September 2007

Parish History Episode 77- Two Students of Oxford

William Franklin, the (non-resident) Rector of Houghton-le-Spring, had, since Cuthbert Tunstall’s enthronement as Bishop of Durham in 1530, chosen to move back to the South of England, where he shortly won preferment and became Dean of Windsor, so becoming a royal chaplain. He did not totally neglect his old parish in the North - he paid curates, who conducted the services, and (most important) collected the tithes and forwarded them to Windsor - but he certainly gave the people of Houghton no guidance or leadership during the extraordinary series of changes which overtook the English Church and nation during the 1530’s, 40’s and 50’s. He himself, like perhaps the majority of the men in King Henry’s Court, seems to have gradually made his mind up that the Reformers were correct; and so, while the King moved steadily “to the right”, and tried to re·instate the church system which he had previously destroyed, Franklin, along with many other men at Court, moved slowly “to the left” in church politics, and supported many Protestant ideas.

When men of rank, of wealth, and of learning, start to give consideration to new ideas, other men begin to follow. But there will also be others, who, perhaps out of sheer contrariness, or perhaps through considering the issues and concluding that the fashionable opinions are wrong and misguided, resolutely stand out against change. Some young students at Oxford seem to have been of very conservative views, and two such young men were Tom Neal and another candidate for Holy Orders by the name of Bernard Gilpin - the man who would eventually succeed Franklin as Rector of Houghton-le-Spring.

Bernard was a NorthCountryman. He had been born in 1517, a few weeks before Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, an act which is seen as the beginning of the Reformation. His father was lord of the manor of Kentmere, a village in Westmoreland, North of Kendal, near the source of the River Kent. The village was remote, and little visited, lying in a “blind dale”, a valley with no through road for wheeled traffic: nobody ever went up the Dale as far as Kentmere, unless they had business at Kentmere - and very few people did have business there.

Although well back from the Border, the Debatable Land, and the West March, the Gilpins were still a typical Border family, and their menfolk were met with along the Border, helping their neighbours to defend themselves, as they would put it; or crossing the Border to steal cattle, as the Scots would put it. Two of Bernard’s uncles had been killed at Flodden, and his father had fought well at that battle.

Their interests were what one might expect of minor lords dwelling in such a spot. When there was no fighting to be done, they went hunting. One of Bernard’s ancestors is said to have killed the last wild boar in Westmoreland, a deed which is still commemorated on the family coat of arms, though it is not the sort of feat which would endear the Gilpins to modern conservationists. (So successful were the Cumbrian squires of this period in killing off anything big, that their descendants, two or three hundred years later, had nothing left to kill larger than a fox – “D’ye ken John Peel at the break o’ day …?”)

Some of Bernard’s brothers took to this life like ducks to water, but Bernard did not. He was found to be not very athletic, and prone to reading books, and happy to help the village priest as an altar boy. His mother and father did not despair. They recalled that his mother’s uncle, Cuthbert Tunstall, had “gone into the church”, and was doing rather well out of it. Tunstall became Bishop of London while Bernard was still a child, and then moved to being Bishop of Durham. When visiting his niece, he suggested that the boy be sent to school, and then to Oxford, and should take Holy Orders.

Bernard was first tutored at home by the village priest, and then sent to the local grammar school, at Sedbergh (a long ride over the hills: Bernard was a boarder, but had to ride there and back at the start and finish of each term, on a pony, along lonely mountain tracks). There he was prepared for university entry, and, a week or two after his sixteenth birthday, he went up to Oxford. (It sounds rather young to us, but in those days, sixteen was a normal enough age for university entry).

He entered Queen’s College in 1533, but later that year he transferred to Christ Church, a college which was seen as being more in touch with the spirit of the “New Learning”, with the Renaissance (of learning and of art), with the “Great Discoveries” (made by Spanish and Portuguese navigators), and with the new Greek text of the Bible, established by the researches of Erasmus. Christ Church had only just been founded, in 1525, by Cardinal Wolsey, and paid for out of his own purse, when he was Lord Chancellor of England (and nominally Bishop of Durham, a city he never visited), and it had originally been called Cardinal’s College. After Wolsey’s fall, disgrace and death, in 1530, its future had appeared precarious, but it was in 1533 in the process of being re-endowed, partly by the King himself, with money confiscated from Wolsey’s estate, and the Master was seeking out brilliant scholars to add lustre to the College, and to prove that King Henry was at least as interested as Cardinal Wolsey in nurturing the New Learning in England.

Two keen young men who came to Christ Church in 1533 were Bernard Gilpin and Tom Neal. They soon became firm friends, took rooms together, and became “chamberfellows” (that is, in modern English, roommates). Both felt indignant at being asked to sign their assent to the Act of Succession (all students at Oxford were ordered to sign), whereby Queen Catherine and her daughter Mary were struck out of the Succession to the Throne, and any children to be born to Anne Boleyn were declared to be the rightful heirs to England’s Crown. But they did sign, and thereby kept their heads: unlike Sir Thomas More, Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor, who resolutely refused to sign, and was beheaded.

While Bernard and Tom were agonising over the matter, Bernard’s great-uncle, Cuthbert Tunstall, came to visit them. He was no longer Bishop of London, but was now Bishop of Durham. One reason why he had resigned the See of London, and had moved to a similar office in the North, was that he refused to try Lollards (and there were plenty of such heretics in and around London), or to condemn them to death by burning, as the secular authorities wanted him to do. He appears to have felt the same way as a contemporary Frenchman, Sebastian Castellio, who wrote “To burn a man is not to establish a doctrine; it is simply to burn a man” (and who, on a later occasion, after watching a friar officiating at the burning of some heretics, wrote, “If Thou hast ordered this, O Christ, what worse thing hast Thou left for the Devil to do ?”).

Although Tunstall’s duties now lay up in the North, he frequently visited London, to take his seat in the House of Lords, and seems to have found the company of his great-nephew Bernard, and of Bernard’s friend Tom, congenial, and he frequently called in at Oxford, and enjoyed many a chat with the young men. All three of them were trying to work out where they stood in the shifting sands of King Henry’s England. None of them were happy with the changes taking place, but they were not all of one mind. Tom Neal was the most conservative of the three, Bernard Gilpin was unhappy with the King’s powers, while Bishop Cuthbert realised that change was necessary, but felt that this was not the way to go about it.

In 1541, the time came for Bernard and Tom to be ordained. By this time Oxford was a cathedral city as well as a university city, for King Henry had used a small part of the spoil garnered from the Dissolution of the monasteries to endow five new dioceses - at Chester, Peterborough, Bristol and Gloucester, as well as at Oxford. There was now a Bishop of Oxford, but no cathedral church; so the chapel of Christ Church was pressed into use to serve as a stop-gap substitute (the gap was never stopped: the chapel of Christ Church is still Oxford’s cathedral). The result was that Bernard and Tom were not only taught at Christ Church; they were even ordained in the college chapel.

It might have been expected that Bernard Gilpin would now return North, to work under the authority of his great-uncle in Durham Diocese. But both Bernard and Tom remained in the South, and both threw themselves into the controversies that were raging as King Henry weakened, and people wondered what would happen to his legacy when he finally died. Both gained a reputation as fiery preachers, and Bernard in particular was much in demand, and he preached sermons in churches all over London. However Tom Neal, possibly the better scholar of the two, obtained a post as Professor of Hebrew, in Oxford University, and unlike his friend Bernard Gilpin, he enjoyed a regular salary.

If Bernard had considered, on hearing the news of his friend’s appointment, going North to seek help from his uncle, we know exactly what he would have found, if he had ridden to Durham along the Great North Road in 1541.

That year a man called John Leyland was riding along the same road. He was an antiquary, that is a man interested in ancient life - the first practitioner known to us of the new interest, or hobby, in studying antiquity. Leyland was interested in finding and recording monuments, such as that at Stonehenge, left behind by the people whom he calls the Ancient Britons. He was even more interested in the buildings associated with England’s later invaders - Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans. He rode all over England and Wales, from 1534 to 1543, recording whatever he found, and then publishing a journal of his travels - it is the first travel book, describing England, known to us. He did not spend much time in the far North of England, but, knowing that there was a fine Norman cathedral, and also a Norman castle, in Durham, he rode North in 1541, to inspect them, and gives us a description of how Durham Cathedral looked, immediately after the King’s Commissioners had departed, after closing the monastic quarters of the cathedral.

Then Leyland rode on to Newcastle, where he knew there was another Norman castle of interest. I quote from his journal the entry (in modernised English spelling) for this part of his itinerary, as it gives a fine flavour of what the country around here must have looked like:

“There is no bridge memorable on the Wear beneath (below) Durham, but Chester Bridge. The Wear comes within a quarter of a mile of the town itself of Chester.

From Durham, over Fram(well)gate Bridge to Chester in the Street, partly by a little corn ground, but most by mountain pasture, and from moors and furze.

Or (= Before) I came in (to) Chester, I saw, some half a mile of it, Lumley Castle, upon a hill, having a pretty wood about it, and about Chester itself is likewise some woods

The town of Chester is chiefly one street of very mean buildings in length. There is beside, a small street or two about the church, that is collegiate, and has a dean and prebendaries, but it is of a very mean building, and in the body of the church is a tomb, with the image of a bishop, in token that St. Cuthbert once was buried, or remained in his feretory, there.

At the very end of the town I passed over Conebrooke (Cong Brook), and there is a fair stone bridge of three arches over it, said to be Roman.

Thence to Gateshead, seven miles by mountainous ground, with pasture, heath, moor and furze. And a little (this) side (of) Gateshead is a great coal pit.

Unfortunately Leyland never deviated from the Great North Road on his journey to Newcastle. He never saw Finchale Priory, as it would have stood immediately after its abandonment, and he never saw Houghtonle- Spring. He never mentions Sunderland, except under the name of Wearmouth: he knew that there had once been great Anglian monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow.

Of what he did see, he was obviously not impressed by the agricultural potential of the North. Everything seems to be “mountain pasture, heath, moors and furze”. But he did see the beginnings of a new mining destiny for County Durham in that “great coal pit” just outside Gateshead.

Leyland describes what he saw. But neither he nor any other man knew what would become of all this once the old king died.

Dick Toy

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