An irreparable loss to the world was the wholesale destruction of the libraries. Printing, an invention of no longer standing than fifty years, had as yet produced comparatively few books. When, for instance, the learned Anthony Brockby had written his book Ad Fratres against the King’s Supremacy, he did not get it printed, but had a duplicate copy made, which he presented to the Franciscans, his brothers. By far the greater part of theology, philosophy, science, and literature remained in MS., and these MSS. formed the Monastic Libraries. When the Houses were suppressed, those who obtained them as a gift from the King for the most part cared nothing about the books: they were dispersed without any consideration for their use or value; if they were well bound, the covers were pulled off and the books thrown away, or turned into waste paper. Thus John Bale writes (Antiq. English Franciscans):—

“Covetousness was at that time so busy about private interest, that public wealth was not anywhere regarded. A number of them which purchased those superstitious Mansions reserved of those Library Books some to serve their Jakes, some to scowr their candlesticks, and some to rub their Boots, and some they sold the Grocers and Soap sellers, and some they sent over sea to the Bookbinders: not in small number, but, at times, whole ships full. Yea, the Universities of this Realm are not all clear in this Fact; but cursed is the belly which seeks to be fed with so ungodly gains, and so deeply shameth his natural country. I know a Merchant man (which shall at this time be nameless) that bought the Contents of two noble Libraries for forty shillings price; a shame it is to be spoken. This stuff hath he occupied, instead of grey paper, by the space of more than these ten years, and yet he hath store enough for as many years to come. A prodigious example is this, and to be abhorred of all men which love their nation as they should do. Yea, what may bring our realm to more shame and rebuke than to have it noised abroad that we are despisers of learning? I judge this to be true, and utter it with heaviness, that neither the Britons under the Romans and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Normans had ever such damage of their learned Monuments as we have seen in our time. Our posterity may well curse this wicked fact of our age, this unreasonable spoil of England’s most noble Antiquities.”... “How many admirable manuscripts of the Fathers, Schoolmen, and Commentators were destroyed by this means? What number of historians of all ages and Countries? The Holy Scriptures themselves, as much as these Gospellers pretended to regard them, underwent the fate of the rest. If a Book had a cross on it it was condemned for Popery, and those with lines and circles were interpreted the Black Art and destroyed for Conjuring. And thus, as Fuller goes on, Divinity was profaned, Mathematicks suffered for Corespondence with Evil Spirits, Physick was maimed, and a Riot committed on the Law itself.”

One change, one result, of the Suppression, everybody can understand. This was the closing of the Hospitals. London was full of Hospitals, but they were Religious Houses. St. Bartholomew’s, attached to the Priory; St. Thomas’, Southwark; St. Mary Spital; Elsing Spital for the blind; St. Mary of Bethlehem for the insane; the House on Tower Hill also for the insane; the House of St. Augustine Papey for old priests; the Infirmary in every Monastic House;—all these provided for the sick poor. I have no doubt, though on the subject I have no information, that the Companies, which certainly took care of their sick and their infirm, must have done so through the existing Hospitals. When the Houses were closed, what became of the sick? It is commonly believed that they were turned into the street, no one caring for them. This was certainly not the case. The Companies cared for their own; the City cared for its freemen and their families; would the City, which maintained a debtors’ prison for its freemen, so that they should not be confined with the general herd, suffer its sick and poor to starve? There was a residuum of those who were not free, namely, the vagabonds and masterless men and women. For them there was a time of great misery; when they were ill there was no one to visit them; no hospital where they might be taken; no hands to minister and alleviate; no voice to console and to fortify. And we know nothing, and cannot estimate the suffering because there were no journalists to publish the things they saw; and the sick and poor lay unheeded and starved, and died unknown and uncared for in the dirt and misery of the Tudor slum.

There is no doubt, also, that the open house kept by such a monastery as the Holy Trinity, where the poor received every day the broken meat and a great deal more, was greatly missed and deplored by the whole company of the masterless. What with daily open house at the greater monasteries, the broken meats of the smaller, the doles and charities of the parish, the “mind days” with their loaves and gifts to the poor, bequeathed by rich citizens, a family which objected to work might rub along in solid and well-fed comfort all the year round. And this resource, looked upon as certain and unfailing like a perennial spring, was suddenly stopped. Then all these people had to work, or to beg, or to rob. The streets became pestered with sturdy beggars: the by-places of Elizabethan Literature present most vivid pictures of the companies of beggars, impostors, rogues and vagabonds. They were the people whom the monks and nuns had fed without asking questions; the folk who would not work; the people turned out of the monasteries; ex-friars; ex-chantry priests; former makers of images, crucifixes, beads, candlesticks and the rest: these were the people who felt most bitterly the abolition of indiscriminate charity and the cruel choice offered them under the new order of work; mendicancy with the whip, or crime with the gallows.

Out of all these evils and sufferings was born, like a sweet flower on a heap of rubbish, the Spirit of modern Charity.

The Church had taken over to herself the whole of Mediæval charity. Did a citizen desire to help the poor, he gave money for the purpose to the Church. If a poor man wanted help, it was not to a merchant that he went, but to a monastery.

For charity, that is, for pity, for almsgiving, the world has always felt the most profound respect. The most popular of mediæval saints was the hard and austere Bishop of whom the world remembered that he had once divided his cloak with a beggar. There were six churches dedicated to St. Martin in the City of London alone.

And when the friars first came over, and men, wondering, saw that they did not lock themselves up in their cloister to pray for the world like the other Religious, but that they went about among the people ministering, comforting, preaching, consoling; that they found no den too revolting, no disease too loathsome, no criminal too base, for their ministrations; then, indeed, there was an outburst of gratitude, of joy, of respect, of awe for men so saintly. They were considered the veritable children of God.

But it was not to be thought that the poor sinners outside the monastery should imitate their example. Nay, St. Francis, their founder, had himself separated his Order from the world, they were called out from the rest of humanity, they were kept separate by vows of celibacy, poverty, obedience. Modern charity as yet did not exist, as we now understand it, only the respect for charity as an ecclesiastical institution.

I believe that the early followers of St. Francis perceived the weak point of this separation from the world. We can hear one wiser than the rest saying, “There is danger that the early zeal may decline. All things human have in them the germs of decay; if there comes a time when our brethren shrink from the task they have undertaken, if their vows become a sham, their prayers a form, their work a pretence and a profession, then it would have been better for the world had St. Francis never existed, because we shall have taken from the layman the duty of personal service and killed it by our own neglect.”

To meet this danger, not to take renunciation and self-sacrifice wholly out of the world, they created another Order, that called the Fratres de Saccâ. This Order contained men and women of the world, married men and married women; they were allowed to go about their daily work; those who were single were not forbidden to marry; they took vows, but not those of celibacy nor of poverty.

When the Houses were suppressed, all the institutions which they had supported were suppressed as well. Yet it did not immediately occur to the people that the burden of the poor, which they had long since willingly laid upon the Church, was now laid upon themselves. When the City took over the House of the Grey Friars; the House of St. Bartholomew; the House of St. Mary Bethlehem; the Palace of Bridewell; the House of St. Thomas,—it seemed to take the place of the Church and to attempt, by way of taxation, all that the Monastic Houses had tried, or professed, to do from their own resources. We hear of sundry collections for the poor; we do not hear of work among the poor, or of responsibility for the poor, for a hundred years and more after the Reformation.

I am not, happily, called upon in this place to attack, or to defend, the Dissolution. I have only to consider its effect upon London. And as regards the London Houses, I repeat, I can find no scandals. The judgment of the people, though that was not asked or regarded, seems to have arrived at a very clear understanding as to the actual spiritual value, apart from any pretension or profession, of the life of seclusion and celibacy. It was a very low estimate. On the other hand, the City does not seem to have been openly hostile to the Religious. They were an institution; these holy men were their own kin; the Monastic Houses were a part of the daily life.

There were violent things published against monks and friars at this time, but they were written by vehement partisans and were forced upon the people. For example, the work of Barnabe Googe with his Popish Kingdom. Had there been any active hatred against them it would have shown itself by the acts and deeds of the ’prentices, who always reflected, roughly but surely, the direction of the current of contemporary opinion. Such slight indications of feeling on the subject as are afforded by the literature in the next generation point to reverence as regards the nuns; while as regards monks and friars they are clean forgotten—a sure sign that they were not very actively hated. At the same time it does seem most remarkable that the treatment of the Carthusians, who must have been regarded as innocent victims and martyrs, unless they were represented as political traitors, should not have excited any popular indignation. One can only suppose that the spectacle of a prisoner drawn on a hurdle, hanged, and quartered, was so familiar, that people hardly troubled to ask who the sufferer was, or for what crime he suffered.

Let us now pass on to speak of certain Martyrs and Confessors. It is by this time needless to point out that the constancy shown by a Ridley and a Latimer for the Protestant form of doctrine was fully equalled by that of those who passed through the way of fire for the ancient faith. There was, however, this difference, that the Catholic martyrs were monks, priests, and men of mark like Fisher and More, while the Protestants included a vast number of men and women from the lower ranks—from the uneducated, who yet dared to hold a belief of their own based, as they thought, on private judgment,—really on the training of the sermons that they had heard.

The case of Dr. Forest, Confessor to Queen Katherine, must not be forgotten when one speaks of the martyrs of this time. Forest, an old man, was committed to gaol, where he lay for two years among the common malefactors, because he refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the King. After two years of Newgate, two years in a close, stifling, and noisome prison, the venerable priest was informed that he was to be hanged over a fire and so slowly done to death. No more terrible form of death was known in England, where the horrors of the French and German capital punishments were never practised. It was the same punishment as had been meted out to Oldcastle, and it was inflicted on Forest for the same reason: to show the hatred and abhorrence of the judges for the doctrines he taught. When the unfortunate Katherine heard of the sentence she wrote to him. The letter, too long for reproduction in these pages, together with Forest’s reply, may be found in The Antiquities of the English Franciscans: they are probably genuine and are very pitiful. The Queen, however, was spared the misery of hearing of her Confessor’s torturing death: he was respited and continued to lie in prison. Two years after the Queen’s death, and when he had been confined in Newgate for four years, Forest was brought out for execution.

On the 22nd of May 1518 they placed the old man on a sledge and dragged him from Newgate to Smithfield, where he was hung in chains from a gallows over a fire. This was the most terrible of all deaths. In ordinary cases, the sufferer, bound to a thick stake with iron chains, was enclosed up to the middle, and perhaps higher, with dry faggots: it would seem that the fierce flames enveloping the victim caused death by suffocation in a very few moments. Latimer, for instance, died in this manner almost immediately; if, however, the flames were blown away, the lower parts of the body might be slowly burned before death ensued: this was the case with Ridley. When, however, the sufferer was simply dangled over a fire, the flames blown this way and that, the agony might last for hours.

In the case of Forest, the bystanders took pity on the old man and threw the gallows into the fire, so that an end was soon made. “In what state,” asked Latimer before the fire was lit, “will you die?” Whereupon the old man replied in a loud voice: “If an angel should come down from heaven to teach men any other doctrine than what I have received and believed from my youth, I would not believe him; and if my body should be cut joint after joint, member after member, hanged, burned, or whatever pain might be done to me, yet would I never turn from my old profession.” A brave old man!

After the Carthusians the principal sufferers seem to have been the Observant Friars, of whom a large number suffered for refusing to acknowledge the King’s supremacy. We may read in the Antiquities of the English Franciscans a great many stories of these sufferings. One hopes that there is exaggeration. For some, according to this book, were carried about the country in chains; some were racked and then strangled; some were starved to death; miracles attended the death of some: the whole prison, in one case, became filled with a heavenly and miraculous light; and an earthquake, in another case, testified to the Divine displeasure at another martyrdom.

On the 22nd day of June 1534, three days after the execution of the three Carthusians, Exmew, Middlemore, and Newdigate, was beheaded that illustrious Catholic martyr, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, for maintaining the Pope’s supremacy; and a fortnight later, that still more illustrious martyr, Thomas More. The witty and pleasant manner of his conversation was kept up to the last. Grafton thus speaks of his last moments:—

“Besides his learning he had a great wit, and in talking verie pleasant and merie conceited, and that even to the last hower; insomuch that at hys comming to the Tower, one of the officers demanded his upper garment for his fee (meaning hys Gowne) and he aunswered, he should haue it, and toke him his cap, saying it was the uppermost garment that he had. Likewise even going to his death at the Tower gate a pore woman called to him and besought him to declare that he had certayn evidence of hers in the time that he was in office (which after he was apprehended she could not come by) and that he would intreat she might have them agayne, or else she was undone. He aunswered good woman have pacience a little while, for the King is so good unto me that even within this half houre he will discharge me of all businesses, and help thee himselfe. Also when he went up the stayres on the Scaffolde, he desired one of the Shriefes officers to give him his hand to help him up, and sayde, when I come downe agayne, let me shift for myself as well as I can. Also the hangman kneeled downe to him asking him forgivenesse of his death (as the manner is) to whome he sayde I forgive thee, but I promise thee that thou shalt never have honestie of the stryking of my head, my neck is so short. Also even when he should lay downe his head on the block, he having a great gray beard, striked out his beard and sayde to the hangman, I pray you let me lay my beard over the block least ye should cut it.” (Chronicle of England, Grafton, vol. ii. p. 454.)

The martyrdom of the Carthusians was the most significant, the most revengeful, the most audacious act of the new Head of the Church, the Act by which he defied, once for all, the whole power of the Pope, of Spain, and even of France. The world trembled, people looked for some supernatural manifestation, some unmistakable sign of the Divine wrath: none came, and they understood that here was an act of open war, and that the Divine will as to the issue had not been pronounced.

Let us pass to the Marian Persecution. I have called attention to the fact that the greater number of the martyrs belonged to the middle class and to the rank or status of craftsmen. Thus, Christopher Wade was a linen weaver; Thomas Wats a linen draper; John Warren was an upholsterer; John Ardeley was a husbandman; Robert Bromley was a grocer; Thomas Ormond was a fuller; Williams a weaver; Margery Polley widow of a craftsman; Dirick Carver a brewer; John Laneden a rustic; John Tudson an artificer; Joan Warne a maidservant. There were wives and widows among them, “simple women,” artificers and ’prentices, maid-servants and girls.

It was the sight of their own people suffering a cruel death which made the name of Rome hateful and horrible for three hundred years and more. It was the sight of the constancy of the martyrs which laid the firm foundations of the Protestant Faith. For none of them flinched before the flames, none of them feared the pains which the Lord God in His mercy and wisdom had ordered them to endure for the sake of the Cause. What was to be expected when a shoemaker such as John Noyes could die triumphant and rejoicing?

“On the next-day morning he was brought to the stake, where were ready against his coming the foresaid justice, master Thurston, one master Waller, then being under-sheriff, and master Thomas Lovel, being high-constable, as is before expressed; the which commanded men to make ready all things meet for that sinful purpose. Now the fire in most places of the street was put out, saving a smoke which was espied by the said Thomas Lovel proceeding from the top of a chimney, to which house the sheriff and Grannow his man went, and brake open the door, and thereby got fire, and brought the same to the place of execution. When John Noyes came to the place where he should be burnt, he kneeled down and said the 50th Psalm, with other prayers; and then they, making haste, bound him to the stake. And being bound, the said John Noyes said, ‘Fear not them that can kill the body, but fear him that can kill both body and soul, and cast it into everlasting fire.’

When he saw his sister weeping, and making moan for him, he bade her that she should not weep for him, but weep for her sins.

Then one Nicholas Cadman, a valiant champion in the Pope’s affairs, brought a faggot and set against him; and the said John Noyes took up the faggot and kissed it, and said, ‘Blessed be the time that ever I was born to come to this.’

Then he delivered his Psalter to the under-sheriff, desiring him to be good to his wife and children, and to deliver to her that same book; and the sheriff promised him that he would, notwithstanding he never as yet performed his promise. Then the said John Noyes said to the people, ‘They say, they can make God of a piece of bread; believe them not!’

Then said he, ‘Good people, bear witness that I do believe to be saved by the merits and passion of Jesus Christ, and not by mine own deeds.’ And so the fire was kindled, and burnt about him. Then he said, ‘Lord have mercy upon me! Christ have mercy upon me! Son of David have mercy upon me!’

And so he yielded up his life. And when his body was burned, they made a pit to bury the coals and ashes, and amongst the same they found one of his feet that was unburnt, whole up to the ankle, with the hose on; and that they buried with the rest.”

Or, to take the case of Cicely Ormes. She was a very simple woman, the wife of a worsted weaver who lived in Norwich. She was present at the martyrdom of Simon Miller and Elizabeth Cooper, and there, being affected with their constancy, she declared that she would pledge them with the same cup from which they drank:—

“She was burnt the 23d day of September, between seven and eight of the clock in the morning, the said two sheriffs being there, and of people to the number of two hundred. When she came to the stake, she kneeled down, and made her prayers to God; that being done, she rose up and said:—

‘Good people! I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, three persons and one God. This do I not, nor will I recant; but I recant utterly from the bottom of my heart the doings of the Pope of Rome, and all his popish priests and shavelings. I utterly refuse and never will have to do with them again, by God’s grace. And, good people! I would you should not report of me that I believe to be saved in that I offer myself here unto the death for the Lord’s cause, but I believe to be saved by the death and passion of Christ; and this my death is and shall be a witness of my faith unto you all here present. Good people! as many of you as believe as I believe, pray for me.’

Then she came to the stake, and laid her hand on it, and said, ‘Welcome the cross of Christ.’ Which being done, she, looking on her hand, and seeing it blacked with the stake, wiped it upon her smock; for she was burnt at the same stake that Simon Miller and Elizabeth Cooper was burnt at. Then, after she had touched it with her hand, she came and kissed it, and said, ‘Welcome the sweet cross of Christ’; and so gave herself to be bound thereto. After the tormentors had kindled the fire to her, she said, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit rejoiceth in God my Saviour.’ And in so saying, she set her hands together right against her breast, casting her eyes and head upward; and so stood, heaving up her hands by little and little, till the very sinews of her arms did brast in sonder, and then they fell. But she yielded her life unto the Lord as quietly as if she had been in a slumber, or as one feeling no pain; so wonderfully did the Lord work with her: His name therefore be praised for evermore.”

Remember that the example was not only an admonition to those who saw her death: it was related by the spectators; it was spread through the length and breadth of the land; it was written down by Foxe, in whose hands it certainly lost nothing of eloquence or of dramatic effect, and it has been read ever since by countless people. Not the martyrdom of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and the rest of the bishops, priests and scholars, so much as those of the “very simple” women, the plain craftsmen, built up the Protestant Faith, scattered the Spanish Fleets, and changed the Englishman of the sixteenth century, so that he of the seventeenth became possible.

The bare list of burnings in London alone, not nearly complete, as enumerated by Henry Machyn in his Diary (1550–1563), conveys a sense of the overwhelming horror which filled England during this reign, perhaps clearer than a laboured treatise on the Lives and Deaths of the Martyrs. In reading the list we can see the crowds flocking to Smithfield: all their sympathies are with the sufferer; they see him dragged on his hurdle, undressed to the shirt and tied to the stake; they see that he flinches not nor offers to retract; the faggots are piled about him, Heaven grant they be of dry wood; from the flames and through the smoke they hear the voice of the martyr praising God and praying till the end comes, when his tongue swells up in his mouth and he can speak no more, or is suffocated with the smoke, or with the intensity of his agony his heart stops and merciful Death seizes him. Then the crowd go home again; they dare not speak to each other; but they remember.

“1555. The iiij day of Feybruary the bysshope of London went into Nugatt and odur docturs to dysgratt (degrade) Hoper, and Rogers sumtyme vycker of sant Polkers. The sam day was Rogers cared be-twyn x and xj of the cloke into Smythfeld and bornyd, for aronyus opinions, with a grett compene of the gard.

1555. The xvj day of Marche was a veyver (weaver) bornyd in Smyth-feld dwellynge in Sordyche, for herese, by viij of the cloke in the mornyng, ys nam was Tomkins.

1555. The xiiij day of Aprell, the wyche was Ester day at sant Margatt parryche at Westmynster after masse was done, one of the menysters, a prest of the abbay, dyd helpe hym that was the menyster to the pepull who wher reseyvyng of the blessyd sacrement of the Lord Jhesus Cryst, ther cam in-to the chyrche a man that was a monke of Elly, the wyche was marryed to a wyff: the sam day ther that sam man saud to the menyster, What doyst thow gyff them? and as sone as he had spokyn he druw his wod-knyffe, and hyt the prest on the hed and struck hym on the hand, and cloyffe ys hand a grett way and after on the harme a grett wond; and ther was syche a cry and showtt as has not byne; and after he was taken and cared to presun, and after examyned wher-for he dyd ytt. The xxiij day of Aprell was the sam man cared to Westmynster that dyd hurt the prest, and had ys hand stryken of at the post, and after he was bornyd aganst sant Margett chyrche with-owt the cherche-yerde.

1555. The sam day of May was arraigned iiij men at Powlles a-for none and after-non, of Essex, and thay wher cast for heresse and all iiij cast to be bornyd and so cared unto Nugat.

1555. The xxv day of May were arraigned at St. Paul’s for heresy, before the bishop, master Cardmaker sometime vicar of St. Bride’s in Fleet-street, and one John Warren a cloth-worker in Walbrook and a-nodur of ... and cast to be brent and carried back to Nugatt.

1555. The xxx day of May was burnt in Smythfeld master Cardmaker sum-tyme veker of sant Bryd, and master Varren clothworker, dwellyng aganst sant John in Walbroke, an hupholster, and ys wyff behyng in [Newgate].

1555. The x day of Juin was delevered owt of Nugatt vij men to be cared into Essex and Suffoke to borne.

1555. The furst day of July whent into Smythfield to borne master Bradford, a grett precher by Kyng Edward’s days, and a talow chandler’s prentice dwellyng by Nugatt, by viij of the cloke in the mornyng, with a grett compene of pepull.

1555. The viij day of July were three more delivered out of Nugate and sent into the country to be burned for heretics.

1555. The xij day of July was bornyd y Canturbery iiij men for herese, ij prestes and ij laye men.

1555. The ij day of August was a shumaker bornyd ay sant Edmundbere in Suffoke for herese.

1555. The viij day of August, between iiij and v in the morning, was a presoner delevered into the shreyff of Medyllsex to be cared unto Uxbryge to be bornyd; yt was the markett day—owt of Nugatt delevered.

1555. The xxiij day of August was bornyd ay Stratford of bowe, in the conte of Mydyllsex, a woman, wife of John Waren, clothworker, a huphulster over against sant Johns in Walbroke; the whyche ... John her hosband was bornyd with on Cardmaker in Smythfield for herese boyth; and the sam woman had a sune taken at her bornyng and cared to Nugatt to his syster, for they will born boyth.

1555. The xxxj day of August whent out of Nugatt a man of Essex unto Barnett for herese, by the shreyff of Medyllsex, to borne ther.

1555. The same day were burnt at Oxford for heresy doctor Latimer, late Bishop of Worcester, and doctor Ridley, late bysshope of London; they were some tyme grett prychers as ever was; and at ther bornyng dyd pryche doctur Smyth, sumtyme the master of Vetyngtun colege.

1555. The xviij day of Dessember be-twyn 8 & 9 of the cloke in the mornyng was cared into Smythfeld to be bornyd on master Philpot, archdeacon of Winchester, gentyllman, for herese.

1556. The xxij day of January whent into Smythfeld to berne betwyn vij and viij in the mornyng v men and ij women; on of the men was a gentyllman of the ender tempull, ys nam master Gren; and they wer all bornyd by ix at iij postes; and ther wher a commonment thrughe London over nyght that no yong folke shuld come ther, for ther the grettest number was as has byne sene at shyche a tyme.

1556. The xxj day of Marche was bornyd at Oxford doctur Cranmer, late archebysshope of Canturbere.

1556. The xv day of May was cared in a care from Nugatt thrug London unto Strettford-a-bow to borne ij men; the on blyne, the thodur lame; and ij tall men, the one was a penter, the thodur a clothworker; the penter ys nam was Huw Loveroke, dwellyng in Seythin lane; the blynd man dwellyng in sant Thomas apostylles.

1556. The xxvij day of June rod from Nugatt unto Stretford-a-bowe in iiij cares xiij, xj men and ij women, and ther bornyd to iiij postes, and ther wher a xx M. pepull.

1557. The iij day of April five persons out of Essex were condemned for herese, iij men and ij women (one woman with a staff in her hand), to be bornyd in Smythfeld.

1557. The vj day of Aprell was bornyd in Smythfeld v, iij men and im women, for herese; on was a barber dwellyng in Lym-strett; and on woman was the wyff of the Crane at the Crussyd-frers be-syd the Towre-hylle, kepyng of a in ther.

1557. The xiiij day of May was bornyd in Chepe-syd and odur places in London serten melle that was not sweet; and thay sayd that hey had putt in lyme and sand to deseyffe the pepull and he was had to the conter.

1557. The sam mornyng was bornyd be-yond sant George’s parryche iij men for heresee, a dyssyd Nuwhyngtun.

1557. The xviij day of June was ij cared to be bornyd beyonde sant Gorgeus, almost at Nuwhyngtyn for herese and odur matters.

1557. The xxij day of December were burned in Smyth-feld ij, one ser John Ruffe the frere and a Skott, and a woman for herese.” (Diary of Henry Machyn.)