Transcription of Tudor Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts (1525-6)
The top part of this folio has been transcribed here Collection for the church steeple (part 5).

Commentary
There are many interesting pages within the churchwardens’ account-book and this page has to rank high up the list of intriguing pages – not for what it says, but more what it doesn’t say!

The entries on this page are directly after the parish collection for the church steeple so cover the period 1525-6. Therefore, they are the first receipts for money received by Great Dunmow’s church recorded in the leather account-book. Churchwarden accounts or church records for Great Dunmow prior to 1525-6 have not survived. However, several entries on this folio indicate that the previous churchwardens had also kept careful accounts prior to 1525-6.

Churchwardens – Line 24/25:
fo.2r recorded that the current (ie 1525-6) churchwardens were Thomas Savage, John Skylton, John Nyghtyngale and John Clerke. This folio records that before them, the previous churchwardens were William Saud[e]r (probably ‘Saunder(s)’ – the churchwardens’ scribe had a soft Suffolk-like accent and didn’t pronounce hard ‘n’s , see  The dialect of Tudor Essex), Robert Parker, Raff/Ralph Melbourne, and Thomas Hervy (Harvey?). As Medieval and Tudor churchwardens were often in office for two years, it is likely that these men were churchwardens for the periods 1523-4 and 1524-5. The 14 shillings which the old churchwardens handed over to the 1525-6 set was either their cash-in-hand money left over from their tenure or their own money to make up shortfall in the accounts (or a mixture of both). Medieval and Tudor churchwardens were personally liable for any shortfall in their church’s finances at the end of their period in office. It is because of this personal liability that the accounts of Medieval and Tudor churches were so meticulously documented and recorded.

Plough Monday – Line 26:
The plough-feast was celebrated on the first Monday after the Epiphany (Twelfth Day) in January and was the traditional start to the new agricultural year. The young men of the town dragged a plough from door to door 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. Money received from Great Dunmow’s plough-feast activities was recorded throughout the Henrician churchwarden accounts. It was likely that this was already a well-established money-making activity for the church within Great Dunmow before this first recording of the event within the leather account-book in 1526. This can be determined by the brevity of this entry which could be interpreted that the churchwardens did not need a full and complete explanation about this particular activity. This was the yearly Plough-Feast – so therefore everyone knew what happened – all that needed to be accounted for was the money received! The churchwardens’ accounts do not record what happened to the money raised from Plough Monday. However, it is likely that the money was used to maintain a ‘plough light’ (candle) within the church. The plough light was one of the many ‘lights’ banned and extinguished by Henry VIII in 1538.

The Wikipedia Plough Monday entry suggests that the Plough Monday customs were revived in the 20^th century in the East of England and are associated with Molly Dancers.  Below are photographs my son took of the Molly Dancers on New Year’s Day 2012 at The Hythe, Maldon.  He’s only aged 8 so the photos are a bit blurry!  All photos are copyright of  The Narrator, 2012.

Dancing money – Line 27:
Unknown what this ‘dancing money’ was for.  Nicholas Parker was one of many Parkers in Great Dunmow but there was only one Parker with the Christian name of Nicholas. In the 1523-4 Lay Subsidy, Nicholas Parker was assessed as having goods to the value of 23s 4d.  In the parish collection for the church steeple, he was recorded as living in Bullock Row and paid 8d towards the collection for the church steeple (fo.2v–fo.3r).  It was likely that Nicholas Parker collected money on behalf of Great Dunmow’s parish church for ‘dancing’ and gave that money to the churchwardens.  The churchwardens were scrupulously thorough in recording which of the many Catholic feast-days money was collected in for the church. Thus, there are receipts for ‘the plough-feast’, ‘Corpus Christi’ and ‘May Day’ on the same page as this entry.  As the entry does not specify a precise feast-day or event, it is possible that this was money collected at some type of ‘general’ dance which was associated with the parish church but not connected with any feast-days within the regular Catholic ritual-year.

Old Hall – Line 28:
Unknown what the ‘old hall’ was.  It is possible that this was a bequest in the will of a William Sweeting.  Unfortunately not many Great Dunmow wills from this period have survived and there is no trace of William Sweeting’s will from this date, so it cannot be established if this was a bequest. (A later blog will explain the reason why there are so few surviving wills in Great Dunmow.)  The only William Sweeting to be assessed in the 1523-4 Lay Subsidy had goods to the value of 40s (so was of moderate wealth).  However, it is possible that this 1525-6 entry was a gift, rather than a bequest because a William Sweeting is documented regularly in parish collections after this date in the churchwardens’ accounts.
– 1525-6 church steeple collection: William Sweeting lived in Bishopswood and contributed 6d.
– 1527-9 church bell collection: William Sweeting lived in Bishopswood and contributed 5d.
– 1529-30 church organ collection: William Sweeting contributed 2d (dwelling-places not recorded).
– 1532-3 new gild collection: William Sweeting contributed 2d (dwelling-places not recorded).
– 1537-8 great latten candlestick collection: William Sweeting contributed 1d (dwelling-places not recorded).
A William Sweeting, ‘the elder’, was the witness to the 1552 will of Robert Grene(1).

May day – Line 29:
May money 28s 4d. This money received for ‘activities’ held on May-day is a significant amount of money.  Records in Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts show that an average daily wage for a labourer was 4d – thus the money raised for May-day equalled approximately 85 days from a labourer.  This was a much larger event than the yearly Plough-Feast and received more money.  From these scant pieces of evidence, it can be interpreted that the May-day money was collected from possibly the entire parish of Great Dunmow (and probably also other nearby towns and villages – as discussed in later blogs).   Again, the shortness of the entry demonstrates that receiving money from May-day was a well-established practice in Great Dunmow by the time of its first entry in the new leather account book of 1526.

This entry does not explain what happened in Great Dunmow on May Day.  Wikipedia suggests some of the activities that might have taken place at May Day.

Corpus Christi – Line 30:
Corpus Christi feast 23s.  The shortness of this entry is both intriguing and annoying in equal measures!  Once again, this was a substantial amount of money, and the briefness of the entry implies that Corpus Christi was a well established feast within Tudor Great Dunmow.  Regular Corpus Christi entries are documented throughout the rest of the Henrician Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts.  These other entries are much more detailed and thorough, allowing the modern-day reader the most amazing insight into the world of Tudor Great Dunmow and the hierarchical relationship between this small parish and their neighbouring towns and villages.  Great Dunmow’s Corpus Christi feast, as documented in the churchwarden accounts, has been greatly studied throughout secondary literature on medieval English drama and late medieval religious practices.  My own Cambridge University’s master’s dissertation spent over half of the word count discussing and analysing what actually happened during Tudor Great Dunmow’s Corpus Christi feast-day.  My own account provides an alternative narrative to the explanation provided by other historians (most of whom do not appear to have consulted directly with the original churchwarden accounts nor have walked the streets of the town).  As this was such a critical part of my masters’ dissertation, my interpretation of Great Dunmow’s Corpus Christi plays will be discussed in detail in a later blog.

Detail of a miniature of a bishop carrying a monstrance in a
Corpus Christi procession under an canopy carried by four clerics
The Lovell Lectionary. Harley 7026, f13 (England, c1400-c1410),
© British Library Board

Rent of church land – Line 33:
Total rent received in for various church lands.  In later years, church rent is fully itemised along with the name of each tenant.

Building materials – Line 34-39:
This part of the accounts is still the receipts (money in) for the period 1525-6.  These entries demonstrate that the church (and the churchwardens) were selling items of building materials to some of the townsfolk of Great Dunmow.  John Atkinson bought a few bricks and a small amount of wet lime.  Mr Fyche (Fitch?) bought some rope, and Thomas Savage bought some scaffolding.  This last item by Thomas Savage is interesting for several reasons: firstly Thomas Savage was the man who made the largest contribution towards the church steeple and was ultimately awarded the contract for building the steeple (Henry VIII’s 1523-4 Lay Subsidy Tax).  Secondly, this entry demonstrates that there were items of scaffolding within the parish church in 1525-6.  Either this scaffolding was in the church in the years prior to the building steeple or its existence was because of the construction of the new church steeple.  The Victorian vicar of Great Dunmow, W. T. Scott, in his 1873 history of Great Dunmow narrated that there was extensive building work in the church in the years before the church steeple was rebuilt in 1525-6.(2)  So there were plenty of reasons for scaffolding to be within the church.

The significance of Thomas Savage’s scaffolding will be discussed in a later blog post.

Footnotes and Further reading
1) Will of Robert Grene, husbandman (March 1552), Essex Record Office, D/ABW 16/83.
2) Scott. W.T., Antiquities of an Essex Parish: Or pages from the history of Great Dunmow (London, 1873) p.20.

For further information on the Catholic religious ritual-year in late medieval/Tudor England, see
– Hutton, R., The rise and fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994).

For further information on the Plough-feast, see the following websites
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough_Monday
– http://www.ploughmonday.co.uk/

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
– Medieval Plough Monday
– Pre-Reformation Catholic Ritual Year

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

Family members mentioned in the churchwarden accounts include:
– Robert Sturton, vicar of Great Dunmow 1492-1523
– Robert Sturton, church clerk of Great Dunmow
– Robert Sturton
– William Sturton
– Stephen Sturton
– Alexander Sturton

Robert Sturton – vicar of Great Dunmow 1492-1523
Patron for the living of Great Dunmow:  Dean and Fellows of Stoke College, Clare, Suffolk.

Reason for leaving the living of St Mary the Virgin, Great Dunmow, 1523: Resigned

University/degree:  Described as ‘master’ in the churchwarden accounts indicating he was an M.A. (Master of Arts).  Unknown which university.

1514: possibly the same Robert Stourton (described as a ‘Professor of Theology’ i.e. S.T.P.) who was rector of Long Melford, Suffolk.(1)  Long Melford is 28 miles away from Great Dunmow.

Long Melford church, Suffolk

19 April 1510: Robert Stourton, clerk, of Great Dunmow, pardoned by Henry VIII.(2)

Died by 1529.  The churchwardens’ accounts detail of 53s 4d, a gift from Robert Sturton ‘sumtyme vycar of thys chyrche’.  The money was given to the churchwardens by William Sturton.(3)  It can be assumed William and Robert were related.

Notes on the Sturton family of Great Dunmow
There were many Sturtons within Tudor Great Dunmow.  William Sturton was assessed in the 1523-4 Lay Subsidy for goods to the value of £40.(4)  Two Robert Sturtons were also assessed, both with goods to the value of 20s.  Stephen Sturton was also assessed.  As the clergy were exempt from the Lay Subsidy, this implies that, including the vicar, there were three Robert Sturtons in Great Dunmow.  Robert Sturton, the church clerk from the start of the churchwardens’ accounts until the mid-1540s was one of them.  Throughout the Henrician churchwardens’ accounts, his wife received payment from the churchwardens for washing the church’s linen.

The only Sturton will to have survived is Alexander Sturton’s will of 1553.  Alexander Sturton, of Clopton Hall, bequeathed money to the children of Stephen Sturton, Thomas Sturton, Robert Sturton and William Sturton (all deceased).(5)  This suggests that Alexander Sturton was possibly the son of one of the three Robert Sturtons.  Clopton Hall was one of Great Dunmow’s medieval manors.

Two William Sturtons from Great Dunmow were educated at Cambridge University.  In 1526 William Sturton, aged 18, a scholar from Eton, of Dunmow, Essex, matriculated at Kings.  He became a fellow of Kings College 1529-30, ordained Deacon of Lincoln 1530, and Precentor of Kings College 1541-9.(6)  The other William Sturton of Great Dunmow matriculated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1564 aged 16 and was the son of Alexander Sturton.(7)

Thus, there is both circumstantial and solid evidence linking these Sturtons together.  The evidence demonstrates they were an elite and well-established family.  It is likely they were related to the Lord Stourtons of Stourton, Wiltshire.

Stourton, Wiltshire

In the early fifteenth century, Sir John Moigne held the Manor of Great Easton along with the advowson of the village’s church.  Sir John’s heirs were his daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Sir William Stourton.   Sir William was presented to the rectory of Great Easton on the 3rd January 1408.  Sir William’s Inquisition Post Mortem took place in Great Dunmow in the regnal year I Henry V. (1413-4).   His son, John Stourton (who later became 1st Lord Stourton), was presented to Great Easton’s rectory on 5th January 1427.  Throughout the fifteenth century and early sixteenth century, the House of Stourton held the Manor of Great Easton, and also the Manor of Blamster in the same village.  Great Easton remained part of the Stourton estate until William, 7th Lord Stourton, sold the Manor and advowson in 1536.(8) Great Easton is a village 2.5 miles from Great Dunmow.

Great Easton, Essex, 2012
© Essex Voices Past 2012.

Henry VIII’s Pardon Rolls of 1509-14 documented William Stourton, knight, Lord Stourton, as the tenant of the manor of Estaynes ad Montem, Essex [Great Easton].(9) It has been suggested the true phonetic spelling of the name ‘Stourton’ is ‘Sturton’.(10)  The scribes who wrote the churchwardens’ accounts used phonetic spellings for many names and places.

Therefore, it is probable Robert Sturton, vicar of Great Dunmow, and the other Sturtons of Great Dunmow, were distant relations to the House of Stourton.

Great Easton, Essex, 1904

Footnotes:
1) William Parker, The History of Long Melford (1873), 35.
2) J.S. Brewer (ed.), ‘Henry VIII: Pardon Roll, Part 1’ in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 1: 1509-1514 (1920), 203-216, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=102632 .
3) Great Dunmow, Churchwarden accounts (1526-1621), Essex Record Office D/P 11/5/1, fo.7r.
4) Hundred of Dunmow: Calendar of Lay Subsidy Rolls (1523-4), E.R.O., T/A427/1/1.
5) Will of Alexander Sturton (1553), E.R.O., D/ABW 33/226.
6) John Venn, ‘William Sturton’ in Alumni Cantabrigienses Part I Volume IV (Cambridge, 1927), 181.
7) Venn, ‘William Stoorton’. in Alumni Cantabrigienses Part I Volume IV, 181.
8 ) Lord Mowbray, Segrave, and Stourton, The history of the noble house of Stourton (1899), 105-7 and 151.
9) J.S. Brewer (ed.), ‘Henry VIII: Pardon Roll, Part 3’ in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 1: 1509-1514 (1920), 234-256, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=102634 .
10) Mowbray, Stourton, 2.

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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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
– Great Dunmow’s Medieval manors

© 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.  His prompt ‘Thankful Thursday’ is all about expressing gratitude for someone/something connected to your own personal family history.   My own ‘someone’ was Great Dunmow’s 1960s & 70s local historian, Dorothy Dowsett.

No local history of Great Dunmow is complete without reference to her work.  She was a lifelong resident of Great Dunmow and had vast knowledge about her home town which she shared in her local history books and articles in the local magazine, Essex Countryside.  I owe Dorothy Dowsett’s work a debt of gratitude both for my academic research on my dissertation into Tudor & Reformation Great Dunmow and also for her work on Edwardian and early 1900s Great Dunmow.

Amazingly, in one of her books on Great Dunmow, Through all the changing seasons, I found a photo of my grandfather’s aunt, uncle and their children (my grandfather’s cousins), the Kemps of the White Horse pub and the Royal Oak, Great Dunmow.   She was a contemporary of my grandfather’s cousins, and I would have loved to have sat and talked to her about them.  Particularly to hear her memories of Gordon and Harold Kemp, two sons of Great Dunmow, tragically killed in the Great War.

So my own ‘Through all the changing Seasons’ is dedicated to the memory of Great Dunmow’s local historian, Dorothy Dowsett.

St Mary the Virgin and Church End, Great Dunmow,
February 2012, © Essex Voices Past 2012.

Dr’s Pond, Great Dunmow,
December 2010, © Essex Voices Past 2012.

Lime Tree Hill, leading down to Church End, Great Dunmow,
February 2012, © Essex Voices Past 2012.

Overlooking Merks Hall and Stebbing, from The Causeway, Great Dunmow,
February 2012, © Essex Voices Past 2012.

St Mary the Virgin, Great Dunmow,
Spring 2011, © Essex Voices Past 2012.

On the road between Bigods and the church at Church End, Great Dunmow,
Spring 2011, © Essex Voices Past 2012.

Bigods (Alfrestons) Farmhouse and spring lambs, Great Dunmow,
Spring 2011, © Essex Voices Past 2012.

Great Dunmow local history books
Dowsett, D., Dunmow Through The Ages (Letchworth, 1968).
Dowsett, D., Through all the changing seasons (1975).

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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
– 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.

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.

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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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
– 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.

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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
– Building a medieval church steeple

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.