Cheshire

by Charles E. Kelsey

On one of the walls of the Parish Church of Macclesfield is a small brass plate, a few inches square. It is called a 'Pardon brass', and represents the Pope bowing before Christ, while Roger Legh and his six sons are in the act of prayer. Beneath the figures is the inscription: 'The pardon for saying of five paternosters, five aves and a creed, is twenty-six thousand years and twenty-six days of pardon.' We are not told how much money Roger Legh paid the Pope for obtaining pardon for his misdeeds, but it was a good round sum, I imagine.

During the Middle Ages the doctrine grew up that sins committed by one man might be atoned for by the prayers or penance performed by others, together with a sum of money, which varied according to the crime. The price of pardon for robbery was twelve shillings, for murder only seven shillings and sixpence, and for perjury nine shillings. By the sixteenth century people began to have an uneasy feeling that the sale of 'indulgences', as these pardons were called, was wrong, and preachers rose up everywhere to denounce the system.

This was only one of many evils which was bringing the Church into ill repute. Reformers, like Martin Luther, showed that the Church believed many things which did not agree with the teaching of the Bible. Moreover, churchmen filled all the principal offices of state, and used their position as a means of amassing great wealth, a portion of which passed into the hands of the Pope, who was the recognized head of the Church and whom the clergy were bound to obey. As the clergy would not reform the Church themselves, the king and his lay ministers decided to do it for them by Act of Parliament. King Henry the Eighth declared himself head of the English Church, which, from this time, became separated from the Church of Rome.

The king then turned his attention to the monasteries, which had grown wealthy at the expense of the people. The monks themselves had grown lazy and careless of their duties, and many of them were living evil lives. The king decided to turn out the monks and do away with the monasteries altogether.

In the year 1536 the king's officers appeared in Cheshire. The first to suffer was the Abbot of Norton Priory, who resisted stoutly and summoned all his tenants to his assistance. The king's men were compelled to take refuge in a tower, but managed to send a message to Sir Piers Dutton, Sheriff of Chester, by whose aid the abbot was captured and conveyed to Halton Castle. The priory was sold, and the revenues, plate, and jewels confiscated to the king.

Vale Royal fared no better. In this case, at any rate, the monks deserved their fate. They had long been the terror of the neighbourhood, and were the friends of the robbers and cut-throats of Delamere Forest. Abbot and monks were expelled from the abbey, which was handed over to Sir Thomas Holcroft. The Holcroft crest was a raven, and superstitious people saw in the fall of Vale Royal the fulfilment of a prophecy of a Cheshire 'wise man' named Nixon, who said that the abbey would one day be destroyed and become a raven's nest.

The Cistercian Abbeys of Combermere and Darnhall, and the Priories at Mobberley and Birkenhead, were treated in similar fashion, and their wealth and estates divided between the neighbouring gentry and the king.

The Abbot of S. Werburgh was the most powerful man in Cheshire, but he could not save his abbey from the greedy hands of the king's officials. The wealth of this abbey was reckoned at more than a thousand pounds, a large sum in those days, equal to a sum at least ten times as great at the present time. The abbots lived in their fortified manor-houses at Saighton and Ince, where they kept great state, and supported large numbers of retainers and dependants. They held a court at Chester, and frequent quarrels arose between them and the Mayor of Chester as to the extent of their powers and jurisdiction.

The people of Chester were probably not sorry to see the abbot stripped of his power. He did not, like the Abbot of Norton, show violence to the royal officers, but fell in quietly with their wishes. For this he received his reward, and returned to Chester within two years, no longer as abbot, but as dean of a new cathedral.

Many of the bishoprics of England covered such a vast extent of country that Henry decided to spend a portion of the wealth which he had taken from the monasteries, in creating six new bishoprics. Chester was one of them, and the Abbey of S. Werburgh became the cathedral church of the new bishopric, a portion of the new buildings being set apart as a palace for the newly made Bishops of Chester. The first bishop was John Bird, a Carmelite friar.