Robert Hacombleyn

Date of Brass:

1528

Place:

Cambridge, King's College

County:

Cambridgeshire

Country:

Number:

III

Style:

Cambridge

Description

July 2024

 Few visitors to King’s College chapel notice Robert Hacombleyn’s brass, which for many years has been missing the foot inscription that would have contained his name. The brass is on the floor of Hacombleyn’s chantry chapel on the south side of the college chapel. 

His brass was produced locally by a Cambridge marbler and now consists of a figure in a furred almuce; a scroll issuing from his hands with the words Vulnera Christe tua michi dulcis sint medicina ('May your wounds, O Christ, be sweet medicine to me'); a marginal inscription with a text from the Office of the Dead, at the corners of which were the symbols of the four Evangelists (three remaining); and two shields, one remaining. That shield depicts the Five Wounds of Christ.

Men with the same surname are known from legal records of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mostly in London. For example the London waxchandler William Hacombley or Hacombleyn, active in the 1460s, owed money to the abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury on more than one occasion. Robert Hacombleyn could have been the son of one of these.

Robert Hacombleyn was admitted to Eton College in 1469 as a king’s scholar. He was from the London parish of St Andrew and was thirteen years old. He went on to King’s College, Cambridge, on a scholarship in 1472, becoming a fellow in 1475. Over the following years he served as Dean twice, as bursar and Vice-Provost. During this period he also proceeded from BA to MA and then BTh, as well as taking holy orders and serving as a junior proctor of the university.

In 1492 he was presented to the living of Prescot in Lancashire, and resisigned his fellowship in 1493. He is next recorded at Cambridge in 1506/7, when he was made a Doctor of Theology. In 1509 he was elected Provost of King’s. In the same year he was named on the Commission of the Peace for Cambridgeshire, and again in 1514. By 22 September 1528 he was dead, when a new Provost had been elected and the vicarage of Prescot was vacant.

In his will, he left the college various books, and a chalice and paten engraved with a shield of the Five Wounds of Christ, plus £33 6s 8d for the celebration of masses of the Five Wounds.

During the completion of King’s College chapel in 1512 and 1513, the contracts were made between (1) the Provost and Fellows with the advice of the King’s surveyor of the works at the college, and (2) the craftsmen. However in the contracts of 1526 for the later glazing, Hacombleyn is the only member of the academic community of the college who is a party. 

Hacombleyn was a composer,. A five-part Salve regina is his only surviving work, although another was listed in the King’s College inventory in 1529. As for his academic work, a commentary on Aristotle's Ethica Nichomachea among the college’s manuscripts seems to be his work.

Although Hacombleyn's brass is easily overlooked, the brass lectern which he gave to the chapel is much harder to miss, with Robertus engraved on one face and Hacumblen on the other. It is thought to have been made in the Low Countries. Happily, the imagery of the four evangelists engraved on one side has not been defaced. The iconoclast William Dowsing visted King's College chapel late in 1643, but must have overlooked the lectern. He also did no damage at all to the famous glass in the windows, something which is a puzzle to this day. 

Copyright: Jon Bayliss (text and photo); Lack, Stuchfield & Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Cambridgeshire (illustrations from rubbings).