Simon Fish

Simon Fish was an English pamphleteer and religious controversialist who died in 1531. Sources consistently connect him with Oxford and Gray's Inn, and he is best known for A Supplication for the Beggars, a fierce attack on the wealth and influence of the clergy.

Written in the late 1520s and circulated from Antwerp, the pamphlet argued that church corruption was hurting ordinary people. It was controversial enough to be condemned as heretical, but it also became one of the best-known polemical texts linked to the early English Reformation.

Fish's life is only partly documented, which gives him a slightly shadowy place in history. Even so, his reputation endures because his writing captured the anger, urgency, and political danger of reform-era debate in Tudor England.