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The Deed of Surrender is held by the National Archives and reproduced with their kind permission.
Object No. 2 is unusual in our collection because it is not held by Christ College Archive at all. The Deed of Surrender document, like the school's Royal Charter, is held at Kew in the National Archives. It has been chosen for the exhibition because it begins the story hinted at in Object No. 1.
Many of the documents that help to build the story of Christ College are lengthy, and in a style of handwriting and legal phrasing (in Latin) that is difficult to decipher. Prepared by the Richard Ingworth, Suffragan Bishop of Dover and agent of King Henry VIII, the Deed of Surrender is rather different. The simplicity of the wording is in marked contrast to the devastating effect it must have had on a monastic house that had been established in Brecon for almost three centuries.
The Dominican Friary of St Nicholas was the first institution to be established on the site that is now Christ College. Established in about 1250, the friary was a flourishing community and, though relatively small, it was the largest of the Welsh Dominican friaries.
The Dominican Friars were mendicant preachers who could own no possessions. The Friary of St Nicholas was supported by benefactions, which enabled the building of the Chapel and two halls (now the dining halls). The remaining stone buildings, the Dining Halls and the Chapel, suggest the importance of the Friary in the local community, an importance that lasted almost three hundred years before Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries.
On 29 August 1538, the day of surrender of the Friary of St Nicholas into the hands of the King, the Friars were summoned by their own church bell. With signatures and crosses (not all of them could write their own names), nine friars and their prior, Richard David, signed the document shown here as Object No. 2. Heart wrenchingly, they were forced to declare that they had surrendered their House "with one assent" and "without coercion". Where they went and what happened to them next is not known.
Be it remembered, we the Prior and Convent of the Black Friars of Brecknock, with one assent and consent, without any coercion or counsel do give our house into the hands of the Lord Visitor to the King’s use; deserving his Grace to be good and gracious to us. In witness we subscribe our name with our proper hands the 29 day of August in the 30 year of the reign of our most dread sovereign Lord King Henry the VIII.
Writing in 1978, Dr Bernard Knight evocatively describes the aftermath of the surrender. "After the dissolution, no services were held in the friary church and the buildings remained empty and forlorn. The lands of the friars now belonged to the King, whose agents leased them out to local people . . . so began a strange period in which the life of the friary stood still and the meadow site seemed to hold its breath."
Sketch of the Chapel of St Nicholas. Archaeological Journal Vol 7 1850.
A few years before the Friary’s dissolution, Richard Rawlins, Bishop of St Davids, had suggested to Henry VIII that the College at Abergwili should be moved to Brecon because the inhabitants of Brecon were “a parcel of illiterate and beggarly savages, ignorant alike of their duty to God and man”. Henry declined.
Bishop Rawlins’ successor, Bishop William Barlow, had rather more success in persuading the monarch. He petitioned for Abergwili College to be transferred to Brecon so that “the Welsh rudeness would soon be framed to English civility”. Henry agreed.
The influence of Bishop Barlow in the transfer of Abergwili College to Brecon should not be underestimated. He not only persuaded the King that Abergwili College was inconveniently placed, he also convinced him of the need for a school in Brecon. Bishop Barlow's success in persuading the King also meant that the friary site did not suffer the destruction that fell upon most monastic buildings in the decades after their dissolution.
As a result of Bishop Barlow's petition, on 19 January 1541 Henry granted that the College at Abergwili would be removed to Brecon and that a Ludus Literarius (Grammar School) would be established on the friary site. So it came about that the ‘College of Christ at Brecknock’ was founded less than three years after the signing of Object No. 2: the Deed of Surrender.
