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 University -of California 
 
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PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY. No. 15 
 
 EDITED BY C. JOHNSON, M.A., AND J. P. WHITNEY, B.D., D.C.L. 
 
 PARISH HISTORY 
 AND RECORDS 
 
 BY 
 
 A. HAMILTON THOMPSON 
 
 M.A., F .S*A. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING 
 CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1919 
 
Ob 
 
 -73" 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND 
 RECORDS 
 
 THE parish has an ecclesiastical origin, and, al- 
 though the word has acquired a wider sense in 
 comparatively modern times, it still means to 
 most people a local area with its centre in a village 
 with a parish church. As a matter of fact, like 
 the word " diocese," its original sense has been 
 considerably limited. The diocese (BioLKija-i<!, 
 dioecesis) in the organisation of the later Roman 
 empire was a civil division including many pro- 
 vinces: Britain, Gaul, Italy and Spain each formed 
 one of the thirteen dioceses into which the empire 
 was divided at the time of the death of Theodosius 
 the Great. As the Christian Church spread through- 
 out the Roman dominions, ecclesiastical establish- 
 ments, under the presidency of bishops, were 
 founded in large provincial cities. The districts 
 to which their missionary efforts extended re- 
 ceived the title of dioceses. These, as necessity 
 arose, were subdivided: bishops were appointed 
 as suffragans or assistants to the bishop of the 
 mother-city, each with jurisdiction over a parish 
 ia, paroecia ^or parochia) or subordinate 
 5 
 
6 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 diocese with its own local cathedral church and a 
 residence for its bishop. 1 In process of time, the 
 large area of the diocesan parish became too 
 populous for its constant supervision by the bishop 
 and his central body of clergy and was mapped 
 out into a number of local divisions, each having 
 a church and resident priest or parson. To these 
 small areas the name of parish became applied; 
 while, -similarly, the original parish to which they 
 belonged acquired the name of diocese, and the 
 original ecclesiastical diocese, under an arch- 
 bishop or metropolitan, consisted of a number of 
 dioceses under the title, borrowed from the civil 
 administration, of province. 2 It may be noted, 
 however, that such terms are elastic, and that, 
 while parochia was in general use for the diocese, 
 the parish was occasionally called dioecesis. 3 
 
 In England the parochial system came into 
 existence long before the Norman conquest. The 
 parochiae formed by Theodore, archbishop of 
 Canterbury 668-690, were not parishes in the 
 modern sense but dioceses. 4 Still, as soon as 
 these large parochiae are constituted, we find the 
 smaller parish in process of formation. A Christian 
 land-owner in the neighbourhood of some ecclc- 
 
 1 For the early organisation of the Christian Church in the 
 Roman empire, see Turner, C. H., in Cambridge Medieval History, 
 I, 143-182. 
 
 2 Thus the ecclesiastical province of Lyons, the Roman 
 capital of Gaul, corresponded to the civil province of Gallia 
 Lugdunensis prima, with its suffragans in the old tribal capitals 
 of Autun, Chalon-sur-Saone, Langres and Macon. 
 
 3 See Ducange, Glossarium, s.v. dio cms. 
 See Bede, Hist. Eccl., IV, ii, v. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 7 
 
 siastical centre founds a church on his property 
 for the use of his tenants. Puch and Addi, noble- 
 men who are lords of vills near Beverley, found 
 churches near their country houses and invite 
 St. John of Beverley, archbishop of York 705-718, 
 to consecrate them. 1 In this way, through the 
 cooperation of the lords of manors, to use a later 
 and more familiar term, the small parish is formed. 
 Collections of parishes were sometimes worked from 
 a centre; and in Domesday (1086) there is abundant 
 evidence of the existence before and after the 
 Conquest of small colleges of priests, leading a 
 common life, and serving churches within easy 
 reach of their own church and dwelling-house. 2 
 But at the time of D<tmesday the principle of the 
 parish as the ecclesiastical unit with its resident 
 priest was already well recognised; 8 and, in the 
 course of the next century, the parochial geography 
 of England assumed a form which it continued to 
 bear with little change for centuries. If we 
 compare, for example, the names of the parish 
 churches of the archdeaconry of Leicester as they 
 were returned to Hugh Welles, bishop of Lincoln 
 1209-1235, 4 with the eighteenth-century lists in 
 
 1 See Bede, Hist. EccL, IV, iv, v. 
 
 3 See the valuable article by Page, W., Some Remarks on the 
 Churches of the Domesday Survey, in Archacologia, LXVI, 61-102. 
 
 3 This is to be inferred alike from the number and locality 
 of the churches mentioned in Domesday and from the numerou s 
 remains of pre-conquest parish churches still existing. On the 
 other hand, the compilers of Domesday were not concerned with 
 ecclesiastical polity, and, where they mention churches, the 
 financial relations of the church to the manor were their sole 
 object. 
 
 * Rotuli Hugonis de Welles (Cant, and York Soc.), I, 238-272. 
 
8 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 Ecton's Thesaurus and Bacon's Liber Regis, we 
 shall find that only a few have vanished or have 
 become consolidated with others. Otherwise the 
 alterations of the parishes and the rural deaneries 
 to which they' belong have been of the most 
 trifling kind until the beginning, still within living 
 memory, of the obliteration on a large scale of 
 ancient boundaries in the interests of modern 
 efficiency. 
 
 Generally speaking, owing to the action of the 
 local land-owner in harmony with the Church, the 
 English parish corresponds to the vill or township. 1 
 This is true, at any rate, of the greater part of 
 England south of Trent, where large parishes 
 comprising several vills, though not uncommon, 
 are the exception. In the wilder country north 
 of Trent, where population was sparse and civili- 
 sation more gradual, the parishes were as a rule 
 larger and included several scattered vills. Thus, 
 of the two largest dioceses of medieval England, 
 Lincoln contained some 1750 parishes, while the 
 number in York, which was actually larger in 
 area, was under 700. There is a vast difference 
 between the normal Midland parish of between 
 two and three thousand acres and the great medi- 
 eval parishes of western Yorkshire, Halifax with 
 75,000, Aysgarth with nearly 80,000 acres. In 
 one case, the historian has to deal with a compact 
 and well-defined area; in the other, he has to 
 pursue the history of a large and intricate district, 
 
 1 See Pollock and Maitland, Hist, of English Law, 2nd. Ed., I, 
 560-2. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 9 
 
 the various parts of which have often separate 
 interests and, even before the end of the middle 
 ages, had acquired a virtual independence of the 
 parochial centre. 
 
 During the middle ages, the parish was purely 
 an ecclesiastical division. When, however, the 
 duty of relieving the poor, hitherto entrusted to 
 the Church, was taken over by the State in the reign 
 of Henry VIII, the ecclesiastical parish became 
 the natural unit for the collection of the poor 
 rate and the appointment of overseers in each 
 parish was established by the poor-law act of 
 1601. Thus the civil existence of the parish, as 
 distinct from its ecclesiastical status, was recog- 
 nised. But, as we have seen, the ecclesiastical 
 parish may consist of several townships without 
 any close connexion with each other; and so, as 
 the civil parish became invested with further 
 powers of local government, its limits were nar- 
 rowed until it has become coextensive with a single 
 vill or township. The Parish Councils act of 
 1889 defined a parish, in its statutory sense, as 
 " a place for which a separate poor rate is or can 
 be made, or for which a separate overseer is or can 
 be appointed." 1 Similarly, with the growth of 
 population, the old ecclesiastical parishes have been 
 split up into new parishes: old outlying chapels 
 have become parish churches and new churches 
 have been built until, for example, the great parish 
 of Halifax has developed into a rural deanery of 
 some forty independent parishes. In this way, 
 
 1 See Pollock and Maitland, op. til., I, 561. 
 
10 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 the ecclesiastical and civil parish are two entirely 
 distinct things. 
 
 The enquirer into parochial records is thus 
 beset by a difficulty at the beginning of his work. 
 He has to deal with the history of a district, which 
 may be primarily one thing in the minds of the in- 
 cumbent and churchwardens, while to the overseers 
 and poor-law guardians it may mean something 
 else. If the ecclesiastical and civil parishes are 
 conterminous, his work is clearly defined for him; 
 but, if the district has undergone much subdivision 
 for purposes of Church and State alike, and if 
 there have been early signs of cleavage in the old 
 ecclesiastical parish or of a self-contained life in 
 any part of it, his task is much harder and he 
 may have to restrict himself to a corner of the 
 subject. In any case, before he begins to collect 
 material, he must confine himself to definite limits 
 and have a clear notion of the historical points 
 which it is his purpose to illustrate. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 11 
 
 II 
 
 A fairly complete example of the task which 
 lies before the historian of a parish may be taken 
 from the south of Leicestershire. 1 The village of 
 Medbourne lies six miles north-east of Market 
 Harborough, not far from the line of a Roman road 
 which, coming from Cambridge and Huntingdon, 
 crossed the Welland at this point on its way to 
 Leicester. The ecclesiastical parish appears during 
 the century following the Norman conquest as 
 including three separate vills or townships, viz. 
 Medbourne, Holt, and the eastern part of the town- 
 ship of Blaston. In these three places the Crown 
 was lord of the manor. In the course of the 
 twelfth century, the manors of Holt and Blaston 
 were granted by the Crown to local knights who 
 had deserved well of it : tradition had it that Ralph 
 Nevyle received the manor of Blaston because 
 he had been with Richard I in the Holy Land 
 " when he killed the lion." Holt and Blaston 
 were both at some distance from the parish church 
 of Medbourne; and, owing to the difficulty which 
 the inhabitants found in attending service at the 
 mother church in winter or wet weather, chapels 
 
 1 The chief source for these details is the long and entertaining 
 certificate of an inquiry held in 1312-3, when the rectory of the 
 chapel of St. Giles, Blaston, was vacant. The document is in 
 the Lincoln episcopal registers, vol. II, ff. 219-221d. 
 
12 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 were founded for their convenience at an early date 
 close to the manor-houses in each place. There 
 was certainly a chapel at Holt in the twelfth 
 century, while the chapel of St. Giles at Blaston 
 was said to have been founded by Richard I 
 shortly before the grant of the manor to Ralph 
 Nevyle. It may be noted that the western part 
 of the vill of Blaston was in the parish of Hallaton 
 and that the manor belonged to the abbot and 
 convent of Peterborough, who founded a separate 
 chapel for their tenants a few hundred yards west 
 of the royal chapel of St. Giles. Chapels exist on 
 both sites to-day and remind us how closely the 
 local organisation of the Church depended for its 
 origin upon ownership of property. 
 
 The chapel of Holt, closely adjoining a beautiful 
 manor-house largely rebuilt in the fifteenth century 
 and further enlarged at later dates, is still depen- 
 dent upon the mother church at Medbourne. 
 But the chapel of Blaston, relying upon its founda- 
 tion by a king of England, was already claiming 
 early in the fourteenth century to be treated as a 
 free chapel independent of Medbourne; and, as a 
 matter of fact, its incumbent, instead of being a 
 mere chaplain appointed by the rector of Med- 
 bourne, was himself a rector, presented by the lord 
 of the manor and instituted by the bishop. The 
 separation between the mother church and the 
 chapel was virtually complete, with this exception, 
 that the rector of Medbourne nominally had the 
 cure of souls in Blaston and that the rector of 
 Blaston, who held his chapel without cure of souls, 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 13 
 
 paid him five shillings a year in token of subjection. 
 At the present time, Blast on St. Giles is a distinct 
 parish with its own cure of souls, but the annual 
 payment of five shillings is still made. 
 
 It is obvious that the historian of Medbourne, 
 if he takes the old ecclesiastical parish as the area 
 of his work, has to deal with three townships 
 which, from the point of view of property law, 
 are three separate manors and at present are three 
 distinct civil parishes; while the original eccle- 
 siastical parish is now two. Further, in the case 
 of Blaston, he will be obliged to deal to some extent 
 with the western manor of the township and so 
 to encroach upon the history of a neighbouring 
 parish. If he confines himself to Medbourne, he 
 will find that Holt and Blaston constantly intrude 
 upon his scheme: if to Holt or Blaston, he will 
 have to turn continually for reference to Medbourne. 
 The bonds which connect an early parish church 
 with its dependencies, however distinct their 
 civil history may become, are not easily broken; 
 and the most satisfactory scheme, although it 
 involves wider and more prolonged research, is 
 to work on the lines of the early ecclesiastical 
 boundaries. 
 
 The history, undertaken on these lines, will 
 resolve itself into three main divisions: manorial, 
 ecclesiastical, and social; the history of the manors, 
 the church and its chapels, and the townships. 
 These, it will be seen, may overlap at many points. 
 The lord of the manor is frequently lord of the 
 church. The chaplain [of Holt was virtually the 
 
14 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 lord of the manor's chaplain, but his appointment 
 depended upon the rector of Medbourne. The 
 ord of the manor and the rector will both have 
 something to say in the local government of the 
 township. Further, as a supplement to the 
 history, the ancient monuments of the parish will 
 demand description; and where the church is of 
 special interest or where, as at Holt, there is a 
 great manor-house, the growth of many genera- 
 tions, such description must necessarily be some- 
 what elaborate. Finally, it often happens that, 
 within the confines of a parish, a monastery or 
 some other religious house, such as a hospital, 
 has been founded. This has its separate history, 
 which is generally connected in great part with 
 property outside the parish and, where documents 
 are plentiful, requires independent treatment. 
 But the history of a small monastery, such as the 
 priory of Austin canons at Bradley in the parish 
 of Medbourne, the documentary history of which 
 is scanty, falls within the compass of the paro- 
 chial history; while the hospitals of the past often 
 survive in the almshouses and charitable institu- 
 tions of a modern parish. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 15 
 
 III 
 
 The value of a parochial history depends upon 
 the use which the compiler makes of original 
 records and is very much enhanced by the amount 
 of unpublished material which he brings to light 
 n his researches. He will probably find that 
 others have been at work before him. The monu- 
 mental county histories of the past and their 
 successors, the Victoria County Histories of modern 
 times, will often supply him with the framework 
 for his task; while the transactions of the local 
 archaeological society will generally yield more 
 or less information of a valuable, if sometimes 
 imperfectly digested, kind. The value of the 
 publications of a record society, such as the Surtees 
 Society, which for over eighty years has printed 
 documents of all kinds relating to the northern 
 counties, is incalculable. 1 Even where his work 
 is confined to little more than editing and bringing 
 up to date the work of a predecessor, the scientific 
 student will be able to amplify and correct to an 
 extent which at first he may hardly suspect. 
 The difficulties with which he has to compete are 
 
 1 As an example of the work of the society may be mentioned 
 a volume (No. XLIX) indispensable to the local historian of 
 Yorkshire, The Survey of the County of York . . . commonly 
 called Kirkby's Inquest: also Inquisitions of Knights' 1 Fees, the 
 Xomina Villarum for Yorkshire, and an appendix of illustrative 
 documents [ed. Skaife, R. H.], 1867. 
 
16 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 the variety of his material and the fact that very 
 little of it is usually to be found within the parish 
 itself. 
 
 Records may roughly be divided into two 
 headings, civil and ecclesiastical; and in both 
 cases their original object is primarily legal. They 
 are testimonies to the ownership and transfer of 
 property, to the rights of individuals or corpora- 
 tions in a certain place or estate, to the administra- 
 tion of local jurisdiction. Here and there the 
 muniment-room of a manor-house or castle whose 
 documents have suffered no disturbance will 
 provide a store of charters, leases, and records of 
 law-suits in which the history of its owners is 
 written, or a succession of court-rolls which supplies 
 long evidence for the tenure of property and its 
 transfer from one tenant to another. This, how- 
 ever, is by no means always the case. Family 
 records have been dispersed and lost to sight or 
 have found their way into some private collection 
 in a distant part of England. Or the manor may 
 have been one of many scattered lordships belong- 
 ing to some great ruling family or well-endowed 
 religious house, among whose archives the cardinal 
 documents of its history are preserved. Thus 
 the historian of a group of villages near Lincoln, 
 Fiskerton, Reepham, Sudbrook and Scothern, or 
 of Collingham near Newark, where the abbot and 
 convent of Peterborough were lords of the manor, 
 will have to look for charters and court-rolls at 
 Peterborough among the muniments of the dean 
 and chapter. Even then his work will not be 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 17 
 
 complete, as the records of the abbey were scattered 
 at the suppression. Some of its registers and 
 chartularies are in the British Museum; others 
 are probably still in private hands. 1 A reference 
 to the numerous reports of the Historical MSS. 
 commission will show how much miscellaneous 
 material for local history exists in the custody of 
 cathedral chapters, the colleges of Oxford and 
 Cambridge, or of the owners of some important 
 house such as Belvoir castle. 
 
 The student who has made himself acquainted 
 with the general lines of the history of his chosen 
 area and with the nature of his local resources will 
 naturally look out for the more distant collections 
 of documents which are likely to aid him. His 
 labour, however, will be materially lightened if, 
 before working at unpublished MSS., he exhausts 
 as far as possible all that has hitherto appeared in 
 print. The manorial history will be his first care; 
 for, in tracing the ownership of the manor, he will 
 come across much that will help him in the other 
 
 1 Thus the register of abbots Genge and Depyng (1397-1439) 
 is in the British Museum (MS. Add. 25,288), while that of abbots 
 Assheton and Ramsey (1439-96) is in the library of the dean 
 and chapter of Peterborough. The great thirteenth-century 
 chronicle and chartulary known as Swapham, and two small 
 chartularies recovered by White Kennett for the library early 
 in the eighteenth century, are still at Peterborough with other 
 miscellaneous documents. The Liber Niger of the abbey is in 
 the library of the Society of Antiquaries. The fifteenth-century 
 customary is in the Lambeth palace library. Two books of 
 charters and kindred documents which belonged to the abbey 
 and passed into the library of Milton park were bought by local 
 purchasers early in 1918: a third, containing Walter of Whit- 
 tlesey's chronicle and other matter relating to Peterborough, 
 has passed into other hands. 
 
 2 
 
18 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 divisions of his work. The entry or entries in 
 Domesday will supply him with a starting-point, 
 from which he can work back through the printed 
 collections of Saxon charters in Kemble's Codex 
 Diplomaticus, Thorpe's Diplomatarium Anglicum, 
 and Birch's Cartularium Saxonicum, and forward 
 through such medieval documents as he will find 
 printed in full or summarised in the local volumes 
 to which we have already referred or in more general 
 collections. The large volumes, including the 
 earliest Charter, Patent, Close and Pipe rolls and 
 some important records of Crown pleas, issued by 
 the Record commission early in the nineteenth 
 century, provide much evidence for the early 
 history of manors. Still more useful are the 
 Calendars of various public records now in progress, 
 which include the complete series of Patent rolls 
 from the reign of Henry III to that of Henry VII, 
 and large series of State papers for the reigns of 
 Henry VIII 1 and later monarchs, while the 
 contents of the Close, Charter and Fine rolls, 
 Inquisitions post mortem and other indispensable 
 sets of documents are being treated in the same way 
 and are advancing towards completeness. The 
 admirable indexes to these volumes enable the 
 student to find his way about them with ease; 
 and, although the documents which they contain, 
 emanating from the royal- chancery and exchequer, 
 are primarily concerned with property held in 
 chief, i.e., directly from the Crown, he will be un- 
 
 1 The Patent and Close rolls are calendared in these volume 
 and arranged chronologically among the other documents. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 19 
 
 lucky if he does not glean from them some local 
 or personal details bearing upon his chosen subject. 
 The volume of Feudal Aids in the same series 
 which relates to his county furnishes some leading 
 landmarks in the medieval history of its various 
 manors; and the publications of the Pipe roll 
 Society, although covering little more than the 
 greater part of the reign of Henry II, throw light 
 upon a period for which the Charter, Patent and 
 Close rolls are deficient. 
 
 Lists of printed sources, however, could be 
 extended indefinitely. Local references, for in- 
 stance, may be constantly found in the series of 
 Chronicles and Memorials published under the 
 direction of the Master of the Rolls, in the legal 
 records published with translations by the Selden 
 Society and in the great collections of charters 
 and other documents in Rymer's Foedera, the 
 Monasticon Anglicanum and similar monuments 
 of the research of a past age. Nor should the 
 more modern books which we owe to private 
 enterprise and scholarship be forgotten. The 
 historian of a, Yorkshire parish will find almost 
 certain help from Dr. Farrer's corpus of Early 
 Yorkshire Charters, while for certain districts he 
 will be well advised to consult Mr. Lancaster's 
 privately printed chartularies of Bridlington and 
 Fountains. It should be remembered that, if 
 the examination and collation of printed records 
 is laborious and may yield a disappointingly small 
 result, it has one great advantage apart from the 
 benefits which are the searcher's primary object. 
 
20 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 It familiarises the student with the various types 
 and forms of document which he has to handle: 
 and, when he comes to such documents in manu- 
 script, the experience which he has gained will 
 enable him to grasp their meaning and extract 
 their essential matter far more surely and expe- 
 ditiously than if in his eagerness he attacks them 
 without preliminary guidance. 
 
 The worker, as we have said, is fortunate if he 
 has in his own neighbourhood some storehouse of 
 original documents to which he can obtain access. 
 Even in this case, there are two great repositories 
 of whose contents he will be obliged to avail himself, 
 the Public Record Office and the vast store of 
 miscellaneous MSS. in the British Museum. Of 
 the varied contents of these collections it is impos- 
 sible in the present space to give more than the 
 briefest idea. The official Guide to the Public 
 Records by Mr. Scargill-Bird classifies and explains 
 the scope of the documents which are the chief 
 sources of our national history; 1 while Dr. Cox's 
 How to Write the History of a Parish, a helpful 
 guide which has lightened the labours of many 
 a local historian, indicates many classes of records 
 in which research may be fruitful. It is only, how- 
 ever, by practical experience and by learning to 
 use the catalogues and indexes in both places to 
 the best advantage that the student will put him- 
 self in the way of getting what he wants. In 
 spite of the library of indexes and calendars, 
 ancient and modern, in the literary research room 
 
 1 See also Mr. C. Johnson's The Public Record Office in the 
 present series. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 21 
 
 at the Record Office, its treasures have not yet been 
 fully explored, and there is always the possibility 
 that the careful searcher may light upon some 
 unsuspected source of information. 
 
 One important line of research for the manorial 
 history of a parish may be emphasised. The 
 descent of a manor is often extremely complicated: 
 it frequently descends to co-heirs or passes by 
 special remainder to some branch of the family 
 whose history is obscure, or, again, falls into the 
 hands of a succession of lessees. Printed sources, 
 however fruitful, will seldom in such cases supply 
 more than an imperfect skeleton; and the missing 
 parts are sometimes undiscoverable. Even where 
 the lord of a manor is a tenant in chief and the 
 descent of his property is well marked by the 
 series of inquisitions held by the Crown escheator 
 after his death, which begin in the thirteenth 
 century, links are occasionally wanting and pub- 
 lished pedigrees, especially as regards the early 
 members of a family, are frequently disfigured by 
 mistakes. To complete and correct an imperfect 
 manorial descent, the student should have recourse 
 to the " feet of fines " which, beginning in 1195 
 and continuing to the end of the reign of William IV, 
 afford " the best illustrations that we have of 
 medieval conveyancing." 1 To secure the transfer 
 of property, a fictitious suit is brought in the king's 
 court or before his itinerant justices, in which the 
 entering tenant demands the property as plaintiff 
 from the existing holder as defendant. The result, 
 called the final concord, is drawn up in the form 
 1 Pollock and Maitland, op. cit., II, 97. 
 
22 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 of a triple indenture, two copies of which are 
 delivered to the two parties in the suit respectively, 
 while the third, forming the lowest part or foot 
 of the sheet of parchment, is preserved among the 
 records of the court. These feet of fines are now 
 arranged under their several counties, and printed 
 lists or summaries exist in the publications of 
 many antiquarian and record societies. They 
 form at any rate a singularly useful body, of 
 material which has the advantage of being easily 
 consulted. 
 
 A much more difficult task lies before the student 
 who undertakes to search the vast mass of plea 
 rolls which contain the records of the courts of 
 King's bench, the Common pleas and the justices 
 itinerant. These include the Curia Regis rolls, 
 extending from the reign of Richard I to the end 
 of that of Henry III, the contemporary series of 
 Placita cor am rege and Placita de banco, beginning 
 with the reign of Edward I, with their later sub- 
 divisions, and the Assize rolls for various counties, 
 which begin in the reign of John. The task can 
 hardly be recommended to anyone who has not 
 time and patience to spare: for there are some 
 thousands of these rolls in all and a De banco roll, 
 for example, covering proceedings from all parts 
 of England for a single term, begins, not long after 
 the series starts, to consist of several hundred 
 membranes of parchment. Owing to their great 
 extent, very little of the matter hidden in them 
 and indicated merely by the name of the county 
 in the margin of each item has been printed ov 
 indexed; and it is obvious that records of suits 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 23 
 
 relating to a particular place are few and far 
 between. No one, however, who has consulted 
 them has failed to realise the contribution which 
 they make to local history; and references to suits 
 frequently occur in other quarters which provide 
 means of easy and direct reference to the original 
 record. If a worker has the opportunity to under- 
 take a labour of love of which the result may be, 
 for his own purposes, very uncertain, he will at 
 least benefit his fellow-workers by noting entries 
 which concern other places in his own neighbour- 
 hood or in the county generally. 
 
 Some imperfect indication has thus been given 
 of the general material upon which the local 
 historian has to depend for the civil history of his 
 parish. As his collections accumulate, he will 
 find that, side by side with the history of the manor 
 or manors and the pedigrees of the leading families, 
 he has acquired many details of the social history 
 of the place. The names of tenants and the 
 position of their holdings will become familiar to 
 him in charters and court-rolls; and further, he 
 will gain acquaintance with the topography of the 
 whole parish. From the numerous charters in 
 the Bardney chartulary, 1 for instance, relating to 
 Barton-on-Humber in Lincolnshire, a map of the 
 common fields of the town might be constructed, 
 so precisely is the site of each strip of land indicated ; 
 and it may be generally said that there are few 
 villages whose past geography cannot be recon- 
 structed and brought into relation with the present 
 by a patient and systematic enquirer. 
 
 1 British Museum, MS. Cotton, Vespasian E. XX. 
 
24 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 IV 
 
 Authorities of an historical turn of mind fre- 
 quently advise parish priests to devote their 
 leisure to parochial history; and the English clergy 
 have not been backward in following their counsels. 
 Ecclesiastical history naturally takes a prominent 
 place in the eyes of the incumbent of a parish: 
 the church and all that belongs to it is his first 
 care and, even if he is not a trained historian, he 
 will feel some curiosity in the fabric and in his 
 predecessors. Of late years there has been an 
 increase in the laudable custom of hanging up a 
 list of incumbents in a parish church; and, as this 
 is the first step towards the ecclesiastical annals 
 of the parish and such lists are often meagre and 
 incomplete, some detailed hints may be given as 
 to their compilation. 
 
 A mere list of names and dates is not enough. 
 One important point in the history of the church 
 is the descent of the advowson or right of patronage, 
 and opposite the name of each incumbent should 
 be given the name of the patron who presented 
 him, with any necessary notes. We have seen 
 that originally the lord of the manor was habitually 
 the founder of the church. Church and manor- 
 house often stand side by side: the chapel of 
 Blaston was so near the manor-house that the lord, 
 as he stood at an upper window of his house, could 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 25 
 
 take part in divine service and see the Host elevated 
 in the adjoining chapel. 1 The tenants pay their 
 civil dues at the manor-house: 2 their oblations 
 and tithes are paid to the incumbent of the church, 
 who is appointed or presented by the lord of the 
 manor, instituted into his spiritual rights by the 
 bishop of the diocese and inducted into temporal 
 possession by the archdeacon. Thus to our own 
 day many advowsons descend as appendages to 
 the lordship of manors: the lord of the manor is 
 the hereditary advocatus or defender of the church 
 and, where the manorial history of a place has 
 been traced, that of the advowson leaves little 
 to be completed. There are cases, however, in 
 which an advowson is a distinct piece of property, 
 a small ecclesiastical manor, as it were, in itself, 
 appurtenant, as the phrase is, to a small piece of 
 land in the parish. Or. again, there are very many 
 instances in which the lord of a manor, for his 
 soul's health, gave away the church that is to 
 say, the rectory, for in a medieval document ecclesia, 
 unless the context clearly shows the contrary, 
 means not the actual fabric but the possessory 
 right which we call the living 3 to a religious 
 
 1 See note on p. 11 above. 
 
 2 See Maitland's definition of the meaning of manerium as 
 " a house against which geld is charged," Domesday Book and 
 Beyond, p. 120. The word " manor," even in its more extended 
 sense, is not geographical: the lord of the manor is not lord of a 
 definite territory, but of rights customarily attached to a certain 
 house which is or has been the caput manerii. 
 
 3 Thus, in such phrases as " Ecclesie de Bredon patronu ; 
 Prior de Sancto Oswaldo " (Rotuli Hug. de Welles I, 252), or 
 " Magister Nicholaus de Fernhame, presentatus per Abbatem 
 et conventum Westmonasteriensem ad ecclesiam de Audenhame '' 
 
26 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 corporation, a cathedral church, monastery or 
 hospital. Here the corporation in question became 
 permanently rector or parson of the church, present- 
 ing a vicar or sometimes, where it could be done, 
 appointing a temporary curate to serve the cure 
 of souls; and its rights descended after the Refor- 
 mation to an individual lay rector whose heirs and 
 assigns usually retained and still often retain the 
 patronage or advowson of the vicarage. 1 
 
 The records of the institution of rectors or 
 vicars are to be found in the episcopal registers 
 of the diocese in which the church is or was situated. 2 
 These entries, apart from casual references in other 
 documents such as the Crown presentations which 
 occur in great numbers in the Patent rolls, 3 are the 
 primary and most trustworthy source for a list. 
 
 (ibid., I, 237), the ecclesia is the rectory. Strictly, the gift of an 
 ecclesia to a religious body was the gift of the advowson ; appro- 
 priation of the rectory did not necessarily follow. After 1279 
 the licence to alienate the advowson of a church to a corporate 
 body in mortmain was habitually accompanied by a licence of 
 appropriation granted to the new patrons. Where ecclesia 
 is shown by the context to mean a fabric, it usually refers to the 
 nave or body of the church as distinct from the chancel. 
 
 1 Where no vicarage was ordained and the proprietors served 
 the church by curates of their own appointment, the custom was 
 continued by lay rectors after the Reformation. This was the 
 origin of many of the so-called donative benefices which existed 
 till recently, and over which episcopal rights had been allowed 
 to lapse by custom. 
 
 8 See Mr. Fowler's Episcopal Registers of England and Wales 
 in this series. 
 
 3 Such presentations are not certain evidence of incumbency, 
 as they were often made in ignorance of the real circumstances 
 and were constantly revoked. Where there is no evidence 
 from other sources that a Crown presentee held a living, his 
 name should be entered in a list of incumbents with a caution. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 27 
 
 They include the date and place of institution, 
 the name, orders and university degree of the 
 presentee, the name of the patron presenting and 
 very frequently the reason of the vacation of the 
 living by the last incumbent, with his name. 
 Further, where there has been litigation about the 
 advowson, the result of the suit is noted and forms 
 a valuable reference to the plea rolls of the time; 
 for in English law an advowson is a piece of real 
 property which comes within the cognisance of 
 the temporal courts. Where it has been necessary 
 to hold an inquisition into the vacancy of a benefice, 
 the details are given at some length and are often 
 curious and instructive. In the dioceses of Lincoln 
 and York these records go back, with a few gaps, 
 to the early part of the thirteenth century: in 
 several other dioceses, including Canterbury, they 
 begin during its second half; while a few begin 
 at various periods during the fourteenth century. 
 The episcopal registers, however, are the only real 
 foundation for a trustworthy and continuous list 
 of medieval incumbents; and such names as may 
 be found elsewhere before they begin cannot be 
 entered upon the list with the same completeness 
 and certainty. 
 
 After the Act of Supremacy, when the first- 
 fruits of benefices, hitherto payable to the pope's 
 collectors, passed to the Crown, the episcopal 
 registers are supplemented by the certificates of 
 
 The number of Crown presentations is due to the fact that the 
 lands and tenements of tenants-in-chief frequently returned to 
 the king's disposal e.g., during the vacancy of a see or monastery, 
 during the minority of an heir, or by forfeiture. 
 
28 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 institutions 1 and the MS. calendars of institutions 
 in the Public Record Office and may be compared 
 with the signatures of incumbents in the parish 
 registers. It should be borne in mind that a mere 
 signature in a parish register, without further 
 evidence to corroborate it, is no evidence of in- 
 cumbency: it may be merely that of a curate, 
 the deputy of a non-resident rector or vicar. 
 Lists, at all events, which depend too much 
 upon parish registers, in themselves documents of 
 late origin, beginning at earliest in 1538, always 
 need careful comparison with more authoritative 
 sources. 
 
 For the compilation of such a list, more than one 
 diocesan registry may have to be consulted, owing 
 to the rearrangement of dioceses at and since the 
 Reformation. In Lincolnshire, Devon, Somerset 
 and several other counties the registers at Lincoln, 
 Exeter, Wells, etc., give continuous information. 
 But a worker, say, in Dorset, having used the 
 Salisbury registers from 1297 to 1542, is for the 
 next three centuries obliged to search the registers 
 at Bristol, which, since the destruction of the old 
 bishop's palace by the rioters in 1831, are very 
 fragmentary, though their contents may be eked 
 out in places by the Subscription Books, containing 
 certificates of clerical subscriptions to the acts 
 
 1 These certificates were returned into the Court of First- 
 fruits and Tenths. They now begin in 1587. The Composition 
 Books for First-fruits begin in 1535 : there are indexes to them 
 in the Public Record Office. The Institution Books, containing 
 the names of incumbents and patrons and dates of institutions, 
 begin in the first half of the seventeenth century. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 29 
 
 of royal supremacy and uniformity. 1 In 1836 
 the county was again included in the diocese oi 
 Salisbury, in which it still remains. Again, there 
 is a large tract of country including north-west 
 Yorkshire, Lancashire north of the Ribble and the 
 southern parts of Westmorland and Cumberland 
 which, nominally in the diocese of York, was 
 actually a private preserve of the archdeacon of 
 Richmond. The archdeacon instituted to livings 
 and had all the jurisdiction of a bishop, save in so 
 far as he had no power to confer holy orders and 
 administer confirmation. 2 The registers of the 
 archdeacons of Richmond with one exception, 
 the present whereabouts of which is not very clear, 
 have been lost ; but short calendars of two of them, 
 covering the period c. 1360-1440 with some gaps, are 
 now among the note-books of the antiquary 
 Matthew Hutton in the Harleian MSS. 3 In 1541 
 the archdeaconry was transferred to the diocese 
 of Chester and its records until 1836 must be 
 sought at Chester. In 1836 it was split into 
 pieces: the Yorkshire portion went to the new 
 diocese of Ripon, the Cumberland and Westmor- 
 land parishes, with the detached portion of Lan- 
 cashire north of Morecambe bay, to Carlisle; while 
 
 1 The Institution Books and other sources already alluded to 
 in the Public Record Oilice will, however, go far to supply the 
 deficiencies at Bristol. 
 
 2 The final composition with regard to the archdeacon's rights, 
 signed in 1331 by archbishop Melton and Robert Wodhous, 
 then archdeacon, is printed in Historians Ch. York (Rolls Ser.), 
 Ill, 248-50. 
 
 3 MS. Harley 6978. These calendars are now being edited 
 for publication in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal. 
 
30 PARISH HISTORY AND t RECORDS 
 
 in 1847 the rest of the Lancashire parishes were 
 given to the new diocese of Manchester. Printed 
 lists of incumbents of most of the Yorkshire and 
 all the Lancashire churches, so far as they have 
 been gathered, exist in Whitaker's Richmondshire 
 and in the Victoria County History of Lancashire. 
 It is possible, however, to make additions to these; 
 and a few years ago the present writer found in 
 bishop Gynewell's register at Lincoln (1347-1362) 
 two hitherto unnoticed institutions to livings in 
 the archdeaconry made by the bishop of Lincoln, 
 acting as commissary for the foreign cardinal 
 who was then archdeacon of Richmond. 1 
 
 Even where the succession of registers in one 
 place is continuous until modern times, gaps will 
 occur which it is difficult to fill. Some of these 
 may be supplied, as regards the province of Canter- 
 bury, by reference to the archiepiscopal registers 
 at Lambeth palace: the archbishop, as metro- 
 politan, had the right of institution when the sees 
 of his province were vacant and occasionally the 
 right, after a long lapse, devolved upon him. The 
 Lambeth registers, indeed, are full of information 
 with regard to the whole province and have the 
 advantage, not common to many registers, of 
 being well indexed. Similarly the York registers 
 supply gaps during vacancies of the sees of Durham 
 and Carlisle and the archdeaconry of Richmond. 
 
 1 Lincoln Reg. IX, fo. 415. Other sources may provide 
 additional names: thus Jo, in of GaunCs Register, ed. Armitage- 
 Smith, S., contains a number of presentation deeds, among 
 wliich are three to churches in Richmondshire: one oi' these 
 supplies a gap in the list of rectors of Ribchester. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 31 
 
 When a metropolitan and diocesan see happen 
 to be vacant at the same time, Canterbury 
 searchers may have to consult the registers of 
 the prior and convent and dean and chapter of 
 Canterbury: the Sede Vacante register at York 
 is fortunately preserved with the archiepiscopal 
 registers. 
 
 The gaps which remain and there are generally 
 one or two, if not more are usually due to omis- 
 sions in posting up registers, which were compiled 
 for permanent record from rough memoranda and 
 not always very carefully. They are apt to occur 
 during the period when exchanges of livings were 
 constantly occurring, which reached its height 
 about the end of the fourteenth century. A 
 fortunate find of the record of an exchange in the 
 registers of another diocese may sometimes supply 
 a need. Thus a Shropshire incumbent in 1440 
 exchanged his living and a canonry in the New 
 college at Leicester for a church in Cumberland. 
 The exchange should have been entered in three 
 registers, those of the bishops of Lichfield and 
 Lincoln and the archdeacon of Richmond. It 
 may be at Lichfield, but it is not at Lincoln; and 
 the writer found it by a mere chance in the Rich- 
 mond notes among the Harleian MSS. already 
 referred to. Again, there is no doubt that, during 
 the stress of the Reformation period, episcopal 
 registers, though kept continuously, were kept 
 imperfectly. Problems frequently occur at this 
 point. The writer, once more, calendaring insti- 
 tutions throughout the diocese of York over a 
 
32 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 period extending roughly from 1520 to 1570, has 
 found many institutions omitted and reasons of 
 vacancy hard to discover. Thirdly, for the Com- 
 monwealth period, recourse must be had to the 
 MS. official records, which, coming into the hands 
 of archbishop Juxon at the Restoration, are 
 deposited at Lambeth; while the appendices to 
 Dr. Shaw's History of the English Church during 
 the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth are 
 also invaluable. In connexion with omissions in 
 registers, a conspicuous example may be noted. 
 We know that John Wycliffe was presented by 
 the Crown to the church of Lutterworth in 1374, 
 and the Lincoln registers tell us that he vacated 
 Lutterworth by death on December 31, 1384. 1 Of 
 his institution, however, there is no record. Nor, 
 at an earlier date, in 1366, when we know from 
 other sources that he was rector of Ludgershall 
 in Buckinghamshire and a canon of the collegiate 
 church of Westbury-on-Trym in Gloucestershire, 
 does his name appear in the lists of pluralists, 
 made for the information of the holy see and 
 copied in Langham's register at Lambeth. Nor, 
 finally, are his resignation of Ludgershall or his 
 successor's institution recorded, as we should 
 expect to find them, at Lincoln : the first indication 
 that he resigned Ludgershall, as he probably did, 
 in 1374, is a dispensation for non-residence granted 
 to his successor in 1376. 2 
 
 The construction of a really satisfactory list of 
 
 1 Cal. Patent Rolls, 1370-4, p. 424; Lincoln Reg. XI, fo. 199. 
 
 2 Lincoln Reg. XII, fo. 148d. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 33 
 
 incumbents is thus a work which involves a large 
 amount of research, especially while the larger 
 number of episcopal registers remain unprinted 
 and uncalendared. Various societies are doing 
 their best to remedy this defect: the Canterbury 
 and York Society, working in co-operation with 
 other similar bodies, has taken several dioceses 
 in hand, while the Hereford and Exeter registers 
 have by this time reached the middle of the fif- 
 teenth century, and the York registers, printed by 
 the Surtees Society, are in a forward condition. 
 Such registers, in addition to records of institu- 
 tions, lists of ordination candidates and various 
 kinds of dispensations, contain a large amount of 
 miscellaneous matter in the form of letters and 
 mandates relating to diocesan business. From 
 these much local information may be gained, 
 generally at the cost of considerable search. It 
 should be said, however, that the primary object 
 of the register was for business purposes of reference, 
 and only a selection of a bishop's more important 
 correspondence was entered in it for the benefit 
 of future times. Such entries saved trouble at a 
 later date. If the patronage of a living came 
 into dispute, the institution records supplied the 
 names of previous patrons. If a clerk could not 
 produce his letters of orders or his title to a benefice 
 which he claimed to hold, or if his documents 
 were suspicious, the registers of the dioceses with 
 which he stated his connexion could be referred to. 
 Correspondence for which further local reference 
 was not required served as a model of common 
 
 3 
 
34 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 form, to be varied according to circumstances. 1 
 Was it necessary for an archbishop of York to 
 admonish the chantry-priests of a church for 
 negligence or to issue a commission to a suffragan 
 for the consecration of a churchyard ? His clerks 
 would find an excellent model in Thoresby's man- 
 date to the rural dean of Nottingham to enquire 
 into the slackness of the chantry priests of St. 
 Mary's, and in Zouche's mandates for the hallow- 
 ing of the churchyards at Windermere and Gras- 
 mere shortly before the great pestilence of 1349 
 visited his diocese. Such forms to suit special 
 occasions became extremely numerous in the 
 fourteenth century and were entered much more 
 sparingly in the fifteenth, when the episcopal 
 chanceries possessed almost all the pattern docu- 
 ments they wanted. The value of bishops' 
 registers for local purposes, apart from the formal 
 records of institutions, thus steadily decreases; 
 but the earlier volumes are full of profit and, even 
 though the fifteenth-century registers are as a rule 
 more jejune, they need not therefore be neglected. 
 
 1 This is clearly shown by the marginal descriptions of docu- 
 ments in episcopal registers, which constantly make no reference 
 to the persons or places mentioned in the documents but indicate 
 merely the general nature of their contents e.g., " Mandatum 
 ad excommunicandum solemniter candelis accensis, etc., pro 
 violencia illata, etc." (Lincoln Reg. XVI, fo. 225d). An 
 instance of a register which is a common form book and nothing 
 more is Worcester Reg. Brian II, where a number of documents 
 have been copied with initial letters A, B, etc., in place of proper 
 names. A large register of this type, which appears to have 
 belonged to a fifteenth-century archdeacon of Essex, has found 
 its way into the diocesan registry at Peterborough : see Archaeol. 
 Journal, LXXII, 233-4. 
 
Next to the advowson and incumbency of the 
 church comes the question of chantry foundations 
 in connexion with it. Every medieval church 
 had more than one altar at which mass was said 
 daily; and the masses at the side altars were very 
 frequently chantry masses said for the repose oi 
 the soul of a special benefactor and his relations. 
 Such chantries the word applies primarily to 
 the service itself, not to the chapel in which it is 
 celebrated were for the most part temporary 
 arrangements, depending upon the amount and 
 duration of a particular bequest. Legacies to 
 this effect were extremely numerous: sometimes 
 a man left a stock of money to hire a chaplain to 
 say mass for him, sometimes a stock of cattle or 
 sheep. The bequest was administered by his 
 executors or by feoffees; and in many cases 
 parishioners clubbed together to provide means in 
 land, kind or money, which might yield a stipend 
 to a more or less permanent chantry priest in a 
 parish church or a distant chapel. Other and more 
 important, because more securely founded, chan- 
 tries were those in which a certain amount of land 
 and rent was alienated for ever to a succession of 
 priests who held the chantry thus founded as a 
 freehold benefice. Chantry property in the occu- 
 pation of feoffees, who merely paid a chaplain at 
 their pleasure, was generally recognised as liable 
 to other charges: it yielded a fund for the repair 
 of local roads, bridges and embankments, for the 
 equipment of militia, for the payment of Crown 
 subsidies, for the dowry of poor maidens, and 
 
36 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 consequently, when such objects were pressing, 
 the chaplaincy might and did sometimes lapse. 1 
 The chantry priest, however, who subsisted on 
 his freehold was always there: his incumbency, 
 terminable only by death or resignation, was as 
 secure as that of the parish priest. Whether 
 permanent or temporary, the chantry priest was 
 expected to join with the parish priest in the daily 
 quire services and to help in hearing the confessions 
 of parishioners at Easter. 2 
 
 The records of freehold chantries, although such 
 benefices were comparatively few in number 
 outside the larger churches, are generally easy to 
 find and interesting to follow. Licences for their 
 foundation, in accordance with the provisions of 
 the statute of mortmain (1279), are entered upon 
 the Patent rolls after that date and occur with 
 frequency throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries, the era during which the foundation of 
 chantries and colleges of chantry priests in churches 
 takes the place of the foundation of monasteries. 
 
 1 As at Henbury, Glouces., c. 1543-8, where the profits of a 
 " feoffees' service " were devoted to the repair of the sea-walls 
 on the bank of the Severn (Chantry Certif. Roll 22, no. 21; 23, 
 no. 15; see Trans. Bristol and Glouces. Archacol. Soc., 1915, 
 pp. 159, 160). 
 
 8 The chantry certificates for some counties have been printed : 
 those for Yorkshire (ed. Page, W.) by the Surtees Soc., for 
 Lancashire (ed. Raines) by the Chetham Soc., for Somerset 
 (ed. Green, E.) by the Somerset Record Soc. The present 
 writer has edited those for Leicestershire and Northamptonshire 
 (Associated Archil. Soc. Reports, XXX, 463-570; XXXI, 87-178), 
 Nottinghamshire and Southwell (Trans. Thoroton Soc. XV- 
 XVIII), and Shropshire (Proceedings Shropshire Archieol. Soc.). 
 Those for Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire have also been printed 
 and those for Lincolnshire have been prepared for publication. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 37 
 
 The contemporary bishop's register often contains 
 the full documentary evidence for the foundation 
 and endowment of a particular chantry with its 
 statutes, which, although they are much alike in 
 general form, are always worth reading and noting 
 for the sake of local variations. Institutions to 
 chantries are also found in the episcopal registers; 
 and a late register may sometimes contain a 
 revision of early statutes which have not been 
 clearly worded. 1 For the later history of chantrie 8 
 there is abundant material in the Public Record 
 Office. In addition to the certificates returned 
 under the acts of 1545 and 1547, by which chantry 
 foundations were suppressed, the rent-rolls and 
 other particulars which came into the hands of 
 the Augmentations office at that time are pre- 
 served in large numbers. It should not be for- 
 gotten that part of a chantry priest's business 
 was to keep a free school for the poor children of 
 the parish and that the history of parochial schools 
 and other charitable institutions may often be 
 linked on by documentary evidence to that of a 
 medieval chantry. In this connexion the numerous 
 works of the late Mr. A. F. Leach, who made the 
 subject of medieval schools in England his own, 
 should be consulted. 2 
 
 1 E.g., in Lincoln Reg. XXII, where there is a complete revision 
 by bishop Russell in 1491 of the statutes confirmed by bishop 
 Gynewell in 1355 for the Newarke college at Leicester. One 
 main object of such revisions was declaratioi.e.,the clearing-up 
 of doubtful phrases. 
 
 3 For the general subject see his English Schools at the Reforma- 
 tion, in which are printed such chantry certificates as bear upon 
 schools, and his The Schools of Mediaeval England, in Methuen's 
 series of " Antiquary's Books." 
 
38 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 For the lesser chantries, especially for those 
 known as feoffees' services, the Public Record 
 Office material will give some help. But, owing 
 to their temporary nature, a complete account 
 of all such benefactions to a particular church is 
 past recovery. Much, however, may be gained 
 from medieval wills, perhaps the most fascinating 
 of all sources of evidence to the explorer. Apart 
 from the collections of more important wills 
 entered in episcopal registers, in the registers of 
 cathedral chapters and of the Prerogative court 
 of Canterbury, wills for the most part of well-to- 
 do clergy and laity, the early registers in local 
 probate offices, to which they have been transferred 
 from ecclesiastical custody, contain a large number 
 of pre-Ref ormation wills of persons of all conditions. 
 Information about chantries is only a small part 
 of what may be derived from them. They are 
 full of references to the guilds of the parish, religious 
 confraternities with their own chantry-chaplains, 
 to the altars and furniture of the parish church 
 and its chapels, to its " works " or fabric-fund and 
 to many petty circumstances which bring us into 
 close touch with the general life and social organisa- 
 tion of the community. 1 Wills of a later date are 
 naturally less interesting from an ecclesiastical 
 
 1 For the information to be obtained from wills with regard 
 to church fabrics and services see Duncan, L. L., The Parish 
 Churches of West Kent, their Dedications, Altars, Images, and 
 Lights (Trans. St. Paufs Ecclesiolog. Soc. Ill, 241-98); and the 
 similar article by Serjeantson, R. M., and Longden, H. I., upon 
 The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northamptonshire, 
 (Archaeol. Journal, LXX, 217-452). 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 39 
 
 point of view: their social interest, however, is 
 well maintained. The student who, at Somerset 
 House and the probate registry of his own district, 
 collects the wills for his parish with due apprecia- 
 tion of their human interest and their phraseology, 
 avails himself of one of the best means of enlarging 
 his own knowledge and of communicating his 
 personal interests to others. 1 
 
 The general origin of church endowments is 
 beyond the scope of a parochial history, save where 
 charters throw light upon endowments connected 
 with a particular church. These should of course 
 be recorded and their subsequent history traced. 
 For the assessment of the annual value of a living 
 two main sources are the Taxatio Ecclesiastica of 
 1291 and the more detailed Valor Ecclesiasticus 
 which superseded it as a basis of taxation in 1535. 
 Both of these were printed early in the last century 
 by the Record commission and may be supple- 
 mented by the clerical Subsidy rolls in the Record 
 Office and by various diocesan subsidy books in 
 other places, which are also valuable for theif 
 enumeration of the names of clergy and chaplains. 2 
 If the living is a vicarage, the documents for the 
 appropriation of the rectory to its medieval owners 
 
 1 Among printed collections of wills the six volumes of Testa- 
 menta Eboracensia (Surtees Soc.) should be specially mentioned. 
 Numerous indices to wills in various public offices have been 
 printed in the series known as the Index Library. 
 
 2 See, e.g., Salter, H. E., A Subsidy collected in the Diocese of 
 Lincoln in 1526, Oxford, 1909, and the taxations of the clergy 
 of the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire in 1525-7, printed 
 from the MSS. of the late T. M. Fallow in Yorks Archaeol. Journal, 
 XXI, 243-52, XXIV, 62-80. 
 
40 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 and the ordination of the endowment of the vicar 
 should be sought out in the episcopal registers. 
 As many churches were appropriated at an early 
 date, before registers begin, these deeds are often 
 wanting; but brief statements of the early endow- 
 ments of vicarages are often to be found; 1 while 
 the documents of later years are very full and are 
 apt to be tediously long. When their gist is 
 extracted, however, it is usually of high importance; 
 and the topography of the rectory and vicarage 
 houses with their precincts is frequently set forth 
 with an interesting minuteness of detail. 
 
 The sources for chantry endowments have 
 already been indicated. Where there was an 
 important early guild in a parish, details may be 
 sought among the guild certificates of the reign of 
 Richard II in the Public Record Office. Many 
 of these have been printed and those which are in 
 English are collected in the volume upon English 
 Guilds published by the Early English Text Society. 2 
 Another class of documents which is gradually 
 finding its way into print is the Inventories of 
 church furniture and plate made in the reign of 
 Edward VI. 8 Those which exist in the Record 
 
 1 See the numerous ordinations of vicarages printed in Rotuli 
 Hugonis de Welles and in the Liber Antiquus compiled under the 
 same bishop (ed. Gibbons, A., Lincoln, 1888). These are in great 
 part formal statements of existing arrangements confirmed by 
 the bishop and so made of permanent force. 
 
 2 Ed. Smith, Toulmin, 1870, with a preliminary essay by 
 Brentano, L. 
 
 3 These have been printed for various counties, some by the 
 Alcuin Club, others in the Transactions of local societies. The 
 Yorkshire inventories have been published by the Surtees Soc. 
 Numerous inventories for individual churches have been printed : 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 41 
 
 Office are indexed under their several counties; 
 but there are other inventories of various dates, 
 for example among the college muniments of 
 Oxford and Cambridge, which the student may 
 have to discover for himself. In general interest 
 and picturesqueness of detail such inventories 
 are inferior only to medieval wills : a proper assimi- 
 lation of their contents goes far to correct the 
 popular ideas of medieval art and ritual which 
 are fostered by the ecclesiastical upholsterer. 1 
 
 for good examples see the vols. of Trans. St. Paul's Ecclesiolog. 
 Soc., and Peacock, E., English Church Furniture, which relates 
 to Lincolnshire churches. 
 
 1 A valuable series of thirteenth and fourteenth century 
 inventories for Cambridgeshire has been published recently hi 
 Vetus Liber Archidiaconi Eliensis, ed. Feltoe, C. L., and Minns,' 
 E. H. (Cambridge Antiquarian Soc. 1917), pp. 30-147. 
 
42 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 It has been said already that the resources of 
 the parish itself, where records are concerned, 
 are somewhat limited, and that, even in the case 
 of court-rolls, if they are no longer preserved in 
 the manor-house or in some lawyer's office in a 
 neighbouring town, the searcher may have to go 
 to a considerable distance. Medieval ecclesias- 
 tical records must be sought wholly outside the 
 parish, with the exception of such local manorial 
 documents as may concern the advowson and the 
 fortunate but few instances in which the church- 
 wardens' accounts begin before the Reformation 
 or in which the act-books of a medieval guild 
 survive. For the later ecclesiastical history material 
 is more accessible and the parish chest or safe will 
 provide a number of books and miscellaneous 
 documents, tithe-book?, terriers, etc., in addition 
 to the parish registers. 
 
 The injunctions issued by Henry VIII's vicar- 
 general, Thomas Cromwell, in 1538 included an 
 order to every parish priest to keep a register 
 for weddings, christenings and buryings. 1 The 
 
 1 For parish registers generally see the volume by Cox, J. C., 
 in Methuen's " Antiquary Books," to which series the same 
 author has contributed another volume on Churchwardens' 
 accounts. The general history of parish registers is outlined 
 by Burke, A. M., Key to the Ancient Parish Registers of England 
 and Wales, 1908; see also Ecclesiastical Records of the Diocese of 
 Bath and Wells, ed. Holmes, T. S., Taunton, 1914. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 43 
 
 parish was charged to provide a " sure coffer " 
 with two keys, one for the priest and the other for 
 the wardens, in which the book should be kept: the 
 entries for the week were to be made every Sunday 
 by the priest in the presence of the wardens. The 
 order was not obeyed at first without some 
 suspicion and opposition, and early registers were 
 kept unsystematically. In 1597 Convocation took 
 steps for their better preservation by ordering the 
 annual transmission of transcripts from each 
 parish to the diocesan registry, and in the canons 
 of 1604 the orders of 1538 and 1597 were embodied 
 in stricter terms. From this time forward the 
 parish was required to provide a parchment book, 
 which took the place of the indiscriminate use of 
 paper and parchment hitherto prevailing. During 
 the civil wars and Commonwealth important 
 alterations took place: in 1644 the committee for 
 the Directory of public worship ordered that births 
 should be registered in addition to baptisms, and 
 in 1653 Parliament put the duty of registration 
 of births, marriages and burials in the hands of a 
 civil registrar to be elected triennially in each 
 parish. After the Restoration the clergy and 
 churchwardens resumed their responsibility and 
 the subsequent landmarks in the history of parish 
 registers are, first, lord Hardwicke's act for the 
 prevention of clandestine marriages (1753), by 
 which a book of official printed forms was provided 
 as a marriage register; and secondly, sir George 
 Rose's act (1812), which regulated theproper keeping 
 of entries and provided separate printed books 
 
44 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 for baptisms, marriages and burials. The acts 
 of 1836-7 secured the civil registration of births, 
 marriages and deaths; and, as these records can 
 be consulted at Somerset House, the historical 
 interest of parish registers practically ceases from 
 this date. 
 
 It is obvious that the chief material to be derived 
 from parish registers is genealogical. The descent 
 of extinct families and of families which have lived 
 for generations in the parish may be traced from 
 them; and the searcher who has the gift of imagina- 
 tion and knows its proper use will be able, by read- 
 ing between the lines of superficially barren entries, 
 to discover many interesting personal details. 
 Further, many clergy, while parochial registers 
 were still confined to manuscript books, took a 
 refreshingly elastic view of the nature of their 
 contents and, in addition to merely official records, 
 made notes of remarkable occurrences in the church 
 and parish during their incumbency. These, 
 written in quaint and picturesque English or some- 
 times in Latin, are often of considerable value to 
 the local historian; and, although such notes are 
 merely occasional wherever they are found, their 
 variety is remarkable and entertaining. But, 
 for our purpose, the use of the parish register io 
 limited. Full details for the earlier period during 
 which registers were kept are wanting in many 
 cases. Only a certain percentage of registers 
 contain entries which go back to 1538 or the years 
 immediately succeeding. Many, in their present 
 state, do not begin until long after. Original books 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 45 
 
 which have been kept in unbroken succession from 
 the earlier period are extremely rare. The early 
 entries generally exist in the form of transcripts 
 made, probably from loose sheets of paper, in the 
 parchment books which were gradually introduced 
 and became obligatory in 1603; while other entries 
 of which no record remains in the parish may some- 
 times be recovered from the transcripts returned, 
 by no means regula/ly, to the diocesan registry. 
 
 The parish register, as has been said, may often 
 be supplemented by the miscellaneous papers of 
 which a certain number are generally to be found 
 among the parochial documents. These include 
 settlement certificates by which the change of 
 abode of a man and his family from one parish to 
 another is recorded by the testimony of the local 
 overseers for poor-rate purposes, bonds of appren- 
 ticeship and papers of a similar kind, covering 
 various departments of parochial activity. One 
 of the subsidiary uses of a parish register is the 
 help which it affords to an estimate of the popula- 
 tion of the parish at certain periods. In this 
 respect it is greatly aided by the presence of a 
 plentiful supply of such papers, which usually 
 extend from the later part of the seventeenth 
 century to the beginning of the nineteenth. 
 
 The fascination which parish .registers exercise 
 upon their confirmed students is largely due to 
 the individual peculiarities of those who kept 
 them and their varying ideas of their duties, before 
 acts of Parliament had given a stereotyped character 
 to their work. This freedom within limits defined 
 
46 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 without great exactness constitutes the charm of 
 all early documents from Domesday book onwards. 
 Of all documents, however, which concern the 
 internal life of the parish, the most interesting and 
 fruitful are early churchwardens' accounts. These, 
 indeed, may be consulted with profit down to the 
 present day, especially for details respecting repairs 
 and alterations to parish churches; and to a com- 
 plete architectural history of any such building 
 they are indispensable. In modern times, they 
 have naturally acquired a prosaic formality with- 
 out, however, losing their individual quality 
 altogether. Earlier accounts are more artless and 
 detailed and afford a wealth of information with 
 regard to the general state of the church and to old 
 customs within the parish. Any parish is happy 
 which possesses a complete series going back to 
 the period before the Reformation or even a single 
 book or fragmentary leaves of pre-Reformation 
 accounts. Such volumes of early churchwardens' 
 accounts as have been printed, bridging over the 
 most critical period in the history of the Church 
 of England and enabling us to estimate precisely 
 the local effect of Reformation changes, are of as 
 much value to the general student of history as 
 to the parochial historian and have besides a 
 literary importance to the student of the English 
 language. To dwell upon their contents would 
 take too long. It is sufficient to refer readers to 
 the churchwardens' accounts of St. Michael's, 
 Bath (1349-1575), printed by the Somerset Record 
 Society; St. Mary at Hill, London (1420-1559), 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 47 
 
 printed by the Early English Text Society; and 
 of St. Mary the Great, Cambridge (1504-1635), 
 printed by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. 
 Among other accounts which have been printed 
 are those of Croscombe, Somerset (1475-1566), 
 by the Somerset Record Society, and those of 
 St. John's, Glastonbury (1866-1625), in Somerset 
 Notes and Queries. 1 Such books are naturally rare, 
 and those which remain, such as the early accounts 
 of St. John's, Peterborough, the fifteenth-century 
 guild accounts of St. Peter's, Nottingham, and 
 the fragment at St. Mary's, Leicester, have been 
 examined and extracts from them printed by 
 antiquaries. They have naturally been better 
 preserved in town churches, as at Bristol, Shrews- 
 bury and other places, than in the country; but 
 here and there a country church may be found, 
 as at Banwell, Somerset, with a continuous series 
 beginning in the sixteenth century. Closely allied 
 to these, but dealing with the civil life of the parish, 
 are the accounts of parish constables, which are 
 frequently preserved in the church with other 
 parochial records. A good example of their con- 
 tents, covering an extremely interesting period 
 (1630-49), will be found in the extracts from a set 
 at Stathern in Leicestershire, near Belvoir castle, 
 printed in vol. Ixix of the Archaeological Journal. 
 
 To these local sources should be added terriers 
 or surveys and extents of glebe-land, in the custody 
 of the church, and the original copies of enclosure 
 
 1 References to others will be found in Gross, C., Sources and 
 Literature of English History, 2nd ed.: see index, pp. 789-40. 
 
48 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 awards, which will usually be found among the 
 records of the parish council, both with a special 
 value for parochial geography. Every scrap of 
 paper, however, which throws any light upon the 
 history of a parish should be examined and inven- 
 toried: an unconsidered trifle may often be the 
 source of some valuable piece of knowledge. Now 
 and then, too, some record may be found which 
 cannot be easily classified under a special category. 
 The manor-book of Henry Bray, lord of Harleston, 
 Northants, early in the fourteenth century, tells 
 us among other things of the rebuilding of the 
 church and the way in which the costs were divided. 1 
 Thomas Botelar, abbot of Shrewsbury, who became 
 vicar of Much Wenlock, kept a diary of his incum- 
 bency which has been printed in vol. vi of the 
 Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological 
 Society, full of local and personal details. A much 
 later volume of a somewhat similar kind, valuable 
 to students of church life under the later Stewarts, 
 is the commonplace book of a rector of Clayworth, 
 Notts, which has been published under competent 
 editorship. 2 These are superficially more interest- 
 ing than the main records which have been de- 
 scribed, and by such pleasant paths the beginner 
 may be recommended to approach the serious 
 study of local documents of a less informal kind, 
 for the understanding of which they prepare the 
 way and quicken the appetite. 
 
 1 British Museum MS. Cotton, Nero C xii. An edition of 
 this book is about to be published by the Royal Historical Soc. 
 
 2 Ed. Guilford, E. L., and Gill, H., Nottingham, 1912. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 49 
 
 VI 
 
 No parish history is complete without an archi- 
 tectural description of the church and other ancient 
 buildings within the parish. This work, it need 
 hardly be said, demands special knowledge and the 
 mere ability to distinguish between the " styles " 
 of English architecture is not sufficient. In the 
 case of churches, early records which bear upon 
 their building are extremely scanty and, where 
 they are found, indefinite. It is not, indeed, 
 until the churchwardens' accounts begin that we 
 can trace the history of the fabric with any cer- 
 tainty; and, as we have seen, such accounts do 
 not begin in most instances until a late date. In 
 writing the history of an ancient dwelling-house, 
 some of the ancient building accounts may survive, 
 or there may be some definite landmark, such as a 
 royal licence to crenellate, 1 to the date of which 
 certain features may be ascribed. Similarly, an 
 occasional indulgence issued by the pope or the 
 diocesan bishop to attract contributions to the 
 rebuilding or repair of a church may be on record. 
 Among the muniments of the church of Totnes in 
 Devon is an original copy of a papal indulgence 
 
 1 These, issued in the form of letters patent, will be found 
 scattered throughout the Calendars of Patent Rolls. A list of 
 the most important is printed as an appendix to Hudson Turner, 
 T ., and Parker, J. H., Domestic Architecture in England, vol. iv. 
 
 4 
 
50 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 granted in 1432 on behalf of the fabric, from which 
 it is possible to give a positive date to the fine 
 western tower. 1 But such documents are excep- 
 tional and, in default of written evidence, the 
 building must be left to tell its own story. That 
 story is often difficult and perplexing and, in 
 unravelling it, the assistance and cooperation of a 
 professional architect w r ho is also a competent 
 antiquary is highly desirable. It is also necessary 
 to accompany descriptions of churches and other 
 important buildings with ground-plans in which 
 the process of development is marked by the use 
 of different colours or by a system of shading. 2 
 
 The amount of documentary evidence for the 
 building of churches may easily be over-rated. 
 It may be stated as a general rule that no documen- 
 tary mention of a church, where the context is 
 not explicitly clear, can be assumed to have any 
 architectural value. A large number of churches 
 in Devon have been confidently dated, even where 
 there is nothing in their fabrics which corresponds 
 to the statement, from the memoranda of their 
 dedications in the Exeter episcopal registers. 8 
 These form no ground for argument : the churches 
 may have been dedicated because their chancels 
 had been enlarged and contained new altars, or, 
 on the other hand, their dedication may merely 
 have been neglected previously, as was not un- 
 
 1 See Archueol. Journal, XX, 550. 
 
 2 Cf., e.g., the series of plans by the late J. T. Micklethwaite 
 in \Yalker, J. W., History of the Cathedral Church of Wakefield. 
 
 3 The documentary significance of these has been discussed 
 by the present writer, Church Architecture in Devon (Archaeol. 
 Journal, XX, 453-94). 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 51 
 
 natural in remote and hilly places. It is note- 
 worthy that the period at which such dedications 
 occur most frequently has left very little archi- 
 tectural influence upon the ordinary parish churches 
 of the county, although the cathedral church of 
 the diocese is one of its noblest memorials. When, 
 however, in 1435, bishop Gray of Lincoln issues a 
 conditional licence for two chantry-chaplains to 
 say mass at two altars recently dedicated in the 
 church of Brampton, near Market Harborough, 1 
 there is some reason for supposing that these two 
 altars formed part of some addition to the church. 
 As a matter of fact, the nave and aisles of the church 
 were obviously rebuilt about that time and are 
 good examples of a type of early fifteenth-century 
 work common in the Midlands. Here the building 
 primarily is left to tell its own tale; but, the visible 
 architectural evidence agreeing, the bishop's licence 
 corroborates it and furnishes an approximate date. 
 In like manner, too much is often made of 
 bequests in wills. Occasionally the meaning of 
 these is beyond all doubt and valuable material 
 may be derived from them; but legacies to the 
 " works " of any particular church do not neces- 
 sarily imply that architectural work was actually 
 going on in the church at the date of the will. 
 The " works " (fabrica or opus] was the permanent 
 fabric-fund under control of the churchwardens: 2 
 
 1 Lincoln Reg. XVII, fo. 180d. 
 
 2 Fabrica in medieval documents is generally to be taken in 
 this sense, unless the context definitely shows that it refers to 
 the actual building. For the practical administration of the 
 fabrica of a great church see York Fabric Rolls (Surtees Soc.). 
 
52 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 legacies to it were a matter of course and it is only 
 when they are noticeably in excess of their average 
 amount that special building activity may be 
 assumed, or when a special fund for one particular 
 portion of a church e.g., the " works of the steeple " 
 is mentioned. 1 Here again the building itself 
 must be consulted. When bishop Alnwick of 
 Lincoln made his will in 1445, he left small sums 
 to each of the parish churches of his episcopal 
 manors. A specially large sum, ten marks, was 
 left to the church of Liddington, Rutland. 2 By 
 itself, this proves nothing but suggests ^that the 
 church needed a larger bequest than the others 
 and that this need was probably caused by building 
 operations. A visit to the church shows us that 
 the nave was entirely rebuilt on a large scale about 
 the middle of the fifteenth century; and so Aln- 
 wick's legacy may be taken as an approximate 
 indication of the date at which the work was in 
 progress. In any case, the greatest caution should 
 be taken in reading architectural meanings into 
 documents which are not primarily concerned with 
 architecture. To do so is to commit the error by 
 which the mention of a church and a priest in 
 Domesday is taken to supply evidence which is 
 nowadays furnished by the directory and the 
 Clergy list. In every instance, the purpose and 
 circumstances of the document should be carefully 
 considered. Is it, for example, a licence to found a 
 chantry ? If the statement is made that the 
 
 1 See, e.g., instances of bequests to the church of Thirsk 
 (Yorks Archaeol. Journal, XXII, 209). 
 
 2 Lambeth Re . Stafford, ff. 178d-179d. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 53 
 
 chantry is to be founded in a chapel newly con- 
 structed or about to be constructed, here is clear 
 architectural evidence. 1 If there is no such state- 
 ment, architectural evidence is wanting, although, 
 by comparison with the existing fabric, the docu- 
 ment may offer strong corroborative testimony. 
 The Crown, in granting the licence, the bishop, 
 in ordaining the chantry, were concerned, the 
 first with the financial aspect of the foundation, 
 the second with the proper regulation of its services. 
 The building, if there was a new building in the 
 case, had nothing to do with them: it was a matter 
 of contract between the founder and a master- 
 mason and any allusion to it in the documents in 
 question, however fortunate it may be for our 
 purpose, is purely incidental. It is much to be 
 regretted that medieval building-contracts, such 
 as those for the churches of Catterick (1410) 2 and 
 Fotheringhay (1434), 3 do not survive in more 
 cases. Those which we have enable us to under- 
 stand the conditions of medieval church-building 
 and to form certain general conceptions of which, 
 in their absence, the episcopal registers will have 
 nothing to say. To look for architectural informa- 
 tion in an episcopal register, however, is a dangerous 
 
 1 See, e.g., the licence to William Nessefeld to endow a chaplain 
 in the chapel of Scotton, near Knaresborough, newly built by 
 him, 29 Jan. 1348-9 (Cal. Pat. 1348-50, p. 256). 
 
 2 Printed by Raine, J., 1834, and by McCall, H. B., Richmond- 
 shire Churches, 1910, pp. 37-40. The contract (1409-10) for 
 the south aisle of Hornby church, in the same neighbourhood, 
 is printed ibid., p. 52. 
 
 3 Printed, with some errors, in Dugdalc, Monasticon (ed. 
 Caley, etc.), VI, (3) 1414 sqq. 
 
54 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 task, 1 and the mistakes which have been founded 
 with the best intentions upon misinterpretations 
 of episcopal documents are exceedingly numerous. 
 There is an elementary point which it is useful 
 to remember in connexion with church fabrics. 
 No question is asked more frequently than, " Who 
 built them ?" The meaning is vague, but pre- 
 sumably it implies, more often than not, " Who 
 caused them to be built ?" The indifferent use of 
 fecit and fecit fieri, familiar in medieval chronicles* 
 is as common in our own day. The answer is 
 generally even more vague, but the charge of 
 building is frequently laid, with or without reason, 
 upon the monks of some neighbouring abbey; 
 and this seems more specious when it is actually 
 a matter of fact that the monastery held the ad- 
 vowson and appropriated the rectory. The splen- 
 dour of the row of great parish churches in South 
 Lincolnshire between Long Sutton and Spalding 
 seems to give colour to the theory, sanctioned 
 by many guide-books, that they were the result 
 of pious emulation between the monasteries, 
 Croyland, Castleacre and Spalding, which profited 
 by the acquisition of their rectorial tithes. The 
 probability does not seem to be greatly weakened 
 by the fact that the writer who was the first to 
 formulate this theory in print, about eighty years 
 ago, brought forward no documentary evidence 
 
 1 Thus an award made in 1394 as to the allotment of liability 
 for contributions to the repair of the tower of Stottesdon church, 
 Salop (Hereford Reg. Trefnant [Cant, and York Soc.], pp. 19, 20), 
 does not necessarily, though it may possibly, refer to actual 
 work proceeding at the time or lately completed. 
 
and confounded the priory of " Acre " with the 
 abbey of St. Mary at York, which thus obtained a 
 gratuitous share in the competition. 1 It is also 
 equally tempting to believe that the beautiful 
 church of Heckington, near Sleaford, was the result 
 of the appropriation of the rectory to Bardney abbey 
 in 1345 and that the chancel was built at the 
 costs of a vicar whom they appointed at that date. 
 Historical fact, however, is against these plausible 
 fancies. In the first place, the responsibility for 
 the building of churches was very definitely divided 
 between the rector and the parishioners. The 
 rector owned the chancel and was bound to keep 
 it in repair. A pious friend might relieve him of 
 his duties : thus in the fourteenth century a wealthy 
 king's clerk, Thomas Sibthorpe, took on himself 
 the expense of rebuilding the chancel of the parish 
 church of his native village of Sibthorpe, Notts, 2 
 doubtless to the great satisfaction of the rector. 
 The nave of the church, the ecclesia proper, on 
 the other hand, was under the control of the 
 parishioners. Henry Bray, to whom we have 
 already referred, tells us that the chancel of Har- 
 leston church was rebuilt by the rector, while 
 he himself and another local gentleman took charge 
 of the fabric of the nave. When, late in the fif- 
 teenth century, the tower of Silkstone church, 
 near Barnsley, at the crossing of the church was 
 taken down and a new tower built at the west 
 end, the relative responsibilities of the parishioners 
 
 1 Churches of Lincolnshire, 1841. 
 
 2 York Reg. Zouche, fo. 99. 
 
56 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 and the rectors, the prior and convent of Ponte- 
 fract, for repairing the portion of the church on the 
 site of the old tower, now partially included in the 
 chancel, had to be determined by a commission. 1 
 It is thus clear that a monastery which possessed 
 the rectory of a church was liable only for the 
 chancel. Further, the appropriation of a rectory 
 was a source of income to a monastery: indiscri- 
 minate appropriation, after the statute of mort- 
 main (1279), was no longer permitted. In the past, 
 it had led to neglect of churches and their services, 
 apart from the damage which it caused to the rights 
 of the Crown and the diocesan. If a monastery 
 wished to appropriate a church, it had to plead the 
 excuse of poverty or depreciation of income; and 
 this, which would certainly be no inducement to 
 expensive building, was usually set forth at some 
 length in petitions for appropriation. 2 If we apply 
 this to the case of Heckington, the rebuilding of 
 the church by Bardney abbey at once becomes 
 unlikely. Moreover, the date 1345 is suspiciously 
 late for most of the existing fabric, which, upon its 
 architectural evidence, was completed rather than 
 begun about that time. And, when the facts 
 about the so-called vicar, whose tomb remains 
 
 1 York Reg. Laur. Bothe, fo. 312. 
 
 9 The petition, e.g., for the appropriation of Geddington 
 church, Northants.to Pipewell abbey, 1357-8, pleads the poverty 
 of the monastery owing to the barrenness of its land, the scarcity 
 of labourers, the mortality among its tenants and consequent 
 decline of rents. Fire and flood and the neighbourhood of the 
 house to the forest of Rockingham and its beasts of game had 
 also contributed to the general depression (Lincoln Reg. IX, 
 fo. 171d). 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 57 
 
 in the chancel, are examined, it is found that he was 
 really the last rector of the church, presented by 
 the Crown in 1309, thirty-six years before the 
 appropriation, and that he was a well-to-do clerk 
 in the king's service, who would be far better 
 able to meet the costs of a magnificent and spacious 
 chancel than a vicar whose only obvious source 
 of revenue was the scanty endowment assigned to 
 him from the fruits of the appropriated church. 1 
 The parishioners now step into their rightful 
 place as the builders of the nave. Less evidence 
 is available for the other churches which have 
 been mentioned; but here again general custom 
 asserts that, in default of positive evidence to the 
 contrary, the parishioners met the expense of the 
 nave in each case, while the monastic rectors paid 
 for the chancels. In practice it will be found, 
 not unnaturally, that monasteries were unready to 
 fulfil their obligations too quickly and generously. 
 Monks were neither architects nor architectural 
 missionaries, although there were many, especially 
 in the earlier period of English and Anglo-Norman 
 monasticism, who had an enthusiasm for art and 
 some knowledge of its practice. 2 To credit them 
 with lavishing sums of money upon churches whose 
 revenues were actually assigned to the relief of 
 their own needs would be to assume an impossi- 
 bility. The chancels of appropriated churches 
 
 1 See Assoc. Archil. Soc. Reports, XXXII, 65-6. 
 
 2 Thus the interest taken in architecture by the Lombards, 
 William of Volpiano and Lanfranc of Pavia, has been made the 
 basis of a structure of architectural inferences for which docu- 
 ments afford no real evidence. 
 
58 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 often tell their own tale of long-delayed repairs 
 and consequent patchwork, or, at best, of a re- 
 building incommensurate in grandeur of scale and 
 beauty with the rest of the building. Of the noble 
 fourteenth-century chancels which are common in 
 England, especially in the Midlands, very few are 
 to be found in churches appropriated to monasteries, 
 and these few belong to the period before the appro- 
 priation was effected, as at Heckington or at 
 Carcolston, Notts. 1 No visitor to the churches 
 of Melton Mowbray and St. Mary's, Nottingham, 
 can fail to be struck by the comparative insigni- 
 ficance of the chancel as compared with the nave 
 and transepts of either church. The discrepancy 
 is explained when it is remembered that the rectors 
 were monastic corporations, in the first instance 
 the prior and convent of Lewes, in the second the 
 prior and convent of Lenton. 
 
 This point has been dwelt upon at some length 
 because the fabric of the parish church makes a 
 special appeal to the local historian. Its claim 
 upon his imagination is not improbably the origin 
 of his interest in parochial history. It is in itself 
 a record which must be read with care and patience 
 and the methods which he must bring to its study 
 are those which he is bound to apply to written 
 records, the resolution to extract from it all that 
 it has to tell him and the caution which it is 
 necessary to employ against mere surmise. Local 
 legends have doubtless become connected with 
 
 1 For these and kindred chancels, see Memorials of Old Xot- 
 linghamshire, 1912, pp. 41-5. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 59 
 
 it, as with much else in the parish; and these 
 deserve attention and careful sifting for the ele- 
 ment of truth which they may contain. To treat 
 them unsympathetically, to " strip fair Truth of 
 every little shadowy vestment in which time and 
 teeming fancies love to array her," is to court 
 the reputation of a mere iconoclast : on the other 
 hand, to pursue the methods of that amiable 
 antiquarian, the bachelor in The Old Curiosity 
 Shop, is to smother truth altogether. The popular 
 mind, ever since The Castle of Otranto and its 
 successors taught it to regard the middle ages as 
 an epoch of mystery and impossible marvels remote 
 from the claims of common sense, has readily 
 accepted the theories that a cross-legged effigy 
 denotes a Crusader, that " low-side windows " 
 were a philanthropic invention for the use of pious 
 lepers, that churches, abbeys and castles were 
 connected by a system of underground passages 
 to the use of which the absence of ventilation made 
 no difference, and that monks, friars and parish 
 priests were convertible terms or mere synonyms 
 for the persons who availed themselves of these 
 subterranean communications. 1 Absurd as such 
 
 1 The popular notion that parish priests were frequently 
 monks rests entirely upon the failure to distinguish between 
 the regular and secular clergy . Monks, in the later middle ages, 
 were allowed now and then to serve parochial cures by special 
 dispensations. Canons regular, especially Premonstratensians, 
 had some licence in this respect; but bishops were unwilling 
 to allow innovations on their part, and it was not until after the 
 pestilence of 1349, which caused great mortality among the 
 clergy, that Austin canons were allowed with any frequency to 
 take charge of churches which hitherto had been served by 
 secular priests. 
 
60 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 traditions are, they have acquired a remarkable 
 prevalence. The task of demolishing them, how- 
 ever amusing it may be, is too often lost labour; 
 and the better course is to present the ascertain- 
 able facts in the history of a church or parish in 
 such a way that the intelligent reader may learn 
 for himself the principles upon which the distinc- 
 tion between truth and legend is founded. Success 
 necessarily depends upon the writer's power of 
 imagination, his ability to picture to himself the 
 scenes which his documents unfold and to transmit 
 the living interest which they arouse in his own 
 mind. The use of imagination is a very different 
 thing from a surrender to dreams and visions 
 and, with humour and common sense to aid it, 
 is a powerful antidote to the allurements of fancy. 
 Parochial history, in short, is founded upon the 
 faithful and discriminating use of existing docu- 
 ments. Enough has been said to show that the 
 essential point for the record-searcher to grasp 
 is the true scope and purpose of his document, 
 the circumstances, that is, of its compilation and 
 the intention of its compilers. To attempt to 
 obtain from it more than it offers is to waste time 
 and run the risk of writing false history. Of this 
 modern scholars constantly remind us: Dr. Horace 
 Round, for instance, trenchantly exposes the errors 
 of those who look upon Domesday book and the 
 records of twelfth-century scutages as dealing with 
 the same class of subject. 1 Furthe", original 
 documents cannot be read altogether by the light 
 of nature. A competent knowledge of Latin, 
 1 Feudal England,\pp.Ji29-81 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 61 
 
 old French and old English and some training in 
 the accurate reading of manuscripts are necessary 
 acquirements. 1 Even with these a document, 
 however well transcribed, may easily be misunder- 
 stood without a corresponding knowledge of English 
 law and constitutional history. The history of 
 every parish is the history of the realm in minia- 
 ture: it may not be greatly affected by the doings 
 of kings and changes of dynasties, but its arrange- 
 ments are inevitably influenced by statutes and acts 
 of Parliament. It follows that the documents 
 which reveal this history bear a strong general 
 likeness to contemporary documents which concern 
 other places and therefore that the historian should 
 acquaint himself with the classification of records 
 and learn to recognise the common forms upon 
 which they are founded. It may be argued that 
 these requirements are too much to expect of any- 
 one who can devote only a limited time to collect- 
 ing historical material, a work which must always 
 be to a great extent a labour of love. On the other 
 hand, an imperfect acquaintance with the language 
 and palaeography of documents is disastrous to 
 the accuracy and utility of transcripts. Without 
 the general knowledge of history to weld them 
 together, such documents become a disjointed 
 collection without connected meaning; and, with- 
 out the ability to classify them and recognise 
 general types, it is easy to assign to any individual 
 
 1 Johnson, C., and Jenkinson, C. H., English Court Hand, 
 1915, with an admirable series of facsimiles, affords excellent 
 practice to the student in deciphering medieval documents and 
 extending their abbreviations. 
 
62 PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 
 
 record a local importance and an unique character 
 which it does not really bear. 
 
 It would perhaps be a mistake to plead too 
 earnestly at present for a more substantial public 
 recognition of the claims of local historians, whose 
 work is pursued with some difficulty and without 
 much hope of pecuniary reward. The raising of 
 the standard of such studies, however, with the 
 awakening consciousness of the fact that they can- 
 not be profitably exercised as a mere pastime 
 without scientific training, must have its eventual 
 effect upon public opinion in an age of universal 
 education. Meanwhile, the removal of hindrances 
 to students' researches may be urged. The generous 
 treatment accorded to them at the Public Record 
 Office and the British Museum is to be found else- 
 where, and custodians of historical documents 
 throughout the kingdom display an increasing 
 readiness to put their stores at their disposal. 
 Nevertheless, greater freedom of access to private 
 collections and the entire abandonment of charging 
 fees in public repositories, or at any rate the reduc- 
 tion of such fees to a nominal charge, is desirable 
 in cases where genuine students are furnished 
 with proper credentials. Prohibition of access or 
 difficulties put in the way of study bring their own 
 Nemesis: documents which are allowed to rest 
 unused are liable to neglect and decay, and much 
 loss in the past has been due to the incuria of 
 custodians who, in failing to realise the use of 
 their treasures to others, have made no use of 
 them themselves. 
 
PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS 63 
 
 Finally, although the necessity of the proper 
 care of documents is much more fully realised to- 
 day than it ever has been, much remains to be done 
 in this respect. This is especially true of such 
 records as parish registers and churchwardens' 
 accounts, which have suffered grievously by care- 
 lessness. Diocesan authorities are fully alive to 
 their responsibilities in this matter; but it is still 
 much to be wished that an inventory of such 
 documents should be prepared in each diocese, 
 as has been done in the dioceses of Bath and Wells 
 and Winchester, from which they can be checked 
 from time to time. The loss of early parish 
 registers is perhaps not quite so deplorable as the 
 process of " restoration " which has too often 
 been freely applied to that most valuable of all 
 records, the parish church, and has deprived it of 
 all trace of its historic continuity in the interests 
 of modern comfort and decorative fancies; but, 
 just as public opinion is gradually being educated 
 against the destructive energy of mistaken zeal, so 
 it may also be aw r akened to the need for a more 
 active control of the guardianship of manuscript 
 records. We have lost so much in times gone by 
 that we cannot be too watchful over the preserva- 
 tion of what is left to us. 
 
 BILLING AN1> SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, QU1LDFORD, ENOLANI) 
 
Date Due 
 
 PRINTED IN U.S.A. CAT. NO. 24 161