The Amersham Martyrs

Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.

Religious intolerance
A stone monument not far from where Time Team was digging in Chesham Bois records one of the bloody incidents of religious intolerance that have occurred throughout British history. In 1521, a group of men who became known as the Amersham Martyrs were burned at the stake for their religious beliefs.

They were Lollards – religious reformers who believed in the right of ordinary people to worship God directly, and according to their own reading of the Gospels, rather than only via the intervention of priests and the unquestioning doctrines of the established Catholic Church. They were a part of the Protestant Reformation that was sweeping across Europe, promoted by the new printing presses that facilitated the publication of the first translations of the Bible into English and other languages.

Cheynes under suspicion
At the beginning of his reign, Henry VIII was strongly opposed to Protestantism and the publication of an English Bible. The Church courts pursued the Lollards and others as heretics, imposing brutal punishments on many of them. In 1521, Robert Cheyne, who was responsible for one of the main building phases at Chesham Bois House, was among those who came under suspicion for his religious beliefs. According to the Victoria County History, he 'turned out one of his tenants in 1538 for reading the New Testament and other books, and had to enter into a recognisance for the appearance of his younger son Thomas Cheyne in 1541'.

The inscriptions
The Cheynes managed to escape punishment for their beliefs. But other local people were not so lucky, as the inscriptions on the monument to the Amersham Martyrs make clear.

In the shallow depression at a spot 100 yards left of this monument seven Protestants, six men and one woman, were burned to death at the stake. They died for the principles of religious liberty, for the right to read and interpret the Holy Scriptures and to worship God according to their consciences as revealed through God's Holy word.

Their names shall live for ever.

William Tylsworth, Burned 1506
Joan Clark, his married daughter, was compelled to light the faggots to burn her father
Thomas Barnard, Burned 1521
James Morden, Burned 1521
John Scrivener, Burned 1521
His children were compelled to light their father's pyre
Robert Rave, Burned 1521
Thomas Holmes, Burned 1521
Joan Norman, Burned 1521

The other side of the monument records:

'The following men, worshippers at Amersham, were martyred in other places

Robert Cosin
of Gt Missenden, burned at Buckingham 1506
Thomas Chase
strangled at Woburn Bucks
His body was buried at Norland Woods 1514
Thomas Man
burned at Smithfield 1518
Thomas Harding
burned at Chesham 1532

Text only