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On the night of November 11, 1536, three weeks after the fall of Pontefract Castle and most of a fortnight after the truce at Doncaster, men were seen mustering in woods near Snaith. It was Sir Brian Hastings gathering his neighbours against a rumoured rustling of his cattle. In the subsequent atmosphere of misunderstanding and recrimination, Somerset Herald was sent to Temple Hirst to challenge Thomas Darcy about the Pilgrims' breach of the truce. For Darcy, this was an opportunity to offer his own account of his actions. Repeatedly he declared his loyalty to King Henry VIII. He had tried to take Robert Aske but failed, he had defended Pontefract for as long as possible without hope of relief. Even though he had ultimately been forced to surrender the castle, Darcy and his fellows had done the king ‘as good a service as though we had been in his privy chamber’.

The Pilgrimage of Grace that occurred during the reign of Henry VIII was thought to be a northern phenomenon and therefore one which contains few lessons for the history of England as a whole. The North, it is maintained, was backward, conservative, lightly governed (a problem solved by the Council of the North), and prone to violence. Its nobility retained a military demeanour at a time when the nobility of southern England had softened into a court or service nobility. Hence, until it was tamed the North was an ideal breeding ground for opposition to the divorce, the royal supremacy, and the dissolution of the monasteries. The clearest evidence that the North was regarded as a problematic area comes from the special arrangements made for its government by councils under a royal lieutenant. In describing the religious inclinations of the North at the time of the Pilgrimage, too great a weight is probably placed on the preferences of Thomas Darcy and Robert Aske, the most prominent figures of the rebellion.

The rising in the East Riding was nothing more than a northwards extension of the Lincolnshire rebellion. This opinion was held by no less than Robert Aske himself. News of events in Lincolnshire was carried into the East Riding by people travelling northwards through Lincolnshire, taking the ferry over the Humber from Barton-upon-Humber to Hessle, and so passing to Hull. News may also have spread coastwise through Boston and Grimsby to Hull. The beacons fired on the Lincolnshire Wolds were readily visible from the north bank. On October 4 Thomas Darcy had a letter from a friend in Lincolnshire alerting him to the rising at Louth; that same evening Sir Ralph Ellerker the younger sent word that the rebels were burning beacons to increase their numbers. News of the Lincolnshire rising spread in an irresistible fashion and spawned a general panic amongst the East Riding gentry.

The reaction of the Lincolnshire gentry, faced with a disturbance which they could not control, was to send word of their difficulties to Henry VIII and await rescue. So, first John Hennage rode southwards, then Sir Edward Maddison. Lord Burgh, who evaded the rebels at Caistor, fled westwards into Nottinghamshire and wrote to the king on Tuesday night from Saundby giving an outline of the day's events. He also sent word to Thomas Darcy and the earl of Shrewsbury in Yorkshire, finding Shrewsbury at his house in Sheffield Park. Shrewsbury immediately sent news of the outrage to the king. Other reports, including one from John, Lord Hussey at Sleaford, were received in the following days. The news was also spread by word of mouth. Yet there were also those who remained in blissful ignorance of the great events taking shape in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.