Gastrell

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Life

Portrait of Gastrell, by Micheal Dahl.

Francis Gastrell (10 May 1662 – 24 November 1725) was Bishop of Chester and a writer on deism. He was a friend of Jonathan Swift, mentioned several times in A Journal to Stella, and chaplain to Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford. The Holme collection of manuscripts, chiefly consisting of heraldic and genealogical memoranda connected with Cheshire and North Wales, in 260 volumes, were, after the fourth Randle Holme's death, purchased by Francis Gastrell, acting on behalf of Robert Harley. In 1753 they were sold to the British Museum trustees, and are now stored as numbered Harleian Manuscripts 1920–2180.

Bishop Francis Gastrell lived at Oxford during his whole occupation of the see. During his tenure as Bishop of Chester, Gastrell refused to sanction the appointment of the later Bishop Peploe as the warden of Manchester collegiate church on the basis that Peploe's Lambeth degree of Bachelor of Divinity was not a valid qualification. It took many years of litigation, until 1725, before it was ruled that Lambeth degrees, which are awarded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, were of equal status with university degrees.

He died from gout on 24 November 1725.

Works

As a diocesan bishop, he is noted for the fine-grained survey he made of every parish, published in the nineteenth century as Notitia Cestriensis.

Along with his survey was published the so-called "Gastrell Manuscript", or Chronicle of St. Werburg, otherwise known as the Chester Chronicle. This was said to have been "a volume preserved in the Diocesan Registry at Chester". It consists of six leaves, of which Richard Copley Christie wrote:

  • "written in the early part of the last century (but, as Mr. Earwaker tells me, not in the handwriting of Bishop Gastrell), was believed by Dr. Ormerod to be a copy of the Mostyn MS. from the fact that all (except the last of) the extracts in the Diptycha of Bishop Kennett are identical with passages to be found in the Gastrell MS., and that Bishop Kennett states that these extracts were from a MS. then at Gloddaeth " penes D. Tho. Mostyn Baronettum"

It is not quite that simple, there are significant differences between the Gastrell document and that from Mostyn Hall.

The full version of the chronicle of the abbey up to 1297, in Latin with an English translation by Christie, was originally published in 1887 as volume 14 of the publications of the Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire.

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