Section 3

MIDWAY between the north-midland towns of Grantham and Nottingham, and just beyond the railway which joins them, lies the modest hamlet of Aslacton.¹ It is not of itself a parish; of old it belonged to Whatton on the south-east, and now it forms part of Scarrington on the north-west. Until recent years its spiritual needs were satisfied with a Primitive Methodist chapel and an Anglican mission room named, like some walks and mounds in the neighbourhood, after its one distinguished native. Its inhabitants do not number five hundred souls, and it covers less than thirteen hundred acres of land. The cross-roads, on which its cottages cluster, lead nowhere in particular, and the great Fosse Way passes it by in contempt four miles to the north-west. Beyond that lies Sherwood Forest, already in the days of Cranmer’s youth celebrated as the scene of the legendary exploits of Robin Hood. To the south-east a stream, dignified by the name of the River Smite, meanders down to its junction with the Devon and then loses itself in the great river, the Trent, at Newark. Beyond this stream the ground rises to the heights whence, in Armada days,

“Belvoir’s lordly terraces the sign to Lincoln sent,

And Lincoln sped the message on o’er the wide vale of Trent.”¹

Few inhabited spots have suffered less from modern civilisation; the nearest money office is three miles distant, and if a rustic of Aslacton requires the telegraph he has still farther to seek. Some six times a day, trains pass in either direction, but Aslacton owes its railway station less to its own than to the borrowed importance of neighbouring Whatton; and the proximity of a railroad at all is solely due to the fact that the pioneers who constructed the line from Grantham and Nottingham must needs pass near Aslacton.

Here on 2 July, 1489, was born “the first Protestant archbishop of this kingdom, and the greatest instrument, under God, of the happy Reformation of this Church of England: in whose piety, learning, wisdom, conduct, and blood the foundation of it was laid.”² But Aslacton, although it was the place of Cranmer’s birth, was not the original cradle of the race. The family took its name from Cranmer, a manor in the parish of Sutterton in Lincolnshire; and its arms, a chevron between three cranes, are an heraldic pun on the name, which signifies a lake abounding in cranes. It occurs as a place-name in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, and under the variant “Cranmore” is found in the west of England.¹ Imaginative county historians,² and fertile makers of pedigrees, have traced the genealogy of the Cranmers of Sutterton back to the reign of Edward I., when one Hugh de Cranmer is said to have wedded the daughter of William de Sutterton. But few genealogists of the sixteenth century were content with a line which began at so recent a date. It was an age of parvenus, and therefore of pedigree-makers, and the legislature has never weighted the imagination of genealogists with the penalties attaching to the forgery of other kinds of documents. The great Lord Burghley himself was a zealous hunter of pedigrees, and even Cranmer liked to believe that his forbears came over with William the Conqueror. When he discovered in the train of the French Ambassador a gentleman with a similar coat-of-arms to his own, he gave him a good dinner at Lambeth on the strength of the supposed relationship.

The truth is that the Cranmers’ antecedents were obscure and their position humble enough. “I take it,” said Cranmer, many years later, “ that none of us all here, being gentlemen born, but had our beginnings that way from a low and base parentage.”¹ No member of his family had been knighted or pricked as sheriff, none had been elected to serve in Parliament or summoned to fight his country’s battles in the wars of the fourteenth century. It is, however, an exaggeration to say that there is no evidence for the existence of the various members of the family, whom the historian of Nottinghamshire has introduced into the fourteenth-century part of the pedigree; for we have it on the authority of the tax-collector that in 1338 one Hugh de Cranmer owned three acres and something more in the county of Lincoln.² It is no straining of probabilities to assume that this Hugh de Cranmer is he whose name was painted on the stained-glass windows of Sutterton Church,³ and that both are identical with the Hugh who figures in the pedigrees as the grandfather of Edmund Cranmer, the first to connect the Cranmers with Aslacton.

This Edmund did not a little to promote the modest fortunes of the family. Early. in the fifteenth century he married Isabella, daughter and heiress of William de Aslacton,⁴ and her family was certainly of higher social standing than that of her husband. It may have been descended from Walkelin, presumably a Norman, who held Aslacton in the time of Domesday Book⁵; one of its members had been sheriff of Nottingham and Derby shires in the reign of Henry III., and another had sat as knight for his native county in the parliament of Edward III.¹ Edmund Cranmer apparently sold his Lincolnshire inheritance, and with the proceeds purchased in 1425 lands adjoining his wife’s in Aslacton. Their son John married Alice Marshall of South Carleton in North Muskham, Nottinghamshire, and by her had issue two sons, Thomas, the father of the future Archbishop, and John. The elder, of course, succeeded to the Aslacton lands, and the younger, in orthodox fashion, devoted himself to the Church.

Of the Archbishop’s father we know more than of any earlier member of the family. He was probably born between 1450 and 1455, and some thirty years later he married Agnes, daughter of Lawrence Hatfield of Willoughby, in the Nottinghamshire hundred of Thurgarton. The suggestion² that these Hatfields were descended from the lords of Hatfield in Holderness is a conjecture unsupported by evidence; but they were a county family of some standing, and Agnes Hatfield’s uncle married the daughter of Sir Thomas Molyneux of Hawton; his son, Henry Hatfield, was in later years surveyor of the Archbishop’s lands.³ By this marriage Thomas Cranmer had a large family; there were three boys and at least four girls. Of the daughters, Dorothy married Harold Rosell, of Ratcliffe-on-Trent,⁴ and Agnes wedded Edmund Cartwright¹ of Ossington, a family which produced more than one well-known name in English history. Two daughters, Margaret and Emmet, were unmarried at their father’s death; one of them afterwards became the wife of that unknown brother-in-law of the Archbishop who perished in the fire at Lambeth Palace in December, 1543.² The other was scarcely more fortunate in her matrimonial relations; her first husband was “a milner,” but during his lifetime she is said to have married a second, one Henry Bingham, and her daughter by one of these husbands (presumably the first) was wife of Dr. Christopher Nevinson, the Archbishop’s commissary, facts which furnished material for an attack on Cranmer by his Prebendaries in 1543.³

With so large a family, the Cranmers’ household can hardly have been luxurious. Despite the slow but steady improvement in the fortunes of the clan, the Archbishop’s father possessed but moderate means, and the extent of his influence and estates can easily be exaggerated. Aslacton was a “lordship” as well as a hamlet, but it is not clear that Cranmer was lord of any of the various manors of which thé “lordship” was composed. The “lord-ship” itself belonged to the Crown, apparently as part and parcel of the duchy of Lancaster. Edward IV. gave it to the Marquis Montagu, brother of Warwick the King-Maker, but on the fall of the Nevilles it reverted to royal hands. Among the various persons appointed from time to time as “receivers” or other royal representatives in the “lordship” the name of Cranmer does not occur¹; and from this fact, and from the smallness of the bequests in the elder Cranmer’s will, it may be safely assumed that his rents hardly sufficed to keep him and his household in the moderate comfort to which the smaller English gentry of the time were accustomed.

These comparatively narrow circumstances determined the careers of Cranmer’s sons. The eldest, John who was born in the spring of 1487, was expected to do as his father had done, keep his inheritance intact, extend it, or enhance his social position by marrying well, and beget sons to carry on the family line and traditions. To him education was a matter of little or no importance, and there is no evidence to show that his intelligence was one whit superior to that of his class. The inference is in the opposite direction, for had he possessed brains or ambition, the influence of the Archbishop could easily have secured for his brother an opportunity of distinguishing himself in some wider sphere of usefulness than the local affairs of Aslacton. But in spite of his lands and his brother, John Cranmer never even rose to the dignity of a justice of the peace. He was perhaps successful in all to which his lowly ambition aspired. He won a wife who boasted among her remote ancestors a baron by writ, and his daughter actually married the youngest son of a living peer.¹

It was beyond the means of the Cranmer estates to support two of the family in such a position, and both of John’s younger brothers were quartered on the Church. There is no reason to suppose that either felt any special call to the spiritual state; the decision was made for them by their parents and their circumstances; younger sons, for whom the family property could not provide, as a matter of course took holy orders. And so Thomas Cranmer was, by no design of his own, launched on his fateful career. His younger brother, Edmund, born about 1491, was intimately associated with him throughout his life; he followed Thomas to Cambridge, assimilated his elder brother’s views and like him, married a wife, received the Archdeaconry of Canterbury, escaped to the Continent on Mary’s accession, and died abroad in 1571.²

The first step in a clerical career was a clerical education, and the Archbishop once told his secretary tary that his father “did set him to school with a marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster.”¹ Another account,² written soon after Cranmer’s death, states that he “learned his grammar of a rude parish clerk in that barbarous time.” But as Morice goes on to speak of Cranmer s leaving his “grammar school” to go to Cambridge, it is probable that his instructor was not the local parish priest, but the master of some neighbouring school. Of these there were at least four within easy reach of Aslacton in Cranmer’s boyhood, Grantham, Nottingham, Newark, and Southwell.³ There is no evidence to determine at which of these schools he was educated; possibly it was at Southwell, for here in 1533 he recommended that his nephew and godson, Thomas Rosell, should be sent to school.⁴ Wherever the pedagogue ruled his “ tyranny towards youth” is said to have been

“such that, as he [Cranmer] thought, the said schoolmaster so appalled, dulled and daunted the tender and fine wits of his scholars, that they commonly more hated and abhorred good literature than favoured or embraced the same, whose memories were also thereby so mutilated and wounded that for his part he lost much of that benefit of memory and audacity in his youth that by nature was given to him, which he could never recover, as he divers times reported. And, albeit his father was very desirous to have him learned, yet would he not that he should be ignorant in civil and gentlemanlike exercises, insomuch that he used him to shoot and many times permitted him to hunt and to hawk and to exercise and to ride rough horses. So that now being archbishop he feared not to ride the roughest horses that came into his stable. Which he would do very comely, as otherwise at all times there was none in his house that would become his horse better. And when time served for recreation after study he would both hawk and hunt, the game being prepared for him beforehand. And would sometimes shoot with the long bow, but many times kill his deer with the crossbow, and yet his sight was not perfect, for he was purblind.”¹

The elder Cranmer was not, however, long to direct his son’s training in outdoor sports or mental exercises. He died in the prime of life on 27 May, 1501, when his eldest son was fourteen, his second twelve, and his third ten years of age. He was buried in the church of St. John of Beverley at Whatton, at the east end of the north aisle, and a simple inscription on a plain slab of alabaster recorded the fact of his death.² His will was proved at York on the first of October following. ³ It was, like everything else we know of its author, entirely commonplace; and such bequests as he made to the Church were for the benefit of secular and not monastic establishments. That was a frequent sign of the decay of monastic influence; and Cranmer’s benefactions did not amount to much. Ten shillings were left to Whatton to buy a new bell, and six shillings and eightpence went towards the maintenance of the Holy Trinity Chapel at Aslacton.¹ The paucity of these ecclesiastical bequests is a little surprising in view of the apparently clerical character of the elder Cranmer’s friends. The overseer of his will was the Abbot of Welbeck, and among the witnesses to it were Thomas Wilkinson, vicar of Whatton, who became Abbot of Welbeck two years later, and Edward Collinson, a Canon of the same Premonstratensian Abbey. That Abbey was rector² of Whatton, and, considering the closeness of the relations between Cranmer and the Canons of Welbeck, it is somewhat strange that neither of his sons should have joined that religious house. The idea must almost have been suggested to the future Archbishop and rejected by him or by his parents.

To the members of his family Cranmer had little to leave except the lands entailed upon his eldest son. Five marks each were given to his two unmarried daughters, and twenty shillings a year each in land were left to Thomas and Edmund; if either of them died, the survivor was to have the shares of both. Perhaps there was more to leave than appears in the will; for the widow, who was appointed sole executrix and residuary legatee, was able to maintain two sons at Cambridge, and, it would seem, to endow the future Archbishop with something above his twenty shillings a year. Many years later, Cranmer wrote that he was better off as a scholar at Cambridge than he was as Archbishop,¹ and the earliest reference to him in the state papers of the time records that in 1528 “Master Doctor Cranmer” of Aslacton had, like Joseph, corn to sell in a time of scarcity.²

Meanwhile, their father’s death made no change in the Cranmers’ plans and position. Thomas remained under his severe and cruel schoolmaster for another two years, and then in 1503 or 1504 he went up to Cambridge, whither, some five years later, he was followed by his brother Edmund. He is assumed to have entered at Jesus College, of which he was elected fellow a few years later. The college had been founded only some six or seven years before on the site of the nunnery of St. Rhadegunde, which had been dissolved on account of the gross immorality prevailing among the inmates.³ There was little in the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge to stimulate the mental activity of even the most inquisitive undergraduate. The Roman hierarchy still discouraged the study of Greek as the language of the schismatic and rival Church of the East; it had been taught more or less spasmodically for nearly a generation at Oxford, but had not penetrated to the recesses of the sister university. Nor does the classical Latin of Virgil and Cicero, Horace and Tacitus appear to have been in greater favour. The University Library at the end of the fifteenth century seems to have consisted of between five and six hundred volumes, and in this somewhat meagre collection there was not a Greek nor a classical Latin author; even patristic theology was poorly represented, and the library only possessed part of the works of the four great Fathers of the Latin Church, Ambrose, Gregory, Jerome, and Augustine. The books were almost exclusively concerned with mediaeval scholastic philosophy, the dry bones of which had as yet scarcely been stirred by the breath of the New Learning.

So Cranmer’s education proceeded uneventfully along the dusty, well-worn paths of the trivium and quadrivium. “He was nozzled,” writes his contem-temporary biographer,¹ “in the grossest kind of sophistry, logic, philosophy, moral and natural (not in the text of the old philosophers, but chiefly in the dark riddles of Duns and other subtle questionists) to his age of twenty-two years.” The Archbishop himself declares that his tutor was “such an one who, when he came to any hard chapter, which he well understood not, would find some pretty toy to shift it off, and to skip over to another chapter, of which he could better skill.”² The name of this learned don has not been preserved, but the fellows of Jesus College, at the time of Cranmer’s entrance, were none of them men of remarkable intellect. The Master was William Chubbes,¹ who had held that post since the foundation of the college in 1497; he was, it is true, the author of two books, but one was an introduction to logic, and the other was a commentary on Duns Scotus; and it is not unfair to assume that they typified a scholastic learning then in the last stage of senile decay. Chubbes died in the second or third year of Cranmer’s residence at Jesus, and his successor was Dr. John Eccleston, of whom little is known except that he became chancellor of Ely Cathedral, and vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He presided over the college for two years; and then, after the six months’ reign of Thomas Alcock, who probably owed his election to his relationship to Bishop John Alcock, the founder of the college, the choice of the fellows fell upon William Capon, who remained Master for thirty years. His chief claims to distinction are the facts that he was chaplain to Wolsey, by whom he was selected to be Dean of his short-lived college at Ipswich, and was brother of the more celebrated John Capon, Bishop of Bangor and Salisbury. Of the fellows scarcely one calls for notice; Sir Thomas Elyot,² the translator of Isocrates and Plutarch, the friend of Ascham and More, and the author of one of the earliest Latin-English dictionaries, has been claimed as an alumnus of Jesus College, but on disputable grounds. The star of the college was, however, in the ascendant. Besides Cranmer himself, a distinguished fellow was elected in 1510 in the person of Thomas Goodrich, afterwards Bishop of Ely, and Lord Chancellor of England; and not long afterwards the college was joined by John Bale, the father of English biographers.

In the wider sphere of the university light was also beginning to shine. In 1497 the illustrious John Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and Cardinal, was made confessor to Margaret Beaufort,¹ the mother of Henry VII. He was at the time Master of Michaelhouse, Cambridge; four years later he became Vice-chancellor of the university, and 1502 saw the first fruits of his influence over the greatest benefactress of Oxford and Cambridge in the establishment of the Lady Margaret chairs of divinity and of the Lady Margaret Preachership. The divinity professor was to lecture on most days in the year, and the preacher was to preach in the neglected vernacular tongue. These endowments were followed by the foundation of Christ’s College in 1505, and then by that of St. John’s College.² In 1506, probably at Fisher’s suggestion, the King himself and his mother visited Cambridge, and in the same year the newly-awakened interest in learning is indicated by the offer of a degree in divinity to the greatest scholar of his age, Erasmus of Rotterdam.¹

That these public events of his undergraduate career had some influence in broadening Cranmer’s outlook scarcely admits of doubt; but for the present he was bound by the limits of the conventional studies requisite for his degree; and it was not until after he had graduated B.A. in 1510 or 1511 that he began to emancipate himself from their trammels. Even then his line of inquiry was strictly prescribed, for soon afterwards he was elected one of the twelve fellows of Jesus College, eleven of whom were compelled by the statutes to study theology. These statutes were the work of three successive bishops of Ely, Alcock, the founder of Jesus, James Stanley, the step-son of Margaret Beaufort and an early friend of Erasmus, and Nicholas West; and their prohibition of the study of canon law is a curious illustration of the unpopularity in which its abuse had involved it. Cranmer accordingly had no option but to pursue his theological course, but there was ample scope for reform in its methods, and he now began to turn from the mediaeval schoolmen to “Faber, Erasmus, and good Latin authors,” including probably the great Fathers of the Latin Church. It may be no more than a coincidence that in the same year (1511), Erasmus took up his residence in Cambridge as Lady Margaret Lecturer in Divinity, and it would be rash to assume any personal intercourse between the Dutch humanist and the retiring young graduate, twenty-one years his junior.¹ That Cranmer attended Erasmus’s lectures is possible; but it is by no means clear to what extent Erasmus lectured either on divinity, as he was bound by the terms of his office to do, or on Greek, in which he was naturally more interested. Cranmer made no mark at this time as a Greek scholar, and Erasmus’s subsequent encomium ² of him as “a most upright man of spotless life” was evoked, not by personal friendship, but by the fact that Cranmer had promised him the same liberality as he had enjoyed from the Archbishop’s predecessor, Warham.

The tenure of his fellowship and the course of his studies were soon interrupted by Cranmer’s marriage. Jesus College was situated in a somewhat remote part of Cambridge, and apparently the nearest spot at which Jesus men could foregather with members of other colleges was the Dolphin Inn at the Bridge Street end of All Saints’ Lane, a site now occupied by part of Trinity College.³ Inns had not then degenerated into mere drinking-shops; they were rather hotels and clubs, and the hosts were in better social estimation than the publican of to-day. With the mistress of the Dolphin lived a young relative named Joan, who is described as “a gentleman’s daughter.”⁴ Cranmer fell in love with her and eventually married her. She continued to reside at the Dolphin, and Cranmer’s frequent resort to the house gave rise to the subsequent fable that he himself was an ostler at the inn.¹ This was one of many calumnies, but in reality there was nothing disgraceful about the marriage except from the point of view of perverted class prejudice, which regards it as more honourable to seduce than to marry girls of humble rank. Cranmer was not in holy orders, and it is entirely due to theological hatred that his marriage was singled out for objurgation by those who passed over in silence the illicit connexions then commonly formed by churchmen from the highest to the lowest degrees.

This marriage necessarily deprived Cranmer of his fellowship, but he was immediately appointed “common reader” in Buckingham College, a recent foundation, now known as Magdalen College.² This post he held for less than twelve months, for about a year after his marriage his wife died in childbed, and his old college paid Cranmer the compliment of re-electing him to his fellowship. The honour was the more marked because this extension of the term “unmarried” to a widower was an interpretation of college statutes which remained unique for centuries.³ It should dissipate any idea that Cranmer had lost caste by his marriage, and it is at the same time indisputable testimony to the esteem in which his character and intellectual attainments were held by those in a position to judge them.

Meanwhile, under the influence of his bereavement, Cranmer pursued his studies with increased vigour. In 1516 Erasmus speaks of the change which had come over the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge in the last few years¹; scholasticism was gradually giving way to the study of literature and of the Bible. Cranmer threw himself into the movement, and the publication of Erasmus’s New Testament in 1516 and of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, in 1517 marks the approximate date at which the future English reformer began a systematic examination of the Scriptures.

“Then he” [says his biographer],² “considering what great controversy was in matters of religion (not only in trifles but in the chiefest articles of our salvation), bent himself to try out the truth herein: and, forasmuch as he perceived that he could not judge indifferently in so weighty matters without the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures (before he were infected with any man’s opinions or errors), he applied his whole study three years to the said Scriptures. After this he gave his mind to good writers both new and old, not rashly running over them, for he was a slow reader, but a diligent marker of whatsoever he read; for he seldom read without pen in hand, and whatsoever made either for one part or the other of things being in controversy, he wrote it out if it were short, or at the least, noted the author and the place, that he might find it and write it out by leisure; which was a great help to him in debating of matters ever after. This kind of study he used till he was made Doctor of Divinity which was about the thirty-fourth of his age.”

Even his bitterest enemies bore witness to Cranmer’s immense industry and personal attractions. “He had in his favour,” writes one of them,¹ “a dignified presence, adorned with a semblance of goodness, considerable reputation for learning, and manners so courteous, kindly, and pleasant, that he seemed like an old friend to those whom he encountered for the first time. He gave signs of modesty, seriousness, and application,” qualities which earned him steady promotion in his college and university. Soon after his re-election to a fellowship he was appointed Lecturer in Divinity in Jesus College; before 1520 he was ordained, and in that year he was selected to be one of the university preachers. He was also entrusted with the task of examining candidates for degrees in divinity, and in this capacity he endeavoured to raise the standard of Biblical knowledge by requiring from them some evidence of their having studied the Scriptures.² Finally, in 1524, he was offered by Wolsey a canonry in the newly-founded Cardinal College at Oxford—an offer which, fortunately perhaps for himself, he declined.

It is a significant fact that most of these Canons, selected for their eminence in learning or character, soon fell under suspicion of attachment to Lutheran doctrines. As early as 1521 a number of Cambridge men had begun to meet at the White Horse tavern to examine and discuss the novel views put forward by the Wittenberg monk. The inn became known as “Germany,” its frequenters as “Germans,” and if Oxford’s reception of the Renaissance was more ready than that of Cambridge, the latter university has at least the honour of having afforded an earlier welcome to the Reformation. Among these Cambridge Reformers were some of the greatest names in the movement: Tyndale and Coverdale, the translators of the Bible; Latimer, the prophet of the Reformation; and Bilney and Barnes, Crome and Lambert, some of its earliest martyrs. The rapid spread of the new doctrines excited alarm in high orthodox circles, and the King himself descended into the arena with his royal fulminations against Lutheran heresies. Sir Thomas More was vexed that any one should so far carry into practice the principles laid down in the Utopia, where all religions were tolerated, as to dissent from the orthodox faith; and soon after his appointment as High Steward of Cambridge in 1525 commissions were issued to check these vagaries. Severer measures were taken by Wolsey in 1528, and some of the Reformers were induced to renounce their opinions.

Cranmer himself was affected by his industrious examination of the Scriptures and of the new doctrines, and about 1525 he began in private to pray for the abolition of papal power in England.¹ But he avoided any open expression of his views, for he does not appear to have incurred any suspicion with regard to his orthodoxy. Naturally of a reticent and unaggressive disposition, he was the very reverse of an enthusiast; his slowness in reading was characteristic. New ideas won their way to his mind with painful, hesitant steps; and they were only adopted after years of mature reflexion. His caution bordered on timidity, not so much from moral cowardice, as from an intellectual perception of both sides to the question. He never possessed the burning zeal which blinds men to all aspects of truth except one, and enables them to go forward in the sublime confidence that they are themselves entirely right and their opponents entirely wrong. His career was that of a conservative reformer, reluctantly abandoning ground which he felt to be untenable, but somewhat doubtful of the security of his next foothold.

He was still, however, occupied almost solely with academic work, and besides his college and university duties he appears occasionally to have taken charge of private pupils. At any rate, two youths of the name of Cressy ¹ were in his care in 1529; their mother was in some way related to Cranmer, and their father owned a house at Waltham in Essex. Here in the summer Cranmer took refuge with his two pupils when that terror of the sixteenth century, the plague, made Cambridge an undesirable habitation; and here occurred the incident which changed the whole course of Cranmer’s life and helped to alter the course of English history.

_______________

¹ So it was generally spelt in Cranmer’s time, and often is to-day, but it was in the sixteenth century, and is now also, spelt Aslocton, or Aslockton.

¹ Macaulay, The Armada.

² Strype, Cranmer, ed. 1820, p. I.

¹ There were also “Cranmores” at Aslacton, a family of inferior social position to the Archbishop’s.

² E. g., R. Thoroton in his Nottinghamshire, ed. Throsby, 1797.

¹ Narratives of the Reformation (Camden Soc.), pp. 274–5.

² Calendar of Close Rolls, 1337–9, p. 493.

³ Holies, Church Notes in Lincolnshire, sub verbo Sutterton.

⁴ Thoroton, ed. Throsby, i., 262.

⁵ Testa de Nevill, Notts, p. 3.

¹ Lists of Sheriffs, P. R. O., 1898; Offcial Return of Members of Parl., i., 72.

² Poulson’s Holderness, ii., 443.

³ Cranmer, Works (Parker Soc.), ii., 265.

⁴ Thoroton, i., 184.

¹ Thoroton, iii., 173; Waters, Chester s of Chicheley, pp. 370–1.

² Stow’s Annals, p. 988.

³ For Nevinson, or Nevynson, see Dict. Nat. Biog., xl., 308, where, however, no mention is made of his wife’s relationship to the Archbishop; compare L. and P., vol. xviii., passim. A fifth daughter is said to have been the wife of John Monins, Lieutenant of Dover Castle, and a sixth is reported to have married one Shepey, a knight, but the relationship of these ladies is highly problematical.

¹ See Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1476–85, pp. 4, 19. The baili-wick of the Lordship of Aslacton was granted in 1476 to one Richard Holt, and the receivership of Aslacton to Gervase Clifton (cf. Cal. Inquis. Post-Mortem, Henry VII., i., 714. In 1780 Aslacton belonged to a Mr. Marriott (Thoroton, Nottinghamshire, i., 264).

¹ His first wife was Joan, daughter of John Fretcheville of Stavely, whose ancestor Ralph de Fretcheville was summoned to Parliament as a baron in 1298; his daughter Susanna (by a second wife) married Thomas Brooke, alias Cobham, the youngest son of the sixth Lord Cobham; he became steward of the Archbishop’s household and died in 1547.

² Waters, Chesters of Chicheley, pp. 395–6.

¹ Morice, Anecdotes (Narratives of the Reformation) pp. 238–9.

² Ibid., p. 218.

³ See a. F. Leach, English Schools at the Reformation, pp. 322–3.

⁴ Cranmer’s Letters (Parker Soc Ed.), pp. 256, 262.

¹ Morice, pp. 239–40.

² Ashmole MS. 854, p. 155.

³ Testamenta Eboracensia (Surtees Soc.), iv., 194.

¹ These sums should be multiplied by twenty to bring them to their modern equivalent; the chapel at Aslacton was apparently on the site of the present parish room named after Cranmer.

² Before the Reformation monasteries and other corporate bodies were often “rectors” (i. e., owners of the tithe) of parishes; on the dissolution of Welbeck, the Archbishop bought the tithes of Aslacton and Whatton, and transferred them to his nephew, Thomas, the head of the family (cf. Massingberd, Hist. Ref. App.).

¹ Works, ii., 437.

² L. and P., iv., 3819.

³ J. Bass Mullinger, Univ. of Cambridge, i., 320; A. Gray, History of Jesus College, 1902, passim.

¹ Narratives of the Reformation, p. 219.

² Jenkyns, iii., 472,

¹ Dict. Nat. Biogr., x., 298. See also Cooper’s A thence Cantabrigienses for Chubbes and the other fellows of Jesus; a list of those noticed is given in the house-lists at the end of the volume. Further information is in A. Gray’s History of Jesus College, 1902.

² Dict. Nat. Biogr., xvii., 347, which also contains lives of Goodrich and Bale.

¹ See Halsted, Life of Margaret Beaufort, 1839.

² Baker, Hist. of St. John’s College, ed. Mayor; Bass Mullinger, Univ. of Cambridge.

¹ See Nichols, Letters of Erasmus, 1901, p. 402; Lewis, Life of Fisher, App. viii.

¹ The fact that Erasmus does not mention Cranmer has been adduced to prove that the latter’s university career was undistinguished (Jane M. Stone, Queen Mary, p. 380); but the argument would be fatal to many other reputations.

² Erasmus, Epistolœ, mcclxi.

³ Bass Mullinger, i., 612; Mason, Cranmer, p. 7.

⁴ Foxe. Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, viii., 4.

¹ Narratives of the Reformation, p. 269; the northern rebels in 1536 called him a tavernkeeper.—L. and P., xi., 714.

² Dict. Nat. Biogr., liii., 447.

³ Bass Mullinger, i., 612; Le Bas, Cranmer, i., 29.

¹ Erasmus, Epistola, cxlviii.

² Narr. Ref., p. 219.

¹ Bishop Cranmer’s Recantaeyons, ed. Gairdner, p. 3.

² Foxe, viii., 5.

¹ Works, ii., 327; L. and P., 1543, ii., 303.

¹ The exact relation between Cranmer and the Cressys is difficult to trace. There was an “ancient and genteel” family of that name settled at Holme near Hodsack, Nottinghamshire, to which the famous Benedictine, Hugh Paulinus Cressy (see Dict. Nat. Biog., xii., 114), belonged; and later in the sixteenth century Cranmer’s grandnephew, Thomas, and one William Cressy married sisters. The Cressy family had held lands in Nottinghamshire since the reign of Edward II., and more than one had attained to knightly rank; there were branches of it in other counties (see Cal. Inquisitionum post mortem, iv., 125, 224, 262, 272, 431, 462; Cal. of Ancient Deeds, i., 403, ii., 520, and iii., passim; Clutterbuck’s Hertfordshirc, i., 407 and other references in Marshall’s Genealogist’s Guide). The Cressy here referred to was possibly Robert Cressy, a notary sometimes employed by Wolsey (see L. and P., i,, 4332, ii., 3925, iv., 6); but the only Cressy connected with Waltham appears to be the John Cressy who, with Joan his wife, was buried in Waltham Church. Fuller says that the name had died out in Waltham before his day (circa 1650.) None of the inquisitions in the Record Office throw Any light on the matter.

↑ Back to top