Pilgrimage of Grace

Pilgrimage of Grace, the name given to a rising of the rural population in the counties of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in the end of 1536. When the commissioners charged with the suppression of the minor monasteries arrived in Lincolnshire, reports were spread abroad among the people that all the church jewels and plate were to be taken away, that most of the churches were to be pulled down, that new taxes were to be levied, and that the rights of the commons were in other ways to be vexatiously interfered with. The rising began at Louth on 1st October; 20,000 men soon gathered at Lincoln, under the leadership of Dr Mackerel, Abbot of Barlings, a shoemaker named Melton, better known as Captain Cobbler, and some of the dispossessed monks and gentry. But the approach of the Duke of Suffolk from the south, and a proclamation by the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was drawing near from the west, stating that what had been done was with the consent of parliament, and promising a free pardon to the rebels, caused them to disband and go away home (October 13). In the meantime a similar rising for precisely similar causes had taken place in Yorkshire; it began on 9th October in the East Riding, the chief leader in the movement being a lawyer named Robert Aske. The rebels, 40,000 in number, took York and Pontefract, capturing in this last town Lord Darcy and the Archbishop of York (not unwilling to be captured). The king sent against them the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Duke of Norfolk, and on the reading of a similar proclamation to that in Lincolnshire they dispersed to their homes. In the following year Aske, Sir Robert Constable (who had been associated with Aske in the leadership), Lord Hussey (suspected of complicity in the Lincolnshire movement), Mackerel, and others, about twenty in all, were executed. See Gairdner's Preface to Calendar of State Papers, Foreign and Domestic: Henry VIII., vol. xi. (1888).