page_title: St Peter's Collegiate Church
section_title: "That captivated Church"
hierarchical_section_title: St Peter's Collegiate Church / History / 1603–1660: Religious strife and civil war / "That captivated Church"
caption_attribution_description: English: Joseph Hall, detail of an engraving by John Payne, 1628 Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
context_page_description: St Peter's Collegiate Church is located on the northern side of central Wolverhampton, England. For many centuries it was a chapel royal, and from 1480 a royal peculiar, independent of the Diocese of Lichfield and even the Province of Canterbury. The collegiate church was central to the development of the town of Wolverhampton, much of which belonged to its dean. Until the 18th century, it was the only church in Wolverhampton and the control of the college extended far into the surrounding area, with dependent chapels in several towns and villages of southern Staffordshire.
  Fully integrated into the diocesan structure since 1848, today St Peter's is part of the Anglican Parish of Central Wolverhampton. The Grade I listed building, much of which is Perpendicular in style, dating from the 15th century, is of significant architectural and historical interest. Although it is not a cathedral, it has a strong choral foundation in keeping with English Cathedral tradition. The Father Willis organ is of particular note: a campaign to raise £300,000 for its restoration was launched in 2008. Restoration began in 2018.
context_section_description: A Puritan survey, which can be dated fairly confidently to the first three months of 1604, found considerable cause for concern. Seven stipendiaries were doing the work: four of them were on incomes of 10 nobles (£6 6s. 8d.) and three on £6. These compare unfavourably with estimates of the incomes required to sustain celibate medieval priests: Bishop William Lyndwood had thought £6 13s. 4. necessary in the early 15th century, well before the inflation of the Tudor period. Six of the seven prebends were in the hands of Walter Leveson. The parish was said to have a population of 4000, many of them Catholic in sympathy and recusant. In the satellite chapel at Pelsall the curate's stipend was £4. At Bilston and Willenhall the curates had no reserved stipend. Two of the curates, named as Mounsell and Cowper, were said to be "notorious drunkards and dissolute men." No comment was made on the parochial work of the sacristan.
  The far from Puritan Joseph Hall, later Bishop of Exeter and Bishop of Norwich, took a similarly negative view of St Peter's. Starting his career as a chaplain to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, he was sent in quest of a prebend by a relative, Samuel Barton (also rendered Burton), Archdeacon of Gloucester, who, "knowing in how good terms I stood at Court, and pitying the miserable condition of his native Church of Wolverhampton, was very desirous to engage me in so difficult and noble a service, as the redemption of that captivated Church." His connections secured him free collation to the prebend of Willenhall, which he seems to have held from 1610. Several of his contemporaries at Wolverhampton were also ambitious, rising clerics, like the consecutive Hatherton prebendaries Godfrey Goodman, a Catholic sympathiser and future bishop, and Cesar Callendrine, a German Calvinist minister who long headed the Dutch Reformed Church in London. Hall found St Peter's under the thumb of Walter Leveson: "the freedom of a goodly Church, consisting of a Dean and eight prebendaries competently endowed, and many thousand souls lamentably swallowed up by wilful recusants, in a pretended fee-farm for ever." Because of this the prebend was worth only 19 nobles or £6 3s. 4d. Using the evidence of forged seals and documents, Hall and other prebendaries became involved in a protracted action against Leveson in the Kings Bench. This was on the brink of complete success, with Dean Marco Antonio de Dominis content, when Leveson died, leaving the situation confused. In 1622 Hall resigned the prebend and the Dean appointed in his place "a worthy preacher, Mr Lee, who should constantly reside there, and painfully instruct that great and long neglected people: which he hath hitherto performed, with great mutual contentment and happy success."
caption: Joseph Hall
exif: {}