Prayer Book Rebellion

• 1. Introduction

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  The Prayer Book Rebellion started with a joke that turned deadly. In the Devon village of Sampford Courtenay in 1549, parishioners forced their priest to abandon the newly imposed English prayer book. They dismissed the new service as "but lyke a Christmas game." Within days, a local man named William Hellyons was run through with a pitchfork and killed on the steps of the village church house. That single killing lit a fuse that ran through Cornwall and Devon, drawing in farmers, tin miners and fishermen against the forces of the crown. Government troops eventually crushed the revolt, but only after months of sieges, ambushes and mass executions. What turned a dispute over a church service into open warfare? And what did that warfare cost the people of the West Country?

• 2. A Reformation Imposed

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  England's new king, Edward VI, was still young, so it was his Protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, who set the country's religious direction. In the late 1540s, Somerset pushed through a wave of legislation extending the English Reformation into Cornwall and Devon, regions with deep Catholic loyalty. Traditional religious processions and pilgrimages were banned outright. Commissioners were then sent into parishes to strip out symbols of Catholic worship, following the reforming policies of Thomas Cranmer.

  In Cornwall, that task fell to a commissioner named William Body. His removal of religious shrines was seen as desecration. On the 5th of April 1548, he was murdered at Helston by William Kylter and Pascoe Trevian. Body's death, a year before the rebellion proper, showed how close to violence the region already stood.

• 3. The Cornish Tongue

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  Cornwall had rebelled once before, in 1497, and its people had long viewed themselves as an ethnically and linguistically distinct part of the Kingdom of England. Between 1536 and 1545, King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries wiped out the scholarly institutions that had sustained Cornish Celtic and Devonian Catholic identity. Glasney College, Crantock College and Tavistock Abbey in Devon were all shut down as part of that process.

  Historians have argued that the Catholic Church had "proved itself extremely accommodating of Cornish language and culture." Later government attacks on that religion, they argue, reawakened old defiance, above all in the Cornish-speaking far west. Retribution followed immediately: twenty-eight Cornishmen were executed at Launceston Castle. One man, described only as a "traitor of Cornwall," was executed on Plymouth Hoe. Town accounts there recorded the cost of timber for gallows and poles. Martin Geoffrey, the pro-Catholic priest of St Keverne near Helston, was taken to London and executed there. His head was then impaled on a staff on London Bridge, as was customary.

  Language sat at the center of the dispute. The historian Mark Stoyle has described 1450s Cornwall as split into three zones. The west was mostly Cornish-speaking, the central belt had largely shifted to English, and the east was entirely English-speaking. In their own Demands of the Western Rebels, the rebels stated that "certen of us understande no Englysh" and utterly refused the new English service. Archbishop Cranmer countered by asking why Cornishmen should object to English when they had never understood the old Latin service either. The historian Anthony Fletcher has argued that religion and economics, not language, were the uprising's real driving forces.

• 4. A Countryside Pushed To The Edge

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  A new poll tax on sheep added fresh pressure on a region whose economy depended on wool. Rumors spread that the tax would soon extend to other livestock as well, deepening resentment among farmers already stretched thin. Wheat prices had quadrupled over two years of rampant inflation, following two decades of unpopular government policy. Rapid enclosure of common land added to the strain, pushing small farmers off ground they had once shared freely.

  Local authority to contain the unrest had also weakened. The Marquess of Exeter, a major landowner around Sampford Courtenay, had recently been attainted and stripped of his lands. His successor, Lord Russell, was based in London and rarely visited the estate in person. That absence left a gap in local power that might otherwise have curbed the revolt before it spread.

• 5. Marching On Exeter

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  The Act of Uniformity had made it a crime, from Whitsunday 1549 onward, to hold a service in the old Latin rite. Local magistrates were made responsible for enforcing that change across the country. In Devon, a group of parishioners left Sampford Courtenay altogether and marched toward Exeter to protest the new liturgy.

  As the marchers moved through Devon, they gathered large numbers of Catholic supporters and swelled into a serious armed force. Marching east through Crediton, they reached Exeter and laid siege to the city, demanding an end to all English-language services. Some residents inside Exeter sent word of support to the rebels outside. The city itself refused to open its gates, which stayed shut for more than a month.

  In Cornwall, a separate army gathered at the town of Bodmin under the leadership of its mayor, Henry Bray. Two committed Catholic landowners, Sir Humphrey Arundell of Helland and John Winslade of Tregarrick, took command alongside him. Cornwall raised a notably large militia for its size, drawing in farmers, tin miners and fishermen alike. That army then marched east across the River Tamar into Devon to join forces with the rebels gathered near Crediton.

• 6. Kill All The Gentlemen

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  The rebels captured both a religious and a social grievance in a single slogan: "Kill all the gentlemen and we will have the Six Articles up again, and ceremonies as they were in King Henry's time." That phrase carried a clear religious demand: restoring Henry VIII's old doctrinal order. Historians such as Guy and Fletcher have also read a social grievance into it. Later rebel demands called for limiting the size of gentry households, a proposal that would have suited a time of population growth and unemployment.

  Archbishop Cranmer took the social reading seriously. He accused the rebels of deliberately stoking class conflict, saying their goal was "to diminish their strength and to take away their friends, that you might command gentlemen at your pleasures." Protector Somerset agreed that the same hatred of the gentry ran through all of the 1549 uprisings. He wrote that the common people had "conceived a wonderful hate against the gentlemen and taketh them all as their enemies."

  Members of the gentry sought safety wherever they could. Some barricaded themselves inside St Michael's Mount, where besieging rebels lit trusses of hay to create a disorienting smoke screen. Food shortages and the suffering of the women trapped inside eventually forced a surrender. Sir Richard Grenville tried to hold out in the ruins of Trematon Castle. Most of his followers deserted him, and he was lured outside to negotiate. He was seized there, the castle was ransacked, and Grenville and his companions were locked in Launceston gaol.

  Rebels marched under the Banner of the Five Wounds, a symbol first adopted during the Pilgrimage of Grace to represent Catholic uprisings against the crown.

• 7. The King's Armies Advance

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  Sir Gawen Carew, a member of the Privy Council, was ordered by Protector Somerset to pacify the rebels through negotiation. At the same time, Lord John Russell was sent west with an army to impose a military solution if talks failed.

  At Crediton, Sir Gawen Carew and Sir Peter Carew tried to negotiate with the Devon rebels. They found their path blocked and came under fire from longbowmen. Cornish reinforcements arrived shortly after, forcing Arundell to split his combined army in two. One force went to Clyst St Mary to support villagers there. The other advanced on Exeter, keeping up a siege that lasted five weeks.

  Rebel commanders tried and failed to persuade Exeter's pro-Catholic mayor, John Blackaller, to surrender the city. Roughly 2,000 men made up the besieging force that first gathered outside its walls.

  On the 2nd of July, Lord Russell's advance force reached Honiton, reinforced by 160 Italian arquebusiers under Lord William Grey. With promised reinforcements from Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Russell's army would eventually number more than 8,600 men, including 850 well-trained cavalry. He estimated the combined rebel force at only 7,000 men. On the 28th of July, Arundell moved to block Russell's approach at Fenny Bridges. The fight was inconclusive, with roughly 300 men killed on each side, and Russell withdrew back to Honiton.

  Russell's reinforcements finally arrived on the 2nd of August, bringing his army to 5,000 men as it marched west across the downs toward Exeter. The force made camp at Woodbury Common, where rebels attacked on the 4th of August. That clash, too, ended inconclusively, though Russell's men took large numbers of prisoners.

  Arundell regrouped roughly 6,000 soldiers at Clyst St Mary, where a force under Sir William Francis attacked on the 5th of August. After a ferocious fight, Russell's troops gained the upper hand, leaving about a thousand Cornish and Devonian rebels dead and many more captured. William Francis himself, the rebellion's highest-ranking casualty, died at what accounts call the "Fight at Carey's Windmill." He was struck by stones thrown at his headpiece as his men marched along a narrow, sunken road.

  At Clyst Heath, Russell had as many as 900 bound and gagged rebel prisoners killed. Their throats were cut within about 10 minutes, according to the chronicler John Hayward. Word of the killings reached Arundell's remaining forces, who launched a fresh attack early on the 6th of August. Lord Grey said he had never seen, nor taken part in, such a murderous fray. That was a striking comment, since he had previously fought the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. Around 2,000 soldiers died in the fighting at Clyst Heath. A group of fleeing Devon men were overtaken north by Sir Gawen Carew, who left their leaders' corpses hanging from gibbets between Dunster and Bath.

  A royal proclamation soon allowed the confiscated lands of defeated rebels to be handed out. Arundell's estate went to Sir Gawen Carew, while Sir Peter Carew received John Winslade's land in Devon. Robert Welch, vicar of St Thomas near Exeter, was hanged in chains from his own church tower, a fate shared by other priests.

  Lord Russell believed the rebellion was already broken, until news arrived that Arundell's army was regrouping at Sampford Courtenay. That report scrapped his plan to ship 1,000 men into Cornwall to cut off the rebels' retreat. Reinforced by Provost Marshal Sir Anthony Kingston, Russell's army swelled past 8,000 men, vastly outnumbering what remained of the rebellion. Lord Grey and Sir William Herbert led the final attack. The Exeter historian John Hooker later wrote that "the Cornish would not give in until most of their number had been slain or captured." Russell himself reported that his forces killed between five and six hundred rebels in the battle, and a further seven hundred during the pursuit after.

• 8. Reckoning And Legacy

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  Sir Humphrey Arundell fled to Launceston but was captured there and sent to London, alongside John Winslade, who had been caught at Bodmin. Arundell was convicted of treason and executed by hanging, drawing and quartering, and Carew took his remaining land. Across the whole rebellion, an estimated 5,500 people had died.

  Somerset and Archbishop Cranmer then ordered further pacification operations across the West Country, placing Sir Anthony Kingston in charge. Kingston then ordered the execution of numerous people suspected of involvement. Among them were Bodmin's mayor, Nicholas Boyer, and St Ives portreeve John Payne. William Mayow, mayor of Gluvian, was hanged outside a tavern in St Columb. Priests were executed too, including Richard Bennett of St Veep and St Neot and Simon Morton, vicar of Poundstock and curate of Pillaton.

  In the years after the revolt, the government came to treat the Cornish language itself as a marker of sedition and backwardness. Unlike Welsh, the Book of Common Prayer was never translated into Cornish, and proposals to do so were quietly suppressed. That decision helped drive the language's rapid decline through the 16th and 17th centuries, until by 1700 Cornish had become an endangered tongue.

  In June 2007, Bishop of Truro Bill Ind received the Trelawny Plate for an outstanding contribution to Cornish life. Accepting the award, he said there was "no doubt that the English Government behaved brutally and stupidly and killed many Cornish people" in 1549. He added that he was sorry, even if he doubted an apology for something so old could truly help.