ABSTRACT
When the leaders of the 1536 rebellion named their insurrection The Pilgrimage of Grace’, and bound themselves and their followers to the common cause by means of an oath called The Oath of Honourable Men’, they invoked two con cepts which function conspicuously and in very close relationship in Henry IV. Grace and honour were of course major concepts in medieval culture, and as a distinguished social anthropologist has recently explained, they have coexisted in a complex and shifting relationship of similarity, complementarity, and opposition in Western culture for a very long time.1 Due however to a combin ation of social, political, and ideological changes associated mainly with the Renaissance and the Reformation, grace and honour were to become notions of quite exceptional consequence in the Tudor period. But grace was the more important and comprehensive of the two notions, a fact which is reflected, I believe, in Henry IV.
