On this day … 27 August 1580

August 27, 2023August 27, 2023 ~ Peter Smith

On 27 August 1580, Thomas Wall was instituted as vicar of Preston. He was described, shortly before his resignation in 1593, as ‘an old grave man of simple persuatione in dyvinity, and one that in his youthe hath used sondrie callings and now at laste settled himself in the ministry’.

Henry Fishwick, in his History of Preston, suggests he was probably related to the William Wall who was curate at the church a few years earlier, but who displayed none of the gravity and simplicity of his namesake.

The vicar, Nicholas Daniel, Thomas Wall’s predecessor, accused William Wall of having, within eight miles of Preston, ‘an hoore great with chyld’. Wall admitted his immorality, and also agreed that he had engaged in ‘cardinge and diceing for drink’, but said he had given up the gambling three years earlier.

The child could have been Thomas, the illegitimate son of William Wall, clergyman, recorded on the guild roll of 1602.

Wall’s loose living was documented in a letter that the vicar wrote to the Bishop of Chester in 1574. The letter shows that many people in Preston had not accepted the Protestant Reformation and still clung to their Catholic forms of worship.

The vicar complained that his congregation was using an old altar that had been used for sung masses as the communion table and that the pulpit was in a worse state than ‘many swynes troofs [troughs]’.

And at his vicarage, which was then just off Tithebarn Street, he had dug up ‘a great number of alabaster images’ which he had destroyed.

Old forms of worship persisted, as detailed in Fishwick’s extracts from the vicar’s letter:

‘The people were so accustomed to have “ye sacramt” put into their mouths that they refused to receive it in their hands; children were christened by “ould prestes” in private houses; the bells were rung for departed souls; and to add to all this he found there acting as parish clerk a “Popish boy,” who only appeared in the church to play the organ on Sunday, when “such a noyse they made ye no man understood” a word they sang.’

Fishwick set the vicar’s complaints in the context of the times in Lancashire:

‘This state of things was not peculiar to Preston, for in many parts of the county the people were refusing to go to church and were said to be “returning to Popery.” Organs in parish churches at this time were by no means common, but there were several in Lancashire; the one at Preston just referred to was apparently shortly afterwards removed, as in the year 1580, Cardinal Allen, anticipating a revival of Roman Catholicism, deposited in the hands of Thomas Houghton, £100, “to bye a paire of organs” for Preston church, “when the time should serve”—that time did not arrive and the money went to the English College at Rheims.’

There was to be no revival in Preston, and as a mark of the public acceptance of the reformation, the parish authorities reached for the New Testament favoured by Protestants for a new name for their church. It was no longer dedicated to St Wilfrid, becoming instead St John’s.