Stadholder Count van Hoogstraten lodges an official complaint that a basketmaker, Adriaen Jacobsz, had allowed a scandalous performance to take place at his house. It seems the basketmaker hired the artist Peter Rippenz to paint a work which stood outside his home. This painting depicted devils dressed in monks' caps fishing for money. The painting served as a backdrop to a rederijker performance in which the actors dressed in costumes identical to those in the painting performed an anti-clerical satire. A tax rebellion occurs in the city.
Contemporaries blame the spelen van zinne competition for encouraging the uprising.
The topic that makes it hard to avoid the religious controversies of that day. The censors of the University of Leuven place the published edition of the nineteen plays from the 1539 Ghent festival on the list of forbidden books. Fraet is beheaded for heresy. Weche plays were and ar forbeden, moche more strettly than any of the boks of Martyn Luter. These pseudonyms often coincided with the name of a local Chamber of Rhetoric.