They called him Little Bilney because he was small, and the accounts that survive describe a gentle, scrupulous scholar rather than a firebrand. Thomas Bilney was born around 1495, probably in Norwich, and entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, around 1510. He read law, took holy orders, and by the early 1520s was a man worn down by trying to earn God’s favour. What changed him was a book. He picked up Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, and a verse in the First Epistle to Timothy, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, brought him, by his own account, a marvellous comfort and quietness. Salvation was a gift, not a wage. From there he preached against the veneration of saints and relics and against pilgrimages, while holding to the Pope’s authority and to transubstantiation. In Henry VIII’s England that was already dangerous enough.
The Horror
Cardinal Wolsey summoned him in 1526 and let him go. In 1527 Bilney was pulled from a pulpit in Ipswich and held in the Tower. In December he stood trial and abjured. The Dictionary of National Biography records the penance: he was ordered to walk bareheaded in the procession at St Paul’s with a faggot on his shoulder, the bundle of sticks used to burn heretics, and to stand before the preacher at Paul’s Cross. The Tudor Society, citing the Oxford DNB, says he never confessed to preaching heresy. He claimed he could not remember what he had said. Either way, he had submitted to save himself.
He was released in 1529, and the abjuration ruined him. His friends feared to leave him alone, and the DNB puts the misery at more than two years. This is the part that makes the end make sense. Bilney had not been caught by surprise. He walked back towards the stake because he could not live with having stepped away from it.
He left Trinity Hall, saying he was going to Jerusalem, and went to Norfolk. His preaching licence had gone, so he taught privately and then openly, in the fields. In Norwich he gave an English Testament by Tyndale to the anchoress. Bishop Richard Nix’s officers arrested him soon after. Convocation drew up articles against him in March 1531, and he was tried before the bishop’s chancellor, Thomas Pelles, as a relapsed heretic. He appealed to the King and was refused. He was degraded from his orders, handed to the civil authorities, and held in the Guildhall.
On Saturday, August 19, 1531, he heard mass in the Guildhall chapel and was taken across Bishop Bridge to the Lollards’ Pit, outside the city boundary. What happened there is told differently by different people, and these are the details to hold loosely.
The best-known detail, the candle, is reported for the evening before. In d’Aubigné’s retelling, friends who visited him, Matthew Parker among them, watched him hold a finger in a lamp flame until the first joint burned, saying he was only testing his flesh and quoting Isaiah’s promise that he would not be burned when he walked through the fire. D’Aubigné attributes the story to an unnamed chronicler, and it comes to us in a devotional account written three centuries afterwards. It may be true. I could not trace it to a first-hand witness. The version in some retellings, in which he did this night after night, is not what that source says: it describes one evening.
At the Pit, the sources diverge. D’Aubigné has him kiss the stake, recite the Apostles’ Creed and Psalm 143, and call on Jesus as the fire, slow to take, was driven aside by a strong wind. The flames seemed to retreat from him three times and return three times before he died. The wind and the three returns appear in the one account I could read, so I cannot call them confirmed.
Did He Recant Again?
The question has a long history. The DNB says Bilney admitted an error about fasting, cleared the anchoress and the friars of blame, urged the crowd to trust the Church, and then read a paper from Pelles so quietly that no one could hear it. The mayor and the alderman Curatt gave contradictory depositions about what followed. Sir Thomas More relied on Curatt to say that Bilney had recanted all his heresies. John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist, denied it and cited Matthew Parker, who was there. The Tudor Society’s summary goes further than the others and says he affirmed Catholic faith at the stake. These cannot all be right, and we cannot settle it from here. The DNB suggests Bilney’s views were mild enough that a plain statement of them might sound like a recantation to a hostile listener. Bishop Nix is reported to have said afterwards that he feared he had burned Abel and let Cain go. In 1534 Nix lost his property, though the charge concerned the Church acting without state authority, not Bilney’s doctrine.
The Modern Relic
The Lollards’ Pit lay just across Bishop Bridge on the Wensum, and Wikipedia gives its position as roughly 52°37′54″N, 1°18′35″E. Others burned there include the Marian victims Elizabeth Cooper and Cicely Ormes. Sources I saw disagree on the origin of the name and on where each marker stands today, and I have not confirmed the exact spot on the ground. The place to check is the Guildhall on Gaol Hill, where a plaque reads “Thomas Bilney, 1495-1531 First Protestant Martyr” and notes the vault below where he was held before the burning. In Cambridge a tablet at St Edward’s Church remembers him with Hugh Latimer and Robert Barnes. Latimer, who owed much of his own turning to Bilney, was burned at Oxford in 1555.
