Robert Hacombleyn

Date of Brass:

1528

Place:

Cambridge, King's College

County:

Cambridgeshire

Country:

Number:

III

Style:

Cambridge

Description

July 2024

While many visitors to King’s College chapel may not register Robert Hacombleyn’s brass, which has been missing the foot inscription that would have revealed his name for many years, the brass lectern he gave to the chapel is much harder to miss, with Robertus engraved on one face and Hacumblen on the other. It was presumably produced in the Low Countries and the figures engraved on one side have not been defaced. Also escaping destruction in the mid-1640s at the time of the visit of the iconoclast William Dowsing are four windows of stained and painted glass for which Hacombleyn contracted in 1513 with Henry VIII’s glazier, Barnard Flower, complemented by the panels produced by Flower’s successor Galyon Hone and his assistants after 1526 that also survive. 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 text from the Office of the Dead, at the corners of which were the symbols of the four Evangelists (three remaining) and one of two shields remaining. That shield depicts the 5 Wounds of Christ, further proof that William Dowsing’s visit in early 1644 was less effective than he had intended. The brass is on the floor of Hacombleyn’s chantry chapel on the south side of the college chapel. In 1526, Hacombleyn set up a fund to provide for his memorial for twenty years after his death.

A small number of men with the same surname are known from legal records of the late fourteenth-century and from the fifteenth, mostly in London. Robert Hacombleyn could possibly have been the son of one of these: the London waxchandler William Hacombley or Hacombleyn, active in the 1460s, was recorded as owing debts to the abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury on more than one occasion.

Robert Hacomblen 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 was admitted to King’s College, Cambridge, on a scholarship in 1472, becoming a fellow in 1475. Over the following years he served as dean twice, bursar and vice-provost. During this period his academic progress went from BA to MA and then BTh, as well as taking holy orders and serving as a junior proctor of the university. He was presnted to the living of Prescot in Lancashire in 1492 and resisigned his fellowship in 1493. Thereafter, he was next recorded at Cambridge when made a Doctor of Theology in 1506/7. In 1509 he was elected provost of King’s and wa named on on the Commision of Peace in Cambridgeshire in November that year and again in 1514. He was dead by 22 September 1528, by which date a new provost had been elected and the vicarage of Prescot was vacant. In his will, he left the college books and a chalice and paten engraved with a shield of the five wounds, plus £33 6s 8d for the celebration of masses of the five wounds of Christ.

During the completion of the building of King’s College chapel in 1512 and 1513, the contracts were made between the provost and scholars with the advice of the king’s surveyor of the works at the college on the one hand and the masons However for the later glazing, in the contracts of 1526 Hacomblen is alone of the academic community of the college in being a party to them. Unfortunately the first glazing contract with Barnard Flower does not survive. Hacomblen

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

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