From History Extra-Fierce fighting raged all day on 4 August 1549 in the fields and lanes outside the Devon village of Clyst St Mary. By evening, royal forces had driven the rebels from the streets, and taken the bridge over the river Clyst. But even in the moment of victory, the king’s commanders feared a counter-attack. The order was given for soldiers to kill any prisoner in their custody: perhaps 900 men were, in the words of a chronicler, “slain like beasts”.
This moment of shocking violence was an extreme but not anomalous occurrence in the course of England’s 16th-century Reformation. Recent scholarship on the changes taking place after Henry VIII’s break with the papacy tends to assert their relatively peaceful character, and points to continuities across the Reformation divide. Certainly, some important things didn’t change – most folk carried on worshipping in the same church, for example. It’s also true that England witnessed no slaughter on the scale of the German Peasants’ Rebellion of 1524–25 (when as many as 100,000 people were butchered), or the Wars of Religion breaking out in France after 1562 (in which as many as 4 million may have lost their lives).
More here-
http://www.historyextra.com/article/bbc-history-magazine/savage-reformation-henry-viii-catholic-protestant-england
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