God and grazing

St Matthew's Thorpe Hamlet is home to some amazing, tragic and inspiring history. If you enter the parish across Bishop's Bridge you follow the footsteps of the Martyrs, Lollards and early reformers executed at Lollard's Pit. From the Lollards Pit you can look up the hill to Kett's heights where you will see a beacon. Here the Kett brothers led a rebellion n that took over Norwich. It was triggered by the rich trying to fence common land for their sheep to graze on. Robert Kett made a list of demands and one intrigues me:
 "We pray thatt all bonde men may be made ffre for God made all ffre w' his precious blode shedding". 

In the Twentieth century Liberation theologians were coming to similar conclusions, but in Norwich a Yoeman  farmer was making the connection between the death of Christ and Gods concern for the poor way back in 1549. He was doing what good theologians always do, he was making sense of the Gospel in his own context. He was arguing in opposition to what the Church was teaching and he was right. 

You can stop in at Lollards Pit, which is now a Gay Pub, one group who have been persecuted and victimised by the Church look after the ashes of another, and perhaps ask yourself what does it mean here in this context to pray that all may be free for God made all free with his precious blood shedding.