On the first Sunday of Lent in 1540, John Gallampton and ‘other misruled and wild persons’ gathered outside their parish church in the town of Pawlett, Somerset. They entered the church ‘with strength and violence’, dragged out their vicar, Thomas Sprent, and ‘cast him over the churchyard wall’, nearly breaking his neck. On Easter Sunday the following month, with Sprent recovered from his injuries, John Gallampton ‘stood at the chancel door’ and ‘kept the parishioners back’ so that they could not receive communion from the vicar's hand. Then in July, Gallampton allegedly ambushed Sprent and beat him with a club. These violent actions, according to the vicar's opponents, were not without provocation. In the autumn of 1539, Sprent had abandoned his benefice for two weeks without providing a replacement, leaving two parishioners to die without last rites. Sprent was also accused of beating two of his parishioners, demanding ‘more tithings of the parishioners than they were wont to pay’, and meeting in his house with ‘women of evil name and fame’. The conflict between the vicar and his parishioners became so heated that local modes of dispute resolution proved futile, and Gallampton and Sprent sued one another in rival actions in the King's Court of Star Chamber.

This anecdote colourfully illustrates a mode of clerical–lay relations in the Reformation era, traditionally labelled ‘anticlericalism’, that scholars have often linked with the rise of English Protestantism.