June 2008

Parish History Episode 86 - Gilpin at Norton

It is possible that, when he preached his sermon at Greenwich, Bernard Gilpin was already contemplating leaving London, and the life of the Court, and the constant theological arguments which disturbed any attempt at leading a devout and godly life, and returning to his homeland in the North, to serve some community as a parish priest.

Towards the start of his sermon he had unleashed a devastating condemnation of the failures of the parochial clergy, but perhaps he was speaking not as a prospective reformer, laying down the ground rules from a palace in London, but rather as a young man who wished, as a parish priest, to serve both his Lord and the Lord’s people. He could see what needed doing, and he wished to go ahead and do it.

He had been known in the past as a Catholic champion. It has been suggested that what he was doing at Greenwich was signalling his “conversion”, his personal acceptance of the new prayer-book, and the Reformation of the Church of England. But he does not speak at all of doctrine in his sermon; though he condemns the many short-comings of the contemporary clergy, he shows no interest in the Creeds or Articles of the Church.

By the start of 1552, the Prayer-Book of 1549 had been in use for two and a half years. Everyone knew that there was another Book on the way, the debates in Parliament and Convocation were widely reported. But Gilpin did not take the opportunity to comment on it in his sermon. Perhaps now, after his disputations with Peter Martyr and John Hooper, he felt disgust at the enthusiasm with which so many churchmen threw themselves into controversy. The preacher’s duty, he now seemed to believe, was to promote virtue and to castigate vice, but not to engage in endless debate about issues on which it is clear that there can be no absolute certainty in this life.

So, shortly after preaching that sermon at Greenwich, he moved up North, to the large village of Norton, in the County of Durham, where, he hoped, he would be more at home in speech and in culture.

Of course, it did him no harm that his uncle, Cuthbert Tunstall, was Bishop of Durham, and patron of St. Mary’s church, Norton. During Lent, 1552, the people of Norton were pleased to find that they had a new vicar, and that both the bishop and the archdeacon were coming over, in time for Easter, to induct Gilpin into the parish.

Norton is to-day regarded as a suburb of Stockton-on-Tees, but the river-port of Stockton was of little importance at that time, and was seen rather as a dependency of Norton. Gilpin was now responsible for both the parish church of St. Mary’s, Norton, and for St. Thomas’, the chapel-of-ease in Stockton-on-Tees.

St. Mary’s was an ancient church, dating back at least to the time of King Edgar (in the Tenth Century), when it had been a collegiate church, served by a community of monks. Although nothing remains of the original wooden church, quite a lot survives of the stone building which replaced it in the time of King Canute, in the early Eleventh Century. It is said to be the only pre-Norman cruciform church in England. Although the married Benedictine monks who had once served it had been cleared out by the puritanical Normans, it had remained a collegiate church, served by a college of eight celibate prebends. Its endowments, however, had been seized by King Henry VIII’s commissioners, and now there was only a stipend for a single vicar, and that vicar had two churches - Norton and Stockton - to serve. The parish had formerly, ever since King Edgar’s time, been under royal patronage, its priests appointed directly by the King, or more probably the King’s secretary, but now that it had been robbed of its wealth, the Bishop of Durham was regarded as its patron, and that bishop, of course, was Bernard’s great-uncle, Cuthbert Tunstall. For that reason, we may assume that Bernard had no great difficulty in obtaining preferment.

For the first time in his life, Bernard Gilpin was serving as a parish priest. He no doubt used the services as laid down in the 1549 Prayer-Book; and he would be well aware that that book was being revised, and that a more radically Protestant book would soon replace it. He mentions, however, in his “Letter to the Earls” (the letter, setting out his “C.V.”, his “Curriculum Vitae”, outlining his career, that Earl Russell of Bedford and Earl Dudley of Leicester asked him, in 1559, to write, when they were advising Elizabeth, the new Queen, on appointments), that, when he was at Norton, he “read Mass but seldom and privately”. Did he mean that he read it to himself, completely privately? Or was it that he occasionally conducted private Masses for a few aged parishioners who were stuck in the old ways?

Other than that, we know very little about Gilpin’s time at Norton. However, we know a lot about his departure from that parish. In the autumn of 1552, after he had only been in office there for a few months, his great-uncle, Cuthbert Tunstall, came to visit him, on his way back from London to Durham. Tunstall was a member both of Convocation and (because the Bishop of Durham sat in the House of Lords) of Parliament, and had spoken often on Cranmer’s proposed new Prayer-Book. On the whole, Tunstall was satisfied with the 1549 Book, and was not concerned with possible ambiguities being read into the Service of Holy Communion by users of the Rite. He did not, apparently, personally believe in a Real Presence within the Eucharist, but he did not feel that the pointblank denial of that doctrine, as spelled out, for instance, in Cranmer’s “Black Rubric” (see last month’s article), was either necessary or desirable.

It seems that John Dudley, the new Lord Protector, regarded Tunstall as a vexation, and wanted him locked up in the Tower, along with Bishops Gardiner and Bonner. (Also, Dudley was aware that his new title, of Duke of Northumberland, was queried by many in the North, particularly by sympathisers with the Percy family, the former holders of the title, who had been stripped of their honours after becoming involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace; and when he had suggested that if the Bishop of Durham recognised his right to the title, the rest of the North would also accept him, Tunstall had shown little inclination to assist, even in such a simple thing as that). But nevertheless, when, at the end of a stormy session in Parliament, Tunstall departed for the North, Dudley let him go, hoping he would not return.

On the last night of his journey, before riding over to his residence in Auckland Castle, Bishop Tunstall arrived at Norton Vicarage, to spend the night with his great- nephew. That evening he made a proposition to Gilpin. “You’ve spent too much time in Oxford and in King Henry’s London”, he told his nephew; “To get an education, to learn, to understand what is happening in the Church in this generation, you must go abroad”. Gilpin listened, surprised at the suggestion. “Go abroad”, his uncle repeated, “Spend a year or two in Germany, Holland, Flanders, France. Put yourself into communication with the ablest men of either side, and read and study for yourself.” Additionally, Tunstall asked Bernard to take the manuscript of a book which he had written to Paris, and to arrange for it to be printed there.

(It was good advice which Tunstall gave, and it could have been demonstrated from his own life. The young Tunstall had, after earning degrees at both Oxford and Cambridge, gone abroad in 1501, to undertake studies at the University of Padua, and had then, in 1505, moved briefly to Rome, where he felt estranged by the sight of Pope Julius II making war on all his neighbours, and had then returned to London, where he spent many years discussing “the Need for Reform” with scholars such as Erasmus and Thomas More, before becoming Bishop of London. But, of course, Gilpin did not have the money to do that).

Gilpin accepted this commission, but then hinted that he should be paid his expenses for undertaking this service for his great-uncle. Tunstall demurred, and pointed out that Bernard would still be receiving a stipend as parish priest of Norton. The nephew however pointed out how often in the past he had denounced absentee parsons as the cause of most of England’s woes, recently and most publicly in his Greenwich sermon, and that he could hardly in conscience continue to draw pay for his pastoral duties in Norton and Stockton, if he were abroad in Paris, arranging for the publication of a book.

Tunstall, misunderstanding his nephew, offered to augment Gilpin’s stipend, but Gilpin refused the stipend, though willing to accept the augmentation. He suggested that he could “get by” abroad, by accepting the odd fee for occasional church services taken, at any rate in countries where Anglican orders were seen to be valid (were there any?), or by translating into English for merchants and others. Bishop Tunstall gave up, though he obviously felt unhappy with his nephew’s scruples. “Here are your friends”, he told Bernard, “endeavouring to provide for you, and you are taking every measure to frustrate them. Be warned : you will bring yourself presently to but a morsel of bread".

The final thing we know about Gilpin’s departure from Norton is that he nominated, or at least recommended, his successor. He suggested that his neighbour, Robert Dalton, the Vicar of Billingham, would be willing to take over Norton and Stockton in addition to his own responsibilities in Billingham. Dalton thus would receive two stipends (and would presumably be assisted by one or more curates), and would take pastoral responsibility not only for a bustling, expanding river-port, but also for two fine ancient churches in two grand old villages. St. Cuthbert’s, Billingham, is even older than St. Mary’s, Norton. Part of it seems to date back to the start of the Tenth Century, before King Edgar’s time, and part of the nave may even be pre-Viking in age. It was a fine pair of parishes, and, as Gilpin had recommended him, one presumes Dalton was a good pastor, and was keen to undertake these duties.

One also feels that Gilpin may, during his brief tenure at Norton, have fallen in love with the Durham countryside. He, as Dalton also, had found himself far from the intrigues and politics of London and the South, serving simple, perhaps pious, people, in stone churches built by the Anglo-Saxons - churches which were already old when the Normans came.

But also, unless he was very simple, he must have been aware of the political problems threatening the position of his great-uncle. Tunstall had become thoroughly unwelcome in London, and feared that if he returned South he would be arrested. There were rumours that, at the beginning of the year. he had been involved in a plot to overthrow Dudley, and to bring Seymour, the former Lord Protector, back into office. That, of course, was one reason why Dudley decided to have Seymour beheaded (though of course young King Edward actually signed the death warrant).

This accusation against Tunstall seems somewhat out of character, but it still could be true. It is possible that he had given some support to the “Commonwealth” men, churchmen such as Latimer (who had once been a friend of Tunstall, when they had both studied at the University of Padua - two English boys in an Italian college) and also Ridley (who had replaced Bonner as Bishop of London). Both Latimer and Ridley had stood up for the rights of yeomen farmers, and they had once supported Seymour in his attempts to halt the spread of enclosures, and to turn the great sheep-runs back into ploughland. Dudley, the new Lord Protector, was one of the worst “enclosers”, and while he might have tolerated verbal criticism from saintly ex-bishops like Latimer, he would see Ridley as a dangerous man, and Tunstall, the Prince-Bishop, as potentially still more dangerous.

There was also the problem of Eucharistic doctrine. Tunstall had written his own book on the Eucharist, and though in some ways it backed up Cranmer’s new “Zwinglian” theology, as laid down in the new Prayer-Book, which became, on All Saints’ Day, 1552, the sole lawful rite throughout the Kingdom, the Bishop of Durham did criticise some of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s innovations. Tunstall realised he was treading on dangerous ground, and that was one reason he deemed it safer to publish abroad, and why he wanted his nephew Bernard Gilpin to oversee the passage of his book through the press.

While Bernard Gilpin was preparing to depart for the Continent, Cuthbert Tunstall remained in the North, but he was not safe there.. On the Fourteenth of October, a party of armed men, bearing Dudley’s warrant, arrived at Auckland Castle, demanded admittance, and arrested the Bishop, and carried him off to London. He was taken to the Tower of London, and there he was accommodated, while plans were laid to bring him to trial.

The trial never took place, however, as King Edward died in July, 1553, and, after a brief attempt, to be described in next month’s “Signpost”, to install John Dudley’s son and daughter-in-law as King and Queen of England, the Crown was seized by supporters of the claim of King Edward’s half-sister Mary. Under Mary’s rule, Bishop Tunstall and many others of John Dudley’s guests in the Tower of London were released, and Bishop Tunstall was able to return home again, and immerse himself in the work of his diocese.

Gilpin seems to have been still at Norton when his great-uncle had been arrested in Auckland Castle. But he rode over to Billingham, where he and Dalton discussed what to do. It was agreed that Gilpin would go abroad, to see to the publication of the Bishop’s manuscript, while Dalton would remain at home, and take pastoral responsibility for both parishes. Such was the state of parochial anarchy in the last winter of King Edward’s reign., and the rule of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.

Dick Toy

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