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The Limitations of Statutes: Elizabethan Schemes to Reform New Foundation Cathedral Statutes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

James Saunders
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Abstract

The lurches from Catholicism to Protestantism and back which occurred in the reigns of Henry VIII, his son and two daughters produced dramatic changes in the liturgies, decorative fittings, and even, on occasions, the architecture of the country's cathedrals. Yet, despite these changes, there was a real sense in which cathedrals were at the eye of the confessional storms which raged about them. It is true that, as part of the Henrician reform process, the monastic corporations at Carlisle, Durham, Peterborough, Ely, Norwich, Canterbury, Rochester, Osney, Winchester, Westminster, Gloucester, Worcester and Bristol had been first dissolved and then refounded as ‘cathedrals of the new foundation’, the monks replaced by minor canons and prebendaries. Once this upheaval was over, however, the new foundation cathedrals underwent little further institutional change. Those cathedrals which had been staffed by secular priests before the Reformation (known as cathedrals of the old foundation), moreover, survived almost wholly untouched. In both new and old foundations, the same administrative and financial structures continued to support dignitaries and liturgical officers whose only obvious function remained the celebration of liturgy, despite the rejection of opus Dei and its accompanying theology of good works.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 1997 , pp. 445 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

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13 Ibid. fo. 18r; MB 15, fo. 109r. Evidence of the use of this formula in other cathedrals can be found in Visitation articles, iii. 237, and in Kennedy, , Elizabethan episcopal administration, ii. 39–40Google Scholar; iii. 251.

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19 Visitation articles, i. 162–5, 197–203; Durham statutes, pp. xxxviii-lxvi. I have given references to these sources only where my account differs, or where I have not seen an original document which they quote. A regrettable consequence of this is to hide just how much the narrative in this section owes to them.

20 The most important of the documents referred to are LPL, MS 276, and WAM, MB 14, 15. The Lambeth Palace document, a rough but apparently basically complete draft, was noted and commented upon by Frere (Visitation articles, i. 197–200), but has been largely neglected since. The Westminster Abbey muniment books are a fairly recent discovery by early modern historians, and have recently undergone repair and rebinding. The other, ‘miscellaneous’ manuscript sources come, in the main, from the British Library.

21 WAM, MB 14, fos 48r, 47r.

22 The remains of Edmund Grindal, D.D. successively bishop of London, and archbishop of York and Canterbury, ed. Nicholson, W. (Parker Society 1843), 282–3Google Scholar.

23 Visitation articles, i. 163; iii. 145–7. Frere rather overstates his case in saying that these injunctions for Carlisle were ‘interim directions’ to be observed until new statutes were provided, if by this he means to imply that the Carlisle orders were in some sense an early draft of a scheme for general revision of new foundation cathedral statutes. Despite its unexpected provenance from the Privy Council, this set of injunctions was, in fact, basically similar in form and content to other sets of royal injunctions for cathedrals, and attempted, in the main, simply to ensure that the existing statutes were correctly observed.

24 WAM, MB 14, fos 49r, 50r, 54r, 58r-, 59r (these communications are not all wholly concerned with statutes); Muniments of the dean and chapter of Durham, Treasurer's Book 7 (1569–70).

25 BL, MS Lansdowne 15, no. 36. That Parker's book and LPL, MS 176 are one and the same is suggested not only by the fact that MS 276 is self-evidently a submission to the queen from the commission for revision of new foundation statutes, but also by Parker's description of the book as containing a section on the ‘imperfeccions and reformacions [of the Henrician code], with a doubt to be resolved’. Cf. the marginal comment ‘A doubte to be resolved’: LPL, MS 276, fo. 5r.

26 Visitation articles, i. 164.

27 Whitgift to Burghley, 11 Feb. 1582/3, BL, MS Lansdowne 46, no. 20, fo. 43r; Barrett, P., The college of vicars choral at Hereford Cathedral, Friends of Hereford Cathedral 1980, 19Google Scholar.

28 WAM, MB 14, fo. 44r.

29 BL, MS Lansdowne 46, no. 69.

30 WAM, MB 14, fo. 2r.

31 Collinson, P., ‘Perne the turncoat: an Elizabethan reputation’, in his Elizabethan essays, London 1994, 197–9Google Scholar.

32 Jones, N. L., Faith by statute: parliament and the settlement of religion 1559, London 1982, 10Google Scholar.

33 Cf. Marcombe, D., ‘Cathedrals and Protestantism: the search for a new identity, 1540–1660’, in Marcombe, D. and Knighton, C. S. (eds), Close encounters: English cathedrals and society since 1540, Nottingham 1991, 51Google Scholar.

34 WAM, MB 15, fo. 93V. The words are taken from a short defence of cathedrals, which Patrick Collinson suggests was probably written by Whitgift himself (Collinson, P., ‘The Protestant cathedral’, in Collinson, P., Ramsay, N., and Sparks, M. (eds), A history of Canterbury Cathedral, Oxford 1995, 156 n. 13Google Scholar). Since they were found in this source along with Whitgift's correspondence, it would certainly seem that the archbishop approved of the sentiments expressed in the defence. Given the fact that most of the arguments used can be found in other sources (cf. the roughly contemporary ‘A deliberation whether it be fitt in a great distresse of money for warre to pull downe cathedrall churches, that 3000 launces may be maynteyned’, LPL, MS 2016, fos 25r–34v), it is impossible to be certain that Whitgift was not, in fact, copying out someone else's arguments for his own reference.

35 Collinson, P., ‘Episcopacy and reform in England in the later sixteenth century’, in his Godly people: essays on English Protestantism, London 1983, 174–5Google Scholar.

36 The names of the commissioners serving in 1572 are recorded in LPL, MS 276, fo. IV, while Grindal (who was included among the original appointees of 1562) is named on fo. 1r. As archdeacon of Ely in the time of Henry VIII, Richard Cox had been one of three royal commissioners responsible for drafting the original statutes for new foundation establishments (Durham statutes, p. xxxix).

37 LPL, MS 276, fos 5r, 25V, 30r.

38 Ibid. fo. 6r–v.

39 Ibid. fo. 2r.

40 WAM, MB 14, fos 49r, 50r.

41 Peterborough statutes, 97; Durham statutes, 158, 160, 180, 178.

42 LPL, MS 276, fos 3V, 4r, 31r.

43 Ibid. fos 2r, 2v, 3V.

44 BL, MS Stowe 128, fo. 6r. I am grateful to Dr Ian Atherton for first suggesting Gardiner as author of the statutes, and to the anonymous reader of this article for the information that the suggestion will appear in print in Houlbrooke, R., ‘Refoundation and Reformation, 1538–1628’, in Atherton, I., Fernie, E., Harper-Bill, C. and Smith, H. (eds), Norwich Cathedral: church, city, and diocese 1096–1996, London-Rio Grande 1996, 531Google Scholar. For evidence of the statutes’ date see Alan Smith's letter to the editor, Musical Times cix (1968), 335Google Scholar.

45 LPL, MS 276, fo. 2v.

46 Ibid. fo. 23r–v. Cf. Durham statutes, 108; Peterborough statutes, 83–4, 109.

47 For references to lecturers from visitation material see Visitation articles, iii. 115, 134, 145–6, 239, 316, 321. Following these references up will reveal the difference between being expected to employ a lecturer, and actually employing one!

48 Answer of dean and chapter of Canterbury (1559), Visitation articles, iii. 49.

49 LPL, MS 276, fos 2r, 30r. ‘ex minutione … compleatur’ has been interlined.

50 Charles Knighton has written that the abolition of the gospeller and epistler at Westminster Abbey in 1560 was the logical outcome of the ending of high masses in that church, given that reading the lessons at mass was the sum total of their duties: Knighton, C. S., ‘Collegiate foundations, 1540 to 1570, with special reference to St Peter in Westminster’, unpubl. PhD diss. Cambridge 1975, 344–6Google Scholar.

51 Visitation articles, iii. 23. This set of injunctions was reissued frequently throughout Elizabeth's reign, and was still referred to well into the seventeenth century.

52 Various records from the Abbey show that twelve minor canons, a gospeller and epistler were employed in the 1540s and 1550s. See, for instance, WAM 37043, fo. 9r (1543/4), WAM 6478, fos 3V, 4r–v (1545), and WAM 37713, fo. 1r (1557). This number was cut to five from c. 1561 onwards (WAM 33617, et seq.).

53 EDC 3/3/8, 3/3/10.

54 PCM 30, 46.

55 Ibid. 46, 52; Cambridge University Library, Ely Diocesan Records (EDR), A/5/1, fo. 19V; PCM 50, accounts 1583; PCM 12, fo. 3r.

56 LPL, MS 276, fos 2v, 3r.

57 King Henry the Eighth's scheme of bishopricks, with illustrations of his assumption of Church property, its amount and appropriation, and some notices of the state of popular education at the period of the Reformation, ed. Cole, H., London 1838, 1, 26–7, 16Google Scholar. For more on Henrician schemes for cathedral education see Knighton, C. S., ‘The provision of education in the new cathedral foundations of Henry VIII’, in Marcombe, and Knighton, , Close encounters, and Simon, J., Education and society in Tudor England, Cambridge 1967, 183–7Google Scholar.

58 WAM 25122, fo. 7r. The two lectores have also been deleted from the chapter ‘De stipendiis’, fo. 34V. They are omitted altogether from two other drafts of the statutes, WAM 25123 and 25124. Two sets of Westminster Abbey accounts dating from 1543–4 include payments to two readers in divinity, and one each in physick, Greek and Hebrew (WAM 37043, fos 11v, 12r; 37044, fo. 4V). The statutes were probably drafted by Dean Goodman, but despite his best efforts in the matter, were never ratified. None the less, most of their provisions seem to have been followed: Carpenter, E. (ed.), A house of kings: the history of Westminster Abbey, London 1966, 452, 133–5Google Scholar.

59 BL, MS Stowe 128, fo. 8r.

60 See, for example, ‘The request of all true Christians…for the succession and restoring of Christe to his full regiment’ (1587), repr. in The seconde part of a register: being a calendar of manuscripts under that title intended for publication by the Puritans about 1593, and now in Dr Williams's Library, London, ed. A. Peel, Cambridge 1915, ii. 211, which proposes that either such ‘dennes of theves’ should be pulled down completely, or else the loitering staff turned out and replaced with four or five preachers, attached not to the cathedral but to surrounding parishes. Any revenue left over was to go to maintain a preacher in a parish otherwise unable to afford one.

61 Seconde parte of a register, ii. 200.

62 Durham statutes, 132; Peterborough statutes, 88; LPL, MS 276, fo. 25r.

63 Ibid. fo. 25V. Cf. Durham statutes, 132, 134; Peterborough statutes, 89.

64 PCM 30, 1–4. For similar programmes at Salisbury, Winchester and York see Visitation articles, iii. 31–2, 137–8, 348–9.

65 WAM, MB 14, fos 50r, 54r–v, 58r, 14r, 17r; MB 15, fo. 109r–v.

66 LPL, MS 276, fo. 5r.

67 Ibid. fos 3V, 39V.

68 WAM, MB 15, fo. 109r.

68 LPL, MS 276, fo. 3r. Cf. Peterborough statutes, 91.

70 See, for example, the patents from Ely of Christopher Tye (1559, EDC 2/4/1, fo. 15r–v) or George Barcroft (1583, ibid. fo. 138V), or that of Sebastian Westcott of St Paul's (1559, London, Guildhall Library, MS 25, 630/1, fo. 377V).

71 Ibid. fo. 4r. Cf. Peterborough statutes, 99; Durham statutes, 170.

72 ‘Certyn articles noted for the reformacion of the Cathedral Church of Excestr’, BL, MS Harley 604, fos 164r–7v.

73 It is worth noting in this regard the uncertain legal authority of the Bishops’ Interpretation of 1561 and Parker's Advertisements of 1566. Both were of great significance in defining more clearly the specifics of the Elizabethan Settlement, but were neither issued nor disowned by the crown.

74 Marcombe, , ‘Cathedrals and Protestantism’, 58Google Scholar.