Welsh Journals

THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH: ANTHONY KITCHIN AND HUGH JONES, TWO REFORMATION BISHOPS OF LLANDAFF Madeleine Gray Anthony Kitchin has been regarded, by contemporaries and historians, as the worst bishop Llandaff ever had. "This greedy old man, with but little learning", as the Spanish ambassador sneered in 1559, "fundi nostri calamitatis", "the disaster of our estate", in the words of his successor Francis Godwin; he was"as inept as he was incompetent" according to his most recent biographer, John Gwynfor Jones. Ex-monk, ex-academic, ex- royal chaplain, he was past what we would now regard as a suitable age for retirement when he came to Llandaff in 1545. Nevertheless, he clung to his episcopal throne through all the turmoil of the mid-sixteenth century, dying in office in 1563. He has been regarded in consequence as a spineless time- server, and to rehabilitate him would seem an impossible task. In an ecumenical age (and in an ecumenical journal), can anything be said in his defence? The first thing which needs to be emphasised about Kitchin is that he was in no way the reclusive child of the cloister described by Lawrence Thomas.2 As abbot ofEynsham he managed a budget several times that of his future diocese. Indeed, his pension after the Dissolution was only a little less than the total income of the diocese of Llandaff. We know little or nothing about his background, though he seems to have had relatives in Hertfordshire. At least, a John Kitchin of Hatfield was one of the sureties for his payment of the first fruits of his diocese in 1545. It was customary by the sixteenth century for monks to take their place of origin as a new surname on profession, but Kitchin's monastic name of Dunstan cannot be identified with certainty.