"... 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.
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