Star Chamber Stories (Routledge Revivals)

G.R. Elton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136989131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

These stories from the Star Chamber papers, first published in 1958, reveal the real, and sometimes comic, side of the functioning of the Star Chamber - an English court of Law from the Middle Ages, which was set up to ensure the fair enforcement of law against prominent people who were too powerful to be convicted by ordinary courts. These stories are valuable both for the 'real life' detail they bring to a historical concept, and for the light they throw on accepted historical generalizations.

1
THE FOOL OF OXFORD

A deplorable story

Few notions about the age of Henry VIII’s break with Rome are more familiar and more solidly entrenched than that it witnessed a reign of terror. Casual words of no real significance (so runs the story) brought harmless men and women to the attention of the authorities, and once a man had been delated to Thomas Cromwell or his minions his fate was sealed. To quote the author who has perhaps done more than anyone to create this general impression: ‘The punishments in these cases were very severe: there are almost no records of the penalties inflicted on those against whom the depositions were brought, but there is reason to believe that comparatively slight misdemeanours were not seldom rewarded with death.’¹ Mr Merriman offered no support for this categorical deduction from missing evidence, but this has not prevented common acceptance of his views. The truth is that he was venting his feelings, not arguing a case. As a rule it is indeed hard to discover what became of the many about whom informations were laid before magistrates or the Council, though common sense suggests that a conviction with penalty (especially an execution) is less likely to go unrecorded than the fact that nothing was done about some poor man who had talked silly in his cups. One may make allowance for the feelings of honourable men in settled times, striving in vain to understand a revolution, but it is not so easy to forgive scholarship as slipshod as this. However, what matters, of course, is not that errors should be shown up but that more should be known, and here the story of John Parkins’ quarrel in January 1537 with the abbots of Eynsham and Osney will assist.

The protagonists are men of some interest. Parkins (or Perkins)* was a lawyer who died round about 1545. The date of his birth is not known, but in 1537 he referred to events twenty years back as though he had then already been engaged in his profession. He is thus unlikely to have been born much later than 1490, and the fact that he did not supplicate for the degrees of B.Can.L. and B.C.L. until 1528–9² must be explained by his originally leaving Oxford without a degree, as Anthony à Wood tells us he did.³ Wood says that he was ‘born of genteel parents, and being naturally inclin’d to good letters, was sent to the university, and there carefully trained up in grammar and logic’. On going down he became a member of the Inner Temple where ‘he made a wonderful proficiency in the common law, was called to the bar, practised the law, and was much resorted to for his counsel’. His fame rests in the main on a textbook—A profitable booke treating of the lawes of England—in which he analysed the law of conveyancing. First published in French in 1528 (and in an English translation in 1555), this little book ran through fifteen editions in the sixteenth century⁴ and was republished as late as 1827. However, successful as

* Perkins is the version of D.N.B., Foster, &c., but as he invariably used the ‘a’ himself and therefore pronounced his name like modern Parkins, not Perkins, I have adopted this spelling.

Parkins may at first have been in his legal career, there are indications that he had come a cropper before we meet him in 1537. By then he was clearly resident and practising at Oxford, which was quite a decline from his London days; also, as we shall see, he was showing signs of a crotchety quarrelsome disposition and a mind disturbed into incoherence and even near-madness. Perhaps these traits were connected with his downfall: he himself relates a story current about him that round about 1517 ‘my heels was turned upward and my head downward in Westminster Hall, and so banished the Hall’.⁵ He denied the story—‘O admirabile scandalum’—but if it was true (and if such ceremonies were really employed in drumming a man out of the centre of England’s legal system) it would certainly help to explain his later state of mind.

Parkins’ views, and especially the line he took over the critical issues of those years, appear from three pieces of his writing—the preface to his book and two papers he sent to Cromwell. The preface⁶ reveals him as a man trained in jurisprudence and eager to speculate about first principles. Being concerned with property law, he first defined possession and property as a consequence of the Fall, after which communism was rendered dangerous to peace (pacifica conversatio) and to necessary sustentation: the greed of strong men would threaten the former and deprive weaker men of the latter, unless the law defined each man’s possessions precisely. He cited Aristotle against Plato, played about with the laws natural and divine, and gave a clear account of the law human or positive. To be just, this last law requires in the legislator both wisdom and authority, wisdom to ensure conformity with right reason and authority because ‘dicitur lex a ligendo’. He went on to analyse authority into paternal and political, the former being based on the law of nature and the latter vested in one person or the community by something very like an original contract. Men create authority by election and agreement, for they can and must so submit themselves in all things not contrary to God’s law. The Bible is quoted—Noah’s division of land among his sons after the Flood, and Abraham’s agreement with Lot—to prove that things very probably happened in this way. Not content with touching in his three or four pages on all the major bases of the conventional jurisprudence of his day, he went on to show himself aware of the relativity of human laws: ‘in legibus aliquid dandum est consuetudini temporis et patriae et moribus hominum.’ This little preface certainly testifies both to the ‘admirable education’ which Wood complacently says Parkins had received at Oxford, and to the reasons for his success as a lawyer.

The book was written before 1528; one cannot help feeling that the two schemes he composed in 1537 show his mental powers much reduced, though his ingenuity remained great. The first of them was a ‘politic means how to destroy the rebellious traitors in the north parts’, that is, the pilgrims of grace.⁷ The essence of this was that some faithful men must pretend to be traitors and ‘sub colore amicicie et cum fidei vultu’ penetrate the pilgrims’ ranks. He offered examples of the sort of talk with which they could win the rebels’ confidence, as that the king’s commander was ready to come over with many men and part of his ordnance. These agents’ efforts must be supported by having them proclaimed traitors in towns near the rebel host. After they have established themselves they shall make the rebels split up into small and widely dispersed groups over which they can easily gain control. ‘Diverse other means may be imagined.’ They can get the rebels to fire their beacons and thus make them gather together at certain points; in the meantime some king’s troops can burn the deserted houses and kill all the women and children. Another way would be to recruit traitors among the rebels themselves. The letter is signed ‘with the shaking hand of your honourable lordship’s daily orator John Parkyns, impotent of body to labour but (thanks be to God and to your honourable lordship) yet alive and whole of mind and perfect memory’. Perhaps so: one wonders. Anyway, in its imaginitive detail, bloodthirstiness, stressing of the obvious and general impracticability (not to say idiocy), the scheme displays to perfection the mind of the inexperienced man of letters planning war. Parkins might have written some good thrillers; in fact, when his tussle with the abbots has been related, it may well be thought that he did. But what cannot be in doubt is his unswerving devotion to the cause of the king and to the new state of affairs in the Church, also witnessed by the fact that in all his voluminous letters and depositions every mention of the king is invariably and tediously followed by the words ‘God save his grace’.

The other scheme is both longer and more important. It presents suggestions for reorganizing the universities and for secularizing further ecclesiastical property.⁸ Hatred of priests and preference for laymen ran right through it. In the first place, Parkins thought that the head of every college should be a ‘faithful subject of the king’s grace…being no priest but a politic wise man’. He was to have exclusive control of all college property and the college seal, to enjoy the fines and profits collected by manorial courts on college estates, and to appoint all college officers ‘and counsellors’—a hint that Parkins may possibly have fallen out with a college which looked elsewhere for its legal advice. After a survey had been made of the college’s revenues (based on the last seven years’ income), the master was to have an allowance for the whole college and he alone was to deal with ‘the payment of the brewers, bakers and all manner of victuallers’. He was to hold office by royal appointment—by letters patent made out ‘quamdiu nobis placeunt’ (that is, during pleasure); fellows and scholars were to be appointed in the same way, while the master would make ‘conducts and Querestars’, that is, priests appointed to conduct the services and choristers. Out of the surplus revenue not put aside for the running of the college, the master was to equip a number of ‘good archers and other fighting-men’, the number being fixed by the king’s Council; he was to have no other servants, ‘the only child of his chamber except’. Here Parkins’ love for detail got the better of him. He ordered the master to provide for every archer ‘a good bow and a good sheaf of arrows, an Armeynge [German] sword and an Armeygne dagger, and a halfpenny purse with twenty shillings of groats, half-groats, and pence in it, to spend in the king his grace’s affairs’. Other servants would get ‘a good halberd or a good poleaxe, a good Armeynge sword and a good Armeynge dagger’, and the same purse with contents. Moreover, all these troops were to have ‘a soldier’s coat ready hanging by his harness [equipment] and a good horse or gelding in the stable’. The purpose of these martial preparations is not explained; perhaps Parkins was thinking of the rebellion in Yorkshire or aware of the difficulties experienced by Tudor governments in raising armies, difficulties they sometimes tried to solve by statutes designed to maintain trained forces in private households. His next point was more obvious: after all expenses paid and sufficient plate saved for the master, the king was to have all the remaining plate and revenue of the college.

This major proposal, by which the universities* would have lost their independence and come under the control of royal officials, was followed by a mixed bag of other reforms. On all feast-days the masters of colleges shall provide preachers in the neighbouring parishes to ‘preach sincerely the gospel or epistle of that day’. Their efforts were to be supplemented in the university itself by six special preachers, doctors and bachelors of divinity, chosen (an interesting point) from the friars and receiving a royal dispensation enabling them to devote themselves to this single task. ‘And every such doctor and bachelor of divinity will be glad to take four marks’ stipend, their livery-gown cloth, their chambers and barbers and commons etc.’—as well they might. This concern for the preaching of the gospel is significant of Parkins’ inclination to the newer ways of thinking; a little further on, however, he expresses himself in favour of continuing ‘all exequies, masses and other devout prayers’ as they had been used. He was no extremist or even Lutheran, though clearly hostile to the old priesthood. The canons of Christ Church (‘the king his grace’s college’) were also to make way for ‘politic wise’ laymen and to live together in the ‘new builded house—they have a fair kitchen for their cooks’. A violent attack is made on the canon and civil lawyers of New College (who are to be reduced in numbers), of Peckwater’s Inn, owned by New College, whose company of law students was to be dispersed and the place used as an almshouse, and of other lawyers’ halls, as Broadgates, Hinksey Hall, Edward Hall, and Wright Hall. Of course, Parkins was a common lawyer of whom such an outburst is to be expected; but he had also once studied the canon and civil laws and as late as 1528–9 had tried

* Though Parkins ostensibly concerned himself with both universities, it is quite plain that he was exclusively interested in Oxford.

to get degrees in those subjects. Had his supplication failed? There is no record of his proceeding to a degree, and this disappointment may well be behind his present violence.

Next, Parkins made some points which strongly suggest that all was not well with his sanity. All these proposals for the secularizing of the universities and depriving them of their revenues were, no doubt, extravagant, but they had some grounding in sense and public policy. What, however, shall we make of his eager attack on academic dress, especially hoods or even boots ‘when they proceed [go in procession] ne at other times’? He wished all members of the university to wear ‘secular raiment named layman’s raiment’. The reason he gave was waste of cloth. Worse still, there is his almost incomprehensible assault on the bedells’ staffs. Their bedells, he cries, go before their doctors

with a clubbed staff and a peak [pike?] in the end, intending to hold by conquest; for the clubbed end with the peak in it is upward, and the staff upon the bedell’s shoulder ready to strike. And once a year the company of the halls in Oxford goeth to the wood and cometh home through the town of Oxford with every man a club on his shoulder etc. And what arms the bedells’ staff hath upon the smaller end I cannot certify to your honourable lordship, but one Daniel Pratt, a very honest man, one of the bailiffs of the town of Oxford and now being within the precinct of the City of London, as I suppose, can testify what arms the bedells’ staff hath upon them, for he is stationer to the university.

He hated the university with a hatred born of personal experiences; when he, an Oxford man of sorts, could actu ally suggest to Cromwell that the university, not being incorporated, had no right to all the liberties it claimed, the town possibly having a better title on occasion, apostasy could go no further.

By way of winding up, the paper turns to the bishops, perhaps because Parkins had just complained about the way in which some bishops, founders of colleges, had reserved scholars’ places for the shires where they themselves had property and connections, simply in order to keep their lands going—‘impietas pessima’. How they achieved this end by this means is not clear, but Parkins is often confused and confusing. As to the bishops themselves, he makes the practical suggestion that their property be confiscated and they be paid a stipend, but also the Parkinsian observation that at their consecration they have the Holy Scriptures placed on their backs (actually, on their necks), whereas they ought to have them before their eyes ‘to look on’.

And the presumptuous, ambitious, vainglorious, and temerarious bishop of Rorne, their extort master, at certain times when he celebrates the holy mass (which I do think is very seldom) standeth upon a book of the Holy Evangel of Christ (0 temeraria audacitas) (O blessed Jesu) my heart sobbeth at it, etc.

Returning to the point, he arranges for the use of the episcopal revenues: there is to be an almshouse and a grammar school in every diocese, the latter ‘for the education of poor men’s children’. The king is to have all unnecessary plate and the first fruits and tenths. These last the king had had by statute since 1534. Similar arrangements are made for the abbots and abbesses of monastic institutions as yet undissolved. As for archdeacons, deans, prebendaries and masters of hospitals, there are many enjoying these places who are not priests and some are even children: for them he orders the same treatment, ‘mutatis mutandis’. Lastly, he touches on a point which once again reveals him as inclined to reform in religion:

percase some will say that such manner of men may have no wives; to that may be answered that it is not against Holy Scripture priests to have wives. It is written in Holy Scripture, quod Episcopus sit unius uxoris vir, and preceptum non habeo de virg’ etc., and Bonum est mulierem non tangere sed melius muliere quam viri,

the last, in muddled Latin, being apparently a hint of that standard suspicion that celibates practise perversion.

This, then, was John Parkins—a practising lawyer who seems at some time to have suffered a sad interruption to a prosperous career at the bar, author of a textbook not really successful until after his death, an eager dabbler in public affairs, hostile to the university of Oxford, hostile to all priests, in favour of a somewhat uncertain advance towards reform and clearly a passionate student of the Bible, a man of some real ability, some penetratingly critical views and some very wild notions, and one who showed signs of a genuine mental instability. This last shoots through his long paper—his ‘rude book’—even if it was written, as he assured Cromwell, ‘with great speed and celerity, for on Saturday night last past there was never a word written of it’. The impression he leaves is a mixed one: even at this stage, before we have seen him in action, we cannot help feeling repelled at his eagerness to slander, impressed by his flashes of brilliance, and worried by his obviously failing control.

The men he accused are much less interesting. The abbot of Eynsham (an Oxford monastery) was Anthony Dunstone, alias Kitchen, who had been elected in May 1530.⁹ Cromwell’s visitor allowed him chastity, but thought that his failings as a disciplinarian were respons...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE FOOL OF OXFORD
• 2 CAMBRIDGE RIOTS
• 3 INFORMING FOR PROFIT
• 4 THE TREASURER AND THE GOLDSMITH
• 5 THE QUONDAM OF RIEVAULX
• 6 TITHE AND TROUBLE
• A NOTE ON SOURCES
• NOTES
• INDEX