ABSTRACT
On 15 January 1531, at Livery Dole in Heavitree, outside the Exeter city walls, the evangelical schoolmaster Thomas Benet was burned for heresy. Benet, who had been a thorn in the flesh of the Exeter diocese for some time, had written a series of tracts which served both as a prospectus of his evangelical belief and as a summary of complaint. His list of criticisms had included the assertions: ‘the pope is Antichrist; and we ought to worship God only, and no saints’. In a provocative imitation of Martin Luther’s action at Wittenburg in 1517, Benet’s son nailed these tracts to the door of Exeter Cathedral. He was caught in the act by a citizen going to early Mass and the next day Thomas was brought before the Bishop, the mayor and the canons of the cathedral and examined as to his beliefs. He was tried for heresy, found guilty and, having refused to recant, sentenced to death by burning. So unwilling were the Exeter magistrates to implement the decision that they refused to allow the stake to be erected in Southernhay, which was within the city limits. He was burned, instead, at Livery Dole, outside the city walls. At his burning, which took place in the middle of the natural amphitheatre which the Devon landscape provides here, the Catholic John Barnhouse ‘took a furze-bush upon a pike, and having set it on fire, he thrust it unto his face, saying “Ah! horeson heretic! pray to our Lady, and say, Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis, or, by God’s wounds, I will make thee do it.”’ Benet indicated his refusal by turning away his head. Foxe recorded Benet’s death as his ‘constant end and martyrdom’ and celebrated him as a ‘mild martyr’ who had elected to ‘yield himself most patiently (as near as God would give him grace) to die and to shed his blood therein; alleging that his death should be more profitable to the Church of God, and for the edifying of his people than his life should be’.1
