The rudiments

In 1607, Christopher Meade, gentleman, and steward of the manor court of Little Gransden in Cambridgeshire, appeared in the Court of Exchequer to give evidence in a suit concerning the size and whereabouts of the demesne and the yardland in Gransden. The purchasers of this former episcopal manor could not, in a fashion not unknown elsewhere amongst this batch of episcopal sales, find their purchase, which had been farmed by the tenants since the fourteenth century. Christopher Meade was an antiquarian of considerable skill and resourcefulness, for he had searched the thirteenth-century episcopal surveys of Gransden, and the medieval reeves’ accounts, and then tied the documents to surviving earthworks to reconstruct the layout of the demesne. It is the first record known to us of a local historian ‘getting mud on his boots’ and doing some fieldwork. Meade, however, had a considerable advantage: he had been to school in the 1570s or 1580s in the chancel of Little Gransden church with a very mixed group of the other witnesses, who, as children, had been schoolfellows. These children had talked about the rumour that houses had once stood in the Bury Close, and played over the surviving tell-tale earth-works. So Meade’s gentry status did not prevent his learning the ‘rudiments’ along with other village children in the church chancel.