ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



was so cruelly handled in the bishop's prison that he could never again 

 go upright, and the third was alive in his own day and told the tale. 

 Somewhere about the same time Thomas Chace, of Amersham, was 

 imprisoned in the bishop's ' Little Ease ' at Wooburn, where a man 

 could neither stand nor lie, and a woman who had something to do 

 with the care of the prison testified that he was secretly strangled there 

 and buried in a wood. 1 This is the substance of Foxe's account. 3 It is 

 impossible to criticize it in detail, as there is no other record with 

 which to compare or test it. We may also note his account 3 ('gathered 

 from Thomas Kirby, of Stratford-Langthorn ') of Thomas Man, burned 

 at Smithfield in 1518, an itinerant lay preacher, who had taught, 

 chiefly at Amersham, for twenty-three years, and boasted that he had 

 ' turned seven hundred people to his religion.' This man, with three 

 others already noted (Tylsworth, Cosin, and Chace) were the chief 

 instructors of the Buckinghamshire congregation. There can, indeed, 

 be no reasonable doubt that the heretics of this county were very 

 numerous, and that the year 1506 was afterwards known in the neigh- 

 bourhood as the year of the ' great abjuration ' ; it is also not improb- 

 able that they did form something like a regular congregation, with 

 private meetings for religious exercises. But it is also quite obvious 

 that they were in no true sense the spiritual ancestry of the reformed 

 Church, but, like the Lollards who went before them, and some of the 

 sectaries who succeeded them in this same district, were among those 

 who were inclined to dispute the necessity of having any visible Church 

 at all. Their teachers, by Foxe's own account, were unlettered laymen, 

 and their teachings were all based upon the exercise of ' private 

 judgment' carried to its most extreme conclusions. 4 



It is not surprising to find, in the records of the general visitation of 

 the diocese ordered by Bishop Atwater in 1519, a very unsatisfactory 

 account of the state of this archdeaconry. The history of Buckingham- 

 shire is, indeed, from the point of view of the Church, a melancholy 

 one, both during this century and the next. There could scarcely have 

 been any part of the country where the churches were so forlorn and 

 ill-kept : various reasons may be given for this, but the facts are beyond 

 doubt, and may in a great measure account for the prevalence of 

 heretical opinion. Pluralist as he was, Bishop Atwater yet found 

 leisure to realize the needs of the diocese of Lincoln, and set himself to 

 reform both the churches and the religious houses which were com- 

 mitted to his care, and the records of his visitation are unusually full 

 and complete. An account is given of 150 churches in the arch- 



1 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, iv. 213. 



Ibid. 123-125. Ibid. 213. 



4 Ibid. 214-243. The speeches reported by Foxe himself show this unmistakably : e.g. Cosin had 

 taught a woman not to make offerings to the church at her recovery of health ' it was enough to hold 

 up her hands to God ' ; and another had been told she might as well drink on Sunday before mass as 

 any other day ; others would sit before the Blessed Sacrament and make no sign of reverence ; another 

 said in Christ's time there were no priests ; with other remarks of a like nature recalling the entries in 

 Chedworth's register of 1464. This view of the heretics of the period has no pretence to originality : 

 it is substantially that set forth by Gairdner in volume iv. of the History of the English Church. 



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