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The Historical Career of Bishop Reginald Pecock, D.D.: The Poore Scoleris Myrrour or a Case Study In Famous Obscurity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Extract
Reginald Pecock, D.D., thirty-second bishop of Chichester (1450–1458/59), had a meteoric career as a historic personage. He made a bright, unexpected appearance out of an obscure background. He shone brightly, first as a curiosity in his world and then as a seeming threat to it. Colliding with the power realities of his time, his career was shattered and his reputation permanently blackened by the Paul's Cross bonfire that reduced some fourteen of his books to powdery ash. This once proud figure (the obvious pun on his name was apt and widely used by his enemies) was now quite pathetic. He was required to suffer the humiliation of standing before 20,000 people to confess his errors and to assist in piling upon the fire the material expressions of his lifetime of thinking and of defending the Church. When those flames subsided, Reginald Pecock returned to the obscurity from which he had emerged, and there he died. Thus, for this the most famous lord spiritual of the Lancastrian regime; author of the most ambitious theological program of the fifteenth century in England; the first bishop of the English Church to be formally convicted of heresy–for this man we have no certain knowledge of the date of his birth or the date of his death, the place of his origin or the site of his burial.
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1 Reginald Pecock was born in Wales sometime during the first half of the 1390s. He was a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford for about ten years from the mid-1410s to the mid-14205. His ecclesiastical appointments were: rector of St. Michael's Gloucester (1424–31); rector of St. Michael Riola and master of Whittington College, London (1431–44); bishop of St. Asaph (1444–50); bishop of Chichester (1450–58/59). He lived the last year or so of his life under house arrest at Thorney Abbey, Cambridgeshire, and died in 1460 or 1461. He was allowed to incept for the Doctor's degree in theology from Oxford, without performing regency, sometime before 1444.
“He was the 32nd or 34th Bishop of Chichester, depending on whether one includes in the list of Bishops Richard le Scrope (1385) and Thomas Browns (1429) who were both appointed to the see, but never exercised the functions of the office.” Letter from Ms. Alison McCann, Assistant Archivist, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, England (26 May 1976). The Record Office accepts the data found in LeNeve, John, Fasti Ecclesiae Angltcanae, 1300–1541, 7. Chichester Diocese, comp. Joyce M. Horn (London: Institute of Historical Research, 1964)Google Scholar and Hennessy, George, comp., Chichester Diocese Clergy Lists (London: St. Peters, 1900).Google Scholar
For the American reader the most readily available modern brief essay on Pecock's biography is to be found in Patrouch, Joseph F. Jr., Reginald Pecock “Twayne's English Authors Series, 106” (New York: Twayne, 1970) 17–46.Google Scholar
The figure of 20,000 people at Paul's Cross is given by Thomas Gascoigne who was not present at the abjuration (Rogers, James E. Thorold, ed., Loci Libro Veritatum, Passages Selected from Gascoigne's Theological Dictionary Illustrating the Condition of Church and State 1403–1458 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1881] 212–18Google Scholar). Yet even when we allow for Gascoigne's secondhand report and the general unreliability of medieval statistics, it is not hard to believe that half of London would have turned out on a Sunday afternoon to see a bishop abjure or burn. After all such a thing had never happened before.
2 Pecock probably wrote more than fifty books and treatises. Only six of them, plus a summary of one of his sermons, have survived. Also John Foxe printed a few pages, mostly from the Book of Faith in his Commentarli. In their probable chronological order the surviving works are: The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. Greet, W. C. (Early English Text Society, O.S., 171; London: Milford, Oxford University, 1927)Google Scholar; The Donet, ed. Hitchcock, E. V. (Early English Text Society, o.s., 156; London: Milford, Oxford University, 1921)Google Scholar; Poore Mennis Myrrour, an extract of Part I of The Donet, collated and published in the same volume as The Donet; “Abbrevatio Reginaldi Pecok,” printed in the second volume of The Repressor; The Folewer to the Donet, ed. Hitchcock, E. V. (Early English Text Society, o.s., 164; London: Milford, Oxford University, 1924)Google Scholar; The Repressor of Over Much Slaming of the Clergy, ed. Babington, Churchill (Rolls Series, no. 19, 2 vols.; London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1860)Google Scholar; The Book of Faith, ed. Morison, J. L. (Glasgow: Maclehose & Sons, 1909).Google Scholar The fragment in Foxe is a summary rather than a transcript (“Collectanea Quaedam ex Reginaldi Pecoki,” in Commentarli Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum [Strasbourg: Rihelius, 1553] 200–205). Thomas Kelly thought it possible that fols. 27b–28b of British Library MS. Roy. 17 A.xxvi were part of the bishop's lost Book of Faith, Hope and Charity. Under wartime conditions Kelly did not have access to the manuscript, otherwise he would have seen that the fragment he refers to is an integral part of a larger work, a handbook for parish priests. There is nothing extraordinary about the work. It does not have any characteristic Pecock ideas and expressions. Both his editors and other writers generally date the bishop's surviving works between 1443 and 1456. Kelly, however, believed that the earliest of them. The Reule, was in circulation by 1433. See “Reginald Pecock: A Contribution to his Biography” (unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Manchester, 1945) 42–43, 129–30.Google Scholar
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29 Oudin, Casimir, Commentarius de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis (Lipsiae, 1722) 3. 2587ff.Google Scholar; Fabricius, Johann, Bibliotheca Latina Mediae et lnfimae Aetatis (6 vols.; Hamburg, 1734–46) 5. 657–58Google Scholar; 6. 172–73; Buddeus, Johann F., Allegemeines Historisches Lexicon (3 vols.; Leipzig, 1730–32) 3. 269.Google Scholar See Kelly, “Pecock,” xv.
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31 Lewis, John, The Life of the Learned and Right Reverend Reynold Pecock, S. T. P. (Oxford, new ed., 1820)Google Scholar vii.
32 Ibid., 180.
33 Ibid., 141, 211. Note Lewis's use of Wharton's phrase. Three of Lewis's four reasons for Pecock's fall come from Wharton as well.
34 Ibid., 218.
35 Lewis did not have access to all of Pecock's surviving works. Daniel Waterland described for him the contents of Repressor. Neither did Lewis see The Reule, though he thought that he had (see Babington, “Introduction,” Repressor, lxi-lxii, lxx).
36 Works, (6 vols.; 3d ed.; Oxford, 1856) 6. 259.Google Scholar
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38 Ibid., 6. 427. Italics in original.
39 A View of the Stale of Europe during the Middle Ages (2 vols.; London: Murray, 1818) 2. 537.Google Scholar This is the earliest reference I have found to the similarity between Pecock and Hooker.
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45 Ibid., 5. 298, 300–302, 304–5, 307. Both Hook and Pecock are now honored within Chichester Cathedral. Hook, dean from 1859 to 1875, is remembered with a cenotaph, by Sir Gilbert Scott, in the south aisle of the choir. When the protective sandbags were removed after World War II it was discovered that the German bombings of 1943 had nevertheless ruined the north wall windows. They were filled in 1949 with glass by Christopher Webb. The new windows depict certain prominent figures connected with the cathedral, and Bishop Pecock is among them. He is shown standing and holding a scroll which bears the titles Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy and Book of Faith. The subscription reads: “Reginald Pecock/Bp. of Chichester 1450—1459/First considerable philosopher/to write in English.”
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50 Lollardy and the Reformation in England (4 vols; London: Macmillan, 1908–13) 1. 211.Google Scholar Gairdner does not provide a reference so that we might know just what the “trifle” too much was. But on the page preceding he had quoted the bishop to the effect that in matters of natural law the judgment of reason is superior to what is written in Scripture (Repressor, l.v [26–27]).
51 “Bishop Pecock, His Character and Fortunes,” Dublin Review 24/47 n.s. (1875) 37, 50, 32, 55.
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59 “Introductory Essay,” Book of Faith, 22–24, 86, 93–94. Wharton's 1688 edition of this work did not include the entire extant manuscript. In any case it had long been a rare book (Babington, Repressor, lxvii).
60 The Reule ofCrysten Religioun by Reginald Pecock: The Original Manuscript … Now for the First Time Described (London: J. Pearson, 1911).Google Scholar This manuscript is in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City (MS 519).
61 “Introduction,” Donet, xxi-xxii. The Myrrour is merely a condensation of Part I of the Donet, prepared by Pecock as a budget edition for everyman (Poore Mennis Myrrour, Prologue).
62 “Introduction,” Folewer, vii, lxxi.
63 “Introduction,” Reule ofCrysten Religioun, xiii-xiv.
64 Ibid., xvii-xviii.
65 Blackie, E. M., “Reginald Pecock,” English Historical Review 26 (1911) 448.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
66 Ibid., 465, 468.
67 Unpublished D. Phil, thesis (Oxford University, 1935) 208. The bishop was also the subject of the Oxford University Arnold Prize Essay for 1922. Jessie H. Flemming (Mrs. C. S. B. Buckland) wrote “Reginald Pecock: His Place in the History of English Thought.” This unpublished monograph was not written as part of a university degree program. Buckland was trained in research at the University of London by Professor A. F. Pollard (History, n.s. 7/28 [1923] 317). It is not cited either by Hurnard or Green. It was, how ever, used by Kelly ("Pecock,” vii). Searches at both Oxford and the University of London, in the spring of 1976, failed to uncover a copy of it.
68 Hurnard, “Studies in Intellectual Life,” 206.
69 Ibid., 321.
70 Ibid., v, 301, 326. Hurnard's perceptive treatment of Bishop Pecock has not received the attention it deserves. So far as I can determine it has never before been cited in any subsequent study of him.
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73 (Cambridge, 1945) 1, 6.
74 Ibid., 233, 235.
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77 Ibid., 125.
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103 Book of Faith, 1.8 (205).