England's Last Medieval Heresy Hunt: Gloucestershire 1540

Abstract

Publisher's copyright statement:Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. The newly appointed bishop Bell was required not merely to be a teacher, pastor and administrator, but a counter-revolutionary. He was successor to an episcopal regime under which he had served, but which he had regarded as profoundly wrong, and he set himself to dismantle its effects. He set about his counter-revolutionary project with considerable verve, but it was a short-lived programme. In 1541, half his territory was taken away from him when the new diocese of Gloucester was created. Gloucestershire was the part of his diocese whichBell had known best, and where the counter-revolutionary task was most urgent. A little more than two years later, in November 1543, Bell resigned as bishop and retired, a choice which no other Tudor bishop emulated. 2 He was succeeded as bishop by Nicholas Heath, a political trimmer, a man with no wish to rock any boats and whose reward for this was eventual appointment as archbishop of York. Bell's counter-revolutionary programme had failed.It was short-lived, but it was eye-catching while it lasted. The centrepiece of it was a drive against religious dissidents in Gloucestershire. This campaign is detailed in a splendid and, for the period, unique visitation book, now in Worcestershire County Record Office.This book is well known to scholars of the period and of the locality. In 1971 K. G. Powell Webbe, apprehended soon after Garrett, also admitted to plying his wares in Bristol. 5 We also

Review of periodical literature published in 2005

“…MacSheffrey stresses the difficulty faced by contemporary authorities and later historians in distinguishing between diverse vernacular religious practice (when even reciting the Lord’s Prayer in English was suspect), and a body of beliefs that might be labelled ‘Lollardy’. Ryrie’s examination of the last ‘medieval’ heresy hunt between 1541–2, by John Bell, Bishop of Worcester, emphasizes the narrowness of these distinctions, and the church’s tendency to pursue the easiest targets. The last ‘heretic’ burned in England was a Protestant, Edward Wightman, who died in 1612.…”