History | 2022/10/11/13:15 | Tuesday/C.E.

/Week Two | Mr A Stacey-Chapman

HWK: Why did the Pilgrimage of Grace ever take place?
While much has been written about the Pilgrimage of Grace, it has proved di cult to
specifically pin down why so many individuals rallied to the cause. The document presented to
the Duke of Norfolk at Doncaster (the Twenty-Four Articles*) should give many clues as the
demands should have been directly linked to the grievances of the rebels. However, the
document was produced by a select group of nobles. No members of the Commonalty were
present, nor invited to attend, and as they constituted the vast bulk of the rebels, their beliefs
are seemingly excluded from these articles. Some of the articles are specific to religion, others
to political issues. While these articles give a clear indication of what a select group wanted,
they cannot be assumed to be what the ‘Commoners’† wanted.

Certain rumours are known to have been very common in Yorkshire immediately prior to the
rebellion taking hold. One was that Henry VIII was about to order all parish churches to hand
over their silver to the government and that they would be replaced with tin ones. There is no
evidence that the government of Henry contemplated this but the rumour spread with due
speed. Another rumour that spread was that a tax was going to be placed on “rites of passage”
– baptism, marriage, and burial. This would have made financially-pressed families feel even
more financially vulnerable if brought into the fold. A final rumour that was popular at this
time was that the poorer classes were to be forbidden to eat certain types of food.

While the vast majority of the rumours seem nonsense now, they were believed in the
mid-1530’s and with good reason. Many believed that Henry wanted to keep the ‘Commoners’
in their place; many believed that Henry was so short of money that he would resort to
anything to get a new source of cash. Whereas there are religious aspects to these rumours,
they also overlap into social and economic issues that dominated lives of the ‘Commoner’. It is
doubtful if you could have separated all three at the time.

There can be little doubt that religious changes were a main reason for the Pilgrimage of Grace.
Robert Aske would not have chosen said nominal title for his followers if the protest had not
had a severe religious input. The Reformation had a ected over one-hundred small
monasteries in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Many of these monasteries had worked with their
local communities in both educational and medical aspects of day-to-day life and the
projected loss of these were, at a local level, potentially very negative. There can be little doubt
that some pilgrims were also angered at the thought of the Pope’s position being eroded by the
introduction of these new reforms. Tier seemingly-basic religious beliefs had been held since
childhood and any attempt to change them must have seemed very threatening.

There is little doubt that some of the rebels also had economic grievances and used the
Pilgrimage of Grace to vent their anger. Rent increases seem to have been the primary reason
for the anger of a good portion of the Commonalty. However, due to the nature of the
Pilgrimage of Grace being limited to the regions of the north-and-midlands of England, the
notion of severe taxation being the primary factor of rebellion would indicate further such
rebellions across the nation, and not simply in the northern reaches of the country.

* Twenty-Four Articles of the Pilgrimage of Grace Rebels (1536), led by Robert Aske, met at
Pontefract Castle ( 2-4 Dec) to draft a petition of ‘demands’ to be presented to King Henry VIII.
† The archetypal average-man (in the gender-neutral sense) of the non-aristocratic
individual, and their opinions.
History | 2022/10/11/13:15 | Tuesday/C.E./Week Two | Mr A Stacey-Chapman
HWK: Why did the Pilgrimage of Grace ever take place?
Those nobles who joined the rebellion (as opposed to being forced into it) seem to have done so
because they believed that their traditional mediaeval feudal rights were being eroded and
replaced with the more modern methods that, in their opinion, undermined the power that
they believed was theirs by right – divine or otherwise. The blame for this erosion of local
power was put on Thomas Cromwell, who wanted to see an expansion of central government’s
power within the localities. It was this perceived policy of central intervention that so angered
the nobility in the north.

With so many people involved in the Pilgrimage, it is almost certain that individuals or small
groups had their own reasons for joining. However, any record of what their grievances were
has been lost to history. The belief that the Pilgrimage of Grace was primarily a rebellion led by
aggrieved nobles being supported by the ‘Commoners’ who (as a vast majority) had serious
concerns about the direction of religious reforms, for all intents and purposes, is the best
accepted (and widely supported by evidence) cause. This was shown in the Twenty-Four Articles
presented to Norfolk at Doncaster. If the rebellion was solely based on religious grievances,
then the Articles would have been purely about religion – similar to Luther’s Ninety-Five
Theses. However, as the articles contained statements that were all based on political and social
reforms, it is safe to conclude that the causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace were a combination of
those, and not anything to do with the Papacy.