to other serious offences, namely, pilgrimage to various local or more distant shrines, or a term of residence in some religious house except that in most cases the delinquents were required to wear a faggot em- broidered on the sleeve for life. Foxe also asserts that as many as six persons, five men and one woman, were burned at this time. [1]
It is most unfortunate that we have no means at present of checking the numbers or other details given by Foxe for the year 1521, and can therefore only give his account as it stands. The persons he names are, as before, all from the lower classes, with the exception of the vicar of Little Missenden and a priest of Horton-by-Colnbrook : he includes also a canon from the abbey of Missenden. The places they come from are very numerous, and show how the new doctrines had spread through the southern part of the county. Amersham was conspicuous as before, while Great Marlow, West Wycombe, High Wycombe, Chesham, Denham, Hughenden, Chalvey, Wooburn, Beaconsfield, Iver, Dorney also appear on the list. Again, under the year 1530, he names four persons brought to trial from Princes Risborough, and a little later ten more, from West Wycombe, Coleshill and Chesham.
The case of Thomas Harding given by Foxe is a typical one. Harding had abjured in 1506 at Amersham, where he was then living, and had been put to penance, which he continued to perform for about ten years. In 1521 he was found guilty of intercourse with other heretics and condemned to wear the faggot on his sleeve.[2] In 1532 he was brought before Bishop Longland at the Old Temple, London (not at Wooburn, as Foxe says [3] ), described as Thomas Harding of Chesham, late of Amersham, a relapsed heretic. This was on 6 April ; and on 29 May he was again examined in the parish church of Chesham before John Rayne, the bishop's vicar-general, the abbot of Thame, and the rector of Ashridge, with the result that he was, under the existing law of the church, excommunicated and handed over to the secular arm to be burned.[4] The bishop's register, from which these dates are taken, gives however one detail which Foxe omits, namely, that Harding, after his condemnation, asked and received absolution from the Church for his errors, to the great joy of his judges. [5]
- ↑ Foxe, Acts and Monuments, iv. 220-244.
- ↑ Ibid. 580.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Linc. Epis. Reg. Memo. Longland, 160, 169.
- ↑ His recantation appears to have been sincere, for at that moment it could only profit his soul he was a relapsed heretic, and for such there was no mercy his repentance only securing for him the consolations which the Church offers to the dying. The recantation may serve to explain the words which Rowland Messenger, vicar of High Wycombe, is said to have spoken after the execution to the bystanders, ' Good people, when ye come home, do not say that you have been at the burning of a heretic, but of a good Christian man.' There is no need to suppose that he spoke oracles, as it were against his own will : the words were quite natural and appropriate to the occasion. The case of Thomas Harding has been noticed by Dr. Gairdner, History of the English Church, iv. 132. The absence from the Memoranda of the details of 1521, for which Foxe carefully gives pages of reference to the ' bishop's register ' (that is to say, for the recantations ; the burnings he seems to give by hearsay), has been noticed already in the Journal of the Associated Architectural and Archaeological Societies, xv. 169-70, and also personally tested by the present writer. The only cases which occur in the register are that of Thomas Harding and ten others arrested in 1530, whose names however are not the same as those assigned by Foxe to that year (Line. Epis. Reg. Memo. Longland, H2d). The Memoranda of Bishop Longland is in good condition, with no appearance of leaves torn or missing ; and the details given by Foxe most certainly are not
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