Social Response and the Prayer Book Rebellion

Assessing Popular Responses: Compliance or Acceptance?

• Changing a law is straightforward, but changing what people believe in their hearts takes generations.
• The primary response of ordinary people was compliance rather than genuine acceptance. Most parishioners outwardly obeyed new laws to avoid harsh fines for recusancy, whilst privately maintaining deep traditionalism.
• Historical records, such as churchwardens' accounts and local wills, provide evidence for the slow pace of change. Wills show that people continued leaving money to pray for souls in Purgatory long after official Protestant reforms were introduced.
• Historians deeply debate this period. A.G. Dickens argued the Reformation was a popular "bottom-up" movement, whilst Eamon Duffy argued that traditional religion remained highly popular and was only dismantled by state force.

The Trauma of Iconoclasm (1547–1550)

• Imagine walking into your brightly painted local building to find all the artwork smashed and the walls completely painted over in stark white.
• Under Edward VI, the government used iconoclasm to physically destroy the visual culture of Catholicism. The 1547 Edwardian Injunctions targeted "abused" images, followed by a 1548 decree demanding the total removal of all church statues and images.
• Interiors were whitewashed to cover murals of saints, and by 1550, a royal order mandated that traditional stone altars be replaced with wooden communion tables, changing the service from a "sacrifice" to a simple commemorative meal.
• Resistance varied from violent to passive. Actively, government official William Body was murdered in Helston in 1548 while enforcing these changes. Passively, parishioners engaged in absenteeism, "parish-hopping" to find traditional services, and hiding church treasures in fields or homes, as famously recorded in the village of Morebath.

The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549

• A translation of a book seems like an unlikely trigger for a war, but in 1549, it ignited one of the deadliest summers in Tudor history.
• The immediate spark was the Act of Uniformity, which enforced the new First Book of Common Prayer. On 10 June 1549, at Sampford Courtenay in Devon, angry parishioners forced their priest to revert to the traditional Latin Mass, mocking the new English service as "but like a Christmas game."
• This event triggered the Prayer Book Rebellion (also known as the Western Rebellion). The rebels flatly rejected the English language, demanding a return to the Six Articles, the restoration of religious images, and official belief in transubstantiation.

Economic Grievances and the "Commotion Time"

• Why do people rebel—is it to save their souls, or to fill their stomachs?
• Whilst religion provided the spark, deep economic hardship fuelled the unrest during what contemporaries called the Commotion Time. A poor harvest in 1548 and rapid population growth had quadrupled the price of wheat, pushing the peasantry to the brink.
• The introduction of a new sheep tax in March 1549 disproportionately devastated farmers in Devon and Cornwall. Resentment over enclosures also sparked fierce class conflict, as local gentry were seen as greedy land-grabbers.
• The rebellion quickly morphed into class warfare, evidenced by the OCR mark scheme's key phrase: "Kill the gentlemen!" This tension was brutally demonstrated when a local yeoman, William Hellyons, was killed with a pitchfork on the church steps for confronting the rebels.

Suppression and the Fall of Somerset

• When a government fails to maintain local order, a political crisis at the very top is rarely far behind.
• The Western rebels besieged Exeter for 5–6 weeks before a royal army led by John Russell, relying heavily on foreign mercenaries, defeated them at the Battle of Sampford Courtenay. Between 4,000 and 5,500 rebels were killed during the battles and the subsequent harsh pacification.
• The inability to quickly handle the 1549 rebellions destroyed Lord Protector Somerset. The Privy Council accused him of "softness," arguing his anti-enclosure proclamations had accidentally encouraged the rebels.
• King Edward VI recorded the crisis coldly in his personal journal, noting he felt "in prison" when Somerset fled with him to Windsor. Somerset was stripped of power in October 1549, allowing John Dudley to seize control and push for more radical, structured religious policies.