According to Knox, Grindal distinguished himself from most of the court preachers in 1553 by denouncing the worldliness of the courtiers and foretelling the evils to follow on the king's death.
Some of them imitated the Hebrew prophets in the performance of symbolic acts of denunciation, foretelling or warning, going barefoot, or in sackcloth or undress, and, in a few cases, for brief periods, altogether naked; even women in some cases distinguished themselves by extravagance of conduct.
It follows from what has been said that prognosis, or the art of foretelling the course and event of the disease, was a strong point with the Hippocratic physicians.
In Stuart times all ranks of society believed in her, and referring to her supposed foretelling of the Great Fire, Pepys relates that when Prince Rupert heard, while sailing up the Thames on the 10th of October 1666, of the outbreak of the fire "all he said was, ` now Shipton's prophecy was out.'" One of her prophecies was supposed to have menaced Yeovil, Somerset, with an earthquake and flood in 1879, and so convinced were the peasantry of the truth of her prognostications that hundreds moved from their cottages on the eve of the expected disaster, while spectators swarmed in from all quarters of the county to see the town's destruction.
In some of these cases, where the dream, &c., has been put on record before its "fulfilment" is known, chance is sufficient to explain the coincidence, as in the recorded cases of dreams foretelling the winner of the Derby or the death of a crowned head.