Richard Hunne

After a dispute with his priest over his infant son's funeral, Hunne sought to use the English common law courts to challenge the church's authority.

In March 1511, Hunne refused to pay the standard mortuary fee, the baby's christening robe, to the rector of St Mary Matfelon in Whitechapel, Thomas Dryffeld, after the funeral of his dead five-week-old son called Stephen.

Hunne was then sued by the rector of St Mary Matfelon for the mortuary fee and appeared in the ecclesiastical Court of Audience, presided over by Cuthbert Tunstall, chancellor to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in April 1512.

Hunne was then sent to the Lollards' Tower of St Paul's Cathedral, after a raid on his house in October 1514 had uncovered an English Bible with a prologue sympathetic to Wycliffe's teachings.

He said that Horsey would not get a fair trial because of the strength of public feeling, which had built up against the Church: "...if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set in favor of heretical depravity that they will cast and condemn my clerk though he be as innocent as Abel."

In 1515, as a result of this affair, Parliament debated whether to approve a bill to restore to Hunne's children the property that had been forfeited when their father was found, posthumously, guilty of heresy.

An anonymous account, "The enquirie and verdite of the quest panneld of the death of Richard Hune which was founde hanged in Lolars tower", published in 1537, suggests that its author also saw parallels between Hunne's case and the Henrician Reformation's attempt to bring ecclesiastical courts under state control.