ABSTRACT
Richard Woodman was executed in Lewes on 22 June 1557. Woodman was burnt, along with nine other Protestants, on a day of extraordinary violence. Woodman, an iron maker from Buxted who ran a successful forge or furnace in Warbleton in east Sussex, is the most prominent member of a group of Marian Protestants problematically identified as 'the Sussex martyrs'. This chapter argues that this doctrinal homogeneity aided the establishment of the cult of the Sussex martyrs, but it also resulted in an overly simplified vision of Protestantism in early modern Sussex, one which neglected other important factors including intra-Protestant debate, cross-county relationships, and varieties of Protestant belief in Sussex. It also ignores the complicated relationship between Sussex's Protestant and Roman Catholic communities. Thus, resulting in Woodman and Sussex Protestantism being subsumed within a fantasy portrait of unified, suffering Protestantism beset by a tyrannical Romish central government.
