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Biography

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Hugh Cook Faringdon, also known as Hugh Faringdon, was an English Benedictine monk and the last abbot of Reading Abbey. He was a native of Faringdon in Berkshire; the year of his birth is not preserved in surviving records. Cook appears to have been his family name, while Faringdon was the toponym he used in religion, following a common monastic custom. He entered the Benedictine community of Reading Abbey, a wealthy royal foundation established in the twelfth century by King Henry I and dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist. Reading was a mitred abbey whose abbot sat among the lords spiritual in Parliament. Almost nothing is documented of Faringdon’s early monastic career before his election as abbot in 1520.

As abbot he was a figure of regional and national standing. He served as a royal chaplain and as a justice of the peace, and he entertained King Henry VIII at the abbey. In the opening phase of the English Reformation he did not stand out as an open opponent of royal policy. Like many English prelates of the 1530s he complied with the crown’s ecclesiastical legislation, acknowledging the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England and continuing to discharge the ordinary duties of a mitred abbot in Parliament and in local government. Reading remained one of the last great Benedictine houses still intact as the Dissolution of the Monasteries advanced through the later 1530s.

In 1539 royal commissioners moved to suppress the remaining greater monasteries. Faringdon was arrested and charged with high treason, the indictment turning on alleged denial of the royal supremacy and on opinions or correspondence that the government treated as papal or rebellious. Together with Richard Whiting of Glastonbury and Thomas Marshall (Beche) of Colchester, he was among the prominent Benedictine superiors singled out that autumn. He was condemned, and on 14 November 1539 he was hanged, drawn, and quartered before the gateway of his own abbey at Reading. Two priests associated with the house, John Eynon of St Giles, Reading, and John Rugg, suffered with him. The abbey was dissolved and its buildings and estates seized by the crown.

The Catholic Church came to regard Faringdon as a martyr for the primacy of the Roman see and for the monastic life. On 13 May 1895 Pope Leo XIII beatified him among a large group of English and Welsh martyrs of the Reformation period. He is known as Blessed Hugh Faringdon and is commonly commemorated on 15 November. He was never canonized. No contemporary full-length life survives; the portrait of his career depends on relatively sparse administrative, parliamentary, and legal notices of the sixteenth century, together with later martyrological tradition, so details of his inner convictions before the final crisis remain limited.

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