Hugh Oldham - Early Life

Early Life

Hugh Oldham was one of the younger of six sons born to Roger Oldham and his wife Margery who were, the limited evidence suggests, yeomen or minor gentry at Ancoats, which at the time was a village in North West England, but is now an inner city area of Manchester. There are few records of his early life, but it is known that he attended university, studying canon law and either arts or civil law probably at Oxford, and he was later (in 1493) a bachelor of law at Cambridge. There is no contemporary evidence, however, that he was a member of Queens' College, Cambridge as was claimed by Thomas Fuller in his Worthies Of England of 1662 and often repeated.

In 1475 he was described in a deed transferring property to him from his eldest brother James as a "clerk of Durham". At this time he was most likely either in the household of, or employed by Lawrence Booth, Bishop of Durham, whose family came from the same area as Oldham's and by whom James had also been employed. He was rector of Lanivet in Cornwall between 1488 and 1493, when he resigned the living on a pension of £12. At this time he was also a servant to William Smyth, who was keeper of the hanaper in the Court of Chancery. In 1492 he was the receiver for Lady Margaret Beaufort's estates in the West Country, and by 1503 he had risen to be the chancellor of her household.

In the years following 1490, Oldham was made a canon of the cathedrals of Exeter, Lichfield, Lincoln, St Paul's, Salisbury and York. In 1496 William Smyth, who was by then Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, appointed him to the non-residential post of master of the hospital of St John in Lichfield, to which Smyth had recently added a free grammar school and almshouse. The year 1499 saw him established as dean of Wimborne in Dorset, and in 1502 he was made archdeacon of Exeter. In 1503, he had sufficient prestige to be present at the placing of the foundation stone of the Henry VII Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey.