Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire rising of 1549

The first clear evidence of an official response to the Rising is a letter from Somerset, the Protector, dated 10 July, in which he refers to persons "nuely assembled" in Buckinghamshire.

[6] King Edward noted the outcome in his journal for 18 July: To Oxfordshire the Lord Grey of Wilton was sent with 1500 horsemen and footmen; whose coming with th'assembling of the gentlemen of the countrie, did so abash the rebels, that more than hauf of them rann ther wayes, and other that tarried were some slain, some taken and some hanged.

[8] In the immediate aftermath of the troops' arrival, there were signs that the Privy Council was beginning to regret employing German landsknechts in Oxfordshire, as it was reported that people were threatening to leave not one foreigner alive in England.

[10] Despite the pardons extended to some ringleaders, the Rising in general seems to have been put down with the same pitiless force and brutality that characterised the response to the Prayer Book Rebellion, where large-scale massacres were alleged.

Half a century later, folk memories of its suppression served as a partial inspiration of a later attempt, the Oxfordshire Rising of 1596: its leader Bartholomew Steer arranged for the rebels to meet on Enslow Hill, where he said "the [1549] risers were persuaded to go home, and were then hanged like dogs".

[14] Though the Rising took place many years before Steer's lifetime he might have learned of it when he worked at Rycote, and he was born in Hampton Poyle, whose incumbent priest was hanged after the events of 1549.

A. Vere Woodman, writing the first detailed study of the sources in 1957, argued that there was little apparent link with anti-enclosure protests that had taken place in 1548 and that the rebellion was largely a result of conservatism in the matter of the liturgy, along with the threatened confiscation of church goods and the suppression of chantries.