Article : "Thomas Cranmer"

Half bred and Cheviot with Leicester. The cattle were : Friesian, Dairy Shorthorn and Ayrshire all intercrossed with either Aberdeen Angus or Hereford. The ley on which the cattle fed contained 5 lbs. coxfoot, 6 lbs. perennial grass, 2 lbs. rye grass, 2 lbs. white clover, and 2 or 3 lbs. of red clover. Mr. Dixon said they also kept about 50 pigs which were mainly Wessex crossed with Large White.

On the 9th February Mr. Mason, an agricultural adviser from Fison's Fertilizers, brought along two films. The first film was called "A.B.C. of N.P.K." (Nitrogen, Phosphates and Potash). This showed why plants needed these elements. The nitrogen was, as it were, the nucleus of the plant, phosphates made good, healthy roots and potash made the plant healthy and gave it good quality. The film also showed that six hundredweight of fertilizer was equivalent to 10 tons of manure. The second film was called "Grasslands". This film showed samples of well fertilized and badly fertilized fields. The main things to keep a check on were drainage, lime deficiency, stocking, cuttings and boundary fences.

The last indoor meeting of the term was a talk given by Professor Bywater on "Careers in Agriculture". Farming was the management of land and the cultivation of food, whereas agriculture could be defined as the science of farming. Farming was one of most important industries and it employed about one million people. As regards income, farming was a very complex industry with farms differing greatly in size. A farmer just beginning would earn about £500 to £700, whereas the big and good farmers would earn a great deal more. If an outsider decided to start farming he would need at least £5,000 capital to buy his farm without mentioning livestock. To enter farming a person should get a university degree or college diploma or spend a year at some agricultural school.

The last meeting of the term, on 18th March, was a visit to Mr. Potter's farms. As we were being shown round the farms Mr. Potter pointed out the facts he had mentioned during his talk earlier in the term. There were three farms all linked together, and covering about 700 acres. After we had looked round all the poultry and housing which was so impressively laid out, Mrs. Potter gave the party a very refreshing tea. C.B.M.G.

THOMAS CRANMER, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY

(21st March, 1956, was the 400th anniversary of his death)

It was the dull, drab morning of 21st March, 1556. An old, white-bearded figure, clad only in a long white shirt, stood firm as a rock, chained to the stake in the ditch opposite Balliol College, Oxford. He had recanted his protestant views; he had acknowledged the Pope, which to him amounted to a denial of Christ. Then on

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that morning strength had come to him, and he had recanted his recantations. It seemed almost as though, in the night, he had dreamt that he had been running to Rome and had seen the Light, and on asking "Quo vadis Domine", had received the reply, "To England, to be burnt", and had returned "ad vincula", and received Christ.

Now as the tongues of flame licked up towards him, hissing their defiance at the rain, which seemed to be sent by the powers of darkness to quench the fire, and deny him his last, most glorious hour, he stretched out his right arm, holding the hand with which he had signed those denials of Christ, steadfastly in the flames, that it might first be burnt, as he had promised in St. Mary's Church, when he had finally renounced the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, Rome, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and the Pope. Then, with a great cry of triumph, "Lord Jesus receive my spirit !" he was utterly consumed by the roaring flames, and taken from human sight.

Thus died Thomas Cranmer, Father of the English Church, whom some claim as a saint, and others condemn as a time-server. Yet in his last hour there was no wavering. Cranmer had served Henry VIII and Edward VI. Then came Mary. He had always been easy to convince; to him the sovereign had the right to choose his people's religion, to be supreme head of the secular church. Then came a sovereign denying that right, accepting the Pope as supreme head. Was he to stand by the sovereign or by his doctrine? That was Cranmer's dilemma. He was a weak man, but when his sovereign rejected him, his dilemma was resolved.

Yet how often, blinded by glory, do we fail to see the man? For after all Thomas Cranmer was a man. He was born, in the year 1489, the son of a gentleman, at Aslacton in the county of Nottingham. He learnt his early lessons under the rod of a brutal schoolmaster, whose severity is probably to blame for the timidity which troubled Cranmer all the rest of his life. Eventually he went to Cambridge, where lie was elected, in due time, a Fellow of Jesus College. On marrying "Black Joan", a kinswoman of the landlady of the Dolphin Tavern, a respectable house, so history has it, which was situated near Jesus College, Cranmer lost his fellowship and became reader at Buckingham College, later refounded as Magdalene College. His wife died after about a year, in childbirth, and he regained his fellowship.

At the age of forty lie took holy orders and the degree of doctor of divinity, becoming lecturer in divinity at Jesus. In the Summer of 1529, having met, in London, at the house of a certain Master Cressy, Dr. Gardiner, the King's Secretary, and Dr. Fox, the King's Almoner, Cranmer was sent for by the King, Henry VIII, who was troubled in the matter of his marriage, partly by his conscience and

partly by Anne Boleyn. The situation is neatly expressed in Shakespeare's "Henry VIII" :- Chamberlain : "It seems the marriage with his brother's wife Has crept too near his conscience." Suffolk : "No; his conscience Has crept too near another lady." Cranmer pointed out that if the Universities of Europe were consulted on the question, and gave a decision favourable to the King (and most of them could be bribed or coerced into doing so) then the Pope could not possibly still withhold the annulment. On hearing this, Henry boomed, "I trow this man has the right sow by the ear", and Cranmer was, at one and the same time, made and undone. For it was his part in the annulment of the marriage between Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII that led to his being created, on the death of Warham in 1532, Archbishop of Canterbury : it was his part in this affair which caused Mary to revenge herself on him in 1556 by deciding to burn him whether he recanted or no.

At the time Cranmer was made Archbishop of Canterbury he had a wife in Germany, for he had taken for his second wife, Margaret, the niece of Dr. Andreas Osiander, the Lutheran pastor of St. Laurence's Church, Nuremberg (Luther having declared it permissible for the clergy to marry). After the Act of Six Articles, 1539, against which Cranmer raised a loud cry of protest, he had, however, to dismiss his wife, as by this act it was forbidden for the English clergy to marry.

Cranmer went from strength to strength, or as some will have it, from weakness to weakness. One thing, however, is certain. He served all his masters well. In 1549 he produced the first English Prayer Book, his greatest work, probably the real profession of his own faith, which he amended in 1552 to suit Protestant criticism, and which was later largely adopted by his goddaughter, Elizabeth I, in the final settlement of the Church of England, and which is used to this very day.

Cranmer was never a politician, as Wolsey had been, or at least not until the death of Edward VI, when he made the fatal mistake of supporting Lady Jane Grey against Mary; a mistake for which he was later tried, and convicted of treason.

Above all things else, Thomas Cranmer was a man, indeed a weak and sinful man. It is in this very fact that his claim to the title of Saint is most firmly based. How much greater is the courage needed by the weak man to face a terrible death, than by the man already brave by his very nature. How much greater the courage needed by the weak St. Peter or the weak Thomas Cranmer, when they went to a martyr's death, than by the strong St. Paul or the strong Hugh Latimer in the same predicament.

Let it be said of Thomas Cranmer, in his weakness lay his strength. Though like the shifting sands throughout his life, yet in his death

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