Wishful Wednesday - John de Bostock of Whethamstede - Part 1 - Gard Line

This is the first of three parts.

 

If I could meet with one person on our family tree for an afternoon of conversation, I think it would be John de Bostock of Whethamstede (1383-1464), abbot of St. Albans in England.

For the record, our common ancestor is Sir William de Bostock (b. 1225).  By his first wife, Elizabeth, he had a son named Edward (b. 1245). By his second wife, Amice, he had a son named Gilbert (b. 1255).  We are descended from Edward, while John de Bostock of Whethamstede is descended from Gilbert.  (Gards, take note: the Bostocks are ancestors of Elizabeth Johnson, who married Jeremiah Gard in 1740.)

John de Bostock of Whethamstede’s life provides a window onto many aspects of medieval life: religious, political, military, cultural, and familial.

Part I: A Window on Medieval Family and Religion

Mackeyre's End

Let’s begin with familial.   The Bostocks were a Cheshire family, owning land near Macclesfield 36 miles northeast of Chester.  The John de Bostock who became Abbot John is regularly designated as John Whethamstede because he inherited the Manor of Mackeyre in Whethamstede upon the death of his mother, Margaret Makary. [Spelling was very fluid in this time period.] Whethamstede is in Hertfordshire, and though the Bostocks were Cheshire men, Hugh de Bostock, father of John, seems to have resided at Mackeyre’s End with his wife and children.  Since John Whethamstede’s name is inextricably linked to the history of St. Albans Abbey, it is worthy of note that St. Albans is also in Hertfordshire.

 At this point, the familial thread begins to blend in with the religious. John’s uncle, also called John Whethamstede, was the prior of Tynemouth.  The Priory of Tynemouth, though in Northumberland, was associated with St. Albans Abbey, a religious house much closer to London, because when the priory of Tynemouth had been decimated by the Danes in the tenth and eleventh centuries, William II had transferred monks from St. Albans to re-populate Tynemouth, which has remained in St. Albans’ jurisdiction ever since.  With his uncle as the prior of Tynemouth, then, it is perhaps not surprising that John de Bostock of Whethamstede became a monk of St. Albans sometime after 1401. 

He also became prior of Gloucester College, a Benedictine house at Oxford, where it is believed he eventually received a doctor of divinity degree.  In 1420, John was elected abbot of St. Albans.  As abbot, John broadened his horizons by trips to the continent on church business.  In 1424, he attended what was billed to be the Council of Pavia in Italy, but because the plague was raging there, the site was changed to Siena.  At that council, John spoke out on behalf of the Benedictine abbeys, arguing that they should be allowed to retain their exemption from papal authority.  In this debate, Abbot John was pitted against Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, who was the pope’s man, so to speak.

St. Albans Cathedral

This would not be the only time in John’s career when he had to take a stand.  Though said to be “shy” by some who knew him, he was assertive enough to take on the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, the following year regarding some jurisdictional issues.  When the case was decided ultimately, it turned out to be in Abbot John’s favor.  Another case arose which pitted John against other clerics of the age on behalf of others.  There was a “troublesome quarrel” in 1433 in which he opposed William Alnwick, bishop of Norwich, on behalf of the prior of Bynham, Norfolk, which was one of the St. Albans cells.  The matter finally made its way to the king’s court in the hall of the Blackfriars in London.  The Dictionary of National Biography states that “the result of the trial is not recorded, but the abbot considered that he had been successful in it.”  There were other such disputes throughout John’s time at St. Albans, which gives us some insight into the politics of the religious houses of medieval England.

 We see in these events that John would speak up when necessary, especially when he spoke on behalf of others, but that is not to say that John was attracted to anti-clerical movements that sprang up in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.  He would have been a child when Wycliffe got into a world of trouble for translating the Bible into English, and though he may have heard discussion about Lollardy (a pre-Reformation movement to return Christianity to Biblical standards), he was not attracted by it.  The DNB records, “He held a synod at St. Albans in 1426, before which he cited some persons suspected of heresy, inflicted penance on one man, and caused an [sic] heretical book to be burnt.”  From this, we can only conclude that in these early English challenges to papal authority, John aligned himself with Rome.

Sources:

Alston, George Cyprian. “The Benedictine Order.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton, 1907.  Web.  27 Mar. 2013. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02443a.htm   

Galbraith, Vivian H., ed. The Abbey of St. Albans from 1300 to the Dissolution of the Monasteries: The Stanhope Essay, 1911.  2008.  Web. 29 Mar. 2013.  http://www.archive.org/stream/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich_djvu.txt

Hunt, William. “WHETHAMSTEDE or Bostock, JOHN.” Dictionary of National Biography. 1885-1900. Vol. 60.  31 Aug. 2012.  Web.  30 Mar. 2013.

      http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Whethamstede,_John_(DNB00)

 Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, qui saeculo XVmo floruere: Registra Johannis Whethamstede. . . London: Longman, 1878. 15 Jan. 2008.  Web. 30 Mar. 2013. http://books.google.com/books/about/Registra_quorundam_abbatum_monasterii_S.html?id=8RsUAAAAYAAJ

 

Images:

 

John de Bostock of Whethamstede. http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeoithb/st.albans.html

 

Mackeyre's End.

http://mediasvc.ancestry.com/image/a7e1fcaf-1053-4bc0-aa3e-76f473d43b4a.jpg?Client=Trees&NamespaceID=1093

St. Albans Cathedral. 
http://mediasvc.ancestry.com/image/b1040224-1d7f-41ba-b8d0-f8b029a23e61.jpg?Client=Trees&NamespaceID=1093

	http://geneabloggers.com

© Eileen Cunningham, 2013

 

John de Bostock of Whethamstede: Part 2 - Gard Line

This is the second of three parts.

If I could meet with one person on our family tree for an afternoon of conversation, I think it would be John de Bostock of Whethamstede (1383-1464), abbot of St. Albans in England.

For the record, our common ancestor is Sir William de Bostock (b. 1225).  By his first wife, Elizabeth, he had a son named Edward (b. 1245). By his second wife, Amice, he had a son named Gilbert (b. 1255).  We are descended from Edward, while John de Bostock of Whethamstede is descended from Gilbert.  (Gards, take note: the Bostocks are ancestors of Elizabeth Johnson, who married Jeremiah Gard in 1740.)

John de Bostock of Whethamstede’s life provides a window onto many aspects of medieval life: religious, political, military, cultural, and familial.

Part II: A Window on Medieval Warfare



Humphrey,
Duke of Gloucester

To the windows on medieval family and religion can be added a window on medieval English warfare—dynastic warfare, to be specific.  As indicated above, the Bostocks were Cheshire men, and as such, had sided with Richard II when he had been challenged by Henry Bolingbroke (later King Henry IV).  However, Abbot John, as a friend of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was more attached to King Henry, who was the father of his friend Humphrey.  The early fifteenth-century dynastic struggles led later to the series of conflicts known as the Wars of the Roses.  The complicated web of alliances and treasons in the fifteenth century are beyond the scope of this narrative, but suffice it to say, that the fortunes of John of Whethamstede rose and fell with those of Duke Humphrey, who fell afoul of Queen Margaret of Anjou in 1441. (Queen Margaret was the wife of King Henry VI and often led her husband’s cause during his bouts of periodic insanity.) 

Now, Humphrey, who would have been in line to be king had Margaret’s son died, fell from favor in 1441 when his wife, Eleanor of Cobham, was convicted of witchcraft and imprisoned.  The DNB indicates that Humphrey’s fall from power might have contributed to Abbot John’s resignation as abbot of St. Alban’s, even though that happened in 1440, a year before the charges were brought against Eleanor.  According to the DNB, “On 26 Nov. 1440 he resigned the abbacy. The reasons alleged for this step are that he was suffering from ill health; that, being of a nervous temperament, he found his work and anxieties too much for him; and that he was painfully bashful.”

Today those symptoms might lead to a diagnosis of agoraphobia, a disorder characterized by reclusiveness and anxiety.  Such a condition could in and of itself lead to a person’s resignation from a somewhat “public” position, and, his friend’s fall from favor—which did certainly happen in 1441—could well have been a contributing factor and might help to explain why the abbot switched from support of the Lancastrian cause to that of the Yorks, who opposed Queen Margaret.

In 1447, Humphrey was arrested and died a few days later, though to this day it is unknown whether he died of a heart attack or stroke brought on by the distress of his captivity—or was murdered by Lancastrians in Queen Margaret’s party. Probably due to his close association with Abbot John, Duke Humphrey was buried at the abbey of St. Albans. (Readers of historical fiction may like to know that Margaret Frazer’s novel The Bastard’s Tale concerns this event, and Abbot John makes a brief appearance in Chapter 25.)

When Whethamstede had retired in 1440, John Stoke had replaced him as abbot; however, upon Stokes’ death in 1451, John Whethamstede was re-elected as abbot and resumed his duties, which meant that he would be in St. Albans where the Wars of the Roses broke out into violence in 1455 at what is called the First Battle of St. Albans, a victory for the Yorkists.  The Lancastrians Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset; Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland; and Thomas, lord Clifford had perished in the struggle, and Abbot John requested permission from the victorious duke of York to bury the three at the abbey.  He was personally affected later on by the Second Battle of St. Albans (1461), which was a defeat for the Yorkists.  The victorious Lancastrian army “plundered the Abbey and horribly ravaged the surrounding country.  The Queen [Margaret of Anjou] even condescended to rob the Abbey of its most precious jewels and treasures.  The result was sheer famine; the convent were dispersed, and the Abbot retired to his native town.  Thus for the only time in its history the continuity of conventual life at St. Albans was broken” (Galbraith).

Sources:

Alston, George Cyprian. “The Benedictine Order.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton, 1907.  Web.  27 Mar. 2013. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02443a.htm  Galbraith, Vivian H., ed. The Abbey of St. Albans from 1300 to the Dissolution of the Monasteries: The Stanhope Essay, 1911.  2008.  Web. 29 Mar. 2013.  http://www.archive.org/stream/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich_djvu.txt

Hunt, William. “WHETHAMSTEDE or Bostock, JOHN.” Dictionary of National Biography. 1885-1900. Vol. 60.  31 Aug. 2012.  Web.  30 Mar. 2013.

      http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Whethamstede,_John_(DNB00)

Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, qui saeculo XVmo floruere: Registra Johannis Whethamstede. . . London: Longman, 1878. 15 Jan. 2008.  Web. 30 Mar. 2013. http://books.google.com/books/about/Registra_quorundam_abbatum_monasterii_S.html?id=8RsUAAAAYAAJ

 

Images:
 

Bolton, J. The Second Battle of St. Albans, 1461. http://tuckdb.org/postcards/70596

 

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/gloucester.htm

	© Eileen Cunningham, 2013

 

John de Bostock of Whethamstede: Part 3 - Gard Line

This is the third of three installments on John of Whethamstede.

 

If I could meet with one person on our family tree for an afternoon of conversation, I think it would be John de Bostock of Whethamstede (1383-1464), abbot of St. Albans in England.

For the record, our common ancestor is Sir William de Bostock (b. 1225).  By his first wife, Elizabeth, he had a son named Edward (b. 1245). By his second wife, Amice, he had a son named Gilbert (b. 1255).  We are descended from Edward, while John de Bostock of Whethamstede is descended from Gilbert.  (Gards, take note: the Bostocks are ancestors of Elizabeth Johnson, who married Jeremiah Gard in 1740.)

John de Bostock of Whethamstede’s life provides a window onto many aspects of medieval life: religious, political, military, cultural, and familial.

Part III: A Window onto Medieval Cultural Life

 In addition, then, to the familial, religious, and military matters of the age, Abbot John’s life is also instructive regarding the cultural life of the times.  The Benedictines were well known for the establishment of libraries, so Duke Humphrey appears in the picture once again.  An avid book collector, Duke Humphrey would eventually bequeath his vast personal library to the University of Oxford, where it is still housed at the Bodleian.  Duke Humphrey made regular visits to St. Albans to meet with the abbot, and over the years helped him to found a substantial library at the abbey.

Education was the province of the monks in the Middle Ages, and during the time that John of Whethamstede was taking his hiatus from the monastic life, the quality of the teaching function of the monastery had sunk to a very low standard.  When John began his second term as abbot, there was virtually no one in the Abbey any longer who could teach grammar [the rudiments of each subject], and at Oxford’s Gloucester Hall there were “hardly any students from St. Albans.”  What is more, it was very slim pickings when it came to finding someone who would take on “the burden of preaching” (Galbraith).  It shows something of Abbot John’s ability and devotion when the DNB reports that the monastery greatly improved once he undertook his second abbacy.

Whethamstede himself was a writer, keeping a chronicle for the period between 1440 and 1460, which still serves today as a source of information for this period.  In his verse, Galbraith reports, “It is impossible not to see in the florid verses of Whethamstede and in his prose (loaded with classical allusion and metaphor) an early appearance of the Renaissance spirit in England. Verse and prose are alike worthless, but show a striving after something better than mediaeval monastic writing. The tendency becomes more marked in his work after his visit to Italy in 1423, where he
was certainly influenced by the early Humanist movement.” The DNB lists the following as writings of Abbot John:

Granarium de viris illustribus (4 vols.)
Palearium Poetarum
Registrum Abbatiae Johannis Whethamstede, Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Albani
     (Register to the seventh year of his abbacy, with various letters)
Super Valerium in Augustinum de Anchona
Super Polycraticum et super Epistolas Petri Blesensis (a commentary on the epistles of Peter)
Cato Commentatus
Cato Glossatus
De situ Terræ Sanctæ
Propinarium
Pabularium Poetarum
Proverbiarium
Letters (“verbose and flowery”) in the Chronicles of St. Albans Abbey
Latin verses for many occasions (“mere doggerel”)
A small book with metres and tables

(Note: Cato Commentatus and the Granarium are probably the two books he presented to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, which Gloucester later donated to the University of Oxford. Others are in the British Museum.)

Whethamstede’s chamberlain at St. Albans, a lay clerk named Richard Fox, was also interested in books and writing and is known for having created an expanded version of the Brut Chronicle and seeing to its printing by William Caxton, who set up the first printing press in England. In addition, Fox wrote an account of the death of the abbot’s friend, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.  

One more aspect of medieval life remains: hospitality.  When one thinks of a medieval abbey, one doesn’t necessarily think of it as a hotel for travelers, but in the Middle Ages abbeys and convents often hosted dignitaries who passed through the area. The boy-king Henry VI and  his mother (Catherine of Valois) are known to have stayed at the abbey in 1428, and, in fact, Henry VI frequently visited the abbey during his reign.  Queen Johanna, the widow of Henry IV, who was Whethamstede’s tenant at nearby Abbots Langley, was hosted by the abbey as were  Henry de Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick, and his wife Cecily Neville, Countess of Warwick.  The fact that the Duke and Duchess of Bedford once arrived with a retinue of three hundred people shows the level of entertaining the abbey was charged with doing.

In summary, then, we can say that the life of John de Bostock Whethamstede provides a window into the world of medieval England in all its array.  Abbot John died at the age of 81 on January 20, 1465, and was buried in the abbey church at St. Albans in a tomb that he had had made for himself years earlier.  Requiescat in pace.

Sources

Alston, George Cyprian. “The Benedictine Order.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton, 1907.  Web.  27 Mar. 2013. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02443a.htm 

Galbraith, Vivian H., ed. The Abbey of St. Albans from 1300 to the Dissolution of the Monasteries: The Stanhope Essay, 1911.  2008.  Web. 29 Mar. 2013.  http://www.archive.org/stream/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich_djvu.txt

Hunt, William. “WHETHAMSTEDE or Bostock, JOHN.”  Dictionary of National Biography. 1885-1900. Vol. 60.  31 Aug. 2012.  Web.  30 Mar. 2013.

      http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Whethamstede,_John_(DNB00)

Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, qui saeculo XVmo floruere: Registra Johannis Whethamstede. . . London: Longman, 1878. 15 Jan. 2008.  Web. 30 Mar. 2013. http://books.google.com/books/about/Registra_quorundam_abbatum_monasterii_S.html?id=8RsUAAAAYAAJ

© Eileen Cunningham, 2013