Chapter 6 - The Towneley Plays, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and Northern Messianism

Summary

Chapter 6 revisits the sixteenth-century plays in the Towneley Manuscript (Huntington MS HM 1), notable for their northern regionalist character. Critics have long debated the plays’ dating, but this chapter proposes to read the manuscript as a compilation emerging from the northern rebellion of 1536–37 known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, which opposed the reformed Protestantism of Henry VIII for old Catholicism and proved, arguably, the largest civil rebellion in English history. The late Barbara Palmer’s work on the plays and on drama in general in the West Riding suggest that the manuscript is a compilation born of the drama centers that included major sites of activity during the 1536–37 rebellion. This chapter asks, then, to what extent religious drama of this sort was provocative of rebellion in the North of England, or to what extent the turmoil of the Reformation in England, and the subsequent rebellions of 1536–37, resonate in the plays? Chapter 6 suggests that the Towneley Plays be read as protest literature emerging from the Pilgrimage of Grace, finding further links between the plays and other prophecy and protest poems written during the rebellion.