The Local Historian Volume 53 Number 4 November 2023

Edited by Jens Rȍhrkasten

(Dugdale Society vol.54 2022 xxxvii+614 ISBN 978-0-85220-107-7) £35+£5 p&p

This large and handsome book adds to the number of thirteenth-century eyre rolls in print. Chronologically it can be set alongside Susan Stewart’s edition of the 1263 Surrey eyre roll, but has an arguably greater interest in coming from the Montfortian heartland, where the baronial cause made its last stand in Kenilworth Castle only four years after the 1262 eyre. For reasons of cost and bulk it comes in the form of an English translation, and it is unfortunate that no AALT references are provided to give the specialist reader easy access to the original Latin text. The manuscript, kept at TNA, is not always in good condition, and the introduction gives welcome, and precise, information about lost and damaged portions. Along with a map of the county and its subdivisions, it also provides a succinct history of the eyre as an instrument of government, followed by details of the justices and some of the important men involved in the 1262 proceedings. Those proceedings, both civil and criminal, are then discussed, and where necessary explained. Regrettably, however, the introduction is silent about the eyre’s financial issues, constituting as they did an important element in a visitation’s impact on a county’s people and communities. This is not a simple matter with Warwickshire, since its revenues were recorded alongside those of Leicestershire, with which it shared a sheriff. But some discussion would have been useful.

The eyre roll is large, twice the size of the 1263 Surrey eyre, and consists of 65 membranes, written in several different hands of varying quality—some neat and clear, others little better than a scrawl. Transcribing and translating it has unsurprisingly been the work of many years, which doubtless helps account for some of the inconsistencies in translation. Thus, mors is variously rendered as ‘death’, ‘killing’ and ‘murder’, or prepositus as ‘bailiff’, ‘beadle’ and (most often) ‘reeve’. At other points the editor’s choice of translation can be unexpected, notably ‘squashed’ for oppressus, but meaning is usually clear enough. Typos are rare, as are misreadings, though the luceys allegedly taken from a fishpond were pikes, not otters, and a narrator was a pleader, not a boatman, while a capitulum was surely a rural chapter rather than a ‘formal meeting’. Whole tithings, not just their heads, were punished when one of their members offended, making it a mistake to insert ‘[he is]’ rather than ‘[it is]’ in such cases. And Dr Rȍhrkasten appears to have misunderstood exemptions from the murder fine, since he consistently renders the phrase non participat cum hundredo as ‘did not cooperate with the hundred’; many manors and vills were exempted from contributing to murder fines when these were imposed on hundreds, but when a death occurred within an exempt community and a murder fine was found to be due, that community became responsible for the whole of it, as the eyre roll often notes.

The annotation of the text is in most respects sparse, sometimes regrettably so. Who, for instance, was the queen of Germany (no.184)? She was Sanchia of Provence, Richard of Cornwall’s second wife. But against this lack must be set one of this edition’s most notable, and most welcome, features, namely its transcripts of fines, sometimes calendared but more often in extenso, where these are referred to in the eyre roll, and also of relevant proceedings from before the eyre, at a Warwickshire visitation in 1260, and after it, at successive eyres in Sussex and Surrey. Providing these must have added significantly to the labour involved in preparing the edition, but they are amply justified by the results and substantially enrich the book. The additions illuminate individual cases, for instance no.73, where the proceedings of 1260 prove far more interesting than those of 1262, or no.197, where the fine helps to explain the proceedings which it concluded. They also shed valuable light on thirteenth-century judicial administration, and not least on the eyre itself, by showing how lawsuits could move from shire to shire, or between the central courts at Westminster and the provinces.

The text is followed by a useful glossary, mostly of legal terms—there will probably be readers who would have appreciated a longer one, explaining some of the agricultural terms used, like ‘assart’, ‘bovate’ and ‘curtilage’, as well as such legal ones as ‘suet of prison’, ‘gage and pledge’, and ‘curtesy’. But no such criticism can be directed against the admirable sequence of no fewer than four indexes with which the volume ends, extending over nearly 150 pages and covering successively Persons, Places, Pleas, and Subjects. The imagination which recoils at the thought of the toil involved in compiling them gives way to gratitude for being reliably guided through the contents of this large volume. The indexes help the reader to pin down every kind of detail, in a document capable of shedding light on many aspects of thirteenth-century English life, whether on tolls in Birmingham, a new lord’s arranging a feast to mark his entry into property, the cost of making a grange, a woman bribed with a coat to sue for her husband’s death, and an allegedly murdered man who ‘was never killed because he is alive and was later seen at Oxford’. The entry under ‘cemetery’ will bring them to the marriage of Gundreda of Broadwell, whose father-in-law, presumably disapproving of his son’s marriage, refused to be present at the ceremony at the church door, preferring to stand among the gravestones instead!

Historians of the medieval midlands will find this book a rich mine of varied information, but it also has a wider value. As Dr Rȍhrkasten observes in his introduction, the civil pleas are dominated by people of ‘free status’, and among them some very important people are recorded as litigating—Simon de Montfort, the leader of the baronial resistance to the government of Henry III, and his eventual nemesis the Lord Edward, the heir to the throne, the earls of Warwick and Winchester, the heads of numerous religious houses, and a multitude of barons and knights. Their activities, as revealed by the eyre roll, are highly competitive but nonetheless predominantly peaceful, as befits people of acknowledged standing in society. Their world is one of continuity and security, in which a litigant can base his claims on grants made early in the reign of Henry II, pilgrimages are made to the Holy Land and Santiago di Compostela, and a landowner fallen on hard times may still make provision for his own future maintenance. The crown pleas, by contrast, are mainly the preserve of the unfree, and by extension of the poor, even the very poor—men and women inhabiting a world in which vagrants die of hunger and cold, or form criminal bands which prey on travellers and break into houses to kill and steal. The society revealed by this section of the roll is constantly insecure and intermittently violent—we see the setting of brawls ending in death, fatal accidents as men, women and children drown in rivers and ponds, and a man may fall to his death even when working in church, or a suspected thief can be held in the stocks until his feet rot and fall off, a world in which the officials responsible for law and order, from the sheriff downwards, appear as routinely self-serving and corrupt.

By the time the eyre was held, four years had passed since baronial malcontents had seized power at Westminster and initiated a wide-ranging programme of reform. Only once does the roll make direct reference to ‘a provision made by the magnates’ common council of England’, but malpractices by officials, royal and baronial, were a principal target for the government of which Simon de Montfort soon became the acknowledged leader, and presentments made at the 1262 eyre do much to justify its concern. Tensions between king and barons, and among the barons themselves, led within two years of the eyre’s end to a civil war in which the county’s landowning classes, hitherto so seemingly secure, became engulfed in all the animosities and conflicts which had previously been the preserve of their social inferiors. At least five of the litigants at the eyre were killed at the battle of Evesham in 1265, while several more are recorded as having been in rebellion against the king. The record of the eyre is thus a record of a county society at a pivotal moment in its history. This edition of it is not flawless, and anyone wishing to cite it should probably check the relevant entries against the original. But a scattering of mistakes does not prevent its being a most valuable resource, illuminating every kind of activity within the shire which produced it, and editor and society deserve congratulations for having made it available.

HENRY SUMMERSON has been studying crime and law enforcement in thirteenth-century England for many years, and has been involved, alone or in cooperation with others, in the publication of four editions of crown pleas rolls, those for Devon in 1238, Suffolk in 1240, Wiltshire in 1268, and Lancashire in 1292. He has also published an extended history of medieval Carlisle, and worked for several years on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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Edited by Ian Atherton, Matthew Blake, Andrew Sargent and Alannah Tomkins

(Staffordshire Record Society 4th series vol.27 2022 432 pp ISBN 978-0-901719-18-8) £40+£5 p&p

Nigel Tringham retired in 2019 after four decades first as assistant editor and then as editor of the Staffordshire Victoria County History. The Staffordshire Record Society has now brought out this collection of essays by 22 of his friends, colleagues and doctoral students (from the English Place-Name Society, Keele University, the Staffordshire Archaeological Society, Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Services, the Staffordshire Record Society, the VCH and the William Salt library) to celebrate his unique contribution to the county’s history.

In an affectionate opening chapter, the editors describe how in 1979, little more than a year after completing his doctoral thesis at Aberdeen University on the medieval vicars choral of York Minster, Nigel Tringham was appointed an assistant editor and subsequently editor of the Staffordshire VCH, combining this with a lectureship in medieval history at Keele University in 1993. In addition to editions of medieval documents and numerous articles in historical journals, he has directed and taught at the Keele University Latin and Palaeography Summer School, edited both the Transactions of the Staffordshire Archaeological Society and the publications of the Staffordshire Record Society, and been an advocate of the Ranulf Higden Society, a board member of Midland History, a trustee of the British Association for Local History and chairman of its publishing committee. For such services to local history he was awarded an MBE in the New Year’s Honours List of 2021. The twenty essays which make up the volume reflect these very varied interests.

The first three medieval papers fall within the sphere of ecclesiastical history. Paul Everson tackles the problem of identifying the site within the kingdom of Mercia called Clofesho by Bede, where numerous synods of the English church were held between 747 and 825. By juxtaposing place-name evidence and topography he suggests that it may have been an assembly point on Chalk Hill in the Chilterns, near the early twelfth-century new town of Dunstable. The building of stone churches in the honour of Stafford after the Norman Conquest and the significance of stone fonts as indicators of the emergence of the parish system are the subjects of John Hunt’s paper. Continuing with an architectural theme, Bob Meeson shows how modern archaeological techniques, including stone-by-stone recording, can lead to a more informed understanding of Staffordshire churches in general.

Moving on to more secular matters, in his submission on animal husbandry Andrew Sargent plots the numerous entries in the Staffordshire section of Domesday Book which refer to territorial woods primarily important for the rearing of pigs. John Baker, Jayne Carroll and Susan Kilby employ field names to reconstruct the medieval landscape of the county and, in a more specialised article, Faith Cleverdon uses the same source material together with standing buildings to document settlement in the vast moorland parish of Leek. Another contributor in the medieval section, Philip Morgan, charts the slow rise of the Stafford family which came to England with William the Conqueror but did not attain national prominence until the reign of Edward III, when Ralph Stafford was created the first earl of Stafford in 1351. The premature deaths of his young grandsons Thomas, the third earl, in 1392, William, the fourth earl, three years later, and Edmund, the fifth earl, in 1403, saved the family from involvement in the political struggles of the last years of Richard II, and in the long term did nothing to halt its progression to even greater heights in the Lancastrian period.

Moving on to the second half of the seventeenth century David J. Appleby considers the extent to which the Staffordshire justices of the peace at the quarter sessions fulfilled their legal obligation to relieve the county’s soldiers injured in the Civil Wars. The career of Thomas Wood, probably the most scandalous churchman ever to have held office at Lichfield cathedral, is re-examined by Ian Atherton. Excommunicated when dean for non-residence in 1669 and then, having subsequently succeeded to the bishopric, suspended in 1684 by the archbishop of Canterbury for the same offence, Wood was only permitted to resume his episcopal functions in 1686 after solemnly undertaking to live henceforth within his diocese and agreeing to make a substantial payment towards the building of a new bishop’s palace. Two papers discuss the achievements of two very different eighteenth-century Staffordshire antiquaries: the yeoman Richard Parrott of Audley and George Tollet of Betley Hall, gentleman. James Bowen relates how Parrott used his enforced leisure when in prison for debt in 1733 to record all the cottages in his native parish together with the occupations and ancestry of the labourers who owned or leased them. An assiduous collector of material relating to Staffordshire, Tollet (unlike Parrott) seems to have felt no inclination to write up his research. As well as including lengthy extracts from his correspondence Randle Knight in his chapter also lists the contents of Tollet’s many notebooks.

In three essays women take pride of place. Ann Hughes traces the eighteen spiritual books which the widow, Rose Bagnall, a respected member of the nonconformist community of Newcastle-under-Lyme, bequeathed to her relations and friends in her will of 1711. Before Florence Nightingale’s reforms nurses have traditionally been portrayed as being rapacious, slovenly, drunken or worse but, basing her article on the board minutes of the newly-founded Stafford Infirmary, Alannah Tomkins shows that between 1765 and 1820 almost without exception the Stafford nurses performed their duties to the general satisfaction of the governors. Peter Collinge turns to very different source material—trade directories, advertisements and newspaper articles—for information on the Lichfield shops from which various female members of the Willdey family were selling London-bought gowns, shoes and other millenary in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Four other contributors concentrate on the Victorian era. David Horovitz dismisses as the product of an overactive imagination the myth that in the reign of Henry V Lollards gathered for worship in a rocky chasm near Quarnford called Lud Church, which surfaced more than four centuries after the supposed event in the anonymous Legends of the Moorland and Forests of North Staffordshire of 1860. The London partnership of Richard Clayton and Alfred Bell wins praise from Robin Studd both for the sympathetic restoration of the medieval glass from the Knights Templar chapel and for the quality of the modern glass installed in the 1860s in the windows of the newly-rebuilt Keele parish church. In his essay Chris Copp narrates how Clement Wragge, a young Cheadle man of independent means, in 1878 bestowed upon the town of Stafford numerous miscellaneous ethnographic, zoological and geological items he had recently accumulated on his travels round the world. Although at first accepted with alacrity by the corporation, the specimens, never properly catalogued or housed, were eventually dispersed in 1956. Matthew Blake tells a not dissimilar tale of initial engagement followed by waning enthusiasm regarding hare coursing in the county, very popular among all classes for much of the period but eclipsed by greyhound racing well before the passing of the Hares Preservation Act of 1892.

The last two essays bring the festschrift into the twentieth century. The detailed entries in Lloyd George’s 1910 Land Tax Valuation Survey enable Paul Anderton to map every farm building and land holding in the parishes of Norbury and Gnosall, where dairy farming remained the predominant activity in the years before the First World War. John Beckett concludes the volume with his analysis of the early years of the Staffordshire VCH. Only the first volume, on the county’s geology, flora and fauna and Roman and Saxon antiquities, was published before the project stalled for financial reasons in 1908, and the whole enterprise went into abeyance. No fewer than seven of the fourteen volumes which have appeared since the project was restarted in 1950 have come out on Nigel Tringham’s watch.

This is a collection to be dipped into rather than perused from cover to cover but, whatever their tastes, readers are bound to find topics to attract and intrigue them. While it will appeal in the first instance to those with a particular interest in Staffordshire history, anyone thinking of undertaking a comparable study elsewhere in England can learn a great deal from the ways in which the contributors have exploited their sources. It is a volume of which the honorand should feel justly proud.

CLAIRE CROSS has worked on midland history in the early modern period, but in her case the history of Leicestershire. For many years she has been a member of the Records Committee of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society which published Nigel Tringham’s editions of the Charters of the Vicars Choral of York Minster, Volume 1: City of York and its Suburbs to 1546 and the Charters of the Vicars Choral of York Minster, Volume 2: County of Yorkshire and Appropriated Churches to 1538 in 1993 and 2002

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Edited by Alan Wright

(Surrey Record Society vol.47 2020 liv+186pp ISBN 978-0-902978-22-5) £20

The Surrey Census of Nomads represented a response to social anxieties about the itinerant population in the county, and was carried out by the police force during June and August 1913. Two major Surrey landowners, a High Court judge, Sir Reginald Bray, and the Earl of Onslow, were the driving force behind the census, an attempt to influence parliament to introduce new legislation concerning the itinerant population. They also founded the Surrey Anti-Vagrant and Prevention of Heath Fires Association and exerted pressure on the Surrey Constabulary to act as landowners’ agents in moving itinerants from their campsites.

In this study, distribution of which was disrupted by the pandemic, Alan Wright provides a fascinating and detailed discussion regarding not only the event itself, but also changes in society that were indeed contributing to the concerns of the settled community, as well as the travelling population. By the beginning of the twentieth century there were a number of pressures on itinerants, including urban sprawl, the continuing enclosure of common land and the introduction of cheap manufactured goods, beginning to replace those supplied by hawkers and Gypsies.

Although no names were taken during the census, the summaries appear in the book in full, listing the types of dwelling, parish and occupations and, importantly, including showmen, fruit pickers, horse breakers, Gypsies, fairground workers, brick makers, charcoal burners, field workers, hawkers and tramps. The volume therefore illustrates that the range of the travelling population was much wider than many supposed. Indeed, seasonal workers, helping with the harvest, or fruit picking and hop picking, were temporarily travelling to sites for this labour, returning to their homes in the autumn and winter, where they lived a settled existence. Nevertheless, many of the itinerant population were spoken of as Gypsies, using it as a kind of blanket term for all travellers. Certainly, almost from their first appearance in Britain at the end of the fifteenth century, Gypsies were regarded by the settled community as a cause of anxiety, principally because they were considered outsiders, and not subject to the controls of law and order in the country. Although many of the settled community were ambivalent in their attitude toward the travelling population, the provision of seasonal labour, goods and musical entertainment was an important contribution to social life which they valued. Gypsies hawked baskets, pegs, and tinware, as well as providing skills in knife and scissor sharpening, and chair-mending. Other travellers, such as fairground keepers, brought pleasure and entertainment, while brick makers, who engaged in this seasonal occupation over the winter and spring, were creating the materials used to build houses for the settled community.

Wright has included some fascinating images, in colour and black and white, of different members of the travelling population, together with those of the men who were involved in organising the 1913 census. Perhaps the most compelling section is the letters between two of these men: Sir Reginald Bray and Captain Sant, Chief Constable of Surrey, as well as members of the population of Surrey, including a landowner, a bailiff, woodcutters, farmers, road labourers and a beer retailer. One letter, from Captain Sant to Sir Reginald Bray, written as early as 1910, reveals the anxieties regarding the itinerant population that preoccupied many. While Sant says that he is anxious to do all he can ‘to satisfy the inhabitants of the county with regard to Gypsies’, he points out that their existence is ‘not an offence . . . their act of encamping on the commons is not an offence . . . and they can only be moved on by the lords of the manor or their agents’, adding ‘when this is done the Police will always be present to see that there is no breach of the peace’. Sir Reginald appears to have suggested that authority could be given to the police to act for landowners, and that Sant should station four or five policemen at encampments, to which the Chief Constable replied, in a manner that will surely amuse readers of this excellent volume, that the police were servants of the public and not for private hire, adding, ‘I should be much obliged if you could kindly give me the benefit of your great legal knowledge and tell me how, while keeping strictly to the law, the Police can prevent the presence of these Gypsies’.

The counts in June and August 1913 were comprehensive in terms of geographical coverage, but the results were disappointing for those who hoped to prove that Surrey was disproportionately impacted by an itinerant population. The figures from the two counts were broadly consistent with those of the 1911 census and equated to 0.3 per cent of the settled population living in the county. Ultimately, Wright argues, the key issue was perhaps not numbers of itinerant peoples, but perception. For Bray it was certainly a terrible disappointment, and any opportunity for further legislation, making a special case of Surrey, could not now succeed. The Surrey County Council census of nomads was effectively consigned to a filing cabinet.

The considerable research, detailed footnotes and well-argued and fascinating introduction to these records offer historians an opportunity to explore both dramatic social change and the occupations of many itinerant and seasonal workers in Surrey and its borders in the early twentieth century. The movement of several groups of people being seasonal, rather than a year-round activity, and the way in which the countryside had relied on an itinerant population, are examined, even as the settled community’s considerable reservations about their presence is discussed.

ANNE-MARIE FORD’s father’s people were Romany Gypsies, often travelling the borders between Berkshire and Surrey, attending fairs and races, and this groundbreaking study has significantly enhanced her knowledge of those they travelled alongside, a vision glimpsed at the moment when this world was fast disappearing

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Edited by David Newman, Bob Ricketts and James Collett-White

(Bedfordshire Historical Record Society vol.97 2022 ix+388pp ISBN 978-0-85155-084-8) £25+p&p from Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Any student of rural life before 1850 will appreciate that it is sometimes necessary to strain to hear the voices of the past. Much of what we know is the result of the intersection of past lives with officialdom—sometimes leaving nothing more tangible than a name in a record, or the second-hand, and often partial, observations of outsiders. Rarely is the original voice heard clearly and unambiguously, but with the publication of the ‘Turner letters’, some of those inherent difficulties can be overcome. This attractively bound volume from BHRS is a collection of 61 transcribed items—personal letters, business correspondence and invoices—which gives a fascinating insight into life in the rural Bedfordshire village of Milton Ernest in the first half of the nineteenth century. Fifty-nine of the items are housed in the Bedfordshire Archives with the remaining two, reproduced in this volume, located in the Tides Institute and Museum of Art, Eastport, Maine (USA).

Milton Ernest is an otherwise unremarkable parish in rural north Bedfordshire, situated on the banks of the Great Ouse, some three miles north of Bedford. It was a self-contained community where the men worked largely in agriculture, while the women stayed at home to make lace and look after the children. The 1831 census records a population of 372, chief among them the Turners: a family of tenant farmers, headed by John Turner senior, originally from Leicestershire, but who apparently relocated to Milton Ernest in 1809. In 1830 John’s youngest son, Thomas Turner (1796-1850) married Susannah Pain, a local woman from a prosperous farming family. Within months of their marriage, they emigrated to St Andrews, New Brunswick (Canada), where Thomas established a business as a merchant. Thomas’ older brother, helpfully labelled John II by the editors, and hereafter referred to simply as ‘John’, remained behind in Milton Ernest, initially as a baker, before assisting in running the family farm. Much of the documentation, and certainly much of the interest, lies in the albeit one-sided correspondence between John in Milton Ernest and his brother Thomas in Canada, of which 28 letters survive. John was a confirmed bachelor, and with time on his hands, had an interest in detailing the events of his life and his many opinions on innumerable subjects in both his journal and his lengthy letters to Thomas.

The logical way in which the editors have structured the book around these letters is a strength. The volume consists of an introduction, five main chapters and some detailed appendices, which effectively divide the main text into three parts: the first two chapters provide the contextual background of the family and the locality; the second part sets out the main themes of the letters and reproduces the correspondence; and the final part reconstitutes the village based on descriptions provided by John.

The first section provides a detailed commentary on the Turner and Pain families dating back to the early 1700s, containing pen portraits of the siblings of Thomas and John Turner on the one side and of Susannah Pain on the other. Accompanying the text are two loose leaf family trees, which prove useful in visualising the various relationships (although I wonder whether over time these would become separated from the book). It is a small quibble, but I would have liked to have seen them as foldouts set within the relevant text. A wide range of sources have been consulted by the editors and it is gratifying to see these largely cited in the footnotes. There is the odd omission that tends to confuse. In August 1845 John was discussing the building of a railway through the parish and the accompanying text referred to the extract being taken from his journal, though this was not cited. After some investigation the text was found in a letter to Thomas, where John had evidently used notes from his journal as his source. This could have been made clearer in the text to prevent confusion.

In the second section the editors set out the main themes of the letters: the economy and trade, farming, emigration, poverty, unrest, electoral reform, Chartism and illness. They provide a useful guide and highlight some key passages in the letters, but there is so much more available from a close reading of the transcribed documents, particularly the surviving letters written by John. The discussion of illness focuses understandably on the 1831-1832 cholera epidemic, which will be of interest to students of demographic crises, but the everyday impact of illness and death on family members is not touched upon. John Turner’s description of the death of his father is one such example among many: a patriarch, clearly desperately ill but still issuing instructions to John; a son almost crushed by the responsibilities now placed upon his shoulders; and a daughter so shaken by grief that she finds herself unable to look upon the corpse of her father. In one small passage there is much to be learned about illness, family hierarchy and grief.

The remainder of the book is a village reconstruction and is this work’s tour de force. In his attempts to keep Thomas up to date with events, John took imaginary walks around the village, describing the 198 people he met upon the way, recording his thoughts and observations in detail within his letters. This is much more than a mechanical exercise and his commentary can be waspish and amusing: for example, describing Mr Poole and Sukey as ‘one is more feeble and the other more greedy’; or John Sturges and his wife as ‘still stewing & fretting & working away & afraid of everything’; while William Gore lived in the Parsonage ‘with his Housekeeper who he appeared to like very well’ (John Turner’s emphasis). There is a touch of the Richard Gough about John Turner with Milton Ernest substituting for Myddle. Much here brings characters back to life and would be of use to social historians examining parish social structures and relationships. The editors have attempted to reconstruct the lives of each villager using the available sources and the result is a valuable and unusual census, of which there are far too few available in Bedfordshire.

The book concludes with a series of informative appendices containing useful timelines, newspaper reports and a transcription of the 1841 census for Milton Ernest. The accompanying illustrations are of a high quality and largely in colour, with the map showing the details of John Turner’s imaginary walk being particularly useful when overlain upon a contemporary plan of the village. The bibliography is comprehensive, though I would have preferred to see primary and secondary sources separated. Overall, there is much to recommend in this book, which represents a valuable addition to our knowledge of rural life, adding new and original voices to the debate.

PAUL SCHOON studies English local history at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the demography and social structures of early modern rural communities in Bedfordshire.

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Edited by Nick Brown, assisted by Christine Whittingham

(Hertfordshire Record Society vol.38 2022 xlix+447pp ISBN 978-0-9501741-5-0) £22+£3.80 p&p

The Hertfordshire Record Society began its publications in 1985 with Tudor Churchwardens’ Accounts edited by Anthony Palmer; it is now to be congratulated on having completed publication of the county’s best surviving collections of churchwardens’ accounts with this volume on Berkhamsted St Peter. The society has been well served by the editor of this volume, Nick Brown, and his assistant Christine Whittingham. They have provided a crisp and clear introduction, helpful advice on main topics covered by the accounts, and useful technical apparatus such as a glossary of terms and a short bibliography. The accounts themselves are laid out clearly in customary format of receipts and disbursements, and local historians will glean much from the latter for entries often specify by name those have who have undertaken work—more often than I think is customary. Given the very full lists of those to be taxed when raising funds for church repairs that occur fairly frequently throughout the period covered, it should be possible to learn much about individuals within this parish community.

Typically of these kinds of records, it is not always clear what year we are in: we start around 1584, find things more reliable after 1590, before encountering a gap between 1632 and 1637, and running into real problems with the 1640s and 1650s. While it is regrettable that we lose material from the 1630s, when we know that Laudian bishops were having an impact on parish churches, a strength of this material lies in how concerned these churchwardens were for the care of their church. Indeed, we get a glimpse of that for 1631, when repairs were carried out in advance of a visit from the bishop, and a rating assessment survives for 1637. We also see that churches in the area were being inspected by royal command in 1632. Even better for those interested in the various church restoration campaigns of the early modern period, these records provide evidence of church repairs in 1605, not long after Archbishop Whitgift’s survey of churches in 1602, and also in 1613, possibly as a result of Archbishop Abbot’s Metropolitical Visitation. To cap it all, given how little we know of what happened in parishes in the interregnum, the fragments we have for St Peter’s suggest that rates for repairs were raised in the 1650s. These accounts thus offer a useful corrective to those inclined to assume that church repairs only occurred as part of the controversial religious policies of the 1630s in the lead up to civil war.

We learn less about the nature of repairs carried out, other than generic costs of building materials, bells, and plumbing, than we do about who was taxed to raise the funds. Yet this is, of course, one of the strengths of the material, for along with details of rents from church property and frequent payments for the poor, we learn a lot about the people in this community over the period. It would be possible to draw up a list of serving churchwardens to assess how evenly these arduous responsibilities were shared out in the community. Inventories of church goods and utensils appear periodically, but not as routinely as perhaps they should have done; an interesting list of books acquired by the church is placed at the end of the glossary. It looks as if this was a congregation that complied by and large with the canons of the Church of England, and, as the accounts reveal, was in regular contact with the archdeacon and his officials.

The accounts offer occasional extra details as when in January 1631 people were urged to attend communion in a seemly manner rather than rush forward before their betters. Care for the less well-off is a constant element, as exemplified in full notes on the famine affecting the region in December 1630. A typical year captures a community enjoying life with its maypole, ringing its bells in celebration, going on perambulation, attending archidiaconal visitations, and maintaining its church with due diligence. How enthusiastically is not recorded, but the bells were rung on the announcement of Oliver Cromwell as lord protector and the later return of Charles II. These are very much the accounts of the churchwardens, overseers and their community, and there is little mention of the clergy who served the parish. John Napier is mentioned towards the end, a rector who clearly survived in the interregnum, as are two lecturers, Thomas Arnold, and Francis Duncombe; but we hear nothing of Thomas Newman and Nicholas Clayton who served earlier. Further research is needed to provide a fuller picture of this community, but the editors have done their job well and provided an excellent record society edition, full of wonderful material for others to mine as they see fit.

ANDREW FOSTER is an honorary research fellow of the University of Kent. He co-edited with Dr Valerie Hitchman Views from the Parish, a collection of essays on churchwardens’ accounts, published in 2015; with Joan Barham, he also edited Church Surveys of Chichester Archdeaconry, 1602, 1610 & 1636, for the Sussex Record Society in 2018.

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By Robert Walker

(Logaston Press 2022 304pp ISBN 978-1-9-910839-54-6) £25

A pleasing development of recent decades has been a growth of interest in stained glass. This has seen a number of cathedrals and greater churches (and also some smaller churches) publishing detailed guides to their stained glass of all periods, a process immeasurably aided by developments in colour printing, which have made it possible to produce high quality colour images for a fraction of what they would have cost a few years ago. Robert Walker’s scholarly and lavishly illustrated volume breaks new ground by making a detailed study of two large counties.

The book is divided into three sections. The first is an introduction of 31 pages; the second takes the form of a gazetteer of all churches within the Hereford diocese which contain any medieval glass; the third an appendix which covers, in slightly less detail, the area of north Shropshire which lies within the diocese of Lichfield. The introduction begins by guiding the reader through the processes by which a window was produced, from the initial draft design or vidimus to the finished article. In a section which will be of particular interest to local historians in the two counties the author goes on to consider the craftsmen who produced the windows. While there is no obvious centre of production like York, Coventry or Norwich (though it is suggested that Coventry-trained craftsmen may have worked in the area covered) it has been possible to identify the work of a few individuals, even if their identity still remains unknown. An example is the ‘Madley Master’ whose distinctively drawn mouths may be found in a range of churches in the region.

Both the gazetteer and the appendix are arranged alphabetically. Although having two series of entries solves the problem of diocesan boundaries not corresponding with those of counties (a not unusual occurrence) it breaks the sequence, and one wonders why the arrangement was adopted. While the appendix examines the more significant examples of medieval glass in the area covered, unlike the main gazetteer it does not include all fragments. Curiously, four Hereford parishes (Ashford Carbonell, Clungunford, Tugford and Hopton Wafers) are included in the appendix rather than in the main gazetteer, though this in itself is a very minor blemish on an otherwise exemplary book.

The two counties are rich in medieval glass of all periods from the thirteenth century until the eve of the Reformation—and indeed beyond, for Viscount Scudamore’s Laudian glass at Abbey Dore, Sellack and Foy is also included by virtue of its iconography. There are several outstanding schemes of medieval glass such as those at Eaton Bishop, Madley, Ludlow and Munslow, and the nationally significant collection of continental glass at St. Mary’s, Shrewsbury, which was amassed by a trio of early nineteenth century antiquarian clergymen. Most churches are represented by a few individual figures, and more often by fragments, often in the heads of window tracery out of the reach of Puritan iconoclasts and the stones of generations of small boys. All these are studied in detail by Walker, both from the standpoint of iconography, and of style.

This raises one of the most important points about medieval windows, namely that over the centuries they have almost always suffered from damage caused by vandalism and neglect. The casual visitor who gazes in admiration at the east window of Ludlow, with its dramatic portrayal of the life of its patron St. Laurence, will probably be unaware that virtually the whole window was restored in 1832, and that only a couple of tiny fragments of original glass remain. On the whole the restorer, David Evans, repeating the techniques he had employed in Winchester College Chapel ten years previously, reproduced the original scheme, but with important deviations. Most of the major medieval windows included in the book have undergone restoration, and in many cases have been reassembled from fragments scattered around the church, as in the case of the important thirteenth-century medallions in the east window at Madley. Walker has made good use of the works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquaries such as Thomas Dingley and Richard Symonds to compare windows as they are today with how they looked before restoration. He has been particularly fortunate in Shropshire to have had access to the work of Rev William Mytton, who travelled the county in the 1720s and 1730s accompanied by a professional draughtsman recording its churches. Mytton’s researches are now in the care of the Cadbury Research Library in the University of Birmingham, and include examples of many windows. Using his work Walker has, for example, been able to examine the important early-sixteenth century glass at Munslow to distinguish between medieval pieces and those which date from Evans’ restoration in the later 1830s.

A fascinating aspect of the book is its author’s capacity for comparison of examples from different churches. The church at Battlefield, erected to pray for those killed in the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, originally contained a series of windows, surviving pieces of which were removed to Prees, a few miles away, when the semi-ruined church was restored by Pountney Smith in 1860-1862. Walker suggests that the replacement scheme of glazing was carried out by the sons of David Evans, rather than the attribution to Lavers and Barraud favoured by the most recent edition of The Buildings of England. This tends to be supported by a most interesting collection of fragments in the present vestry. The Evans workshop contained numerous fragments of medieval glass which were used to fill in gaps in various windows on which the firm was employed. In the Battlefield vestry are two original heads from the east window at Ludlow, which, when compared with Evans’ replacements in that window, reveal that the new work did not exactly copy the original. This detective work is one of the most fascinating aspects of a most scholarly and original study.

One could quote many other examples of similar insights, and those who wish to know more are most strongly advised to purchase the book. In addition to the breadth of knowledge which it reveals in a most clear written style, the quality of the colour plates, numbering almost 200, most of which have several subdivisions, is outstanding. The book production represents Logaston Press at its best, and it should be given a place on the shelves of all who have more than a casual interest in medieval glass, and not only those who live in the Welsh Marcher counties.

MARTIN SPEIGHT is chairman of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, and is currently engaged in research on Munslow church, which receives detailed attention in the book reviewed above.

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Edited by Tony Hadland

(Oxfordshire Record Society vol.75 2023 xiii+222pp ISBN 978-0-902509-77-1) £25

This edition of material relating to post-Reformation Roman Catholicism in Oxfordshire has moved the Oxfordshire Record Society onto new ground, although its editor remains on familiar territory as this is another of his many acclaimed publications on Catholic history in this county and neighbouring Berkshire. The volume itself, which admirably confirms Tony Hadland as the ideal choice, consists of two sections. The first is a lengthy, tightly structured and extremely informative introduction with several sub-sections, beginning with the national context: the making, amending and patchy enforcement of the penal laws, or anti-Catholic legislation, from the reign of Elizabeth to the early eighteenth century. These punished those (usually called recusants, and sometimes papists) who adhered to their religious beliefs. Outside events and attempts to ameliorate their condition often made matters worse, notably Pope Pius V’s excommunication and ‘deposition’ of Elizabeth I in 1570, which allowed the authorities to suspect Catholics as potential traitors. After the disastrous reign of James II, followed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, legislation reinforced the Test Acts, cementing the exclusion of Roman Catholics from local, as well as national, civil and social life. The Jacobite movement, especially the abortive risings of 1715 and 1745, cast further doubts on their loyalty. Only with the First Catholic Relief Act 1778 did an amelioration of their fortunes begin, although the Gordon Riots which followed indicated that the way forward would not be smooth. Full emancipation was not achieved until 1829. A useful summary of the legal status of English Roman Catholics over the whole period resulting from the penal laws is the theme of the next sub-section.

With the national background firmly established, Hadland then surveys and discusses the situation locally. Supported by a detailed timeline of relevant local events, and two maps by Giles Darkes, one of Roman Catholics and the centres of the Oxford Catholic Mission in the county, and another of Catholic centres and the later chapel and church in the city, he provides a full description of the role of each of the main Catholic centres of the period, their residents, families and connections.

The religious allegiance of the country house occupant was crucially important. Since the modest size of contemporary Oxford offered them little by way of concealment (it was mainly at inns such as the Mitre that they could hear Mass) Oxford’s Catholics more usually resorted to Holywell Manor, just beyond the city boundary. This served ‘as a more enduring location’, a family chapel and an ‘urban masshouse’, until a ‘crackdown’ after 1688 prompted a move to a more distant location, the manor house and very small village of Waterperry. It was there that until about 1804 ‘country-house Catholicism’ largely kept the faith alive until it could be practised safely in public. Three other centres and their residents (Britwell Prior, Great and Little Haseley and Overy House, Dorchester) were also significant. A community of Poor Clare nuns settled for a few years at Britwell. Although Jesuit priests were prominent among the clergy serving these Mass centres, exiled French priests ministered at Overy for a short time. They were among the large number of the clergy fleeing Revolutionary France in these later years, given sanctuary in both Oxford and Reading.

When the Catholic Mission returned to Oxford in 1791, at what eventually became the Chapel of St Ignatius in St Clement’s parish, it was those French priests, as well as Jesuits, who served it. After recording the trials and hardships of previous centuries, Hadland ends his survey of Mass centres with a substantial discussion of this chapel. When it became too small for its growing congregation, it was replaced in 1875 by the church of St Aloysius on the Woodstock Road, still there today. The chapel, the later church and their congregations then became parishes in the newly formed Birmingham diocese.

The core of the volume is the registers of the Oxford Catholic Mission. These are preceded by a lengthy and essential explanation of their contents, how they have been edited and a summary of themes they display. The registers themselves are the surviving ‘sacramental records’ from a number of centres of Roman Catholic worship in and around Oxford in the last decades before Catholic Emancipation and a short period after. The format here is a transcript, translation and tabulation of entries in the registers of Waterperry House and the Chapel of St Ignatius at St Clement’s Oxford, essentially parish registers. The baptismal entries at Waterperry date from 1701 to 1800, those at St Ignatius from 1800 to 1875 and Bampton 1856 to 1860. Waterperry’s register records deaths and burials 1700-1779, St Ignatius deaths and burials on some dates between 1798 and 1875. There are very few marriages recorded in either register and then only on a few dates between 1758 and 1875; the majority of confirmations is at St Ignatius. Some baptismal records include the names, age, parentage and other information about those baptised; recorded deaths at St Ignatius add ages and burial dates. Conversions are found only at St Ignatius 1872-1875, converts often former members of the Church of England.

In addition, there are two appendices. The first the names of priests of the Oxford Mission 1700-1875; the second provides an account of the short-lived, late nineteenth-century chapel at Bampton. The list of sources is impressive. There are two indexes, one to the introduction and another to the registers. Attractively produced for the Society by Boydell & Brewer, this will be a valuable resource, not only for members of the Oxfordshire Record Society, for family and local historians in the county and beyond, but also for anyone with an interest in religious history in general and Catholic history in particular. Both the editor and the Society are to be congratulated on providing such an excellent resource. They deserve our grateful thanks.

JOAN DILS is president of the Berkshire Local History Association and is currently working on an edition of the churchwardens’ accounts of Stanford-in-the-Vale 1552-1705 for the Berkshire Record Society. She is a member of St James Roman Catholic Church in Reading.

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By Angus J L Winchester

(Boydell Press 2022 xv+312pp ISBN 978-1-78327-743-8) £60; also available as an ebook £19.99

This most engaging book is the product of many years’ work by the author, though largely written during the Covid-19 lockdowns. It tackles a subject highly relevant today, as different interest groups argue over the merits and implications of private ownership of, and public access to, the land. Defining commons as ‘half-wild country’ (after Everitt), ‘left-over land’, ‘untamed … shared space’, the author seeks to cover all three nations of Great Britain both through an historical survey from the Middle Ages onwards in Part I and several local case-studies in Part II. We therefore have a book which fills a major gap in the literature, for despite many forays into aspects of the subject over the years there has been nothing truly to compare with this since The Common Lands of England and Wales by Hoskins and Dudley Stamp in 1963.

The book is part of a series on ‘Garden and Landscape History’ edited by Tom Williamson. As such, plenty is said about the evolving appearance of different commons, and about their distinctive features today, but this is set in the context of social, economic, political and cultural factors, alongside the impact of changing legislation. It is a pity that a few of the 64 illustrations (if maps and plans are included) could not have been in colour, since some commons are strikingly photogenic, but this would presumably have pushed up the cover price to a prohibitive level. In fairness, all those in black and white are at least adequate for their purpose.

The first five chapters of Part I address themes embracing the regional distribution of common land, the role of commons in the local economy, evolving rights and customs affecting communal access and resource management, the use of commons for public gatherings (a particularly appealing chapter for anyone interested in popular recreation and protest), and dependence on the commons by the poorest in society. All this focuses on the medieval and early modern periods, taking in along the way such matters as boundaries, stinting, fuel collection, squatting and ‘good neighbourhood’, in a series of discussions which are well-researched and clearly expressed. As the author asserts at one point, ‘much of the literature on the history of common land has focused on its demise through enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, so this early section of the book is especially valuable as an insightful study of the commons in what we may fairly call their heyday.

That said, ‘improvement’, privatisation and the condition of commons today demand attention, given the parameters of the book, and they are duly covered in the final three chapters of Part I. Although some of this will be more familiar territory to most readers, the author manages to traverse fresh ground by focusing on the deliberate setting aside of commons at enclosure, and on efforts since the mid-nineteenth century both to protect commons and to put them to new uses, ostensibly for the public good. A quotation from a recent article by the editor of this journal, that common heathland on the Surrey-Berkshire-Hampshire borders was utilised in the 1850s and 1860s ‘for the secluded accommodation of society’s undesirables’ illustrates one of the strengths of the book: the successful weaving of innumerable local studies into a comprehensive survey overall.

In Part II, the author provides eight such local studies of his own, deliberately selected to illustrate the various themes set out in Part I and all heavily reliant on primary sources. They focus on the management of different types of common, mostly since the nineteenth century but going back much further in some cases. The chosen examples embrace upland grazings in Sutherland, the Lake District, County Durham and Snowdonia (each managed distinctively), turbary allotments in the Isle of Axholme, lowland commons put to different uses in Herefordshire and the New Forest, and metropolitan Wimbledon Common. They run to less than ten pages each but are models of local historical research and presentation, by an author clearly in command of his source material.

In their turn, these studies precede a fine, short, summary concluding chapter, in which the author makes some sweeping statements: ‘The multiple interests in common land and the different meanings and values assigned to it by different players have resulted in a fluid balance between the processes of taming and wilding across the centuries’ and ‘The collaborative culture of grazing on common land and the role of commoning tradition in fostering a strong sense of community identity are increasingly recognised as possessing a cultural value as well as a practical benefit’. And he is fully entitled to make these statements, having justified them time and again through detailed research and exposition in the pages gone before. To illustrate the enduring appeal of common land he quotes an anti-enclosure propagandist of Westmorland, Thomas Wilkinson, who wrote in 1812 that ‘The Common and the Grave-yard are almost the only places that I know of where the rich and the poor are in partnership together’.

Despite the avowed intention of the book to cover Britain as a whole, and the inclusion of a case-study from Snowdonia, Welsh readers may well feel that their country is under-represented. Scotland, again with a case-study and also with a different legal framework for attention, fares a little better. Nevertheless, the book is geared heavily towards England: a product of the availability and accessibility of primary and secondary sources but an issue which might have been acknowledged more openly. The author deserves much credit, however, for his skilful navigation of a subject which aroused passions and provoked controversy in the past and still does. This is an important book.

GRAEME WHITE is Emeritus Professor of Local History at the University of Chester and president of the Chester Society for Landscape History. He edits the journal Cheshire History and among his books is The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (Bloomsbury, 2012).

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By Steve Hindle

(Oxford University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-192868-46-6) £100 or ebook

The Arbury estate, near Nuneaton, is known to students of nineteenth-century fiction as the birthplace of George Eliot. Now it, or at least the parish in which it lies, is destined to become just as well known to students of the early modern period. Thanks to Steve Hindle’s new book, Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire will soon rank alongside Myddle in Shropshire, Terling in Essex and Whickham in County Durham as a go-to place to get deep under the skin of a rural community. For those who follow Hindle’s work, this is not the first time Chilvers Coton has featured. We have already enjoyed case studies from this parish about a tithe dispute, a Jacobean magistrate, and a pre-Eliot scene from clerical life. The references for these, and for so much more, can be found in this book’s very useful 30-page bibliography. Chilvers Coton is almost uniquely well-served with data about its inhabitants at the end of the seventeenth century, thanks to an in-depth survey carried out between 1682 and 1684, which included a detailed map of the of the north-east quadrant of the parish and a census of the inhabitants in December 1684, all done to the order of Sir Richard Newdigate (1644-1710), lord of the three manors within the parish and resident of Arbury Hall.

Hindle first introduces us to the locality and to the Newdigates. There then follow thirteen chapters, each focused on one of the 176 households visited over a space of three days by the census-takers, jurors of the manor of Griff and Coton. Chapter by chapter, the author guides the reader along the route followed by the jurors, which started at the home of one of them, Henry Clay. Henry lived at the mill on the Wem (the only watermill in the parish) together with his wife, five children, two servants and a boarder. The jurors recorded everyone’s names and ages, together with the acreage of Clay’s land and his yardlands in the common fields, the rent he paid, and the name of his landlord. Some householders were sub-tenants of small freehold estates. As with several other chapters, an extract of the survey map is included. The cartographer included a graphic three-dimensional sketch of the mill, a three-storey, two-winged, double-chimneyed, red tiled, H-plan building, although curiously lacking any depiction of a wheel, hoist or any other indication of its function. While the map extracts are welcome, the limitations of standard book format and reproduction quality, coupled with the faintness of much of the original cartography, makes them often hard to read, certainly for this reviewer’s eyesight. Anticipating this, the publisher has made the map available on its website, from which it can be downloaded and examined at greater magnification. Hindle has also provided a useful map of the whole parish, extracts of which are used to illustrate those chapters about parts not on the contemporary map. This map is also viewable on-line, with colour-coded descriptors providing a valuable visualisation of the spatial relativities of the dwellings and their occupants, and their positioning in the overall topography. I strongly recommend viewing both maps while reading the two introductory chapters. The jurors’ visit to the mill also provides the author with the opportunity to discuss grain production and mill use in the parish, as well as Clay’s need to supplement his mill income from agriculture. As do others, this chapter looks backwards and forwards along Clay’s timeline and that of the mill, greatly enhancing the snapshot of the census from other data sources to provide a life story of Clay and of his home and workplace.

The jurors next walked to the largest settlement, Coton Town, passing the church and the adjacent vicarage, one of the largest houses in the parish. This was occupied by the Reverend John Perkins and his wife, with their four children and two domestic servants. Perkins was an Oxford graduate, albeit born only six miles from Chilvers Coton. The living was poor, producing only £38 10s annual income, and Perkins was grateful for further financial support from Sir Richard Newdigate, which was given even though the Newdigates and their household usually worshipped at the private chapel at Arbury Hall and had their own chaplain. A plan of the pews in the church survives from the same year as the census and it has been possible to identify the ownership of around 160 of the pews with houses or occupants listed in the census. This provides the opportunity to explore social ranking within the parish, which was a significant determinant of pew allocation, as of course was gender. Perkins’ inventory following his death in 1691 revealed the furnishing of the vicarage’s eleven rooms to be adequate but by no means lavish. Moving on, the jurors visited the other houses in Coton town, occupied by labourers, nail-makers, a shoemaker, a butcher, and the silk-weaver John Knight, one of eight men following this occupation in the parish. Silk-weaving, particularly ribbon making, had been growing as an industry in north-east Warwickshire for around twenty years. It was a business Daniel Defoe remarked upon early in the next century, and one which the author explores in some detail, considering the role of the silk-masters who provided the raw material and bought the finished products, and contrasting their wealth with the poverty of weavers like Knight, whose inventory totalled only £13 including weaving equipment worth £1. Other trades are similarly examined as the jurors visit the blacksmith’s forge, the alehouse and a nail-maker’s house.

Leaving the village, the jurors moved on to the area of Heath End, where many of the smallest plots were located, each having no more than a small garden. Several were occupied by widows, and most of the rest by labourers, including Abraham Checkly, who paid his quarterly rent of 6d to Newdigate, or at least to his bailiff, from whom he also regularly got work on the Arbury estate. Here the author turns to the Arbury estate records to discover Checkly’s work of digging, woodcutting or piling brick and his pay of 7d to 10d for every day he worked. Passing Coalpit Croft, the jurors arrived at Wash Lane, another poor part of the parish, which bordered on Nuneaton. There, five of the houses were found to be occupied by coal miners. Mining had been a sporadic activity in Chilvers Coton, which was part of the Warwickshire coalfield, for many years. Pits were dug, only to fail due to flooding, unprofitability or even sabotage. Just two weeks before the census, Newdigate had begun to reopen a mine, known as the Seven-foot Delph, which within three months had taken on almost 200 men and boys, the majority recruited from outside Chilvers Coton. Account books for the mine show the extent to which the services of parishioners other than miners were also called upon: blacksmiths, carpenters, a chandler supplying illumination, women weaving caps for the miners, and shovels and other equipment from the rake-maker, all benefiting from Newdigate’s very significant investment. However, the mine never provided Newdigate with the return he anticipated. Even the introduction of an early Newcomen steam pump in 1714 only delayed the inevitable, and it closed in 1730.

While at Griff, the jurors visited the home of another of their number, yeoman Henry Beighton. His house was subdivided, with Henry (53) and his remaining family living in the older part and his son, also Henry (23), living with his young family in the lower part. The Beightons owned 74 acres of freehold land, working it with a large force of resident labour. Henry senior was an influential figure in the parish, owning two other houses and being steward of the manor of Griff and Coton. The status of the family was to increase after Henry senior’s death—on one occasion his son referred to himself as a gentleman—only to decline into financial difficulty and social scandal as Henry junior both mismanaged his finances and carried on a too-public affair with the wife of a local miner.

The jurors’ third day began at Arbury Hall itself, where Sir Richard Newdigate and 36 other household members were registered, and progressed to the demesne where a number of the estate’s craftsmen lived. The extensive estate records cast a wider light on Newdigate’s agricultural activities, and on his employment practices, particularly the high level of control he maintained over his workers’ behaviour through the imposition of quite severe fines for offences, such as being late for work. The jurors and the author end their perambulation with a visit to a mason, a husbandman and a carpenter, again considering aspects of their trade as well as their personal lives.

The Social Topography of a Rural Community provides a fine example of how to use record linkage productively. Steve Hindle, ably assisted by The Local Historian’s own Heather Falvey, has trawled wills and probate inventories, parish registers, estate records, local and national legal suits, and many other sources to paint a convincing picture of a parish which represents in microcosm many parts of rural England at the advent of industrialisation. And it is almost certainly more than just coincidental that some of the characters we meet there foreshadow George Eliott’s poor clergyman Amos Barton, weaver Silas Marner, or carpenter Adam Bede.

MIKE KIPLING is a retired actuary who is currently mid-way through a D. Phil. in English Local History at the University of Oxford, researching finance and trade in early modern Sussex mainly via the records of the Westminster equity courts. He is treasurer of the Local Population Studies Society and a committee member of the West Sussex Archives Society.

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Edited by David Noy and Lyn Robinson

(Buckinghamshire Record Society vol.41 2022 xliv+266pp ISBN 978-0-901198-46-4) £30

It is impossible to have too many books which bring together a collection of wills. This volume is not only a good addition to any bookshelf, but also an excellent example of how such a collection can be put together. It came about due to the intrusion of HS2 through the area, and a brief to research Chetwode Mill and the locality to inform any archaeological investigations which might be undertaken before HS2 damaged the site. What started as a small project looking at thirty wills relating to Chetwode, expanded to 108 wills and any disputes which arose from them. The small size of the parish of Chetwode has enabled the editors to delve more deeply into the lives of the people living there and the land that they owned. Their conclusions are covered in the introduction, setting the complexities of landownership and the local society into context and cross-referencing the relevant wills and disputes with the person and property. They have drawn some comparisons with Stoke Mandeville, the wills of which have also been published by the Buckinghamshire Record Society, although for those with no local knowledge, or who are not members of the BRS, a little more detail on the comparisons would have been helpful. However, what this volume demonstrates so well, is how useful a collection of wills can be for local historians as well as family historians.

One of the main benefits of the introduction is that it also acts as a ‘How To’ manual for anyone else setting out to publish local wills. The depth of additional research undertaken to provide a picture of Chetwode over the centuries and the people living there is remarkable. Starting with two maps, one locates the parish within the surrounding villages and the second shows part of Chetwode in close up. This demonstrates just how sparsely populated the parish was, and also helps us to visualise Chetwode as we read through the introduction and the wills. Buckinghamshire is fortunate in that a wide variety of sources relating to its history have already been printed (such as The Posse Commitatus 1798 and Buckinghamshire Subsidy Roll 1524). There are also works by a number of antiquarians and historians on the county, individual families or places. All of these have been mined for information on Chetwode and its people, covering a little over 300 years of its changing history.

Chetwode benefited from two major families—the Chetwodes, who took their name from the village, but rarely lived there, and the Risley family who did, occupying the former Chetwode Priory. Useful family trees have been provided for both, again cross-referenced to the wills. This helps us to follow the two families, their descendants and name changes. The two families dominate as a continuing presence, but there were other freeholders, five being listed in the 1780 Land Tax return. Some of their wills are here: the Dentons who fell into debt and had to sell to the Chamberlaynes, who in turn experienced financial difficulties during the Civil War. The land remained but the owners changed, and this is traced through the wills and other records, along with the various families’ fortunes. Chetwode Mill, the starting point for this project, has its own section, tracing the millers who operated it, several of whom made wills.

The story of the church is equally fascinating, Appendix 2 sets out the dispute in 1583 between the parishioners and William Risley. It opens with a history of the foundation, and how the priory church was granted to the parish to become their chapel of ease. The purchase of the priory by Risley’s father after the Dissolution led to the destruction of the chapel, angering the parishioners. The parish church also fell into disrepair with Risley demolishing the tomb of Sir John Chetwode. Despite being responsible for the maintenance of the church, the Risleys allowed it to collapse, neglecting the surrounding wall and allowing pigs to roam the graveyard. The ecclesiastical court found in the parishioners’ favour, Risley ignored the findings, and so the case went to Chancery. While this may not appear to be relevant to the wills, it is relevant to the history of the parish and its landholders and was well worth including.

There is a useful glossary, focusing especially on words from local dialect. The excellent index is a joy. The index of places is broken down into areas (Chetwode, Buckinghamshire, England and Wales, and places outside England and Wales) and is especially useful for those with little or no knowledge of Chetwode or Buckinghamshire. The index of subjects is equally detailed, including headings which are of specific interest, such as godchildren, marriage (which is broken down further to dower, without consent, settlements and more), and burial. All possibilities and areas of specific interest for historians seem to have been considered and included. Larger collections of wills (as from a particular archdeaconry) or a register from TNA, necessarily take a different approach. Covering a larger geographic area or a shorter time span, they can only be more general, but the format of the index as used here is one to consider, especially when wills have such a wide variety of uses.

The small-scale approach has much to commend it: a more detailed picture can be given of the place and its community, enabling comparisons to be made with neighbouring parishes. This book also has the benefit of previous work done by the BRS, drawing together a collection of records to provide a fuller picture not only of Chetwode but of the county. It demonstrates just how useful the work of county record societies is, not just to the locality but nationally.

LYNDA PIDGEON is involved with a similar project for The Friends of Lydiard Park: its ‘100 Wills Project’. A small group of volunteers are transcribing PCC wills at TNA covering the years 1422-1857, relating to people who lived in Lydiard Tregoze and Lydiard Millicent (Wiltshire) as well as members of the St John family who were lords of the manor.

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By David Cressy

(Oxford University Press 2022 313pp ISBN 978-0-19-286339-3) £30

At the heart of David Cressy’s magisterial study of shipwrecks is a shocking archival tragedy which should be of interest to all BALH members. This was the loss in 1660 of half the government archives of Scotland. In 1650, these records had been forcibly removed by Oliver Cromwell after his victory at the battle of Dunbar and taken to London by cart and waggon. Then with the return of Charles II they were sent home by sea, a poor return for the loyalty of many Scots to the Royalist cause. The Eagle, overloaded with 107 hogsheads, twelve chests, five trunks and four barrels of Scotland’s precious archival history set out from London, but its captain had to press the merchant ship Elizabeth into service near Yarmouth when he got into difficulties. Eighty-five hogsheads of papers were then transferred to the Elizabeth at sea in stormy conditions and against the wishes of the second crew. On 16 December 1660 the Elizabeth sprang a leak eighteen miles from land in the North Sea. Ironically the surviving crew, who abandoned ship after two days of heroic pumping, landed on the Scottish coast near Dunbar. Their ship was a total wreck with no identifiable wreckage ever found.

This total loss is an exceptional case in a book concerned primarily with the landward end of things. Shipwrecks are treated here as ‘social events in the lives of English communities’ with untold economic benefits potentially accruing to coastal dwellers. Conflicting legal rights, shifting sandbanks, salvage and rewards for finders, rescue and offers of shelter for shipwrecked mariners all feature in this study of ‘the liminal edge’, where legal salvage might shade imperceptibly into unlawful wrecking and murder on occasion.

The book spans the long early modern era from the 1550s to the 1750s with documentary evidence surviving for more than 850 named vessels. Inevitably these are the newsworthy wrecks or those subject to dispute, with larger and foreign ships probably over-represented. Cressy estimates that the actual total of wrecks in this period ‘may have exceeded four thousand’. Of the 755 known wreck sites, Kent’s Goodwin Sands, the Sussex coast, Isle of Wight and the south-west’s rocky coasts accounted for more than 70 per cent. The North Sea was the location of 20 per cent of well-documented wrecks, including that of the Elizabeth in 1660. The remainder, just under 10 per cent, were wrecked on the Irish Sea coast from Cumbria to the Bristol Channel, including Wales. This geographical distribution of shipwrecks was replicated in the nineteenth century when coastal losses exceeded 1500 each year.

In the first chapter (‘Ships at risk’) Cressy states that this was a period of expansion of English merchant shipping. The value of cargoes and ships was generally a few thousand pounds each. Given that ‘approximately 5 percent of ships putting to sea each year wrecked’ losses could be astronomical. The second chapter, ‘The perils of the sea’, reviews the literature of shipwrecks from the Bible through the Odyssey and other classical sources to Renaissance accounts like Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Shipwrecks provided a metaphor for moralising sermons and these were used to appeal to merchants and traders, while the greatest storm of all, in November 1703, destroyed around 300 vessels. As Cressy notes, ‘the safest place in a tempest was the open sea’. Faulty charts, navigational miscalculations, incompetence and a failure of God’s providence all played a role in the wreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet in 1707, the outstanding Scillonian casualty. With a life expectancy of 30 years for most ocean-going vessels, wear and tear, groundings and other misfortunes led many such ships to leak, as the Elizabeth had done so catastrophically in 1660.

Chapter 3, ‘Wreccum maris’, considers the law of ‘Wreck of the sea’, starting with statutes which decreed that if any living thing survived, the ship could not be considered a wreck. Set against this was the common belief of finders-keepers. Cressy explores the many layers of conflicting rights, focusing here on the Admiralty and the Common Law. ‘The barbarous country people’ is the theme of chapter 4, which questions whether the coastal inhabitants were really as savage as sixteenth century and later accounts made out, Cressy considering that much of the rhetoric is overblown. The term ‘wrecking’ actually encompasses beachcombing through to deliberately luring ships to their doom for which no English evidence has been found. Praying for ships, if they must wreck, to wreck on one’s own coast can be found from Cornwall to Northumberland, however, but the reality was more nuanced with such ‘predators’ often giving succour to the shipwrecked. ‘Salvage was a collaborative effort…conducted under pressure of time in sometimes dangerous conditions and was universally disagreeable to parties who had lost their goods’.

‘The great profit of the lords of the manors’ is the subject of chapter 5, an often-overlooked aspect of shipwreck. Manorial proprietors frequently came into conflict with wardens of the Cinque Ports, the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, the Admiralty and the Crown. Starting with the Bristol Channel, Cressy draws examples of conflicted wrecks from Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Sussex, Kent, Norfolk, Yorkshire and the North. In Cornwall, plans to build lighthouses were opposed by Sir John Killigrew’s tenants in 1619 and Sir William Godolphin in 1689 on grounds of a loss of manorial rights. Chapter 6, ‘The Lord Admiral’s droits and His Majesty’s profit’, takes the story of clashing rights further with the jurisdiction of the Cinque Ports noted as covering ‘the richest of all wreck zones including the Goodwin Sands’. Trial by law was frequently resorted to by lords of manors with ‘favouritism, graft, malfeasance and corruption’ usually deciding the outcome.

With the intention of ‘opening windows into rural coastal communities’, chapter 7 ‘Shipwreck tales from sea and shore’, looks at community entitlement. Shipwrecks tested ‘the social order’ but left ‘its architecture intact’. Cases are arranged chronologically starting with Northumberland in 1559 and 1565 to Cakeham in Sussex in 1676. A fascinating aspect of the last case is just how far inland shipwrecked goods were traded: Arundel and Midhurst in Sussex, Farnham (Surrey), Winchester in Hampshire, and Salisbury in Wiltshire. A detailed case study of a Chesil Beach wreck follows in chapter 8, ‘The Bounty of the Golden Grape’. Chapters 9 and 10 cover ‘Mariners in distress’ and ‘Material bounty brought ashore’. The latter focuses on the types of cargoes and their condition: wine was often described as ‘brackish’ even when it was good. Used for lighting and lubrication, cargoes of oil could be traded 20 miles inland or given as a reward to female salvors as at Seaford in Sussex in 1637. Textiles, clothes, bullion and coin were particularly desirable, as were culinary delights like raisins, no less than 535 barrels having been on the Golden Grape. In 1637 Dorset children were given raisins as treats from this wreck. ‘Deep recovery’ is the subject of chapter 11, and features fishing for guns and the use of early diving bells. A final chapter entitled ‘Eighteenth-century wrecking revisited’ explores a theme touched on in chapter 4 and hopefully finally dispels the myth of the deliberate wrecking of ships.

David Cressy is to be congratulated on producing an empirical and very well-illustrated study of a subject too often consigned to the realms of myth, legend and exaggeration. Obviously of interest to maritime historians, archaeologists and beachcombers, the depositions of ordinary named people filling these pages will also be of interest to local historians of counties with a coastline. As Cressy noted in his acknowledgments ‘the book was written under the shadow of the pandemic’ when many libraries and archives were closed, making his achievement all the greater. It is particularly appropriate that this book was published in time for the 50th anniversary of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973. In Cornwall the focus this year is on wreck sites at Gunwalloe on the Lizard.

JOANNA MATTINGLY worked for the Cornwall Maritime Museum and National Maritime Museum Cornwall. She is currently advising Cornwall’s Historic Environment Service on the local impact of the wreck of the Portuguese treasure ship St Anthony in 1527 and how this might relate to the church screen at Gunwalloe.

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Edited by David Short

(Hertfordshire Record Society 2022 vol.37 xliii+244pp ISBN 978-0-9501741-3-6) £22

For such a common type of documentation, there are surprisingly few published sets of overseers’ accounts. Most of the major urban censuses of the poor from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have come out in print, and there are several calendars of records relating to settlement, removal, apprenticeship, and similar. But the most characteristic, most ubiquitous form of documentation generated by the ‘Old Poor Law’ remains a rarity on the bookshelves. There is no especially good reason for this. Overseers’ accounts survive in massive numbers. They are generally straightforward to transcribe, and they are full of fascinating detail about the lives of paupers and the policies adopted by parishes towards their relief. But there remains a vast resource of unpublished material out there in the local archives.

The village of Ashwell, a small—indeed declining—settlement in the gentle countryside of Hertfordshire, is lucky. For it now boasts not one, nor two, but three published volumes of overseers’ accounts. This new book, produced with care and dedication by the Hertfordshire Record Society, represents the earliest set: running from 1676 to 1722. In some ways this was the heyday of this kind of account. By the later seventeenth century, virtually all parishes were implementing the poor laws pretty diligently. The infamous population pressure of the early part of that century had eased somewhat, and so therefore had the poverty problem, but the amounts being spent generally still seem to have been on an upward trajectory. Either there were significant changes in the social structure at this time (proletarianisation perhaps) that brought more people in need of support; or, more simply, parishes found themselves maintaining their poor to a better standard of living. Whatever the cause, Ashwell follows the trend: total disbursements more than doubled from an average of around £50 a year in the 1670s and 1680s to over £110 a year in the 1710s.

Accounts like these can tell us a lot about the poor and the systems in place to relieve them. Yet there are some frustrations here, though not through any fault of the editors. The most annoying is the decision made by the overseers not to record the name of regular recipients of relief. The accounts are divided into pensions and extraordinary payments, and the pensions sections are accounted by month. But they do not name the recipients, so any kind of nominal linkage exercise, creating pauper biographies or linking the poor accounts to parish registers, is impossible. Still, there is not a lot that can be done about this, and if nothing else it is a timely reminder to readers of the methodological exasperations of so many historical sources. If only those parish officers had enjoyed the foresight to render their accounts in such a manner most amenable to twenty-first century scholars.

No matter. The book itself is an illuminating and well-crafted addition to the local history shelf. The editor has done a fine job transcribing the records, and provided a compendious introduction and a useful index. He has also put together an extremely handy set of biographies for the overseers of the poor, showing them to be broadly (as expected) representative of the rural middling sort, but also to include a number of Dissenters, even Quakers. It seems unlikely, in this village at least, that the poor law purse was being used to enforce Clarendon Code Anglicanism. Instead, we see a system giving out a wide-ranging and flexible set of payments, from rent to work tools to fuel to clothing. Of course, what we don’t see is those not in receipt of relief. But such is the nature of these kinds of accounts.

Each poor law parish was distinctive, though less so than one might necessarily think. The rent of ‘clunch pits’ to provide employment to the poor and building materials (in this case a chalky limestone) is no doubt unusual, as is the use of the poor rate to pay ‘king’s carriage’, apparently some hangover from the old royal right of purveyance (actually abolished in 1660, so still something of a mystery). But arguably the main thing about these accounts is that they stand as a fairly typical example of rural overseers’ papers. In this sense, it is great to have them published in such a well-produced book, for they can stand for many. The editors and the Hertfordshire Record Society should be congratulated on a successful project, and a worthy volume. More of the same, please.

JONATHAN HEALEY, Associate Professor in Social History, Kellogg College, Oxford, directs the MSc in English Local History and the Undergraduate Diploma in Social and Local History for the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on aspects of the early modern Poor Laws.

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Edited by Janet H. Stevenson

(Boydell & Brewer Ltd for Canterbury and York Society vol.112 2022 xliv+243pp ISBN 978-0-907239-85-7) £35

A renowned doctor of theology and expert on the treatment of heretics, Richard Praty accompanied Henry VI to France in 1430 for his coronation as king of France, and in 1431 was one of the theologians who presided at the trial of Joan of Arc. His influence with the young king was evidently considerable, and led to his appointment to the bishopric of Chichester in 1438. This recent publication by the Canterbury and York Society is a transcribed and translated record of his register during the seven years that he served in that capacity.

Richard Praty’s register was originally written on parchment folios and divided into six quires: admissions, institutions, collations, resignations and exchanges of benefices; mandata superiorum; elections, benedictions and resignations of abbots and priors; visitations of the diocese of Chichester; memoranda and axta maiora; and the names of those promoted to orders and their place of ordination. Some of the parchment folios have subsequently been lost, while the ordering of some of the others had become muddled: this volume presents the entries in what would have been their original order.

Record society publications such as this are not intended to be read for pleasure. Nevertheless, for a range of researchers this volume is likely to be of significant interest. Foremost among these are those with an interest in the late medieval church. Registers which record the administrative acts of bishops in the management of their dioceses provide an important insight into the role that the church played in the lives of medieval people, including dealing with such issues as heresy, witchcraft and matrimonial irregularities. In 1441 the bishop imposed the sentence of greater excommunication on Roger Stillefeld ‘who damnably detains Joan Holte in adulterous embrace and refuses to perform the marriage between himself and Maud Whethewell … his wife’. They also reveal how medieval church leaders had to balance the needs of the English Church with those of the pope in Rome and, increasingly, the influence of the Crown. For example, the register records Praty dealing with matters appertaining to the state, including making arrangements for the collection of the clerical subsidy granted to the king in 1440 (collected in 1441), as well as attending parliament concerning the defence of the realm; publishing mandates of the archbishop of Canterbury; and promulgating papal bulls, including the Bull of Pope Eugenius IV, sealed in Florence in 1439, which granted a plenary indulgence to all those who contributed to the expenses incurred in the union of the eastern and western churches.

The register also gives an insight into Richard Praty himself as a hard-working diocesan. He appears as a bishop keen to uphold standards within his see while, at the same time, appearing to be fair, and even benevolent, in his dealings with his clergy. When the parish priest John Rose, accused of holding ‘the various heresies and deadly opinions of John Wyclif’, admitted that he had entertained in his house heretics whom he had failed to report to the bishop, as well as possessing the four gospels in English, and that he had performed exorcisms in addition to holding books of incantations, exorcisms and necromancy, he was granted absolution by the bishop after he had sworn on oath never to preach or disseminate heretical beliefs in future. William Lewes, prior of Sele, accused of a range of offences in 1442 including sodomy, obtaining his office by simony, adultery and squandering the goods of his house, as well as a number of failures in relation to the religious services conducted within the priory, was initially suspended, but restored to office after having appeared before the bishop and undergone compurgation.

The register also provides an insight into the condition of the English Church in the century prior to the Reformation and will be of interest to students of this topic. There are indications that all was not entirely well within the diocese of Chichester. Although the comparatively limited number of issues relating to the secular church recorded suggests that, in general, the church probably provided an effective care for the souls within the diocese, the behaviour of regulars frequently caused concern. The case of William Lewes, prior of Sele, is referred to above. In the same year, a visitation of the priory of Easebourne (West Sussex) by Master Walter Eston’, commissary of Richard Praty, found that the house was in debt to the sum of £40, mainly due to the behaviour of the prioress, who rode out for periods of time with an excessive retinue, dined magnificently, forced her sisters to work every day like hired women and ‘is very particular in her dress, so much so that the fur linings of her cloak are worth 100s’.

The register has been edited by Janet H. Stevenson, formerly an assistant editor of the VCH for Wiltshire, who has edited a number of record society volumes including the register of Edward Story, one of Richard Praty’s successors as bishop of Chichester (The Register of Edward Story, Bishop of Chichester, 1478–1503). Stevenson supports the register with full notes and an introduction, which includes a brief biography of Richard Praty, followed by a discussion of the register’s content. This, and the ongoing notes throughout the text, have been meticulously researched using a very wide variety of both published and original sources. The volume also benefits from a comprehensive index of names and places, together with a shorter index of subjects, and two appendices, one of which is the itinerary of Bishop Praty during the eight years of his office and which puts into context the travelling required of a busy fifteenth-century bishop around his diocese and further afield.

To conclude, this is an excellent new addition to the calendars of medieval English episcopal registers published by the Canterbury and York Society. It very well researched and presented and is heartily recommended to all those with an interest in the pre-Reformation English church.

JOANNE SEAR is the co-editor of a translation and transcription of the extant fifteenth-century rolls of the manor of Newmarket, recently published by the Suffolk Records Society as The Records of Medieval Newmarket.

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