ABSTRACT
In 1919 Rachel Reid boldly asserted that the pilgrimage of grace ‘was at bottom just the first of the great agrarian risings that marked the transition out of the Middle Ages in England’. For her it represented a reaction against the ‘steady progress of enclosures’, as well as against the ‘rapid rise of prices, especially rents and fines’, and showed that ‘capitalism was already dividing master from man’.1 No other historian has awarded agrarian grievances such a central place in the uprising; but others have stressed how decisively they influenced its overall character. Ruth and Madeleine Dodds claimed that ‘in Cumberland and Westmorland the rising was almost entirely directed against enclosures and unpopular landlords’, adding: ‘In the Yorkshire dales, as in Cumberland and Westmorland, the movement was chiefly social and was directed against the earl of Cumberland.’ The Dodds contrasted these upland regions of revolt, where the complaint rested principally upon an antipathy to landlords, with the lowland regions of revolt, located in south Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, where the complaint was exclusively against the government.2 This overview of the pilgrimage of grace is reflected in R.W. Hoyle’s opinion that the October uprisings essentially comprised two revolts: one with ‘no sign of an agrarian agitation’ and confined to Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire; the other driven by ‘agrarian discontents, with tenures, fines and tithes’ and located in the northern uplands. Unlike the Dodds, however, he sought to explain the Pilgrims’ hostility to the earl of Cumberland as provoked not by harsh landlordship but by his loyalty to the government.3 Nonetheless, in spite of attributing so much importance to agrarian complaints, none of these accounts provides a careful examination of their real nature. Scott M. Harrison’s The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties attempted to redress this omission, but his study was necessarily confined to Westmorland and Cumberland. Moreover, while usefully mapping out the range of grievance by means of a substantial analysis of the objection to entry fines, tithes, enclosures, noutgeld and sergeant corn, it has serious
shortcomings, with regard to his interpretation of tenant right and the reasons he offered for the contentiousness of tithes and enclosures.4
