The Pilgrims’ Complaint: A Study of Popular Thought in the Early Tudor North (review)

This is Michael Bush’s third major book on the Pilgrimage of Grace, a rebellion that saw as many as 60,000 people in northern England rise in protest late in 1536. One of Bush’s earlier books studied the formation of the rebel armies; the other, coauthored with David Bownes, examined the set of smaller revolts that followed the December settlement that brought the main rebellion to an end. This book focuses on the Pilgrims’ grievances and how they reflected popular political and religious thought in the north more generally. Bush argues that these people cannot simply be characterized as “traditionalists” nor their beliefs as “conservative.” Rather, they sometimes used the language of custom to demand innovation. They sought to defend a “society of orders” by demanding changes both reversionary and new.

Bush devotes individual chapters to complaints about taxation, constitutional issues, and agrarian conflict. Another examines the degree to which a sense of “northern-ness” shaped the rebellion, concluding that the sense existed but played relatively little part in the origin or outcome of the rising. Distinctions between the Yorkshire Pilgrims and those further to the northwest are clearly mapped, with the latter’s efforts marked by stronger expressions of agrarian grievance. Readers might well find the chapter on the Pilgrims’ religious complaints of greatest interest. Here Bush makes the reasonable point that the Ten Articles and other such documents must be interpreted in the light of contemporary attitudes, as “from a historical perspective the meaning of the articles depends not upon what scholars now think but on how they were perceived at the time” (p. 82). Bush argues that underlying the Pilgrims’ religious complaints were attachments to papal supremacy and the system of saintly intercessors. Part of his evidence for the depth of popular opposition to the royal supremacy—or at least to claims for the king’s cure of souls—comes from the angry reactions of some to the December pardon, which required recipients to recognize the king’s supremacy over body and soul. Given that so many Pilgrims accepted the pardon and oath, however, even while in a position of strength, further discussion of this point seems necessary. More generally, Bush argues that the Pilgrims’ religious complaints can be characterized neither as proxies for underlying agrarian or economic concerns, nor as sentimental traditionalism. Rather, they were rooted in faith and a fear of heresy.

Although the bibliography is largely up to date, the book rarely engages directly with current discussions of popular politics and political culture, nor with the sorts of theoretical approaches adopted by Andy Wood, for example, in his recent study of the 1549 rebellions. On the specific matter of the Pilgrimage, however, the book clearly stakes its position in the relevant debates. No elite conspiracy, the Pilgrimage was essentially a rising of the commons in defense of a society of orders. It was neither primarily religious nor predominantly economic in motivation, but both in tandem. Nor does Bush think that one category of complaint can be subsumed in the other, although he does frequently identify the overlapping elements. “A person and an event” linked both the religious and commonwealth complaints, for example, with Thomas Cromwell “detested as both a heretic and an expropriator of the realm’s wealth” and the recent dissolution of the lesser monasteries seen “as both a major blow against the old religion and a cause of social impoverishment” (p. 4). Bush recognizes the problem of provenance in evaluating the Pilgrims’ petitions, oaths, songs, and other such documents for evidence of grievances held by the commonalty as opposed to the gentry or clergy, weighing words against actions. The discussion is often speculative, but always careful. The book will not convince all readers on all points, but it does offer a lucid and often enlightening discussion of popular sentiment in the early Tudor north.