Diplomat - Abingdon on Thames Town Council

John Mason was an important patron of Abingdon in its transition from a property of the abbey to a chartered borough under its own mayor and corporation.

He was born about 1503 to a woman supposed to be a sister of Thomas Pentecost, the last Abbot of Abingdon. Nothing is known of his father, and there were always rumours that he was an illegitimate son of the abbot himself. Certainly, it was the abbot who saw to his education. Studies in Oxford, Paris, and at Valladolid in Spain prepared him for a successful career as a diplomat. He became a member of the group of humanist intellectuals around William Cecil, the future Lord Burleigh, although older than most of them; and his achievements included a knighthood and the chancellorship of Oxford University.

Although he was never resident in Abingdon, Mason maintained his connection to the town. He acquired a life interest in the site of the abbey after its dissolution, which he afterwards sold on. When the question of a town charter was first mooted in 1551, he opposed it, but seems afterwards to have relented. In 1553, it was he who persuaded the Privy Council, of which he was by then a member, to permit the setting up of Christ’s Hospital to replace the old Holy Cross Fraternity that had been dissolved, and to grant it a charter and adequate sources of income. He was the first Master of the Hospital, and gave it its first set of rules. He must have been involved in the grant of Abingdon’s first charter as a borough, although no details of his role have come down to us, and he certainly nominated its first Member of Parliament.

Mason died in 1566, having served four Tudor monarchs, become reasonably but not excessively rich, and earned the thanks of his native town.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

John Sant was one of the few abbots of Abingdon whose career path led beyond the confines of the Abbey. He became abbot in 1468. It was the time of the Wars of the Roses. The Yorkist Edward IV was on the throne, and Sant probably owed his position to his allegiance to the Yorkist cause. Nothing is known of his birth or earlier career, save that he had a degree in theology from Oxford.

In 1474, Edward sent Sant on a diplomatic mission to Rome. He seems to have made a good impression on the pope, and in the next few years, with Edward’s approval, would be a papal nuncio and then legate de latere to England, Ireland and Wales. His remit included the sale of indulgences and the personal inspection and, if necessary, the reform of religious institutions in all three countries. He was in Rome again in 1478, when he became a patron of the Church of San Spirito in Sassia, originally founded by King Ine of Wessex, and recently rebuilt by Pope Sixtus IV. In the next year, he went there once more as head of an official embassy with several other churchmen to report to the pope on the success of his mission.

Difficulties started in 1485, after the Battle of Bosworth, when the Lancastrian claimant took the throne as Henry VII. Two Yorkist fugitives took sanctuary in Culham church, which belonged to Abingdon Abbey, but were physically pulled out by the new king’s men. Sant was immediately under suspicion of complicity with the Yorkists and was threatened with heavy penalties in case of further opposition.

Henry occasionally visited Abingdon and once sent Sant on an embassy to France, but did not gain his allegiance. Sant helped one Yorkist rebellion with money, and later foolishly agreed to finance a local group that was plotting against the Tudor regime. The plot was discovered, and most of the plotters were executed. Sant was forced to pay a fine approximately equal to half the abbey’s annual income. Much of the Abbey’s landed property was forfeited to the Crown, but was later restored. Sant died in 1496, having bequeathed his personal possessions to Henry ‘in token of all the grace shown to him’.

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