Last Mass of the West: The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549

In June 1549 the parishioners of a small Devon village refused to hear the new English prayer book and ordered their priest to say the old Latin Mass. Within weeks, the commons of Devon and Cornwall were in arms.What followed was one of the bloodiest rebellions of the Tudor age. Marching under the Banner of the Five Wounds, farmers, tinners, priests and gentlemen besieged Exeter for five starving weeks, demanded the return of the Mass, the saints and the prayers for the dead, and told the king that many Cornishmen understood no English. The government answered with Italian gunners, German mercenaries and Welsh infantry. At Fenny Bridges, Clyst St Mary and Sampford Courtenay the rebel armies were destroyed; on Clyst Heath some nine hundred bound prisoners were killed in a single night. Priests hanged from their own church towers. The leaders died at Tyburn.Drawing on wide scholarship, this narrative history recovers the rising as its participants understood it: a coherent defence of faith, community and language against a state determined to impose uniformity.It is the story of how the West Country lost its old religion, how Cornish began its long fall into silence, and how an entire region learned the price of saying no.