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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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.

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.

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

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.