I teach history courses for the Workers' Educational Association as well as giving talks on various history topics across Yorkshire and the Midlands as well as talks about the history and creation of cross stitch samplers and blackwork embroidery.
Divine right is the belief in the God given right of a monarch to rule. The idea was established in the reign of James (1603-25) who believed that the king was subject to no other earthly authority and could only be judged by God. Any attempt to depose or even to restrict the powers of the king went against God’s will. In 1598 he had published a book called The True Law of Free Monarchies. He claimed that ‘Kings are justly called gods for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power on earth’. The Basilikon Doron written by the king as a set of instructions for his eldest son, Prince Henry, in 1599 identified his ideology more clearly.
The book is divided into three parts:
I) how to be a Christian king
2) practical aspects of kingship
3) the king’s behaviour in everyday life.
James’ belief in the divine right of kings had a negative impact on his relationship with the English Parliament. During the reign of his successor, Charles who inherited the throne following the deaths of his elder brother in 1612 and James in 1625 also believed in the divine right of kings. Charles I also believed that because he was God’s representative only he had the right to make laws and that to oppose him was a sin. He believed that he was above the law and had to govern according to his conscience.
By the time James died in 1625 Parliament was suspicious of the Stuart kings, by 1628 the tension turned to Parliamentary demands known as the Petition of Right. Charles lacked both experience and confidence and relied upon the advice of his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham advocated a raid on Cadiz which was a disaster. Parliament demanded that she should be impeached – so Charles dissolved parliament before it granted him any funds. Buckingham arranged for the king to marry a French Catholic bride (Henrietta Maria) and then went to war with the French in 1627 in support of the Huguenots of La Rochelle – the whole thing was a disaster because of poor planning. By 1628 Charles was at war, without any money and was trying to extract forced loans. He had no choice but to call Parliament.
Sir Edward Coke, a lawyer, put together the Petition of Right which stated, there would be no more forced loans; no imprisonment without trial – 5 knights had been sent to prison because they refused to pay Charles’ forced loan. In addition there would be no further use of free lodgings (billeting) for soldiers in civilian households and no use of martial law against civilians. At the same time, the House of Commons granted the king five subsidies but only if he agreed their terms. Coke and Parliament were defining the law by asserting rights that already existed. It should have been an opportunity for the king and parliament to learn to work together…
Click on the book to open the link in a new tab to find the book and read more about their contents. I love Leanda de Lisle’s writing. Last year she published a biography of Charle’s queen, Henrietta Maria
Reformation, taxation and enclosure were causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. During the reign of Henry VII rebellions including the Lovell/Stafford rising, the rebellion in favour of Lambert Simnel and the Perkins Warbeck rebellion were all related to the dynastic upheavals of the fifteenth century. it wasn’t really just about bloodlines by that time, it was also about power and influence at court – who would help the king to govern. But even they had more than one cause.
Taxation and enclosure: this could be a localised problem as with the Yorkshire rebellion of 1489 that saw the murder of the Earl of Northumberland. The same was true of the Cornish Rebellion of 1497 that was then followed up by the Cornish commons joining with the Perkin Warbeck Revolt. The most well known of the rebellions associated with enclosure was Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk in 1549 during the reign of Edward VI. Local taxation, rent rises and enclosure of common land led to risings based on social and economic need – but they weren’t necessarily a major threat to the Tudors because they were regional rather than national. Where the rising was contained in one area it was easier to put down.
Religion: The Pilgrimage of Grace is the most obvious example, but in 1554 when Mary Tudor, a.k.a. Bloody Mary, was on the throne Wyatt’s Rebellion aimed to place Elizabeth on the throne because she was protestant.
The Tudors always feared rebellion but they centralised government, used propaganda and had a secret service. The real problem with any rebellion was if it was backed by a foreign power like the French, Spanish or the papacy. One of the reasons Henry VIII was so alarmed by the Pilgrimage of Grace was because there was a potential threat from Catholic nobles who wanted Princess Mary restored to her rightful place in the succession. Taken together with the support of the gentry (not always given willingly) and the clergy it was perhaps the biggest challenge to Tudor authority. The Pilgrimage of Grace is something studied at school because it was the biggest rebellion that expressed anti-Reformation beliefs.
Henry VIII and Thomas Wolsey continued with their programme of closing the monasteries but it was only during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I that opinions completely polarised. Reformers became gradually more radical, while Catholics wanted to keep to their traditional values. It was one of the reasons that the presence of Mary Queen of Scots in England was difficult for Elizabeth. The Scottish queen was recognised by many catholics as England’s legitimate monarch and it led to prolonged plotting against Elizabeth.
Religious contention would lead, in 1605, during the Stuart era, to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 which aimed to kill James I and his heir, destroy the Protestant parliament and leave the way clear for a Catholic restoration. The plotters intended to place James’ daughter Elizabeth Stuart on the throne, convert her to catholicism and ensure that she was married to a Catholic husband. In 1701 the Act of Settlement finally drew the matter of the religion of the succession to a conclusion – the monarch had to be Protestant or Parliament wouldn’t recognise their right to rule. Ultimately in 1714 George I became King of England because he was the nearest in line to the throne from among the potential claimants who was a Protestant. Of course, that didn’t stop the Catholic heirs of James II (who had been deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – his son James (the Old Pretender) and his grandson Charles (Bonnie Prince Charlie, a.k.a. the Young Pretender) attempting to regain the throne for the Catholic branch of the Stuart family in the Jacobite rebellions of the eighteenth century.
And of course, in between the times – the seventeenth century saw the English Civil Wars, which is where we will be going next.
The pilgrims of 1536 demonstrated that religion could be an alternative authority to the Crown. Rituals and symbolism were important throughout the rebellion. The image here shows monks and a bishop heading the procession of pilgrims- they carry a cross and a banner showing the five wounds of Christ which was the pilgrim badge. One of the things that this did was to create a sense of unity among the thousands of pilgrims who came from many layers of society with diverse social and economic backgrounds.
The Five Wounds of Christ depict the injuries Christ sustained during his crucifixion. They were a powerful reminder of the rebels’ catholic beliefs and their opposition to Henry VIII’s reform of the Church. The imagery was an easy way for ordinary people to understand what the protest was about – that the rebels objected to the break with Rome and the closure of the monasteries. Men who might not have rebelled against the king would protest because they believed that their spiritual life – and eternity – were being damaged by the Crown.
The rebels took an oath of allegiance to the Pilgrimage of Grace, took part in masses and mass processions and had churches return to the old way of conducting services. As well as showing their devotion to God, these were an act of defiance against the authority of the king.
Having provided a title of the Pilgrimage of Grace I provided you with the Lincolnshire Rising as a preliminary and now will round it all off with Bigod’s Revolt – demonstrating that the rebels, or pilgrims as they preferred to be known, definitely didn’t do joined up.
In December 1536 the Duke of Suffolk agreed terms with the Pilgrims and Henry pardoned them. He didn’t really have much choice. His army was too small and besides which Suffolk was rather busy restoring order in Lincolnshire. Aske’s error lay in taking Henry’s word that they were free to go and that he would address their grievances. In reality the king had been on the receiving end of a nasty shock. There may have been as many as 50,000 rebels across the north of England and it didn’t help Henry that the gentry were involved. Their organisational skills and use of the regional wapentake system meant that it was harder for the royal authorities to put the rebellion down. It was perhaps only because the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire rebellions weren’t co-ordinated that matters hadn’t taken a turn for the worse – that and of course, the rebels didn’t want to overthrow the king, they just wanted him to change his mind about getting rid of Catholicism and the monasteries.
Henry invited Aske to spend Christmas with him at Greenwich and the lawyer had complained to the king about Thomas Cromwell little realising that the minister was acting on the king’s orders.
SIr Francis Bigod, initially in favour of reform and one of Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners tasked with looking at the monasteries before he had a change of heart, disagreed with Robert Aske. He didn’t believe that the king would keep his word. His view was corroborated by the evidence of a military build up at Hull. On 16 January 1537, Bigod renewed the rebellion. He was supported by men who had grievances with their landlords putting up the rent. This was a result of the closure of monasteries. Men purchased land but needed to get their money back – putting up the rent was one way of doing that. Bigod planned to attack Hull and to capture Scarborough Castle.
At the end of January the Duke of Norfolk declared martial law – rebels could be hanged without trial. On 1 February 74 rebels were hanged in Westmorland. Thee executions continued even though the Duke of Norfolk expressed pity for the rebels to Cromwell. He understood that land enclosure and rent rises had as much to do with the rising as rebelling against the king.
Aske returned to Yorkshire and gathered his men intending to defeat Bigod. His intention was to join up with the Duke of Norfolk’s army but so far as the king was concerned the agreement made in December was off because Bigod’s revolt, in his eyes was an extension of the Pilgrimage of Grace. When Norfolk arrived at Beverley, most of Aske’s men were captured.
Francis Bigod was found hiding with two servants in Cumbria. He was taken to Carlisle Castle before being sent to London where he was executed on 2 June 1537. Aske, Thomas Percy and Lord Darcy were also arrested as were other members of the gentry, along with six abbots including the Abbot of Jervaulx who was a very unwilling participant in the Pilgrimage of Grace. They were all executed as were six abbots. Aske was executed on 12 July 1537 at York. Perhaps they were marginally more fortunate than Margaret Bulmer whose husband John was one of the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace. A priest called John Watts testified as to her involvement and she was promptly tried, found guilty of treason and burned at Smithfield. Women found guilty of treason were burned rather than being hanged because apparently it preserved their decency. It was only in 1790 that the Treason Act abolished the penalty of burning for high treason.
In 1536 an act was passed closing the lesser monasteries worth less than £200 per year. By September there were three groups of commissioners in Lincolnshire i)commissioners to dissolve the monasteries, ii) commissioners to collect a subsidy and iii) commissioners to investigate the fitness of the clergy for their jobs. There were lots of rumours about church plate being stolen, that taxes were to be levied on all horned cattle, that there would be new taxes for baptisms, marriages and burials…there were other even wilder rumours. An atmosphere of suspicion and panic began to brew. It didn’t help that the monasteries were the organisations which provided alms and medical care to the poorest members of society. The gentry and northern nobility had their own grievances. Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister was busy reducing the power of landowners. Inflation continued to rise. Basically the north was not a happy place and men had just about had enough of their king playing with their long established beliefs.
The Lincolnshire Rising turns into the Pilgrimage of Grace.
1 October 1536 – Thomas Kendall, Vicar of St. James’ Church, Louth, preached a sermon which made his listeners believe that the church, of which they were very proud because of its spire, and their beliefs were in danger.
2 October 1536 – The ordinary people of Louth, led by shoemaker Nicholas Melton (Captain Cobbler), seized John Heneage, the Bishop of Lincoln’s registrar, as he tried to read out Thomas Cromwell’s commission to the townspeople. His papers were ripped from his hands and burned.
3 October 1536 – 3,000 men marched from Louth to Caistor and seized the King’s subsidy commissioners (remember a subsidy is a tax that doesn’t conform to the accepted fifteenths and tenths).
4 October 1536 – Trouble in Horncastle. Thomas Wulcey (or Wolsey), one of Cromwell’s men, and Dr Raynes, the chancellor of the Bishop of Lincoln were murdered by the rebels. Articles of complaint were drawn up by the gentry, Sheriff Edward Dymmoke and his brother, and then presented them to the gathered crowd. The rising until then was inspired by the commons but now the gentry took their place as captains of the ordinary people. They objected to the dissolution of the religious houses, the grant to the king of the tenths and first-fruits of spiritual benefices ( a clerical tax that usually went to Rome), the rise of Thomas Cromwell and Richard Rich onto the King’s Council and the promotion of archbishops and bishops who they felt “subverted the faith of Christ”. The rebels then decided to march to Lincoln Cathedral. In north Lincolnshire the gentry called out the wapentakes for which they were responsible – the administrative system was turned against the king.
7 October 1536 – Rebels from Horncastle, Louth and other Lincolnshire towns met at Lincoln Cathedral. There were between 10,000 and 20,000 men. Peers loyal to the king discovered that their tenants would not join forces against the rebels. The clergy of Lincolnshire, in particular Barlings and Kirkstead, also did did their part to rouse the commons. Without the gentry and the clergy, the king was not able to use the administrative system to put down the rebellion locally.
8 October 1536 – Lawyer Robert Aske roused the people of Beverley in Yorkshire to the same cause as the Lincolnshire rebels – calling on them to maintain the ‘Holy Church’.
9 October 1536 – The rebels in Lincoln sent their petition of grievances to the King, and also sent messengers into Yorkshire. The rebellion began to spread throughout Yorkshire.
10 October 1536 – Robert Aske, a lawyer, was named the leader of the rebels in West Yorkshire, which now joined in with the uprising.
11 October 1536 – The King’s herald arrived at Lincoln with the King’s reply. He wasn’t amused and told them to go home unless they wanted to be found guilty of treason. If they didn’t he would send an army commanded by the Duke of Suffolk. Many of the rebels went home – they didn’t fancy being hanged, drawn and quartered.
13 October 1536 – Lord Darcy reported that the whole of Yorkshire was in rebellion and the following day rebels gathered in York.
15 October 1536 – Henry VIII wrote to his commanders, the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Duke of Suffolk with orders and also sent another message to the rebels in Lincolnshire promising to show them mercy if they left their weapons and went home.
19 October 1536 – Henry VIII wrote to the Duke of Suffolk ordering him to destroy Louth. He also wrote to the Earl of Derby, giving him instructions for the Abbey of Salley in Lancashire – which was to be recaptured, the rebellion put down and all the traitors executed including the abbot and the monks.
20 October 1536 – Lord Darcy handed Pontefract Castle to the rebels, or pilgrims as they were known. The castle’s inhabitants – which included Lord Darcy and Edmund Lee, Archbishop of York swore the rebel oath.
21 October 1536 – Robert Aske refused to allow the Lancaster Herald at Pontefract Castle read out the proclamation explaining that the Lincolnshire rebels had submitted. Instead, Aske announced that the rebels would march on London.
25 October 1536 – Four chaplains of Poverty were appointed by the Pilgrimage of Grace rebels to instruct them in the true Catholic faith. A mass, known as the Captains’ Mass was performed at Penrith Church and again on the following day.
26 October 1536 – The rebels stopped near Doncaster, where they met troops commanded by the Duke of Norfolk. There were about 50,000 pilgrims by then while the duke only had about 8,000 men. But Robert Aske who always declared his loyalty to the Crown preferred to negotiate. He wanted to make it clear that they did not object to the king but they did object to the changes he was making to religion.
November 1536 – Norfolk promised, on behalf of Henry VIII that the people’s demands would be met and that they would be pardoned. Aske then dismissed his troops.
3rd December 1536 – A proclamation was made to the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace offering them a pardon. They hurried home to celebrate Christmas – little realising that the king had no intention of keeping his word and that someone had kept a list of all the gentry involved with the pilgrimage, whether they joined willingly or not….
There’s 2 more parts to the Pilgrimage of Grace – but to get you thinking, these are the kinds of question that sixteen year olds are being asked for their history exam where a working knowledge of the Pilgrimage of Grace is useful:
Have ideas, such as equality and democracy, been the main reason for protest in Britain? Explain your answer with reference to ideas and other factors. Use a range of examples from across your study of Power and the people: c1170 to the present day. (16 marks)
Has religion been the main factor in causing protest in Britain since Medieval times? Explain your answer with reference to religion and other factors. Use a range of examples from across your study of Britain: Power and the People: c1170 to the present day. (16 marks)
And for those of you who would like to know more about The Pilgrimage of Grace – click on the picture to open a new tab.
Henry VII’s hated tax collectors – Empson and Dudley. The Duke of Rutland Collection
Society remained unequal even though feudalism was no more. Rebellion against the Tudors was not about class or fairness, it was, after the Wars of the Roses, about belief and, of course, money! Equality and democracy were not always reasons to protest.
Kings should only tax their subjects to meet the needs of war or other exceptional circumstances. In 1483 an act of parliament made non-parliamentary taxation illegal. In medieval times this was eventually worked out as a fixed about known as fifteenths and tenths and was a valuation made upon a whole communities. The Tudors came up with the idea of assessing individuals. These taxes were known as subsidies and were arbitrary. They were levied in 1489, 1497 and 1536. Opposition to the subsidies in Parliament led to heated arguments and to outbreaks of violence in the wider realm. Tax collectors were not popular men. Between 1485-1547 there were 11 recorded cases of tax collectors being assaulted and more than 100 occasions when goods and property seized by the tax collector was forcibly taken back. On occasion resistance to taxation resulted in the challenge to royal authority turning into rebellion.
In April 1489 the 4th Earl of Northumberland tried to collect a subsidy that had been granted to Henry VII by Parliament so that he could support Brittany against the French. Northumberland confronted a gathering near Thirsk and was promptly assassinated. He was the only person to be killed during the uprising. Polydore Virgil and the Great Chronicle of London suggested that Northumberland was killed by men sympathetic to the Yorkist cause. Although the Percy family was traditionally Lancastrian in sympathy, the 4th earl was a teenage in 1461 at the Battle of Towton and was eventually rehabilitated by Edward IV who he served in various roles. In 1485 he was at the Battle of Bosworth in charge of the reserves. His failure to enter the fray was regarded as extremely treacherous by the Yorksist supporters of Richard III and even today historians regard him as being a supporter of Henry VII rather than the man whose colours he wore. Vergil and the writer of the Great Chronicle of London thought much the same. In either case Northumberland was either killed because of the loyalty of the north to the memory of Richard or because Henry wished to impose his will on the north – and Northumberland paid the price for forcing it upon the men of Yorkshire.
The rebellion of 1497 was perhaps more serious. Taxation became a major issue in Cornwall where Henry was levying a subsidy to raise an army to deal with the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck (obviously if you’re a Yorkist then he wasn’t a pretender but this isn’t the time or the place for that discussion). Parliament granted the king two fifteenths and tenths and a subsidy equating to £120,000 which was huge. In addition wealthier members of society found themselves subject to a forced loan. The Cornish were already fairly irritated by regulations imposed on the tin mining industry and the loss of their privileges which were an important part of the local economy.
Recognising that blaming the king would be treason the agitators blamed the king’s advisors Cardinal Morton and Reginald Bray. They marched to London to present their grievances to the government and to demand an end to the taxation. They were led by a blacksmith and a lawyer. As well as gentry, and tin miners there were men from all the working class ranks of society and by the clergy. At Wells in Somerset they even gained the support of Lord Audley – who was fairly cash strapped at the time. In a way it made the rebellion more alarming because it crossed the social hierarchy.
By the 13 June 15,000 protesters were at Guildford. The army that Henry intended to send to Scotland had to be diverted south. On 16 June the rebel army arrived at Blackheath causing panic in London but the support wasn’t as widespread as many of the protesters hoped. Plus no one wanted to be a rebel – the consequences were unpleasant. A large number of men deserted, especially when they heard that Henry’s army had swelled from 8,000 to 25,000 – making it one of the largest armies ever gathered by a king of England.
The Battle of Blackheath took place on 17 June 1497 at the bridge at Deptford Strand. Lord Daubeney, the king’s commander crossed the bridge, was captured by the Cornish but quickly rescued. The Cornish didn’t have any reserves or any artillery. They were soon defeated. The leaders of the rebellion, including Lord Audley, were hanged, drawn and quartered. Originally the king thought he would send the butchered body parts to Cornwall as a warning but decided that it wouldn’t be wise – he was right. Instead he fined everyone involved with the rebellion – he was systematic and severe – unsurprisingly the Cornish promptly rebelled again, still in 1497, and joined forces with Perkins Warbeck who landed in Cornwall that September.
Polydore Vergil, who was a Tudor historian, recorded that resistance to Tudor taxation did not always take the form of violence. When Cardinal Wolsey tried to raise funds for Henry VIII’s French campaigns between 1513 and 1525 many men simply shrugged their shoulders and said they couldn’t afford the payments. The Amicable Grant of 1525 was aimed specifically at the clergy but Wolsey found that many abbots simply claimed not to have the money or that the economy was so bad that even if they sold goods they would be unable to afford what the king wanted. At Lavenham in Suffolk the subsidy was largely paid by wealthy clothiers but they owned less than 3% of the property and many of the adult males of the area were out of work. As a consequence some 4,000 men from all walks of life banded together to protest – the tax collectors, on this occasion the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, were hesitant to stir the anger of the protesters and had some sympathy with their difficulties. Public opinion wa becoming more vocal and it meant that the first two Tudor kings were forced to recognise that the Crown rested on partnership with the men who paid tax. Popular opinion was becoming more important than ever before.
For a comprehensive overview of Tudor Rebellions click on the image to open the link.
Parliament was summoned in September 1399 because King Richard II had been deposed by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, the eldest son of John of Gaunt. Parliament unanimously accepted the 33 articles of deposition on 1 October and a fortnight later Henry IV was crowned king. Effectively, Henry used parliament to validate his actions and to give authority to his reign. Of course one of the difficulties was that Richard had already by deposed so there was technically no monarch to open the so called Convention Parliament which was then recalled after the 13th October in the name of Henry IV.
Parliament increasingly recognised that it held the right to withhold new taxes. It used this power to withhold funds until it got what it wanted from the monarch and in 1414, the Commons successfully ensured that it was them rather than the Lords who held the power in voting taxes for the king or not. By the time Henry V died in 1422 there could be no taxation and no new laws without parliamentary agreement, and more importantly it was the Commons who wielded the stronger power.
As the fifteenth century progressed Parliament was often used to pass acts of attainder against either the Yorkist or Lancastrian nobility depending which side was in the ascendent and by kings to justify why they should be on the throne. The monarchy was still powerful but because of the challenges it faced during the fifteenth century parliament was growing in importance and felt more able to challenge the king, even if he was still on the throne by Divine Right. King’s validated their rule through acts of Parliament and by using acts of attainder to punish men who fought against them.
Today I’m offering a warm welcome to Paul, the son of Michael Hodgetts who wrote Secret Hiding Places first published in 1989. Given my views about the religious beliefs of the original designer of the Unstitched Coif project from 2023, this re-publication seems serendipitous as does the idea of hiding in plain sight.
The English Reformation was given official approval because King Henry VIII wished to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Inevitably, Henry’s marital disharmony led to the mid Tudor crisis of which religion was a part and to difficulties for those of his daughter, Elizabeth I’s, subjects who chose to remain Catholic. So, over to Paul for a fascinating guest post.
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Priest-holes are a familiar feature of the English country house. Some are on show to the public – King Charles II’s hide at Boscobel has been a tourist attraction for nearly 300 years – and at Harvington Hall in Worcestershire children and small adults can squeeze into one of the hides. But while most people are aware that they were built to shelter Catholic priests at the end of the sixteenth century, and the name of Nicholas Owen has become well known, very few realise quite how many of these strange spaces there originally were or know of the carefully planned strategy behind them.
From almost the start of the reign of Elizabeth I, Catholic services were supressed and fines could be imposed for non-attendance at the Parish Church, but for the first fifteen years or so the laws were not enforced very strictly. The early 1570s saw a tightening, with searches and arrests becoming more frequent: the first record of a purpose-built hide is in 1574 and in 1577 the first execution took place of an overseas-trained priest. The Jesuits arrived in 1580 but the real turning point was after 1585, when a new law made, not only the priests, but also their hosts, liable to execution. A year later, the government was winning the war: fewer than one-third of the 300 priests who had returned from abroad over the previous twelve years were still at work and the tempo of arrests and executions was increasing.
But in July 1586 at a week-long conference organised by the only three Jesuits then at liberty (William Weston, Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell) and attended by other non-Jesuit priests and some young noblemen, a new strategy was born. Instead of priests moving around constantly as they had previously been doing, each would now have a base of operations in a country house and a network of sympathisers would be set up to smuggle incoming priests to holding points until a suitable base could be found for them. Because the priests would be henceforth static, these houses also had to be equipped with hides. Most such houses would only need a single hide, but the holding points would need more, to be able to conceal larger numbers of priests. Weston was arrested two weeks later and spent the next seventeen years in prison, but Garnet and Southwell put the scheme into effect and it is not an exaggeration to say that Catholicism in England and Wales would not otherwise have survived. Southwell, who had relatives all over the Sussex and Hampshire aristocracy, created the ‘underground railroad’ whilst Garnet took into his service a carpenter from Oxford called Nicholas Owen with a very particular set of skills – the ability to create hidden spaces within the fabric of buildings.
In this private house, the two plaster panels and the sturdy upright beam are a secret door into a large hide. The house was owned by two of the Gunpowder Plotters and the hide may have been built by Nicholas Owen.
All three eventually met grisly deaths: Southwell was arrested in 1591 and executed four years later and Owen and Garnet were arrested in the crackdown that followed Gunpowder Plot. Owen was tortured to death in the Tower of London without revealing any of his hides and Garnet was hanged, drawn and quartered. But the network they had set up survived and grew. By 1610 there were 400 priests at work in England and Wales and the danger of extinction had passed. Eventually, this network sustained Charles II after the Battle of Worcester and took him safely to exile in France.
Secret Hiding Places, first published in 1989, uses eyewitness documents and the physical evidence of the buildings themselves to tell the story of how Owen and others created enough safe hides to enable the Catholic mission to grow to by 1610 and details many searches, narrow escapes, arrests and executions. The book was originally written by Michael Hodgetts, leading Catholic historian and undisputed authority on priest holes. Following his death in 2022, his family have reissued the book and advances in printing technology have enabled, for the first time, full colour illustrations to show these fascinating spaces in unprecedented detail and the new edition has 250 photographs of the hides and their houses.
One of the first priests to be arrested and executed, Edmund Campion, was captured because the searchers saw light shining out of his hide through cracks in the panelling. The door to this hide, at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire, has the remains of cloth that was glued along the inside of the hinge line to prevent that problem.
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This hide, at Towneley Hall in Burnley is enormous – big enough to stand up and walk around in, as shown by the two members of Hall staff. The floor is of sound-deadening clay. This house has a list dating from around 1710 listing no fewer than eleven hides that then existed.
The book covers all the famous houses and hides but here are some pictures of places that are less well known and that the public cannot see. The book is available on Amazon at
The G.C.S. E question worth 8 marks asks students to explain two ways in which the Peasants’ Revolt and the campaign for the People’s Charter were similar. This is not a complete answer. It could be developed and tweaked but it covers the key points. It raises the interesting question of what other key events in British history might be compared – for instance could Chartism be compared to the English Civil War? And what else could the Peasants’ Revolt be compared with – certainly to the French and American revolutions.
The Peasants Revolt of 1381 and Chartism which was most active for the decade between 1838 and 1848 were both about ordinary people trying to improve their lives with more freedom or a greater say in how their lives were governed. In both cases, economics had a part to play. The peasants of 1381 were tied by serfdom, the wage limits of the 1351 Statute of Labourers that kept pay to pre-Black Death rates and by the poor harvests that followed the Black Death and the impact of the medieval mini Ice Age. Trade was also badly impacted by piracy resulting from the Hundred Years War and the French raids on the Isle of Wight and southern ports including Rye. The 1830s saw bad harvests and the impact of the corn laws keeping bread prices artificially high.
In 1831, peasants wanted their freedom from a feudal hierarchy that saw 40% of them described as serfs, unable to leave the manor where they lived without their lord’s permission, to work without pay and to pay feudal dues including the right to inherit their father’s property. They also wished to abolish the poll taxes that saw everyone over 15-years-old paying the same taxes, whatever their rank in society. Wat Tyler demanded that corrupt officials should be punished. During the Nineteenth century the ordinary working classes were disappointed by the failure of the 1832 Reform Act to give people more rights and in 1833 the Factory Act failed to limit the working day to 10 hours. For those who fell into poverty there was also the impact of the 1834 Poor Law Act which forced paupers into workhouses and made poverty a crime to be punished. Ordinary people in Medieval England and the Nineteenth Century felt that there should be better wages and living conditions for everyone not just the elite. The Chartists demanded regular elections and full male suffrage, ending the 40 shilling property bar that prevented most adults from voting.
The peasants were united in their demands and turned to violence to ensure that evidence of their servitude was destroyed and that local JPs and churchmen were punished. Simon Sudbury, one of Richard II’s advisors and the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered by the peasants when they were let into London. The Chartists were more divided in the way that their goals could be achieved. Some of them preferred argument and moral force but in the end violence was less easy to ignore. In 1837, Feargus O’Connor, an Irish lawyer living in Leeds, published the Northern Star, a newspaper that campaigned for better wages and living standards. O’Connor supported Physical Force Chartism, which championed using violent means. He felt that even if the violence was negative, that in the long term there would be positive outcomes.
The Chartists were emulating the men and women who were part of the reform movement that led to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. The event, named after Waterloo, was something of a turning point for the working classes in the nineteenth century. The meeting in Manchester asking for universal male suffrage ended in chaos and 11 deaths when the authorities seized Henry Hunt, a political reformer. Some people blamed the violence on the authorities while others blamed the 60,000 strong crowd. The poet, Shelley, urged the working classes to ‘rise like lions from slumber’ but his words weren’t published until 1832. The authorities wanted to keep the country calm but they feared a revolution of the kind that happened in France. On 4 November 1839, 10,000 Welsh Chartists at Newport, many of them miners, were waylaid by soldiers. Between 22 and 24 of the protesters were killed. The chartists who were not armed really stood no chance – something of a difference to the peasants of 1381 who were armed with whatever they could find and who had killed justices and churchmen during May and June 1381. The Newport chartists’ leader, John Frost, was sentenced to be executed along with several other men who were at the forefront of the campaign – it was the same fate of hanging drawing and quartering that befell the leaders of the Peasant’s Revolt. For John Frost and other chartists the sentence was changed to transportation.
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Something for any G.C.S.E. students or anyone interested in the concept of power and the people.
Jean Froissart was a fourteenth century monastic chronicler. He was not sympathetic to the peasants when he recounted the English Peasants Revolt of 1381. He wrote, ‘Never was any land or realm in such great danger as England at that time. It was because of the abundance and prosperity in which the common people then lived that this rebellion broke out.’ Despite the ‘never had it so good’ viewpoint – which would have gone down well with his European patrons who did not want to see the peasants getting a different deal, he did explain that the peasants believed that they were treated like animals and were determined to be free ‘and if they laboured or did any other works for their lords, they would be paid for it.’
There are different editions of the chronicles. In one version the illustrator makes Richard II look like a young boy but in another, fifteenth century version, he is an adult with dark hair.
Wat Tyler and John Ball meet outside London – they’re carrying English banners so that readers know who they are. Wat and John are labelled for clarity by the artist but the background and the buildings are stylised. It is unlikely that the rebels would have been as well equipped as the illustrations show them – the illustrators were used to armies of the Hundred Years War and even then it was only the wealthy who could afford armour. Most ordinary soldiers were fortunate to have a padded jerkin known as a ‘jack’ or a coat reinforced with chain links. Armour was expensive – and peasants could not afford it.
The king meets the rebels at St Catherine’s wharf. The back ground is stylised but the image also shows rebels being admitted to London in the background. The next scene shows the killing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury and other officials by the peasants.
The death of Wat Tyler- killed by the mayor of London William Walworth – apparently for not taking his hat off to the king. The scene also shows Richard II winning over the peasants by promising to be their leader. Wat was drawn into the revolt because, amongst the other grievances, a poll tax collector had assaulted his daughter. The image below is the same scene by a different illustrator – the king is shown as an adult. Smithfield has taken on a stylised urban aspect.
