ABSTRACT
The pilgrimage of grace was a play on three conceits, all serving to confer upon the uprising a sense of coherence and direction. In the first place, the rebels saw themselves as pilgrims, seeking the king’s grace. In the second place, they saw themselves as an upsurgence of the commons, obliged to take extraordinary action to correct what the gentlemen and clergy had failed to put right. In the third place, they were moved by a conceit of the north, driven to throw off the domination of greedy, tyrannical and heretical southerners. In this latter respect, the documentation of the pilgrimage of grace helps to show how, and with what effect, the distinction between north and south imparted a sense of regional identity to early Tudor England. On the other hand, could the uprising be regarded as, quintessentially, a regional rebellion?
