"In depth" John Tomkys (died 1592) public preacher and tenant of the Drapers Hall

St. Mary's Church, Shrewsbury (image) [+]
St. Mary's Church where John Tomkys was based as public preacher.

John Tomkys, a clergyman in the Church of England, came to Shrewsbury in 1582 when he was appointed the ‘public preacher’ of the town, a position attached to the incumbency of St. Mary’s church of which he became curate. It was, as the historian Patrick Collinson has written, a ‘moment’ in the town’s history, leading to ten years of sometimes dramatic incident.(1) Little has been discovered about his life before his arrival in Shrewsbury, though there is some intrigue about what is known. He was a native of Bilston in Staffordshire, the son of Richard Tomkys who seems to have been a person of some note as his ancestors were said to have been buried in the church at Wolverhampton. His Shrewsbury employers were to credit him with a MA, and he may be identified with a man, of similar name, who graduated from Balliol College, Oxford. His early studies seem to have been supported by a Staffordshire neighbour, Sir Richard Pipe, a lord mayor of London, and it is just possible that these studies took him to Switzerland since in later life he translated and published religious works by the Zürich reformer Heinrich Bullinger, and dedicated the first of these to Thomas Bentham, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, who had once ministered to the English congregation at Geneva. That congregation included the Marian ‘exiles’, of protestant persuasion, who had left England to avoid persecution during the reign of Queen Mary, though whether Tomkys himself was one of them is uncertain. Later in England at least Tomkys is known to have served, as he once put it, at the ‘spiritual table’ of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, ‘in the county of Stafford where I was born’. Dudley, with the earl of Essex and Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of the Council in the Marches (based at Ludlow), were among the most powerful supporters of protestant evangelism in Elizabethan England.

Tomkys’s appointment in Shrewsbury had been recommended by Sir George Bromley, Shrewsbury’s recorder (chief legal advisor on civil litigation) and the elder brother of Sir Thomas Bromley, the Lord Chancellor. Among the gentry of North Shropshire, the Bromleys, with the Corbets and Leightons, had been among the most active promoters of the protestant inclination in the county, and of the establishment of a preaching ministry which could drive that process forward. Bromley himself had written to the Shrewsbury bailiffs hoping that the new appointment would allow ‘the work of God and good religion’ to continue. Tomkys’s predeccesor as public preacher (and the first officially appointed in Shrewsbury) was Dr. Edward Bulkeley, who had been paid £72 a year – a very handsome salary, and a sign of how important the post was to the civic authorities. For provincial towns in Elizabethan England a good public preacher was akin to a celebrity, someone a town could advertize and boast of. On Tomkys’s arrival a new method of funding his salary was worked out which involved raising a substantial sum (£400) from the fees of a large number of burgesses newly admitted for the purpose, and lending that sum out at interest, though the practice was later attacked as usurious and thus, in the eyes of the hot protestants, an ungodly practice.(2)

For his residence Tomkys was leased the Drapers’ Hall in June 1582,(3) originally framed for the company by the Welsh carpenter Roger Smyth in 1576, but including an extension added in 1582, the year of Tomkys’s arrival.(4) Over time the Drapers were to lease their hall to several public preachers, and in 1618 it was let to the radical puritan Julines Hering after the corporation had approved his appointment to the lectureship of St. Alkmund’s. The rent was £4 p.a., the same as Dr. Bulkeley had paid, though Tomkys had it for slightly less, ‘the company repairing it and having the use of it at their meetings as accustomed’.(5) Support for a godly ministry among some of Shrewsbury’s leaders was thus clear enough, a relationship given physical representation when in 1586 the parishioners agreed to give Tomkys a church pew located immediately behind that of the aldermen. This seat was in future to be the property of the occupant of the Drapers’ Hall, and was a reward for Tomkys’s generous help towards the pewing of the church, including a gift towards the making of some of the long benches.(6) The decision to pew St. Mary’s, ‘for the convenient ease of God’s people to sit in time of divine service and sermons’, had been taken in November 1582, shortly after Tomkys’s arrival. The protestant stress upon the importance of hearing the word of God was manifest – but the community was also to be seated in church according to prevailing notions of social hierarchy.

St. Mary’s Church, of which Tomkys was incumbent, was also a ‘royal peculiar’, i.e. it was outside the control of the diocese, which prompted Tomkys to style himself ‘Her Majesty’s Stipendiary Minister’, though in reality he was employed by the borough. The ‘peculiar’ conveyed the right to hold a consistory court to enforce moral and religious discipline within the parish, a right which as the ‘Ordinary’ of the court he was quick to exploit. About 1585 – perhaps in response to a visitation held in the diocese in 1584 – he set out 79 articles which may be seen as the Shrewsbury equivalent of the ecclesiastical ordinances which governed John Calvin’s Geneva.(7) (Significantly perhaps, in 1584 a charitable collection for Geneva had actually been organized in the town – something that Tomkys had presumably had a hand in.(8) ) As well as stringent requirements in respect of church maintenance and attendance, and observance of the Sabbath, the 1585 articles also listed various kinds of immoral behaviour which were to be investigated, and instructed the parishioners to keep a keen look out for Catholic practice such as ‘to the hearing of mass, using of matins, beads, or any unlawful popish books, to superstitious fasting, superstitious praying, superstitious crossing, superstitious ringing, or such other vain popish trash.’ Jesuits and seminary priests were to be exposed, and residents asked ‘whether any of the parish have any of their kindred or kinsfolk beyond the seas, how long they have continued out of the realm, what by hearsay or in conscience you judge their affection to be in religion, and what be their names.’ Hostility was also expressed towards sorcery, charms, prayers and invocations (uttered, for instance, by midwives attending a birth) – all thought to be tainted by superstition – as well as the wizards, ‘wisemen’ and ‘wisewomen’ who practised those dubious arts. No sooner had the articles been issued then fines for ‘faults’ started to be imposed upon offending parishioners, while fines also began to be paid to forgo acts of public penance which Tomkys had ordered in his court.

Catechism (religious instruction) was another key issue for protestant reformers, and Tomkys’s articles also emphasised its importance, especially for the young. In 1585 he himself published ‘A briefe exposition of the Lordes Prayer’, intended for children gathered at Evening Prayer. He also made recommendations for religious instruction at Shrewsbury School, whose pupils by the 1580s were scattered in lodgings throughout the town, and so numerous that effective catechism at that time was difficult to achieve.(9) Meanwhile at St. Mary's church remnant 'superstitions', such as the stone altar and a stained glass window showing the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, were removed, the organs sold off (sung metrical psalms were introduced instead), and the walls whitewashed and then painted with scriptural texts. The churchyard cross had already been pulled down in 1581, but Tomkys also had the ‘palm stone’ (probably used in the old Palm Sunday procession rites) removed in c. 1583.(10) Elsewhere in the town the churchyard cross at St. Julian's suffered the same fate in 1583, and those of St. Chad's, St. Alkmund's and St. Giles's, with official approval, in 1584 5.(11) Another cross just outside the Castle Gates, mentioned in 1382 and shown on the 'Burghley' map, had also gone by 1584, though shown on the bird’s-eye view of Shrewsbury on this site.(12)

Tomkys also supported the Shrewsbury magistrates in the attack, reaching a peak after 1580, on moral offences, and in particular the bearing of bastard children. The co-ordination between the town magistrates and their public preacher is suggested by a number of cases. In one instance Tomkys himself bought the special garments used to clothe a woman of ‘ill fame’ when the JPs banished her from the town for co-habitation, or ‘living in sin’ as the common phrase had it until quite recently.(13) In another case John Gardner was fined in 1582 by the Great Court and then indicted before the borough sessions for consorting with his maidservant and getting her pregnant. He was ordered by the magistrates to appear at Sunday evensong in St. Mary’s dressed in the traditional white sheet of penance – a public humiliation also imposed on occasion by other church courts and the Council in the Marches.(14) In a third case in October 1584 Richard Maddox of Astley (a village within the Shrewsbury liberties and the parish of St. Mary) was found to have committed incestuous adultery – he had impregnated Margaret Maddox who was not only a step-daughter, but also the widow of his recently deceased son. The town magistrates then bound him over in the penal sum of £100 under conditions which included not only an obligation to care for both mother and child once the baby had been born, but to remain in St. Mary’s parish until order had been taken by Tomkys or his deputy in St. Mary’s court. To that end he was to appear before Tomkys at the next sitting of the court in November between 9 and 11 o’clock in the morning. The bond was not discharged until 1592, and one can only imagine the resentment that it caused Maddox who came from a well-known farming family in the village.(15)

Amidst this programme of moral and religious reformation, Tomkys also preached a sermon before the earl of Leicester, who made a notable visit to the town in 1584, and had it published – the only sermon ever preached before the earl to have been printed. Nonetheless, as Patrick Collinson has noted, the fact that many ‘superstitions’, especially the stone altar at St. Mary’s, ‘had survived until this late date is remarkable, raising questions about the thoroughness of Reformation processes in pre-Tomkys Shrewsbury.’ In that respect it may be significant that both the churchyard crosses at St. Mary’s and St. Julian’s had to be taken down at night, suggesting that the authorities were sensitive to any reaction to these acts of iconoclasm. At St. Chad’s opposition to the removal of the font to the chancel forced the minister (Thomas Price) to put it back in 1588 in its ‘old and usual place in the entering of the church’, an event which also suggests parochial resistance to protestant precisianism.(16)

Such resistance was particularly evident in response to Tomkys’s attempts to clamp down on various traditional recreations and festive customs. Like other of the godly party in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign Tomkys was hostile to customs of this kind. At a later date he would certainly have been called a ‘puritan’, though that term, used as a term of abuse, is not found in Shrewsbury until the 1620s and after.(17) The articles of 1585 reveal his distaste well. One item for example, closely modelled on the diocesan visitation, enquired ‘whether there have been any lords of misrule, or summer lords, or ladies or any disguised persons, as morris dancers, maskers or mummers or such like within the parish either in the nativitide(18) or in summer or at any other time, and what be their names.’ All the same the tight discipline which Tomkys sought to enforce in this respect met spirited resistance. As Collinson has written, ‘This clustered around the symbol of the shearmen’s tree, a kind of maypole erected in celebration of their annual midsummer feast by the members of a trade and company, many of whose members were effectively dependent on the drapers for employment.’ Tomkys in his sermons had begun the campaign against the tree, and in 1591, when some of the younger shearmen defied an order forbidding the setting up of the tree ‘in superstitious order’ – their act of defiance led to a legal cause célèbre which gripped the town. The full story can be found under the link for the Shearmen’s Hall.

During these events, and at a time when four of the incalcitrant shearmen were still in gaol for refusing to admit they had done wrong and to make a formal submission, Tomkys himself was subjected to a ritual humiliation. According to one of the legal documents relating to the case, ‘upon Sunday the 6th of June 40 of the apprentices of that company [i.e. of the Shearmen’s company] followed John Tomkys the public preacher through divers streets of the town as he came from the visitation of one that was sick in St. Chad’s parish, having a blind minstrel playing upon a harp led before them. And when the preacher stayed at any turning to know their intent, they stayed also behind him, and when he went forward they followed after with the blind minstrel playing before them, until they had in this mocking and flouting manner brought him to his house [Drapers’ Hall]. And after they had in this sort brought him to his house, being in St. Mary’s churchyard, they there caused the blind minstrel to go around the churchyard playing before them and they following after according to the old order of procession.’(19) This kind of public humiliation is known by historians as a ‘charivari’ after a French word to denote the practice. The reference to the ‘old order of procession’ is probably to the Corpus Christi procession, one of the most important ceremonial occasions in the civic calendar before the Reformation. In Shrewsbury the procession had been kept up until 1547 and was revived briefly in 1554 during the reign of Queen Mary.(20) Anything that echoed that procession, so redolent of the old religion, would have been anathema to Tomkys.

Although the shearmen were successful in retaining the customary use of their tree, Shrewsbury’s cultural wars were to simmer for some years afterwards. But Tomkys himself, exhausted one likes to imagine by his exertions in the face of so much hostility, was not to live much longer. Already in the winter after the incident of the Shearmen’s Tree, February 1592, he was described as ‘notoriously visited with sickness’, and in that state obtained special licence, as permitted by Act of Parliament, to eat meat during Lent in order to build up his strength.(21) But he died four months later on 23 June and was buried next day – Midsummer’s Day – in St. Mary’s church. When the town bailiffs wrote to Tomkys’s predecessor Dr. Bulkeley, asking him to return (he could not, but recommended a successor), they stated that Tomkys had been ‘the golden candlestick of doctrine which hath shined amongst us now divers years by his ministry’, and the town annalist recorded that among the ‘perfect protestants was great lamentation’. It was a sentiment, one suspects, that was far from widespread among the townsfolk, including no doubt Margaret Freeman, once thrown into the town gaol ‘where she lies upon the bare boards, overpressed with irons and ready to starve with hungers . . . for speaking certain idle words of the public preacher’(22). Tomkys had already buried his devout wife Elenor in 1584 (there were four surviving children), and now asked to be buried beside her, but not for any ‘superstitious’ reason. There was to be no ringing, alms giving or ‘entertaining of friends’ at his funeral. Ironically his son Thomas, who attended Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge, became a playwright. His comedy ‘Albumazar’ (1615), a satire on the pretensions of astrology, was something of a hit in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it is unlikely that his father would have approved of his son’s chosen career.(23) With John Tomkys’s death in 1592 the drive to impose parochial discipline, and to turn Shrewsbury into a godly city on the hill, seems to have lost some of its dynamism: the churchwardens’ accounts for St. Mary’s, for example, indicate that fines for moral faults or to commute public penance had begun to peter out by the end of 1594.(24) It had been a brief but vivid period in the town’s history.

Sources
1 Except where noted, this account is based closely on the entry on Tomkys in the Dictionary of National Biography (2004 edn.) and the sources given there, especially P. Collinson, ‘The shearman’s tree and the preacher: the strange death of merry England in Shrewsbury and beyond’, in P. Collinson, J. Craig (eds.), The Reformation in English towns (1998), and B. Coulton, 'The Establishment of Protestantism in a Provincial Town: A Study of Shrewsbury in the 16th Century', Sixteenth Century Journal, xxvii. (1996).
2 Shropshire Archives [SA] 3365/76, fos. 300v-302r, 303v, 365, 370v, 376v; Rev. H. Owen, Rev. J.B. Blakeway, A History of Shrewsbury (2 vols. London, 1825), ii. 364 n., 412n.; SA P257/X/2/1.
3 SA 1831/6/1, p. 294.
4 Madge Moran, Vernacular Buildings of Shropshire (2003), 252-4.
5 SA 1831/6, fo. 29v.
6 SA P257/B/3/1, fos. 88r, 100r. Seats for the bailiffs and the aldermen were erected in 1582-3, and roofed over in 1613: ibid. fos. 85r, 236r.
7 SA P257/B/3/1, fos. 94v-97v.
8 Historical Manuscripts Commission, 15th report, Appendix, part X (1899), 55.
9 See in general James Lawson, ‘John Tomkys and the Catechising of Shrewsbury School, 1580-1640’, Transactions Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, lxxvii (2002), 85-88.
10 SA P257/B/3/1, fo. 88v; E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), 23-4.
11 Transactions Shropshire Archaeological Society [T.S.A.S.] i. (1878), 61; iii. (1880), 288, 295-6.
12 SA 3365/784, m. 16d; 3365/2623/11; NA C 142/85/57.
13 SA 3365/1803 (30 Oct. 1584); SA 3365/64, 1795, 1803, 1808 (bonds taken for good behaviour); T. Phillips, The History and Antiquities of Shrewsbury (1779), 92-3.
14 SA 3365/1890 (punishment of Elizabeth, wife of Jevan ap Hugh Taylor), 3365/2500.
15 SA 3365/1803 (bonds, unfoliated).
16 T.S.A.S. iii. (1880), 288, 295, 312.
17 In a dispute in Coleham in 1621, for example, John Evans was alleged to have bawled through the thin wall separating him from his neighbour Thomas Hodges (another labourer), ‘Thou come out of a puritan’s house, and I came out of a papist house, and if thou will I play at cards with thee for a pot of ale.’ When Hodges replied that he knew no puritans, Evans shouted out in bravado, ‘I know a papist’s house and I love the papists and I pray god bless them, and I will stand with them while I live and those that speak against them I pray God a plague of God’s light upon them for I will adventure my life for them and shed my blood for them.’ SA 3365/1203, fo. 7r. Elizabeth Whitcott, a widow, was described as a ‘lying puritan lady’ in 1629: SA 3365/2230. And in 1630 Richard Hall was called by George Heath, a turner of Shrewsbury, ‘a private whoremaster, an outcome rogue, and a puritan knave’: SA 3365/2232. In 1638/9 alderman William Rowley, of Rowleys’ House, was also abused as a puritan by one of the common council: SA 3365/2236.
18 Note ‘nativitide’, not ‘Christmas’ – the ‘Christ Mass’ was anathema to a hot protestant like Tomkys.
19 SA 3365/1113. Full transcript in J. Alan B. Somerset, Records of Early English Drama. Shropshire, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1994), i. 266-271.
20 SA 3365/486, fo. 4r; Somerset, id. i. 204.
21 SA P257/B/3/1, fo. 131v.
22 Coulton, ‘Establishment’, 327.
23 See the entry for Thomas Tomkis in the Dictionary of National Biography (2004 edn.).
24 Last noted at SA P257/B/3/1, fo. 144r.