In May of 1601, Robert Hicks, rector of Tansor church in Northamptonshire, had reached his sixty-sixth year and was a dying man. On a beam situated over the fire in his bedchamber rested his divinity books, some of which may have been given to him by his predecessor, William Pollard. In the days of King Henry VIII, Pollard had been a fellow of the collegiate church in nearby Fotheringhay, now in ruins. In Hicks’s church at Tansor were twelve choir stalls from Fotheringhay (which are still there); he had almost certainly purchased these in, or just after, 1574 when the collegiate church was dismantled by the Crown and its contents sold piecemeal. Hicks mentions both books and stalls in his last will and testament and, in nominating his successor to the parsonage of Tansor (although it was not in his gift), he suggested John Johnson, currently master of the grammar school at Fotheringhay. Hicks evidently maintained close ties with Fotheringhay, which interest presumably resulted from his admittance, some fifty-four years previously, as one of the last choristers of the college in what was to be the final year of its existence.

1547 had not proved the most auspicious year in which to begin a career in a collegiate institution. Many colleges had surrendered to the Crown only a year or two earlier, following the first Chantries Act of 1545; and barely a decade before that, the even more momentous dissolution of the monasteries had thrown the ecclesiastical establishment into turmoil. The young Robert Hicks faced an uncertain future, although as a child of twelve or so (and as a new recruit) he could have had little knowledge of the politics influencing him on that 25th day of March in 1547. It being Lady Day, the college was busy with elaborate liturgical preparations, but the country as a whole was still reeling from the news, confirmed only weeks before, that Henry VIII was dead. What the new reign would hold was far from clear.

Hicks was in the fifth month of his employment at the college, when, on 12 August 1547, the composer Hugh Aston made the thirty-five-mile journey on horseback from Newarke College in Leicester to the college of the Blessed Virgin Mary and All Saints, Fotheringhay.