58 
the confiscation of the revenues of Bishop Strickland’s Chantry at 
Penrith Church. 
Chancellor Ferguson, in his recently published story of 
Cumberland, speaking of this rising, says :—‘* The Act of 1536 for 
the suppression of the smaller religious houses affected all the 
religious houses in the county but those of St. Mary’s, Carlisle, 
and of Holm Cultram. This excited much discontent, and ‘Aske’s 
Rebellion,’ or ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace,’ found local sympathisers 
in the Abbot of Holm, the Chancellor of Carlisle, the Prior of 
Lanercost, and the Vicar of Penrith, who busied themselves in 
collecting men at Penrith and sending them to the insurgents at 
York.” Penrith would be a convenient centre where bodies of 
men could be massed and marched over Hartside to the Tyne 
Valley, thence to join the main body of insurgents in the east. 
When I was a small boy, in my native county, Durham, we used 
to repeat some strange doggerel lines running thus :— 
Roberty, Boberty, big fat hen, 
Ate the Church and all the men, 
He ate the Church, ate the steeple, 
He ate the parson and all the people ; 
Roberty, Boberty, big fat hen. 
This grotesque doggerel lingered in my memory for sixty years 
before it struck me that it was a relic of a seditious song of the 
“Pilgrimage of Grace.” ‘“ Robberty, Bobberty” was, I think, 
originally Robbery, Robbery; the big fat hen was the corpulent 
Henry the VIII., and the big fat hen’s voracious appetite for 
things ecclesiastical was a burlesque of the fat King’s absorption 
of monastic and chantry revenues, with which he filled his own 
and his courtiers’ pockets. I wonder if the original of “ Roberty, 
Boberty” was sung in Penrith when, as the “proper not” quaintly 
says:—‘‘There was commotion in these North parts, 1536.” Other 
notes may be passed over, for English History has evidently pirated 
them and made them common property. 
THE PLAGUE. 
Near the bottom of the page we find this note:—‘A sore 
plague in Richmond, Kendal, Penrith, Carlisle, and Appleby, and 
