1566: The Examination and confession of certaine wytches at Chensforde

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The county of Essex, England, is notorious for the high number of sixteenth and seventeenth century witchcraft trials which took place at its regular county Assizes (courts) in Brentwood, Chelmsford and Colchester.  There is not a consensus of opinion why it was that Essex had such a high number of these witchcraft trials.  It could be simply be that a higher number of trial records survive in Essex then in other counties, thus distorting the figures.  Other reasons could include the fact that Essex seemed to be particularly unlucky in having at least two very active ‘witchfinders’ who took it upon themselves to root out so-called ‘witches’.  These ‘witchfinders’ included the magistrate of St Osyth, Brian D’Arcy, who in 1582 contributed to at least 10 women being tried and hanged for murder; and Matthew Hopkins, the infamous ‘Witchfinder General’ who rampaged through the eastern counties of England in 1645.

Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches (London, 1647) Shelfmark: E.388.(2) © The British Library Board

The mandate for these trials were the Elizabethan witchcraft statute of 1563 (an “Act against Conjuracions Inchantments and Witchecraftes” (1)) and the harsher 1604 Jacobean witchcraft act (an “Act against Conjuration Witchcrafte and dealinge with evil and wicked Spirits(2)”) which was finally repealed in 1736.  Contemporary people throughout England and Europe were fascinated by witches and the perception of malicious harm caused to both people and animals by people practising witchcraft.  It seems that all levels of society believed in “witches”, from King James I of England (who, as James VI of Scotland, wrote “Daemonologie” (1597), an influential treatise on the subject), to the victims and witnesses who reported their former friends and neighbours as witches to the authorities.

Today, these witchcraft cases are much studied by eminent historians and anthropologists, for example, Alan MacFarlane(3), Keith Thomas(4), Robin Briggs(5) and James Sharpe(6).  Historians consider both official public records such as the Assizes and Quarter Sessions accounts, along with “unofficial” accounts, such as contemporary treatises and pamphlets.  Studying these records can provide a picture of life, relationships and tensions within sixteenth and seventeenth century communities of England.  An explanation for witchcraft that modern historians such as Thomas and MacFarlane have put forward is that the accusations occurred when there were disputes between people.  Thomas observed: “[this was a] tightly-knit, intolerant world with which the witch had parted company.  She was the extreme example of the malignant or non-conforming person against whom the local community had always taken punitive action in the interests of social harmony.”(7)  He further remarks that when there was a breakdown of the mutual help that many English villagers relied on during this period, accusations of witchcraft often followed.(8)

The apprehension and confession of three notorious witches. Arreigned and by iustice condemned and executed at Chelmes-forde, in the Countye of Essex, (Joan Cunny, Joan Upney and Joan Prentice) (1589)

This breakdown of previously good, neighbourly relationships can be observed by analysing Great Dunmow’s Lay Subsidy returns, the churchwardens’ accounts, together with Assize trial records to determine how neighbours Robert Parker and John Prestmary fell out to such an extent that the cry of ‘witchcraft’ was heard in Great Dunmow.  The first Prestmary husband and wife witches to appear in the court records are in 1567:

Alice Prestmary
 “on 1 February 1567 Alice PRESTMARYE of Great Dunmow, wife of John PRESTMARYE spinster, bewitched Edward Parker son of Robert Parker “tanner”, putting him in peril of his life, so that his life is despaired of.”  (9)

She pleaded not guilty but was found guilty. The Judgement was according to the Statute (which meant 1 year in prison with quarterly appearances of 6 hours in the pillory).  However, she died of the plague in prison on 7 May.

“INQUISITIONS: Taken on 7 May 9 Eliz., at Colchester, before John and rob. Myddeton, coroners for the town of colchester, on view of the body of Alice PRESTMARY a prisoner in Colchester Castle. the jurors say that she languished for a month of on illness called `a fever’ from 1 to 6 May and then died. Visitation of God.”(10)

Colchester Castle, Tudor county gaol and prison for many Essex women (and men) accused of witchcraft

John Prestmary
John Prestmary was Alice’s husband.  Sadly, he committed suicide shortly before his wife’s trial.  The records are very sparse and we can now only guess why he was driven to such an act.

“INQUISITIONS: Taken on 1 February 9 eliz., at Great dunmow, before tho. Knott, coroner, on view of the body of John PRESTMARYE of Great Dunmow lab. aged 60 years. The jurors say that John on 30 January hanged himself from a `walnute tree’ in his garden with a halter. Felo de se.” (11)

Alice’s husband’s suicide (the felo de se in the inquisition records) would probably have been taken as further prove that Alice was a witch.  “In England, Satan was frankly cited as an accessory in case of felo-de-se and homicide, and the coroner’s inquisition taken upon view of the body of a suicide formerly followed the wording of the indictment for murder, the jurors presenting that the deceased ‘not having God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, did murder himself’”(12)

The Parkers and Prestmarys had been neighbours since at least the 1520s.  However, forty years later, Alice was accused of bewitching Robert Parker’s child, Edward.  Part 2 of this story explores the Parkers and the Prestmarys of Great Dunmow and examines the circumstances surrounding the first Prestmary husband and wife tried for witchcraft.

Note on the Prestmary spelling
So far in the records I have seen the name spelt as below.  For uniformity my posts (unless quoting directly from primary sources) will use the most consistent spelling – ‘Prestmary’.

• Prestmary
• Prestmarye
• Prestmery
• Prestmarie
• Presmary
• Presmarye
• Presmere
• Presmere
• Preistmarye
• Prestmare
• Preasmary

Footnotes
1) MacFarlane, A; Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A regional and comparative study; (1^st Edition,1970) p14.
2) Ewen, C L’Estrange; Witch Hunting and Witch Trials : The Indictments for Witchcraft from the Records of 1373 Assizes held for the Home Circuit A.D. 1559-1736; (1929)  p19.
3) MacFarlane, A; Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (2^nd Edition,1999).
4) Thomas, K; Religion and the decline of Magic (1991).
5) Briggs, R; Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (2^nd edition, 2002)
6) Sharpe, J., Witchcraft in early Modern England; The bewitching of Anne Gunter: A horrible and true story of football, witchcraft, murder and the King of England; English witchcraft 1560-1736; Volumes 1 to 6 (Gen Ed)
7) Thomas, K; (1991), Religion and the Decline of Magic; p632
8) Thomas, K; (1991), Religion and the Decline of Magic; p662
9) Calendar of Essex Assize File [ASS 35/9/2] Assizes held at Brentwood (13 March 1567), Essex Record Office, T/A 418/11/5.
10) Calendar of Queen’s Bench Indictments Ancient 619, Part I, (1567), Essex Record Office, T/A 428/1/14A
11) Calendar of Queen’s Bench Indictments Ancient 617,Part I, (1567), Essex Record Office, T/A 428/1/12A
12) Ewen, C L’Estrange; Witchcraft and Demonism (1933), p87-88.

Postcards displayed on this page in the personal collection of The Narrator.

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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If you want to learn more about Essex’s witches, then you may be interested in my online course about the Witches of Elizabethan and Stuart Essex. Click the “Learn More” button below for full details.

The post Tudor vicar William Walton’s arrival in Great Dunmow explained how one of the drivers for the 1525-6 collection for the church steeple (and the establishment of the beautiful leather account-book), was the arrival of the new vicar, Master William Walton.  Another driver for the parish collection must have been the tax imposed by Henry VIII two years prior to the church steeple collection.  This tax, known as the Lay Subsidy, was imposed on England by the king to levy money for his expensive wars with France.

Tent design for the 1520 Field of Cloth of Gold (Henry VIII’s meeting with the king of France) (1)

Each village, town and parish throughout England had to keep meticulous records as to the amount that had been levied on each head-of-household. The tax levied was based on a person’s income from their land or moveable good. John Josselyn, from the nearby parish of High Roding, who also owned a manor within Great Dunmow(2), was responsible for collecting the tax within the Hundred of Dunmow.(3) It is possible that the elite and clergy of Great Dunmow, who probably helped Josselyn administer the parish’s 1523-4 collection of the Lay Subsidy, used methods from this tax’s administration to facilitate their own parish collection in 1525-6.

The returns for Great Dunmow’s 1523-4 Lay Subsidy are in The National Archives (T.N.A.).(4) These returns detail a) the house-holder’s name (first name and surname), b) whether they had been assessed for income based on goods or land, c) the Valor (value assessed), and d) the tax payable. These returns would have been written down and recorded by John Josselyn or one of his men, resulting in the detailed manuscript that is now in the care of the T.N.A. Thus, a list of all the house-holders (and, more importantly, their wealth) could have been made available to vicar Master William Walton when he instigated the collection for the church steeple.

Perhaps, after a service in the church, when the parish clergy, churchwardens and church clerk were collecting each person’s contribution to the church steeple, the returns from the Lay Subsidy were used to assess how much each parishioner should pay towards their new steeple. This would explain the distinct connection between a person’s wealth and the amount they paid to a seemingly voluntary collection. This correlation is demonstrated in the graph below, which illustrates the distribution patterns of amounts paid to the Lay Subsidy compared to the steeple collection: the trends are remarkably similar. According to entries within the churchwarden accounts, the cost of labour per day was 4d, therefore the majority of householders were contributing an amount roughly equal to one day’s pay for both the Lay Subsidy Tax and the church steeple collection.

1523-4 Lay Subsidy versus 1525-6 parish collection

The returns for  the 1523-4 Lay Subsidy records 139 tax-payers, whereas just over 160 house-holders were recorded for the 1525-6 church steeple collection.  This discrepancy can be accounted for by the exemption of clergy and paupers from the Lay Subsidy.  Therefore, allowing for the parish’s four clerics (as detailed in the post Late medieval clergy), and a small number of deaths which might have occurred between the two events, it can be assumed there were approximately 20 paupers within the parish.  With a greater number contributing to the parish collection, some of the poorest residents, exempt from Henry VIII’s tax, had paid the parish church’s informal levy.  Perhaps, for the paupers, it was for spiritual, pious and religious reasons that money was paid to their church rather than to their lord sovereign, the King.

The elite of the parish have also been examined by comparing their wealth, according to the Lay Subsidy, against their generosity to the church steeple collection.  From this comparison, it is apparent that at least five lords of the manors from Great Dunmow’s medieval manors paid the highest contributions.  This comparison also confirms the men listed at the start of church steeple collection were the elite and from the upper echelons of Great Dunmow’s society.   Eamon Duffy has argued that investing in parish projects was one way in which the elite could establish and promote their place in local society.(5)   This self-promotion is apparent in Great Dunmow.  The largest contributor to the church steeple collection in 1525-6 was the builder and churchwarden, Thomas Savage, who, at £36s 8d, paid over £1 more then the next closest contribution and, according to the 1523-4 Lay Subsidy, was the tenth wealthiest parishioner.  In spite of his wealth and generosity, he was only listed twenty-fourth in the list – his wealth and generous contribution were not enough to push him up the social rank.  But, it did win him the contract to assist the building of the church steeple (as documented in a later folio within the churchwarden accounts).

Footnotes
1) Tent design for the Field of Cloth of Gold (1520), shelfmark: Cotton Ms. Augustus III. 18, ©British Library Board.
2) Scott. W.T., Antiquities of an Essex Parish: Or pages from the history of Great Dunmow (1873), p74.
3) Hundred of Dunmow: Calendar of Lay Subsidy Rolls (1523-4), The National Archives, E179/108/161.  Essex Record Office also hold a photocopy of these returns (Hundred of Dunmow: Calendar of Lay Subsidy Rolls (1523-4) T/A 427/1/1) but they are a handwritten transcript made by an unknown researcher sometime in the last 30-50 years.  Having consulted both versions, I have found that the E.R.O. version has some errors in the transcription of names.  Crucially, one of these errors concern the distinction as to whether one inhabitant of Great Dunmow’s surname was ‘Pannell’ or ‘Parnell’.  Mr Parnell, resident of Great Dunmow, will be discussed in a later blog.
4) Hundred of Dunmow, The National Archives, E179/108/161.
5) Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,1400-1580, (2nd Edition, 2005).

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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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom.  If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading this post.

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
– Henry VIII’s Lay Subsidy 1523-1524

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

From Henry VIII’s Psalter, Jean Mallard (1540), Shelfmark: Royal 2 A xvi, f.3,
See all of Henry VIII’s Psalter using the British Library’s innovative
Turning the Pages™ technology.  © British Library Board.

Inventory of Henry VIII’s assets on his death, (September 1547)
Shelfmark: Harley Ms. 1419 A, f.206, © British Library Board.

Henry VIII, Charles V and Pope Leo X, (Italy, 1520s)Shelfmark: Add. 35254 S, © British Library Board.   Henry VIII holding a roll, the Papal Bull which gave him the title “Defender of the Faith”). He is supported by a Cardinal (Wolsey?) who is holding an open book (possibly Henry’s treate against Luther, “Defence of the Seven Sacraments”). Henry is disputing with Charles V before Pope Leo X. In front of Charles V is a dragon transfixed by a spear-head.

Notes
All digital images from the British Library’s Online Images archive appear by courtesy of the British Library Board and may not be reproduced (© British Library Board).

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Thank you for reading this post.

You may also be interested in the following
– Henry VIII
– Harley Manuscripts
– Henry VIII Manuscripts
– Henry VIII Psalter

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

Genealogist Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers runs a great website for genealogists. He suggests ‘Daily Blogging Prompts’ to help inspire bloggers to write genealogical posts.  In the spirit of one of his Prompts, Shopping Saturday, my blog today is about shopping (or rather tradesmen) in Tudor Great Dunmow.

The list of names for the 1525-6 collection for the church steeple contains some of the trades of Tudor Great Dunmow. It should be noted that the list is not a census in the modern terms of a census, and so the trade of a person was only recorded if two people had the same name. Thus the three John Parkers had their trade recorded alongside their name distinguish them from each other – John Parker the tiler, John Parker the wheeler and John Parker the fletcher. Trade (and occupations) within the parish, as documented within the 1525-6 collection for the steeple include
– church clerk
– dyer
– wheeler
– fletcher
– parish priest
– vicar
– retired vicar
– haberdasher
– butcher
– glover
(Obviously, this is not a complete list of the occupations of Tudor Great Dunmow, just a list where someone’s occupation had been recorded).

A ‘fletcher’ was an arrow-maker – a trade that evidently made John Parker, the Fletcher, a very wealthy man. His contribution to the church steeple was 26s 8d – a substantial amount of money. In further parish collections he contributed 18s 10d for the Great Bell, and 13s 4d for the church organ. In the 1523-4 Lay Subsidy returns for Great Dunmow, John Parker was assessed as having goods to the value of £105 13s 4d which resulted in him paying tax of 105s 8d. The Lay Subsidy returns show that he was the wealthiest man in the parish. However, despite his great wealth, in the list for the church steeple collection, John Parker, the fletcher, appears below the clergy and two lords of manors. Wealth wasn’t everything in this Tudor parish: the status of the elite meant more than the wealth and piety of tradesmen.

Being a fletcher in Tudor England was a very important trade. Throughout his reign, Henry VIII was, at various times, at war with either France or Scotland. Both Henry, and his father Henry VII, passed legislation to enforce that the men of Tudor England were reasonably proficient at the longbow. In 1515 Henry VIII imposed a Statue that all men, except ‘spiritual’ men, Justices and Barons, should practice shooting long bows. Bows and arrows had to be bought for all male children between the ages of 7 and 17. Henry also dictated that every city and town should have butts so that the men could practice their shooting their long bows at them.

Luttrell Psalter, Psalm 79; Archers practicing at the butts (1325-35) (1)

Throughout the Henrician churchwarden accounts there are numerous receipts for sums of money which was received for ‘shooting’ i.e. shooting longbows and arrows at a target. These ‘shooting’ games held in Great Dunmow and surrounding villages will be discussed in detail in future blog posts.  For John Parker, fletcher of Great Dunmow, business must have been flourishing and profitably. We can only guess at how John Parker sold his arrows to his customers. Did they come ‘shopping’ to his workshop, and if they did, in the spirit of Geneabloggers’ Daily Prompt, was it on a Saturday?

March of the Archers, Moorfields, City of London 1530 (2)

Medieval Archers (3)

Footnotes
(1)  Luttrell Psalter, Psalm 79 (East Anglia, England, 1325-35), shelfmark Add. 42130,  f.147v, © British Library Board.
(2) Walter Thornbury, ‘Threadneedle Street’, Old and New London: Volume 1 (1878), pp.531-544. (Consulted online at british-history.ac.uk, date accessed January 2012).
(3) Weapons and war machinery, in Pseudo-Aristotle’s ‘About the Secrets of Secrets’ (1326-7), shelfmark: Additional MS 47680, f.43v, © British Library Board.

All digital images from the British Library’s Online Images archive appear by courtesy of the British Library Board and may not be reproduced (© British Library Board).

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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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom.  If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading this post.

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
– Tudor trades and occupations
– Building a medieval church steeple

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

Within the 1525-6 collection for Great Dunmow’s church steeple, two vicars and two parish priests are recorded at the start of the list. The two priests can be detected from the suffix ‘Sur’ [Sir] alongside their names. ‘Sir’ was a courtesy title given to medieval parish priests and should not be confused with the title ‘Sir’ as given to knights. This use of ‘Sir’ for the parish priest was widespread throughout pre-Reformation England and only died out during the Elizabethan era with the end of Catholicism as the recognised church within England. Thus, the Tudor parish priest of Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath was ‘Sir’ Christopher Trychay (pronounced ‘Tricky’).

According to the 1525-6 returns for the church steeple, the two parish priests in Great Dunmow were
– Sur John mylton
– Sur Wyllyem Wree

Other priests are named in the other parish collections as recorded in the church warden accounts between 1526 and 1539:
– Sir Gutfraye [Godfrey]
– Sir George
– Sir Nicholas
– Sir Thomas

Within the churchwarden accounts, both the vicar ‘mayster vycar thatt now ys’ (William Walton) and the retired vicar (Robert Sturton) ‘sumtyme vycar of a late tyme’ have the suffix of an ‘M’. This is not a contraction of ‘Mister’ but is an abbreviation of ‘Master’ i.e. they both had a Master of Arts degree from a university – most likely either Cambridge or Oxford. My own research, as will be explored in later blogs, concluded that they were probably Cambridge men. So the two principal clerics in Great Dunmow were university educated men and Master of Arts.

A previous historian of Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts, W.A. Mepham who was active in the 1930s and 1940s, mis-understood this ‘M’ suffix. He highlighted what he termed a ‘curiosity’ from the corporation records of the Essex town of Maldon(1):

‘11 July 1540, Relick Sunday, Received of Mr. Vykar, by hym gathered
at Moche Dunmowe vjs [6s]’(2)

The puzzle over why the vicar of Great Dunmow gave money to the town of Maldon can only be solved when it is understood that this was not ‘Mister Vicar’ but rather ‘Master Vicar’ and that Master William Walton was the vicar of both Great Dunmow and All Saints, Maldon. Unfortunately, Mepham had totally missed that the vicar of Great Dunmow was William Walton, a pluralist vicar (i.e. he held the living of more than one parish). Walton had gathered money from his flock in one of his parishes (Great Dunmow) and gave this money to the borough of his other parish (Maldon).   The reason behind this will be explored in a later blog.

All four clergy documented in the 1525-6 collection appear as witnesses to various Great Dunmowian wills from the 1520s and 1530s.  These clergy, ever present at death-beds, included Robert Sturton,  who had resigned by this time, but was still administering to his flock in his retirement. So, in 1526, Great Dunmow had four religious clerics active in the parish to administer to their flock of at least 165 houses – approximately just under 1,000 parishioners.

 A Priest Administering the Last Rites(3).

 A priest giving communion to a sick man,
with an acolyte, carrying a bell and a candle(4).

Footnotes
1) Maldon Borough Chamberlains’ Accounts (1494-1564), Essex Records Office, D/B 3/3/236.
2) W.A. Mepham, ‘Villages Plays at Dunmow, Essex, in the sixteenth century’, Notes and Queries, 166, (May 1934), 345-348 and 362-366.
3) Richard Rolle, A Priest Administering The Last Rites in ‘The Crafte Of Deying’ (1450), shelfmark: Additional MS 10596, item number: f.1v, ©British Library Board.
4) Priest giving communion to a sick man, image taken from Omne Bonum. (London, 1360-1375), shelfmark: Royal 6 E. VII f.70, ©British Library Board.

Useful background books
Peter Heath, The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the Reformation, (London, 1969).

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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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom.  If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading this post.

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
– Pre-Reformation English church clergy

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

Between 2009 and 2011, whilst I was researching for my master’s dissertation, on a daily basis I read the Tudor churchwarden accounts from my digital images. This reading of each page over and over again resulted in me hearing the voices of people long dead.   No, not literally! But in my head I started to understand and ‘hear’ the dialect of the Tudor scribe who had written up a particular set of accounts. The scribes wrote their entries exactly as spoken. Thus the nearby city of Cambridge became ‘Camrege’, the parishioner, Thomas Ingram, became ‘Thomas Iggrom’, ‘our’ became ‘owr’, and ‘off’ (meaning ‘from’) became ‘of’.

Eamon Duffy, in his seminal book, The Voices of Morebath, indicated that many Tudor churchwardens read their parish’s accounts out aloud before the congregation gathered within the church. This would have been in a manner similar to a modern-day public meeting and was to ratify the parish’s accounts. Therefore, the language used in many accounts imitates the behaviour of the spoken word.(1)   So, it is likely that the list of all the contributors to the church steeple was read out aloud before the entire parish after the church service on the Dedication Day (feast-day) of St Mary the Virgin 1526.  (I wonder what the parishioners thought of those who had contributed ‘nichell’ and those whose amount had not been properly recorded!)

If you are interested in the accents and dialect that our ancestors had, go back through my blog and read all the names of the contributors to the church steeple. Read each name out aloud exactly is it was written by the Tudor scribe (ignore my translations).

For anyone familiar with the accents of England, the scribes of Great Dunmow appear to have had a most definite soft Suffolk ‘burr’!   Hard ‘n’s and hard ‘d’s seemed to have almost totally disappeared from each scribe’s dialect.  Hard ‘t’s have become soft ‘d’s – Robard instead of Robert.  From now on, if you can’t understand the Tudor text when you read my transcriptions, read the entries out aloud and you will be taken into Tudor Essex and will have the key for unlocking Great Dunmow’s past.

Sadly, today’s Great Dunmowians no longer have the soft Suffolk accent but instead sound more like the characters from EastEnders or The Only Way is Essex (TOWIE).

Miniature of a scribe with a knife,
shears, a pen-case, and an inkpot (2)

Footnotes
(1) Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath, p23-4.
(2) Detail of a miniature of a scribe with a knife, shears, a pen-case, and an inkpot, shelfmark: Royal 19 C XI f. 27v, © British Library Board.

For more information about medieval scribes, check out these sites
Medieval writing
Late Medieval Scribes

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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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom.  If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading this post.

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.

The entries detailing the collection for Great Dunmow’s church steeple are a fascinating window into the lives of our ancestors of 500 years ago.  This is not only because of the names that are listed but also because the collection gives an amazing opportunity to analyse the administration of a small parish in late medieval/early Tudor England.   The next few blog posts will unpick some of that administration and show how innovative, thorough and diligent our ancestors of 500 years ago were in the management their finances.

The collection was written into the accounts on ‘ye dedicacion day the yere of owre lorde god mcccccxxvi’ [Dedication day, 1526].  The parish church was (is) dedicated to St Mary the Virgin who had several saints days in Catholic Tudor England, so this date could have been one of several days including her two major feasts; the Annunciation (25 March) and the Assumption (15 August).   However, this was not the date that the collection took place but just the date the contributions were formally written into the account-book.  The collection must have taken place over a period of time previous to this – perhaps as long as a year.  So the true dating of the collection for the parish steeple was 1525-6.  It may seem pedantic to clarify the date to such a fine level.  However, Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts have been examined by many historians over the last hundred years or so and many of these historians have misdated events that happened in the town.  Thus some fascinating connections between Great Dunmow and events that occurred elsewhere in Tudor England and Scotland have been totally ignored or misinterpreted. (These events will be discussed in future blogs.)

The church clerk (named in the list as Robert Sturton), and the churchwardens took great care in documenting each contribution to the church steeple.  Maybe at the end of each church service, the clerk set up a table near the church’s exit and collected each parishioners contribution and recorded their contribution in rough within notebooks or on scraps of paper as the parishioners left the church.   Those rough scraps would later have been collated into the list that we see today.  This list, as entered into the account-book has been written in strict social-hierarchy order of the parishioners: named first are parish clergy, followed by the elite, and then everyone else (as shown in the table below).

Postcards displayed on this page in the personal collection of The Narrator.

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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If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom.  If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading this post.

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
– Pre-Reformation English church clergy
– Building a medieval church steeple

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

St Mary the Virgin church, Great Dunmow: The tower was built in the fifteenth century.(2)

The opening pages of Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts contains a list of all the house-holders within the parish (165 names) along with the amount each house-holder contributed towards a collection for the parish church’s steeple.   It cannot be coincidence that this, the first of seven parish collections which took place in the 1520s and 1530s, occurred approximately two years after the arrival of a new vicar, William Walton.  Walton (vicar 1523-40) was a pluralist who from 1524 also held the larger Essex parish of All Saints, Maldon.  It is likely Walton, newly appointed to his second living, decided his parishes should have impressive and admired religious artefacts.  Thus the commissioning of the beautiful leather churchwardens’ account-book, to record monies raised for a steeple, was a visible method that demonstrated his authority and piety.  It can also be conjectured the laity and clergy cast an envious eye on the magnificent steeple of nearby Thaxted’s church before deciding they too wanted the same.  Moreover, Walton’s Maldon parish had an outstanding medieval steeple (as shown in the picture below).  It is likely Great Dunmow, under the guidance of Walton, wanted to assert its piety, wealth and importance by building a new steeple and then record its benefactors within the handsome churchwarden account-book under its dedication to ‘Jhesus Maria’.  This was a visible method of demonstrating the parish of Great Dunmow’s piety and expressing their community pride.  However, the donations were not enough to build a substantial steeple and it has been suggested the work undertaken was merely for repairs, new windows and a wooden spire.(1)  The photo above (taken by The Narrator in 2011) demonstrates that indeed the church does not have a steeple, and if a wooden spire was built, it has not survived.

All Saints church, Maldon.(3): The hexagonal steeple was built in the thirteenth century.(4)

St John the Baptist church, Thaxted.(5): The tower was built in the late fifteenth century.(6) This 1776 engraving shows Thaxted’s original spire. The spire was rebuilt after it was hit by lightning in 1814, and remodelled on the original.(7)

Footnotes
1)W. T. Scott, Antiquities of an Essex Parish: Or Pages from the History of Great Dunmow (1873), 21.
2) James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner, Essex, The Buildings Of England (2007), 401.
3) Maldon Archaeological and Historical Group, Recent Projects (2010), MAHG Recent Projects.
4) Bettley and Pevsner, Essex, 579.
5) Robert Goadby, Cooper Engraving of Thaxted Church (1776).
6) Bettley and Pevsner, Essex, 764.
7) Nikolaus Pevsner, Essex, (2^nd edn.,1965), 380.

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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom.  If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below. Or like my page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/KateJCole/

Thank you for reading this post.

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
– Pre-Reformation English church clergy
– Building a medieval church steeple

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

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

Commentary
Line 2: Nichell – Latin for ‘none’ ie this household did not contribute any money towards the collection.

Notes
Text in square [brackets] are The Narrator’s transcriptions.  Line numbers are merely to assist the reader find their place on the digital image.

The early-modern spellings of the inhabitants of Great Dunmow have been transcribed into modern English so that family historians and other researchers can pick up these names via internet search engines.  Please leave a comment if you can improve the modern-day spelling or transcribe any of my question marks.  The other hundred or so names written within this list will appear over the next few days, followed by an analysis of the names on the list and the reason for the church collection.

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.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom.  If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading this post.

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
– Building a medieval church steeple

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

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

Commentary
Line 17 & 29: Father = ‘old man’ ie a local aged man

Line 8: Mother = ‘old woman’ ie local aged woman, probably a widow as this is a list of heads of households.

Line 2: Church End, the area of the parish where the parish church is located (nearly one mile from the main town)

Line 19: Bigods Quarter – an area in the north of the parish.  Bigods was one of Great Dunmow’s medieval manors.

Line 33: Bishopswood Quarter – an area to the south of the parish.

Notes
Text in square [brackets] are The Narrator’s transcriptions.  Line numbers are merely to assist the reader find their place on the digital image.

The early-modern spellings of the inhabitants of Great Dunmow have been transcribed into modern English so that genealogists, family historians and other researchers can pick up these names via internet search engines.  Please leave a comment if you can improve the modern-day spelling.  The other hundred or so names written within this list will appear over the next few days, followed by an analysis of the names on the list and the reason for the church collection.

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.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom.  If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading this post.

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
– Building a medieval church steeple

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.