On 19 October 1651, the emigré Huguenot inhabitants of Sandtoft, the new settlement established on the lands drained by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden on the Isle of Axholme, were approaching their church for the Sunday service. In the churchyard their passage was barred by a number of yeomen from the neighbouring villages, headed by their legal advisors, Daniel Noddel, an Epworth attorney, and John Lilburne, who acted as spokesman for the group. ‘This is our common’, Lilburne is reported to have said, ‘you shall come here noe more unles you bee stronger than wee.’ The locals entered the church, the doors of which were guarded by armed men, and Lilburne prayed and preached. The building was then sacked; Lilburne, who had appropriated the house of the French minister, subsequently used the derelict church as a stable and cowhouse. For the unhappy settlers, the incident was the culmination of a miserable year of violence and intimidation. In October 1650 the commoners had smashed their fences, devastated their crops, and seized their cattle; in the following May an all-out assault on Sandtoft had resulted in the destruction of eighty-two houses, a mill, barns, implements and crops. For Lilburne, the incident was the most theatrical moment in more than a year's involvement in the affairs of the Isle, where, from the autumn of 1650, he acted as legal expert, agent and publicist for the commoners in their long-standing feud with the fen-drainers and their French and Dutch tenants.