A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



the whole diocese in its grasp. During the rest of the time of the visitation 

 Bishop Bateman never left his diocese for a day. In the single month of 

 July he personally instituted 207 persons. Till the gth of the month he was 

 at Norwich, the plague making awful havoc all around him. On the loth 

 he moved to Hoxne, and there in a single day instituted twenty persons ; 

 from this time till the pestilence abated he moved about from place to place, 

 rarely staying more than a fortnight in any one house, and followed every- 

 where by troops of clergy, who came to be admitted to the livings of such 

 as had died. 1 



The bishop, in the midst of this fateful year, sought the guidance of the 

 pope as to the supply of clergy. By bull of 1 3 October, Clement VI, seeing 

 that so many parishes were bereft of ministers, authorized the bishop to 

 ordain sixty young men who might be two years under the canonical age 

 for the priesthood; provided always that they were proved fit after due 

 examination, and that they had in all cases completed their twenty-first year.* 



Bishop Bateman's register for this period has far fewer instances of the 

 institution of clergy to benefices in minor orders than was the case in the 

 great neighbouring diocese of Lincoln. Such instances as do occur are 

 almost entirely confined to those livings that were in the gift of the crown, 

 of the nobility, or of the great landed proprietors. Dr. Jessopp is also 

 undoubtedly right in stating that this register makes it quite plain that 

 ' the laity of East Anglia were not ashamed to make merchandise of their 

 patronage.' 



It was during the episcopate of Henry Spenser (1370-1406), known as 

 'the soldier-bishop,' that the agrarian rebellion of 1381 broke out, in which 

 that great Suffolk ecclesiastic, Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, suffered at the 

 hands of the mob. Spenser, in person, fell upon the Suffolk insurgents with 

 prompt fierceness near Newmarket ; but the story of this formidable uprising 

 in East Anglia belongs to another part of this history. 



It was in the days, too, of Bishop Spenser that this diocese gained the 

 unenviable notoriety of being the first to bring about the death .of an 

 Englishman for preaching heresy. But the tale of William Sawtre, a 

 chaplain of St. Margaret's, Lynn, who solemnly abjured his errors befo/e the 

 bishop at Elmham in 1399, and on repeating them in London diocese two 

 years later was burnt to death, pertains to Norfolk rather than to Suffolk. 8 



Lollardism, which was a strange combination of extreme socialistic 

 views with opposition to most of the received religious tenets of Christendom, 

 increased much during the reign of Henry IV. It is to the credit of the 

 bishops that they generally hesitated to take action against heretics, knowing 

 that death by the flames would be the eventual penalty of obstinacy. Whilst 



1 Dioc. Hist, of None. 1201. 



1 Dr. Jessopp remarks that it is much to the credit of Bishop Bateman that, so far from availing himself to 

 the utmost of the papal dispensation, he exercised this exceptional privilege with scrupulous reserve, for only 

 five instances occur in his register of candidates under the usual canonical age of twenty-three being admitted 

 to a cure of souls. This evidence is, however, decidedly doubtful, for it is quite possible that such exceptions 

 were not always recorded when both the bishop and his scribe, in those times of stress, were continually 

 moving from place to place. 



1 The Act De heretico comburendo was passed by all estates of the realm in 1401 ; it provided that the 

 bishop was to arrest, imprison, and bring heretics to trial at his courts. Should they refuse to recant, or 

 relapse after recantation, they were to be handed over to the sheriff or mayor to be burnt alive. Sawtre was 

 its first victim. It has been well remarked that in no country save Great Britain was a special law necessary 

 for the execution of heretics ; the mere will of the government was elsewhere sufficient. 



2O 



