Newark Church, Nottinghamshire.
The town, as one of the halting-places of the funeral progress of Queen Eleanor, was ornamented with one of the crosses with which the king marked every step of that great pageant.
To come to more recent times, and to the particulars with which we are most concerned, the borough was one parish[598] under the care of a vicar; and its parish church,[599] rebuilt in the reign of Henry VI., is a very large and noble structure, with its chancel screen and carved stalls, and some fine carving, still remaining uninjured. We have already had occasion to give the particulars of the income of the vicar,[600] which amounted at the time of the “Valor” to £21, and of the outgoings, which included a stipend of £5 for a chaplain,[601] we have to add here the services and priests which helped to complete the religious arrangements of the town.
The Calendar of Chantries, etc., so often quoted, gives the following list of them—
St. Nicholas’ Chantry, a chantry at the altar of St. James; Sawcendine’s Chantry; “Morrow Mass” Chantry; St. Catherine’s Chantry; Corpus Christi Chantry, founded by Fleming;[602] Corpus Christi Chantry, founded by Isabell Caldwell; Newark Chantry; Trinity Chantry; All Saints’ Chantry; Foster’s Chantry; Trinity Gild[603] Chantry; Trinity Chantry, founded by John Leeke.
There are thirteen chantries in all. One we note was for a “Morrow Mass,” i.e. a very early celebration of Holy Communion; the rest would be arranged at various hours. The Trinity Gild was the great gild of the town, which here, as in many other towns, supplied, to some extent, the place of a municipal corporation.
Some solidarity was given to this group of cantarists by the fact that they lived together in a mansion which a benefactor had provided for them. The internal economy of the mansion would require some regulation which would not improbably be borrowed from the rules which were customary in a college of priest-vicars, or chantry house of several priests. The rules for the chantry priests lodging in Archbishop Rotherham’s College,[604] and those for the chapel at Kingston-on-Thames,[605] will indicate their general character.
Thomas Magnus, Archdeacon of the East Riding of York, a native of the town just before the Reformation (1532), founded at the north-west point of the churchyard a free school for a priest sufficiently learned to teach grammar, who was to be paid £10; together with a song school for a priest[606] sufficiently learned to teach plain song and play the organ, who was to have £8; and six children to be taught music, and to play upon the organs, who were to have 26s. 8d. each. The founder also founded an obit of 40s., and 40s. to be given to the alderman [of the Holy Trinity Gild] for the time being.
The cathedral-like choir of the church would then be well filled on Sundays and holy days by the vicar and his chaplain and the thirteen cantarists and the children of the song school, and the Divine service honourably rendered, and the long nave would doubtless be filled with the devout people. The whole clerical staff of the town consisted of the vicar, his chaplain and clerk, the brethren of the two friaries, perhaps a dozen in each, the thirteen cantarists in their chantry house: nearly forty men, besides the military monks in the preceptory.