmers and labourers, led by a few of The Gentry, ignorantly pitting themselves against the whole power of The State, marched on Exeter behind their robed priests, singing as they advanced.

We do not know how many conservative or stubborn West Countrymen marched in that hopeless rebellion - a few thousand, probably. They spoke and fought for tens of thousands no doubt, who disliked and detested the changes."


Prof. WG Hoskins,
Protestant Historian

"In 1549, Thomas Cramner, the appostate Archbishop of Canterbury was at last able to fulfill his greatest ambition - the traditional Latin Mass was abolished and replaced with a new Mass in English, Communion under both kinds, where any reference to the hated Doctrine of SACRIFICE had been removed.

For many of The Ordinary Faithful, this turned out to be The Last Straw, and provoked a number of armed risings - and this was, of course, in the reign of Edward VI, The Boy King, who, if you will remember, became King in 1547.

Like all Revolutionaries of every era, Cramner was convinced that he knew what was best for The People, in whose interest he claimed to be acting - although They had given him no mandate to represent Them.

"The Services," he said, "must be understood by The People, and be congregational - The People must be turned from spectators,lost in their private devotions, into active participants."

"The Real Cause of the opposition of country clergy and Devonshire peasants was the proof the Prayer Book seemed to give that all the agitations and changes of the last few years really were  going to end in a permanant clevage between The Past and The Present, and The Familiar was to give way to something strange, foreign, imposed."

"Tudor men and women had stoicly endured many religious changes in the reign of Henry, but these early Edwardian changes were recognised as something new - something different.

The Marian Church wardens of Stanford-in-the-Vale, Berkshire, stocktaking after 6 years of destruction, articulated a very generally-shared perception, when they dated "the time of schism, when this realm was separated from The Catholic Church" not from The Breach with Rome in the Early 1530s, but from "the second year of King Edward VI, when all good ceremonies and good uses were taken out of The Church within this realm"

- Dr. Eamon Duffy 

The Stripping of The Altars