History is full of what-ifs. What if Hitler had been killed in the First World War? What if the weather had been in Spain’s favour when their armada sailed towards England? What-if, what if?
For Tudor England, one of the biggest what-ifs, is… What if Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Henry VII and his wife, Elizabeth of York, had not died at Ludlow Castle in 1502? Arthur, so named after that most legendary of English kings, and named to herald in a new golden age of anointed Tudor kings. Arthur, that poor half-forgotten boy-husband of early 16th century politics. His marriage and untimely death in 1502 indirectly leading to his younger brother’s break with Catholic Rome and aiding the fuel in the fire of the English Reformation.
On 14 November 1501, Arthur, Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne, married Catherine of Aragon at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Less than five months later, Arthur was dead having (allegedly) never consummated his marriage to Catherine. In 1509, the newly crowned King Henry VIII, married his brother’s widow and thus cast the seeds of England’s quarrel with the Pope. In the eyes of God, could a man marry his brother’s widow? This was the essence of Henry VIII’s Great Matter – which only troubled his conscience years after his marriage, after he had cast his eyes on the comely Anne Boleyn.
What if Arthur had survived and, with Catherine of Aragon, fathered his own Tudor dynasty?
Arthur, Prince of Wales in c1501; and the young widow, Catharine of Aragon c1502 (by Michael Sittow).
The images below are from the Book of Hours (i.e. prayer book) of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Arthur and his brother, Henry VIII. Each page has additional text inserted relating to Prince Arthur.
This weekend Britain celebrates the Diamond Jubilee of our Queen, Elizabeth II. It therefore seems appropriate that my posts this weekend are about the visit of her Tudor namesake and ancestor, Queen Elizabeth I, who progressed through the town of Great Dunmow in the Summer of 1561. Â This was mere 20 months after she became Queen on the 17th November 1558 – her East Anglian progress was of vital importance to convey her image of royalty to her subjects.
There is only one very brief reference relating to Queen Elizabeth I’s 1561 visit to Great Dunmow within the Tudor churchwardens’ accounts.
[Itm payd to the the good wyfe barker for ale for those yet dyd rynge when ye Quenes grace cam thorow ye parysshe 8d] Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts – folio 45v.
Previous records from the churchwarden’s accounts show that the going rate in the 1520s for a day’s labour for a man was about 4d to 6d. So the bell-ringers of the church of St Mary the Virgin, Great Dunmow, consumed the equivalent of nearly 2 days wages in ale! This must have been some celebration…
Unfortunately, no other record survives of Queen Elizabeth’s progress through the town – the church records have no other details. Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary, had granted Great Dunmow borough status in 1555. Therefore, any expenses that the town incurred during Elizabeth’s visit would have been entered into the borough records – which have not survived.
However, by examining the primary and secondary sources on Elizabeth’s Summer Progress of 1561, it can be stated with considerable certainty that she progressed through the town sometime during the day of Monday 25th August 1561. Elizabeth had been a guest at the home of Lord Rich at nearby Leez Priory 21-25 August; and then stayed at Lord Moreley’s estate in the Hertfordshire village of Great Hallingbury on the night of the 25th. Therefore, she must have come through Great Dunmow sometime during the day of the 25th.
Her route would have been along the Roman Stane Street (now known most romantically as the ‘Old A120’) from Leez Priory to Great Dunmow and then through the town’s High Street. My map of Tudor Great Dunmow illustrates her likely route through the parish. The postcards below show Great Dunmow in the early 20th Century – the Edwardian High Street of Great Dunmow looks very much as it does now. (Tudor town hall on left of 1st two postcards and on right of next 2.)
Many of today’s shops in Great Dunmow originate from medieval and Tudor houses. Therefore, the town of Great Dunmow probably looked very similar 400 years previously in the Elizabethan era. The Town/Guild Hall was built during the 16th century so was probably there in 1561 when Elizabeth progressed through the town. The pale (white) double-roofed building 2nd from the left in the two postcards below is thought to have been a pre-Reformation Catholic priest house which served the town’s small pre-Reformation Chapel. This Chapel was probably closed and destroyed as part of Edward VI’s reforms but it’s priest-house remains and is now a clothes shop.
The town must have extensively and jubilantly celebrated their Queen’s progress. Was there the  equivalent of today’s bunting and streamers be-decking the streets of Tudor Great Dunmow? How did the ordinary towns-folk of Great Dunmow celebrate the exciting event of their monarch’s presence in their town?
‘Every spring and summer of her 44 years as queen, Elizabeth I insisted that her court go with her on ‘progress’, a series of royal visits to town and aristocratic homes in sourthern England. Between 1558 and 1603 her visits to over 400 individual and civic hosts provided the only direct contact most people had with a monarch who made popularity a cornerstone of her reign. These visits gave the queen a public stage on which to present herself as the people’s sovereign and to interact with her subjects in a calculated attempt to keep their support.’
Mary Hill Cole, The portable queen : Elizabeth I and the politics of ceremony (Massachusetts, 1999), p1.
Griff Rhys Jones, in the BBC’s new series on the Britain’s Lost Routes, has charted Elizabeth’s 1570s progresses from Windsor Castle to Bristol. Rhys Jones re-enacted the queen’s progress with modern-day people and their cars. He states that accompanying the queen were
All told, according Rhys Jones, there were 350 people in hundreds of wagons, carts and on horseback. The whole procession was about one mile in length and included all that a fully mobile queen required – from her kitchen to her court documents. This procession travelled at approximately 3 miles per hour as it wound its way through the Elizabethan countryside.  The queen often rode ahead of this procession in the type of litter shown in the first picture above.  But before her went her ‘Habingers’ who rode ahead to prepare her subjects (and her hosts!) for her presence.
The distance from Leez Priory to Great Dunmow is approximately 6 miles – so it would have taken Elizabeth’s procession two hours just to get to the town.  After that was her  slow and steady progress through the town.  It must have been a day of great celebration for the townsfolk of Great Dunmow!  Do watch Griff Rhys Jones’ Britain’s Lost Routes about the west country progress of Elizabeth to understand how she might have progressed through Essex and Suffolk in 1561.
Images – All postcards on this page are in the personal collection of The Narrator and may not be reproduced without permission.
– Procession portrait of Elizabeth I of England (Robert Peake the Elder, 1551–1619).
– ‘A hermit sitting outside a tavern drinking ale; the alewife approaches him with a flagon’ from Decretals of Gregory IX with glossa ordinaria (the ‘Smithfield Decretals‘), (France, last quarter 13th century or 1st quarter 14th century), shelfmark Royal 10 EIV f.114v, (c) British Library Board.
– John Nichols, The Progresses & Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, (London, 1788-1823).
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.
Watching Helen Castor’s recent excellent BBC programme on the She-Wolves of England prompted me to write this post on ‘reading between the lines’ of primary source analysis. In my post, I will be considering ‘reading-between-the-lines’ in both the literal and also the metaphorical sense.
My last post on Palaeography and Old handwriting gave some tips on how to tackle the transcription of primary sources. Today’s post is about the benefits of transcribing your source word-for-word, which, coupled with some of the principles of unwitting testimony, can give you (perhaps) unexpected and surprising results.
For this, we will be looking at two ‘features’ of palaeography and primary sources
– Understanding why text has been inserted in your source
– Understanding why text has been deleted or strikethrough
Edward VI and Lady Jane Grey Consider king Edward VI’s Devise for the Succession(1). This is the document that the boy-king, Edward VI, wrote on his sick-bed shortly before he died on 6 July 1553. The Devise is a crucial document in the history of England because in it, Edward attempted to overturn his father’s will (Henry VIII) by making his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, his heir. Thus, Edward was attempting to bypass the royal rights of his two half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth, and by doing so, was ignoring no less than an act of parliament. In this document, (which we know was written by the dying king himself) if we include the struck-through text (ie the original text before it was deleted) but we ignore the inserted text, Edward wrote
‘To the L[ady] Frau[n]ceses heires masles, for lakke [lack] of such issu[e] to the L[ady] Janes heires masles. To the L[ady] Katerins [Katherine] heires masles. To the L[ady] Maries heires masles’.
In other words, the crown of England should first go to any male children of Lady Frances. If Lady Frances did not have any male children, then the crown would pass to any male children of Lady Jane [Grey]. If Jane did not have any male children, then onto Lady Katherine’s male children. Finally, if Katherine didn’t have any male children, then onto Lady Mary’s male children. Lady Frances Grey (Duchess of Suffolk),  was the mother of Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, Katherine and Mary. Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor, Dowager Queen of France, was Frances’ mother.
However, Edward was dying and time was running out for him and a fledgling Protestant England. Neither Frances nor her children had any male children so Edward wanted to ensure that the crown would go straight to Protestant Jane – so he altered his ‘Devise’.  If we now ignore the original (but subsequently deleted) text and include the new inserted text, we have:
‘To the L[ady] Fra[n]ceses heires masles, if she have any such issu[e] before my death to the L[ady] Jane and her heirs masles’.
Edward was specifying that if Frances produced any male children before he died, then the crown would go to them, but without male heirs from Lady Frances, the crown would go directly to the Lady Jane Grey and then to her male children.
If, as historians, we had not transcribed the document properly and not correctly highlighted all the deletions and insertions as such, then our interpretation regarding the position of women in the early-modern period (and Helen Castor’s entire hypothesis on the She-wolves Queens of England!) would be blown out of the water. Edward VI had left his throne and the crown of England to a mere woman!
However, if we transcribe this manuscript correctly, showing all the deletions and insertions, then we get a truer picture as to what had really happened. Thus Edward’s Devise for the Succession should be transcribed as follows (the \ / indicates inserted text):-
‘….To the L[ady] Frau[n](ces ) \thissu [the issue] femal, as I have after declared/ ceses [ie Frances] heires masles , for lakke of \if she have any/ such issu[e] \befor[e] my death/ to the Lady Janes \and her/ heires masles…’
The dying king had no other option but without male heirs, on his death-bed, he had left England to Lady Jane Grey. Transcribing this document properly (by acknowledging the deleted and inserted text) shows just how remarkable  the events that had unfolded during the final days of the boy-king’s life had been.  And, the benefit of hindsight in history is a wonderful thing, by altering his Devise for the Succession, Edward VI had unknowingly passed the death sentence on poor tragic Lady Jane Grey.
Another example of Edward VI’s handwriting can be seen in this, his diary. Here Edward VI describes how he and Elizabeth learnt of their father’s death from his uncle Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, at Elizabeth’s Enfield residence on 30 January 1547.
Click this link, The Streatham Portrait of Lady Jane Grey, for a recently discovered portrait of Lady Jane Dudley (nee Grey) now in the possession of the National Portrait Gallery, London. (Copyright reasons restrict me from publishing it on my blog. It is a fascinating portrait, do look at it).
The tale of two early Tudor wills The example of Edward VI’s Devise for the Succession  is an extreme example of ensuring that primary sources are correctly transcribed. In our own family history or local history research, it is unlikely that you would have to transcribe such as crucial document to history as this! However, when transcribing our own primary sources, we have to use judgement and other evidence to assess why text has been deleted or inserted and thus we have to ‘read-between-the-lines’.
During the research for my Cambridge University’s masters’ degree in local history, I studied a large number of Tudor wills written by the townsfolk of Great Dunmow. Two of these wills, when compared together, showed that the same text (a religious bequest) was included in both wills but had been struck out and therefore deleted from one.
The historian, Margaret Spufford, was one of the first historians to discuss the possibility that early-modern wills had been written by a scribe and that a dying testator could be influenced by such scribes.(2) Two wills from Great Dunmow written in the 1520s have evidence that there was a Henrician scribe active in the parish, and he had used a book containing standard formulaic clauses to create the wills of his clients. This type of ‘precedent book’ was not unusual during the Tudor period. The will of widow Clemens Bowyer, dated February 1526, almost exactly mimics the earlier will of John Wakrell (October 1525) and is in the same handwriting.(3) 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 [mother] holy chyrch of polye [St Paul’s] in London’. Both wills also 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, in Bowyer’s will , the bequest for her trental was entirely crossed through.
Did our scribe copy the wording from his precedent book, and widow Bowyer (or someone else present at her death-bed) make him cross it out after it had been written into the will? Trentals were a series of 30 Masses performed within one year of the person’s death, with three Masses on each of the ten major feast-days of Christ and the virgin Mary. The priest also had to perform other liturgical duties throughout the year.(4) This was a substantial undertaking, as demonstrated by Wakrell’s bequest of 10s to pay for his trental. Maybe widow Bowyer did not have sufficient funds, and so either she or one of her children made the scribe delete the bequest before her death.
So, the various crossings-out in widow Bowyer’s will can be used as evidence that
the scribe in the parish was using a precedent book; and/or
the widow Bowyers (or the people present at her death) did not want the trental said after her death. This could be for either religious or monetary reasons. Because this will was written in the 1520s (when England was still very much a Catholic country), it is unlikely that the crossing-out was for religious reasons (and the other bequests in her will show a very Catholic will). Therefore a more likely reason for the striking through of the text was for monetary reasons.
Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts have a great deal of crossings-out and inserted text – as could be expected in an account-book that was written up maybe once a year when the accounts were tallied up. This post on the Tudor dialect of Great Dunmow has details about a crossing out of the word ‘my’ on one of the folios (folio 5r, line 20). Was the scribe (who wrote up Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts) copying word-for-word various people’s loose receipts into his account book? Were those loose receipts in front of him as he copied them into his book?
Conclusion When you are analysing your primary sources, don’t forget to work out why text has been deleted or inserted into your document. It could be for a very simple reason, but, as in the case of Edward VI’s Devise for the Succession, sometimes the reasons for altered text could be much more complex. As historians transcribing primary sources, we must ALWAYS include any text that has been struck-through or inserted. Our transcriptions MUST show which text has been inserted or deleted.
Don’t forget to read-between-the-lines of your primary source!
Footnotes 1) Edward VI My devise for the succession (July 1553), held  at The Inner Template Library’s Manuscript Collection, London.
2) Margaret Spufford, ‘The Scribes of Villagers’ Wills in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and their influence’, in Local Population Studies (1972), 28-43 at 29.
3) Will of Clemens Boywer [Bowyer] of Great Dunmow (26 February 1526), Essex Record Office, D/ABW 3/8; Will of John Wakrell of Great Dunmow (19 October 1525), Essex Record Office, D/ABW 39/7. Both wills available online via subscription to Essex Record Office’s Essex Ancestors.
4) Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,1400-1580 (2nd Edition, 2005) p370-371.
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Calendar page for April with Prince Arthur’s obit (prayers for the dead) added after his death, from Book of Hours (The ‘Beaufort/Beauchamp Hours’) (South East England, after 1401, before 1415) shelfmark Royal 2 A XVIII f29v, © British Library Board.
Calendar page for September with additions of the dates of Prince Arthur’s birth and Catherine’s of Aragon 1501 journey to England, from Book of Hours (The ‘Beaufort/Beauchamp Hours’) (South East England, after 1401, before 1415) shelfmark Royal 2 A XVIII f32, © British Library Board.
Calendar page for November with the addition of the date of the marriage of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon, from Book of Hours (The ‘Beaufort/Beauchamp Hours’) (South East England, after 1401, before 1415) shelfmark Royal 2 A XVIII f33, © British Library Board.
[Itm payd to the the good wyfe barker for ale for those yet dyd rynge when ye Quenes grace cam thorow ye parysshe 8d] Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts – folio 45v.
Edward VI’s diary
 Frontispiece with the arms of Edward VI, Shelfmark: Royal 16 E XXXII f.1v,