June 2007

Parish History Episode 74- The Cromwellian Parish

Sir Thomas More had, as we noted in the article headed “The King’s Divorce”, in the January issue of “Signpost”, resigned his office as Lord Chancellor in 1532 because he could not accept Henry’s repudiation of Queen Catherine, and disinheritance of the Princess Mary, and the King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. In 1535 More was to be executed for refusing to sign the Act of Succession. Meanwhile he had been replaced in office by Thomas Cromwell who was to govern England, on behalf of the King, for eight years (1532-1540). It was during these years that the monasteries were dissolved, to the enrichment of the King, and even more of the King’s friends - including Thomas Cromwell himself, who secured ownership of much of the prime agricultural land belonging to three great Huntingdonshire abbeys : Ramsey, St. Neot’s and St. Ive’s.

There were plenty who were disgusted by the rapacity with which the King and his friends fell upon the monastic lands. We have seen how the peasants of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, together with the men of Hexham and the Lumley family at Chester-le-Street, rose up in protest against these changes; and how many of them paid with their lives for their temerity in trying to remonstrate with King Henry.

Of course, those country gentry and great aristocrats who hoped to gain by the dissolution of the monasteries, loyally approved of the King’s actions. And so did many artisans, merchants, scholars, lawyers, even priests, living in the towns, and having no hope of joining in the despoliation of the monasteries. Influenced by Erasmus and other humanists, they saw the monks and friars as mendicant parasites who had no place in the new Christendom of the New Learning.

Other than the King, two men presided over these changes : the lawyer Thomas Cromwell and the priest Thomas Cranmer, who was Archbishop of Canterbury. As yet, neither was fully committed to the ideals of the Reformation. Cranmer’s first reforms will be alluded to next month. Cromwell inclined to the clamour for “Reform” that seemed to be coming from most educated men, but he was as yet much more interested in administrative efficiency than in purity of doctrine.

In his view the instruments with which efficiency could be achieved were the parishes of England. Parish churches had of course existed since the beginnings of Christianity in Roman Britain, but early patterns of parochial life had been twice wiped out, in the chaos first of the English invasions in the Fifth Century, and then as a result of the Norse invasions in the Ninth Century. Then, in the Anglo-Danish period, in the century or so before the Norman Conquest, the germs of the present system of dividing the Kingdom into ecclesiastical parishes, deaneries and dioceses developed.

From the start, lay patrons, as well as bishops, had been involved in the control of the parishes. In the earlier mediaeval period, most parish churches were crude and cold buildings of stone, with relatively little decoration, and the wealth of local patrons sufficed to keep them in good enough repair to serve their purpose : and that purpose tended to be, in the eyes of the families which held the patronal rights over a parish, to serve as a mausoleum for the deceased members of the patronal family : hence the effigies of two knights, believed to be Sir John le Spring and Sir Roland Bellasis, in the South Transept of our church.

But then, in the later Middle Ages, churchwardens began to appear, particularly in town parishes and in large villages such as Houghton-le-Spring. These tended to be either self-appointed men of wealth, attempting to beautify and to improve the church of the parish in which they resided (for instance, in the case of Houghton parish church, assisting Rector Burstall in raising the funds to pay for the installation of the great “Decorated” windows), or men appointed by the parish priest to assist him in running the affairs of the church.

Now, however, Thomas Cromwell resolved to make use of churchwardens in every parish of the Kingdom, in order to assist him in carrying out the King’s policies throughout the land. Acts of Parliament now required every parish to be governed by two churchwardens, and laid down rules governing their election by the men of property within the parish. The churchwardens were required to carry out many civil duties not directly linked to church worship, such as maintaining the roads, repairing bridges, and relieving the poor. The money to pay for these schemes, and also for the upkeep of the parish church, was to be raised by a “church rate”, a sum of money levied on every household in the parish.

Thus, inventories needed to be maintained, to show how many buildings there were in a parish, what their value was, who occupied them, how much money was required for various schemes for improving the condition of the people, how it was to be raised from the parishioners, and how it was to be disbursed.

In order to carry out these duties effectively, churchwardens were required to keep a register of all the inhabitants of the parish: and, as the number of households and parishioners continually fluctuated, as people were married, children were born, and old people died, so parish registers needed to be maintained, listing all weddings, baptisms and funerals within the parish.

At first, it would seem, the churchwardens, sometimes men unwillingly co·opted into undertaking these tasks, tended to regard any old scrap of paper as being good enough for the purposes of maintaining a parish register, and no really early registers survive, either in our parish or elsewhere in this diocese. The oldest surviving register for Houghton parish church dates from the 1580’s, in the time of Rector Barnes, Gilpin’s immediate successor. These registers of weddings, baptisms and funerals have continued in use to the present day, though now supplemented by the records kept by civil Registrars, and they have proved invaluable to bureaucrats, statisticians, and of course historians.

However, Thomas Cromwell originally envisaged the parishes being charged not only with the keeping of “vital statistics” (the registration of births, marriages and deaths) but also with maintaining a land registry, containing complete information on who owned or rented every acre of land (other, of course, than “common land”, in which all parishioners shared), and on what terms they held it. If such plans had been carried out, it would probably have saved endless litigation in the centuries to come.

Most people were, however, hostile to the idea of trying to register everyone and everything. Like King David’s subjects in ancient Israel (II SAM 24), they saw such bureaucracy as blasphemy against God, and they also feared the prospect of higher and more effective taxation. As the King became aware of their grumbling, he began to move against Cromwell, and he also abandoned the plans for a land registry.

The main cause of Thomas Cromwell’s downfall, however, was a disastrous marriage. Queen Jane (Seymour) had died almost immediately after the birth of Prince Edward, the King’s son and heir. But the boy was a sickly child, and Henry thought it safer to secure the House of Tudor by marrying a fourth wife, who would (hopefully) present him with a healthy son. Thomas Cromwell advised his master to make the religious settlement he had imposed upon England the more secure by marrying the daughter of a foreign prince who had created in his own dominions a similar semi-reformed Church, outside the Roman obedience, to that of England. He pointed out that Duke Johann III of Cleves was in a similar ecclesiastical position to the King of England, and moreover had a daughter, Anne, of marriageable age.

The political and religious situation in the Rhineland was at this time complicated. The city of Cologne was a Free City, governing itself, though also the see-city of one of Germany’s three great archbishops. The Archbishops of Cologne, prince-bishops like those of Durham, ruled an area, on both banks of the Rhine, with its capital at Bonn, surrounding the Free City itself, though their cathedral was of course within the City. The lands of the Prince-Archbishopric were themselves surrounded by four Rhineland duchies, those of Cleves, Jülich, Mark and Berg, and, through fortunate marriages, Duke Johann III of Cleves had come to be lord of all four Duchies.

Much, though not all, of Germany was by this time Protestant. Some bishops had abandoned the Roman obedience, and had followed Luther, but so far no archbishops had defected. But Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne, had, on his own authority, “reformed” the liturgy, and had begun to authorise the use of the German Mass, and Archbishop Cranmer of Canterbury was starting to experiment with some of the Colognese reforms. It seemed as if a whole Province, that of Cologne, was about to go over to the cause of the Reformers; but the Papal nuncio persuaded von Wied to resign, and the crisis on the Rhine grew, for Rome, less severe.

But before Hermann von Wied resigned, King Henry had, on Thomas Cromwell’s advice, proposed marriage to Duke Johann’s daughter, Anne, and the girl had hastily begun to equip herself with some knowledge of the English language, in order to converse with her future subjects. She arrived in London, and married the King. The two became instantly incompatible.

It turned out that she knew not only German and English, but also Latin, Greek and Hebrew : and the last two languages were beyond Henry’s learning. His new Queen, instead of simply sitting loyally beside her husband, insisted on talking to him about theology, politics, history and science, and Henry’s vanity was wounded by the realisation that his wife was cleverer than he was. He began to institute divorce proceedings on various technical grounds.

His anger blazed out against Thomas Cromwell, whom he blamed for recommending the marriage. Accusations of both treason and heresy were trumped up against the man, and Cromwell, like More before him, was beheaded. Three days after Cromwell’s execution, King Henry demonstrated to his subjects the advantages of following the Anglican “middle way” by simultaneously burning three Lollard “hotgospellers” and three Papal loyalists in the same execution.

Anne of Cleves, however, came out of the situation rather better. As part of her divorce settlement she was granted a pension for life, a house and estate in Sussex, and a life-long supply of books.

(Her father, Johann III, was succeeded by his son, but a generation after that the House of Cleves became extinct, and the Princes of Prussia inherited the Rhineland Duchies. This would make Prussia a power in Western as well as in Eastern Germany. But it also influenced the hitherto orthodox Lutheran Church of Prussia towards a more humanist and Calvinist form of Protestantism: a form perhaps more akin to the Church of Johann III’s Cleves or of late Tudor England).

The division of England into thousands of parishes, of petty jurisdictions, each ruled jointly by two churchwardens, has endured unto the present day - though the present pair of churchwardens are not responsible for the state of roads and bridges in Houghton.

Iit might be asked what, if any, is the relationship between Thomas Cromwell, at the start of the English Reformation, and Oliver Cromwell, at its climax, a hundred years later.

Well, they were by law related, though not by blood.

Thomas Cromwell had several sons, but he also adopted a lad called Richard Williams, orphaned after the death of his father, one of Thomas Cromwell’s colleagues in the administration. This lad would, out of gratitude to his benefactor, adopt the surname of Cromwell.

When Thomas Cromwell was executed, nominally for treason (and heresy), it might have been expected that the Crown, as was then the custom, would expropriate all his property. But King Henry possibly had an uneasy conscience over the execution of his chief minister (after all, introducing the King to a woman more clever even than himself may be unwise, but it is not normally seen as a crime punishable by death), and he therefore permitted the sons of Thomas Cromwell, including young Richard, né Williams, to retain their share of their father’s lands. This Richard retained ownership of much good, fertile land, around the former Benedictine abbey of St. Ives.

These lands were inherited by Richard’s son, and then by his grandson, and then by his great-grandson Oliver. And that Oliver, a country squire, was to become a Member of Parliament, and then a rebel general; and then, after cutting off the head of his king, he would make himself Lord Protector of England.]

Dick Toy

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