Pembridge Rectors

Pembridge Rector’s Elevation to Archbishop Thwarted

We have just witnessed the enthronement of a new Archbishop of Canterbury as Dr Sarah Mullally takes up the post of the Church of England’s most senior cleric.

Two former Rectors of St Mary’s Church Pembridge were destined to become  Archbishops which indicates the importance of Pembridge in the  late  Medieval world. In January 1479 Dr Thomas Langston was inducted as Rector of St Mary’s Pembridge. Four years later he became Bishop  of St David’s. 1485 saw promotion to Bishop of Salisbury and in 1493 he became Bishop of Winchester. In 1501 he was elected Archbishop of Canterbury. But he  was never  enthroned as he died of the plague only a few days later.

Langston’s successor as Rector of Pembridge was Christopher Bainbridge who took office here in 1485. In 1501 he moved to Surrey to become Archdeacon and in 1503 Dean of York. Promotion to Master of the Rolls and Dean of Windsor followed.

Master of the Rolls is a judicial appointment. Today it is divorced from the church and is a role undertaken by a senior judge. The Medieval church played a much greater role in settling civil disputes with many ordinary people turning to the Ecclesiastical Courts to resolve their differences.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

By 1507 he was the third most senior cleric in the English  Church as Bishop of Durham but within a year had taken on the Archbishopric of York, effectively the Archbishop of Canterbury’s deputy. In 1512 he was  rewarded by the Vatican and made a Cardinal. Bainbridge’s rapid rise through the priesthood ended in 1514 when he was murdered by his own chaplain who administered a poison to him.

Bainbridge was not the only Pembridge parish priest to be the victim of murder. In 1324 Henry le Deyere was murdered by Richard de Staunton. He was absolved of the crime by the Pope’s representative. Two years later the Bishop of Hereford ordered that de Staunton should do public penance for his crime in the churches of Pembridge, Shobdon, Leominster, Kington, Eardisland, Almeley and Preston on Wye. Given that the alternative was capital punishment, de Staunton got off lightly but nevertheless it would have been a humiliating and drawn-out penalty.

References:

Medieval Pembridge and the Pembridge Family, Andrew Stirling Brown and Ian Brown, Homebrown Press 2005

Pembridge Clergy, P Klein, 2001

Sherbourne Family of Pembridge, Rev S Cornish Watkins M.A, Woolhope Club Transactions, 1917