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Penitential Bequests and Parish Regimes in Late Medieval England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2017

Extract

The orthodoxy which dismissed the pre-Reformation parish as the point where the many failings of the Church met to blight ordinary lives has exercised a tenacious grip on the historical imagination. Current opinion, on the other hand, perceives the parish as deserving of inquiry, not least because of a dawning realisation that it was a point where managerial expertise and a noteworthy buoyancy of spirit intersected. Ostentatious programmes of church rebuilding and embellishment testify both to competence and to a vitality bordering on exuberance in many parish communities. If more difficult to appraise, the liturgical life of many parishes seems to have flourished and was enhanced by the steady accumulation of vessels, vestments, lights, embroidered cloths and painted images. Many wealthier parishes also supported numerous auxiliary clergy and a sophisticated musical repertory and performance. But building and liturgical elaboration were not products merely of whim. In addition to an obligation to support the incumbent by regular payment of tithe, responsibility for maintaining church fabric and the wherewithal for worship within the church had been assigned to the parish community by canon law in the thirteenth century. Many parishes conspicuously exceeded their brief. In matters of securing revenues it seem at the very least safe to assume widespred competence. Historians, however, have by and large failed to respond to the laity's achievement and that in spite of abundant surviving documentation. Investigation of the financial regime of the late medieval parish is long overdue. If it has received any attention at all, parish finance has been charaterised in very general terms of corporate levy and ad hoc donation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 The far-reaching influence of propaganda like Simon Fish's A Supplication for the Beggars and John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, when reinforced by denominational commitment and patriotism, produced an uncompromising tradition emerging with clarity in, for instance, works by eminent late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians, among them J. A. Froude, J. R. Green, J. Gairdiner, G. M. Trevelyan and G. G. Coulton. It still proves convenient to disparage the pastoral standard of the pre-Reformation Church in order to provide adequate cause for the changes to come, as in Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation, 2nd edn, London 1989, 6874 Google Scholar.

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6 Blair, L., A List of Churchwardens' Accounts, Ann Arbor 1939 Google Scholar, is the most recent compilation, but not easily available; for an earlier, select list, see Philipps, E., ‘A list of printed churchwardens' accounts’, English Historical Review xv (1900), 335–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the standard work is still Cox, J., Churchwardens' Accounts from the Fourteenth Century to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, London 1913 Google Scholar.

7 Councils and Synods II, ii. 1008; visitation is discussed in Swanson, , Church and Society, 163–5, 256Google Scholar and Owen, , Medieval Lincolnshire, 120–1Google Scholar; for examples of the rulings which resulted from visitation, see Kentish Visitations of Archbishop William Warham and his Deputies, 1511–12, ed. Wood-Legh, K. L. (Kent Archaeological Society, Kent Records xxiv, 1984), 2c, 20c, 40c, 59d, 77d, 84c, 121a, 166h, 195c, 221g, 225a, 228cGoogle Scholar.

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9 Tentler, Sin and Confession, ch. i and passim; Burgess, C. R., ‘”A fond thing vainly invented”: an essay on purgatory and pious motive in later medieval England’, in Wright, S. (ed.), Parish, Church and People: local studies in lay religion, 1350–1750, London 1988, 5684 Google Scholar.

10 Wood-Legh, K. L., Perpetual Chantries in Britain, Cambridge 1965 Google Scholar, remains the most comprehensive survey of the chantry.

11 Westlake, H. F., The Parish Gilds of Medieval England, London 1919 Google Scholar; Rosser, G., ‘Communities of parish and guild in the late Middle Ages’, in Wright, , Parish, Church and People, 2955 Google Scholar; Barron, C. M., ‘The parish fraternities of medieval London’, in Barron, C. M. and Harper-Bill, C. (eds), The Church in pre-Reformation Society: essays in honour ofF. R. H. Du Boulay, Woodbridge 1985, 1337 Google Scholar.

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13 It is nevertheless to be emphasised that although contemporaries exercised a wide choice when making bequests, the parish was the main beneficiary in both town and country: Tanner, N. P., The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, Toronto 1984 Google Scholar, app. 12, and Whiting, The Blind Devotion, app. 2.

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15 A clear example of the profits which could accrue from anniversary foundation concerns Juliana Fairhead's foundation in St Andrew Hubbard and is given in detail below (n. 30); for a number of examples from late medieval Bristol, see Burgess, , ‘A service for the dead’, 198205 Google Scholar.

16 The Churchwardens' Accounts for St Mary at Hill for 1494–5, for instance, printed in The Medieval Records of a London City Church, St Mary at Hill, A.D. 1420–1559, ed. Littlehales, H. (Early English Text Society cxxv, cxxviii, 1904), 205–16Google Scholar, list the income and expenses of the seven perpetual chantries established in the parish church. One of these, the Causton chantry, enjoyed an annual income of £18, of which only £12 need be spent on services and maintenance: the difference profited the parish.

17 Burgess, C. R., ‘Strategies for eternity: perpetual chantry foundation in late medieval Bristol’, in Harper-Bill, , Religious Belief, 1718 and passimGoogle Scholar.

18 Burgess, C. R., ‘The benefactions of mortality: the lay response in the late medieval urban parish’, in Smith, D. M. (ed.), Studies in Clergy and Ministry in Medieval England, York 1991, 6586 Google Scholar. It is to be noted that this article, while very much springing from ‘Benefactions of Mortality’, modifies some of its emphases. The accounts for St Mary at Hill, London, are printed in Medieval Records of a London City Church, and those for All Saints', Bristol will shortly appear in a Bristol Record Society volume edited by Clive Burgess.

19 The Church Book of St Ewen's, Bristol, 1454–1584, ed. Masters, B. R. and Ralph, E. (Publications of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, Records Secition vi, 1967)Google Scholar; the churchwardens' accounts of StHubbard, Andrew, London (Guildhall Library, MS 1279)Google ScholarPubMed have been transcribed by the authors.

20 The houseling populations are taken from the 1548 Chantry Certificates, printed in London and Middlesex Chantry Certificate 1548, ed. Kitching, C. J. (London Record Society xvi, 1980)Google Scholar and Chantry Certificates, Gloucestershire’, ed. Maclean, J., Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society viii (18831884), 232–51Google Scholar.

21 The Churchwardens' Accounts of Ashburton, 1479–1580, ed. Hanham, A. (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new ser. xv, 1970)Google Scholar; Peterborough Local Administration: parochial government before the Reformation: churchwardens' accounts 1467–1573, with supplementary documents, 1107–1488, ed. Mellows, W. T. (Publications of the Northamptonshire Record Society ix, 1939)Google Scholar; The Churchwardens' Accounts of Prescot, Lancashire, 1523–1607, ed. Bailey, F. A. (The Record Society for the Publication of Original Documents Relating to Lancashire and Cheshire civ, 1953)Google Scholar; A History of the Chantries within the County Palatine of Lancaster, ed. Raines, F. R. (Chetham Society lix, lx, 1862), 78 Google Scholar.

22 Boxford Churchwardens' Accounts, 1530–61, ed. Northeast, P. (Suffolk Records Society xxiii, 1982)Google Scholar. The reference to the Muster Rolls is found on p. xii.

23 The figures are from Beat Kümin, The Late Medieval English Parish, c. 1400–1560, forthcoming.

24 Churchwardens' Accounts of Prescot, 3, reveals that in 1523–4 the parish had to pay 14d. to Sir Henry Sherdeley ‘for his costs and a citation and a suspension for Farnworth’; ibid. 102, 128 indicates that the problem was recurrent.

25 Gift-giving in the context of the late medieval parish church awaits detailed research; nevertheless, common formulations like ‘from a stranger’ or ‘as a bequest’ probably mean that it never will be possible to assign each item its proper place.

26 This applies to both urban and rural accounts, although less to the former. It is to be noted that discrepancies are frequently so considerable that the averages in the graphs are the results of fresh calculations and do not repeat churchwardens' additions.

27 Large bequests are occasionally encountered, such as Richard Hatter's legacy of £3 6s. 8d. to All Saints', Bristol, in 1457 (All Saints' Church Book, p. 528 Google Scholar, matching the instruction in his will, PCC 10 Stokton), and in the St Andrew Hubbard, London, accounts for 18–20 Edward IV, which enters a receipt of £5 from ‘Manes' widow’ which was said to be a bequest (Accounts, fo. 39r); but considering how many testators bequeathed sums to their parish or to the church fabric, such entries are rare.

28 The first extant St Andrew Hubbard account, 33–5 Henry VI, makes no reference to the clerk's quarterages; the following accounts, 35–6 Henry VI and 36–8 Henry VI, do; similarly, the accounts for 6–8 Edward IV and that following (no date) include quarterages, while none are entered in the accounts for 9–12 Edward IV and 12–14 Edward IV, and so on. Information in the churchwardens' accounts of StAldersgate, Botolph's, London, for 1487–8 (Guildhall Library, MS 1454, roll 9)Google Scholar, may however explain why payments are erratic, as the wardens record that no money was ‘by theym recevyd for the clerk wage thys yere ffor asmoch as the clerke gadereth hyt hymsylf’.

29 Occasionally traces of supplementary accounts do survive. The Church Book of StEwen's, , Bristol, , preserves financial record of the building of a new church house in 1492/3 which was entered on a number of pages left blank between the church inventory and the first recorded parish account for 14541455: St Ewen's, Bristol, 1124 Google Scholar. In other archives fragments of the much fuller working accounts occasionally survive, like the sheet of receipts for All Saints', Bristol, for 6 Henry VI (Bristol Record Office, MS FOX 70). Or there are references to such accounts which were presumably used by wardens to compile the surviving fair copy. The wardens of StMary, at Hill, for example, refer to ‘the boke of parcellis’ or to the ‘boke of receytis’ where particular items ‘more playnly doth appere’: Medieval Records of a London City Church, 95, 99, 100Google Scholar. Similarly the wardens of StAldersgate, Botolph refer to a ‘byll shewyd apon thys accompt and among the memorandes of thys accompt remaynyng’: Roll 8, 1486–7Google Scholar.

30 Calendar of Wills proved and enrolled in the Court of Hustings, London, AD 1258–1688, ed. Sharpe, R. R., London 1890, ii. 563 Google Scholar. Fairhead had in fact provided for a perpetual chantry and anniversary; it seems unlikely that the chantry was ever established. In the mid-sixteenth century chantry certificate, however, the Fairhead obit is recorded as yielding £4 annually, £1 of which was devoted to costs with the remainder accruing to the church: London Chantry Certificate, 44.

31 This is to assume Fairhead's benefaction was in fact the property known as the Church House, referred to repeatedly in the St Andrew Hubbard accounts.

32 But not impossible: Sergeant, Agnes in her will in 1492 left a close called ‘Thorncroft’ to be enfeoffed to the use of the churchwardens: Boxford, 90 Google Scholar; its ownership became the object of a legal dispute between the parish and the Reche family between 1532 and 1534, which serves to emphasise that land-management required more of wardens than just collecting rents.

33 Blair, J., ‘Minster churches in the landscape’, in Hooke, D. (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Settlements, Oxford 1988, 56 Google Scholar; see also idem, ‘Introduction: from minster to parish church’, in his Minsters and Parish Churches: the local church in transition, 950–1200 (Oxford University Committe e for Archaeology xvii, 1988), 7; Taylor, C., Village and Farmstead, London 1983, 104–5, 124, 148–50Google Scholar; Morris, Churches in the Landscape, ch. iv.

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38 Spiritual or quasi-spiritual activities not dependent upon parish initiatives flourished in certain towns, the best attested being in Coventry, a town where craft gilds had attained a high civic profile and were able to organise and pay for processions and plays: Phythian-Adams, C., Desolation of a City: Coventry and the urban crisis of the late Middle Ages, Cambridge 1979, 111–12Google Scholar; idem, ‘Ceremony and the citizen: the communal year at Coventry 1450–1550’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700: essays in urban history, London 1972, 63 and passim.

39 Between 1334 and 1515 it is estimated that London and other provincial capitals experienced a fifteen-fold increase in their prosperity; growth in other milieux was much slower: Schofield, R. S., ‘The geographical distribution of wealth in England, 1334–1649’, in Floud, R. (ed.), Essays in Quantitative Economic History, Oxford 1974, 101 Google Scholar.

40 Pollock, and Maitland, , English Law, ii. 260313, 325–30Google Scholar; Sheehan, M. M., The Will in Medieval England, Toronto 1963, 274–81Google Scholar; Borough Customs, ed. Bateson, M. (Selden Society xxi, 1906), 90102, 201–4Google Scholar; The Great Red Book of Bristol. Introduction: burgage tenure in medieval Bristol, ed. Veale, E. (Bristol Record Society ii, 1931), 5ffGoogle Scholar.

41 On the effect of mortmain legislation in towns, albeit more in the fourteenth century and concerning monastic acquisition, see Raban, S., Mortmain Legislation and the English Church, 1279–1500, Cambridge 1982, 130ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the position in London and Bristol, respectively see Chew, H. M., ‘Mortmain in medieval London’, English Historical Review lx (1945), 115 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Burgess, , ‘Strategies for eternity’, 915 and passimGoogle Scholar.

42 Richmond, C., ‘Religion and the fifteenth-century English gentleman’, in Dobson, R. B. (ed.), The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, Gloucester 1984, 193208 Google Scholar; the gentry might nevertheless judge it unwise to withdraw completely from so important an arena as the local parish: Carpenter, C., ‘The religion of the gentry of fifteenth-century England’, in Williams, D. (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century: proceedings of the fifteenth-century Harlaxton symposium, Woodbridge 1987, 66 Google Scholar; c.f. Harper-Bill, , The Pre-Reformation Church, 73 Google Scholar. For comments on social differentiation in another milieu, see Barron, , ‘Parish fraternities’, 30 Google Scholar.

43 Useful general discussions may be found in Bolton, J. L., The English Medieval Economy, 1150–1500, London 1980, ch. vii and bibliographyGoogle Scholar; Rubin, M., Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge, Cambridge 1987, 1533 and nn.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on tenurial changes, Hilton, R. H., The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England, London 1969, 4451, 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dyer, C., Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: the estates of the bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540, Cambridge 1980, 210ff., 373Google Scholar; Howell, C., Land, Family and Inheritance in Transition: Kibworth Harcourt 1280–1700, Cambridge 1983, 57, 236, 248–9Google Scholar; Britnell, R. H., Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525, Cambridge 1986, 147, 259–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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45 Contemporary parish ordinances are unambiguous: failure to contribute to the collective effort was an offence punishable by financial and spiritual sanctions. Examples may be found in the archives of All Saints' and StStephen's, , Bristol, , respectively: All Saints Church Book, 46 Google Scholar; and ‘ Ancient Bristol document, no. VII: regulations of the vestry of St Stephen in 1524’, ed. Fox, F. F., Proceedings of the Clifton Antiquarian Club i (18841888), 198203 Google Scholar. It should be noted, too, that outstanding church dues could be successfully claimed at visitations on pain of spiritual penalties: Kentish Visitations, 306, 111c, concerning contributions to the wages of parish employees at Westbere and Smeeth.

46 Recent continental and English research supports the argument of a basic correspondence of theological doctrine and the religious priorities of the common people: Blickle, P., ‘Communal Reformation and peasant piety: the Peasant Reformation and its late medieval origins’, Central European History xx (1987), 223–6Google Scholar; and, on the sacrament of the eucharist, Brigden, S., London and the Reformation, Oxford 1989, 1223 Google Scholar; for contrasting opinion, Delumeau, J., Le Catholicism entre Luther et Voltaire, Paris 1971 Google Scholar.

47 In the St Mary at Hill, London, accounts, which reveal how some chantry founders sought to profit their parish financially (see n. 16 above), it may be noted that Wrytell's, Rose chantry commanded an income of £6 13s. 4d., which sum exactly provided for the salary of the celebrant: Medieval Records of a London City Church, 211 Google Scholar.

48 John Mathew, parishioner of St Ewen's, Bristol, who died in 1521, endowed the parish with an annual rent of 33s. 4d.; of this, apart from provision for an anniversary and for weekly commemoration, 6s. 8d. was to be used to relieve poor householders in the parish of their contribution to the clerk's wages: PCC, Maynwaring 17 (fo. 131–v), and St Ewen's, Bristol, pp. xxviii–ix.

49 In his will made in 1353, John Causton, who established a perpetual chantry in St Mary at Hill, London (see n. 16 above), entrusted his chantry endowment to StBishopsgate, Helen's, with instructions that it revert to the parish should prioress and convent prove negligent in their duties: Medieval Records of a London City Church, 49 Google Scholar; they or their agents may indeed have been negligent, since it certainly appears that St Mary at Hill had assumed responsibility for the chantry by the later fifteenth century. John Weston's instructions, dating from 1407, concerning his chantry in the same church (ibid. p. 12), include a clear default clause which may stand to illustrate founders' determination to safeguard their provisions. For the same process operating to safeguard property devise and associated anniversaries in fifteenth-century Bristol's parishes, see Burgess, , ‘A service for the dead’, 200–1Google Scholar.

50 Expertise in property management is certainly attested by a number of examples in the years preceding the Reformation of churchwardens extending their holdings by purchase: in 1517 at St Botolph Aldersgate, London, for example, the wardens borrowed £10 from the wardens of the Trinity fraternity and paid £23 2s. 8d. for the tenement next adjoining the south side of Black Horse Alley (an area where the parish already held property) – thereafter an annual rent of 23s. 8d. represented roughly a 5% return (Guildhall Library, MS 1454, roll 36).

51 Halesowen Churchwardens' Accounts, 1487–1582, ed. Somers, F. (Worcestershire Historical Society xl, 19521957)Google Scholar.

52 Gibbs, G. G., ‘Parish Finance and the Urban Community in London, 1450–1620’, unpublished PhD diss., Charlottesville, 1990, 190 Google Scholar.

53 Guildhall Library, MS 1454, roll 54.

54 The Accounts of the Churchwardens of the parish of St Michael Cornhill, ed. Overall, W. H., London 1871 Google Scholar.

55 The Churchwardens' Accounts of Yatton, Somerset Record Office, D/P/yat/4/1/1–3.

56 Bridgwater Borough Archives, ed. Dilks, T. B. (Somerset Record Society xlviii, liii, lviii, lx, lxx, 19331971)Google Scholar. We are grateful to K. L. French for bringing the Bridgwater accounts to our attention.

57 Burgess, , ‘Strategies for eternity’, 1015, 17–18Google Scholar and passim, for discussion both of enfeoffment to use and of the competence of churchwardens.

58 Raban, , Mortmaìn Legislation, at p. 170, and 170–4, 190–2Google Scholar; Ives, E. W., ‘The genesis of the Statute of Uses’, English Historical Review Ixxxii (1967), 673–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lehmberg, S. E., The Reformation Parliament 1529–1536, Cambridge 1970, 94–6, 133–4, 141, 216, 220, 235–8, 252, 255Google Scholar.

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60 Kreider, A., English Chantries: the road to Dissolution, Cambridge, Mass. 1979, chs vi, viiGoogle Scholar, discusses the debate and tactics accompanying the government's assault on small-scale intercessory institutions.

61 St Botolph, Aldersgate, for instance, appears to have had concealed lands: property yielding 25s. annually was confiscated in 1559–60, ‘for that the same quite rentes were geven to the said church to the mantenence of lampes lightes and soch like’, and hence were said to belong to the crown; see also Kitching, C. J., ‘The quest for concealed lands in the reign of Elizabeth’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. xxiv (1974), 6378 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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