The death of an alleged heretic,Richard Hunne (d.1514), explained

Abstract

On 4 December 1514, a suspect heretic named Richard Hunne died while being held in Lollards Tower, the bishop of London’s prison in Old St Paul’s. The discovery of Hunne’s body, hanged, provoked sharp dissension between Church and State while also triggering an anticlerical backlash among London’s citizenry in the years preceding the Reformation. This study will consider if Hunne’s death was murder, as John Foxe, the martyrologist, subsequently insisted, or suicide, as claimed by the church authorities and by Thomas More in his later published treatment of the affair. A definitive answer to this question has eluded historians for 500 years, but here a new explanation, judicial but bungled torture, is suggested as the key to this death in custody.