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November 2006
Parish History Episode 67 - One of the Old School
Rector Robert Kent enjoyed a long tenure of office at Houghton-le-Spring - from 1500 to 1528. As the first rector of Houghton to possess a university degree - that of a Professor of Scared Theology - he would have been well aware of the crises that were at that time overtaking the Church: the Crisis of Authority that arose out of the criticisms advanced by Erasmus and others, and the new discoveries they made in textual criticism; and the Crisis of Doctrine that arose out of Luther’s rejection of the practice of selling Indulgences, and his declaration that “Justification” (that is, the granting of Salvation, through the Redemption of the sinner by means of the Atoning Sacrifice of Christ) was by Faith alone, and not by “Works” (meaning the payment of money, but also the performance of penances, pilgrimages, meritorious acts, and the like).
As Rector Kent was not a “pluralist” - he did not, to my knowledge, hold any offices in the Church other than that of Rector of Houghton - and seems to have normally resided in Houghton Rectory, he would have had ample opportunity to explain to his people in sermons the crisis that was facing the Western Church.
As his sermons have not survived, we have no idea whether or not he did keep his flock abreast of the issues that were then convulsing much of Christendom. Perhaps he thought that it would be all above the heads of the peasants and pitmen of his parish, and avoided all mention of such topics. After all, for England the crisis did not come to a head until the divorce of King Henry VIII, and the Breach with Rome. People were not, as yet, obliged to take sides.
His patron, Bishop Richard Fox, who had originally invited Kent and other men of learning to come North, and to take over parishes within the Diocese of Durham, in the hope of bringing something of the new enlightenment, the Revival of Learning, into the North of England, resigned as Bishop of Durham in 1501, the year after Kent’s induction into our parish. Fox moved across the Border to Edinburgh to represent King Henry in the arrangements for the marriage of Henry’s daughter, the Princess Margaret, with King James IV of Scotland. William Senhouse replaced him as Bishop of Durham, and then, in 1503, Fox became Bishop of Winchester, where he devoted himself to building up the defences of Portsmouth, which, from now on, became England’s most important naval base. After Henry VII died, in 1509, his successor, the young Henry VIII, described (the Bishop of) Winchester as “a Fox who buildeth a strong lair”.
Fox had successively built up the fortifications of Calais, established the Wardenships of the Marches, rebuilt Norham Castle, and begun the development of a permanent base for the English navy at Portsmouth: he had brought the Kingdom into a state of readiness, prepared equally for war with Scotland or with France, or with both.
At Durham, Fox’s episcopate was succeeded by those of Senhouse, Bainbridge and Ruthall, none of whom seemed to be as interested in military matters as “the Old Fox” had been. Thomas Ruthall, who became bishop in 1509, brought with him a man named William Franklin who would, along with other duties, become the next Rector of Houghton-le-Spring. Franklin would be the successor to Robert Kent, and immediate predecessor to Bernard Gilpin, the most illustrious of our rectors.
Franklin had been born in Bedfordshire, about 1480, of wealthy parents, and had been educated at Eton College (not then as exclusive as it later became) and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he obtained the degree of “Bachelor of Sacred Theology” (a lesser degree than that of “Professor”, which had been awarded to Kent), and was probably ordained priest while at Cambridge. He then became, perhaps with help from his family, a royal chaplain, serving at Windsor Castle and other palaces around London. Here he appears to have come to the attention of Thomas Ruthall, a priest who had held various administrative posts in the service of King Henry VII. When Ruthall moved to Durham in 1509, to become Prince-Bishop, he took Franklin with him, and the young man served the Bishop successively as Treasurer, Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor. In 1515 he became Rector of Easington and Archdeacon of Durham.
He obtained several other benefices in addition to that of Easington, including that of Master of Sherburn Hospital, and, in 1528, on Kent’s death, he additionally became Rector of Houghton-le-Spring. Our village immediately disco-vered that it had an absentee rector. Franklin already had a house at Durham, where he had many important duties, and it appears that Houghton Rectory began to fall slowly into decay during the next thirty years, until Gilpin arrived in the parish. I suspect that, as a strongly fortified manor-house, Franklin would have kept a handful of men-at-arms stationed there throughout those troublesome years, but soldiers do not look after their billets well, and when Gilpin arrived, he found that there was a lot of work needed to make the Rectory at all comfortable. It is easy to see Franklin as a fat, easy-going pluralist, living a comfortable life in the city, while starveling clerks carried out his duties for a pittance. This, we say, is the sort of priest whose negligence was the cause of the Reformation: “One of the Old School”, we might say deprecatingly, in contrast to his predecessor, Kent, or his successor, Gilpin.
But that would not be entirely fair. An absentee he was, though not a distant one, he lived but seven miles from Houghton, but he does not seem to have been a lazy man. He probably worked harder in his post as Chancellor than did many a country priest in residence within his parish. He was a conscientious man, after his lights, but the trouble was that he was not interested in the parish, only in the revenue to be got from it.
What he was chiefly interested in appears to have been military engineering. After the Battle of Flodden in 1513, when King James IV met his death in an abortive invasion of England, Franklin undertook the reconstruction of the city walls of Berwick, and the castles of Norham, Ford and Chillingham, all of which had suffered artillery damage (Norham had only just been rebuilt in 1513, after the previous pounding it had received in the 1496 campaign).
Later he planned, and, when cash permitted, built additional castles, one of the best preserved being Lindisfarne Castle. This man, Bernard Gilpin’s predecessor at Houghton, rode round the Northern Dales, a sort of Gilpin in reverse, preparing the Dales for war, rather than preaching the Peace of God.
The fortification of Lindisfarne was undertaken for rational reasons, to deny a Scottish fleet the possible use of an excellent small fishing harbour which up to then, thanks possibly to its importance in Christian history, had lain unfortified. But it might have seemed to some that a Tudor Prince- Bishop’s Chancellor was, through introducing a garrison of armed men into Holy Island, laying claim to the birthplace of Northumbrian Christianity.
As to what Franklin would have thought about that, we are ignorant. He may not have appreciated the importance of Lindisfarne in sacred history at all. He had perhaps never heard of the place during a boyhood and youth in Bedfordshire, Eton, Cambridge and the Chapels Royal. It may be that he knew nothing about the history of the North of England until Ruthall became Bishop of Durham, and invited the young Franklin to follow him there, and to work in the Episcopal Treasury.
Then, when he had become Chancellor of the Diocese, he found his true interest, and began preparations for war, assuming that, sooner or later, the young Scottish king, James V, would come over the Border, eager to avenge his father’s death at Flodden.
Preparing for war was what interested Franklin. To sustain him comfortably while he fortified the Border, he was, from time to time, inducted into rich parishes as they became vacant, and so, on Robert Kent’s death in 1528, he was installed at Houghton-le-Spring.
As stated above, he never resided here, and I suspect that his occasional visits were as much concerned with looking to the war-readiness of the Rectory, a fortified manor-house since Rector Keeling’s time, and checking that he was not being cheated of the tithes to which he was entitled, as to giving guidance to the people of the village during the revolutionary changes to the English Church which took place in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I.
Dick Toy
