In 1585 a Puritan set of sermons, used in the parish of Redmarshall just outside the city of Durham, was given an inscription commemorating the former conservative bishop of the diocese, Cuthbert Tunstall, more than two decades after his death in 1559.Footnote 1 This book may have been bought by the new rector of the parish and future canon of Durham Cathedral, Marmaduke Blakiston.Footnote 2 Durham Cathedral's exceptionally rich records and surviving sixteenth-century library offer an unusual case study in how both conservatives such as Tunstall and evangelicals such as one of Blakiston's predecessors at the cathedral, the dean Robert Horne, could conceptualise the cathedral as a resource to be used in their efforts to improve religion in the diocese. This attitude looks rather unexpected because cathedrals have usually been seen as offering sinecures and rewards for well-connected priests during the sixteenth century, rather than as diocesan centres.Footnote 3 Bishops’ efforts at reform within their dioceses during this period have not been thought to run through their cathedrals.Footnote 4 For example, Paul Ayris examined the political and theological changes to Cranmer's ideas about the bishop's role in his diocese, not in his cathedral.Footnote 5 Cuthbert Tunstall in Durham has largely been studied for his personal beliefs and response to the Reformation.Footnote 6 Instead of being seen as part of their dioceses, the reformation in the cathedrals has largely been the object of local studies.Footnote 7 Yet, as Stanford Lehmberg noted, cathedrals were a deep resource of learning and talent within the English Church and remained significant to their communities, despite later sixteenth-century Puritan polemic that attacked them as idle and useless.Footnote 8 This polemic continues to shape their historiography and presentation as external to their dioceses.Footnote 9 This study looks at the episcopate of Cuthbert Tunstall in Durham from 1530 to 1559 to examine how both conservative and evangelical factions used the cathedral as an intellectual and practical resource to meet the changing challenges of religious reform. It is made possible because Durham Cathedral had a remarkably stable group of personnel through the most turbulent years of the English Reformation. Its own staff remained largely in place across the transition from priory to secular college and through most of the changes in allegiance to Rome in the mid-sixteenth century.Footnote 10
Durham Cathedral
When in 1530 Cuthbert Tunstall was installed in the bishop's cathedra above the tomb of his fourteenth-century predecessor, Thomas Hatfield, Durham was still a monastic priory at near-full strength, with about sixty monks and high standards of education.Footnote 11 The prior, Hugh Whitehead, had been in office since 1520 and was seemingly an active and effective head of the institution.Footnote 12 A visitation on behalf of Tunstall's immediate predecessor, Thomas Wolsey, in 1528 had found no particularly pressing problems, as only the citation was copied into the priory's register and there are no indications of any orders that had been given by Wolsey or his deputies.Footnote 13 Most of Whitehead's senior monks held advanced degrees from Durham College in Oxford and there were still monastic students studying there.Footnote 14 Durham's enthusiasm for education can be seen in the books that monks were purchasing during this period, including history and geography alongside the standard canon law and theological works. The monks had eagerly embraced the possibilities of printed books and over forty of their incunables survive. One of the earliest, a 1474 copy of the fourth volume of Dun Scotus’ Questiones printed at Strasbourg, had been assigned to the common library alongside several other printed books by John Auckland (prior, 1484–94), around 1484–5.Footnote 15
Durham Cathedral's influence in its diocese was often indirect, exercised through the appointment of vicars and rectors to the many benefices that it controlled throughout the diocese, through ordination to its titles, and through monks’ family connections across the north of England, as well as through regular preaching activity in the city of Durham.Footnote 16 The library certainly contained preaching texts for use by the monks and Thomas Swallwell's prolific and distinctive notes often suggest that his reading was directed towards sermon writing.Footnote 17 The monk Thomas Sparke, suffragan bishop from 1537, may also have played a role in linking the monastic community with the rest of the diocese as he travelled the diocese during Tunstall's absences. Finally, the song school and the grammar school provided some basic education for the local populace and their masters were paid from the priory revenues.Footnote 18
By the time of Tunstall's death in November 1559 the cathedral was a very different place. Durham College had been suppressed in 1545, breaking the official links between Durham and Oxford and ending direct support for university students.Footnote 19 The cathedral community was made up of twelve canons and thirteen minor canons alongside the lay clerks and choristers. In 1541 the new canons and the dean were drawn from the former senior monks, including Whitehead as dean.Footnote 20 The monks who stayed on as canons seem to have been chosen because they held higher degrees, but by the standards of Edward vi's reformers they could be called ‘stiff and unlearned’, reflecting their religious sympathies rather than their actual educational background.Footnote 21 From 1541 to 1556 any vacant canonries were filled by the monarch of the day. As it happened, the cathedral's senior staff was remarkably homogenous: only two prebends and the deanery fell vacant in this period. In 1542 John Crawford replaced Edward Hyndmer in the first prebend and in 1550 John Rudd replaced Ralph Blaxiston in the tenth prebend.Footnote 22 Rudd was deprived under Mary three years later because he was married and replaced with George Bullock.Footnote 23 The deanery had a similar experience. Dean Whitehead survived Henry viii and died in custody in 1551.Footnote 24 His replacement was Robert Horne, a Puritan chaplain to Edward vi.Footnote 25 Mary i then appointed two deans of Durham, Thomas Watson and Thomas Robertson, both of whom were largely absentee.Footnote 26 When new statutes for the cathedral were issued in 1556, the bishop won the right to present to vacant canonries and his visitation powers over the community were confirmed.Footnote 27 Tunstall's two appointments to the cathedral were Anthony Salvin, who replaced William Wylom in the twelfth prebend in 1556, and the former Durham monk George Cliffe in September 1558.Footnote 28 Just after Tunstall's death a significant number of former monks were deprived for refusing the Elizabethan religious settlement and the new canons sent north by the Elizabethan regime gave, as David Marcombe has noted, the chapter a new and often less local character.Footnote 29
After 1541 the newly secular cathedral took on an expanded role within the diocese. The cathedral retained responsibility for providing rectors and vicars for twenty-two of the approximately 140 diocesan parishes and the presentation of curates, singing men and chantry priests to another sixteen churches after 1541.Footnote 30 As a secular college of priests it could also be asked to take on more direct parochial responsibilities. The first and most obvious new way in which the new cathedral community was asked to contribute in the diocese was as vicars and rectors of cathedral livings. Rectories were a serious responsibility in terms of pastoral care and Elizabethan canons struggled to meet their obligations.Footnote 31 They were expected to oversee preaching and to teach the parishioners the new catechisms of the Church of England. How well they carried out these tasks is unknown as no churchwardens’ accounts from before 1580 have survived. Tunstall sought to appoint or have appointed to the cathedral local priests active in the diocese who would also continue their parochial work to the cathedral. The men who were appointed to the cathedral or who are known to have been suggested as canons by Tunstall himself were locally-based, university-educated and interested in preaching. He attempted to persuade Bernard Gilpin, whose fame as a preacher was memorialised in Elizabeth's reign, to accept a prebend in the cathedral and managed to induce him to accept one of the archdeaconries for a time before Gilpin resigned because he did not want to be a pluralist priest.Footnote 32 Anthony Salvin, who became a canon in 1556, was from a prominent local family and had held diocesan benefices in the 1540s.Footnote 33 George Cliffe, appointed in September 1558, had been a monk working towards a higher degree at Oxford in 1539.Footnote 34 Of the men who were appointed by the monarch before 1556, John Crawford was probably the most successful new appointment. It may have been at Tunstall's request that he was appointed by Henry viii to a canonry in 1542 as he was otherwise unlikely to have come to royal attention. He was an Oxford-educated former friar from Newcastle who had been pensioned off in 1536 and who in November 1541 received a prebend at Lumley from Tunstall.Footnote 35 Crawford's will included several bequests to his fellow canons, suggesting friendships and amicable working relationships.Footnote 36
The intellectual world of the cathedral
Durham Priory was unusually in sympathy with its bishop's intellectual interests and the possibilities for cautious diocesan reform after 1530. The monastic nature of the cathedral might have precluded a close association between the bishop and the chapter. Instead, Tunstall found himself head of an institution with which he had shared intellectual interests and in which university education was the route to monastic office.Footnote 37 He and his chaplains mostly came from Cambridge's humanist theological world of the early sixteenth century while the prior and his senior monks had been educated at Durham College in Oxford, but they shared a sense of intellectual engagement with the issues of the day.Footnote 38 All were familiar with the new humanist editorial work of men such as Erasmus and Guillaume Budé. Both the bishop's household and the cathedral were worried by the king's demands for royal supremacy in the Church and perhaps by the new succession plans of 1533. More generally, they all were thinking about the intellectual and religious problems of Christendom as it faced schism and division. With its heavy emphasis on university education for almost half the monks, the provision of education in the song school and in the continuing eager acquisition of books both by individual monks and by the common library, Durham appears to have been trying to be a model of monastic practice in the early sixteenth century.Footnote 39
Engagement with the themes that had occupied Tunstall as a scholar is evident in Durham's books. Tunstall had published his influential De arte supputandi in 1522, the first treatise on mathematics published in England, which was based on an older work, Luca Pacioli's Somma of 1494.Footnote 40 Simon Grynaeus’ edition of Euclid's Geometry was dedicated to Tunstall because of the excellence of De arte supputandi.Footnote 41 At least one sixteenth-century monk had an interest in mathematics, as he added a description of how to perform calculations using the technique of algarismus into a fifteenth-century collection of Durham historical writings.Footnote 42 Among the books owned by the monk and then canon Robert Dalton was a 1542 edition of Georg von Peuerbach's fifteenth-century treatise on the motion of the planets, printed at Wittenberg and dedicated to the reformer Philipp Melanchthon among others.Footnote 43 Peuerbach's work was an explanation and adaptation of Ptolemy's scheme of astronomy. Dalton annotated it with interest, thinking through Peuerbach's refinements to Ptolemy.Footnote 44 The four books that Tunstall is known to have given to the cathedral library were similarly medical or concerned with the physical world: Budé’s De asse of 1515 bound with his Annotationes of 1508, Sylvaticus’ Opus Pandectarum of 1511 and Dioscorides's De materia medica of 1518.Footnote 45 The Sylvaticus in particular was an attempt at comprehensive knowledge of the natural world to parallel the De proprietatibus rerum already in the collection.Footnote 46 As these books have Tunstall's characteristic ‘sum Tunstalli’ inscription, it is probable that they had been in his library for some time before he gave them to the cathedral and that they reflected his own scientific interests, shared with his cathedral staff.
One of the other major intellectual themes that united the monastic community and then the cathedral community was the concern for textual accuracy and source criticism. A comment about Tunstall as ‘most learned bishop of Durham’ was added alongside Erasmus’ thanks for his help on a tricky point of source criticism on Ambrose of Milan.Footnote 47 Tunstall edited a text on the Apocalypse that he thought was by Ambrose and that was published under that label in 1554.Footnote 48 He had chosen to edit this text from a thirteenth-century version originally from Hereford rather than from the copy in the cathedral library, probably because he felt the Hereford copy was more accurate, and certainly had fewer interpolated chapter summaries.Footnote 49 Books owned by Tunstall, his chaplains and cathedral canons all reflect a scholarly concern with textual accuracy and particularly biblical accuracy. His chaplain, Robert Ridley, gave to Durham Cathedral in 1533 a copy of the 1517 Polyglot Bible, in which the shortcomings of the Latin Vulgate were laid bare through the provision of the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts, with their own translations into Latin alongside the standard Vulgate translation by Jerome.Footnote 50 The cathedral library also acquired at some point Tunstall's own copy of the 1519 New Testament edited by Erasmus, which again gave the community access to the cutting edge of biblical textual scholarship.Footnote 51 Much later, Tunstall's nephew and chaplain, the Puritan Bernard Gilpin, owned and used a Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic Psalter, in which he underlined the Hebrew, again with concern for the range of meanings possible in translation.Footnote 52 The monk Thomas Swallwell had bought in 1510 a copy of the 1508 Quintuplex Psalterium, which offered side-by-side access to the three key variant versions of the Psalter: the French, the Roman and a new translation into Latin of the Hebrew, as well as two further versions, one of which was the editor, Jacques Lefèvre's, own translation.Footnote 53 At some point, the book passed to Thomas Sparke who gave it away in 1566, but who seems to have made use of it first.Footnote 54 All these men were engaging with the tools of the humanist scholar as turned towards the religious texts of the day, regardless of their varying opinions on doctrinal issues.
The final area where Tunstall, his household and the monastic community had strong shared interests was in the emerging literature of the confessional divide and in attempting to make sense of the emerging theologies and possibilities of reform. The place of monasticism within reforming theology was also in question. The monks and then canons William Wylom and John Tutyng owned a copy of John Trithemius’ Sermones et exhortationes ad monachos.Footnote 55 Wylom and Tutyng seem to have read this volume closely for its discussions of the possibilities of a humanist and reforming monastic life; for example one of them, probably Tutyng, has underlined and added a ‘nota’ to a section on how monks are among the soldiers of Christ by tending to the altars and living virtuously through humility and patience.Footnote 56 In Tunstall's letter to Reginald Pole concerning Pole's book on why Henry viii’s religious policy was wrong, Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, Tunstall made use of the Church Fathers to assert that church authority belonged not to the pope, but to church councils, and in addition that obedience to the king was a higher virtue than obedience to the pope.Footnote 57 It was a theme and a defence that he returned to in the open letter that he and John Stokesley wrote to Pole later that year where he quoted Ambrose, Cyprian and Jerome.Footnote 58 Earlier, his chaplain Walter Preston, who was also the rector of the parish of Redmarshall, had been reading, annotating and underlining a copy of the conciliar theorist of the early fifteenth century, Jean Gerson, on exactly that question of apostolic succession from Peter and the competing authorities of the wider Church and the papacy.Footnote 59 The volume ended up in the cathedral's library after Preston's early death in 1533, and was possibly also used by the monks.Footnote 60 These anti-papal views in Tunstall's circles went alongside a specific dislike for Luther. Tunstall's anti-Lutheran stance as bishop of London led to his involvement in heresy trials there, and to his licensing of More to read Luther's works in order to refute them.Footnote 61 Similarly, the monk Richard Maudley went through Cochlaeus’ sermons against Martin Luther carefully adding the biblical references to Cochlaeus’ refutation of Luther's arguments, and emphasised his own credentials as holding a doctorate in theology.Footnote 62 Only one heresy case is known from Durham, Ralph Dichaunte of Newcastle in 1536, but heresy and its definitions were clearly still of concern in the diocese and to the cathedral community.Footnote 63
The defence of the priory, 1536–9
The cathedral's role within its diocese extended beyond intellectual collaboration and preaching to practical concerns over ecclesiastical reform, lands and wealth. Here, too, the bishop and the community collaborated in their efforts to shape the diocese and maintain their financial positions at a period when monasteries as a type were under threat from reformers, most notably Erasmus, and royal desire for land and wealth. As Trithemius’ work and the interests of the Durham monks showed, monasteries were not necessarily antithetical to reform. Yet in England from 1535, the lands of the Church were under threat from Thomas Cromwell's valuations of their lands and then the first legislation dissolving the monasteries.Footnote 64 The prior's awareness of the potential fragility of his position in the 1530s can be seen in that there are no novices mentioned in Tunstall's register, and there were none pensioned off in 1539. The last monk to celebrate his first mass was Richard Foster between June 1538 and September 1539.Footnote 65 Durham Cathedral would be defended with care on all possible fronts in those uncertain years before it was finally dissolved on the last day of December in 1539.
Tunstall and Prior Whitehead acted to preserve Durham Cathedral's distinctive mix of wealth, educational provision and library resources during the uncertain years of the dissolution of the monasteries, in order to maintain good order in the diocese. The General Visitation of the monasteries in 1536 commented on Tunstall's success in bringing reform to the diocese through the good governance of the cathedral. The commissioners, Thomas Legh and Richard Layton, wrote effusively to Cromwell on 26 January 1536 about what they found at Durham, praising both the priory and the bishop.Footnote 66 Tunstall had met them at the border of the diocese and rode with them to Auckland, where he entertained them before sending them on their way with ‘large rewards’ to the commissioners and their staff. No other serious faults were found in the other two remaining monasteries in the diocese. It probably helped that Layton was related to Tunstall himself, and had held offices within the diocese.Footnote 67 Legh even used the visitation as a chance to recommend that Tunstall be put in charge of the entire project of reformation in England. Their comments were substantive rather than glancing, however, and concerned actions within the diocese as a whole as well as at the cathedral. Tunstall had preached widely in the diocese against the power of the bishop of Rome, ‘so that no part of the realm is in better order in that respect’.Footnote 68 Layton echoed his fellow commissioner, saying that the ‘country hereabout is substantially established in the abolition of the bishop of Rome’.Footnote 69 Both men acknowledged Tunstall's learning and the weight that was given to his opinion among learned men, such that his views ought to be taken seriously, and that if he could be persuaded to write against the papacy ‘all the kings of Christendom’ would follow England's example.Footnote 70
Tunstall was also associated with the long-running efforts to ensure that Durham was financially protected from royal plunder, which drew on the cathedral's existing relationships with the wider lay community of St Cuthbert. Between 1534 and 1537 Thomas Cromwell was given annuities and the office of steward of the bishop's manor of Howden and Howdenshire to persuade him to look favourably on the cathedral.Footnote 71 In addition to efforts to ensure considerate treatment for Durham, both Whitehead and Tunstall sought to put as much of the priory's, and indeed the diocese's, potential patronage out of reach of Cromwell and the Crown even as they placated Cromwell with annuities and offices. In 1538 and 1539 the bishop and the prior consistently granted out the right to present to the next vacancy of a benefice to groups rather than waiting for the actual vacancy to arise and then appointing a candidate.Footnote 72 This was a standard manoeuvre that had been used by the kings of England themselves to offer access to clerical patronage for their lay supporters.Footnote 73 It was particularly useful when the patron did not have a candidate in mind for a benefice. Tunstall and Whitehead in 1538 and 1539 were probably not widening their patronage within the diocese, but instead drawing on existing connections.Footnote 74 They were working with these groups to protect the cathedral's rights because if a benefice or office came vacant while the rights of the priory and of the bishop were unclear, the king would claim the right to present. It would then be difficult to reassert the cathedral's rights in the future, if at all. The grantees knew that they could present only once and that the rights would then revert back to the cathedral community, hopefully once the dangerous period of uncertainty was over. There was not much room left for any independent exercise of church patronage to benefit local families on the rise at the expense of the cathedral's rights to land and ecclesiastical patronage within the diocese. While the king could have challenged those grants for transparently shielding church property from him, he did not do so.
New statutes and the role of the cathedral
The relationship between the bishop and the cathedral was heavily conditioned by the attitudes of the bishop towards his powers within the diocese, his visitation rights to the cathedral and the priory's leadership. Both the bishop and the priory controlled extensive patronage and property within the diocese, with by far the largest part of the benefices within the diocese being in their gifts.Footnote 75 The priory also had deep connections within the local community as monks were often drawn from local families.Footnote 76 After a long thirteenth-century conflict between Bishop Anthony Bek and the priory over the extent of the bishop's rights to hold visitations, the mid-fifteenth century had seen close co-operation and mutual admiration between Bishop Thomas Langley and the priors with whom he worked.Footnote 77 Langley gave books and vestments in his will as well as founding the new song school.Footnote 78 During the Wars of the Roses Bishop Laurence Booth struggled with the Neville dominance in the north and quarrelled with the priory over his oversight of the cathedral and of the priory lands in the diocese.Footnote 79 By the time that Tunstall was appointed in 1530, the rights of the priory to be free of interference from the bishop other than at times of the yearly visitation had been long-established.Footnote 80 As such, the bishop's powers were potentially quite large if he could successfully assert the victories of Anthony Bek and, to a lesser extent, Laurence Booth, but otherwise the priory would continue to act independently. Thus in 1556, when the new statutes were created, there was an opportunity to clarify what the relationship between the bishop and cathedral should be as well as the role that all parties envisaged for the cathedral within the diocese.
Reginald Pole's expectations for the involvement of the English cathedrals in the religious and intellectual life of their dioceses in the 1550s were already reflected in the practice at Durham.Footnote 81 The canons were already highly educated theologians with a good working relationship with their bishop. The library seems to have continued to be a major concern through the 1530s and 1540s as new books continued to be added. Mary's reign, however, marked the codification in the statutes of 1556 of Tunstall's ideals of how the bishop, the cathedral and the diocese should be related. Most of the new cathedrals of 1541 had received statutes according to a common form by 1544, but Durham seems to have been omitted for no apparent reason. Draft statutes may have been drawn up but never ratified; the statutes start with doubts about the existence of any former statutes, as they were to be inspected ‘if there be any’.Footnote 82 The community had operated according to the foundation letter patent of March 1541 and local custom, which would probably have involved ongoing improvisation and consultation with Tunstall, his suffragan, Thomas Sparke, or with his chancellor, Robert Hyndmer, in his absence. In March 1555 Philip and Mary set up a commission to create statutes at last for Durham.Footnote 83 While no records survive of this process, the commissioners seem to have used the Henrician statutes as a base text onto which particulars of Durham's situation and Tunstall's own concerns were grafted. He would have had the strongest sense of what was needed at Durham and the relationship that he wanted to exist between the cathedral community and the bishopric. It is no accident that the Durham statutes start with the rules for greeting the bishop when he arrives at his cathedral and the role that he can and should play in cathedral services.Footnote 84 Tunstall clearly believed that the bishop should be an integral part of the liturgical life of the cathedral when possible. In this he parallels the official legatine constitutions of Archbishop Pole, which state that the purpose of the cathedral church is to ‘assist the bishop and aid him in his duties’, including through providing a good example in performing the liturgy.Footnote 85
Another area where Tunstall's own concerns probably shaped the statutes’ provisions was in the concern for its books and preaching. The new statutes made careful provision for the library. The sacrist was to be responsible for ‘the book cupboard or library’, which was to be ‘exhibited yearly before the dean and others’ to guard against losses. There was also to be a register kept of the books and any loans to canons or ‘a stranger’ were to be authorised by the dean and recorded.Footnote 86 While no sixteenth-century book list survives, this provision in the statutes suggests that the common library was intended as a resource for the cathedral, and indeed perhaps for a wider community of priests from surrounding parishes. The purpose of this concern for the library and theologically-informed preaching throughout the diocese fits well with Pole's use of preaching, as noted by Eamon Duffy, to make the case for his implementation of the emerging Tridentine practice.Footnote 87 Elsewhere the statutes emphasised the need for the cathedral's staff to preach, both within the cathedral and within their own benefices elsewhere in the diocese.Footnote 88 The dean was to preach on specified major feast days in English rather than Latin in the cathedral, and at least twice a year in the wider diocese. Each canon was to preach in the cathedral four times a year, which would mean that there could be a sermon every week or even potentially more frequently depending on how much time the dean and bishop invested in preaching. Preaching was a valid reason for shortening the liturgy and ‘the dean and canons [were] to be diligent … in spreading the Word of God in the country and especially in the cathedral church’.Footnote 89 After discussion with the cathedral's canons, several additions were made in December 1556, including an agreement that if a canon was preaching two or more sermons in the diocese on a particular day, it would count towards his residence payments in the cathedral and thus the common fund would be used to support diocesan work, both in the canons’ own parishes and more generally.Footnote 90
Education continued to be a priority at Durham. Tunstall had intervened earlier to save the schools connected with Durham Priory and to ensure their continuance. He wrote to Cromwell in 1537 to save the song school and the grammar school from the crushing weight of arrears of pay for the teachers.Footnote 91 In 1556 due attention was then given to ensuring that the grammar school would continue and would support efforts at counter-reformation. These statutes reflected the cathedral community's and Tunstall's own concern for learning, anticipating Reginald Pole's calls for good Catholic schooling, and the demand that cathedrals turn their efforts towards doctrinal teaching at a seminary level.Footnote 92 As such, they mark a very early implementation of the type of wider programme that would emerge from the Council of Trent. At Durham, there were two groups of boys who received free education by the terms of the new statutes, the choristers and the scholars of the grammar school.Footnote 93 The choristers might become scholars in due course and were to be preferred to newcomers in admissions. Others might also be admitted to the school, but would not be educated at the expense of the dean and chapter. The new rules for the grammar school were precise. Eighteen boys from the diocese who already were literate and ‘had the rudiments of grammar’ were to be supported by the cathedral while they learned Latin, for four or at most five years. The master was to have both Latin and Greek, although a Greek curriculum was not mentioned. On leaving the grammar school, probably around the age of nineteen, the boys would be well-equipped to go on to study at the universities. This plan, while not quite matching Reginald Pole's ideas of a seminary attached to each cathedral, could easily have been expanded to involve training for the priesthood. The bishop was to have oversight of the curriculum, even if he were not expected to draw up the plans of study himself. Once again, just as in the liturgy, Tunstall and his cathedral seem to have envisaged the bishop's role within the community as one of active and continuous oversight and co-operation, between the biennial formal visitations.
Robert Horne and the Protestant cathedral
The vision of the cathedral as integral to the diocese through education and preaching was not solely a conservative ideal or one that was particular to Tunstall's good working relationship with the cathedral community. Henry viii’s evangelical bishops also issued injunctions which suggested that they felt that their cathedrals were potential sources of good reformed practice. Thomas Cranmer was frustrated with the hybrid at Canterbury after 1541 between preachers and traditional canons because they were not helping him in his aim of educating the diocese.Footnote 94 In 1543 Bishop Nicholas Heath's injunctions to Rochester Cathedral dealt with the practical needs of the new foundation, but also emphasised the need for preaching, with the implication that part of the function of his cathedral as he envisaged it was to provide an example to the rest of the diocese.Footnote 95 The Edwardian regime's concern for cathedrals as the head of their dioceses led to further injunctions to them to ensure that their rectories be properly looked after, that they provide appropriate libraries and that they preach and provide grammar schools.Footnote 96 These injunctions show the regime looking to use the resources noted by Stanford Lehmberg for their own ends.Footnote 97 How successful these reforms were can only be guessed at, although the lack of mass resignations from cathedral prebends in 1553 when Mary came to the throne as compared to the widespread deprivations in 1560 suggests that Reginald Pole's efforts to introduce early Tridentine practices of scholarship and education were rather more successful.Footnote 98
At Durham, the evangelical dean under Edward vi also offers a case study in the possibilities of the cathedral as a base for reform, even in difficult circumstances, through preaching and personally overseeing education. Robert Horne, appointed as dean in 1551, does not seem to be have been well liked at the cathedral and was isolated because most of the other residentiary canons were former monks.Footnote 99 He was sent north to spearhead the Edwardian Reformation in the diocese, starting with the cathedral itself. The author of the Rites of Durham blamed him for the loss of significant parts of Durham's ‘ancient monuments’.Footnote 100 Despite opposition within the cathedral community, he seems to have been effective. The Privy Council ordered the canons to obey his orders, particularly in relation to the liturgy, which probably meant the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer to cathedral services as well as in the diocese.Footnote 101 At the same time as Horne was sent north from the court, Tunstall was imprisoned in the Tower of London, so Horne was free to fill the gap left by his absence. Horne's own account of how he himself came to flee Durham after Mary's ascension in 1553 is illuminating as a polemic about what he thought his role as the cathedral dean within the wider diocese should be. There were two key elements of his work that had been undone. First, Horne despaired of losing, under Mary, his liturgical changes not just at the cathedral but in the whole diocese: ‘I saw God's Book [the Book of Common Prayer] … taken forth of the churches in the bishopric of Durham.’Footnote 102 Secondly, he deplored the loss of his educational efforts, the ‘edifying of Christ's congregation’, through reading the Book of Common Prayer.Footnote 103 That Tunstall had charged him with having ‘infected the whole diocese with new learning [evangelical religion]’ and having ‘exercised his [Tunstall's] office in his bishopric’ was a source of pride for Horne; he laughed to himself at the charges made by the returning bishop.Footnote 104 He felt that he had been effective in using his position at the cathedral towards reform, even if he then had to see it undone again by the change of regime back to Catholicism.
Horne's career also allows us to assess the potential relative roles of the dean and the bishop in reforming efforts, although there were special circumstances at work because of the intention of the Edwardian regime to divide Durham into two new dioceses in 1552. When the diocese of Durham was officially, although not practically, divided in order to attempt to recapture much of the bishop's revenues for the Crown, Horne was suggested as a possible bishop for one of the new dioceses but refused the post.Footnote 105 He clearly did not feel that episcopacy was inherently alien to his reforming ambitions, as in 1560 he became bishop of Winchester. That, however, was in a very different context within the English Church, where there was much less of a fight over the revenues of the dioceses. In 1552 Cranmer was at odds with Northumberland over doctrine and the sale of the chantry lands confiscated in 1548, which meant that acquiescence to Northumberland's plans might be disadvantageous to Horne's wider career.Footnote 106 Certainly, the duke of Northumberland did not find him congenial, calling him in this context ‘peevish’.Footnote 107 At Durham Horne seems to have felt that he was better placed as dean of the established cathedral in charge of its patronage, wealth and influence in the diocese, rather than as a bishop trying to build a new diocese in the region with substantially diminished funds. As dean, he had the financial and institutional resources to carry out his educational work, particularly in the cathedral's traditional role of providing priests to many of the diocesan parishes, and in providing preaching, which would then be formalised in the statutes of 1556, after his departure for Geneva. Reform in the cathedral's liturgy and tearing down its Catholic monuments acted as an example of Horne's intentions for the rest of the diocese, which was the natural work of the dean, but also an expansion into the void left by his imprisoned bishop. In 1552 Horne judged that preserving the rights of the cathedral rather than taking up the episcopacy was the route to energetic reform in the diocese of Durham.
The monastic and then collegiate community at Durham was exceptional in the depth of its intellectual commitments and its personal and intellectual sympathy with its distinguished bishop in the 1530s. The community sought out information about the live controversies of the early years of the Reformation and, along with Tunstall's own chaplains, turned to their historical and theological books to make sense of what they were being asked to do. They were not unquestioning of late medieval religion, nor were they ardent reformers. The monks who annotated and interrogated their books were educated theologians interested in the new methods of textual criticism and the possibilities that it offered. The sixteenth-century books at Durham also reflect ongoing commitment to the ideals that were to be codified in the 1556 statutes and carried forward until the new twenty-first century statutes finally replaced them: a document based on Henrician models, drawn up under Philip and Mary and lasting through centuries of Anglicanism. The commitments to the diocese, through preaching, education and choice of parochial clergy, predated the Reformation at Durham and could be mobilised by both conservatives such as Tunstall and evangelicals such as Horne. They were ideals that were in the process of being clarified and intensified on both sides of the emerging confessional divide. For both men and for their contemporaries the cathedral community was potentially the leader of the diocese, particularly, as at Durham, when many of the cathedral staff already had familial and personal links to the surrounding diocese. The cathedral was not a remnant of the medieval structure of the Church, inexplicably retained within the Church of England at the Reformation, but a resource to be used in the fight for godly religion, however defined.
