Our Village Ancestors E-Book

Helen Osborn

• Herausgeber: The Crowood Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 420

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This book will be a source of help for anybody researching their farming and countryside ancestors in England. Looked at through the lens of rural life, and specifically the English village, it provides advice and inspiration on placing rural people into their geographic and historical context. It covers the time from the start of parish registers in the Tudor world, when most of our ancestors worked on the land, until the beginning of the twentieth century, when many had moved to the towns. Helen Osborn demonstrates how genealogical records are integral to their place of origin and can be illuminated using local newspaper reports, and the work of local historians. She explores the stories of people who lived in the countryside in the past, as told by the documents that record them, both rich and poor. The book will be particularly valuable to anyone who is looking for a deeper understanding of their family history, rather than simply collecting names on the tree.

Leseprobe

A Genealogist’s Guide to Understanding the English Rural Past

Helen Osborn

ROBERT HALE

First published in 2021 by Robert Hale, an imprint of The Crowood Press Ltd, Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2021

© Helen Osborn 2021

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7198 3148 5

The right of Helen Osborn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover design by: Catherine Williams, Chapter One Book Production

Contents

1 The Rural Past

2 Parish and Family

3 The Land and the Farmer

4 The Church and the Tithe

5 Supporting the Poor

6 Work and School in the Countryside

7 The Whole Community: Lists of Villagers and the Victorian Census

8 Leaving the Village

Appendix – Dates of Interest

Sources

Notes and References

Index

1

The Rural Past

This book is aimed at those who have discovered a love for filling in the details about the lives of their ancestors as they build trees; even the novice family historian should be able to take something away from it, although it is not a ‘how to’ guide in starting genealogy research. There are many books and resources that show how to start researching a family tree, and it is expected that the reader will have already progressed beyond the stage of simple name gathering, and will be ready to discover increasing amounts of local and historical context and how to open up the records to gain the maximum from them.

The subject is a wide one: English village life from the middle of the sixteenth century up to the nineteenth century, viewed through the lens of documents that genealogists commonly use. This 400-year sweep of time resulted in the creation of almost all the local records we use to build the pedigree of a family, whether that family is rooted in landed gentry and the lords of the manor, or came from the ranks of the humble farm servant.

The period begins with the setting up of parish registers in England and Wales in 1538 during the reign of Tudor king Henry VIII, and ends with the nineteenth-century census and the administrative reforms that centralized administration and records, making them less useful at the local level. Along the way we will meet some of the most important records that give information for genealogical tree building and evidence of relationships, as well as illustrating how life was lived in the countryside, through the stories they tell.

Notwithstanding the blood kinship links that DNA investigations have brought to the study of genealogy, genealogists remain overwhelmingly reliant on written sources – and luckily there are a huge number of sources for England. From the Middle Ages onwards the growth in those sources allows an increasing amount of light to be shed on our ancestors’ lives. As the centuries unfold, the documentary sources for both village history and family history simply within a rural parish multiply, and do not stop being of use until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the parish lost many of its administrative functions.

As well as the parish registers, there are other records of the parish, such as surveys and tithes, accounts and records of the poor law, and records of local charities. Outside the parish system there were the records of the manor, concerning themselves not only with tenancies and cultivation of land, but also with the misdemeanours of villagers.

This book doesn’t describe all the possible records in which people can be found for the whole of a 400-year period, but tries to put some of the most common and usable local records into a useful context. The emphasis throughout is on thinking about geographic and historic context, and the records that are created and held locally.

I do not deal with records created by the Victorian national administrations, such as civil registration, which started in 1837, although we will meet the Victorian census because it gives us so much useful information about a place. Nor do I describe many records created at the local but wider levels of diocese or county, except where they are particularly important to showing how life was lived, such as with probate inventories and the records of quarter sessions. Many of these records are of equal importance to the history of towns and cities: they are certainly not all unique to the village.

The family historian who desires to get ‘under the skin’ of their ancestors and understand their way of life, as well as to interpret the records correctly, needs to switch their focus away from names and on to geographical places. In that respect, this book is an antidote to the myriad online data websites, which encourage quick searching for names. I am convinced that research into the people of a place – research that unfolds in a more leisurely fashion, allowing the family historian to truly understand both the records and the location – is ultimately the most rewarding.

The Importance of Place

The sixteenth century witnessed a huge rise in record creation, documentary sources and writing of all kinds useful to both the genealogist and the historian. It is possible to combine information from these sources so that pictures of even ordinary individuals can be built up. The survival of all these records varies a great deal from parish to parish and village to village, yet it is still true that most English parishes have extensive sets of records from the sixteenth century up to the present. Even if records from the nineteenth century appear different from the earlier types, they were still created for the same purpose: to deal with the same kinds of problem that a community needs to deal with day to day. The good news for the genealogist is that they record individuals, sometimes in detail.

The way we should approach these records and interpret them is the same, whether the local system varies from north to south or east to west, although it is necessary to keep a firm sense of place and to understand that the interpretation and practice of the law in one area might differ from another.

As I showed in my book Genealogy: Essential Research Methods, genealogists often need to analyse documents in a very exacting way. This gives us special needs, which differ from the needs of local historians, because genealogists are always concerned with small personal details and minutiae. Historians choose topics and themes, and thereby select which sources to study; however, genealogists do not get to choose their sources: they are forced to use all available sources to prove a pedigree. Questions about individuals appearing or not appearing in records are of vital importance to the genealogist, while the local historian is quite rightly more concerned with whole communities rather than single families or individuals.

Yet there is much cross-over between local history and genealogy, because in order to gather truly the evidence that we need to reconstruct families into genealogical trees, we should understand both the historical and local context as well as have a good understanding of the documents used. Thus, local history and family history come together over questions of place community, and the melding of family history and local history is nowhere more apparent than when a locality has given rise to a particular surname.

As we get further involved with the history of our families, and in the wider context of surname history and the development of surnames, we find that many English surnames come from place names, some of them recognizable places today, others generic, still others so small or local as to be all but lost, others with subtle spelling changes: Attlee, Bainbridge, Bakewell, Eccleston, Greenwood, Heath are just a few examples from hundreds. Many of us still carry information about an original village, hamlet or farmstead around as our surname, like a long invisible thread tying us to a specific place.

The genealogist tends to look at his or her ancestors with backward glances, travelling in time backwards, starting in the crowded cities and moving backwards through parishes of lesser and lesser population, and sparser and sparser records. In a way it is the opposite of the traditional historian’s view of the forward march of history, with expanding populations, new places created, and social progress. As the genealogist progresses backwards up the tree, the broader world increasingly gives way to the smaller and smaller place, even while at the same time the whole ancestral tree increases! We move from the base of a pyramid up to the tip.

Adding a deep sense of geographic place to the analysis of records, as is the practice of good genealogists, takes family history into a whole new realm. It is often slow research, with an emphasis on acquiring knowledge through a deep understanding of place and context, yet it is deeply satisfying as mysteries and problems are solved or at the very least made a whole lot clearer.

Life has never been straightforward. Laws may be enacted and records created, and administrations can be messy, and it helps us to untangle whether the community in which our ancestor appears was interpreting the law as it was written, or whether it was widely ignored. Local situations can be just as complex as individual relationships, so any local or family historian must be aware that while a broad-brush approach can start you off on a voyage of discovery, the true prize is likely to be in bringing to life the real, messy human situation.

It has become a cliché to talk about putting the flesh on the bones of the family-history skeleton, but even when all the facts about someone’s life and family are discovered, the full story of the place your ancestors lived in, and the community that surrounded them, is often ignored. The distillation of my theme therefore is that whenever we genealogists research a person or family, we should really be thinking not just of the name or of the individual, but of the place. It is the place that adds the needed context: it is the cloth that clothes our ancestors, cut here by the wealth or poverty of the land, darted there by the climate, embroidered here by the local customs, and trimmed and seamed by local officialdom.

The English Village

So much has already been written about the English village that it almost consists of a genre in its own right. Local histories specific villages are available in their hundreds; books specifically about records, such as John West’s Village Records1 and Peter Edwards Rural Life2, have pointed out interesting trails for the local historian to follow. However, there has not been a great deal of work putting together the study of the local community with an analysis of local documents from a genealogical point of view, nor from the point of view of genealogical problem solving, with most books aimed at family historians simply being a description of different types of record. The late historian David Hey has trodden this path with his books on family history and his interest in the communities of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, particularly Family History and Local History in England (1987), Journeys in Family History (2003), and within his editorship of the very useful Oxford Companion to Family and Local History (1996 and 2008) – yet there is certainly room for more to be done in this area.

Almost everybody with English roots will have an ancestor who lived in a village; some of us have ancestors who lived, were married and died in the same village for generations. We often first pick up the trail of our ancestors through finding them in the census in the big cities, usually in the nineteenth century. We follow them backwards for only a few generations, and then find that the family’s origins are in the countryside. The cities took in so much immigration during the nineteenth century, firstly and partly due to better transport links, the coming of industry and the factories, and the economic pull, the promise of a better life in town, but also due to the push of agricultural depression and land reforms. However, the transport and industry that drove so many to an urban life is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is in the countryside where our collective history began.

If your own starting point has been the census, and the discovery that your nineteenth-century town-living ancestor was born in a country parish, then, other than the county and the parish name, this may be all you know. If you have a parish name, a very good piece of advice is to look up the parish, village or hamlet in a good nineteenth-century gazetteer such as Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary3, to discover more. Lewis is available in a number of editions online, and also at some of the genealogical websites such as Ancestry. His entries will give you a brief description of that place at the date of publication. But however useful that may be, it won’t even begin to really inform you about the sort of community your ancestor lived in.

The village and the parish are, of course, not necessarily the same thing. A parish often contains several villages, with hamlets and scattered farmsteads as well, or it might have just one main settlement. In the north of England, parishes can be very large, and then they may contain many different settlements, commonly known as townships, but of village size. Looking at a modern map may not prove very enlightening, although it is certainly better than not looking at any kind of map, and will at least enable you to have some idea of the topography and the main features, although many of them are likely to be modern.

As population has risen, and as industry has grown and maybe collapsed again, it has left a very different landscape from the one our ancestors knew. Nevertheless, in the absence of other information about a place, a modern map is a starting point. The Ordnance Survey Land Ranger series allows you to see individual plots and fields clearly, although it is better to get hold of a map from the Ordnance Survey County Series (1840s–1890s), which is drawn at a large scale. See the section on Starting Points for the Researcher at the end of this chapter for more information.

There is, or was, no such a thing as an average village over such a long period of time as 400 years over the whole of the country. Villages are all alike, up to a point, and then they diverge according to soil, to region, to local culture and historical happenstance. We all think we know what a village consists of. It sits in the mind’s eye as a small, but not too small, settlement around an ancient church, a venerable public house or two, maybe a shop, sometimes a village green. Green fields and farms lie round about it, and it has its own distinct identity developed over hundreds of years.

I was born in a Hertfordshire village, went to the village school, and was christened and married in the parish church, so I can certainly claim acquaintance with what a village means to me personally, and I don’t find it so very difficult to imagine the same place 100 years ago, or even 500 years ago. Un-tarmac the roads, shrink the field sizes, increase the woodland, of course lose just about all the houses, and put dozens of people to work in the fields, and there you have it.

Not everyone who lived in a village was working on the land. Apart from the farmers and their many labourers, village residents often included the parson or rector of the parish, some gentry folk in the bigger houses, shopkeepers, innkeepers or beer-house keepers. There were blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters and other tradesmen as well, and waggoners and carriers too. Sometimes there were grander folk, with some villages being owned and part of large estates. There were people who took the crops from the farmers and turned them into food and drink, such as millers and brewers. And there may have been some industry: mining, quarrying and clothworking all took place largely in rural areas.

For our ancestors, the village was both a place in which to live and work, and a place to retire to, a place to be born in, marry in and die in, a place where everybody knew you, and you knew your place – but it was also a place to escape from.

Historical Background

Before we can jump in at our starting point of the English Reformation and the first parish registers, it is useful to survey the scene from even further back and discover some of the remnants of the culture of medieval life that were still very much clinging on in the mid-sixteenth century. Historians like to divide up the periods of time into nice neat packages, and the mid-sixteenth century is often referred to as being within the ‘early modern period’.

This time-span takes in 400 years, roughly 1400 to 1800 – but even so, Tudor people with their odd customs and costumes, Henry VIII and England in the 1540s, seem very far from modern to the ordinary reader. It is ‘early modern’ to the historian because it is no longer medieval, and both state and country were changing. Indeed, the whole of Europe was changing. But to the non-historian it is certainly not ‘modern’. In fact, it is almost as if we must learn about a totally different country, largely because the medieval world was still very much around.

To ensure the broadest possible overview we should travel even further back than 1400, to be sure of the full context for all the records we are going to use. There is such a history of continuity in rural English life that even if we start at the year 1000, there would still be even more ancient customs that we could discover underlying the history of the parish, the manor and affecting village life.

By the late Saxon and early medieval period, the village as a recognizable entity was starting to come into being. The word ‘village’ is derived from the word ‘vill’, but the two are rather different. The ‘vill’ of the Domesday Book in 1086 was a unit of land that did not have to include a settlement, or it could include several hamlets – whereas any village is a single settlement. The location of any village settlement was dependent on soil, on climate and on the availability of water, as well as population and the carrying capacity of the land.

It was also dependent on, and intertwined with, a feudal system of lordship, specific jurisdictions in the locality, and any local customs.4 Three structures were at the heart of the early medieval village community: land ownership, social hierarchy and the Church. All three resonated down the ages and were still impacting on people throughout our much later period. First, land was paramount for feeding people, both rich and poor. Food was not imported as it is today, and it didn’t even move very much from its own locality. The early village story is therefore one of self-sufficiency. The organization of land holdings (land being the purest representation of wealth) was of prime legal importance, both at the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 and into the future as generation succeeded generation.

Already established before the Norman invasion of 1066 was feudalism or service to the local lord. This service was bound up with land holding, farming and tenancies known as the ‘manorial system’, all of which continued to affect the lives of villagers (and indeed townsfolk) right into the nineteenth century, and even today can still have a residual effect on land and property ownership. We meet some of the records created by the manorial system in Chapter 3.

Ownership of land changed slowly over our period. In general, large landowners such as the Church or the aristocracy tended to remain large landowners. In some areas land became ever more concentrated in a small group of hands. However, what mattered to our rural ancestors, over and above whether they were part of a huge estate or not, and what enables us to trace them, are the dealings they had with their landlord and their communities through the manorial courts.

Local customs sometimes had extremely ancient roots, often pre-Norman, and are important because they can affect inheritance in ways that are strange to modern people. We tend to think that the system of the eldest son getting the property was fixed and immutable, but it was dependent on local custom. These inheritance customs can extend a very long way back in time – to the Saxons, or the Angles for example. Customs were written down in manorial records, which therefore provide the local historian with a wealth of information about differences between manors and localities.

These differences extended to dialect and language. It can be worthwhile considering the very oldest history of any area: customs and language that developed in the north and east under the Vikings or Norse invaders differ very much from those of the southern counties, which differ in turn from those of the West Country.

Yet while many places were slow to change, change did, of course, happen. Rural life was disrupted by changes in agricultural practice, by the growth and then decline of the wool trade, by new laws enacted by parliament, by the coming of the industrial age, by the growth of transport systems across the country, particularly the coming of the railways in the first half of the nineteenth century, and by changes in society itself as Britain grew an empire and forged trade links abroad. Some villages grew and prospered, others were poorer, and differences in location as well as landlords played a vital part in differing fortunes.

The locality of a person’s birth, as well as their status and circumstances, must have affected them for the remainder of their lives. Many of them stayed put in the same region or area, if not the same parish. About one in ten migrated to London, but there isn’t thought to have been much trans-regional movement, except where the pull of new industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sucked in people from far and wide. Anyone who did move a long way out of their own area would be marked out as a stranger by their accent, even their choice of words, and would no doubt have been made to feel like a fish out of water, unless of course they were within a migrant community of other folk like themselves.

Twentieth-century historians argued that it was the Tudors who ‘united’ the country. They brought Welsh blood into England and forged a sense of identity and community. Yet they weren’t quite like us. There were no Scots or Irish in any numbers in Tudor England, and even the gentry and aristocrats were largely homogeneous. The Tudor period was a time when people, particularly in rural areas, were ultimately descended from the local tribes, even if they could not trace their ancestry back there using documents.

Things began to get more mixed during the seventeenth century, as the Scottish, who moved south under the further uniting force of James I of England and VI of Scotland in 1603, added their genetic heritage. The sixteenth century also saw increasing immigration from the continent, but if you were living in Tudor England in a village, then your blood undoubtedly went back for hundreds of years into a purely indigenous population. What this means is that any provincial characteristics must have been very much more marked than they are today. A thick accent might be almost impenetrable anywhere except on its own territory, and dialects were commonly used, being a hangover from the very earliest settlements.5

Genetic research may yet overturn this view, or at least allow it to become more nuanced; however, for our purposes we need to recognize that the individual ancestor might be taken out of the community and studied in isolation, but ultimately we can’t remove the community from the individual. People in the past carried their original communities with them in a way that simply does not happen today.

Population and Economic Growth

At the time when parish registers started in the mid-sixteenth century there are estimated to have been about 2.8 million people in England, a severe decline on the numbers before the Black Death 200 years earlier. Of these 2.8 million, only around 25 per cent, or 750,000, lived in the cities and towns. England was very sparsely populated compared to today. More or less everybody, even those in the towns and cities, lived very close to the countryside, within a short walk away. Vast tracts of countryside might be traversed without perhaps meeting anyone, and many marshy areas of the landscape were undrained and essentially wild, such as most of the fens, the Somerset levels and other marshlands.

Between 1541 and 1801, the population of England grew from 2.8 million to 8.6 million, with rapid growth between 1560 and the 1650s. Decline in the second half of the seventeenth century was followed once again by growth in the early eighteenth century, and then by more rapid growth from the 1740s onwards. By 1781, the population was 7.2 million, and then very rapid growth saw rises in the nineteenth century from 8.6 million in 1801 to 21.5 million by 1871.6

The implication of this for the genealogist is that most of us will have family trees that explode with collateral lines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but once we get back into the seventeenth century and further back, the brothers and sisters of our direct ancestors are much less likely to have survived. Our direct ancestors were the survivors: we are all descended from the strongest or the luckiest. Nevertheless, the high death rates mean that burial registers can be very useful for pinpointing any family within a parish.

Up until the nineteenth century the majority of people lived a rural existence. However, by 1801 one-third of England’s population was already urban. But all was soon to alter dramatically, as the pace of change in both population growth and migration to towns and cities accelerated throughout the nineteenth century. By 1851 a majority of English people lived in towns and cities.

Right at the end of our period, the countryside was depopulated of the agricultural labourer. Between 1850 and 1914, an agricultural workforce of just over 1 million collapsed to just 225,000, as child labourers were brought out of the workforce, and people migrated to urban areas. Machinery and changes in agricultural practice of course helped push this vast migration along, just as much as rising employment opportunities in towns and cities pulled people in. The population in England in 1901 was 30.8 million.

Our whole period is thus a time of increasing population, at first slowly and sporadically and with great differences according to area, but then with increasing pace. Eventually, towns and cities grew so fast that whole villages were swallowed within them.

The implication of all this expansion should be self-evident. As research proceeds backwards in time there are simply fewer people to find. If we were able to find all our possible Tudor ancestors – perhaps our tenth through to our thirteenth great-grandparents – then some of them would be related to others of them with many cross linkages, leaving us with fewer actual ancestors than we would have in theory. This is called pedigree collapse. From a numbers point of view it makes it easier to reconstruct families further back into the past as there are fewer of them to search for; however, the records also get sparser around the same time to frustrate us.

Family size varies, too. Greater numbers of death due to disease meant Tudor families were smaller than might be imagined since so many babies died soon after birth. Property could therefore become concentrated in only a few hands. As population rose, and particularly if a place and family were generally healthy, in the eighteenth century more members of a family might be surviving, thus in turn leaving many more descendants. However, this also allowed some people born into previously comfortably off families to fall down the social scale.

In his wonderful study of Kibworth in Leicestershire, Michael Wood found that soon after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century people were marrying later than previously as well as having fewer children. This tended to mean that family property became concentrated in just one branch of a family. The consequence of this was that by the time of the sixteenth century, there was a marked change between the extended families of peasants in the village of the Middle Ages, to just one nuclear family branch, as people had died and families had split and migrated.7 This development obviously has implications for any genealogist who is researching in the sixteenth century. It is a pattern that is familiar to me from various families researched in the seventeenth century as well.

Historians believe that agrarian reforms helped the rising population feed themselves, as new land was reclaimed from waste, marsh drained and so on during this period. The Tudor period was characterized by a young population, with about a third of the population under fifteen in 1541. An expanding population led to price rises and the expansion of existing villages, rather than new villages being founded. With this sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansion came a great rebuilding in England, as newly prosperous villagers built bigger houses. This was the time that the stone houses of the Cotswolds and the timber-framed houses in southern counties – such as Sussex, Essex, but also Warwickshire and Cheshire – were erected. Many stone farm-houses in the Yorkshire Dales and other northern areas also date from the seventeenth century.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was also a fashion for the wealthier to erect family monuments and tombs in the parish church; this was coupled with an interest in genealogy and heraldry among the newly emerging middle and professional classes8, and is extremely helpful for the family historian who is descended from such families. Many of the most interesting records used to trace the history of a family also come from this period of expansion; for example, probate inventories from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and surviving parish registers, are relatively complete as compared with the eighteenth century.

Among other changes, in areas that grew arable crops there was a trend over time for farms to get larger, and to employ wage-earning labourers from outside the family or immediate circle of neighbours. Aside from the men working on the land, some of these workers were women who worked in the dairies, at brewing and in domestic service. A newly prosperous merchant class also needed domestic servants, and adolescent girls and boys who moved from home into the local towns and to the bigger farms became part of everyday life. It is thought that labourers and servants added together made up the biggest section of early modern English society, making up to 60 per cent of the population.9

The Church and the Parish

The Christian church, one of the three great pillars at the heart of medieval society and village life, was already well established in England at the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066. The church kept its power over, and its effect upon, the village and parish right through the medieval period and into the early modern period. While the Crown and the landholder had relaxed some of their grip, in the 1540s the church was still the predominant force in any villager’s life. No one of modest means could escape, as the church acted not only as the registrar of births and deaths, and as the local administrator, but also as moral judge and jury.

The church and monasteries were also large landowners; individual monasteries prior to the Reformation farmed large estates of land. However, at the start of our period the church had only recently become the Church of England, a reformed church with an English bible and English services, not Latin ones, and churches were newly deprived of painted decorations and carved rood screens and the colourful gaiety of the medieval world.

The monasteries may have been swept away and their land redistributed, much of it ending up in private hands, but the old intertwined Christian and folkloric or superstitious belief system was far too strong to disappear, although it was more pervasive at the start of our period than at the end. Far from being swept away, the influence of some of the older systems held on: for example, church courts, originally created in 1072, were still very much there to judge both clergy and the layperson, as well as to administer probate after death. Throughout the medieval period the church had been enlarging its role and jurisdiction so that by 1540, a large amount of law was covered by the church court as the church sought to have jurisdiction over moral behaviour.

For the average villager who had no goods to leave and did not transgress, it was the parish priest himself who was all-important. Genealogists and local historians need to know not only about the parish registers that record people – they also need to know the way the parish priest was supported by a community. Priests’ income did not come directly from the church as in a modern salary, but from special plots of land granted to them, known as glebe lands, from offerings from the congregation, and from tithes. The parish and the tithe were closely interlinked, and have, of course, created a large number of records.

Parish registers were not the only documents created by the parish, and the village researcher will want to study more or less all records that survive. These records tend to be known as ‘parish chest records’, because they were originally kept in a big wooden chest in the church. The parish was the local administration, much like a local council. It was concerned with supporting the poor, supporting the priest, keeping out beggars, the upkeep of roads and perhaps waterways, as well as maintaining the fabric of the church. This was all done against a background of the overall authority of the local bishop, who periodically sent out visitations around the diocese to check on things, mainly record keeping. Each parish had to send a representative to these visitations with copies of documents.

As the centuries rolled by, the Crown spotted various opportunities to raise money, by taxing entries in registers, or supporting the woollen industry by decreeing that all burial shrouds be made of wool. This created a pattern of ecclesiastical records, with additional records created for civil purposes. It is possible to see this as state interference in local matters. At the start of our period, back in 1538, the balance was tipped more towards the ecclesiastical authorities, but by the end of the nineteenth century their powers had declined by a very large extent, and civil matters had more prominence.

The Great Poor Law Act of 1601 is probably the real start of what became known as the civil parish, as opposed to the ecclesiastical parish. This Act, and its many further amendments, needed the creation of a number of new records, ostensibly concerned with accounting, but which provide wonderful material for genealogists. They include records of apprenticeship, settlement papers, and removal orders and payments to the poor.

How to deal with the poor and those who could not work, and their strain upon parish resources, is a constant theme in both rural and urban areas throughout our period. Records from the parish that provide evidence as to measures taken to support the deserving, or to inhibit those likely to become a burden on a local community, are extremely useful to the family historian. Many families are recorded in such records, and they often provide the best evidence of migration from place to place, and evidence of relationships for the very poorest, who are not so well recorded in other records. Generally people were supported by their villages and parishes, and tales of outright starvation did not happen as much as might be imagined, although they did occur – we meet a notorious case later on in Chapter 5.

The civil authorities therefore started interfering in local administration, which had hitherto been left up to the church. In a sense it can be said that the civil authorities – that is, the government of the day – were using the parish as an instrument by which to rule and organize. The parish was given a large range of responsibilities, and ended up touching on almost every aspect of everyday life. It had to collect local rates, and was also used to gather up any national taxes. The parish constable was meant to report to the local quarter-sessions courts on a variety of public nuisances. This work of the parish provides a parallel to the manor, which is discussed in Chapter 3.

The church had its own concerns. Any parish was not just an area of pastoral care, but also a self-supporting area that had to provide for its priest and the maintenance of the church buildings. Thus there is an emphasis in parish records on amounts paid for this support, and the boundaries of the area. The payment of tithes was a part of this – namely, who paid what, and the local customs surrounding these payments.

Boundaries and Administrations

For the genealogist, boundaries, jurisdictions and administrations loom large because they tend to dictate where the records we seek were created and end up. For example, our family history societies are organized by county, and so are many of our local records. However, for our ancestors it may have been irrelevant whether they were in Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire, or whether they lived in Kent and came to market in Sussex: what was important for them were physical barriers to travel, such as hills and rivers, the state of the roads, whether they could travel by boat – in other words, the utter practicality of moving around.

The parish, too, may not always be the best way to understand a local area. The parish did create and hold a number of useful records for genealogists, which is why we tend to emphasize it over all else; however, in many places the researcher is going to be just as interested in the manor, the township, or perhaps the tithing.

Tithings originated in Anglo Saxon England as ten householders who acted as a group responsible for keeping law and order and for collecting payments. The tithing answered to the hundred, which had its own court. During the medieval period, the tithing lasted in southern England as a peace-keeping force. It was headed by the tithing man, or ‘headborough’, who was equivalent to the constable of the township. The tithing and the township became the basic small districts for the keeping of law and order. The township, strictly speaking, was defined as having its own constable, but the word ‘town’ is misleading, as townships could be very small hamlets. In northern England overseers of the poor were appointed at this level.

In the North, a quarter is the name for an administrative area that is a division of a parish just for the collection of rates. Other divisions, which may or may not be important to your research, are the hundreds, known as ‘rapes’ in Sussex, ‘lathes’ in Kent, ‘wapentakes’ in Danelaw counties, ‘wards’ in the north-west and ‘leets’ in East Anglia. These are ancient divisions of shires, consisting of a group of parishes.

In some southern and eastern counties of England parishes were very small, and it was possible to reach a dozen other parishes within an hour’s walk from one village. In northern counties, parishes were very large indeed, and townships may or may not have had their own chapel. Whether the villagers could physically attend a service or bring a child to be baptised might depend on floods or snowfall and other natural barriers. In large parishes, chapels of ease were set up to serve a more local population. In some cases they had the right to baptise and bury, and more occasionally to marry, those who lived in their bounds. Thus in a parish with both parochial records and chapelry records, it always makes sense to look for both.

Rural market networks were also extremely important. In an age without shops, being able to hold a market was of vital importance for a community. Towns that were positioned on boundaries between different farming regions could encourage trade between two regions, and attract people from both. Links for trade crossed boundaries, and this means that the researcher often needs to spend time studying a whole region in order to work out where a migrant ancestor might have come from.

Starting Points for the Researcher

There are some well-established and invaluable guides, or jumping-off points, to help you discover more about historical geographic context in England. I have already mentioned Samuel Lewis and his series of topographical dictionaries of England, first published in 1831 before county and parish boundary changes. The second and greatest in its ambition is the Victoria County Histories series; and third is historical mapping. If you use all these together, you will be able to locate places and to understand something about their administration and boundaries, and their relationship to their locality.

It is also useful to know who the big landowners were, what crops were grown in the region, where the rivers were, and find the nearest market town. Any printed or online history of a village, or history of its church, can also provide a starting point. Armed with the basic background knowledge that all of this brings, some preliminary searches of the local archives catalogue can then be started.

The Victoria County History was originally founded in 1899, and is a long run of printed volumes organized by county; although sadly incomplete, its aim is to provide each county with its history. Where they exist, volumes can give detailed information about manors, parishes, towns, boroughs and other settlements to provide essential background reference. Often the local landowners will be mentioned by name, and sometimes memorial inscriptions in the local church are listed.

The project is organized by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, and is still ongoing, with the modern volumes usually the most useful. Major libraries and the local county record office should have the volumes for their county, and a full set is held at The National Archives on the open shelves on the second-floor reading room. They have an online presence at http://www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/ and the volumes can also be searched online at British History Online (http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk).

Samuel Lewis was the publisher and editor of topographical dictionaries of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, with the aim of providing a description of every place. A Topographical Dictionary of England lists every place in alphabetical order, showing exactly where a particular settlement, village, parish or place was located in relation to the nearest town or towns; this includes any relevant barony, hundred, county or province, the saint’s dedication of the church, the Poor Law union, and the tithes and living of the church. The 7th edition (1848) of Lewis’s dictionary can be found online at British History Online (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/) where it can be searched and read for free.

Three different and contrasting entries from Lewis are given here as examples, from Kent, Hertfordshire and North Yorkshire:

BREDHURST (St. Peter), a parish, in the union of Hollingbourn, hundred of Eyhorne, lathe of Aylesford, W. division of Kent, 5 miles (S.S.E.) from Chatham; containing 131 inhabitants. It comprises 600 acres, of which 274 are in wood. The ancient village is said to have stood at a short distance, near a wood, where several wells are still visible. The living is a perpetual curacy, in the patronage of the Rector of Hollingbourn, and endowed with the tithes, which have been commuted for £130: there are 9 acres of glebe. The church is a small edifice, consisting only of one aisle and a chancel, with a tower surmounted by a low spire: adjoining it is a small ruinous chapel in the early English style, formerly the burial-place of the family of Kemsley. There is a small dissenters’ place of worship.10

DATCHWORTH (All Saints), a parish, in the hundred of Broadwater, union and county of Hertford, 2½ miles (N.E. by E.) from Welwyn; containing 581 inhabitants. It is situated on the great road from London to York, and comprises 1922a. 3r. 35p., of which 1491 acres are arable, 230 pasture, 97 woodland, and 60 common or waste; the soil is chiefly gravel, in some parts alternated with clay. The living is a rectory, valued in the king’s books at £14. 13. 4., and in the patronage of Clare Hall, Cambridge: the tithes have been commuted for £475, and the glebe comprises nearly 24 acres, with a glebe-house. The church has been enlarged by the addition of 150 free sittings.11

ABBOT-SIDE, HIGH, a township, in the parish of Aysgarth, wapentake of Hang-West, N. riding of York, 1¼ mile (N.W. by W.) from Hawes; containing, with the chapelries of Hardraw and Helbeck-Lunds, and the hamlets of Cotterdale, Fosdale, Litherskew, Sedbusk, Shaw, and Simonstone, 574 inhabitants. The two townships of Abbot-Side received their names from the monks of Jervaulx Abbey, who had considerable property in the district. This township, which comprises by computation 13,000 acres, is altogether wild and mountainous, and consists of moors, dales, and ravines; it is rich in springs, waterfalls, rocks, and caves, and a variety of interesting natural curiosities. The magnificent cataract Hardraw Scarr, 102 feet in height, with its stupendous rocks and romantic caverns, and the elevation of Shunner Fell, 2329 feet above the level of the sea, and commanding views of several counties, are both situated in the township. The River Ure, on which are several beautiful waterfalls, rises at the head of the valley. A rent charge of £163 has been awarded to Trinity College, Cambridge, in lieu of the appropriate tithes.12

I have chosen these three entries for a purpose, firstly because they show us how widely any village or settlement can differ, and how different administrations have played a part in the language used. Thus for Hertfordshire, a hundred is used, for Yorkshire, a wapentake, for Kent a lathe. These areas of land are very ancient. The unit of land called ‘a hundred’ existed until relatively recently, and certainly for all the period that is discussed here. It was originally an area consisting of one hundred ‘hides’, but more latterly is a collection of parishes used for administrative purposes, such as tax collection. The hide was the amount of land, depending on soil, that a team of eight oxen could plough in one year: around 120 acres.

The two southern entries refer to villages that are also parishes, one very small, while Abbotside is a township. Abbotside is within the much larger parish of Aysgarth, and contains several little hamlets strung out along the hillside above Wensleydale. Both Abbotside and Datchworth are connected to Cambridge colleges, Clare Hall and Trinity respectively, thus demonstrating how widespread the landholdings of the early universities could be.

In addition to using the above resources, the researcher should always arm themselves with plenty of maps; a modern one is useful, but the first and second series Ordnance Survey are invaluable. The first series for all the counties in England and Wales was published from 1842 at 6in to the mile, although the second series, starting in 1854, gives greater detail, being mapped at 1:2500 and known as the 25in maps. The National Library of Scotland now allows online access to the full range of Ordnance Survey maps, including for England. Those most commonly found online are from the 6in to the mile, but if you can get hold of the sheet from the 25in series for a place you are interested in, then that is to be preferred because of the amount of detail shown, even down to individual trees.

Once you have located some good large-scale maps, learned something of the local history and found an entry in Lewis and/or the Victoria County History, you will be properly equipped for some serious study of the records via the relevant archives catalogues.

2

Parish and Family

Parish Registers in Context

We start our journey into the records with a birth. It is Sunday 1 December in the year of our Lord, 1577. Queen Elizabeth has been on the throne for nineteen years, and in less than two weeks’ time Francis Drake will set out from Plymouth, with 164 men and five ships, on a mission to raid Spanish holdings on the Pacific coasts, which three years later ends as a circumnavigation of the globe.