| Archdeaconry records
and the family historian Joan
Dils
On 31st January 1569, the Archdeacon of Berkshire,
Thomas White, was holding his court at St. Helen's
Church, Abingdon. The case before him concerned a
middle-aged lady with a problem. Her new married name
was Anne Barber but she was previously Widow
Bradshaw, her husband, Thomas having died well over a
year before. She had married Thomas as the supposed
widow of John Fitzherbert, gent., whose wife she had
been for almost twenty years and who had fathered her
five children 'of which 4 be not alive'.1
He had gone overseas about 1553 and fourteen years
later she had word from another traveller that he had
died in Antwerp, hence her two subsequent marriages.
However she had recently heard rumours that he was
alive, and moreover some witnesses came to the court
saying they had seen him. To whom was she now validly
married?
The Archdeacon, or his Official, usually had less
problematic work. He was the 'eye' of the bishop and
often had legal qualifications since much of his work
involved matters of church law. Every diocese had its
archdeacons, supervising sub-divisions of the
diocese, archdeaconries, so helping the bishop to
administer and control his flock. The Salisbury
Diocese had two, Wiltshire and Berkshire, each
roughly co-terminous with the county, though
excluding areas of peculiar jurisdiction. At courts
held in large centres round his territory every few
weeks, and at his annual visitations, the Archdeacon
dealt with such non-contentious matters as the
probate of wills and the granting of licences for
schoolmasters, midwives and for marriage without
banns.2 He also judged those accused of
offences against church law: non-attendance at
church, deviation from the prescribed order of church
services, non-payment of tithes, libel and a range of
sexual misdemeanours including premarital sex,
irregular marriages and adultery. It is these latter
cases which have earned the archdeacon's court the
name of 'bawdy court', an inappropriate title, as
sexual immorality comprised a small proportion of his
work. He could order convicted offenders to do
penance or, as the ultimate penalty, excommunicate
them. Many offenders were reported to the court by
churchwardens, sometimes as the result of a set of
questions sent to them in advance of a visitation.
The questions would include the state of the church,
the service books, bible and sacred vessels but also
the spiritual and moral behaviour of the incumbent
and parishioners. Any matters dealt with because of
this process were called office cases. Others, called
instance cases, were brought by individuals
complaining of libel by neighbours, unfair treatment
in a will, breach of promise bv one partner in an
irregular marriage or adultery by a spouse. Ve brief
summaries of the cases and the archdeacon's
judgements were recorded, in abbreviated Latin in
volumes called Act Books. They are very difficult to
use without a good knowledge of Latin, secretary hand
and court procedure.3
In some instance cases the evidence of witnesses
for both parties was recorded in the form of written
answers (depositions) to written questions. There are
also a few examples of personal statements made by
defendants summoned to answer charges made against
them. The evidence is in documents called Deposition
Books, of which six survive for Berkshire between
1558 and 1620.4 The depositions themselves
are in English (though the rest of the court's
business was in Latin) and are perhaps the most
interesting of the archdeaconry records for the
family historian.
Though they are not easy to read - the clerks
wrote quickly in an inelegant secretary hand - the
search can be rewarding. They are unlikely to yield
details of individual family history since very few
people ever went to court and the records (unindexed)
cover whole counties, but they are a mine of
information about the way of life of our Tudor and
Stuart ancestors.5
Before giving their version of the events in
dispute, witnesses had
"He utter'd not one word of truth,
but with delusions led me on,
And cropt the rose-bud of my youth,
so that my splendid glory's gone:
My wounded heart no one can heal,
Too soon I left my spinning-wheel.
"I am a damsel now defil'd,
and am exposed to open shame,
For here I find myself with child,
and have no father for the same.
My very tears do's grief reveal,
Too soon I left my spinning-wheel.
to provide, as proof of their fitness to appear, a
truncated autobiography (duly translated into Latin
by the clerk before he wrote it down); this was
customary in church courts and in civil courts too. A
typical example in Berkshire is that of Thomas
Macall, thirty years old, born in Cholsey, who then
worked in Dorchester and Wallingford and in 1598 was
living in Sutton Courtenay, about nine miles from his
birthplace; or Thomas Fry of Abingdon, born there
twenty years before but who had spent three years in
London.
What is striking about many of these very
incomplete life histories is that two-thirds of
village witnesses and three-quarters of town dwellers
had left their birthplaces either temporarily or
permanently. Berkshire people were not unusual in
this; studies of church and quarter sessions courts
from many other counties show very similar results.6
Most people only moved a short distance, usually
within a ten-mile radius, to take up an
apprenticeship, to marry or to find work. At the age
of 76, Roger Taylor was a husbandman in Greenham
where he had spent sixteen years. Born at Bishopstone
in Wiltshire he had worked in Speen for nineteen
years, Sandleford for ten and Donnington for three.
Women were just as mobile, often leaving home as
teenagers to work as farm servants. Evidence from
hamlets in the large parish of Shrivenham illustrates
this very well. In 1571 Margaret Wise, aged nineteen,
had been working in Longcot for two years, before
which she was at Goosey, before that at Garsington,
Oxfordshire, though she was born at Highworth, a
small Wiltshire market town about four miles away
from Shrivenham. Joan Smith had been in Bour-ton for
about eight years, possibly working for Edmund and
Edith Dawbram, though the two previous years were
spent in the town of Wantage to which she travelled
from her home at Charney Bassett at the age of
sixteen. Somewhat older was Juliana Buckland, aged
thirty, who had come to Shrivenham from her
birthplace at Wroughton, Wiltshire about 1582; she
stayed for the next twenty years.
Others travelled long distances. Thomas Purcell
from Winkfield was a Salopian who had spent eight
years in London, continued to practise there as a
lawyer in the Court of King's Bench, and had friends
in Reading; Walter Bateman, a wealthy clothier of
Reading, was born in Kendall in the Lake District;
Simon Painton, a teenager working in Warfield, had
come from Worcester.
The evidence witnesses gave can be interesting but
more so are the details of daily life which were the
context in which they described events relevant to
the case. Many incidents happened at home. The rooms
of the Tudor and Stuart house are familiar from wills
and probate inventories; depositions describe how
they were used. The fireside in the hall was the
place to sit and chat with family, friends and
neighbours like those who on a September Sunday in
1567 went to visit Catherine Bradstock of Abingdon
who was expecting a baby soon. Friends invited to
dinner or supper would eat in the hall with the
family and sometimes watch the meal being prepared if
there was no kitchen.
There was little privacy for anyone. Few people
had a bedroom, or
even a bed of their own. Servants (including dairy
maids and farm workers) shared beds as a matter of
course, frequently referring to each other as
'bedfellows'. Occasionally a maidservant might share
a room with her mistress if the master was away, as
did Elizabeth Coles employed by Margaret Champion of
Reading. Even when young folk might assume they were
alone for some discreet courtship, they were often
overlooked; Thomas Roberts sent the family servant,
Margaret, out of the hall to give him time with his
sweetheart, Joan Bennet, in her father's house in
Newbury in 1565, but Margaret 'conveyed herself
privily to a little house thereby and did hear their
talk'.
Houses in town and country had their long gardens,
quaintly called 'backsides'. Here poultry and pigs
were kept and vegetables grown, but occasionally
important events such as formal betrothals took place
in this semi-public setting; John Ene and Alice Keate
were betrothed in the backside of Richard Keate's
house in Harwell in February 1560.
Houses of craftsmen in towns and of yeomen and
husbandmen in villages were workplaces and lodgings
for employees as well as homes for the master and his
family. Work was, in sociological terms, 'gender-related'
and for both men and women was physically demanding.
Women milked the cows in the fields, having a good
gossip on the way, scrubbed dirty clothes and tended
the garden; men worked in the fields or the workshop,
coming home for meals which were sometimes rather
meagre. William Lowe of Hampstead Marshall found only
'a cupple of eggs and a messe of milke' for his
supper in 1617. Hours were long yet there was always
'time to stand and stare' since machines and the
clock did not yet control the pace of work: Richard
Bowen left his tailor's loft in Reading in 1557 to
listen to a quarrel in the street outside.
Leisure activities were often simple and
traditional: bowls or football on the common, a visit
to an alehouse, a meal with friends. More elaborate
events involving all or some of the community
persisted despite the Reformation: beating the bounds
as at Newbury in Rogation Week; summer festivals like
the one at Wasing or Milton in 1590 when the young
people chose a 'whitson lord' or a 'summer lady' to
preside over their supper and celebrations in the
church house, and of course weddings when the whole
village joined in the festivities. Not all weddings
were formal affairs in church, solemnised by a
clergyman, much as the church tried to insist on it;
the old tradition of handfasting still survived but
how frequently is impossible to say since only where
things went wrong did the case come before the courts.
The essential elements of the ceremony were the
exchange of vows and the giving of tokens. In 1570 on
the Sunday before St. Mark's Day (23 April) in the
kitchen of his house, John Ridge claimed that he and
Margaret Bourne had exchanged vows saying, 'I, John
Ridge, do take you, Margaret, to wife' and she said
the same, 'then gave either of them faith and troth
and drew hands and kissed and in token of the same he
gave her a ring which she put on her finger in the
right hand.' If this were true and the union
consummated, then they were validly, if irregularly,
married. However the wording had to be in the present
tense and unconditional or there was no marriage. In
this case Margaret refuted John's version of events
and both brought witnesses to support their
respective cases. It is easy to see how handfasting
could make for endless arguments if one party decided
to end the relationship, and why the authorities
frowned on the practice.
Of family life after the wedding the church court
records give a very jaundiced view, similar to that
in lurid press reports of marriage breakup today.
Occasionally we glimpse what were probably normal
family relations: a husband and wife working together
in his carrier's business at Abingdon, or Mistress
Gastrell and her husband running their farm at East
Garston and only quarrelling with the vicar about the
tithe pig. Most family problems were probably sorted
out between themselves. When they weren't, the
community, and as a last resort the courts were
called on. Some married people, men and women, were
unfaithful such as Joan Godwin of Tilehurst who was
caught by her husband in bed with one of their
lodgers, Francis Headache, a carpenter, working on a
new house for Sir Peter Vanlore. Some wives were
assaulted by their husbands, so badly that they
needed medical attention: Robert Blake beat his wife,
Joan, throughout the three years of their marriage,
on one occasion so severely that the wound needed
dressing with sugar 'to stay the blood'. Others were
deserted. A few were over-domineering, refusing the
accepted role of the obedient, submissive wife.
Witnesses said that Eleanor Pincke of Milton slept
upstairs and her husband, Edmund, downstairs. He was,
they said, 'all togeather overruled by his wiffe',
who, to add to her sins, was having an affair with
William Coome. If matters reached crisis point, one
spouse might ask for a separation 'a thoro et mensa'
(from bed and table) as did John Keate who claimed
his wife, Dorothy, had committed adultery in his own
house and whom he suspected of plotting to kill him.
In all such cases the court would attempt to restore
traditional marital relations, though we can beg
leave to question how long any reconciliation might
last.
Other family arguments might occur over the
content of wills, the probate of which was granted by
the archdeacon. Sometimes the witnesses' evidence
throws light on will-making. On a Sunday morning in
September 1572 John Tesdale 'lay upon his bed in a
chamber called the Crosse Chamber in the New Inne at
Abingdon' surrounded by family and friends. He was
obviously dying and was persuaded to make his will.
It was written by a friend, Richard Bostock, on a
'table sitting on a forme...... by his bedde side
.... first he wrote one half and read that to hym [John
Tesdale] then wrote the rest and so read the whole to
hym and then he conformed hit'. Having several
witnesses to a will might be important if it were
challenged; in this case those present confirmed
Richard Bostock's account, adding a few details of
particular concern to themselves.
Such confirmation was even more important in the
case of a nuncupative will, often written down from
memory after the testator's death, or when he was so
sick as to be incapable of even putting his mark to
it. John Robbin's relations challenged his will in
which he gave all his goods to Richard West of
Abingdon with whose family he was living. The will
was written by a scrivener the day after he died,
Ralph Wise, who had also read some prayers by the
bedside. In such a situation, it was vital for the
beneficiary to be able to call on well-regarded
citizens to vouch that Robbins ,spoke sensibly' and
did not want to give anything to his kindred.
The everyday speech of ordinary folk is one of the
most interesting aspects of depositions. Time was not
always reckoned by the clock but by activities: 'a
little before milking tyme at nyght'; 'at candle-
tendinge' time; 'before the last change of the moon
before Michaelmas in the afternoon between dinner and
evensong'. Two young folk were said to have spent the
whole night 'until the grey morninge alone together
in the milkinge house'. Distances were expressed by
using familiar objects: the night was so dark that
lone might diseerne and know a man from a nother a
quayts [quoit'sl cast from him; 'he was so nere them
that he could have cut of a peace of his coate'. A
word which frequently occurs is ,cuckoo', used when a
man was being cuckolded by an unfaithful wife. As
Alice Bennet of Reading put it to Joan Forster's
husband in 1592, 'You are come out of the wood. I
think it is more and tyme for it is cuckowe tyme, and
the cuckoo is very loud'. Instead of words some
neighbours used actions, such as putting up a pair of
horns over the door of a house where they suspected
someone of adultery.
Much of the landscape and way of life which gave
rise to these expressions and actions has long since
disappeared. Such records as deposition books allow
us to recapture a small fraction of this lost world.
1 All the examples quoted in this article come
from the Archdeaconry of Berkshire Deposition Books (Berkshire
Record Office (D/ A2/c 40,46,61,153-5). Detailed
references will not be given.
2 For more details about the courts, though in
another diocese, see R. Houlbrooke, Church courts and
the people during the English Reformation 1520-1570,
(1979), and for details of cases see M. Ingram,
Church courts, sex and marriage in England 1570-1640
(1987)
3 A useful introduction to the Act Books is E.R.
Brinkworth, 'The study and use of the archdeacons'
court records: illustrated from the Oxford Records'
in Trans. of Royal Hist. Soc. 4th series 25 (1943)
4 In the Berkshire Archdeacon the answers alone
have survived for a few years in the 16th and early
17th centuries.
5 Some of the deposition books for the diocese of
Oxfordshire have been calendared by J. Howard-Drake
and published by Oxfordshire County Council.
6 See, for example, P. Clark, 'Migration in
England in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries'in Past and Present 83 (1979)
|
