ABSTRACT
The story of the war waged by the villagers of Hayes in Middlesex against their parish clergy provides, on the very eve of the Reformation, a splendid case history to test the well-known commonplace that the Reformation was successful in England because the country was resolutely anticlerical-because people disliked priests and hated the claims and the courts of the Church. Hayes may now be a London suburb; in 1530 it was a village in the shire, remaining so as late as the middle of the nineteenth century when it was regarded as ‘the most backward part of the county’.1 It comprised a manor whose lord was the archbishop of Canterbury; that see had allegedly acquired it as early as 832.2 The archbishop also owned the advowson, the right to present to the living. In consequence the parish was a ‘peculiar’ of Canterbury, that is to say it was exempt from the bishop of London’s jurisdiction and came directly under the archbishop’s.3 The village was therefore just a little out of the ordinary: it lay near London, and it enjoyed a direct relationship with the primate of England. These facts, as will become apparent, had something to do with the troubles which beset it in the later 1520s, but they do not make so much difference that one need regard Hayes as altogether exceptional.
