In October 1536 an army of some 20,000 men drawn from the six northern counties of England confronted King Henry VIII's forces across the River Don. In form at least this was a popular rising: its ‘grand captain’, a hitherto unheard-of lawyer, Robert Aske; its members bound together not by feudal loyalties but by an elaborate oath. Its imagery was religious; the rebels called themselves ‘Pilgrims’, they carried banners of the Five Wounds of Christ and invoked God's grace and defence of Holy Church in their marching song. They demanded the rooting out of heresy, the restoration of recently dispossessed monks and nuns to their convents, an end to the despoliation, and even the renunciation of the recently asserted royal headship of the church. With the immediately preceding (and quickly suppressed) rising in Lincolnshire, the Pilgrimage of Grace constituted the only major armed challenge to the Henrician Reformation, that series of revolutionary changes otherwise implemented with the apparent acquiescence if not the outright approval of the English people.

Naturally a movement drawn from a vast tract of country from the Lincolnshire wolds to the Cumberland fells, and embracing all ranks of society, contained within it a number of contradictions. Nobles and gentlemen were prominent in the leadership, even though disclaiming any part in initiating proceedings and deferring to the nominal command of Aske. Secular concerns figured among the demands, and still more were hinted at in the various proceedings on a local level.