The Arch Conjuror of England (42 page)

Dee's absences from Manchester were not unusual, since like the Fellows of Manchester Collegiate Church he struggled with its long-standing religious, personal and financial squabbles. As Archbishop of Canterbury and Privy Councillor, Whitgift knew those problems well. They had bedevilled his predecessors, Archbishops Parker and Grindal.
³⁸
By proposing Dee for the Wardenship, Whitgift not only headed him off from St Paul's but also lumbered him with Manchester's nonconforming radical Protestants, who found Dee a far less sympathetic warden than Chaderton. At the same time Whitgift repaid Dee for thwarting his anti-Presbyterian drive in 1591 with responsibility for a College that, as Dee complained to Edward Dyer in 1596, ‘is almost become no College’ but a ‘labyrinth’ of baffling financial complexity, fraud and incompetence.
³⁹

By ‘no College’ Dee meant precisely that. Northern England's largest complex of college buildings had been bought by the Earl of Derby at the dissolution in 1547 and not returned when Philip and Mary refounded the College in 1556. Lacking a physical location, the eight Fellows of that second foundation spent the 1560s and 1570s quarrelling over how to share their pillaging of the College finances.

Long leases at low rents to local gentry, which were sometimes competing leases of the same land, sapped the College's income. The final blows came in 1575 and 1577, when Elizabeth leased the grain tithes of Manchester from the College for a bargain price, initially for forty years and then for ninety-nine. A minor favourite acquired them, leaving the Fellows with only £86 a year in income from tithes.
⁴⁰

The scandal led to Elizabeth's new charter of 1578. Completely failing to remake the College into a centre for Protestant evangelisation, this document crippled Dee's last years. Fatally, it protected the existing tithe leases and failed to restore to the College its buildings, leaving the Warden and Fellows homeless, despite providing for a rent-free ‘collegiate house’. Its one useful innovation stipulated that the warden and Fellows would be paid only while resident, unless the chapter authorised absence on college business. Dee's patent of appointment dispensed with this requirement, leading to quarrels with the Fellows when they refused to pay his stipend of four shillings a day during his absences.
⁴¹

Burghley and Walsingham appointed a commission to renegotiate the College leases and raise money to repurchase the grain tithes, which completely failed.
⁴²
Throughout Dee's Wardenship men holding leases from different foundations battled in the Westminster courts of the Duchy of Lancaster over College lands and tithes.
⁴³
One litigant, Thomas Goodyear, visited Dee at Mortlake on 12 July 1595. He had previously sued Warden Chaderton and the Fellows over his rights to tithes.
⁴⁴

The following day Dee turned sixty-eight. Jane was a month away from giving birth to Margaret, their seventh living child. Their household in Manchester would also include Bartholomew Hickman, Francis Nichols and nine servants, including a butler, a cook and a nurse. Dee's official stipend of four shillings a day would have to support them all – if he
received it. His next actions suggest Dee had already abandoned any illusions about Manchester's independence from William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby.

In June he wrote to Derby, dined with him twice in September, and cast a horoscope for his daughter born the following 26 December. Dee persuaded Derby to rent him lodgings within the College, though despite their charter the Fellows refused to pay the rent.
⁴⁵
Inevitably, now that his appointment had been settled, two days before Jane gave birth on 14 August he received a letter from Kelley inviting him back to serve Emperor Rudolf II. When in November he heard rumours of Kelley's death, he must have felt vindicated.

His appointment brought unwanted attention. The executors for his booksellers now demanded he settle his ancient debt of £63, which had been outstanding for thirteen years. At Christmas he signed a bond to pay by instalments. The bond remains, uncancelled, in the Elizabethan Chancery rolls, because Dee failed to make the payments out of his inadequate warden's stipend.
⁴⁶
By then he knew more about the extent of his problems. In late October he urged the attorney general of the Duchy of Lancaster to help recover ‘some land detained from the College’, which suggests why he maintained Hickman to secure angelic advice.
⁴⁷
Within weeks of his belated installation on 20 February 1596, Dee began campaigning to restore the College's chaotic finances. In response, lessees with competing leases from different College foundations united to defend their generous terms.

Dee also faced social tensions exacerbated by growing population pressure. Local manorial lords were converting open grazing to arable farming to profit from rising grain prices. These changes severely diminished the College income because occupiers owing tithes on open grazing land narrowly interpreted their obligations, refusing tithes once they enclosed that land for crops. Changes in agricultural methods also destroyed ancient landmarks, creating boundary disputes.

In these contests the existing long leases hamstrung the College, preventing it from exploiting changing conditions as aggressively as private landlords. The internal conflicts between the Fellows and warden,
and the College's susceptibility to political pressure from the Crown and powerful courtiers also weakened its position. Above all, Dee's failure to gain redress reveals the Crown's inability to enforce justice in Lancashire through the remote Duchy Courts at Westminster, two hundred miles away.

The Collegiate Church served the vast parish of Manchester, sixty square miles containing several manors, thirty townships and seven chapelries. It took six days to perambulate the parish boundaries in May 1597. Large parts of the parish, including Manchester town itself, belonged to the manor of Manchester, while other parts owed service to the warden and Fellows as lords of the manor of Newton, which lay several miles to the north-east, bordering the manor of Failsworth, also within the parish.
⁴⁸

Soon after arriving in Manchester, Dee invited Sir John Byrom, Lord of Failsworth, to dine on 2 April 1596. Dee raised the issue of College tithes owed by Byrom's tenants, who ‘promised well’. However, on 20 April Dee held his first court for the manor of Newton, where he learned that Byrom's tenants had decades earlier built houses and barns that trespassed on the open grazing of Newton Heath. Dee responded in June by arranging a commission of inquiry into the College's landholdings and tithes from the Duchy of Lancaster in London. The College's opponents furiously obstructed the inquiry, for the following January another draft commission appeared. Not until May 1598 did the Duchy finally issue a commission to inquire into ‘the decay and poor estate’ of the College.
⁴⁹

Byrom's tenants claimed ancient rights over Newton Heath. Dee's ‘Mathematical Preface’ had justified geometry as God's merciful remedy for such a social conflict. Accordingly, he employed Christopher Saxton in July 1596 to survey the boundaries of Newton manor, especially where they bordered the manors of Manchester and Failsworth. Though now known for his handsome county maps, Saxton specialised in surveying disputed boundaries, and courts often hired his skills.
⁵⁰

On 6 July he met Dee and Nicholas Mosley, Lord of Manchester, to discuss their common boundary. Saxton surveyed Manchester township, which extended far beyond the built-up area, between 10 and 13 July. He also surveyed Newton Heath and College lands in Salford. On
14 July, armed with Saxton's survey, Dee prosecuted Byrom's tenants at Manchester quarter sessions. Rebuffed, he sought advice from the legal centres of Lancaster and Chester.

In early September he tried negotiating with Byrom, who alleged that Saxton's survey of Newton Heath had illegally incorporated part of Failsworth manor. Dee had to request another commission before he left London in June 1600, to investigate the encroachments by Byrom's tenants on Newton Heath. This finally established that by enclosing common land in Failsworth, Byrom had forced his tenants to graze their cattle on Newton Heath, thereby cutting the College's income. Therefore, the encroachments still stood in November 1602, when the Duchy Court of Lancaster ordered the tenants to demolish the offending buildings and pay the fines imposed by Dee's court.
⁵¹
Byrom's tenants ignored both orders, because their landlord's enclosures meant they could not survive without grazing their animals on Newton Heath.

The poor harvests and consequent dearth of grain in 1596–7 further hampered Dee's attempts to collect the College's tithes of increasingly valuable corn. In late August he recorded ‘much disquietness and controversy’ about the tithe-corn in Hulme township, immediately south of Manchester. At Crumpsall township to the north he thought he had obtained the tithe-corn by consent, then the parishioners ‘doubted and half-denied’ and finally ‘utterly denied’ when the harvest failed disastrously, sending the price of corn rocketing.
⁵²

Dee took several tithe cases to the Chester consistory court but had to settle for partial payment when the cases dragged on into 1598.
⁵³
Without gifts of cattle from his Radnorshire relatives and of Polish rye from his merchant friend John Pontois, Dee would have been unable to feed his household during these years of hunger and deprivation.
⁵⁴
In July 1600 a commission was still vainly investigating detained tithes.
⁵⁵

Hunger increased social tensions around rights, tenures and boundaries. Those who had seized the College's lands, tithes and title deeds violently defended their gains. In October 1596 Dee sent William Nicholson to the Queen's Master of Requests, to demand justice for ‘intolerable afflictions’ visited on Nicholson's family by opponents of a
commission of inquiry he supported. Large parts of Nicholson's houses had been pulled down and most of his goods, corn and hay ‘cast out of doors’. Dee anticipated similar treatment, because London's distant authority carried little weight.
⁵⁶

In February 1597 Dee procured a Duchy Court commission to assess the calamitous state of the College. It should investigate embezzled charters and title deeds, forging of the seal, and the granting of illegally long leases. It would also scrutinise the College's spending. The commission demanded a thorough perambulation of the parish boundaries, particularly the extent of Theale Moor, where new enclosures had shifted boundary markers, enabling occupiers to claim they owed tithes in adjacent parishes. Dee undertook this perambulation over six days at Rogationtide, very precisely measuring from the ‘three corner stake’ dividing Manchester parish from Prestwich and Middleton. A survey of the manor of Newton in June provoked a three-day protest by several affected individuals. It was all very different from the Rogation processions of Dee's youth, which had been undertaken to drive out the Devil and the social conflict he provoked.
⁵⁷

This commission again failed to restore the College's rights. In September 1597 Dee complained to Edward Dyer that the ‘very great dearth here’ compounded the ‘intricate, cumbersome’ and lamentable affairs of this ‘defamed and disordered College of Manchester’. He could hardly feed his household of eighteen on four shillings a day, and payment depended on the goodwill of the Fellows. Yet what really made him despair was that the Privy Council ignored his complaints, hence his letter to Dyer.
⁵⁸

Did Whitgift ensure that the Privy Council ignored Dee? Hard to say, but in 1598 Dee obtained yet another commission which repeated that of 1597 verbatim, right down to the perambulation of the same landmarks on Theale Moor and the interrogation of parish ancients about boundary markers.
⁵⁹
It took until November 1600 for even this information to be returned to the Duchy Chamber, and interested parties managed to stall publication of the commission's findings in May 1601. The dispute remained unresolved in 1604.
⁶⁰

Given these interminable legal problems, it is hardly surprising that Dee and his family spent the two years after July 1598 ‘at London for the College good’.
⁶¹
In between tedious attendance at the Duchy courts, he spent this time at Mortlake, where he appeared at the Manor Court on 7 May 1600.
⁶²
His ‘Diary’ ends in March 1601, but he spent the summers of 1602 and 1604 in London, and at the age of seventy-seven prepared to attend the courts again in November 1604.

Other circumstances encouraged him to avoid Manchester, despite having to cajole the Fellows into paying his stipend. The College buildings were falling apart, while the church chancel had been crumbling for twenty years. One of the College gatehouses actually collapsed under heavy rain in February 1598, taking a section of wall with it.
⁶³
That summer, when Dee departed for London, the Earl of Derby mortgaged the ‘College house at Manchester’, leaving Dee without lodgings there.
⁶⁴

Dee used his lack of accommodation and the need to follow interminable court cases in London to escape his increasing confrontations with the Fellows. Their money quarrels only exacerbated a more fundamental clash of personalities, revealed in contrasting styles of religion. Seen from London, Lancashire had long appeared one of the ‘dark corners of the land’. Traditional Catholicism still flourished there in the 1590s. Distant ecclesiastical supervision from Chester and York compounded the failure of many enormous, impoverished Lancashire parishes to support resident educated clergy able to preach the Protestant religion.

Closer to, Manchester appeared a bulwark against the resurgent tide of Catholicism. In south-east Lancashire, if the Bishop of Chester, who until 1595 was Warden Chaderton, wanted any sort of preaching ministry, he had to bear with nonconforming preachers, who elsewhere would have been hounded for their scruples about wearing the surplice and following the Book of Common Prayer. In the 1580s Chaderton had enforced clerical attendance at ‘exercises’ monitored by these radicals, including Oliver Carter of Manchester College.
⁶⁵