was so cruelly handled in the bishop's prison that he could never again go upright, and the third was alive in his own day and told the tale. Somewhere about the same time Thomas Chace, of Amersham, was imprisoned in the bishop's ' Little Ease ' at Wooburn, where a man could neither stand nor lie, and a woman who had something to do with the care of the prison testified that he was secretly strangled there and buried in a wood.[1] This is the substance of Foxe's account.[2] It is impossible to criticize it in detail, as there is no other record with which to compare or test it. We may also note his account [3] ('gathered from Thomas Kirby, of Stratford-Langthorn ') of Thomas Man, burned at Smithfield in 1518, an itinerant lay preacher, who had taught, chiefly at Amersham, for twenty-three years, and boasted that he had ' turned seven hundred people to his religion.' This man, with three others already noted (Tylsworth, Cosin, and Chace) were the chief instructors of the Buckinghamshire congregation. There can, indeed, be no reasonable doubt that the heretics of this county were very numerous, and that the year 1506 was afterwards known in the neigh- bourhood as the year of the ' great abjuration ' ; it is also not improb- able that they did form something like a regular congregation, with private meetings for religious exercises. But it is also quite obvious that they were in no true sense the spiritual ancestry of the reformed Church, but, like the Lollards who went before them, and some of the sectaries who succeeded them in this same district, were among those who were inclined to dispute the necessity of having any visible Church at all. Their teachers, by Foxe's own account, were unlettered laymen, and their teachings were all based upon the exercise of ' private judgment' carried to its most extreme conclusions. [4]
It is not surprising to find, in the records of the general visitation of the diocese ordered by Bishop Atwater in 1519, a very unsatisfactory account of the state of this archdeaconry. The history of Buckingham- shire is, indeed, from the point of view of the Church, a melancholy one, both during this century and the next. There could scarcely have been any part of the country where the churches were so forlorn and ill-kept : various reasons may be given for this, but the facts are beyond doubt, and may in a great measure account for the prevalence of heretical opinion. Pluralist as he was, Bishop Atwater yet found leisure to realize the needs of the diocese of Lincoln, and set himself to reform both the churches and the religious houses which were com- mitted to his care, and the records of his visitation are unusually full and complete. An account is given of 150 churches in the arch-
- ↑ Foxe, Acts and Monuments, iv. 213.
- ↑ Ibid. 123-125.
- ↑ Ibid. 213.
- ↑ Ibid. 214-243. The speeches reported by Foxe himself show this unmistakably : e.g. Cosin had taught a woman not to make offerings to the church at her recovery of health ' it was enough to hold up her hands to God ' ; and another had been told she might as well drink on Sunday before mass as any other day ; others would sit before the Blessed Sacrament and make no sign of reverence ; another said in Christ's time there were no priests ; with other remarks of a like nature recalling the entries in Chedworth's register of 1464. This view of the heretics of the period has no pretence to originality : it is substantially that set forth by Gairdner in volume iv. of the History of the English Church.
