Stratton High Cross and general receivers’ accounts

The Stratton High Cross or churchwardens’ accounts for 1512 to 1578 are made up of 104 paper folios and a parchment cover and are in the British Library collections. Written mostly in English, they are significant because they are among only eighteen (of some two hundred) surviving sets of pre-Reformation churchwardens’ accounts which cover the whole period 1535–70 when most Reformation change took place. This allows us to track the progress of the Reformation in a single parish and its impact on the lives of ordinary people. Some of the other seventeen accounts have been published as edited volumes by county record societies or as extracts, with St Laurence's in Reading being the latest. The Stratton accounts were published as cherry-picked extracts in 1880, but de-contextualised, and not always accurately or consistently transcribed. Other comparable, but less complete, published sets of accounts used here include Mildenhall in Suffolk and Chagford in Devon.

What makes Stratton a little more unusual, and arguably adds to its importance for Reformation historians, is the fact that there are also two general receivers’ or stock wardens’ account books covering parts of the same period. Written mainly in English, like the High Cross wardens’ accounts, these cover the periods 1534–49 (with half of a 1531 account) and 1557–81. The earlier of these two books, also at the British Library, is made up of twenty folios with a recycled, and very rare, early-fourteenth-century model book folio as a cover. It lists guild, store and other account returns regularly, including those of the High Cross which became churchwardens’ accounts. This gives us an overview of parish administration in Stratton, with at least thirteen groups accounting to the general receivers, who were effectively parish treasurers. These were six groups known as guilds, including the High Cross; four less elitist groups known as stores, who held goods and livestock; and three miscellaneous groups called the Sextons, Our Lady Maidens and Robin Hood. Apart from High Cross, none of their accounts has survived, but an idea of the likely content can be gained from good survivals elsewhere in Exeter diocese. The High Cross wardens’ accounts show that by 1531–32 a group known as ‘the eight men’ also accounted at Stratton.