This paper is a study of a fragment of folklore that became assimilated into serious academic discussion; it investigates the story that John Lord Hussey, who was executed in Lincoln following the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536, was dragged to his execution through a window. If it were true, this would be an early example of the iconography of ‘defenestration’ which, by the seventeenth century, connoted the martyrdom of adherents of the Old Religion by Protestant extremists. On examination, however, the persistent story of Lord Hussey's defenestration would seem to be a post hoc fabrication. It is argued here that the story may have been invented in the early eighteenth century, at a period when there was, once again, strife between High and Low Church, and when accounts of previous religious controversies were being recruited by antiquarians as weapons in their contemporary disputes. It is further suggested that the power of the image was still strong in the nineteenth century and it might have played a role in the preservation of a window in Lincoln Castle, even though it had no documented association with Hussey and is too small to climb through.