‘The scanty band of martyrs’ to the Catholic cause1 during the reign of Henry VIII poses a question for the historian of the Henrician Reformation which is still far from receiving a wholly satisfactory answer. Whatever the causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace, however varied the particular regional grievances which fuelled it, it cannot be regarded solely in terms of religious protest, and it was geographically confined. The vicar of Podington in Bedfordshire might tell his parishioners in November 1536, ‘Take ye heed what ye do, for the Lincolnshire men are up, and they come for a common wealth and a good intent, and their opinion is good, and yours is nought’, but he did not raise his congregation, and his very words suggest they were not in sympathy with him even though they did not report him immediately. For the most part, the people of England appeared to acquiesce in the religious changes of the 1530s: whether they were won over by the government's policy of propaganda or whether their silence was a grudging acceptance of the inevitable we do not know. But it was no small matter to change the basis of authority within the church, to translate that authority into an active and inquisitorial royal supremacy, and to accompany these changes with the dissolution of the monasteries and the taxation of the clergy on an unprecedented scale.