I am delighted to be able to tell you that fellow local historian of Great Dunmow, Austin Reeve, has just published his book Remembrance: The World War One Memorials of Great Dunmow.

Austin has meticulously researched some of the men commemorated on the war memorials in and around Great Dunmow and recounted some of their tragic stories.  He has also gathered together a unique collection of photographs and memorabilia (such as postcards, medals, certificates and – most extraordinary – a battlefield will) from the families of the town’s fallen and combined it all into a compelling book.

If you are interested in the local history of Great Dunmow (a small town in North West Essex), or indeed, the fallen of the First World War, I would highly recommend this book to you.

I must admit to getting goose-bumps when I saw the front cover as I know my granddad and my grandmother were likely to have been in the crowd, and also possibly my great-grandparents – the two Kemp brothers commemorated on the memorial being my granddad’s cousins (my great-grandmother’s nephews).

If you wish to purchase this book for the highly reasonable price of £5 (inc p&p to the UK), please email Austin Reeve directly at ashble55[at}yahoo.com.  Austin’s book is proving to be very popular and he is currently just about to go into his third print run.  He asked me to tell potential buyers that he wouldn’t be able send out books immediately until his next print run is confirmed.

Please do get in contact with him, if you wish to purchase.

Lest we forget

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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
– Remembrance Sunday 2014: Great Dunmow’s Roll of Honour
– Reflections on the Tower of London’s Poppies
– The war to end all wars
– Christmas Greetings from the Trenches
– Great Dunmow’s Military Funeral: A follow-up
– War and Remembrance: It’s a long way to Tipperary
– War and Remembrance: Great Dunmow’s Emergency Committee
– War and Remembrance: Great Dunmow’s Military Funeral 1914
– Postcard home from the front – The Camera never lies
– Postcards from the Front – from your loving son
– Memorial Tablet – I died in hell
– Memorial Tablet – I died of starvation
– Memorial Tablet – I died of wounds
– The Willett family of Great Dunmow
– Postcard from the Front – To my dear wife and sonny
– War and Remembrance – The Making of a War Memorial
– Great Dunmow’s Roll of Honour
– For the Fallen
– Aftermath

© Essex Voices Past 2014.

Remember the men of this place who died for freedom and honour A.D. 1914-1918

Percy Charles Archer: died 15 July 1917
John Lewis Pasteur Armstrong: died 22 June 1916
Frederick Attridge: died 9 October 1916
Frank William Bacon: died 4 December 1918
Amos Alfred Barrick: died 31 December 1916
George Henry Barrick: died 11 June 1918
Frederick John Bartley: died 26 March 1917
George Henry Beard: died 7 September 1916
Albert Brand: died 8 October 1915
Frederick J Burchell: died unknown
Alfred Richard Burton: died 5 April 1917
Harold Vincent Burton: died 22 December 1916
Thomas F Burton: died 29 November 1918
Edwyn (Edwin) Bush: died 24 April 1917
David William Button: died 8 December 1918
William Henry Carter: died 24 July 1918
Alfred Thomas Caton: died 13 April 1918
Frederick Chapman: died 6 December 1918
Frederick George Clarke: died 30 July 1916
Alfred Coates: died 21 May 1918
Stanley Richard Coates: died 2 September 1918
George Cock: died 4 January 1918
William Coppin: died unknown
Sydney Cox: died 13 August 1918
Albert Crow: died 1 November 1914
William Frederick Crow: died 5 October 1917
Benjamin Thomas De Voil: died 1 July 1916
Ernest Cecil Freshwater: died 8 May 1915
Arthur Edwin Greenleaf: died 3 August 1916
George Frederick Gunn: died 18 July 1917
Arthur Gypps: died 16 October 1917
Harry Hines Halls: died 26 March 1917
Ernest Edward Harris: died 8 August 1918
Frank Harris: died 21 November 1916
Leonard Melsome Hasler: died 21 September 1917
Stanley Howland: died 21 October 1916
Thomas David Jarvis: died 16 July 1916
Gordon Parnall Kemp: died 26 September 1917
Harold James Nelson Kemp: died 28 May 1916
George Henry Ledgerton: died 2 November 1917
Frederick James Watson Lines: died 12 December 1915
Frank J Lodge: died 26 March 1917
Arthur Thomas Lorkin: died 26 March 1917
Hayden Lyle: died 6 November 1918
Llewellyn Malcomson: died 5 October 1916
Leonard Frederick Mason: died 12 September 1918
Ralph Milbank: died 23 March 1918
George Nelson: died 3 November 1917
George William Perry: died 17 November 1916
Francis Louis Pitts: died 15 June 1915
Bertram James Porter: died 2 September 1918
George Rawlings: died unknown
Arthur T Reed: died unknown
Harry Charles Edwin Robinson: died 28 March 1918
Henry Alfred Robson: died 28 April 1917
Frederick Isaac Rootkin: died 22 August 1915
Frank Edward Sams: died 1 November 1914
William George Saunders: died 26 March 1918
William Sayer(s): died 29 March 1915
Harold Mackenzie Scarfe: died 3 May 1917
Charles Edwin Sewell: died 24 March 1915
Frank Sewell: died 18 May 1917
Sidney Sharp: died 1 October 1918
Walter Sharp: died 9 April 1915
Arthur Smith: died unknown
Sidney J Smith,unknown
Victor Spurgeon: died 8 October 1918
Percy A Stock: died 9 December 1917
Arthur George Stokes: died 26 October 1914
Ernest Archibald Stokes: died 19 February 1919
Edward Charles Stone: died 23 August 1918
William Matthew Stovold: died 6 November 1914
Montague Beavan Tench: died 10 August 1916
Harry Turbard: died 12 November 1915
Joseph A Turner: died unknwon
John S Wackrill: died 12 October 1918
William Waite: died 11 July 1917
John Joseph Walsh: died 19 November 1917
Edward Warner: died 21 March 1918
Hubert John Welch: died 29 September 1918
Arthur Albert Willett: died 25 February 1916
Frank Willett: died 23 October 1916
James Wilson: died 10 September 1915
A Edgar Yeldham: died 10 November 1917
Arthur William Young: died 21 November 1915

Not on the town’s war memorial but commemorated
on the Congregational Church’s memorial
Walter Vosper Jakins: died 10 July 1917

Buried in St Mary’s Churchyard but not
commemorated on the town’s War Memorial
Charles Henry Parham: died 30 June 1918
C Spiers: died 7 November 1918

They whom this tablet commemorates, at the call of King and country left all that was
dear to them to endure hardships and face dangers. And then passed out of the
sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice giving up their lives
that others might life in freedom.
Let those who come after see to it that their names be not forgotten
(War Memorial in St Mary’s Church, Dunmow)

100 years on from the start of the Great War, the moat of the ancient Tower of London contains a sea of blood-red poppies – some of which represent the dead of this small north Essex parish.

Lest we forget

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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
– Reflections on the Tower of London’s Poppies
– The war to end all wars
– Christmas Greetings from the Trenches
– Great Dunmow’s Military Funeral: A follow-up
– War and Remembrance: It’s a long way to Tipperary
– War and Remembrance: Great Dunmow’s Emergency Committee
– War and Remembrance: Great Dunmow’s Military Funeral 1914
– Postcard home from the front – The Camera never lies
– Postcards from the Front – from your loving son
– Memorial Tablet – I died in hell
– Memorial Tablet – I died of starvation
– Memorial Tablet – I died of wounds
– The Willett family of Great Dunmow
– Postcard from the Front – To my dear wife and sonny
– War and Remembrance – The Making of a War Memorial
– Great Dunmow’s Roll of Honour
– For the Fallen
– Aftermath

© Essex Voices Past 2014.

I have written before on my blog about the aerial photography taken of the town and environments of Great Dunmow by a small aircraft flying high in the skies of East Anglia in 1928.  During the same flight, the small airplane also flew over the tiny village of Little Dunmow and captured for posterity one of the area’s main employers, the factory of the Anglo Scottish Sugar Beet factory. This part of Essex and East Anglia has a long history of the refining of sugar beet and it is incredible to see an aerial photograph of a factory in it’s inter-war heyday.

Anglo-Scottish Sugar Beet Factory, Little Dunmow, 1928. This photo is from English Heritage’s Britain from Above project. Click the photo to be taken directly to a zoomable image of this photo from their website.

During a recent rummage around an antiques shop in Lavenham, Suffolk (a small beautiful town which also has a history of small sugar beet factories), I found the 1976 book Essex and Sugar by the local historian Frank Lewis. It is to him I turn to now regarding the Anglo-Scottish Sugar Beet Factory in Little Dunmow, Essex. In his book, Mr Lewis refers to the factory as being in Felsted, the neighbouring village to Little Dunmow.  As the two villages are so near each other, the location of the factory changes in documents/books between Little Dunmow and Felsted.  The factory also appears to have changed name over time and at points in its history was known as the “Anglo-Scottish Sugar Beet Factory” or the “British Sugar Corporation Sugar Beet Factory”.

Our main Essex interest in beet sugar lies now with the Felsted factory of the British Sugar Corporation. With Mr. and Mrs. Chartres, I spent a full and interesting day at the village, now for over three decades [i.e. by the time of the book’s publication in 1976] associated with sugar production, but famed more for its ancient school [Felsted School]. In the morning at Princes Farm Mr. Gordon Crawford showed us the “Forecaster” at work, the most advanced beet-harvesting machine, and far from the days of hand-digging of obstinate roots is the operation of this mechanical giant, also an advance on machine harvesters needing an accompanying lorry in which to deposit the uplifted beet. The Forecaster is an Essex development, and is constructed as a compact unit, carrying the extricated beets to a receiving space at the top of the machine, detaching earth or mud en route, at the same time slicing off the tops of the next row of beets preparatory to lifting. Only when full did the harvester go off to deposit its contents in a lorry, thus one man only was needed for the actual harvesting; in the early days, several laboured at an arduous and unpopular toil. The crops, destined for the nearby factory are grown from seed supplied by the buyers to ensure uniformity and quality. Mr. Crawford harvested his first sugar beet with a pair of horses in 1930, and he is a member of the family formerly of Suttons Farm, Hornchurch, the site of the R.A.F. Station.

The Forecaster in 1976

…

During the day we had observed the lofty buildings of the British Sugar Corporation establishment with its plume of white smoke, and later its dominance in the scene when lit up at night. One writer has remarked that with a favouring wind the factory smell carries for miles around, and a former woman member of the office staff recalled her strongest memory was of the ‘sickly sweet smell you couldn’t get away from’, but though beet processing has its characteristic odour, as does a refinery, our party were not conscious of strong odours, either in or out of the buildings, though I questioned a girl on this point, knowing from experience how responsive young women are to sugar smells, pleasant or unpleasant. The warmth of the building was felt by her, not to a too trouble-some extent. On commencing this conducted tour, we were made aware of the fact that this was a factory in the country when we were informed that the visiting party in which we were included would be the last for a long period, as a precaution against the foot and mouth epidemic appearing in that region.

The factory tour showed the cleansed beets pass to machines slicing them into strips, a glimpse of the revolving drums in which the strips yielded their sweetness into water (diffusion), the resulting thin syrup of ‘juice’ charged with lime and carbonic acid gas which combined to form a precipitate trapping impurities in the juice (Carbonatation) the extraction by filtering of this precipitate, a second carbonatation and filtering, the juice treated with sulphur dioxide to a neutral reaction, the concentration of juice containing 15% sugar to syrup containing 65% sugar under vacuum in huge boilers or vessels called evaporators, another close filtering, no char, and the rest of the process as described in a refinery with vacuum pans, centrifugal machines, final drying.

…

This huge Essex successor to the ventures of Marriage and Duncan treats annually over 300,000 tons of beets from 23,000 acres spread over Essex and surrounding counties from Cambridge to Kent, and each day can process 2,500 tons of beet to yield 350 tons of white sugar, 250 tons of dried pulp or pulp nuts for cattle food and 130 tons of molasses for industrial and other uses. (An acre of beet will yield from 38 to 40 cwt of sugar against 8 to 12 tons per acre from cane; and the sugar content of the beet is 15% to 16%, the cane about 13%.) The personal of 325 men and women operate the process continuously day and night for approximately 120 days, each season or campaign from about late September to the end of January; and this seasonal labour force is recruited from the surrounding locality and from Ireland. Delivery of beets to the factory is by road, though in the past some cargoes in sailing boats travelled from Walton to a suitable point for Felsted. 

…

Mrs B. McArdle, who mentioned the ‘sickly smell’ has provided me with some other early memories of the Felsted factory where in her early 20s she was employed as a compotometer operator in the 1927 and 1928 campaigns. In those days no refining plant existed and she recalls the piles of brown sugar to be sent to Tate and Lyle. The small office had a canteen attached for the clerical and similar staff of 12; she can remember that wellington boots were worn for the necessary journeys to muddy and wet floors where the beet was washed and writes of having to work out prices for the farmers according to sugar content of beets, and allocating molasses on the amount of beet sent in. She lodged at a farm near the Flitch of Bacon [a pub still in existence today] in Little Dunmow, where only one shop existed, and without public transport the journey to and from the factory was a fair walk, unless a lucky car picked her up. Apparently there was little time for amusements as she worked ‘fairly late’, also Saturday and Sunday mornings when the beets were coming in; but a hard tennis court was outside the office, there were whist drives and dances in surrounding villages, a cinema at Braintree where you had to book your seat and the music was supplied by one tinny piano, and the manager sprung a party at his home for the staff. She was young and evidently found her situation not uncongenial, for both in her letters to me and to the Essex Countryside [a monthly local interest magazine] she writes of a ‘happy time of long ago’ and ‘pleasant memories of the happy time I spent at Felsted’.

Essex and Sugar by Frank Lewis, 1976 pp107-p111

Sugar Beet Factory in 1976

Sugar-beet harvesting in 1948.  Click on the image above to be taken to British Pathe’s website to see a short film of Felsted’s sugar-beet harvesting in 1948.

In February 1999, the Sugar Beet factory was demolished and now in its place is a large housing development.  The estate was originally known as Oakwood Park, but in very recent years has now been renamed to Flitch Green – a throw-back to the days of the Dunmow Flitch, when it was originally held in Little 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 Dunmow Flitch Bacon Factory
– Interwar Great Dunmow from the air
– The Dunmow Flitch – Bringing home the bacon
– The 2012 Dunmow Flitch
– Berbice House School, Great Dunmow
– War and Remembrance: Great Dunmow’s Military Funeral 1914
– Great Dunmow’s 1914 Military Funeral: A followup
– The Willett family of Great Dunmow

© Essex Voices Past 2014.

Dunmow* is known throughout the world and history as being the English town where the curious but ancient custom of the Dunmow Flitch takes place.  This ancient ceremony is when couples come into the town, and, in front of a judge and jury, try to persuade a court of law that for a year and a day they haven’t wished themselves unwed.  If they win the court case, and persuade the judge and jury of their love for each other, then they win a ‘flitch of bacon’ (a large side of cured pig).  The court is quasi-formal with a proper judge, jury and barristers.  However, all is not as it seems as the legal proceedings are very light-hearted with  one barrister defending the Pig, and the other for the couple.  Any couple who wins the Flitch is said to be ‘bringing home the bacon’ and is carried aloft on the ancient Dunmow Flitch chair by the town’s ‘yeomans’ in a parade through the streets of Great Dunmow.

The last Dunmow Flitch – in 2012 –
carrying the flitch of bacon through the town
before the Flitch Trials

This ancient custom was mentioned in medieval literature by both Geoffrey Chaucer  and William Langland towards the end of the 14th century.  Chaucer’s Canterbury’s Tales – The Wife of Bath’s Tale states

The bacon was nat fet for hem, I trowe, 
That som men han in Essex at Dunmowe.

William Langland’s Piers Plowman states

Though they go
to Dunmow,
they never fetch
the Flitch.

In the 20th century, the Dunmow Flitch – the side of cured bacon – was provided by the Dunmow Flitch Bacon Factory.  This was a large factory and employer of many people within Great Dunmow and surrounding areas until its closure in the 1980s.  Sometime in the 1920s or the 1930s, the owners of the Dunmow Flitch Bacon Factory commissioned Willett’s of Great Dunmow to take photos of the workforce in action at the factory and thus create a unique set of postcards of the Dunmow Flitch Bacon Factory.  As one of my readers pointed out on my post about Great Dunmow’s Berbice House school – why were these postcards produced? Who were they aimed at?  I cannot answer these questions, but I can show you the postcards of the Dunmow Flitch Bacon Factory and flitches of bacon produced in the factory.

Dunmow Flitch of Bacon Factory (Exterior)

Dunmow Bacon Factory  – Pig Killing

Dunmow Bacon Factory – The Hanging Hall I. The child at the left of the picture looks to be about 12-14 years of age.

Dunmow Bacon Factory – Cleaving the pigs

Dunmow Bacon Factory – The Employees.  Is the person 3rd from the left a woman?

Dunmow Bacon Factory – The Hanging Hall II

Dunmow Bacon Factory – The Manager and Irish Employees. It is interesting that the Irish Employees are in a photograph separate from the other employees.

These postcards are incredible pieces of 20th century social history showing us the employees and the inside of the factory.  In addition to the inside of the factory, there are also in existence external photographs.  In 1928, an aeroplane flying the skies of Essex and Suffolk took the photo below of Great Dunmow.  The large building in the centre is Hasler’s Corn and Seed mill, and the low-lowing buildings to the right-edge of the photo is the Dunmow Flitch Bacon Factory.

Hasler and Company Corn and Seed Merchants, Great Dunmow. This photo is from English Heritage’s Britain from Above project. Click the photo to be taken directly to a zoomable image of this photo from their website.

Close-up of the Dunmow Flitch Bacon Factory from the air in 1928.
To the left of the factory are the railway sidings running to
the factory from Dunmow’s station.

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*I use the word “Dunmow” with great care, because the medieval Dunmow Flitch originated in the tiny village of Little Dunmow and its pre-Reformation priory.  But in modern times – certainly since the Flitch’s revival in the nineteenth century – the ceremony has moved to the neighbouring larger town/village of Great Dunmow some three miles away from its original location.  There are two Dunmows – Great and Little.  In the Tudor records, Great Dunmow  was called “Much(e) Dunmow” and Little Dunmow was called “Dunmow Parva”. During my research on Great Dunmow, I have read many many accounts about the medieval/Tudor Dunmow from many commentators and even from well-known historians who fail to realise that there are two Dunmows. It annoys me intensely when I read “facts” about Tudor Great Dunmow, but the events actually took place in Little Dunmow (and vice versa).

An artist’s impression of Dunmow Priory in 1820 (now part of Little Dunmow’s church) – the original home of the Dunmow Flitch.

Update February 2014: That well-known internet auction site currently has for sale the card “The Hanging Hall II”.  On that card, there is a postmark: 1 July 1910.  So my estimate (above) that these cards were from the 1920s is totally incorrect!  The set dates must date from sometime around 1910.

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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
– Interwar Great Dunmow from the air
– The Dunmow Flitch – Bringing home the bacon
– The 2012 Dunmow Flitch
– Berbice House School, Great Dunmow
– War and Remembrance: Great Dunmow’s Military Funeral 1914
– Great Dunmow’s 1914 Military Funeral: A followup
– The Willett family of Great Dunmow

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

During my research of Great Dunmow’s Tudor past, I have come across quite a few mysteries and conundrums.  One such mystery is that of Griffith Ap Rice, a Welshman who appears in Great Dunmow’s records in the 1520s and 1530s.  I have a lot of circumstantial evidence as to who he ‘might’ be.  But no hard concrete evidence as to who he really was. More to the point, exactly what was a lone Welshman doing in the relatively sleepy backwaters of a small East Anglian town nearly 40 years after the Battle of Bosworth brought many soldiers out of their native Welsh hamlets and villages and into England? Like a medieval ghost, our Welshman flits through the records of Great Dunmow every now and again; and only the mere tantalising hint that he existed can be glimpsed in the records.

So here he is, my unfinished research on Griffith ap Rice, the only Welshman in Tudor Great Dunmow. To help with reading my post, I have Anglicised his name in my commentary but have kept to the many various original spellings for when he appears in the records.

Who was Griffith ap Rice?
He was a stray in Great Dunmow’s Tudor records during the reign of Henry VIII and can be counted as one of the “middling sort” of the town – one of the wealthy elite of the town, but not quite in the upper echelons of the town’s society – and the only person in Tudor Great Dunmow with a definite Welsh name.

Documents/Records where Griffith ap Rice is recorded?

1523 – Great Dunmow’s lay subsidy returns.  Grephyd Ap Rice was assessed for goods to the value of 20 shillings and paid tax of 12d. He was the joint 37th wealthiest man (out of 139 households) listed in the lay subsidy returns. My post on Henry VIII’s Lay Subsidy describes this levy – a tax to raise money for the king’s wars with France.

1525-6 – Great Dunmow’s Churchwardens’ accounts : Essex Record Office D/P 11/5/1 folio 2r.  Collection for the Church Steeple – Grefyn Apryce paid 2s (average was 4d per household).  Griffith ap Rice’s entry is the 16th entry in the list of the whole parish.  The list was written-up into the churchwardens’ account book in strict social-hierarchical order – thus the parish’s clergy were first on the list, followed by the elite, then the middling sort.  The person who contributed the most to the collection, Thomas Savage, who gave £3 6s 8d, is listed at number 24 – lower down than Griffith ap Rice.  ap Rice’s entry is amongst the entries for the middling sort.

1527-9 – Great Dunmow’s Churchwardens’ accounts – collection for the Church Bell:
Grefythe Apryce paid 14d (average 2d or 4d per household).  In this complete list of all the heads of houses in Great Dunmow, Griffith ap Rice is listed in 15th place – amongst all the middling sort of the town.  In this list, a complete list of the entire town, heads-of houses from 19th place onwards are listed alongside the location of their dwelling-place in the town.  So, for example, John Swetynge is listed as living in Windmill Street, and Nycolas Aylett as living in the High Street.  However, the first 18 heads-of-houses listed do not have their location in the town named.  It is as if these people are so important that the church did not need to make a note of these people’s houses.  Griffith ap Rice’s name is within this portion of the list and so his precise location in the town is unidentified but the lack of location gives firm testimony that he was an important person in the Tudor town of Great Dunmow.

1529-30 – Great Dunmow’s Churchwardens’ accounts – collection for Church Organs:
Gryffeth Appryce paid 12d (average 2d or 4d per household).  In this collection, he is detailed 8th in the list of contributors towards the church’s organs – immediately under the town’s elite and amongst the town’s middling sort.

He did not contribute towards the church’s collection for the ‘New Guild’ (1532-3) – but was almost certainly dead by time of this collection.

1532-3: Great Dunmow’s Churchwardens’ accounts : Essex Record Office D/P 11/5/1 folio 17v.  Gift of money from Griffythe Appryce £3 6s 8d.  ‘Ite[m] resayvyd of John Honwyke [churchwarden] & John ffost[er] off gefte of Greffythe Appryce iijli vjs viijd’ This sum of money was probably a bequest left to the church by Griffith ap Rice in his will. In the nearly ten years between his entry in the 1523 Lay Subsidy returns, and his entry in the churchwardens’ accounts for his bequest at the time of his death, his wealth increased from owning goods to the value of 20 shillings (or £1) to leaving in his will a sum of money over three times that amount.

Apart from the instances noted above, Griffith ap Rice does not appear anywhere else in Great Dunmow’s surviving records for the period.  Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts start in 1525 and numerous local people are named in these accounts – names of churchwardens, the elite of the town, the church’s lay-officials, local builders, the church’s tenant farmers, and labourers appear throughout the accounts – but he is not mentioned anywhere else in the accounts, nor, despite his wealth, was he named as being any of the town’s Lords of Misrule.   Is this unwitting testimony that as a Welshman, even though he was fairly wealthy and one of the middling-sort of the town, he was not allowed to take on one of the more prestigious roles within this Tudor parish?  Or am I reading too much into him being totally missing from the rest of the churchwardens’ accounts?

Do we know Griffith ap Rice’s vital details?
Birth: No later than 1502 (because of entry in 1523 in Lay Subsidy). I do not know the minimum age for contributing towards this tax levied by Henry VIII so am assuming that 21 was the minimum age.  The subsidy was imposed on the heads of households – so by 1523, Griffith ap Rice was the head of his house.  This puts his date of birth more likely to be in the mid to late 1400s.

Marriage: Do not know if he was married or if he had children.  Great Dunmow’s marriage records start in 1558 and baptisms start in 1538 – so theses records are too late to discover details about him or a possible wife and children. However, it would seem that ap Rice either was unmarried at the time of his death, or died a childless widower. His financial bequest to the parish church in Great Dunmow was physically handed over to the church by the churchwardens, John Honwyke & John ffost[er], not by a member of his family. Elsewhere in the churchwardens’ account, monetary bequests of money are stated to have been handed over by the dead man’s widow or kinsfolk to the church. Also, the name “ap Rice” disappears totally from the churchwardens’ accounts: the name is not detailed in any further parish collections, nor in any other context within the accounts.

Death: 1532/1533.  We know this because of the gift of money entry in Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts and the fact that he is not named in the later church collections raised by Great Dunmow on the entire parish.  Great Dunmow’s burial records start in 1558.

What was Griffith ap Rice’s wealth?
Wealth: Paid more than the average donation to each of Great Dunmow’s church collections levied on the entire parish – he is listed with the three (nearly) yearly collections to buy items for the church and is consistently listed in the section containing the “middling-sort” of the town. In the town’s Lay Subsidy returns, he was the equal 37th wealthiest man in Great Dunmow (out of 139 recorded households – not including the clergy and paupers).  So in terms of wealth, he was in the top 20-25% of the town.

Will: No surviving 1530s ap Rhys will in Essex Record Office, London Metropolitan Archives, or National Archive.  ERO has 10 surviving wills from Great Dunmow for the period 1520s to 1546.  LMA is missing ALL wills for the London Consistory Court from 1521 to approx 1539.  The entire registers are missing and have been probably since the Reformation – see my post on Reformation Wills and Religious Bequests.  Great Dunmow was in the archdeaconry of Middlesex but many nearby towns and villages (for example, Maldon and Chelmsford) were in the archdeaconry of Essex.  If a testator had land in two archdeaconries, then the will would be proved in London Consistory Court.  Lay subsidy and parish collections show that ap Rice was of the middling-sort (top 20-25% in terms of wealth), so very possible that he had land not just Great Dunmow but possibly in two archdeaconries.  So very likely that his will has not survived as it would be in the missing registers.

That’s it!  That’s all I have on my Tudor conundrum –
Griffith Ap Rice, the only Welshman in the village.  Who was he?

Can a link to another person help?
With the little detail I have on Griffith ap Rice, could researching another person help me work out who he was?  To do this, I looked at two Tudor people, Lord Stourton, 7th Baron Stourton and Agnes ap Rice.

Kinsfolk/Linkage to Agnes Rice (aka ap Rhys)
William Stourton, 7th Baron Stourton (c1505-1548) of Wiltshire had an ‘association’ (as a Victorian book on the Stourtons so prudishly put it) with Agnes Rice (born circa 1522, died 1574) – who was also known as Agnes ap Rhys.  Lord Stourton bigamously married her whilst his first wife was still alive. On his death in 1548, Lord Stourton left his considerable fortune to Agnes and their child, but his will was ultimately overturned because of the bigamous nature of their marriage, and the small fact that his legal heir was his eldest son, Charles, by his first (legitimate) marriage.

Although the Baron Stourtons’ family home was in Wiltshire, they owned the ecclesiastical living of Great Easton in Essex (about 3 miles from Great Dunmow) and their names are present in numerous records in both Great Dunmow and Great Easton from the 1300s onwards. (See Lord Mowbray, Segrave and Stourton, C., The history of the noble house of Stourton (1899)).  This 1899 book states that the evidence seemed to point that the Lord Stourtons did not live in Great Easton/Great Dunmow.  However, my research shows that the National Archive holds a couple of records proving that, even if the 7th Baron was not living in Great Easton, he had considerable interests in the village and legally defended those interests in the courts of law of the time when the Abbott at nearby Tilty Abbey tried to infringe on his interests at the church in Great Easton.

There is no hard evidence that William, Lord Stourton, nor Agnes ap Rice lived in (or visited) Great Easton but it is a great coincidence that in the town just 3 miles away was a Griffith ap Rice, who, although not the wealthiest of townsfolk, was amongst the middling-sort.  Great Easton had very strong Tudor connections to Great Dunmow – the latter seeing itself as the “mother” town to all the nearby villages – especially when celebrating the Catholic ritual year such as May Day and the community feast-day of Corpus Christi when people from outlying villages came into Great Dunmow to make merry and celebrate.  Moreover, there is a further link between Great Easton and Great Dunmow and the elite of the two villages.  The vicar of Great Dunmow between the 1490s and 1520s was a Robert Sturton.  The town of Great Dunmow was stuffed full of elite Sturtons (including two other men named ‘Robert Sturton’), and, although only one Sturton will has survived from the 1550s, I can loosely connect this vicar to all these Great Dunmow Sturtons (ie they ‘have’ to be related to each other but, because he was an unmarried cleric without children, I’m not sure exactly how).  So this was a long established elite family with various members living in some of the medieval manors of Great Dunmow and one of their own, a Cambridge University educated man, was the town’s vicar.  Therefore, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence linking the Lord Stourtons of Wiltshire to Great Dunmow’s Sturtons and that these Essex Sturtons were a lesser branch of the Wiltshire Stourtons – probably connected in some-way during the 1300s or 1400s. My post on the vicars of Great Dunmow gives more details about the Sturton/Stourton connection.

So why are the links between Great Easton/Great Dunmow and the Sturtons/Stourtons so important when trying to discover who Great Dunmow’s only Welshman in the village was? To answer this, we have to look at the genealogy of the mistress (or bigamous wife) of William Stourton, 7th Baron Stourton, Agnes ap Rice.

Agnes ap Rice’s parents were Rhys Ap Griffith (1508–1531) and Catherine Howard (daughter of the Duke of Norfolk)  – making Agnes the first cousin of Henry VIII’s queens, Catherine Howard and Anne Boleyn. Her father, Rhys ap Griffith (executed by Henry VIII for treason in 1531) was the son of Gruffydd ap Rhys (c1478–1521). Gruffydd ap Rhys was a prominent knight firstly at the court of prince Arthur and then at the court of Henry VIII and he was at the Field of the Cloth of Gold with Henry VIII.

His father was Rhys ap Thomas (1449–1525) who was a fierce supporter of Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.  There is a still current rumour that it was this Rhys ap Thomas who cut down and killed Richard III on the battlefield with a pole-axe (boo, hiss!) When Henry Tudor became King Henry VII, Rhys ap Thomas, the slayer of the anointed king of England, became the most powerful man in south Wales.

If you’ve managed to follow these Welsh family with their patronymic names, well done!  I got very lost working out who was who – so I had to draw up a very rough and ready family tree.

Was Agnes ap Rice a kinswoman of Great Dunmow’s Griffith ap Rice?

The possible links between Great Dunmow’s Griffith ap Rice and Agnes ap Rice are tantalising.  With the Welsh patronymic naming system, was our Griffith ap Rice’s father Rhys ap Griffith?  But if his father was thus named, then our Griffith wasn’t Agnes’ brother as Agnes’ brother, Griffith ap Rice, is well documented in the records.  So if they are related, the links would be further back in time then the 1520s.

I’m so near, but so far from working out who Great Dunmow’s only Welshman in the town really was.

Had our Griffith ap Rice (or his father) come to
East Anglia after the Battle of Bosworth with Henry Tudor’s Welsh army
alongside their kinsman Rhys ap Thomas

(Or am I, as a historian, getting way too much carried away with myself!)

This is still very much work in progress, and maybe one day I’ll discover who Tudor Great Dunmow’s Welshman was.

Postscript
Agnes ap Rice, in her own right was a very interesting character.  After the death of Lord Stourton, 7th Baron Stourton, she went on to marry Sir Edward Baynton.  There is a very interesting account on the Bayntun History website of the death in 1564 of Agnes’ and Edward’s only living son, William, allegedly by witchcraft .

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You may also be interested in the following
– Reformation Wills and Religious Bequests
– Transcripts of Great Dunmow’s Churchwardens’ accounts – 1526-1621
– Medieval Catholic Ritual Year
– Tudor local history
– Building a medieval church steeple
– Henry VIII’s Lay Subsidy 1523-1524
– Images of Medieval Funerals
– The dialect of Medieval Essex

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

In 1928, an aeroplane flying above the skies of East Anglia, took these incredible aerial photographs of Great Dunmow

St Mary’s Church, Churchend, Great Dunmow.  The churchyard is in the top left of the photo; the vicarage is opposite the entrance to the church.  Bottom right is the cluster of houses in Church Street.

The junction of Market Street and High Street, Great Dunmow.  The building at the top of the photograph (facing towards the camera) is the Starr Inn.  The Tudor Town Hall (dating from the 16th Century) is the large building (with 3 windows facing the camera) on the right just after the junction .

Hasler and Company Corn and Seed Merchants, Great Dunmow.  The tracks of the Bishops Stortford to Braintree branch line visible at the front of Hasler’s building. Chelmsford Road is the line of houses running horizontally across the photograph – with the fields & trees of Dunmow Park immediately behind the road.  Great Dunmow Park is the far edge of the site of the original medieval manor of Great Dunmow.  This manor was dower land given to Katherine of Aragon by Henry VIII when he married her in 1509.

Hasler and Company Corn and Seed Merchants, Great Dunmow.  The railway line was closed to passengers in 1952, and freight in 1971.  Great Dunmow’s bypass (the B1256) now follows the route of the railway line and the Flitch Way Country Park runs alongside.

All photos on this page appear by kind courtesy of English Heritage’s Britain from Above project. Click each photo to be taken directly to the Britain from Above website.

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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
(These posts have early 20th Century real photograph postcards of the areas covered in this page’s aerial photographs)
– Queen Elizabeth’s Visit to Great Dunmow
– Postcard home from the front
– Medieval Wills and Religious Bequests
– The Willet Family of Great Dunmow
– Tudor Administration within Great Dunmow

When fellow local historian, Austin Reeve, read my post about Great Dunmow’s Through all the changing seasons and the comments about the local boarding school, Berbice House, it prompted him to get in touch with me and send me 6 postcard images of the school. Adding his images to my own collection means that today I can bring you 9 photographs of Berbice House boarding school from the 1950s.

This boarding school was located on Great Dunmow’s Causeway at the place where today’s roundabout to Godfrey Way is located. The school building was demolished during the 1970s or the 1980s – and now, in its place is Godfrey Way (named after one of the heads of Berbice House School), a large winding road to the top of a hill containing hundreds of houses. There is turning off Godfrey Way, called ‘Berbice Lane’ – named after the school. Prior to the school being located in the building shown in the first photograph, during the 1940s, it was located in the Clock House.

Then

The Clockhouse – sometime during the early part of the 19th century.

Now

The Clockhouse – Summer 2013 – from the same location as the Edwardian postcard.

The top of the church steeple – visible from the highest point on Godfrey Way. The sun-scorched yellow fields of Stebbing in the distance.

Godfrey Way – looking back down the hill to where Berbice House once stood.

Godfrey Way and the fields of Stebbing in the distance.

Do you have any photos of your time at Berbice House School?
If so, please do contact me

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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

– Great Dunmow – Through all the changing seasons
– 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
– Medieval Essex dialect
– Henry VIII’s Lay Subsidy 1523-1524
– The Tudor witches of Essex
– Building a medieval church steeple
– Great Dunmow’s Medieval manors

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

Transcription of Tudor Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts (1527-9)

Commentary
Line 4: Whoever Thomas Wete was, he either hadn’t paid his rent for a long time or rented a large piece of church land/house. £3 6s 8d was a very large sum of money for the time equating to very roughly three or four months wages for a labourer.

Line 5 & 17: This must have been money collected for events held on May Day.  The fact that there are two entries on this page for May Day gives unwitting testimony that the churchwardens hadn’t been as diligent as they should perhaps have been.  They appear to have been  ‘catching up’ on their yearly accounts long after the event.

Line 6 & 18:  This is money collected during the festivities held on Corpus Christi day.  See my post on Great Dunmow’s Corpus Christi events.  Again, as per the commentary above on May Day, these two entries for two years show that the churchwardens were writing up the church’s accounts years after the actual event.

Line 7: John Foster had been playing the lord of misrule – possibly during the Christmas celebrations in the parish.

Line 8: Mister Joyner’s gift of £5 was a large sum of money for an unspecified reason.  However, at the bottom of this folio and on subsequent folios, the churchwardens’ document each house-holder in the parish and their individual contribution towards purchases a new church bell.  Mister Joyner is not documented within the list so it is entirely plausible that this entry is his  individual contribution to the collection.  Perhaps he didn’t give money at the time the collection took place, or maybe he didn’t live in the town. Bearing in mind that the entries on this page were written up some years after the events they were recording (as shown by the May Day and Corpus Christi feast entries), it is therefore unsurprising that Mr Joyner’s substantial gift appears separate to the list of the town.

Line 9: I would love to be able to read the missing word in this line! Can anyone help?  Were the ladies washing torches! This line probably relates to torches that were used during the funerals of the great and good of Dunmow.  The elite were buried within the church and torches were kept lit around their bodies on the night before their funeral.  But I’m not sure where the ‘ladys’ come into this – unless the word is ‘lads’?

Line 11: This gift from Mawde Bemysche is probably the result of her bequeathing money to the church in her (now lost) will.

Line 15 & 16: This is money from the old vicar, Robert Sturton’s, now missing will.  William Sturton was possibly Vicar Sturton’s nephew or other relation.  The Sturton family were a very large and important elite family within Tudor Great Dunmow.

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 Catholic Ritual Year
– Unwitting testimony
– Great Dunmow’s Corpus Christi events
– Christmas in a Tudor town
– Reformation wills and bequests
– The Sturton family of Great Dunmow and Great Easton

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

Today’s post is about the contents of Tudor wills and how they can be used to inform the modern-day reader about religion during the turbulent reigns of Henry VIII and his three children.  The text below formed one of the chapters within my dissertation Religion and Society in Great Dunmow, Essex, c.1520 to c.1560 from my Cambridge University’s Masters of Studies in Local and Regional history awarded to me in January 2012. The text here is in its entirety from my dissertation so reads more as an academic essay rather than a blog post.  For this blog post, I have included headings (to break up the text) and images, my original was both heading-less and image-less.  If you are wondering why my introduction and conclusion are so short, remember that this is just one chapter in a very lengthy 100 page dissertation and I had a very strict word count to adhere to.  The dissertation’s overall introduction and conclusion was far more comprehensive.  I have also had to re-arrange the two tables on this post from their original positions within my dissertations – so Table 2 now comes before Table 1. The research of wills I undertook for my dissertation is very different to my normal genealogical research. For genealogical research, I am normally sifting through the personal bequests so to find evidence of family relationships. But for my dissertation, I had to totally ignore family relationships and go for the ‘other bequests’.

St Mary the Virgin, the Parish church of Great Dunmow, circa 1910-20.

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Introduction
Historians have studied the wills of many English parishes to gain understanding about the impact of the Reformation.  Eamon Duffy examined the wills of the Yorkshire village of Otley(1)  and Caroline Litzenberger, in her analysis of the Reformation Gloucestershire, studied the wills of approximately 8,000 testators(2).   Therefore, the analysis of wills is a significant methodology employed by historians to provide evidence for the acceptance (or non-acceptance) of religious changes during the Reformation.

Methodology
The methodology used for this article has been to locate, transcribe and analyse all wills for Great Dunmow for the period 1517 to 1565: 40 wills in total.(3)    Litzenberger divided her Gloucestershire wills into elite and non-elite wills, but this division is not possible for Great Dunmow’s much smaller sample.  Table 1 and Table 2 displays the results from this analysis and this article examines those results.

Great Dunmow’s 1523-4 Lay Subsidy assessments listed 139 tax-payers and 1525-6 church steeple collection listed 165 donations.  From these figures, it can be deduced many wills have not survived.  Those that have are

• thirty-seven wills proved in the archdeacons’ court of the Commissary of the Bishop of London (originals held by the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford);
• two proved in the London Consistory Court (official copies held by the London Metropolitan Archive in London); and,
• one proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (official copy held by The National Archives in Kew).

The discovery of only two wills proved in the London Consistory Court is particularly disappointing.  However, this has been caused because the registers from 1521 to 1539 are missing.(5)  Moreover, the first surviving Great Dunmow will that was proved in this court, is from 1559.  This demonstrates there are other inconsistencies within the surviving registers from the 1540s and 1550s with the wills for Great Dunmow almost totally missing.  Great Dunmow was in the archdeaconry of Middlesex but many nearby towns and villages (for example, Maldon and Chelmsford) were in the archdeaconry of Essex.  Any testator with land in only one archdeaconry had their will proved in that archdeacon’s court (and therefore, now their original wills are held by Essex Record Office).  However, testators with land in more than one archdeaconry had theirs proved in the London Consistory Court (i.e. the official copies of their wills will be held by the London Metropolitan Archives in London).  Therefore, many wills for the years 1520 to 1559 are missing for parishioners who were the ‘middling sort’ or elite (i.e. they owned land/property in both Great Dunmow and neighbouring villages or towns).  The missing registers almost exactly span the offices of two incumbents of the bishopric of London: Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop 1522 to 1530(6) ; and John Stokesley, bishop 1530 to 1539(7).   It could be speculated that the missing volumes were lost not long after these dates, perhaps handed over to the Elizabethan martyrologist, John Foxe, for his examination of early martyrs within the diocese of London.(8)

There is evidence within Great Dunmow’s Henrician churchwardens’ accounts which can also be used for will analysis.  These accounts document six gifts of money from named parishioners to the church, but the wills from these people have not survived.  However, as these donations were likely to have originated from wills, they have been included within this analysis.  For example, vicar Robert Sturton’s missing will would undoubtedly contain a bequest to the church, as there is a 1528 churchwardens’ accounts entry ‘of[f] wylyem sturton of ye gyfte of M[aster] Sturton sumtyme vycar of thys chyrche…liijs iiijd [53s 4d]’(9).   The churchwardens were diligent in recording bequests and gifts to the church in their accounts.  This can be detected from John Skylton’s will of 1533 in which he left a bequest of 13s 4d to the church.  This exact amount duly appeared in that year’s churchwardens’ accounts, given to the churchwardens by his wife.(10)   Therefore, there is credibility to include gifts recorded within the churchwardens’ accounts within this analysis of wills.

Above, Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts (folio 9r) showing the gift from the former vicar. ‘Ite[m] Rec[ieved] of wylyem sturton of ye gyfe of M[aster] Sturton sumtyme vycar of thys chyrche liijs iiijd (53s 4d)‘.

Will of John Skylton of Great Dunmow (January 1533), Essex Record Office D/ABW 8/28.  The Tudor scribe who wrote the will (above) couldn’t write in straight lines! The request to the church starts on the third line… ‘hie awter [high altar – this is the end of Skylton’s tithe bequest] of the church – xxd [20d] also to the rep[er]ations [repairs] of the church of Du[n]mowe xiijs iiijd [13s 4d] also to the church of powles iiijd [4d – this is the bequest to St Paul’s cathedral in London]‘.

And here’s the entry in Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts showing that his widow had duly handed over the bequest to the church ‘Ite[m] Rc [Received] of Jone [Joan] Skylton of the gyfte of John Skylton – xiijs iiijd [13s 4d]’.

Analysis of Soul Bequests
[The table below for soul bequests was originally on an A3 sheet of paper.  I have had to shrink it so that it fits this blog post.  Click it to display it within a new window and then use your zoom facility to increase the size of the text.  The wills for Elizabeth’s reign are only up until 1565 as this is the point my dissertation ended.]

Soul bequests within preambles of wills have been used by historians of Reformation England to ascertain religious changes.  A Catholic preamble would include words similar to ‘almyghtie god & to our blyssed lady saynt mary the virgyn & to all the holy company of heaven’(11).   An evangelical or Protestant might include words such as ‘Almighty God and his only Son our Lord Jesus Christ, by whose previous death and passion I hope only to be saved’(12).   Somewhere in between would be other types of soul bequests.  Litzenberger divided her wills into three major categories: ‘Traditional’ [i.e. Catholic], ‘Ambiguous’, and ‘Protestant’, and within these categories, wills were further sub-divided.  Litzenberger’s categories have been used as a framework for the analysis of soul bequests for Great Dunmow’s wills; as demonstrated in Table 2.  Categorising soul bequests have to be handled with caution.  Wills were only ambiguous if there were no other bequests indicating that they were traditional.  Some wills contain either a final stipulation to the executors to provide for the wealth/health of the testator’s soul, or the bequest for ‘tithes forgotten’.  The existence of either clause, it can be argued, was the sign of a traditional will, as discussed below.  Moreover, ambiguity might have been a defence employed by traditionalists against an increasingly hostile environment.(13)    This strategy of ambiguity by traditionalists might account for the eight ambiguous Edwardian wills made during evangelical vicar Geoffrey Crisp’s time.  Furthermore, a Protestant was unlikely to use an ambiguous soul bequest and would almost certainly proclaim their religion in unmistakable language.(14)   Table 2 demonstrates there were no unquestionably Protestant soul bequests within the surviving wills of Great Dunmow.

Analysis of other bequests (not family)

There are other limitations when using wills for the analysis of religious belief.  Duffy comments ‘wills tell us more about the external constraints on testators than they do about shifting private belief.’(15)   External constraints could be the religious policy imposed by the monarch, for example, the Edwardian denouncement of purgatory, trentals and masses.(16)   There were other constraints, including the scribe who wrote the will and the testator’s witnesses.  Margaret Spufford, in her work on sixteenth and seventeenth century wills was the first historian to observe a will could be written by a scribe.(17)   She stated

A man lying on his death bed must have been much in the hands of the scribe writing his will.  He must have been asked specific questions about his temporal bequests, but unless he had strong religious convictions, the clause bequeathing the soul may well have reflected the opinion of the scribe or the formulary book the latter was using, rather than those of the testator. (18)

Some wills indisputably demonstrate the testator had not been influenced by a scribe or witness.  Great Dunmow’s Marian will of Thomas Baker contains a traditional soul bequest along with bequests for tithes forgotten; and, even more revealingly, an obit and a solemnly sang dirge.

A priest providing Extreme Unction (the Last Rites) to a man in bed, from Pontifical; Tabula (England, 1st quarter of the 15th century), British Library’s shelfmark Lansdowne 451 f.234.

There is evidence of a Henrician scribe who was active in two 1520s wills from Great Dunmow, and he possibly used a book containing standard formulaic clauses.  This type of precedent book was not unusual during the Tudor period.(19)   The will of widow Clemens Bowyer, dated February 1526, almost exactly mimics the earlier will of John Wakrell (October 1525).  Both wills have the same soul bequests (Catholic, as would be expected from this period); along with bequests to the high altar, to Saint John’s gild, to the church’ torches, and to the ‘moder holy chyrch of polye [St Paul’s] in London’.  Both wills have a bequest for an ‘honest prest to synge a tryntall [trental] for my sol & all crysten solls yn ye p[ar]rsche churche’.  However this is crossed out in Bowyer’s will.  It is possible the scribe copied the wording from his precedent book, and Bowyer made him cross it out.  Trentals were a series of 30 Masses performed within one year, with three Masses on each of the ten major feast-days of Christ and Mary; the priest also had to perform other liturgical duties throughout the year.(20)   This was a substantial undertaking, as demonstrated by Wakrell’s bequest of 10s for his trental.  Maybe Bowyer did not have sufficient funds, and so made the scribe delete the bequest.  This scribe was probably the parish priest, Sir William Wree who was witness to these and one other will.  Also witness to Wakrell’s will was former vicar, Robert Sturton, described as ‘p[ar]rsche prest’.  Sturton had resigned as vicar in 1523, so he was still performing some of his previous clerical duties.

Will of John Wakrell of Great Dunmow (October 1525), Essex Record Office D/ABW 39/7. The trental bequest reads (from the second word): ‘It[e]m I be q[u]esthe [bequeath] unto an honest prest to synge a tryntall [trental] for my sol [soul] & all crysten [Christian] solls [souls] yn ye p[ar]iche chyrch \of D[u]nmowe a fore sayde xs [10s]’.

Will of Clemens Boywer [Bowyer] of Great Dunmow (February 1526), Essex Record Office D/ABW 3/8. The first crossing out is the trental: ‘It[e]m I bequethe to han [sic] honest prest to sy [n] ge [sing] a try[n]tall [trental] yn ye p[ar]rshe of myche [Much i.e. ‘Great’] D[u]nmow aforsad’.  (Were pre-Reformation priests anything other than ‘honest’?)

Old St Paul’s Cathedral – the ‘moder[mother] holy chyrch of polye [Paul] in London’ mentioned by 7 testators of Tudor Great Dunmow. St Paul’s was the mother church of the Diocese of London, and this diocese included the parish of Great Dunmow. The cathedral was the largest church in England and had the tallest spire in England. The spire was struck by lightning in 1561 and not replaced. St Paul’s was destroyed in 1666 – a casualty of the Great Fire of London. Sir Christopher Wren designed the new cathedral – one of the iconic images of today’s London.

Witnesses to Wills
The vicars and priests of the parish were witnesses to many wills. However, the decline in priests as witnesses demonstrates fewer priests were within the parish after Henry VIII’s break with Rome.  Sir Edmund Clarke was witness to three traditional wills in the 1530s.  Evangelical vicar Crisp, was witness to two Edwardian wills in 1551 and 1553; both with ambiguous soul bequests to ‘almighty god, my maker and redeemer’.  Catholic vicar John Bird was witness to one traditional Marian will.  The vicars must have witnessed many wills and surely influenced some testators by imposing their own beliefs on their dying parishioners.  However, Elizabethan vicar, Richard Rogers, a former Protestant exile who spent Mary’s reign in Frankfurt,(21) did not enforce his beliefs on the wills of his parishioners.  Seven Elizabethan wills were written during his tenure, although he was not witness to any of them.  None of these wills were unequivocally and unmistakably Protestant: indeed the 1563 will of Gilbert Cooke had a traditional soul bequest including ‘the blesyd company of heavne’.

 Priest administering last rites
from The Dunois Hours (Paris, c. 1440 – c. 1450 (after 1436))
British Library’s shelfmark Yates Thompson 3 f.211 .

The limitations of using wills to determine religious belief
Wills do not always accurately reflect the complete representation of a testator’s religious beliefs.  In an investigation of late Medieval wills for All Saints, Bristol, the author of the study found the wills of some of the elite did not include bequests to the parish church.(22)    However, the parish’s Church Books demonstrate that during these testators’s lifetime, substantial gifts, such as gilding of the Lady altar, and the refurbishment of the rood loft, had been made to the church.  Furthermore, a wife often made donations after her husband’s death but during her lifetime, on behalf of them both.  This generosity would most likely not have appeared in either the husband’s or his widow’s wills.  This discrepancy between a testator’s will and the gifts made during their lifetime is also true within Great Dunmow.  For example, Miles Docleye’s Edwardian will of 1551 has an ambiguous soul bequest and only bequests to his family; there are no religious bequests.  It would appear his will was ambiguous but conforming to Edward’s Protestantism.  However, Docleye, who must have been at least in his 50s when he died, had given money to each of the parish’s seven collections for traditional religious items during the 1520s and 1530s.  It is impossible to determine if his beliefs had changed or if his will was conforming to Edwardian policy. It was probably the latter.  This one example demonstrates that the analysis of wills for religious beliefs has its limitations.  The laity of Great Dunmow had been investing in traditional religious artefacts throughout the 1520s and 1530s, but these donations are not apparent from their wills.

The importance of ‘tithes negligently forgotten’
The bequest to the high altar for ‘tithes negligently forgotten’ clause was an important part of pre-Reformation wills; and all ten Henrician wills have this bequest.  One of the duties of the parish priest was to pronounce the Great Excommunication or General Sentence to his parishioners four times a year.(23)   This proclaimed transgressions against the church; and debts (including unpaid tithes) were such transgressions.  The bequest ensured the testator cleared his or her debt to the church and so their soul could benefit from prayers.  Furthermore, unpaid debts meant the testator’s soul would be longer in purgatory, so this was an important bequest for traditional religion.  Henry VIII banned the reading of the General Sentence in parish churches because it was vehemently against those who appropriated Church property or contested the authority of the Church(24), and, of course,  Henry VIII had unquestionable contested the Pope’s authority in England.

This prohibition, along with the Edwardian theological retreat from the concept of purgatory,(25)  was perhaps the reason why none of Great Dunmow’s Edwardian wills have the tithes to the high altar bequest.  Moreover, the Great Dunmow’s high altar had been destroyed on the orders of Edward VI.(26)   However, four Marian wills do have the clause; of these, three also have a traditional soul bequest.  These four wills were written in 1557 and 1558; so it is possible this bequest was not included in earlier Marian wills because Great Dunmow’s high altar was still to be rebuilt after Catholic Mary came to the throne of England.  In Elizabeth’s reign, Elizabeth Dygbey’s will written in December 1558 (i.e. one month after Mary’s death), also had a traditional soul bequest, along with the tithes clause.  This was before the Marian high altar was taken down sometime between 1559 and 1561.(27)   In 1564, John Byckner used a variation of the tithes bequest for a will which was otherwise ambiguous; the high altar had again been destroyed, so he left his money for ‘tithes forgotten’  to the ‘curate’.  Byckner’s will is unusual because, apart from Dygbey’s will written shortly after Mary’s death, no other early Elizabethan will contains the tithes bequest.  If this John Byckner, a wax chandler, was the same John Byckner, who lived in the High Street in 1525-6,(28)  he would have been at least in his 60s and so perhaps had some of the old, traditional habits.  This confirms the remark, ‘Wills were made usually by the old, who were generally less open to new ideas than the young or middle aged.’(29)

A priest excommunicating a group of people by raising a candle
from Omne Bonum (Ebrietas-Humanus) (London, England, c.1360-c.1375)
British Library’s shelfmark Royal 6 E VII f.75v.

Conclusion
The analysis within this articles has demonstrated that bequests within wills alone cannot substantially confirm the religious faith of a testator.  However, it is clear that collectively the wills of Great Dunmow do demonstrate significant changes over time.  Bequests to the church almost totally stopped after Henry VIII’s reign, in all probability because his attack on traditional religious artefacts made parishioners cautious.  Not a single Edwardian testator made an unequivocally Protestant will, even with evangelical vicar Crisp present.  Mary’s reign demonstrated a shift back towards traditional religion, with bequests to the high altar, and obits.  The early years of Elizabeth’s reign demonstrate that wills had once again started to move away from traditional bequests.  However, external factors could influence a testator’s will, for example, religious changes enforced by the monarch, local vicars, scribes and witnesses, and the age of the testator.  Therefore wills cannot provide the complete account of the parishioners of Great Dunmow’s changing beliefs.  Moreover, Henrician and Marian anti-Catholic events did take place in the parish with the 1546 re-enactment of the murder of Cardinal Beaton, and Thomas Bowyer’s disobedience to the re-established Catholic Church.  Therefore, wills can provide only a limited narrative regarding the changes experienced by this parish during the Reformation.

Details of a funeral
from Book of Hours, Use of Sarum
(England, S. E. (Suffolk, Bury St Edmunds?), 2nd or 3rd quarter of the 15th century)
British Library’s shelfmark Arundel 302 f.77v.

Church End, Great Dunmow, postcard circa 1910-20.

Footnotes
(1) Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (2^nd edn., 2005), pp.515-21.
(2) Caroline Litzenberger, The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire, 1540-1580 (Cambridge, 1997), pp.168-178.
(3) (n/a to this blog)
(4) This includes six monetary gifts, as documented in Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, but a corresponding will has not survived.
(5) London Metropolitan Archives, Diocese of London Consistory Court Wills index (2011), (At the time of writing my dissertation, these indexes were in pdf file format and online at http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk.  However they do not appear to be there at present.)
(6) D. Newcombe, ‘Tunstal, Cuthbert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online Edition, May 2011), http://www.oxforddnb.com
(7) Andrew Chibi, ‘Stokesley, John’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online Edition, May 2011), http://www.oxforddnb.com
(8) Personal correspondence, Richard Rex, Cambridge, March 2011.
(9) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fo.7r.
(10) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fol.18v.
(11)  Will of Katherine Smythe (1558), Essex Record Office, D/ABW/33/335.
(12) Margaret Spufford, ‘The Scribes of Villagers’ Wills in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and their influence’, Local Population Studies (1972), pp.28-43 at 29.
(13) Correspondence, Rex.
(14) Correspondence, Rex.
(15) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, p.508.
(16) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, p.505.
(17) Margaret Spufford, Scribes of Villagers’ Wills, pp.28-43.
(18) Margaret Spufford, Scribes of Villagers’ Wills, p30.
(19) Correspondence, Rex.
(20) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, pp.370-371.
(21) Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles (Cambridge, 1966), p.273.
(22) Clive Burgess, ‘”By Quick and by Dead”: Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval Bristol’, The English Historical Review, 102 (October 1987), pp.837-858 at p.842.
(23) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, pp.356-7.
(24) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, pp.356-7.
(25) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, pp.504.
(26) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fo.40v.
(27) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fo.44v.
(28) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fo.2v.
(29) Robert Whiting, Local Responses to the English Reformation (Basingstoke, 1998), p.130.
(30) The first two columns of Table 2 have been taken from Caroline Litzenberger, The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire, 1540-1580 p.172

Notes
Great Dunmow’s original churchwarden accounts (1526-1621) are 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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Detail of a medieval plough (folio 77v) from The Macclesfield Psalter,
probably produced at Gorleston, East Anglia circa 1330
Gold & tempera on vellum, 17cm x 10.8cm,
© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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Today, the first Monday after the Christian feast of Epiphany, was traditionally the day of another money-raising celebration in the lives and times of our Catholic Medieval ancestors: Plough Monday.  My posts, Christmas in a Tudor Town, told the story of how the people of the North Essex parish of Great Dunmow celebrated Christmas with a Lord of Misrule who ‘reigned’ throughout the Twelve Days of Christmas, collecting money for the church.  In 1538 (or 1539), Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts show that the Lord of Misrule possibly also collected money for the yearly Plough-Feast.

1538 (or 1539) In primo receyvyd of the lord of mysserowell & for the plowgh ffest – xls [40s] (folio 29r).  This entry is ambiguous – did the Christmas Lord of Misrule also collect money for the plough-feast?  Or have the churchwardens simply lumped the two events together in one entry?  As the two events have not been recorded as separate sums of money, it is more likely the former.

In Medieval times, many rural towns and villages of England celebrated the first Monday after the Feast of Epiphany as the start of the agricultural year.  Ancient customs and religious practices were used to protect and safeguard the plough which was so vital for the coming year’s crops. ‘Plough lights’ were kept burning in the parish church and feasts were held to celebrate the plough.  Sums of money received from Great Dunmow’s plough-feast activities were recorded throughout the churchwardens’ accounts for the reign of Henry VIII.   As the accounts were only the financial records of the church, once again the accounts do not explicitly state what occurred during the Plough-Feast.  However, it is likely that the young men of the town dragged a highly decorated plough from door to door of the richest households in the parish collecting money. If people did not hand-over money, then a trick would have been played on the unlucky house-holder (an event similar to today’s Halloween Trick or Treating). This trick was likely to have involved the young men ploughing a furrow across the offender’s land. So that the house-holders could not identify them, the lads probably had their faces blackened with soot. The young lads were often accompanied by someone playing the Fool – in Great Dunmow’s case, this person could possibly have been the Christmas Lord of Misrule (I have made this assumption because of the way the entries in the accounts have been written.)

The accounts do not state what happened to the money raised but possibly the money was used to maintain a special candle (the plough-light) to constantly burn within the church. Henry VIII banned the practice of plough-lights in 1538 – along with other traditional lights maintained in churches.  However Great Dunmow’s plough-feast still continued for a further few years -the final plough-feast occurring during one of the years between 1539 and 1541.

Item Reseyvyd of the lorde of mysrowle at thys Crystmas last wt [with] the plowfest mony at the town declard to the chyrche & all thyngs dyschargyd – xxxviijs jd [38s 1d] (folio 30v, sometime between 1539-1541)

The forty shillings (£2) raised in 1538 and the final 38s 1d  were considerable amounts of money in Tudor times.  According to Great Dunmow’s accounts paid out to various labourers for a day’s work during the 1520s, the average daily pay was 4d.  Therefore, the collection for the Lord of Misrule and the Plough Feast was roughly equivalent to 114 to 120 days labour.

It is interesting to note that the above two entries on this blog post have nameless Lords of Misrule.  Other ‘Lords’ were explicitly named in the churchwardens’ accounts – see my post here.  I think that this is unwitting testimony that only the Lords who were amongst the middling sort or the elite of Great Dunmow’s social hierarchy were named.  Those Lords of the common sorts were too unimportant and lowly to have their names recorded in the magnificent churchwardens’ accounts!

It is possible that the modern day practice of Molly Dancing derives from the ancient practices of plough-Monday.   My post The Catholic Ritual Year has photographs my son took of Molly Dancers in Maldon on New Year’s Day 2012.

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Notes
Great Dunmow’s original churchwarden accounts (1526-1621) are 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.

All digital images from the Macclesfield Psalter appear by courtesy of The Fitzwilliam Museum and may not be reproduced (© The Fitzwilliam Museum).

You may also be interested in the following
– Images from the British Library’s online images from the early modern period
– Images from the medieval illuminated manuscripts
– The Macclesfield Psalter
– Christmas in a Tudor town
– Medieval Christmas Stories
– Medieval Catholic Ritual Year