The Exempt Jurisdiction of Woburn

Summary

The Cistercian abbey of Woburn was endowed by Hugh de Bolebec, in 1145, with the manor of Woburn and its appurtenances, and with the church of Birchmore. There is no mention in the grant of a parish of Woburn, which presumably lay within Birchmore, and certainly by 1242, when a charter concerning the market and fair in Woburn was executed, it is clear that the only ecclesiastical provision there was a chapel. This chapel seems to have been regarded as private, or manorial; it was served by a stipendiary curate who was provided by the abbey, and was evidently completely under monastic control. Meanwhile the rectory of Birchmore had been appropriated to the abbey’s own use and no vicarage was ordained, the cure being served by a monk and a stipendiary priest, and after 1399 by a monk alone. When in 1519 the Bishop of Lincoln was visiting the southern parts of the diocese, the abbey’s proctor displayed this and other appropriations and seven years later in 1526, the “parish of Birchmore” was said to be served by a curate. These are, however, the last appearances of what was evidently a “lost settlement” and from now on the “chapel of Woburn” replaced it in all but the most formal of connections. The Cistercian order had successfully claimed exemption from episcopal jurisdiction but this cannot have protected from episcopal and archidiaconal visitation the parishioners of its appropriated churches, in those parishes where regular vicarages had been ordained. But in the “protected” churches, such as this, there clearly was no such arrangement and it was to deal with this situation that the act of 31 Henry VIII c.13, s. xxiii ordered that all such exempt churches and chapels … “shall from henceforth be within the jurisdiction and visitation of the Ordinary or Ordinaries, within whose diocese they or any of them be situate or set”. Woburn Abbey was dissolved in 1537 and within ten years Lord Russell had acquired “the rectories of Birchmore and Woburn”. From then on Woburn was treated as a perpetual curacy in the nomination of the Russells, whose curates were admitted by the Bishop or Commissary, while Birchmore was an impropriate rectory without cure of souls.