This is a study of what the “people” might be taken to have wanted during the series of disturbances that constituted the pilgrimage of grace of 1536. Michael Bush distinguishes his approach from that of others whom, he argues, have been too preoccupied, in their narratives of the Henrician Reformation, with the allegedly objective meaning of the foundation documents of that Reformation, for instance, the Act of Supremacy. Here, then, the petition material of the pilgrims is crucial.

In this context, Bush demonstrates how politically and theologically aware the commons were, perhaps rather in contrast to those such as Christopher Haigh, for whom the mass of the populace, throughout the Reformation period, was essentially an inert mass, reacting negatively to the initiatives of successive central government regimes. The tendency here, by contrast, is not to assume a distinct and separate purpose of the gentry leaders or to claim that the commons were, in effect, hoodwinked by them (x–xi, 8). Or, if there is a distinction, Bush wants to recover the popular interest in the rebellion (42), a pilgrim's-eye view of the event, as it were. This, then, is a coherent attempt to integrate the kind of social, economic, and political issues that, we know, inevitably inflected each other in a widespread oppositional movement that incorporated a range of different interests and lobbies, a “multiplicity of grievance,” as Bush calls it (12, 41).

In recent times there has been a good deal of scholarly interest not just in popular politics but also in what might be taken to constitute a “public sphere,” the echo chamber in which the kind of sentiments and ideas such as those described by Bush were able to reverberate and be passed around, glossed, discussed, endorsed, and refuted.

In this context the chapter on religion is a useful back-to-basics reminder of what was at stake for those involved in the revolt. In the context of increasingly sophisticated, not to say convoluted, accounts of sixteenth-century civil unrest, it is helpful to be reminded of the variety of opinions among the pilgrims (notably about the royal supremacy; 50) and how far they were likely, or not, to hang together once they were in rebellion. As with most coalitions, there was a range of issues and of attitudes as those involved tried to establish how much they could agree upon. The extent to which this was possible accounts in part for the way that common purpose was constructed, for a time at least, across relatively narrow class and economic concerns. Bush says, for example, that those who have argued that the pilgrims were in sympathy with the king's “moderate” agenda as set out in the Ten Articles are simply wrong. I thought that, here and there, slightly more historiographical signposting would have been welcome, at least to nonspecialists, in part because the historiography of the pilgrimage is now so complex. Bush's work in general challenges other versions of this controversial early Tudor topic, one that is of course always at the center of textbook-based treatments of the Reformation.

Each subsequent chapter then deals with a different aspect of the revolt: taxation, what one might call constitutional issues, regional variation (broadly speaking, divisions of opinion between North and South), and agrarian conflict. What comes across is how far the regime managed to create a perfect storm of protest, as different concerns (about evil counselors, intolerable fiscal exactions, subversion of the law and the chain of being, and so on) across a wide geographical area were, at least temporarily, welded together in such a way that the king was forced to negotiate with his own people. I was reminded of the extent to which early Tudor government here set a precedent for the tenor of so much of the conflict between early Stuart government and what many historians have taken to be the “people” over much the same issues about one hundred years later. Bush's argument is essentially that the pilgrimage was not the result purely of social conservatism, and in the wider context of popular political unrest over the early modern period, this seems exactly right.