While the Norwich ministers' reluctance to comply with contested rites and ceremonies during the 1580s had vexed Edmund Freke, both the bishop and his successors were soon to be alerted to more radical challenges to episcopal authority. At their most extreme, such dissent amounted to instances of heresy. Indeed, between 1579 and 1589, Norwich became the backdrop for proceedings against four individuals who held a variety of heterodox beliefs, with each case ending in a burning. The first concerned Matthew Hamont, a ploughwright of possible Dutch descent from Hethersett. Examined before Bishop Freke for espousing Arian ideas, which denied the divinity of Christ and rejected the New Testament as a fable, he had courted attention for speaking slanderous words against the queen. Refusing to recant, he was committed in April 1579 to the mayor, Sir Robert Wood. Having been honoured with a knighthood during the royal progress of the previous year, Wood was compelled by Hamont's outburst against Elizabeth to sentence him to lose his ears before committing him to be dispatched in the castle ditch on 20 May. Proceedings against Hamont sit uneasily with Muriel McClendon's argument for the forbearance of Tudor Norwich's magistrates.

An eye-witness account of the burning was later provided in 1592 by the nonconformist minister William Burton, who was then anxious to demonstrate his own loyalty to the established church by denouncing heretics in print. Burton furnished details of two further heresy trials in the city.