CHELLE or CHELL, WILLIAM (fl. 1550), precentor of Hereford, took the degree of Mus. Bac. at Oxford on 3 April 1524. In 1532 he held the prebend of Yne or Eigne on the establishment of Hereford Cathedral. In 1535 he was sub-chanter, and in 1545 he exchanged his prebend of Eigne for that of East Withington. In 1554 he was precentor, but after the accession of Elizabeth, five years later, was deprived of all his cathedral appointments, doubtless on doctrinal grounds, and nothing further is known of his history. Chelle has been described by Bishop Tanner (Bibliotheca, ed. 1748, p. 174) and other writers as the author of two treatises on music. The authority for this statement is a manuscript volume in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth (No. 466), which is described as‘Guillielmi Chelle (Musicæ B.) Musicæ Compendiii; script. A. 1526. Ejusdem Tractatus de Proportionibus.’ But the greater part of this volume consists of treatises by John Dunstable and John Otteby, and it seems most probable that the volume was only transcribed by Chelle, especially as a similar collection exists in the British Museum (Add. MS. 10336), transcribed by John Tucke of New College, Oxford, in 1500. Chelle’s copy was written by him in 1526, and, according to an inscri tion in the manuscript, was given by him to his pupil, John Parker, who was probably the son (born in 1548) of the archbishop. Matthew Parker was elected archbishop of Canterbury in 1559—the year of
Chelle’s deprivation; so it would seem that after this date the ex-precentor occupied himself in teaching music. The date and place of his death have not been discovered.
[Wood's Fasti, ed. Bliss, i. 65; Havergal’s Fasti Herefordenses, 50, &c.; Hook’s Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury; Athenæ Cantab.; Calendar of Hatfield MSS. i. 307.]
CHELMESTON or CHELVESTON, JOHN (fl. 1297), Carmelite, was a native of Yorkshire, and is said to have been professor of theology at Oxford. By command of the prior-general of his order, Gerard of Bologna (who filled that office from 1297 to 1317), he went to teach in the Low Countries, principally at Bruges and Brussels. He is said to have obtained great celebrity as a scholastic theologian, and Pits states that manuscripts of many of his works formerly existed in the Carmelite Library at Norwich. The writings attributed to him are ‘Determinationes Theologicæ’ ‘Lecturæ Scholasticæ,’ ‘Quaestiones Ordinariæ,’ ‘Quodlibeta,’ and ‘Sermones et Collationes.’ Leland writes his name Schelmesdun, and Tanner quotes the form Clemeston.
[Bale’s Script. Brit. Cat.; Pits, De Angl. Script.; Tanner’s Bibl. Brit.; Bibliotheca Carmelitana, i. 809.]
CHELMSFORD, Lord (1794-1878). [See Thesiger, Frederick.]
CHELSUM, JAMES, D.D. (1740?–1801), an opponent of Gibbon, son of a member of the choir of Westminster Abbey, or perhaps of the Chapel Royal (Neale, Westminster Abbey, li. 290), was born about 1740. He was admitted to Westminster School on Bishop Williams’s foundation, and thereafter entered Christ Church, Oxford. He proceeded B.A. 4 May 1759, M.A. 22 May 1762, B.D. 11 Nov. 1772, and D.D. 18 June 1773. He was ordained in March 1762, and subsequently held a number of ecclesiastical appointments. He was one of the preachers at Whitehall, chaplain to the bishops of Worcester and Winchester, rector of Droxford, Hampshire, and vicar of Lathbury, Buckinghamshire. He also held the benetice of Badger in Shropshire. Chelsum was a man of considerable learning, but of a somewhat strange and variable disposition, and towards the end of his life his mind became affected. He died near London in 1801, and was buried at Droxford. Chelsum, in ‘Remarks on the two last chapters of Mr. Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in a letter to a friend’ (1776, published first anonymously, but afterwards enlarged and acknowledged, Oxford, 1778), attacked the account given
