On Whit Monday 1549, William Underhill and William Seagar two respectable inhabitants of the little Devon village of Sampford Courtenay - got into an argument with their vicar at the parish church. They told him that they disliked the new Book of Common Prayer in English, which had recently been introduced by an act of parliament and which he had read in church the day before. They urged him to revert to the traditional service in Latin instead and, after some debate, he acceded to their request.
Within hours, the church had become the centre of a popular demonstration against the Protestantising religious policies of Edward VI, which sought to remove all vestiges of the traditional Catholic faith. Within days, that protest had spread to the surrounding country parishes, and within weeks it had engulfed the whole of Devon and Cornwall. Self-appointed captains soon emerged to lead the protesters, prominent among them being Underhill and Seagar themselves. In July they assembled an army of common people and laid siege to the regional capital, Exeter. From there, they sent a list of demands to the government in London, insisting that all further moves towards Protestantism should come to a halt, and that the Church of England should be restored to the position in which it had been left by the king’s father, Henry VIII, at the time of his death.
The rising is widely remembered today as the “Prayer Book Rebellion”. This epithet perhaps
