Now! Then! Tag: Henry VIII (1491-1547)

Entries for the tag ‘Henry VIII (1491-1547)’

Ruled 1509 until his death, initiator of the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority and introducing the theory of the divine right of kings, dissolved convents and monasteries, invested heavily in the navy.

29 September 1513: Black humour in a report to Venice regarding the arrival at York of the body of James IV of Scotland after Flodden
8 August 1514: Sir Thomas Wortley’s death inaugurates the memorial he has built for himself at Wharncliffe
31 May 1526: Properties for the Corpus Christi performance of the (moribund) mystery play of York’s Mistry of Mercers
1 November 1530: Dining at Cawood on All Hallows’ Day, Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s ex-Lord Chancellor, receives divine warning that his time is nigh
13 January 1536: Richard Layton, dissolver of monasteries, writes to Thomas Cromwell claiming that Yorkshire clergy use birth control
20 January 1536: Thomas Cromwell’s dissolvers of monasteries, Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, report allegations of whoring and theft by William Thirsk, Abbot of Fountains
21 October 1536: Henry VIII’s herald encounters part of the Pilgrimage of Grace at Pontefract
25 October 1536: God stands between Henry VIII’s army at Doncaster and a superior force of Catholic rebels from the Pilgrimage of Grace, according to a Tudor chronicler
21 September 1549: The leaders of the Seamer Rebellion – egalitarian, republican and Catholic – against the Edwardian Reformation are hanged at York
19 February 1557: At a tithe hearing, Ralph Dicconson (60) of Malton recalls his visits 40 years ago as a pedlar to Kirkham Priory before its dissolution in 1539
29 August 1570: On arriving in Yorkshire, Archbishop Grindal declares war on bloody-minded folk-Catholicism
25 June 1586: At a tithe tribunal, elderly ex-nuns recall hay-making at Moxby Priory before its dissolution in 1536
3 May 1641: On the day of the discovery of the True Cross, Driffield folk start moving their livestock out of town to high summer pasture, endangering crops
26 May 1808: The first Ascension Day on which is generally contemplated the notion that ammonites found on Whitby beach are snakes petrified by Saint Hilda, and that seabirds dip their wings in her honour when over-flying
31 December 1848: A fragment of the Richmond Hagmena song, performed this New Year’s Eve by the town pinder
26 May 1941: Headingley’s Shire Oak falls, legendary site of Anglo-Saxon local government between Aire and Wharfe

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