Bishop Hamo of Hythe (c.1275-1352)

Perhaps second only to Gundulf in shaping the medieval Cathedral and St Andrew’s Priory, there is some evidence to suggest it may be down to Hamo and the turbulent times in which he lived that resulted in the two halves of Textus being bound together in the mid-fourteenth century.

The dawn of the fourteenth century saw the onset of the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. The Great Famine of 1315–1317, Black Death of 1347–1351, the first century of the Little Ice Age and the onset of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), bringing about a dramatic end to the relative prosperity of the High Middle Ages.

Bishop Hamo was elected 18th March 1317 and consecrated 26th August 1319, resigning the see in early 1352 before his death on the 4th May that year. His extraordinarily long tenure broached many of the crises of the century, and yet he is credited a range of achievements from the building of the crossing tower, leading of the priory building roofs, a substantial reordering of the Cathedral interior, and the construction of the monk’s night stair between the south quire transept and the Chapter House that would become the Chapter Room and eventually the Chapter Library as we find it today.

Hamo is the last name featured in the list of the Bishops of Rochester. The list was compiled by the main scribe c.1123 and updated irregularly over the next two centuries.

It was also during Hamo’s tenure that the penultimate text was added to the end of the cartularly half of Textus; the Watch and Ward list for defence of the Kentish coast at the onset of the Hundred Year’s War.

A fourteenth-century inscription below the opening of Æthelberht’s Code on folio 1r must have been added after the reordering of the quires bringing this folio to the front of the manuscript. It is from this inscription that the manuscript gets its name.

It is perhaps the construction of the night stair that is of most significance in understanding Hamo’s influence on the priory library. Hamo is recorded as lamenting the lack of labour in the wake of the Black Death. In 2015 tree-ring dating of the Chapter Library roofs confirmed that a number of the timbers were from a stockpile formed a few years before the others, suggesting a considerable pause in work.

Jacob Scott

Research Guild