Transcription of Tudor Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts (1525-6)

The Voice of Great Dunmow’s scribe
This blog has many readers from the North Essex and Suffolk area.  To them (and, of course, to my other readers too) I say… can’t you just hear the Suffolk accent shining through this folio!  Say the names of the following villages and towns out loud and you will hear that scribe from five-hundred years ago!  Remember, the scribe was writing phonetically, so pronounce each word out-loud phonetically and you will hear our long-dead, invisible, but always present, scribe.

• Ayston (ie Great Easton or Little Easton)
• Camrege (ie Cambridge – I love saying this one out loud… to start with, a nice hard ‘cAM’ and then growl out that ‘r’ to get the soft Suffolk burr to the ‘rege’!  Wonderful!)
• Dyttun (ie Duton Hill)
• Tayclay (ie Takeley. This town is now pronounced ‘Take-Leigh’. So try out you best Tudor accent: try the ‘Tay’ and then sound out that ‘clay’!)
• Thaxsted (ie Thaxted, everyone I know still pronounces this town’s name as Thaxsted, despite its modern day spelling! Thaxted is one of Essex’s jewels-in-the-crown of beautiful villages.  The town has many medieval buildings still standing including the beautiful medieval church (pictured below) which is more like a cathedral in its dramatic size and dimensions and the town’s medieval guildhall.  This town is well worth a visit to tourists visiting Great Britain.  If anyone is visiting this area during June or July, then I strongly recommend the Thaxted Festival for an evening of beautiful music in a remarkable location.

The beautiful Thaxted church, home of the yearly Thaxted Festival.
© Essex Voices Past 2012.

Being able to ‘hear’ the sound of our Tudor scribe is the very reason why this blog is called Essex Voices Past and also why my pseudonym is ‘The Narrator’.  I can only merely narrate the stories from Great Dunmow’s past, the Tudor scribe can speak perfectly well for himself.

Unwitting Testimony
There are several items on this folio that we can use unwitting testimony to interpret the entry.  For example:

• Line 3: ‘paid for the rest of the gilding of Our Lady’s Tabernacle’.  Although we are now five folios into the leather-bound churchwardens’ book, we are still on in the first year of the accounts recorded within it.  Therefore, this entry implies a couple of things, firstly the initial gilding was done (or paid for) prior to the start of the account-book (so perhaps in the years 1524-5), and secondly that the tabernacle must have been large because the payment was in (at least) two parts and this instalment was for 12s 4d (a significant sum).
• Line 6: ‘New work’.  What new work?  It’s not itemised in the accounts and so must have occurred prior to the start of the churchwardens’ accounts in 1525-6.  The very way it’s described implies that this was an area of the church that everyone knew as the ‘new work’.
• Line 20: the crossed out ‘my’.  This is intriguing.  Was Thomas Savage the unknown scribe?  Unlikely, as he was the churchwarden.  Also, the entries on this folio imply that he was the builder commissioned to build the steeple (and the person who contributed the largest amount towards the same steeple!)  Maybe the scribe was copying entries into the leather-bound account-book from various people’s loose receipts and he was busy word-for-word copying Thomas Savage’s receipt and accidently wrote ‘my’.

Church Steeple
Finally we are into the expenses for the building of the new church steeple.  Anyone who has seen Great Dunmow’s beautiful church will know that there is certainly not a steeple in existence now (and the church hasn’t had one in living memory).  However, here we have costs for the timber, the scaffolding, stones and limes.  Perhaps the Victorian vicar of Great Dunmow, W. T. Scott, was correct in his assessment that this merely for repairs, new windows and a wooden spire.

The steeple-less tower at St Mary the Virgin, Great Dunmow.
© Essex Voices Past 2012.

 
Notes about Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts
Great Dunmow’s original churchwardens’ accounts (1526-1621) are kept in Essex Record Office (E.R.O.), Chelmsford, Essex, D/P 11/5/1.  All digital images of the accounts within this blog appear by courtesy of Essex Record Office and may not be reproduced. Examining these records from this Essex parish gives the modern reader a remarkable view  into the lives and times of some of Henry VIII’s subjects and provides an interpretation into the local history of Tudor Great Dunmow.

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You may also be interested in the following
– Index to each folio in Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts
– Great Dunmow’s Churchwardens’ accounts: transcripts 1526-1621
– Tudor local history
– Medieval Essex dialect

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.