abbey came a waggon-load of victuals; oxen and sheep were driven in from the neighbourhood; and a retainer of the house carried a banner, on which was worked a plough, a chalice and a host, a horn, and the five wounds of Christ.[1] The sheriff, with his brother, rode up and down the heath, scattering money among the crowd and the insurrection now gaining point, another gentle man 'wrote on the field upon his saddle bow,' a series of articles, which were to form the ground of the rising.
Six demands were to be made upon the Crown: 1. The religious houses should be restored, 2. The subsidy should be remitted. 3. The clergy should pay no more tenths and first-fruits to the Crown. 4. The Statute of Uses should be repealed. 5. The villein blood should be removed from the privy council. 6. The heretic bishops, Cranmer and Latimer, Hilsey Bishop of Rochester, Brown Archbishop of Dublin, and their own Bishop Longlands the persecuting Erastian, should be deprived and punished.
The deviser and the sheriff sat on their horses side by side, and read these articles, one by one, aloud, to the people. 'Do they please you or not?' they said, when they had done. 'Yea, yea, yea!' the people shouted, waving their staves above their heads; and messengers were chosen instantly, and despatched upon the spot, to carry to Windsor to the King the demands
- ↑ The plough was to encourage the husbandmen; the chalice and host in remembrance of the spoiling of the Church; the five wounds to the couraging of the people to fight in Christ's cause; the horn to signify the taking of Horncastle.—Philip Trotter's Examination: Rolls House MS. A 2, 29.
