the church predating that. The church itself was built over a spring,
making for a rather damp sanctuary. As a number of burial mounds are
near both the church and atop the hills of the Steridge Valley, the
location of Bowden farm, it would seem safe to assume that before the
church was built, the place was probably the site of pagan worship.
Descendants of the Jewel family still live in nearby Combe Martin and
Ilfracombe. Though Jewel’s childhood predates the coming of the
Reformation to the area, once it did arrive, the area itself proved slow in
conforming or converting. Even the Bowden farm has evidence of a
priesthole, the room being discovered just a few years ago during some
renovations. Arlington Manor, some seven miles from Bowden farm, was
the home of a notorious recusant family who willingly paid their yearly
fine to Elizabeth to function as Recusants as opposed merely to being
Church Papists.
Young Jewel’s earliest education came at the hands of his maternal
uncle, John Bellamie, rector of the parish church in Kentisbury,^2 just four
miles from Berrynarbor. When he was seven, Jewel ‘auunculo
commendatur, ut statim principia bonarum artium disceret.’^3 The place
of Bellamie’s education is not known, his name appearing among the
graduates of neither Oxford nor Cambridge. Having given his nephew
the rudiments of grammar, Bellamie then sponsored Jewel to the schools
at Brampton, South Molton and lastly Barnstaple, all about ten miles
distant from Berrynarbor. The school at Barnstaple – reputedly the oldest
borough in England – where Jewel was educated ‘sub auspiciis Walteri
Bowen’,^4 still stands next to St Peter’s church. It seems that his teachers
at Barnstaple were the ones who got him into Oxford and the well-
established and conservative institution of Merton College. Ironically,
another Barnstaple student, also from Devonshire, would make his way
to New College, Oxford the following year, namely Thomas Harding.
Jewel arrived at Merton College in 1535.^5 Founded in 1264 by Walter
de Merton, then Lord Chancellor and also bishop of Rochester, the
college is located along the south wall of medieval Oxford, and was one
JEWEL TILL 1558 7
(^2) Various of Jewel’s lives give Hampton as the parish of Jewel’s uncle (for example, Ayre
inWorks, IV, p. v).
(^3) Humphrey, Vita Iuelli, p. 17. ‘He was commended to his uncle that he might learn the
principles of the good arts.’ Unless otherwise noted, all of the translations from Humphrey
are my own, as the book has remained untranslated, though some writers on Jewel have
translated the odd bit here and there, especially Le Bas.
(^4) From Thomas Tanner, quoted in Ayre, biographical memoir, in Jewel, Works, IV, p.
xxvi.
(^5) Norman Jones, English Reformation(Oxford, 2002), pp. 114 ff., uses Merton as a
case study in the spread of Protestantism among institutions, laying out the process by
which the once strongly Catholic Merton slowly embraced Protestantism.