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May 2004

Parish History Episode 37

A Fat Parish

So, Houghton-le-Spring was, according to Bishop Bury, a fat parish - not that it is one to-day, as the churchwardens and people well realise! It is a struggle to find the money to pay the parish share to the Diocese (which is responsible for training, paying and housing the clergy); and to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of a beautiful and ancient building, the pride of the local community; and to give support to many other organisations which work for the well-being of the World. But in Bury’s time it was said to be a fat parish.

Who was Bishop Bury? When did he make this remark? And what did he mean by it?

Richard d’Aungerville was a Suffolk nobleman, of Norman lineage. The family seat was at Bury St. Edmunds, and he liked to refer to himself as Richard of Bury, perhaps to emphasise his Englishness; and after being enthroned at Durham, he became known as Bishop Bury.

Long before that, he had become a monk and a priest, and had studied at Oxford, and had become known for his learning. He was then summoned to London by Queen Isabelle, the wife of Edward II, and she appointed him to be private tutor to her little son, the future Edward III. Later he was sent to France, where he became Chancellor of the Duchy of Guienne, an English fief. There he gave sanctuary to Queen Isabelle and his former pupil, Prince Edward, when they had to flee from England during disturbances between King Edward II and the barons.

After the murder of Edward II, Richard of Bury returned to England, and held several offices in church and state before being appointed to Durham in 1333, on the death of Bishop Beaumont. His Enthronement in Durham Cathedral (a year later, in 1334) was the most splendid affair that Durham had ever seen. Two kings were present among the many guests: his old pupil, Edward III of England; and, more surprisingly, an old enemy - the young King of Scotland, David II, a son of Robert Bruce.

Ambassadors of the two Crowns had no doubt made arrangements beforehand for both monarchs to attend Richard’s Enthronement, with a view to making peace between the two kingdoms. The two kings duly embraced, and peace came at last, to the great relief of the people of Northern England. The Black Douglas rode on his raids no more (well, not against England, at any rate; he went overseas, and died, like a good Christian, fighting against the Moors in Spain).

The Peace did not last, of course. By the following year, the English and Scots had started fighting again.

Though Bury may have been a prince-bishop, he was no warrior - he was a monk and a scholar. He was in fact the first of many bishops of Durham who have been renowned for their scholarship. He read widely, and also wrote books. He founded a new college at Oxford, called Durham College, and used the money he had received, for his services to the Crown in Guienne and London, to endow scholarships for lads from the Palatinate, and from other counties of the North of England. (The college no longer exists. It was amalgamated with other institutions at the time of the Tudor Reformation.)

He may have been no warrior, but he ran the Prince-Bishopric efficiently, and he paid those who had a talent for soldiering to undertake the work of fighting the Scots. Soon the campaigns shifted to Scottish soil, and the Northumbrian lands began to recover from the long years of war. Instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the Scots, people could at last afford to quarrel amongst themselves.

One perennial source of disputes within any rural community were the tithes levied on farm produce. The tithe was a one-tenth part of the harvest, which the parson (the incumbent, the priest, the rector) could claim for himself, basing his claim on Biblical texts: on texts in the Hebrew Scriptures (where the tithe was, at least in part, returned to the donor with a blessing - LEV 27:30; NUM 18:26; DEUT 12:6-18); and on references in the New Testament, by which time tithes seem to have been spent entirely upon the Temple and upon the maintenance of the cult (and the words of Jesus, in LUKE 11:42, may imply hostility to the practice. The system of tithing seems to have come to England in the Tenth Century, when the Church and country were being reconstructed after the ravages of the Danish “Great Army” (see Episode 15 of this history, in the “Signpost” of July, 2002, if you still possess it).

When Bury took over the administration of his diocese in 1334, he discovered that there was a crisis in the affairs of Houghton-le-Spring, the Rector - Manserus Marmeyon by name - being at odds with the people over the payment of tithes, and also over more serious matters. It was alleged by Marmeyon’s enemies that he had obtained the rectorship of the parish by deceit.

It appears that when the former rector, Theobald de la Valle, died, Pope John XXII, who was already in dispute with Kaiser Ludwig IV, and with the whole Franciscan movement (he seemed to imagine that the life of poverty professed by the friars was some sort of rebuke to the Papal Court at Avignon), tried to appoint Cardinal Anibaldas (at that time the Papal Nuncio in England) to be Rector of Houghton. Anibaldis had enriched himself by accepting several rich Livings in the South of England, but was reluctant to move North. He seemed to believe that it was dangerous territory - and, considering what had happened to the two cardinals who had ridden to Durham in the company of Bishop Beaumont, who can blame him?

Anibaldis, therefore, declined the appointment, but he recommended Pope John to give (or rather sell) the Parish of Houghton-le-Spring to Manserus Marmeyon. This man had been a chaplain to Bishop Beaumont, but at this time he was, among other responsibilities, a Prebendary of Durham Cathedral and the Rector of the collegiate church at Lanchester. Marmeyon was happy to take on the additional responsibility of Houghton, so long as he was able to receive the tithes from the parish. Theobald may have been somewhat lax in claiming his tithe, but Marmeyon seems to have begun his incumbency at Houghton by giving his stewards instructions to be more vigilant in ensuring that the peasants paid over to him everything which he could legally claim from them. This naturally did not endear him to his new parishioners.

Bishop Bury became embroiled first in the disputes about the tithes in Houghton, and then, presumably in the hope of finding some means of getting rid of Marmeyon, he instigated an investigation into whether Marmeyon was ever legally Rector of Houghton. It was alleged that Marmeyon had obtained the post by deception, or even by theft, it being suggested that he had robbed Cardinal Anibaldis of the Papal letters authorising the bearer to take control of this parish. When Marmeyon said that he could not find his letter of appointment, suspicions grew deeper. Bury was quoted as stating wearily that Houghton was a fat parish, and that it often attracted men to it who were more interested in its revenues than in serving a cure of souls.

The Bishop may or may not have been correct in making this remark about the then Rector of Houghton, but it is probably significant that in 1335, one year later, Marmeyon was given indefinite leave of absence, because of his ill health. Curates would have served the parish for the next few years, and no replacement was made, as far as we know, until 1347, when William Dalton became rector. During the intervening twelve years, it is probable that the bishop drew all or most of the tithe revenue from the parish, and paid the curates out of this income.

The source of all this wealth, enough to cause jealousy and quarrels between churchmen, would not be the tithes levied upon the subsistence agriculture which had hitherto been practised at Houghton. It would come from the tithes taken from an export crop, which was now becoming important in many parts of England. This was not coal, the substance which would later employ most of the men of the parish. Though there was then some coal being won from drifts and shallow bell-pits around Penshaw and the Raintons, the organised coal trade was then in its infancy.

The product that had suddenly become important, throughout the North-East, was wool. The hillsides of Northumberland and Durham, and even more those of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, were becoming covered in vast flocks of sheep. The wool from these flocks was being exported to Flanders, where a huge clothing industry had grown up, supplying fine-quality cloth to most of Europe. The Rector’s, or the Bishop’s, stewards attended the shearing, and saw to it that their masters received a tithe of the crop.

Most of us to-day would probably feel that it was irrelevant whether the wealth from the shearing was used for the benefit of the Rector, the Bishop, or the Pope. We would probably say that the peasants who shepherded and sheared the sheep should have been the ones to draw the benefit of the harvest. But these peasants seem to have wanted the Church “to be there”, and they seem to have wanted its sacraments, its services, and its blessing: and it all took money.

It is also surprising to note how important the appointments to parishes in the North of England were at this time; even the popes were becoming involved. When the popes had come to reside on this side of the Alps, they had begun to get a lot more interested in the affairs of France, and in appointments of clergy at all levels, even down to parish priests; and as the English Crown claimed overlordship over so many lands in France, so the English Church was also becoming more dependent on the Papacy.