The Lunar Men (2002)

 

This is where it happened: Matthew Boulton’s dining room at Soho House, Birmingham, where the Lunar Society used to meet. Looks like there aren't enough chairs to go round, but perhaps not everyone joined every dinner.

The history of science genre is quite a growth industry in publishing.  Forty years ago, you wouldn't see many science titles in a bookshop. Today, books on popular science aren’t confined to the specialist shelves, but appear in the mainstream new title displays. But has the history of science progressed from a dreary niche to the mainstream? Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, confidently subtitled “The friends who made the future”, is worth appraising in that context. My verdict? It certainly attempts to be popular, has a great subject, but compared with the earlier Robert Schofield’s The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1963) it sets out to be more enjoyable to read, but maddeningly, turns out often to be less clear.

Infantile

Uglow writes as if the reader has to be entertained like a child. Every statement has to be illustrated by metaphor and simile: "In these early years the lives of the Lunar men crossed like cotton threaded between pins on a map." [p35]. The book has many sweeping generalisations that, on reflection, should never have appeared: “Children learned from the world around them just as much as from books.” [p9]. All children? More than today? What proof? “Mechanical wonders entranced many children.” [p10]. Well, that’s true today as well. Frequently, the author tries to make the facts become more entertaining, by throwing in anecdotes that turn out to be less than relevant. For example,  Uglow describes how Erasmus Darwin goes to school in Chesterfield, but we have a paragraph about Derby on page 9. Derby was 25 miles from Chesterfield, and it is unlikely Darwin will have gone there while at school.

Part of the attempt to turn this book into something more entertaining, is the use of an image with a woman in the cover illustration of the paperback edition, but none of the Lunar Men (note the title) were women. In fact, the cover shows none of the Lunar Men. There is a cumbersome attempt to justify the cover picture in the text, but could Uglow not have found a more relevant illustration for the cover?

Too many words

Sheer number of words is not necessarily a problem: the book has over 500 pages of text , and around 210,000 words, and a leisurely pace (chapter 1 is essentially “Erasmus Darwin went to school”), but the anecdotal style and lack of signposting makes it difficult to keep track of the major figures in the Lunar Society. There is a list of “The Principal Lunar Men in order of age”, but a paragraph on each would be welcome. As we jump across characters, it is challenging to keep track of who we are reading about, especially since Uglow seems to believe that she can only engage the reader by adding anecdotes, relevant or otherwise, to keep our interest. Frequently, that involves adding more names, resulting in a general mish-mash of people that no reader can follow. For example:

In 1766, Edgeworth was 22 – a good twelve years younger than Darwin – a tall, dark-haired, talkative, arm-waving Irishman. His conjuring was a side interest, taken up with the rake Sir Francis Delaval with whom he put on entertainments based on his working out of the magnets and mechanisms used by the great French conjuror Comus.

Comus is not mentioned further, but we then proceed to an anecdote about Delaval sabotaging a show by another magician. But we have moved away from the Lunar Society completely! The story is complicated enough without this meandering for effect.

I learned, incidentally, from Schofield’s much shorter account, that the Lunar Society left no records of its meetings. That makes it more difficult for us to assess how the Society worked in practice. Paradoxically, this gives Uglow more opportunity to write in a more discursive way, at times maddeningly so.

Too much striving for effect

I don’t mind each character’s appearance and behaviour being described, but the author is in the habit of using many terms that would not be understood by the general reader, so why not gloss them? For example, “Bohea Tea”, p5, which was common at the time, but not today.

Uglow seems to be on a mission to point out any intersection between the Lunar Men, to the point of irrelevance. When Watt and his friend John Marr travel to London in 1755, we read “Finally, after crossing the Trent at Newark, near Erasmus Darwin’s home, they reached London” [p29] But Watt had no connection with Darwin at that time!

Non-sequiturs

Despite the book’s length, there are many throwaway references that don’t make sense: “As a student at Trinity College, Dublin, he lived at such a drunken pace that his alarmed father sent him to Oxford” – does that make any sense? Would Oxford in the 1760s have been any more sober than Trinity College Dublin?

Argument not backed up

After all the above, this reader feels it is something of a struggle to isolate Uglow’s argument from the text, but there are some attempts to link the Lunar Society with larger themes. However, I would want much more corroboration for me to be convinced. For example, in chapter11, Uglow writes “Even though they were down-to-earth companions of reason, a part of the delight was to feel they were unlocking esoteric secrets, exploring transmutations like alchemists of old.” But after visiting the Erasmus Darwin house, I feel the opposite was the case. Darwin was fascinated by all kinds of natural phenomena, but it was always to search for a rational cause behind them. It’s an unnecessary and unwarranted romanticisation of the Lunar Men to suggest this kind of angle. 

Frequently, major claims have no citation, e.g. [p6] “Yet for all the future Lunar men, as for so many of the coming generation, the [Jacobite 45] Rebellion was a key point in the forging of a stout, Protestant, Hanoverian nationalism, whose patriotic rhetoric would ring loud in future projects.” Says who? You could argue, and some did, that Thatcher’s invasion of the Falkland Islands forged a kind of nationalism in Britain. But I’d want a citation or two to demonstrate it.

Another statement without citation is “Progressive-minded Whigs championing the demonstrators [of electrical effects], and High-Church Tories claiming it was blasphemy to expose God’s secrets to an ignorant populace.” Was all scientific innovation Whig? This could be an interesting angle, but it is not developed further. William Withering, for example, was a Tory.

Some of Uglow’s statements appear to be sweeping generalisation: “Darwin, Boulton and Wedgewood were […] all descended from ‘yeomen’” – perhaps, but Darwin was from a wealthy family. Uglow herself states “the Darwin family were … brought up on the collected volumes of the Tatler and Spectator.”

I’m not always convinced that Uglow communicates the science well. For example, the discussion of static electricity states “it was thought that you had to insulate it [the Leyden jar] as a precaution against it being ‘leaked’. Well, a static electricity generator does have to be insulated, otherwise the charge will be dissipated. That can be described as leaking.

Summary

The Lunar Society is, for me, a fascinating phenomenon. Uglow’s book is a major achievement, with much quotation from primary unpublished sources, but I feel there is still an opportunity for placing the group in the context of Enlightenment Britain and Europe.

The Highland Clearances (John Prebble, 1963)

 

All that is left of the settlement of Ceannabeinne, cleared in 1842

Few non-fiction books have as much narrative power as this one. Prebble’s account of the expulsion of tenants from the Highlands in the 18th- and 19th-centuries reads like a novel where you race to find out what happens next. His achievement is all the greater when you realise that what happens next is no different from what happened before: the law wins, and the people lose. Yet you cannot stop reading.

It’s only after you have finished the book, after getting your breath back, as it were, that you start to question the book. Prebble has chosen to focus on one story only, and one explanation. For him, the Clearances took place in the Highlands, where traditional relationships between tenant and chief were forcibly terminated, the people removed (and encouraged to emigrate) and replaced by sheep farms. For him, the story is the maltreatment of humans by humans, using the law as an agent of oppression. As he states, the law was frequently ignored even in the 18th century when the people were oppressed, as with the American Revolution.

But while the oppression of the poor is horrific, it’s not the whole story. Prebble focuses so much on the horror that he doesn’t really explain how the story ended, with the 1886 Crofters Holdings Act, granting security from eviction to tenants (too late to matter, he would say). For him, the story ends with yet another eviction. But why did the population of the Highlands increase over the time period described in the book? Is there any possible sustainable life that could exist in the Highlands then or now, apart from the meanest form of subsistence farming that left every family at risk from famine or disease? Or, as Tom Devine would point out, in his book pointedly entitled The Scottish Clearances (2018), do we ignore the Lowland Clearances, or even consider the unforced movement of people away from the land and to the towns, to a different kind of employment? it’s certainly true that Prebble makes blatant use of the Highland myth to reinforce his case. Each episode of clearance he describes is preceded by local details: names of places in Gaelic, a little description of the geography, not for you to identify the location, but for you to be more moved by the horrific tale of eviction following. It’s not wrong, but it’s a piece of powerful propaganda. Worryingly, Prebble rather unquestioningly posits the idea of a traditional golden age before the clearances, and before Culloden, when society lived in harmony, tenants with their chiefs.

It’s probably best to take the book as Prebble would want it: as one long howl of anger. He begins, as he ends, with a defiant statement of the injustice of the Clearances:

It is said that the Clearances are now far enough away from us to be decently forgotten. But the hills are still empty. In all of Britain only among them can one find real solitude, and if their history is known there is no satisfaction to be got from the experience [page 8, Penguin edition]

A week in the Scottish Highlands

 

The former village of Ceannabeinne, forcibly cleared in 1842.

After a week-long field trip in the NW Highlands, covering much of the area of Sutherland, I’m still mulling over what I saw. Ostensibly, the trip was to look at rocks, and indeed this is one of the most famous centres of geological controversy. What any visitor sees, however, is not just rocks. There was a lack of population, and yet the roads were busy with camper vans (much less the permanent population). The weather was dramatically different to the East Anglia where I live, so much so that it felt like a different country when I returned. On the plane from Inverness to Gatwick, the cabin crew told us the local time as we were landing, so clearly, this was a different country.

As we clambered over the rocks, we saw the remains of traditional stone-built houses, many of them derelict or simply repurposed into dry stone walling. The number of permanent inhabitants in the NW Highlands area that comprises the Geopark is around 2,500, which is close to one person per square kilometre. Plenty of room, you might think, for people to live from the land – but much of that land is barren, Lewisian gneiss, a very hard rock, on which grass does not grow. Indeed, it was very visible where there were patches of limestone, and a corresponding greenery on the surface, compared to the older rocks.

Why so depopulated? Like many before me, I started reading John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances (1963). This book is written with a passion and drive that can only leave you indignant. It is a tale of grasping landowners forcibly removing the local population to make room for sheep. Melodramatic, yes, exaggerated, probably not, but certainly selective in its evidence. Nonetheless, the work of Prebble created a whole generation of academic historians, as James Hunter admitted. The best-known of these is Tom Devine, whose revisionist book The Scottish Clearances (2019) acknowledges the achievement of Prebble, but points out there were Lowland clearances as well. In fact, they weren’t all clearances at all; many people left simply seeking more opportunity elsewhere. Devine gives a whole range of causes for what he describes as the “dispossession” of land (a considerably more neutral term). Scotland, he says, was one of the most industrialized nations in the world by 1850, so some at least of that movement was to the cities. Here, as elsewhere in the world, we see the seemingly inexorable move towards industrialisation, urbanisation, and agricultural revolution. For a region like the Highlands, there was (and is) no industry to speak of, so next to no opportunities for work. Instead, a handful of local initiatives, such as the Geopark, a flourishing pottery factory that even makes mugs labelled “Torremolinos”, or the recent redevelopment of the island of Tanera Mor by one very wealthy philanthropist.  But these are like drops in the ocean.

We saw one very poignant former village, near Durness. A few information boards stated there had been a handful of cottages, but the inhabitants were all removed in a single clearance. Were the clearances, as the infamous Peter Sellars stated, for the good of the inhabitants and their children? Would it have happened anyway, as in other areas, like Lowland Scotland, perhaps only in a less brutal form? Is emigration always tragic? Queuing to visit the Red Star Line museum in Antwerp gave the impression that it was. Like Karl Marx, I read about the triple hammer of urbanization, agricultural revolution, and industrialization, and I see the impact very starkly today in deindustrialized Britan in places such as Dundee or Glasgow. Initiatives to live in the Highlands, like Frank Fraser Darling’s Island Years (1940), an account of his living on an island for a few months, are at best quixotic, and certainly not sustainable. Studying the bird life is great fun but does not, for the most part, generate an income.

The questions I am left with are:

• Could the transition have been managed in a more humane way? (Of course it could).
• Is there a sustainability option for the NW Highlands today, or can it survive only on second houses and camper-van tourism?
• Was there ever a golden age in the Highlands when the clans lived in harmony, with the tenants working the land and relying on the chief for support and protection (very unlikely, but often this is the hidden assumption in many texts)?

In the meantime, I keep looking at that deserted village, and imagining what live must have been like when it was inhabited.

Unconnected communities

 

Shingle Street, a tiny hamlet in Suffolk, is the end of the road, the last few houses before a deserted beach.

What is the romance of a road that leads nowhere? Part of the pleasure is just to visit the last destination on the signpost.  

You have almost certainly never heard of Shingle Street: it is the end of the line, in deeply rural Suffolk. The nearest town or village of any size is is Woodbridge, 25 minutes by car away. Hence the magic: from a busy dual carriageway from Cambridge, into rural Suffolk, then to single-track roads, until the final destination. The contrast between busy and deserted. The lack of noise; there was nothing to hear, except for seagulls and oystercatchers. Then you notice the sound of agricultural machines (about which more later).

Shingle Street is simply one street – and it’s hardly much of a street. At one end, a row of coastguard cottages; at the other, a converted Martello Tower, looking as ugly and forbidding as it must have been when built. In between, a handful of individual houses, each of them a separate design, although design is hardly a way to describe a distinctly ramshackle collection. No shops, but certainly plenty of shingle: the beach, which extends for miles in either direction, is all pebbles, with fascinating plants, including verbascum and sea kale growing directly out of the shingle. There were stern warnings as you approached the beach not to disturb the plants (which, to be honest, didn’t look very disturbed), but to follow the designated paths to the waterline (there weren’t any paths). As for the plants, they clearly ignored that notice, and it was indeed as if they existed in a different universe to that of the standard beachgoer: they were getting on with their job, ignoring where visitors walked, and growing in a random fashion. As for visitors, just a handful: one or two people fishing, a couple with their dog, a group who had clearly come from some distance and even brought chairs to sit on the beach. Nobody swimming, as far as I could see: not that kind of day, not that kind of beach. Out at sea, vast container ships were visible on the horizon – waiting for high tide so they could berth at Felixstowe, a few miles further south. 

The “street” wasn’t really a street at all. There was a rough track for cars at the back of the houses, but at the front, the tiny gardens opened straight on to the beach. Two or three of the gardens had people sitting in the open, talking. There was, briefly, a moment of interaction as a woman and a child, with towels wrapped around them, ran from the sea back to a house, clearly ignoring the signpost stating not to disturb the plants. Then quiet again. There was a rusted winch for dragging a boat up the beach, but the current inhabitants of Shingle Street no longer had any relationship with the sea. 

We walked from Shingle Street to Alderton, the nearest village, a couple of miles away, across a very sandy landscape, with more Martello towers and World War II pillboxes, one of them with a tree growing out of the entrance. Although the soil looked very unsuitable for growing anything, the surprise on the walk was the intensiveness of the agriculture. Vast, oversized tractors and cropping machines were harvesting potatoes as we passed. The village of Alderton was almost shaken to its foundations by a convoy of agricultural vehicles thundering through. As they passed us, pinned to the hedge to avoid them, one of the drivers waved half-heartedly, as if our presence was incidental to the main business of harvesting those potatoes. There were a few hedgerows, some trees, some birds, but the overriding impression from the nature on the walk was that it barely survived the onslaught of modern agriculture: in the contest between nature and large-scale agriculture, nature was the loser. Any wild plants you saw were incidental survivors from what was really an industrial landscape: vast fields with hedges and borders removed, farmed by one or two machines. One field of sweetcorn had plants growing dramatically, already reading five or six feet, so clearly very healthy; but there was absolutely nothing growing beside them in the middle of the field. It was a pure monoculture, that could only exist by highly specific fertiliser and herbicide to encourage the sweetcorn, and at the same time obliterate everything else. 

Alderton itself was a small, unassuming village, with a rather sad local shop and a church with just a very plain hall nave, half rebuilt by the Victorians, a porch that was so decayed you could hardly make out what the carvings on it had been, and the church’s most distinctive feature, a tower that was half-collapsed. This was one of those unmemorable churches that you only remember for what is not there. The stump of the tower remained, but fenced-off, and trees had grown around it, so one end of the church had become a wild space, the opposite of the what the church authorities would have wanted: fenced off, with notices saying “the tower is dangerous: keep out”, as if the danger came from the wildness, not the loose stones. Inside the church, the wildness was emphasised by the way the tower entrance was cordoned off in a haphazard, unplanned way, with some railings, as if the tower collapse had been yesterday, and nobody had worked out how to deal with the door that now led to a heap of rubble. Despite all that, the impression was that the church had once been the centre of something, and that something no longer existed. 

As usual in English villages, there were a few new cul-de-sacs of recent housing development, with new houses in no particular style looking as though they could have been built anywhere. Who lives there? Do they use the shop? Do they have any organic links with the village of Alderton? They looked entirely oblivious of the old village, the handful of listed buildings, the church and the old rectory.  

At the end of the day we went into Woodbridge. Compared to Shingle Street, Woodbridge is a major town, but in reality, it still does not have the feel of being part of the modern world. It has a small quay, boats with people living on them, some individual (rather than chain) shops, and station on a line that goes from nowhere to nowhere. As we queued up for our fish and chips, we saw diners in the adjacent pizza restaurant looking monumentally bored. Couples in their sixties, each of them looking at their phone, not talking. The only thing to wait for seemed to be for the meal to arrive, after which there would be no need for further conversation. They didn’t seem to be engaged with anything much outside themselves. 

Of course we all dream about how things once were: the myth of a golden age, when the countryside was a small-scale working and farming community, that was never really like that. I was very moved by Eamonn Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath, that used parish records to suggest a community around a pre-reformation parish church, a community that changed forever with new religious practices, but I acknowledge that it is a romantic, one-sided presentation by an author with an agenda.

Nonetheless, here was a day with a powerful sense of fragmented communities. The residents of Shingle Street, sitting in their gardens looking at the sea; the farm workers; the inhabitants of the new developments at Alderton; the church, the sea kale and verbascum. Are all lives so fragmented?

The rise and fall of cities and their art

 

Rubens, Samson and Delilah, c1610, commissioned by Nicolas Rockox, mayor of Antwerp, for his own house

I am intrigued to learn more about cities. That very vague idea is not very helpful – a glance at bookshops for books with “city” in the title rapidly runs into hundreds. It needs to be a more precise interest. How about this? 

Some cities give the impression that they were always big: London and Paris are examples. Their history can be found, but isn’t very visible among the constant renewal and rebuilding of the centre. In contrast, former cities display much more of their history even to the casual observer. By “former”, I mean a specific group, which enables me to refine my interest in cities to something much more specific: cities that experience a dramatic change in fortune, whether growing or retracting, and ideally both. Think about it: cities that were once great, but no longer: Venice, Bruges, Dundee. In England, Norwich, Kings Lynn. Further down the scale, think of Boston, Lincolnshire, with its enormous spire as evidence of a time of wealth, and now looking down on some quite significant poverty.

So, a reading programme about why cities decline. It seems to me a good combination of reading with visiting, since the evidence on the ground will be very apparent – nobody had the money to demolish all the remains of former wealth. One problem, however, is that there always seem to be more books written about “golden ages” (which could include Amsterdam, Antwerp, Venice) but much less about the decline. I find the long slow cultural decline of Florence under the Medici a fascinating subject, even if it shows an inverse relationship between wealth and artistic quality. Or, more precisely, while the Medici remained rich, there was no longer a wide art-buying public.

Does Antwerp fit this scenario? After a couple of visits my superficial impression was the very significant presence of 17th-century buildings and culture. The Rubens House, and his vast output, is entirely 17th century. The Plantin printing and publishing operation had a monopoly of publishing liturgical texts for the Catholic Church. The Rubens House was begun 1610. The Snijders & Rockox House dates from 1603 onwards. Yet we are told the Fall of Antwerp in 1585 reduced the city to a shadow of its former self, losing 40% of its population.

Perhaps it is my contrary thinking, but it looked to me that Antwerp (and surrounds) did not appear to be suffering too much in comparison with its northern neighbour, The (northern) Netherlands. It’s not, in other words, a simple claim that Protestantism is linked with artistic quality. 

But artistic quality may have a link with economic success. At least, in the eyes of Maarten Prak, who writes (in Five Books on the Dutch Golden Age):

There is a big debate about the economic origins of the Dutch Golden Age. The debate is about whether it was the result of Antwerp merchants moving to Amsterdam, and taking Antwerp’s ‘golden age’ with them in their bags, or whether things had been happening already in the Dutch economy before 1600 that helped launch the Dutch Golden Age.

But what interests me is what of course should be obvious, that great art happens when there is economic success. Perhaps it’s just a matter of statistics: painters in the Italian Renaissance painted a lot of pictures because they were being paid well, and widely, to do so. Similarly, in the Dutch Golden Age, there was a vast market for domestic paintings (and paintings paid for by private clients for display in churches). Among those thousands of pictures, a handful will be exceptional. That happened in 15th-century Flanders, in 16th-century Antwerp, and in 17th-century Netherlands. Maarten Prak again:

A group of painters emerged, including van der Weyden and van Eyck, the best of whom were producing for courtier audiences, but still operated in urban environments, and also had an urban clientele … You see that happening in Ghent and Bruges in the 15th century, in Antwerp in the 16th century, and then in Amsterdam, and other towns in Holland, in the 17th century.

But you also see it in 17th-century Antwerp, with Rubens, Jordaens, and others. Why should this be?

Flower paintings at Kettle's Yard (July 2026)

 

Doron Langberg, Hibiscus I, 2022

Painting flowers is one of the most obvious subjects for painting, so you wonder why there are not more flower painting exhibitions. Perhaps the organisers – and the public – have been put off by the practice followed by many galleries, including the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam, to group all the flower paintings together in a single room. This practice might make sense if the gallery had a wide ranger of flower paintings, but both galleries choose to display all their 17th-century Dutch flower paintings together. My heard sinks when I see so many similar works together, all with a black background.

Today, the situation is very different. There are many kinds of flower-inspired paintings, and what could be simpler to curate than an exhibition of them? Except that the Kettles Yard team seems to have extended their brief to include works primarily about people (Kay Donachie), or not including any flowers at all (Howard Hodgkin). Limiting ourselves to those works that are of flowers, what struck me was the difference between the skill of the 50 or so artists included (the show only contains one work only from each artist, so the judgements below apply only to these works).

I would imagine a trawl of amateur art exhibitions would reveal thousands of flower painters: flowers are easy to obtain, they typically last a few days (with some exceptions), and are typically colourful, so it should be easy to get a result. Most importantly, they raise little problem of perspective being largely in a single plane.

For me, the magic of flower paintings is that they represent a kind of pure painting. They aren’t about anything other than the flower being depicted. So when the catalogue tells me that a painting honour's the painter's father, I don't get it.  

Nonetheless, a few paintings stood out very clearly in this show. 

David Jones: a lovely demonstration of watercolour without, as far as I could see, any preparatory drawing, with light flowing, as it were, through the leaves and petals. 

Cass Namoda: a dramatic close-up of part of a single flower, with not enough space within the picture to display the whole. 

Doron Langberg: very rough daubs of bright pink, against green, give a powerful suggestion of hibiscus. The image is representational, but only just. 

William Nicholson: always one to provide a witty commentary on the ostensible subject, Nicholson includes a dramatic shadow that almost obscures the foliage below the peonies. 

Cedric Morris: the viewer appears to be in the middle of an almost exploding bunch of flowers, filling the rectangular canvas with bright, living colours. This man can paint the essence of flowers better than anyone else in the show! His paintings of people are never as good. 

Judith Tucker: A very dramatic view of sea asters against a dark background. The leaves especially are a vivid orange, yet the background is dark, so the effect is somewhat surreal. Undeniable is the power of the piece. Looking up sea asters in Wikipedia suggested their flowers are not that different to any other aster, and not very dramatic: the focus here is on the leaves.

What did I dismiss? Any artist who included human figures, since, in my opinion, the human figure directs the viewer how to interpret the image. Thus, Caroline Walker, whose naturalistic depictions of home life complete with child are not, I think, flower paintings. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is included for a fritillary sketch, but it looked too small-scale in the context of an exhibition gallery.

In summary: great show, but it would have been better to have included a few examples from earlier centuries, especially the 17th century. 

The Bill Gates of the 15th century?

 

The picturesque remains of Chichele College

The town of Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, perhaps a little larger today than a village, with a population around 8,000, is not so different to many other small towns in the Midlands: an old church, a market square, a few old buildings, some small-scale industry (shoemaking). But in the centre is the intriguing Chichele College, the ruined remains of a religious institute set up in the 15th century for canons. Today, the property is owned by English Heritage, and is open to the public, courtesy, it would appear, of volunteer curators. I was intrigued by the idea of a “chantry college”, and how it came to exist.

On the site there were a few information boards, but these seemed more interested in the building over the more succeeding centuries following the dissolution of the monasteries (according to Wikipedia, Henry VIII seized the college in 1542). There was no guide, and Pevsner, as usual, focuses on the buildings, rather than about its purpose. What was a chantry college? Wikipedia has an entry for the founder and benefactor Henry Chichele (pronounced “Chichly”) which, although a poor entry, gives some idea about his career: a rapid rise to the top of the English Church, partly as a result of his wealthy connections, notably, his brother. In the town of Higham Ferrers, Chichele also built a grammar school and a “Bede House” (an alms house), both in the grounds of the parish church.

What was a Chantry College?

That, to me, is a mystery. I was aware of Chantry chapels, founded to say masses for wealthy donors, but Chichele College appears to have had at least partially an educational function. Its responsibilities included teaching grammar and song. It appears to have been abolished because it was not part of a university or school.

What was the motivation behind Chichele’s philanthropy?

Clearly, Chichele was wealthy. In addition to Chichele College, founded 1422, he also founded two colleges in Oxford, one for Cistercians in 1437 and one, All Souls, founded 1438, which still exists, as well as Chichele College, and the impression comes to mind of a 15th-century equivalent of Bill Gates or Howard Hughes – whatever was spent on philanthropy only amounted to a small proportion of their total wealth. But is that assumption correct? Chichele’s money came from multiple benefices – at one point, he had at least eight, and was instructed to give them all up except one. Owning more than one benefice was, of course, one of the complaints by reformers against the established Church. English law prevented a bishop having multiple benifices, but nonetheless, Chichele appealed to the Pope, and was granted an exemption in 1407 on being made bishop of St David’s in Wales, enabling him to keep them.

 

Was Chichele corrupt?

According to the Wikipedia entry for Chichele obtained clerical benefices (that is, the position of rector as well as the income from the parish) via his wealthy brother (at least initially). It also mentions how, as archbishop of Canterbury, he investigated and condemned heretics who complained about the corruption of bishops and archbishops. Complaints about corruption in the senior clergy were clearly already widespread in the 15th century, even before Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in 1517.

So my questions are: how corrupt was Chichele (compared with other clergy in the Church of England in Chichele’s time)? Was the founding of the College at Higham Ferrers motivated by genuine altruism or simply face-saving? The Wikipedia entry for Chichele, although over 3,000 words long, gets too involved in trying to arguing with scholars to give a good summary (“The struggle between them [Chichele and Pope Martin V] has been represented as one of a patriotic archbishop resisting the encroachments of the papacy on the Church of England. In point of fact it was almost wholly personal, and was rather an incident in the rivalry between the Duke of Gloucester and his half-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, than one involving any principle.”, but no citation for this claim). The Wikipedia entry uses the term “diplomatist”, an outdated term today replaced by “diplomat”, and which suggests that much of the Wikipedia entry was lifted from an earlier source, probably the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 edition (acknowledged in the references).

It will require some detective work to try to establish, if the sources are sufficient, the real background to Chichele’s philanthropy.