"...
thirteen poor men and thirteen poor women, of whom one should preside
over the others and be named the Master... " So says the
license in mortmain granted by the King to Michael de la Pole in
1383. The foundation deed of the following year goes into a lot
more detail. The Master had to be a priest over the age of 30.
He would have his own house and be responsible for the management of
the hospital, the brethren and sisters (including paying their
allowances), and the administration of the estates. He also had
to lead daily prayers and say mass two or three times a week.
He would be answerable to the representatives of the de la Pole
family, to the Prior of the neighbouring Carthusian priory and to the
Mayor of the town.
Little
changed until 1525 when the last of the de la Poles, Edmund Duke of
Suffolk, died. Fourteen years later another layer of oversight
was removed when the priory was "dissolved" under Henry
VIII. In 1552 King Edward gave the patronage of the hospital to
the Corporation of the town. That consolidated the power of the
Mayor and the "Bench" of Aldermen. But they showed
little interest at first, and that meant the Master was left to his
own devices. The temptation was obvious; run down the number of
inmates, do as little maintenance as possible, collect all the rents
and pocket the surplus money. In 1558 Thomas Turner was appointed
Master, and also had to assist at Holy Trinity Church, saying mass at
least once a week. This dual role was to become the norm for
centuries, but for the first time we see the view that the Mastership
of the hospital was not a full-time job.
In
1571 the Bench at last showed an
interest
in what was happening. They came up with a long list of corrupt
practices and petitioned the Archbishop of York to act against
Turner. Turner pointed out that the Mayor and Aldermen had the power
to deal with him themselves; so they did. The Master was made to
swear adherence to a long list of rules, mainly financial (including
an annual audit of the accounts),
which would put the hospital back on track. In the process the Bench
assumed powers it did not legitimately possess. But
the next Master, Griffith Briskin, failed to comply and had to
resign, owing £50 to the hospital. The problem of how to get rid of
a Master was to recur for many years. The Bench could sack him; but
what happened when he would not leave? In 1644 they thought that
William Stiles had resigned and appointed a replacement. Stiles
insisted he was going nowhere. There
was a long legal wrangle and Stiles stayed put. It was Cromwell’s
Council of State which solved the problem in 1651 by removing him for
his politics, and at last John Shaw, who had been waiting impatiently
for 7 years, replaced him. That didn’t end well either. Shaw was
an extreme Puritan who was eventually sacked by Holy Trinity but
refused to leave the hospital. He used it as his base for preaching
his inflammatory sermons to his large following before agreeing to
move elsewhere.
One
power which seems to have been taken out of the hands of the Master
for good in
the 18th
century
was that of deciding who was to be admitted to the hospital. The
Master received the applications but the Corporation selected the
“winners”. This lead to a suspiciously high number of inmates
who had connections to the Corporation. A practice grew up of the
Aldermen taking it in turn to nominate someone to fill a vacancy,
and, unsurprisingly, they rewarded people they knew personally. It
was a scandal which was no secret but was only publicised in the
1830s. The newly-constituted Corporation acted to make the process
more transparent. In
1847 a committee of Advisers to the Charterhouse was formed – a
kind of sub-committee of Aldermen – to deal with admissions and
other matters, such as the maintenance of the buildings.
One
power, or responsibility, which seems to have been left with the
Master for
longer was
that
of collecting rents and organising leases on the lands which gave the
Charterhouse its income. By the 1860s the Advisers thought they had
control, but John Healey Bromby was not one to leave matters to
others.
He
proposed that, in
order to pay for new rooms, part
of the land at Hessle be developed as “villa residences”, leased
out at £20 per acre per annum. Bromby already
had the lessees signed up and
the plans drawn. The Committee members were not best pleased at his
presumption but were obliged to go ahead. They would not allow this
to happen in the future.
By
this stage the
City Council was becoming determined to diminish the powers of the
Master drastically.
The role, they argued, was not a full-time job. The Master should
become a part-time chaplain, on half his current salary, and
he should find and pay for his own lodgings. The
matron (a role created in the early 19th
century) would run the place on a day-to-day basis. But
the Council did not now have
the
final word. That lay with the recently formed Charity Commissioners,
and they refused to countenance the plan. In 1872 they produced a
set of rules based on the foundation document. The
Council tried to ignore this and go
ahead with their own plan but they lost the battle. In 1901 the
Charity Commission’s scheme was imposed. There were to be 9
trustees, 5 of them to be nominated by the Council. The duties of
the trustees were spelled out, as were those of the Master. He
had to take services on Sundays and three other days; visit inmates
and enforce discipline among them and the staff; pay the inmates
their allowances; arrange for the special needs of infirm inmates and
the removal of the insane; and “to appoint and remove the doctor,
matron, nurse and porter of the Hospital”. There were few actual
powers there, and
one wonders whether he could, in
reality, appoint staff without the approval of the trustees.
In
the wake of World War 2 the question of downgrading the Master's role
re-emerged. His house had been badly damaged by a bomb in 1941 and
fell into ruin. The hospital itself was closed, and the Master,
Arthur Kent Chignell, lived in temporary accommodation and had little
to do. The Charterhouse was reopened in 1948 but the Master's House
was a bone of contention for several years after. Some people
reverted to the idea of the Master as chaplain, with the House being
demolished or rebuilt as rooms for inmates. Chignell was naturally
alarmed. He wanted a pay rise, not a cut. He asked for an assistant
because he couldn’t afford to retire (there was no pension) but was
too old to do the work. The Charity Commission was adamant; no
assistant. In a letter which is startlingly blunt in its language it
insisted that there was no provision or money for an assistant and if
the Master was too old for the job he should retire. It
seems that an assistant was appointed. Chignell died in 1951 and his
assistant, Ronald Helm, succeeded to the Master’s job. In 1956 the
House, rebuilt as closely as possible to the original, was reopened.
What
few powers remained to the Master were weakened by the holder of the
post of Clerk to the Trustees. He
was also
the
Town Clerk, and
he
tightened the grip of the Council on the Charterhouse. One
long-serving clerk took to pre-empting or ignoring any decisions by
the trustees. At one stage he told the Master of the time that he
should not be handling money. The Master responded that he couldn’t
not
handle
money and he pleaded for a written job description. It is not clear
if he got one. (The
clerk to the Trustees is no longer a Council officer.)
The
scheme of governance has been updated several times in the last 120
years, but the clauses on the duties of the Master remain almost the
same, except that he (or she) no longer appoints staff without
reference to the trustees and,
of course, no longer pays allowances to residents.
The emphasis is on duties rather than powers. No doubt the
situation will continue to evolve, but the position of Master of the
Charterhouse survives after 637 years.
