Bishop Oldham’s Chapel
Bishop Hugh Oldham was born in 1452. Although his birthplace is uncertain, it was somewhere near Manchester which was then a small town. Educated in the Lancashire household of Thomas Stanley and Lady Margaret Beaufort – the stepfather and mother of King Henry VII (1485-1509) – he remained chaplain to Lady Margaret who helped him to study law at Oxford and Cambridge and supported his career in the church with valuable grants of benefices. He also served as chancellor in Lady Margaret’s household, and in 1503 was chosen to help lay the first stone of the royal mausoleum being built by Henry VII at Westminster Abbey. Hugh Oldham became Bishop of Exeter the following year.
Bishop Oldham took an active interest in education, in his diocese and beyond. In 1515, he used part of the land inherited from his father to found Manchester Grammar School. With his friend Bishop Richard Fox of Winchester, he was also a founding benefactor of Corpus Christi College Oxford in 1517.
Bishop Oldham’s burial chapel at the south end of the retroquire was built at the same time as the chapel for Sir John Speke at the north end. Although the details of these two chapels are different, they form a corresponding pair, maintaining the building’s north-south symmetry. Bishop Oldham died on 25 June 1519, six months after he wrote his will in which he left £80 for the vicars choral of the cathedral to celebrate a daily Mass for his soul at his tomb.
The frieze on the outside of the chapel screen contains royal symbols, including the portcullis as a Beaufort emblem widely used by Lady Margaret. Inside, there is a profusion of owls – around the walls, on the ceiling and in the bishop’s coats of arms. The owl is a rebus of his name as ‘Owl-dom’. Statues and other figures have been damaged, whilst the owls remain intact. The most notable damage is on the panels of the retable above the altar where all the figures (except one which is hidden) have been decapitated. This destruction may have happened around 1537, when King Henry VIII imposed a new Dean of Exeter, Simon Heynes, who soon set about implementing orders relating to the abolition of pilgrimages, cults and offerings to images. Dean Heynes was likely responsible for ordering the damage to these panels depicting the cult of St Gregory, a 6th-century pope. The subject of the central panel is Gregory’s vision of Christ appearing during the Mass, a popular late medieval theme that sought to persuade viewers that Christ’s body and blood were truly embodied in the ceremonial bread and wine.
These details supplement information provided in the cathedral on the stand Why are there owls in this chapel?
