Please contact us if you would like to request a copy of our booklet of extracts from Foxe telling the story of the Mendlesham Martyrs.

John Foxe (1516 – 1587)
By V. Perry, 2007

John Foxe was born at Boston in 1516. He studied at Oxford University and became a Fellow of Magdalene College. On the accession of Queen Mary in 1553 he had to flee to the Continent. There he published in Latin Book 1 of a history of persecutions ‘from the time of Wiclif to this age’ (i.e. to the death of Henry VIII). The book was rushed out in time for the Michaelmas fair of 1554 in Frankfort. The publication of Book 2 of this history was overtaken by events. On 4 February 1555 John Rogers, translator of Matthew’s Bible which preserves Tyndale’s translation of the Old Testament history books, was burned at the stake at Smithfield, the first of the Marian martyrs. Soon news was reaching the exiles on the Continent of a procession of martyrs. Foxe began to collect their stories, aided among others by Edmund Grindal, who became Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth. In 1559 he brought out Part 1 of a second history in Latin giving an account of the ‘dreadful persecution under Mary, lately queen’. (The second volume, intended to tell the stories of the continental martyrs, was not written.) In October of that year Foxe returned to England. Now he could interview friends and relatives of the martyrs and examine episcopal registers. Then in March 1563 there was published in English the first edition of Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days…, a work that has become popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Foxe published further editions in 1570, 1576 and 1583. The 1570 edition came out shortly after the Roman Catholic revolt had been put down in the north, and it was immediately welcomed as an authoritative account of the situation in church and country. The Bishop of Ely was one of the church dignitaries who ‘ordered the book to be set up for all to read in city orphanages and the halls of city companies’. In 1571 Convocation ordered bishops to make the Bible and Foxe available in the hall and dining room for the use even of servants and visitors. Deans had to have them provided in cathedrals, and soon Foxe’s book could be found in many churches and in Oxford and Cambridge colleges. In 1577 Francis Drake took a copy with him when he set out on the voyage that took him round the world.