"Item, that Baptisme is not necessarie in the Churche of God, neither the use of the sacrament of the body and bloude of Christ." There is record also of a freethinker named John Lewes burned at the same place in 1583 for "denying the Godhead of Christ, and holding other detestable heresies," in the manner of Hamond. [22] In the same year Elias Thacker and John Coping were hanged at St. Edmonsbury "for spreading certaine bookes, seditiously penned by one Robert Browne against the Booke of Common Prayer"; and "their bookes so many as could be found were burnt before them." [23] Further, one Peter Cole, an Ipswich tanner, was burned in 1587 (also at Norwich) for similar doctrine; and Francis Kett, a young clergyman, ex-fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was burned at the same place in 1589 for heresy of the Unitarian order. [24] Hamond and Cole seem, however, to have been in their own way religious men, [25] and Kett a devout mystic, with ideas of a Second Advent. [26] All founded on the Bible. Most surprising of all perhaps is the record of the trial of one John Hilton, clerk in holy orders, before the Upper House of Convocation on December 22, 1584, on the charge of having "said in a sermon at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields that the Old and New Testaments are but fables." (Lansdowne MSS. British Museum, No. 982, fol. 46, cited by Prof. Storojenko, Life of Robert Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. of Greene's Works, i, 39, note.) As Hilton confessed to the charge and made abjuration, it may be surmised that he had spoken under the influence of liquor. Even on that view, however, such an episode tells of a considerable currency of unbelieving criticism. Apart from constructive heresy, the perpetual religious dissensions of the time were sure to stimulate doubt; and there appeared quite a number of treatises directed wholly or partly against explicit unbelief, as: The Faith of the Church Militant, translated from the Latin of the Danish divine Hemming (1581), and addressed "to the confutation of the Jewes, Turks, Atheists, Papists, Hereticks, and all other adversaries of the truth whatsoever"; "The Touchstone of True Religion ... against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures, Libertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times" (1590); An Enemie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin of Avenar (1591); the preacher Henry Smith's God's Arrow against Atheists (1593, rep. 1611); an English translation of the second volume of La Primaudaye's L'Académie Française, containing a refutation of atheistic doctrine; and no fewer than three "Treatises of the Nature of God"--all anonymous, the third known to be by Bishop Thomas Morton--all appearing in the year 1599.