This September marks my 25th anniversary of arriving in Essex via the leafy (and not-so-leafy) suburbs of S’rf London. Having reached a landmark birthday in July, I can now say that I’ve spent exactly half my life living and breathing Essex air – but I am still considered an outsider to those living within its more rural areas. To say Essex is an “interesting” county is an understatement with its reputation as being one of England’s brashest and loudest counties – a reputation actively encouraged by television programmes such as The Only Way Is Essex. But, more positively, its long history is fascinating with a curious mix of influences from its neighbouring counties, alongside the local impact of monarch-enforced policies during the medieval and early modern period.
In 1958, John Betjeman (who became the Poet Laureate in the 1970s) complied a book on the churches of England. He personally wrote the introduction to the chapter on Essex’s churches. 50 years later, much of his observations on Essex still hold true today. Here are his pithy words, accompanied by my selection of images from vintage postcards and my own photographs, which I think perfectly encapsulates his words. John Betjeman wrote about my Essex. He wrote about the good, the bad, and the ugly (although not the beautiful Essex village of Ugly).
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“Essex is a large square with two sides water. It is a stronger contrast of beauty and ugliness than any southern English county. Most of what was built east of London in this and the last century was a little bit cheaper and little bit shoddier than that built in other directions. Southend is a cheaper Brighton. Clacton a cheaper Worthing and Dovercourt a cheaper Bournemouth. Over a million Londoners live Essex. Leyton, Canning Town, Silvertown, Barking, Ilford and West and East Ham are all in the county. Only the Norman parish church of East Ham and the scant abbey remains of Barking and Leyton parish church tell us that these were once country places. Our own age has added the planned and sad dormitories of Becontree and Harold Hill. Along the Thames bank factories and power stations can be seen for miles over the mud flats and the hills of Kent on the opposite bank look countrified by comparison.
The 12th Century St Mary Magdalene, East Ham in the early 1900s
Remains of Barking Abbey in 1818
Bradwell Power Station. Unsurprisingly, as it was built in the 1950s/1960s, I could not find vintage postcards of it. However, even modern postcard publisher didn’t think it worthy of a postcard. So, here is one of my own photographs taken in 2012 during one of our many walks around the banks of the River Blackwater.
But Essex is a large country and the ugliness is only a part of it. The county has the deepest and least disturbed country within reach of London. Between the Stour, Blackwater, Crouch and Thames Estuaries is flat agricultural scenery with its own old red brick towns with weather-boarded side streets like Rochford, Maldon and Georgian Harwich, the first named the headquarters of the Essex puritan sect, The Peculiar People. Colchester is, as Dr. Pevsner says in Essex (Buildings of England Series), more impressive than any town in England for ‘the continuity of its architectural interest. It began before the time of the Romans and lasted through to the 18th century’. The flat part of Essex has not the man-made look of the fens. It is wild and salty and its quality is well described in Baring-Gould’s novel of Mersea, Mehalah. It is part of that great plain which stretches across to Holland and Central Europe.
Heybridge Basin in the early 1900s. It is very much the same today with its weather-board clad cottages.
Maldon in the early 1900s. It is for valid reasons that the town is unkindly known throughout Essex as Maldon on the Mud. But, putting the oceans of mud aside, it is one of the nicest locations in the whole of Essex.
Osea Island and Northey Island from the rooftops of Maldon town centre. Two of the beautiful but wild islands within the Blackwater Estuary. Osea Island has a Roman-built causeway which is exposed twice a day at low tide. It has been much used by film-crews needing a desolate and bleak island. Most recently it was used in 2012 as the location of Eel Marsh Island for Daniel Radcliffe’s Woman in Black. Northey Island also has a twice-daily uncovered causeway, and is the alleged site of the Battle of Maldon in 991 AD when the Vikings invaded England.
Most of inland Essex, east and north of Epping Forest, is undulating and extremely pretty in the pale gentle way suited to English water-colours. Narrow lanes wind like streams through willowy meadows past weather-boarded mills and unfenced bean and corn fields. From elms and oaks on hilltops peep the flinty church towers, and some of the churches up here are as magnificent as those in neighbouring Suffolk – Coggeshall, Thaxted and Saffron Walden and Dedham are grand examples of the Perpendicular style. Thaxted, for the magnificence of its church and the varied textures of the old houses of its little town, is one of the most charming places in Britain.
Town Street, Thaxted in the early 1900s
Thaxted Guildhall, with Stony Lane running along its side. The second house in the lane is known as “Dick Turpin’s House”, although there is no evidence that this notorious highwayman lived in the town.
Chiefly, Essex is a place of varied building materials. “It would be interesting study from an antiquary of leisure to trace the various sources of materials employed in Essex church-building, and the means by which they were brought to their destination.” (G. Worly, Essex, A dictionary of the county, 1915). To build their churches, the East Saxons and the Normans used any material that came to hand, Roman tiles, split oak logs, as at Greensted, pudding stone taken from the beach deposits and flints. The 15th century tower of South Weald was made of ragstone brought across from Kent on the opposite shore. But chiefly Essex is county of brick which was made here as early as the 13th century. There are many brick church towers with unexampled beauty, red as bonfire; there are brick arcades and brick porches and brick window tracery. And when they left off building churches in this beautiful red brick, moulded into shapes and patterned with blue sanded-headers, the Essex people continued it in houses until the past century.
The beautiful Tudor red-brick building of Layer Marney, where I was married.
Essex looks its best in sunlight when the many materials of its rustic villages, the brick manor houses, the timbered “halls” and the cob and thatched churches, the weather-boarded late Georgian cottages, the oaks and elms and flints recall Constable. The delightful little town of Deham and one half of the Stour Valley, be it remembered, are in Essex, and were as much an inspiration to Constable as neighbouring Suffolk, where he was born, and to which Essex is often so wrongly regarded as a poorer sister. It may be poorer in church architecture, but what it lacks in architecture it makes up for in the delicacy and variety of its textures.”
John Betjeman’s Essex is my Essex – full of textures that change from village to village, town to town. And Essex is at its most beautiful bathed in the sunlight…
Old wooden beach huts at Mill Beach on the River Blackwater
Sailing boats by the Blackwater Sailing Club. The red sails of a Thames Barge in the distance.
The sun setting over Saltcote Maltings.
Christopher Sexton, Essexiae Comitat’ Nova Vera ac Absoluta Descriptio (1576)
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Like many of my readers, I cannot resist a good rummage around an antique or junk shop. My recent foraging uncovered an excellent book, which I just have to share with you. An Essex Dialect Dictionary is a dictionary of the dialect of early twentieth century Essex, and was written in 1923 by Edward Gepp – the then retired vicar of High Easter (a small very rural village in North-West Essex – a few miles from Great Dunmow).
The blurb on the front is a delicious description of folk living in north Essex in the 1920s. I’m not sure that Mr Gepp would be able to call the folk of Essex “peasants” today and live to tell the tale!
A very valuable contribution to dialectical lexicography, the result of seventeen years’ continuous work amongst the Essex peasantry. Incidentally it throws much interesting light on rustic life, character and humour. Essex singularly remote as it is from railways and main-roads, is a peculiarly favourable county for the observation and collection of uncontaminated folk-speech and folk-lore and Mr Gepp has devoted endless toil and special knowledge to the compilation of his work.
Although only an honourary Essex girl – I was born in Surrey and raised in Gloucestershire but have spent my adult life in Essex – many of the words and terms in the dictionary I recognise from my own childhood within rural Surrey/Gloucestershire. Gepp’s examples of how the words were used in local Essex speech are somewhat curious and show the type of terms still in use in rural Essex at the beginning of the last century.
Do you recognise any of this small sample of words and terms – all of which begin with “A”?
AGIN: against – “I hain’t got nothin’ agin ye” “she live agin the pump” “have ut ready agin I come back”
AHUH: awry/crooked – “Them there post-es is all ahuh”
ALARMING: used as a verb – “She goo on stuff’n ‘larm’n”
AN: if – “There’s t’ many ifs an’ ans”
ANDRER: a buffon (a dialect abbreviation of merry-andrew). An old woman asked why she did not dress in white replied “Why, I should look like a andrer”
ANGLE: vaguely, a locality, direction “A knowed ’twas somewhere about that angle”
ARGAFY: to argue “That don’t argafy” (i.e. it cannot be argued); “I can’t stand argufying here about charity”
ARSY-VARSY: upside down “The estate of that flourishing towne was turned arsie varsie”
ASK: to publish banns of marriage. When the banns have been published three times the parties are said to be out-asked.
The village of High Easter in the early twentieth century
Gepps Close in High Easter village
I look forward to bringing you more terms from this fascinating book about Essex country-life.
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Today’s post is about the contents of Tudor wills and how they can be used to inform the modern-day reader about religion during the turbulent reigns of Henry VIII and his three children. The text below formed one of the chapters within my dissertation Religion and Society in Great Dunmow, Essex, c.1520 to c.1560 from my Cambridge University’s Masters of Studies in Local and Regional history awarded to me in January 2012. The text here is in its entirety from my dissertation so reads more as an academic essay rather than a blog post. For this blog post, I have included headings (to break up the text) and images, my original was both heading-less and image-less. If you are wondering why my introduction and conclusion are so short, remember that this is just one chapter in a very lengthy 100 page dissertation and I had a very strict word count to adhere to. The dissertation’s overall introduction and conclusion was far more comprehensive. I have also had to re-arrange the two tables on this post from their original positions within my dissertations – so Table 2 now comes before Table 1. The research of wills I undertook for my dissertation is very different to my normal genealogical research. For genealogical research, I am normally sifting through the personal bequests so to find evidence of family relationships. But for my dissertation, I had to totally ignore family relationships and go for the ‘other bequests’.
St Mary the Virgin, the Parish church of Great Dunmow, circa 1910-20.
Introduction
Historians have studied the wills of many English parishes to gain understanding about the impact of the Reformation. Eamon Duffy examined the wills of the Yorkshire village of Otley(1) and Caroline Litzenberger, in her analysis of the Reformation Gloucestershire, studied the wills of approximately 8,000 testators(2). Therefore, the analysis of wills is a significant methodology employed by historians to provide evidence for the acceptance (or non-acceptance) of religious changes during the Reformation.
Methodology
The methodology used for this article has been to locate, transcribe and analyse all wills for Great Dunmow for the period 1517 to 1565: 40 wills in total.(3) Litzenberger divided her Gloucestershire wills into elite and non-elite wills, but this division is not possible for Great Dunmow’s much smaller sample. Table 1 and Table 2 displays the results from this analysis and this article examines those results.
Great Dunmow’s 1523-4 Lay Subsidy assessments listed 139 tax-payers and 1525-6 church steeple collection listed 165 donations. From these figures, it can be deduced many wills have not survived. Those that have are
thirty-seven wills proved in the archdeacons’ court of the Commissary of the Bishop of London (originals held by the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford);
two proved in the London Consistory Court (official copies held by the London Metropolitan Archive in London); and,
one proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (official copy held by The National Archives in Kew).
The discovery of only two wills proved in the London Consistory Court is particularly disappointing. However, this has been caused because the registers from 1521 to 1539 are missing.(5) Moreover, the first surviving Great Dunmow will that was proved in this court, is from 1559. This demonstrates there are other inconsistencies within the surviving registers from the 1540s and 1550s with the wills for Great Dunmow almost totally missing. Great Dunmow was in the archdeaconry of Middlesex but many nearby towns and villages (for example, Maldon and Chelmsford) were in the archdeaconry of Essex. Any testator with land in only one archdeaconry had their will proved in that archdeacon’s court (and therefore, now their original wills are held by Essex Record Office). However, testators with land in more than one archdeaconry had theirs proved in the London Consistory Court (i.e. the official copies of their wills will be held by the London Metropolitan Archives in London). Therefore, many wills for the years 1520 to 1559 are missing for parishioners who were the ‘middling sort’ or elite (i.e. they owned land/property in both Great Dunmow and neighbouring villages or towns). The missing registers almost exactly span the offices of two incumbents of the bishopric of London: Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop 1522 to 1530(6) ; and John Stokesley, bishop 1530 to 1539(7). It could be speculated that the missing volumes were lost not long after these dates, perhaps handed over to the Elizabethan martyrologist, John Foxe, for his examination of early martyrs within the diocese of London.(8)
There is evidence within Great Dunmow’s Henrician churchwardens’ accounts which can also be used for will analysis. These accounts document six gifts of money from named parishioners to the church, but the wills from these people have not survived. However, as these donations were likely to have originated from wills, they have been included within this analysis. For example, vicar Robert Sturton’s missing will would undoubtedly contain a bequest to the church, as there is a 1528 churchwardens’ accounts entry ‘of[f] wylyem sturton of ye gyfte of M[aster] Sturton sumtyme vycar of thys chyrche…liijs iiijd [53s 4d]’(9). The churchwardens were diligent in recording bequests and gifts to the church in their accounts. This can be detected from John Skylton’s will of 1533 in which he left a bequest of 13s 4d to the church. This exact amount duly appeared in that year’s churchwardens’ accounts, given to the churchwardens by his wife.(10) Therefore, there is credibility to include gifts recorded within the churchwardens’ accounts within this analysis of wills.
Above, Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts (folio 9r) showing the gift from the former vicar. ‘Ite[m] Rec[ieved] of wylyem sturton of ye gyfe of M[aster] Sturton sumtyme vycar of thys chyrche liijs iiijd (53s 4d)‘.
Will of John Skylton of Great Dunmow (January 1533), Essex Record Office D/ABW 8/28. The Tudor scribe who wrote the will (above) couldn’t write in straight lines! The request to the church starts on the third line… ‘hie awter [high altar – this is the end of Skylton’s tithe bequest] of the church – xxd [20d] also to the rep[er]ations [repairs] of the church of Du[n]mowe xiijs iiijd [13s 4d] also to the church of powles iiijd [4d – this is the bequest to St Paul’s cathedral in London]‘.
And here’s the entry in Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts showing that his widow had duly handed over the bequest to the church ‘Ite[m] Rc [Received] of Jone [Joan] Skylton of the gyfte of John Skylton – xiijs iiijd [13s 4d]’.
Analysis of Soul Bequests [The table below for soul bequests was originally on an A3 sheet of paper. I have had to shrink it so that it fits this blog post. Click it to display it within a new window and then use your zoom facility to increase the size of the text. The wills for Elizabeth’s reign are only up until 1565 as this is the point my dissertation ended.]
Soul bequests within preambles of wills have been used by historians of Reformation England to ascertain religious changes. A Catholic preamble would include words similar to ‘almyghtie god & to our blyssed lady saynt mary the virgyn & to all the holy company of heaven’(11). An evangelical or Protestant might include words such as ‘Almighty God and his only Son our Lord Jesus Christ, by whose previous death and passion I hope only to be saved’(12). Somewhere in between would be other types of soul bequests. Litzenberger divided her wills into three major categories: ‘Traditional’ [i.e. Catholic], ‘Ambiguous’, and ‘Protestant’, and within these categories, wills were further sub-divided. Litzenberger’s categories have been used as a framework for the analysis of soul bequests for Great Dunmow’s wills; as demonstrated in Table 2. Categorising soul bequests have to be handled with caution. Wills were only ambiguous if there were no other bequests indicating that they were traditional. Some wills contain either a final stipulation to the executors to provide for the wealth/health of the testator’s soul, or the bequest for ‘tithes forgotten’. The existence of either clause, it can be argued, was the sign of a traditional will, as discussed below. Moreover, ambiguity might have been a defence employed by traditionalists against an increasingly hostile environment.(13) This strategy of ambiguity by traditionalists might account for the eight ambiguous Edwardian wills made during evangelical vicar Geoffrey Crisp’s time. Furthermore, a Protestant was unlikely to use an ambiguous soul bequest and would almost certainly proclaim their religion in unmistakable language.(14) Table 2 demonstrates there were no unquestionably Protestant soul bequests within the surviving wills of Great Dunmow.
Analysis of other bequests (not family)
There are other limitations when using wills for the analysis of religious belief. Duffy comments ‘wills tell us more about the external constraints on testators than they do about shifting private belief.’(15) External constraints could be the religious policy imposed by the monarch, for example, the Edwardian denouncement of purgatory, trentals and masses.(16) There were other constraints, including the scribe who wrote the will and the testator’s witnesses. Margaret Spufford, in her work on sixteenth and seventeenth century wills was the first historian to observe a will could be written by a scribe.(17) She stated
A man lying on his death bed must have been much in the hands of the scribe writing his will. He must have been asked specific questions about his temporal bequests, but unless he had strong religious convictions, the clause bequeathing the soul may well have reflected the opinion of the scribe or the formulary book the latter was using, rather than those of the testator. (18)
Some wills indisputably demonstrate the testator had not been influenced by a scribe or witness. Great Dunmow’s Marian will of Thomas Baker contains a traditional soul bequest along with bequests for tithes forgotten; and, even more revealingly, an obit and a solemnly sang dirge.
A priest providing Extreme Unction (the Last Rites) to a man in bed, from Pontifical; Tabula (England, 1st quarter of the 15th century), British Library’s shelfmark Lansdowne 451 f.234.
There is evidence of a Henrician scribe who was active in two 1520s wills from Great Dunmow, and he possibly used a book containing standard formulaic clauses. This type of precedent book was not unusual during the Tudor period.(19) The will of widow Clemens Bowyer, dated February 1526, almost exactly mimics the earlier will of John Wakrell (October 1525). Both wills have the same soul bequests (Catholic, as would be expected from this period); along with bequests to the high altar, to Saint John’s gild, to the church’ torches, and to the ‘moder holy chyrch of polye [St Paul’s] in London’. Both wills have a bequest for an ‘honest prest to synge a tryntall [trental] for my sol & all crysten solls yn ye p[ar]rsche churche’. However this is crossed out in Bowyer’s will. It is possible the scribe copied the wording from his precedent book, and Bowyer made him cross it out. Trentals were a series of 30 Masses performed within one year, with three Masses on each of the ten major feast-days of Christ and Mary; the priest also had to perform other liturgical duties throughout the year.(20) This was a substantial undertaking, as demonstrated by Wakrell’s bequest of 10s for his trental. Maybe Bowyer did not have sufficient funds, and so made the scribe delete the bequest. This scribe was probably the parish priest, Sir William Wree who was witness to these and one other will. Also witness to Wakrell’s will was former vicar, Robert Sturton, described as ‘p[ar]rsche prest’. Sturton had resigned as vicar in 1523, so he was still performing some of his previous clerical duties.
Will of John Wakrell of Great Dunmow (October 1525), Essex Record Office D/ABW 39/7. The trental bequest reads (from the second word): ‘It[e]m I be q[u]esthe [bequeath] unto an honest prest to synge a tryntall [trental] for my sol [soul] & all crysten [Christian] solls [souls] yn ye p[ar]iche chyrch \of D[u]nmowe a fore sayde xs [10s]’.
Will of Clemens Boywer [Bowyer] of Great Dunmow (February 1526), Essex Record Office D/ABW 3/8. The first crossing out is the trental: ‘It[e]m I bequethe to han [sic] honest prest to sy [n] ge [sing] a try[n]tall [trental] yn ye p[ar]rshe of myche [Much i.e. ‘Great’] D[u]nmow aforsad’. (Were pre-Reformation priests anything other than ‘honest’?)
Old St Paul’s Cathedral – the ‘moder[mother] holy chyrch of polye [Paul] in London’ mentioned by 7 testators of Tudor Great Dunmow. St Paul’s was the mother church of the Diocese of London, and this diocese included the parish of Great Dunmow. The cathedral was the largest church in England and had the tallest spire in England. The spire was struck by lightning in 1561 and not replaced. St Paul’s was destroyed in 1666 – a casualty of the Great Fire of London. Sir Christopher Wren designed the new cathedral – one of the iconic images of today’s London.
Witnesses to Wills The vicars and priests of the parish were witnesses to many wills. However, the decline in priests as witnesses demonstrates fewer priests were within the parish after Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Sir Edmund Clarke was witness to three traditional wills in the 1530s. Evangelical vicar Crisp, was witness to two Edwardian wills in 1551 and 1553; both with ambiguous soul bequests to ‘almighty god, my maker and redeemer’. Catholic vicar John Bird was witness to one traditional Marian will. The vicars must have witnessed many wills and surely influenced some testators by imposing their own beliefs on their dying parishioners. However, Elizabethan vicar, Richard Rogers, a former Protestant exile who spent Mary’s reign in Frankfurt,(21) did not enforce his beliefs on the wills of his parishioners. Seven Elizabethan wills were written during his tenure, although he was not witness to any of them. None of these wills were unequivocally and unmistakably Protestant: indeed the 1563 will of Gilbert Cooke had a traditional soul bequest including ‘the blesyd company of heavne’.
Priest administering last rites
from The Dunois Hours (Paris, c. 1440 – c. 1450 (after 1436))
British Library’s shelfmark Yates Thompson 3 f.211 .
The limitations of using wills to determine religious belief Wills do not always accurately reflect the complete representation of a testator’s religious beliefs. In an investigation of late Medieval wills for All Saints, Bristol, the author of the study found the wills of some of the elite did not include bequests to the parish church.(22) However, the parish’s Church Books demonstrate that during these testators’s lifetime, substantial gifts, such as gilding of the Lady altar, and the refurbishment of the rood loft, had been made to the church. Furthermore, a wife often made donations after her husband’s death but during her lifetime, on behalf of them both. This generosity would most likely not have appeared in either the husband’s or his widow’s wills. This discrepancy between a testator’s will and the gifts made during their lifetime is also true within Great Dunmow. For example, Miles Docleye’s Edwardian will of 1551 has an ambiguous soul bequest and only bequests to his family; there are no religious bequests. It would appear his will was ambiguous but conforming to Edward’s Protestantism. However, Docleye, who must have been at least in his 50s when he died, had given money to each of the parish’s seven collections for traditional religious items during the 1520s and 1530s. It is impossible to determine if his beliefs had changed or if his will was conforming to Edwardian policy. It was probably the latter. This one example demonstrates that the analysis of wills for religious beliefs has its limitations. The laity of Great Dunmow had been investing in traditional religious artefacts throughout the 1520s and 1530s, but these donations are not apparent from their wills.
The importance of ‘tithes negligently forgotten’ The bequest to the high altar for ‘tithes negligently forgotten’ clause was an important part of pre-Reformation wills; and all ten Henrician wills have this bequest. One of the duties of the parish priest was to pronounce the Great Excommunication or General Sentence to his parishioners four times a year.(23) This proclaimed transgressions against the church; and debts (including unpaid tithes) were such transgressions. The bequest ensured the testator cleared his or her debt to the church and so their soul could benefit from prayers. Furthermore, unpaid debts meant the testator’s soul would be longer in purgatory, so this was an important bequest for traditional religion. Henry VIII banned the reading of the General Sentence in parish churches because it was vehemently against those who appropriated Church property or contested the authority of the Church(24), and, of course, Henry VIII had unquestionable contested the Pope’s authority in England.
This prohibition, along with the Edwardian theological retreat from the concept of purgatory,(25) was perhaps the reason why none of Great Dunmow’s Edwardian wills have the tithes to the high altar bequest. Moreover, the Great Dunmow’s high altar had been destroyed on the orders of Edward VI.(26) However, four Marian wills do have the clause; of these, three also have a traditional soul bequest. These four wills were written in 1557 and 1558; so it is possible this bequest was not included in earlier Marian wills because Great Dunmow’s high altar was still to be rebuilt after Catholic Mary came to the throne of England. In Elizabeth’s reign, Elizabeth Dygbey’s will written in December 1558 (i.e. one month after Mary’s death), also had a traditional soul bequest, along with the tithes clause. This was before the Marian high altar was taken down sometime between 1559 and 1561.(27) In 1564, John Byckner used a variation of the tithes bequest for a will which was otherwise ambiguous; the high altar had again been destroyed, so he left his money for ‘tithes forgotten’ to the ‘curate’. Byckner’s will is unusual because, apart from Dygbey’s will written shortly after Mary’s death, no other early Elizabethan will contains the tithes bequest. If this John Byckner, a wax chandler, was the same John Byckner, who lived in the High Street in 1525-6,(28) he would have been at least in his 60s and so perhaps had some of the old, traditional habits. This confirms the remark, ‘Wills were made usually by the old, who were generally less open to new ideas than the young or middle aged.’(29)
A priest excommunicating a group of people by raising a candle
from Omne Bonum (Ebrietas-Humanus) (London, England, c.1360-c.1375)
British Library’s shelfmark Royal 6 E VII f.75v.
Conclusion
The analysis within this articles has demonstrated that bequests within wills alone cannot substantially confirm the religious faith of a testator. However, it is clear that collectively the wills of Great Dunmow do demonstrate significant changes over time. Bequests to the church almost totally stopped after Henry VIII’s reign, in all probability because his attack on traditional religious artefacts made parishioners cautious. Not a single Edwardian testator made an unequivocally Protestant will, even with evangelical vicar Crisp present. Mary’s reign demonstrated a shift back towards traditional religion, with bequests to the high altar, and obits. The early years of Elizabeth’s reign demonstrate that wills had once again started to move away from traditional bequests. However, external factors could influence a testator’s will, for example, religious changes enforced by the monarch, local vicars, scribes and witnesses, and the age of the testator. Therefore wills cannot provide the complete account of the parishioners of Great Dunmow’s changing beliefs. Moreover, Henrician and Marian anti-Catholic events did take place in the parish with the 1546 re-enactment of the murder of Cardinal Beaton, and Thomas Bowyer’s disobedience to the re-established Catholic Church. Therefore, wills can provide only a limited narrative regarding the changes experienced by this parish during the Reformation.
Details of a funeral
from Book of Hours, Use of Sarum
(England, S. E. (Suffolk, Bury St Edmunds?), 2nd or 3rd quarter of the 15th century)
British Library’s shelfmark Arundel 302 f.77v.
Church End, Great Dunmow, postcard circa 1910-20.
Footnotes
(1) Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (2nd edn., 2005), pp.515-21.
(2) Caroline Litzenberger, The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire, 1540-1580 (Cambridge, 1997), pp.168-178.
(3) (n/a to this blog)
(4) This includes six monetary gifts, as documented in Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, but a corresponding will has not survived.
(5) London Metropolitan Archives, Diocese of London Consistory Court Wills index (2011), (At the time of writing my dissertation, these indexes were in pdf file format and online at http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk. However they do not appear to be there at present.)
(6) D. Newcombe, ‘Tunstal, Cuthbert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online Edition, May 2011), http://www.oxforddnb.com
(7) Andrew Chibi, ‘Stokesley, John’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online Edition, May 2011), http://www.oxforddnb.com
(8) Personal correspondence, Richard Rex, Cambridge, March 2011.
(9) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fo.7r.
(10) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fol.18v.
(11) Will of Katherine Smythe (1558), Essex Record Office, D/ABW/33/335.
(12) Margaret Spufford, ‘The Scribes of Villagers’ Wills in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and their influence’, Local Population Studies (1972), pp.28-43 at 29.
(13) Correspondence, Rex.
(14) Correspondence, Rex.
(15) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, p.508.
(16) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, p.505.
(17) Margaret Spufford, Scribes of Villagers’ Wills, pp.28-43.
(18) Margaret Spufford, Scribes of Villagers’ Wills, p30.
(19) Correspondence, Rex.
(20) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, pp.370-371.
(21) Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles (Cambridge, 1966), p.273.
(22) Clive Burgess, ‘”By Quick and by Dead”: Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval Bristol’, The English Historical Review, 102 (October 1987), pp.837-858 at p.842.
(23) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, pp.356-7.
(24) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, pp.356-7.
(25) Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars, pp.504.
(26) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fo.40v.
(27) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fo.44v.
(28) Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts, fo.2v.
(29) Robert Whiting, Local Responses to the English Reformation (Basingstoke, 1998), p.130.
(30) The first two columns of Table 2 have been taken from Caroline Litzenberger, The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire, 1540-1580 p.172
Notes Great Dunmow’s original churchwarden accounts (1526-1621) are in Essex Record Office (E.R.O.), Chelmsford, Essex, D/P 11/5/1. All digital images of the accounts within this blog appear by courtesy of Essex Record Office and may not be reproduced. Examining these records from this Essex parish gives the modern reader a remarkable view into the lives and times of some of Henry VIII’s subjects and provides an interpretation into the local history of Tudor Great Dunmow.
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Transcription of Tudor Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts (1525-6)
1
Item to Rychard scoryar for pavynge in ye cherche[Item to Richard Scoryar for paving in the church]
xd
2
&ffor mendyng of a hole on ye fuvll(??)[& for mending a hole on the ??]
3
Item payde ffor ye reste of ye gyldyng of owr ladye[Item paid for the rest of the gilding of Our Lady’s]
xijs iijd
4
tabarnakyll & all ye yrynwark yt longye ye to[tabernacle & all the ironwork it belongs to]
5
Item for curtan ryngs for ye same tabernakyll[Item for curtain rings for the same tabernacle]
iijd
6
Item \payde/ ffor parte off ye dore yt is sett on ye owte syde off ye new warke[Item paid for part of the door which is on the outside of the new work]
xijd
7
Layd owte ffor ye stepyll [heading][Laid out for the steeple]
8
In primis – ffor ij tun off ston wt ye carryynge[Firstly, for 2 tons of stone with the carrying (ie carriage)]
xxvis viijd
9
& Amd(??) all other costs & charge ye sum[& along?? all other costs & charges the sum]
10
Item payde to John Atkynson ffor viij dayes warke & halfe[Item paid to John Atkinson for 8 and a half days work]
ijs xd
11
to fett ye scaffalde tymber & to gay(??) roddye[to fetch the scaffold timber & to ????]
12
ffor to make ye hardylls wt dyvers oyr besynes[for to make the hardalls (handles?) with divers (ie sundry other) our business]
13
Item ffor ij dayes warke off henry longe & hys cart[Item for 2 dayes work from Henry Long & his cart]
iijs iiijd
14
to fett home tymber for ye scaffawde & ye bryke from ayston[to fetch home timber for the scaffold & the brick from Easton (ie either Great or Little Easton –nearby Essex villages)]
15
Item ffor ye borde thee(??) ij dayes[Item for the bord(er?) 2 days]
viijd
16
Item to Thomas Savage ffor xv dayes wark to[Item to Thomas Savage for 15 days work to]
vs
17
purvey pyce(??) stufe As ye workmen showelde need[?? ?? stuff as the workman should need]
18
Item& to sett them a werke & helpe to stage wt oyr[& to set them to work & help to stage with our]
19
Item ye same tyThomas for ij dayes jornay to camrege[Item the same Thomas for 2 dayes journay to Cambridge]
ijs
20
& to dyttun to seke for ye ston my hys costs for myhys horse & hyme\selfe/[& to Duton (Duton Hill, nearby Essex village) to seek for the stone his costs for his horse & himself]
21
Item ffor goynge to haddam to speke for ye lyme[Item for going to Haddam (a village in Hertfordshire – probably Much Haddam) to speek for the lime]
iijd
22
Item ffor goynge ij tymye to thaxsted for buttoll[Item for going 2 times to Thaxted (a nearby Essex town) for ??]
iiijd
23
to a made ye stagynge becawce he was expert in ye making[to make the staging because he was expert in the making (of this)]
24
Item ffor a load of lyme from haddam pryce[Item for a load of lime from Haddam (a village in Hertfordshire – probably Much Haddam), price
viijs
25
Item ffor a fewe of lyme fett att haddam wt ye cost[Item for a few(??) of lime fetched at Haddam with the cost]
xixd
26
Item ffor xij bosshall off shalnerd lyme[Item for 12 bushalls of ?? lime]
xviijd
27
Item ffor qrt naylle \and/ to john brewer of tayclay[Item for quart of nails and to John Brewer of Takeley (nearby Essex/Hertfordshire village)]
ijs ixd
28
Item payde to Thomas Averell fo nayle[Item paid to Thomas Averell for nails]
jd
29
Item ffor iij ston off scaffalde lyne <illegible> a half[Item for 3 stone(??) of scaffold line a half]
iiijd xd
30
Item for ij ropys to wynd up ye tymber & ston pryce[Item for 2 ropes to wind up the timber & stone, price]
iijs vd
31
Item to robarde kelynge ffo xxij dayes warke & half[Item to Robert Kelynge for 22 dayes work]
xis
32
for to make ye stagynge wt oyr besynes wt mete & drynk[for to make the staging with our business with meat & drink]
33
Item to Thomas dygby for iiij dayes warke &[Item to Thomas Digby for 3 days work &]
xixd
34
for to make hardell for ye stagynge[for to make the hardall(??) for the staging]
35
Item for mete & drynke \when we/ wente to choce ye okye[Item for meat & drink when we went to choose the oak
iiijd
36
Item ffor wex & for Rofyn for to mak syme(??) for ye stayer[Item for wax & for Ruffin(??) to make ?? for the stairs.
xiid
The Voice of Great Dunmow’s scribe This blog has many readers from the North Essex and Suffolk area. To them (and, of course, to my other readers too) I say… can’t you just hear the Suffolk accent shining through this folio! Say the names of the following villages and towns out loud and you will hear that scribe from five-hundred years ago! Remember, the scribe was writing phonetically, so pronounce each word out-loud phonetically and you will hear our long-dead, invisible, but always present, scribe.
Ayston (ie Great Easton or Little Easton)
Camrege (ie Cambridge – I love saying this one out loud… to start with, a nice hard ‘cAM’ and then growl out that ‘r’ to get the soft Suffolk burr to the ‘rege’! Wonderful!)
Dyttun (ie Duton Hill)
Tayclay (ie Takeley. This town is now pronounced ‘Take-Leigh’. So try out you best Tudor accent: try the ‘Tay’ and then sound out that ‘clay’!)
Thaxsted (ie Thaxted, everyone I know still pronounces this town’s name as Thaxsted, despite its modern day spelling! Thaxted is one of Essex’s jewels-in-the-crown of beautiful villages. The town has many medieval buildings still standing including the beautiful medieval church (pictured below) which is more like a cathedral in its dramatic size and dimensions and the town’s medieval guildhall. This town is well worth a visit to tourists visiting Great Britain. If anyone is visiting this area during June or July, then I strongly recommend the Thaxted Festival for an evening of beautiful music in a remarkable location.
Being able to ‘hear’ the sound of our Tudor scribe is the very reason why this blog is called Essex Voices Past and also why my pseudonym is ‘The Narrator’. I can only merely narrate the stories from Great Dunmow’s past, the Tudor scribe can speak perfectly well for himself.
Unwitting Testimony There are several items on this folio that we can use unwitting testimony to interpret the entry. For example:
Line 3: ‘paid for the rest of the gilding of Our Lady’s Tabernacle’. Although we are now five folios into the leather-bound churchwardens’ book, we are still on in the first year of the accounts recorded within it. Therefore, this entry implies a couple of things, firstly the initial gilding was done (or paid for) prior to the start of the account-book (so perhaps in the years 1524-5), and secondly that the tabernacle must have been large because the payment was in (at least) two parts and this instalment was for 12s 4d (a significant sum).
Line 6: ‘New work’. What new work? It’s not itemised in the accounts and so must have occurred prior to the start of the churchwardens’ accounts in 1525-6. The very way it’s described implies that this was an area of the church that everyone knew as the ‘new work’.
Line 20: the crossed out ‘my’. This is intriguing. Was Thomas Savage the unknown scribe? Unlikely, as he was the churchwarden. Also, the entries on this folio imply that he was the builder commissioned to build the steeple (and the person who contributed the largest amount towards the same steeple!) Maybe the scribe was copying entries into the leather-bound account-book from various people’s loose receipts and he was busy word-for-word copying Thomas Savage’s receipt and accidently wrote ‘my’.
Church Steeple Finally we are into the expenses for the building of the new church steeple. Anyone who has seen Great Dunmow’s beautiful church will know that there is certainly not a steeple in existence now (and the church hasn’t had one in living memory). However, here we have costs for the timber, the scaffolding, stones and limes. Perhaps the Victorian vicar of Great Dunmow, W. T. Scott, was correct in his assessment that this merely for repairs, new windows and a wooden spire.
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.
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)
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.
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The village of High Easter in the early twentieth century
Gepps Close in High Easter village
St Mary the Virgin, the Parish church of Great Dunmow, circa 1910-20.
Above, Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts (folio 9r) showing the gift from the former vicar. ‘Ite[m] Rec[ieved] of wylyem sturton of ye gyfe of M[aster] Sturton sumtyme vycar of thys chyrche liijs iiijd (53s 4d)‘.
Will of John Skylton of Great Dunmow (January 1533), Essex Record Office D/ABW 8/28. The Tudor scribe who wrote the will (above) couldn’t write in straight lines! The request to the church starts on the third line… ‘hie awter [high altar – this is the end of Skylton’s tithe bequest] of the church – xxd [20d] also to the rep[er]ations [repairs] of the church of Du[n]mowe xiijs iiijd [13s 4d] also to the church of powles iiijd [4d – this is the bequest to St Paul’s cathedral in London]‘.
And here’s the entry in Great Dunmow’s churchwardens’ accounts showing that his widow had duly handed over the bequest to the church ‘Ite[m] Rc [Received] of Jone [Joan] Skylton of the gyfte of John Skylton – xiijs iiijd [13s 4d]’.
Church End, Great Dunmow, postcard circa 1910-20.
The beautiful Thaxted church, home of the yearly 
