My post on Elizabeth I’s visit to Great Dunmow discussed Elizabeth’s summer progress through the town on 25^th August 1561.  Today’s post is about the route she took and the houses she visited that summer.

Title page from the Bishops Bible (London, 1569),
shelfmark G.12188, © British Library Board

Mary Hill Cole ‘s book The portable queen : Elizabeth I and the politics of ceremony (Massachusetts, 1999) lists the hosts and their houses visited.  Looking at that list today, the venues now read as a who’s-who of 21^st Century wedding venues and independent/private schools!  I myself married at Layer Marney Towers (nr Colchester).  It’s interesting to note that many of those hosts were descendants of Richard Rich, 1^st Baron Rich, that arch-villain of Tudor history.

– London (Robert Dudley), 24 June 1561.
– Charterhouse, London  (Lord North), 10-14 July 1561
– Strand, London (William Cecil), 13 July 1561.
– Wanstead, Essex (Lord Rich), 14 July 1561.
– Havering, Essex, 14-19 July 1561.
– Pyrgo, Essex (Lord John Grey), 16 July 1561.
– Loughton Hall, Essex (Lord Darcy), 17 July 1561.
– Ingatestone Hall, Essex (Sir William Petre), 19-21 July 1561.
– New Hall, Essex (Earl of Sussex), 21-26 July 1561.
– Felix Hall (Henry Long), 26 July 1561.
– Colchester (Sir Thomas Lucas), 26-30 July 1561.
– Layer Marney (George Tuke),around 26-30 July
– St Osyth (Lord Darcy), 30 July to 2 August.
– Harwich, Essex,  2-5 August.
– Ipswich, Suffolk,  5-11 August.
– Shelley Hall, Suffolk (Philip Tilney), 11 August.
– Smallbridge, Suffolk (William Waldegrave), 11-14 August.
– Castle Hedingham (Earl of Oxford) 14-19 August.
– Gosfield Hall (Sir John Wentworth), 19-21 August.
– Leez Priory (Lord Rich), 21-25 August.
– Great Hallingbury (Lord Morley),  25-27 August 1561.
– Standon, Hert (Sir Ralph Sadler), 27-30 August 1561
– Hertford Castle, Herts, 30 August – 16 September.
– Hatfield, Hert (16 September?).
– Enfield, Middsex (16-22 September).

Below is a map of Elizabeth’s route.
 © Essex Record Office, Map Showing the Royal Progress of 1561 (2008)

The cost of the Queen’s progress
The cost to both the Queen and her hosts was extensive.  The cost to Sir William Petre of Ingatestone Hall was £136, the Earl of Oxford spent £273 and to Lord Rich at Leighs (Leez) Priory was £389.

At its heart, then, challenge of travel for the royal household was a financial one, because the Queen spent more on food, supplies, and accommodation when on progress than when she remained in the London area….. For the 1561 progress into Essex and Suffolk, Thomas Weldon, cofferer of the household, kept a tally of the Queen’s expenses at each of the places she stayed during the seventy-six day trip.  The court’s expenses varied from £83 to £146 per day, with a total cost of £8,540.

J. E. Archer, E. Goldring, and S. Knight (ed.),
The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I

Below are 20th century images of the homes of some of Elizabeth’s hosts.

 

Layer Marney

 

 

 

 

 

Layer Marney

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leez Priory

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leez Priory

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Castle Hedingham

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

St Osyth Priory

 

 

 

Further Reading
J. E. Archer, E. Goldring, and S. Knight (ed.), The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2007).
Mary Hill Cole , The portable queen : Elizabeth I and the politics of ceremony (Massachusetts, 1999)
F.G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home (London, 1961)
John Nichols, The Progresses & Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (3 volumes),  (London, 1788-1823).
University of Warwick – Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, The John Nichols Project, (2012)

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

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You may also be interested in the following:
– Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Great Dunmow: Part 1
– Index to each folio in Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts
– Great Dunmow’s Churchwardens’ accounts: transcripts 1526-1621
– Tudor local history
– Elizabeth I

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.

Today is the much heralded and awaited day of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant on the River Thames.  Ahead of the Royal Barge, Gloriana, and the boat carrying the Queen and her party, The Spirit of Chartwell, will be a belfry barge (the Ursula Catherine) carrying eight church bells specially cast for the Diamond Jubilee Pageant by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in East London.  Bells in many of churches along the route of the River Thames’s Jubilee Pageant will be ringing to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.  Many of these churches have been part of London’s rich heritage for hundreds of years.

Each bell on Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee bell belfry barge is named after a senior member of the British Royal Family.

Bell, Name of bell (Donated by) – Musical Note
– Tenor, Elizabeth (Worshipful Company of Vintners) – G#;
– 7^th, Philip (Worshipful Company of Dyers) – A#;
– 6^th, Charles (Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers) – B#;
– 5^th, Anne (Church of St James Garlickhythe) – C#;
– 4^th, Andrew (The Bettinson family) – D#;
– 3^rd, Edward (Joanna Warrand) – E#;
– 2^nd, William (Stockwell family & Worshipful Company of Joiners and Ceilers) – F##; and
– Treble, Henry (Harry)  (Nicole Marie Kassimiotis & Worshipful Co. of Musicians) – G#.
(Information from The Royal Jubilee Bells.)

Watch the BBC’s programme Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant Highlights to see the bells on the belfry barge.  There’s a good clear shot of the barge and the bells starting at 29:41.

Canaletto’s River Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day 1746, © The Lobkowicz Collections

Church bells ringing to celebrate a British monarch is not a modern-day event but has its roots deep in our history. The image below is from the early fourteenth century and shows Henry III (born 1207, died 1272) on his throne beside Westminster Abbey and the Abbey’s bells.

Henry III, by Westminster Abbey and its bells – below is a
genealogical table of  his descendants, (England, c1307-c1327),
shelfmark Royal 20 A II f.9, © British Library Board.

Church bells were not just used to celebrate coronations and jubilees. My post, Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Great Dunmow, detailed how the church bells of Great Dunmow rung out as Queen Elizabeth I took her royal progress through Essex and Suffolk in the summer 1561.  Of course, the primary purpose of church bells in late medieval England was to call a parish’s Catholic community to prayer and so were significant religious objects.   Surviving English churchwardens’ accounts from this period often detail the recasting and mending of their church’s bells, bell clappers and even the ropes.  Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts are no exception and the accounts have many entries relating to the mending of bells at St Mary the Virgin.  Along with mending their bells, the pre-Reformation parish of Great Dunmow also commissioned the casting a new Great Bell in the 1520s from an unnamed bell foundry in London.

The churchwarden accounts detail that between the years of 1527 and 1529, the parishioners of Great Dunmow collected £7 0s 7d for their new Great Bell to be installed in the parish church. This was a highly organised collection instigated by the parish’s pre-Reformation vicar, William Walton, and the local elite. This was the second in a series of seven collections organised by Walton to raise funds for church and religious artefacts.  The first was for the church steeple.  For the Great Bell collection, the 153 names of house-of-households, their location within Great Dunmow, and the amount each contributed were carefully and meticulously recorded for posterity within the churchwarden’s accounts.  Cross referencing the lists of names for each collection with the returns from the 1520s Lay Subsidy Rolls (a tax enforced by Henry VIII) proves that contributions for the new Great Bell were made by nearly every household within the parish – including the parish’s clergy and paupers. Paupers, who were exempt from Henry VIII’s Lay Subsidy tax, paid the unofficial church levy for the parish’s new bell. Many parishioners contributed the equivalent of a day’s pay (4d).  The casting of a new church bell was a significant event in the life of this Tudor parish, as can be gleaned from the events surrounding the collection.

After the entries for the parish collection, the churchwardens’ accounts record a great flurry of activity. The churchwardens and local elite went back and forth to the bell-foundry in London to inspect the casting of their new bell. This incurred some expense as the men claimed their expenses for food & lodgings for their numerous trips from the church’s accounts. Finally the bell was ready to be taken back to the parish church. Whilst the accounts’ purpose was only to list the expenditure and receipts received/made by the parish church, they manage to convey the sense of triumph the entire parish must have felt when the elite were finally able to go to London to ‘fett home the bells’.   They paid a staggering £10 to the bellfounder. A further £6 13s 4d was paid out by the parish church ‘for makynge a new flower [floor] in the stepell & a new belframe & new wheles & stoke all owre bells redy to go’. The accounts are silent as to whether or not there was a grand opening ceremony for the new bell – but I rather suspect that there was. The serious shortfall between the amount collected for the bell and the amount eventually paid out was not commented upon in the accounts!

‘Man ringing a church bell with another kneeling behind him; to their right, a priest is at an altar’ from Decretals of Gregory IX with glossa ordinaria (the ‘Smithfield Decretals‘), (France, Last quarter of the 13th century or 1st quarter of the 14th century),
shelfmark Royal 10 E IV f.257, © British Library Board.

The churchwardens’ accounts do not specify the name of the London bell foundry – just that the Great Bell was cast in London.  The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the makers of the Diamond Jubilee Bells, was founded in 1570 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. However, in recent years a historian has established a link from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to one Master Founder, Robert Chamberlain, who was active in the first quarter of the fifteenth century.  Thus, this Bell Foundry is thought to have been active as early  as the 1400s during the medieval period.  During the reign of Henry VIII, there can’t have been too many bell foundries in the London and it is likely that all the bell foundries would have been in the east outside the City walls.  The noise, smell and risk of fire would have kept the foundries outside populated area and downwind from the prevailing winds coming from the west.  There is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that the pre-Reformation church bells of Great Dunmow were cast in the same bell foundry that cast the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Bells, The Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

London and Westminster in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, anno dom. 1563,
© British Library Board.

It was these same church-bells which rang out the joy of Queen Elizabeth’s summer progress through the parish over thirty years later on Monday 25th August 1561.   Griff Rhys Jones, in the BBC’s new series on the Britain’s Lost Routes, charted Elizabeth’s 1570s progresses from Windsor Castle to Bristol.  In his programme, he doesn’t comment on the church bells that must have rung out heralding the Queen’s progress.  This is probably more because of the scarce survival of primary source evidence, rather than the pealing of the bells didn’t happen.  Great Dunmow is lucky to have any surviving evidence – and this was only because the churchwardens meticulously recorded the expense of 8d paid out to the Good Wife Barker  for her ale (Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts – folio 45v.)

There are no surviving church records of the churches in village surrounding Great Dunmow. However, it can be assumed that each village’s church rang out to celebrate the Queen’s progress: Felsted, Little Dunmow, Stebbing, Barnston, Great Dunmow, Little Canfield, Great Canfield, Takeley, and the villages of Hertfordshire surrounding Great Hallingbury. The ringing of the church bells would have been heard by all Elizabeth’s subjects during her progress through the Essex and Hertfordshire countryside.

You may also be interested in the following posts
– Transcripts of Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ account
– Diamond Jubilee
– Queen Elizabeth I’s Progresses through Elizabethan England

Notes about Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts
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 original churchwarden accounts (1526-1621) are in Essex Record Office (E.R.O.), Chelmsford, Essex, D/P 11/5/1.  All digital images within this blog appear by courtesy of Essex Record Office and may not be reproduced.

Examining these records from this Essex parish gives the modern reader a remarkable view  into the lives and times of some of Henry VIII’s subjects and provides an interpretation into the local history of Tudor Great Dunmow.

This 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.  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 25^th 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 25^th.  Therefore, she must have come through Great Dunmow sometime during the day of the 25^th.

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 20^th 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

– Court Officers
– Ladies in Waiting
– The Privy Chamber and the Privy Councillors
– Servants
– Other ranks

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 13^th century or 1^st quarter 14^th 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.

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You may also be interested in the following:
– Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Great Dunmow: Part 2
– Great Dunmow’s Churchwardens’ accounts: transcripts 1526-1621
– Tudor local history
– Elizabeth I

© Essex Voices Past 2012-2013.