 Dr Barnes was the Prior of Austin Friars, Cambridge, and was sent to Austin Friars in London after his penance had been done at the cathedral and in the notorious Fleet Prison.His time at Austin Friars, though supposedly undertaken as a form of house arrest, was free and unmolested – he was able to meet whom he liked, and to buy and sell copies of the English New Testament, a work banned at the time as heretical.Thomas Cromwell was a leading supporter of the English Reformation, indeed one of its principal masterminds, and found his neighbour the Prior to be sympathetic to his cause.