Narborough hawk tag find linked to man who burned heretics

A Tudor-era hawk identity ring owned by a man who persecuted Protestants across East Anglia during Mary I’s reign has been found by a metal detectorist.

Sir Clement Higham was a lawyer and landowner from Barrow, Suffolk. During Roman Catholic Mary’s reign, Protestants were considered heretics and if they did not recant, they were executed, with many burned at the stake.

Historian Helen Geake said he appeared to have been particularly harsh towards people he saw as heretics in a way that “turns the stomach” today.

The tag – which is known as a vervel – was discovered at Narborough, near Swaffham, Norfolk, where one of his daughters lived after her marriage, she added.

Hunting with hawks was a hugely popular sport for better-off people, from the Middle Ages until the mid-17th Century.

The vervels were used to identify ownership of the birds if they were found dead or had flown off.

“It is engraved with the horse head, part of the Higham family’s coat of arms, and there is no evidence of any other C Higham in that family at the right time,” said Dr Geake, Norfolk’s finds liaison officer.

“He could have lost it when he was visiting his daughter – on current roads it’s about 40 miles (64km) away from his home near Bury St Edmunds.”

The accounts of his persecution of Protestants are listed by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs, published after Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558.

These include details of the executions of two women tied together in Ipswich, of a painter from Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, who was burned in Ely, and of a blacksmith from Wattisham, Suffolk.

Dr Geake said: “He does seem to have been a nasty piece of work, but he must have genuinely believed in it all.”

The find is the subject of a coroner’s inquest and Norwich Castle Museum hope to acquire it.