Page:VCH Buckinghamshire 1.djvu/360

Rh which one John Baron of Amersham confessed that he had in his pos- session : for it includes 'the second book of the Canterbury tales.'

It was in 1464, two years after the burning of Wyllis, that most of the examinations of heretics took place. Richard Benett of High Wycombe was the first to abjure his errors. On 4 June of this year in the parish church of High Wycombe seven men of the same town and one from Princes Risborough abjured ; on the next day another purged himself of the accusation of heresy by the oath of twenty fellow- townsmen. On 12 September, before the bishops of Lincoln and Exeter, in the same place, five men of Amersham and three of High Wycombe made their recantation ; on i October eleven more from High Wycombe, Turville, Great Marlow and Hughenden did the same, while one from Hambleden managed to purge himself, though 'vehementer suspicatus'. All of these were required to do penance by bearing faggots and wax candles in the parish church of High Wycombe and in the market place of Aylesbury.

Unfortunately the methods of the bishops at this time seem to have been, like those of the heretics, more negative than positive ; and the care they took to bring the erring to recantation and penance was not accompanied (so far as it is at present possible to judge) by any earnest effort to establish the faithful and confirm the wavering by a better and more intelligent teaching of the Catholic faith. The results were just what might have been foreseen. During the episcopate of Bishop Smith (14951514) there was found in Buckinghamshire a 'godly and great company ' of men and women who, though they were for the most part still in external communion with the Church, had lost faith in some of her most distinctive doctrines. What their actual numbers were we can only gather from the testimony of Foxe, as there is no allusion to the matter in the Memoranda of Bishop Smith's register, and it is evident that Foxe's sources of information were not in this case of a very reliable kind. He assures us that one man, William Tylsworth, was burned at Amersham in 1506, and that sixty other persons carried the faggot at the same time, amongst whom was Tylsworth's daughter, who was compelled to lay a faggot on her own father's fire. This he knew from the testimony of an old man and woman still living in his day, the latter indeed more than a hundred years of age. He also asserts, though not so positively, that one ' father Roberts ' (elsewhere called ' Dr. Cosin,' as being a teacher of the congregation), a miller of Missenden, suffered death at Buckingham about the same time, and that over twenty bore faggots at his burning. At Amersham again, about two years later, two men were burned in one fire and three others branded in the cheek, while about thirty more bore faggots. He adds that of the three who were branded one was afterwards burned, another