March 2007

Parish History Episode 71- The Fall of Durham

Back from Norham came Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, towards the end of 1536. Back he came to a city and district where the “Pilgrims of Grace” had done some damage, and were now paying for it with their lives, as the Duke of Norfolk carried out King Henry’s orders to hang some peasants, as an example to others, in every village which had sent supporters to the Pilgrimage.

Tunstall of course was no rebel. He faced neither hanging, nor yet drawing and quartering. But, not surprisingly, King Henry put no further trust in him. If he hadn’t been against the king in the recent troubles, he can hardly have been said to be for him. The King had no further use for him as a warden for his Northern Marches. That is the background to the reorganisation of government in the North, which will be described in next month’s article.

King Henry was preparing to strike at the very heart of the Diocese of Durham. He was to strip away most of the Bishop of Durham’s powers as a prince-bishop, a sub-king ruling the far North of England. But he was also to strike at the great Northern cathedral itself, and at the family of monks who had served that cathedral (and its Anglo-Danish predecessor) for over half a millennium. Even the very person of Saint Cuthbert himself, dead for nearly nine hundred years, whose Incorrupt Body was still believed to be housed within the Shrine at the heart of the cathedral, would be disturbed by the King’s men.

This was done in part as an act of revenge against an unruly people who had protested rowdily against the closure of many an ancient abbey. But it would be seen, by more adventurous thinkers, as a new beginning : a turning away from a religion of rule and ritual, of seeking Salvation through self-denial and through the keeping of Law, to one in which the sinner became justified only through his acceptance, in Faith, of Salvation through the Cross of Christ. But in the North of England such thinkers were as yet few.

King Henry himself would not be sure whether or not he would agree with such thinking. If he had at one time written a ferocious condemnation of Luther’s ideas (for which Pope Leo X had rewarded him with the title of “Defender of the Faith”), he had by now, thanks to his quarrel with later popes, who looked askance at his practice of discarding one wife when he wanted another, come round to sympathy with Luther’s anti-Papal teaching. But what the King was really interested in was the wealth - the lands, the enterprises (for instance, in the case of Durham, the coal pits), and the silver and gold to be found in the House of the Lord. If Henry had kept all the wealth of the monasteries for the Crown, then the English monarchs might have become as wealthy - and as powerful - as those of France. But Henry preferred to buy friendship, by giving most of the monastic booty away to his friends and courtiers. Thus, as the Fount of Wealth, as well as of Honour, he won a reputation for munificence. (He also left behind a selfconfident and independent aristocracy which would, a century later, tame his heirs and successors, and make England a very different type of monarchy to that which developed in France.)

By 1539, King Henry had resolved on the elimination of all monasteries throughout the land. He was aware of the hostility with which many of the monks in those Foundations which had not yet been dissolved regarded him, and he knew that some of them had given support to the Pilgrimage of Grace (and had paid the price for it). The spurious, and sometimes ridiculous, relics which had been confiscated from those monasteries already suppressed, had been displayed in exhibitions, not unlike those mounted by anti-clerical dictators in the Twentieth Century. This, it was hoped, would turn public opinion against the monastic life.

A new Parliament was summoned, and it duly voted for the dissolution of all the remaining Religious Houses - monasteries, friaries, nunneries, the lot. It is probable that many of the Honourable Members had hopes that some of the wealth of these monasteries would come their way.

Late in 1539, three Royal Commissioners - Leigh, Henley and Blythman - set out by ship for the North of England, accompanied by a train of assistants. They were charged with closing the remaining Religious Houses in the Far North. These included communities of Benedictine nuns at Newcastle and at Neasham; the Premonstratensian houses at Alnwick and Blanchland; the Augustinian canonesses at Holystone, in wild Coquet Dale; communities of grey, black, red and white friars in Newcastle, with an additional grey (Franciscan) friary in Hartlepool, a red (Carmelite) friary in Hulme, and a black (Dominican) friary in Bamburgh; the community of Knights of St. John (abroad, they had recently lost Rhodes to the Turks, but were establishing themselves anew on Malta) at Chibburn, by Druridge Bay; and the house of Trinitarians (their main activity was raising money to ransom Christian captives in North Africa) in Newcastle. But more important than any of these were the three surviving communities of Benedictine monks - those of Durham, Finchale and Tynemouth. These were the oldest now remaining of all the religious communities in the North, descended directly from “the Family of Saint Cuthbert”, who had, six centuries and more before, carried the Incorrupt Body of Cuthbert from site to site. (As mentioned in last month’s Signpost, the even older Houses at Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Wearmouth had been closed in an earlier wave of sequestrations in 1536.)

Leigh, Henley and Blythman landed at Tynemouth, and immediately took action to seize the monastery there. They purchased The people of Durham gathered in the market place of their city, on what was presumably a cold winter day, to watch the procession of men ride in, to seize the treasures of that great cathedral which reared up, high above the town, a building that they had known, and perhaps loved, all their lives. Leigh, Henley and Blythman rode ahead. Behind them came a troop of followers, mounted on lesser steeds - armed guards; horses and ponies, and loaded the more valuable possessions of the Priory onto those creatures. They then crossed the Tyne by the Shields Ferry, and rode on to Finchale (perhaps passing along Newbottle Street and Durham Road in Houghton-le-Spring, as they rode to their destination ), where they repeated the process.

On the last day of 1539, they rode on again to Durham, leaving an empty shell of a priory at Finchale, stripped of everything of value - a building soon to fall into a decay from which it has never recovered.

The people of Durham gathered in the market place of their city, on what was presumably a cold winter day, to watch the procession of men ride in, to seize the treasures of that great cathedral which reared up, high above the town, a building that they had known, and perhaps loved, all their lives. Leigh, Henley and Blythman rode ahead.

Behind them came a troop of followers, mounted on lesser steeds - armed guards; surveyors and scriveners, for defining ownership; valuers and jewellers, for identifying what was worth removing; and labourers, for breaking through locked doors, and for destroying immovable objects of superstition. At the rear, came a long string of pack ponies, which would carry away the loot, and the grooms who attended the ponies.

Prior Whitehead met them on the Palace Green, and read their warrant. He then admitted them into the cathedral. His “guests” then began the identification of all “objects of superstition”, and of everything that could be taken down, and which was worth removing and carrying to London. In the first days of 1540 they went methodically through the building, confiscating what they could take with them, and destroying much of what was immovable (though plenty was left to be dealt with by later Reformers).

They came at length to the Shrine of Saint Cuthbert, behind the Neville Screen. It was a wondrous thing, a marble tomb, piled high with gold and silver and precious jewels : tapestries of rare fabric hung above it, ornate books and bejewelled reliquaries stood upon it, along with such rarities as a griffin’s egg. There was a splinter from the Tree of Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden (who had dared pluck it?), a splinter from the tree under which Abraham had met the Three Angels, and of course a splinter from the True Cross, and even a garment once worn by the Virgin Mary.

It was all dismantled under the supervision of Leigh, Henley and Blythman. They then opened up the tomb itself, the vault beneath the floor wherein the body of Cuthbert was reputed to lie. Removing the marble cover, they found, not unexpectedly, an ornate wooden coffin. A workman got down, and began to prize the lid open. He then called up to Henley,
“There’s a body inside it!”
“Of course there is”, the Commissioner replied, “It’s a coffin, isn’t it?”
“I’ve broken one of his legs”, the workman said apologetically.
“Never mind!”, Henley called back, “Just throw the bones up!”
“It isn’t bones”, the workman replied, “It’s a whole body!”

Leigh, who was presumably younger and fitter than Henley, got down and joined the workman in the tomb. He then insisted on Henley and Blythman joining them. The older men were helped down into the tomb, and discovered that the body inside was entire and uncorrupted, and was of a man with a short beard upon his chin, clad in gorgeous, ancient vestments, and with other treasures and relics laid out around him.

This was not the sort of exhibit that the King would wish to put on display, to expose the superstition of the monks of Durham. The three Commissioners gave orders that the Incorrupt Body be carefully removed, and placed in a locked room, while further instructions from the King’s Court were awaited.

Leigh, Henley and Blythman, along with most of their retinue, rode out of Durham, to undertake further duties for their King. They left behind a couple of scriveners, to draw up the legal documents needed to transform the cathedral from a “regular” (monastic) to a “secular” institution.

There were sixty-six monks in Durham at this time. Twenty-five of them stayed on, to serve in the new “Protestant” cathedral. Hugh Whitehead, the last Prior of Durham Monastery, became the first Dean under the new arrangements, and twenty-four others became canons of the cathedral. Thirty-two elderly monks were awarded pensions, and passed into retirement. That seems to leave nine monks unaccounted for. Most of these nine probably became parish priests in villages around Durham. One or two, of conservative views, perhaps became private chaplains to neighbouring lords - the start of a tradition of recusant families in the North of England continuing a practice of “Catholic” private worship. (Some of the retired monks also perhaps became private chaplains.) It may also be the case that one or two others, of very different views, abandoned the Established Church, and went off to become “hot Gospellers”, or Anabaptist preachers.

Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall resided in Durham Castle while these changes were taking place. His namesake also remained behind, in a locked room. Protected by that Incorrupt Body, the priests of the cathedral continued their duties, and, for the time being, the spoilation of Durham Cathedral ceased, thanks to their ninehundred- year-old protector. King Henry never replied to his Commissioners’ letter, asking what was to be done with the Incorrupt Body of Saint Cuthbert. The later Cuthbert (the only one of more than seventy bishops of Lindisfarne, Chester-le-Street and Durham to bear the same name as the See’s patron) entered the locked room from time to time. As decay began to set in at last, after nine centuries’ delay, he decided on reburial. In 1542 the coffined body was taken back to the empty tomb in the feretory, and deposited there once more. Instead of the gorgeous structure which had once stood over it, there was now naught but a plain marble slab, inscribed CUTHBERTUS, as can still be seen to-day. It seems a more fitting memorial to a man whose life had been devoted to holy poverty.

Around the saint’s tomb, worship continued, though the rites were changing. Later, in 1593, an anonymous writer who had once, in the Thirties, been a choirboy in Durham Cathedral, wrote a book called “The Rites of Durham”. Lovingly he describes the ways of worship as they had been before the three Commissioners arrived, and retells many an old legend about the Cathedral’s past. It is from his book that we derive the story of the lost cow and the beginning of Durham Cathedral. Maybe he wrote much nonsense, but at least we can thank this choirboy for the preservation of so much of what had been lost when the King’s men arrived to reform the Church with their sledgehammers. And it would seem to be Cuthbert whom we have to thank for the fact that not all has been lost, and that they retired without achieving all their objectives.

[The remains of the coffin, now badly decayed, in which Cuthbert’s body had once rested, can still be seen in the Treasury of Durham Cathedral, along with various other treasures which survived the visit by these iconoclasts. Cuthbert’s body remains, in the Feretory of the Cathedral, under the marble slab inscribed CUTHBERTUS].

 

Dick Toy

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