At the height of the English Peasants’ Revolt, today in 1381, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, had his head chopped off. Sudbury, who was also holding down the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer, had introduced the terminally unpopular third poll tax, so when the rebels found him hiding in the Tower of London, he was dragged out to his death. His head spent the next 600 years in St Gregory’s Church, Sudbury, and was then used in 2011 by a forensic expert to reconstruct his face (above). ‘He’s a strange looking fellow,’ reported the expert.
The Index of Forbidden Books was abolished by Pope Paul VI today in 1966. For 400 years it had listed books that were judged heretical or immoral, and which Catholics were not allowed to read, including anything by Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Catholics such as Galileo, Erasmus and Montaigne, and translations of the Bible. The last books to be added to the index before it was scrapped were Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (banned in 1953 and 56).
Augustus Toplady, the 18th century hymn writer, who had a bitter, long-running quarrel with John Wesley about predestination, got out of bed today in 1778 to scotch rumours that he had renounced Calvinism on his deathbed. He then got himself to Orange Street Chapel on London’s Haymarket, preached a strongly-worded sermon about it, and then went back to bed to get on with dying, which he completed a couple of months later.
‘So certain and so satisfied am I, of the Truth of all that I have ever written; that, was I now sitting up in my dying Bed, with a Pen and Ink in my Hand, and all the religious and controversial Writings I ever published (more especially those relating to Mr John Wesley, and the Arminian Controversy) whether respecting Facts or Doctrines, could at once be displayed to my View, I should not strike out a single Line relative to him or them.’ Augustus Toplady
Today in 1098 Peter Bartholomew found the Holy Lance that pierced the side of Christ. Despite the fact that the lance was already on display in Constantinople, Bartholomew, a peasant, was told by Christ to look for it under the floor of Antioch Cathedral, where the Crusaders (in the First Crusade) were besieged by Turks. The lance was unearthed, its power routed the Turks, and Antioch was saved.
Pope Benedict XIV issued the encyclical A Quo Primum (‘God in his goodness’) today in 1751, deploring the advancement of Jews in Poland and calling on the authorities to victimise them.