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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
A married vicar with a passion for a young single woman, a bitter publican, a Peeping Tom, a resentful church warden: our human frailties are still much as they always have been. Over three hundred years ago, the Reverend Robert Foulkes arrived as the new incumbent at the wealthy parish of Stanton Lacy, Shropshire. Charismatic, 'exceedingly followed and admired', he set off a chain of events which led to his hanging at Tyburn in 1679. What irrational impulse could have brought a man of the Church to such a squalid end? Historian Peter Klein has pieced together remarkable documentary evidence which shows a village seething with jealousies, covetousness and sexual intrigue. Their eloquent new vicar was the catalyst for the moving and powerful tragedy that followed. Awaiting execution, in Newgate gaol, Foulkes wrote his confessional pamphlet, An Alarme for Sinners, which was an immediate C17th best-seller. Today the ancient church of Stanton Lacy still stands and there inscribed on a wall plaque, along with other less notorious vicars, is the name of Reverend Robert Foulkes and the dates he served there. In this remarkable book, Peter Klein unfolds the full story of Robert Foulkes for the first time. From the scaffold, Foulkes addressed the crowd: 'You may in me see what sin is, and what it will end in.' A true story "more real than any historical novel - more moving, more evocative, more human." John Fowles
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Being the Story of Robert Foulkes, the Late Vicar of the Parish of Stanton Lacy near Ludlow, in Shropshire who was Tried, Convicted, and Sentenced for Murder at the Sessions House in the Old Bailey, London on January 16th 1679, and Executed on the 31st following.
The TEMPTATIONand DOWNFALLof the VICARof STANTON LACY
‘You may in me see… what it is for
one who was a Member of Christ, to
make himself the Member of a Harlot.’
Robert Foulkes
Tyburn, 31st January 1679
Front cover: An Alarme for Sinners pamphlet, 1679 original supplied by the author, costumes kindly provided by Amy Ormond and Moreton Hall, and with special thanks to Elfrid.
CONTENTS
Stanton Lacy parish church and churchyard as it looked about 100 years ago. From a photograph taken by W.A.Call of Monmouth.
PREFACE
The Beginnings of a Mystery
In the autumn of 1968, a man from Ludlow travelled a couple of miles north to visit St. Peter’s church at Stanton Lacy. His purpose was to take some photographs of this important Saxon church for a historian friend. But when he got there, he was overcome by an ‘eerie feeling of terror’ when standing in the chancel, and he left without his photographs. Later he returned with his wife, but again came the inexplicable feeling of fear, so the couple decided to contact the vicar, the Reverend Prebendary L J Blashford Snell. He accompanied the man into the church, witnessing his hair apparently standing on end, and this extraordinary incident was even reported in local and national newspapers1.
The vicar later mentioned a local story about the murder of a young man by Cromwellian troops in or near the church during the Civil War; and crudely carved into the chancel arch there is an inscription, possibly commemorating this death in 1649. Someone had recorded it in 1952, so perhaps it was to this that Prebendary Snell referred. Whatever the explanation, the story demonstrates that the small and apparently quiet village of Stanton Lacy may harbour secrets and stories of which few people are aware.
I ought, however, to add here that I have spent many happy and serene hours in Stanton Lacy church without the slightest misgivings, or any experiences other than feelings of profound peace, and an awareness of the passing of history. For most the church is a supremely tranquil place, and this is attested by the many messages of appreciation in its visitor’s book. It was, however, in the mid-1970s, before researching the history of the church and while writing the first edition of the present guide, that I first encountered Robert Foulkes. The printed edition of the parish register, published in 1903, rather baldly lists him as follows:
1660-78 Robert Foulkes, inducted 12 Sep., 1660; executed 31 Jan., 1678-92
The book briefly goes on to say: The Rev. Robert Foulkes, Vicar 1660-1678, was the chief actor in a notorious tragedy, to which, strangely enough, there is not the slightest allusion in the Registers. Three pamphlets were published at the time of Foulkes’ death, one of which was written by Foulkes himself while awaiting execution. This features and is quoted in John Fowles’ novel The Magus, and even Foulkes himself puts in a brief appearance. Apart from this, the story is little known, and much of the detail has remained obscure. It deserves better. This book draws together the complicated threads of this story for the first time. There is no happy ending, but it does bring to light a fascinating tale of humanity.
Peter Klein
Pembridge, 2005
Notes
Abbreviations:DNB Dictionary of National Biography; HRO Herefordshire Record Office; ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004; SA Shropshire Archives; TNA The National Archives
1.Shropshire Star, 29 Nov 1968; Daily Mail, 2 Dec 1968
2. Before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the civil and legal New Years Day was upon Lady Day, the 25th of March. The last day of the old year was therefore March 24th. What we would today call the 31st January 1679 was then regarded as being in 1678. To avoid confusion, even at that time, it was often referred to as the 31st January 1678/79
A 17th-century woodblock illustration from a ballad sheet, showing a hanging of the period. It shows well the excitement of the occasion, with the press of the throng gathered around the gallows, and the ring of pikemen to stand guard and control the crowd.
CHAPTER 1
The Three-Legged Mare
It was a freezing morning on the last Friday in January, 1679. Shortly after ten o’clock, a subdued figure in black was escorted out of the press-yard of the grim and pestilential London prison known as Newgate. Being a clergyman, he was allowed the privilege of the Ordinary’s coach rather than the usual cart; and with him were the several grave and eminent churchmen who were to accompany their passenger on this last brief journey of his life – a matter of a mere two and a half miles.
As the great bell of St. Sepulchre’s church tolled, the coach lurched slowly away, preceded by a hearse, and flanked by an escort of constables with staves, and pikemen. As it passed the church steps, the cortège paused for the customary address by the bellman of St. Sepulchre’s, and a cup of wine and a nosegay were offered in at the coach window. Then it rattled over the cobbles down Snow Hill, over Holborn Bridge and the Fleet River, up to High Holborn and through St. Giles’s, and out onto the highroad leading towards Oxford.
As for our passenger, a former minister from a far-away rural parish in Shropshire, he now had little inclination to observe the excitement and flurry of work-a-day activities in the streets as he passed by. He and his companions were too earnestly absorbed in prayer, in rapt preparation for the final and terrible scene of his life. In the wake of the coach, an excitable throng was already following, swelling in size as the cavalcade passed on its way. At the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields a bowl of ale was offered to him as his last refreshment – a small gesture of kindness in an unforgiving world. After no more than half an hour his destination was now in sight – a robust utilitarian structure of massive wooden beams, triangular in plan and some eighteen feet high, erected at the junction of three roads, and close to what is today Marble Arch. This was the infamous hanging-tree, the Deadly Nevergreen, the Three-Legged Mare of Tyburn.
Here, encircled by a ghoulish crowd, was played out the grisly conclusion to events that took place over three hundred years ago, and much of that story will be told here in the words of those who were directly involved. And yet, despite its remoteness from us in time, it is in many ways as familiar a tale of human passion, weakness, and folly, as any told in headlines splashed across the front pages of our more lurid tabloids today. It is the tale of a man who should have been the steady, dependable rock at the core of his Christian community but who, in his own words, yielded to ‘an unclean, a filthy devil’ within him. There had followed an Old Bailey trial, sentence, and this very public humiliation and retribution. He was condemned to dance what the gleeful watching multitude had gruesomely dubbed, the ‘Tyburn jig’.
At the time it was a national scandal, especially for the Church, because in Stuart England the Church was an integral part of the State’s apparatus of government. What we would regard today as fundamentalist Protestantism was then the national religion, and those who were unwilling to conform to it were regarded at very least with suspicion. Those who refused to acknowledge its authority, and thus the prerogative of the King at its head, could be deemed a subversive threat to State security. Individuals, whether catholics, non-conformists, or simply the irreligious, were fined or harassed. Some were threatened with barbaric torments, if not brutally punished, even on occasion for completely imaginary offences. Indeed Foulkes’ execution took place at the height of the mass hysteria generated by ‘The Popish Plot’, when Titus Oates, aided and abetted by Parliament, fabricated an imagined Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles the Second. While the Plot does not impinge directly upon our story, it does reflect the fears and powerful forces at loose in a society dominated by religion. The parish was the instrument of local government and social control, and Charles the First had once declared England to be ‘ruled from the pulpit.’ Attendance in church once a week and partaking of Communion were compulsory, and most male members of the parish were expected to attend their vestry, and were annually elected to serve terms as local officials, such as churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor. The role of parish priest was therefore an onerous one, for he was presumed to be a man of stature, beyond reproach, and a Christian example to all. If he failed to live up to these expectations, then the integrity and authority of the system came under threat.
To add to the compulsory religious observance, and the expected conformity to acceptable Christian behaviour, within the parish community there were eyes and ears that were ever alert to detect departure from what was expected. Churchwardens were duty-bound to act upon information, and a liability to be presented might be particularly apparent where an individual had made enemies. In rural communities especially, this suspicion of dissent or deviance was common, although in the more densely packed towns it tended to break down, and immorality and crime were rife.
The village of Stanton Lacy, and its Saxon parish church, are today almost entirely shrouded in trees, as this view from the north-west shows. Rising behind, and bathed in autumn sunshine, is the Hope; and beyond that is Whitbatch.
While these historical circumstances are very much of their time, the essential story of Robert Foulkes is timeless, and all too familiar to us, and as we read we can easily forget the passing of the years, and view it almost as a contemporary event. If the study of history shows us anything, it is that our human frailties are still much as they have always been; only the backdrop is different. No account of Foulkes’ life, therefore, would be complete unless some mention was made of the landscape, people, and times that helped to shape him. So first we need to set him against the background of the parish where he lived and worked, for most of the parishioners that Foulkes encountered were Shropshire born and bred, with roots that went back in this border landscape for hundreds if not thousands of years.
The fertile valley floor of the river Corve provided the wealth that, during the mid-11th century, built the fine late Saxon church at Stanton Lacy. In the foreground of this view is The Barn farm. Beyond it to the east lies the village; and beyond that is the high ground of Titterhill and Hayton’s Bent.
CHAPTER 2
Stanton Lacy
The parish of Stanton Lacy has at its centre the finest surviving Saxon church in Shropshire, dedicated to St. Peter, much of which dates from shortly before the Norman Conquest; and there are also signs of what may have been a circular churchyard. Whether this implies the existence of a former prehistoric enclosure, or alternatively an earlier Christian site, is as yet unexplored.
This feature is however not the only visible sign of antiquity, and the roots of this community go back far further, as a glance about the surrounding landscape plainly shows. Surrounded by hills, and drained by the rivers Corve, Onny and Teme, recent archaeology has shown that this flat fertile valley floor was being cleared for agriculture some 5500 years ago, during the early Neolithic period. There is good evidence that occupation increased in intensity into the Bronze Age, supporting thriving family communities somewhere near-by. Within a mile of the church to the south-west, on the far side of the river Corve, are the remains of a barrow field, a large group of Bronze Age burial mounds, of which there were originally about twenty in number, together with a large cremation cemetery which remained in use for a thousand years. This area, known as the Old Field, continued as the site of pagan burials and cemeteries on through into the early Anglo Saxon period. In Foulkes’ day there was an alehouse and bowling green there; but today it is better known simply as the site of Ludlow Race Course, and the Golf Club.
In Roman times a villa or farmstead stood about 500 yards to the north of St. Peter’s parish church, slight remains of which were found during field drainage in 1910. Intensive farming continued throughout the Saxon period until, by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, Stantun as it was now called, the place of the stones, or perhaps on stony ground, was at the centre of some of the richest and most productive land in Shropshire, amply shown by the number of plough-teams, and its population. This provided the wealth that by about 1050 had helped to build a large stone cruciform church, much of which survives today in the north and west walls of the nave, and the north transept. According to the Domesday Book, at the Conquest Stanton had been held by a Saxon freeman named Siward. He was probably the ‘rich man of Shropshire’, Siward son of Ethelgar, who, according to the monk chronicler Orderic Vitalis, was in the service of the great Norman Marcher lord Roger de Montgomery. Siward had also been involved in the founding of another church dedicated to St. Peter outside the east gate at Shrewsbury, later to become the Benedictine abbey site.
Stanton Lacy parish church is therefore among the oldest in the country, and over the succeeding centuries was further altered and enlarged, being given a chancel almost as long as the nave during the 13th-century. A new south aisle was added during the early 14th-century; and the powerful Mortimer family built a sturdy bell-tower and south transept in about 1330. Despite a sweeping Victorian ‘restoration’ in 1847, including new windows and the clearance of its interior, Stanton church remains today much as it was during Robert Foulkes’ day, and he would have little difficulty in recognizing it.
In Foulkes’ time, the parish was a sizeable one of some 7000 acres, then including what later became the parish of Hopton Cangeford, and it had a population of over 4003. It was and still is divided into two portions, its boundaries perhaps representing at least in part the bounds of the Saxon manor of Stanton. Between these two portions lies part of the parish of Bromfield, and during the late 11th-century the parish and town of Ludlow was created out of its south-western extremity, on the banks of the river Teme, and less than three miles away across the fields.
Here, on an excellent natural defensive site on a hilltop, Ludlow’s great tower keep and castle were built by the Norman Marcher lords. The town was encircled by a substantial defensive wall and ditch; and the castle was further developed and elaborated by the Mortimers, and under the Tudors became the seat of the Princes of Wales.
Between 1534 and 1641 it was also the headquarters of the Court of the Council in the Marches of Wales, the regional centre of government for the whole of the principality. Here what has been aptly called a ‘bureaucratic anthill’ of judges, lawyers, clerks, and administrators, implemented the edicts and instructions from Westminster and the Royal Court in London.
Watercolour view of Stanton Lacy parish church, drawn in 1790 by the Rev. Edward Williams, a Shropshire antiquary. Elm trees then surrounded the churchyard, and this sketch shows the church very much as Foulkes would have known it. High up in the south wall of the south transept can be seen a long rectangular window, that threw light onto the crossing where the Communion table would have been placed. This window was replaced in 1849 during the Victorian ‘restoration’. (Shropshire Archives).
It therefore comes as little surprise that Ludlow was a Royalist stronghold at the time of the Civil War. In 1646, after a punishing siege lasting six weeks, during which many buildings had been burned or damaged, if not already pulled down to clear the town wall for defence, Ludlow finally opened its gates to Parliament, and a period of prolonged stagnation followed. As the result of an Act of Parliament that had abolished the Court in 1641, Ludlow had been deprived of an important part of its livelihood in supplying the castle with provisions, stationery, building materials, labour, and all the other supplies needed by a busy government department. During the Commonwealth Ludlow became a depressed garrison town, controlled from Shrewsbury by the County Committee. The grand houses of the lawyers now had other occupants or stood empty, and the inns no longer catered for the flurry of comings and goings of the visitors who had flocked to the castle for justice. Even the great parish church was stripped of its 15th-century organ, as the dreary hand of Puritanism took its hold.
With the Restoration of Charles the Second in 1660, life had slowly begun to return once again; and Robert Foulkes, who had arrived in Ludlow some three years before, will have witnessed the gradual revival of the town’s fortunes as the Court was re-established, although after his death it was to survive for barely a further decade. Though distant from the national centre of government, the parishioners of Stanton Lacy were thereby better placed than many to make direct contact with people of influence, and had lines of communication open to them that others would have found much more difficult to access. Here too, in the St. John’s Chapel of Ludlow parish church, was held the consistory court of the Bishop of Hereford, then presided over by his Commissioner Sir Timothy Baldwyn, where the bishop’s authority was enforced, and where matters of lay and clerical parochial discipline were heard. Among this court’s main functions were the proving of wills, the enforcement of church attendance and payment of parochial dues or fines, the detection and fining of recusants or catholic dissenters, and the punishment of lapses in morality. Here, too, parishioner could sue parishioner, in a litigious age when lawyers were at their most abundant. It is the record books and other surviving papers of this court, now housed in the Herefordshire Record Office, that have provided much of the material for this story.
Notes
3. The Compton Census returned a rounded population figure of 400, but this excluded children under the age of sixteen. See: ed. A Whiteman, The Compton Census of 1676: A Critical Edition (British Academy Records of Social & Economic History, n.s. X, 1986), 255
CHAPTER 3
Foulkes’ Predecessors
‘Mr Clayton calls himself a doctor, yet he is a man of that behaviour, that I have seldom known his fellow, and if credit be given to his oath, every man that he beareth malice unto will be utterly undone.’
During the 17th-century the clergy were, as at any time, unique individuals of varying strengths and character. To put Robert Foulkes in perspective, therefore, it is certainly worthwhile comparing him with those that preceded him in office, if only to get some idea of the variety of men that a relatively remote parish such as this might attract. The vicars were increasingly university graduates; and they were almost invariably outsiders, although they were not alone in this. By the 17th-century the population was far from static, and it becomes clear during the later legal proceedings, as we shall see, that a number of Foulkes’ more influential parishioners, of yeoman stock, were from elsewhere in the county, moving from tenancy to tenancy. Some had only been in Stanton Lacy a matter of months, and one indeed arrived only six weeks before the events to be described took place.
In 1634 John Whateley had passed away, having been vicar at Stanton Lacy since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, after an incumbency of 47 years. He was a man who, according to the parish register, had ‘lived religiously, preached painfully, and died comfortably’ there on the first of July. We know little else of him except that he had been ordained by the Bishop of Gloucester, and that he was well educated, perhaps at grammar school or university, but had no degree. He made a will just a month before he died, and amongst other bequests he left his son, William, fifty pounds in cash, together with the rest of his books that remained and were ‘not yet sent to him in London’.4 A total of forty shillings he left to the parish poor, who were to be divided into three groups of ten, chosen by his widow according to their need. Here, apparently, we have a vision of a thoroughly decent and well-respected man, who died peacefully and full of years among his own community.
Onto this scene of apparent bucolic tranquillity arrived ‘Dr’ Ralph Clayton, possibly the Yorkshireman of that name who had matriculated from Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1605 at the age of 16. By September 1634, he now claimed to be a ‘Doctor of Sacred Theology’, but where this degree was obtained is a complete mystery, as there is no record of him having continued at any university; and there appears to have been some doubt even at the time. Yorkshire, particularly the West Riding, and the area around Hull, was renowned as a stronghold of puritanism, but whether this might have had any bearing on Clayton’s bizarre behaviour is open to speculation. Whatever, in July 1637 Sir John Bridgeman, Chief Justice of Chester and the presiding judge at Ludlow Castle, was writing to Westminster about a man whose activities, to say the least, had raised a few local eyebrows:
‘You wish to understand from me the condition of Dr.Clayton. I have perused a presentment upon oath whereby he is accused of, firstly, haunting alehouses, and once continuing in several alehouses in Ludlow from Thursday to Wednesday, neglecting to come to his church, or any other church, on the Sunday. Secondly, for tempting the chastity of divers women; and thirdly, for causing the bells to be rung at the bringing of beer into his house, making those who brought it drunk, and giving the ringers two shillings. I find also information depending against him before the Council in the Marches of Wales, for beating his sexton with a staff in the church on the 7th of March last’.5
By March 1638 Clayton’s ‘condition’ had not improved, and we find him imprisoned in Ludlow Castle, with moves clearly afoot to have him ejected from his living. In June legal counsel to Archbishop Laud found Clayton refusing to defend himself on the grounds that his incarceration made it impossible, and he wrote that ‘the doctor now lies in prison in Ludlow Castle, he has his liberty of drinking and rioting, and lives as it were in contempt of justice’.6 In January 1639 Arthur Winwood, chief porter and Clayton’s gaoler at the castle, and someone who also just happened to be one of the churchwardens at Stanton Lacy, was summoned to the Star Chamber in London after Clayton had accused him of uttering treasonable remarks. Winwood however carried a letter from Bridgeman’s successor, Sir Thomas Milward, that did not mince words:
‘Mr Clayton calls himself a doctor, yet he is a man of that behaviour, that I have seldom known his fellow, and if credit be given to his oath, every man that he beareth malice unto will be utterly undone. When I came first to Ludlow he was in the porter’s lodge for divers misdemeanours, and this last term he was fined again, and stands committed for the like offences. I beseech you to be informed of Clayton’s credit before you give any allowance of his oath.’7
Winwood was acquitted within the day, at a hearing held in the presence of the King; and a fortnight later he was granted permission to bring an action against Clayton in the same court.8 Of Ralph Clayton nothing more is heard, and here he seems to vanish into the dust of history. With benefit of hindsight, that Stanton Lacy should have had to endure two such men as Clayton and Foulkes, within the space of only forty-five years, would seem to suggest that the parish may have been somewhat ill-starred, but the vicar who was Clayton’s immediate successor was in contrast quite plainly a man of considerable qualities and stature.
THOMAS ATKINSON, AND CIVIL WAR
‘… the most worthy pastor of this church; whose heart was the home of the brightest virtues side by side with knowledge; whose tongue was the polished expounder of a keener judgement; whose hand was the treasure house of the poor …’
After Clayton’s expulsion, greater care was evidently taken in choosing his replacement, and it was Thomas Atkinson, Master of Arts from Trinity College, Oxford, and recently inducted as rector of the wealthy living at nearby Wistanstow, who came to live at Stanton Lacy in May 1639. Patron to both these livings was John Lord Craven of Ryton, who died childless in about 1648, and who was succeeded by his elder brother William Lord Craven, to whom Atkinson became chaplain and possibly a close friend. Atkinson also became related to the Cravens through his second marriage in about 1645. William Craven inherited great wealth, and during his very long life was a career soldier and devoted Royalist supporter, but because of this he had to spend the period of the Commonwealth in exile abroad. As the storm clouds of the Civil War gathered, Atkinson wrote in the parish registers of his feelings about puritanism and the impending wind of change. Under cover of Latin, he wrote: ‘Pios multos est rem monstrosam. Scitote posteri, et erubescite’, (Much piety is a monstrous thing. Seek to know it, you who succeed us, and blush with shame). This dread of religious fundamentalism seems as pertinent today as it was three and a half centuries ago.
In the summer of 1645, a Parliamentary force swept through the country to the north of Ludlow, and many royalists sought shelter within its walls. It is here that we apparently find Atkinson, or at least his family, when in January 1646 his son John, later a physician and one who figures in this story, was baptized in the parish church. Ludlow surrendered to Parliament in the following June, and for five years we lose track of Atkinson until 1651 when he appears to have returned to Stanton Lacy. The parish register, a number of pages almost blank, comments only upon the lack of entries ‘through distractions of the fearfull civill warre and the vicars enforced absence thereupon’. This is then followed by an agonised plea: ‘Da pacem domine lassati sumus’ (Give us peace, O Lord, for we are wearied).
There is little doubt that during the period of the Civil War the community at Stanton Lacy was probably as riven in its loyalties as most others, for this was a time when even members of families were divided against one another. While most may have remained staunchly loyal to Lord Craven and the King, some will have sympathised with Parliament, or saw that they stood to gain if they collaborated with the winning side. There is little recorded, what with the parish register being suspended during Atkinson’s absence, but there is one curious document which, unusually, is in the form of a graffito in the parish church.
On the jamb of the chancel arch on the south side, facing the altar, is a very curious monumental inscription, particularly rare in being cut directly into the church fabric itself. It speaks to us of a tragic event during August 1649, a few months after the trial and execution of Charles the First, and while Cromwell was away suppressing Royalist resistance in Ireland. It is improvised and crudely scratch-carved, abraded and illegible in places, but it commemorates a young man, Richard Heynes of Downton, who died on the 19th August 1649, in his 24th year. Heynes was certainly the local man whose baptism appears in the parish register on the 23rd April 1626. Whoever the writer was, possibly Atkinson himself, he was moved to express himself effusively in Latin, and the words: FLETE NEFAS – Bewail this horrid deed – and: RAPTUS FLORE VIGENTE MEO – Snatched away in the Flower of my Youth – strongly suggest that Heynes was the victim of untimely violence. He ends with a quotation from an ode by Horace: PULVIS ET UMBRA SUMUS – We are but Dust and Shadow – followed by the initials T R, perhaps for TERMINUM RESPICE. The earliest known record of this inscription was taken as recently as 1952; and it may be that a story about someone being pursued and murdered by Parliamentary troops, in or about the church, may have been put forward as an explanation at that time.
With his patron and protector in exile abroad, Atkinson was now hounded by Parliament probably for merely being so closely associated with Lord Craven, and in June 1651 we find him defending himself before the County Committee for Compounding in Shrewsbury, who had seized his estate, and having to ‘beg the heads of the charge of delinquency against him, and leave to examine witnesses’.9 His persuasive powers may have saved Atkinson, for he succeeded in keeping his vicarage and he appears to have returned to his duties by October 1651, when the entries in the register recommence. Moreover on his memorial inscription, engraved for his widow Elizabeth on a brass plate in the church, and originally placed within the altar rails in the chancel, we read that ‘his tongue was the polished expounder of a keener judgement’.10 He had however been unjustly declared a ‘scandalous minister’, and deprived of his rectory at Wistanstow for his loyalty to his patron and the Crown.
A drawing of the remarkable inscription, scratched into the chancel arch.
that records the death of Richard Heynes of Downton, who died on the 19th of August, 1649, in his 24th year. Parts are almost illegible, but it reads: ‘In the flower of my youth I, Richard, lie buried… Snatched away in the flower of my youth. Bewail this horrid deed. Certain stands the end for all of you. [?] Remember, O Mortal, we are but dust and shadow. T.R.’ In parts some letters are very abraded if not later obliterated, while others are still filled with lime wash, and as a result the carving is not easy to photograph.
In his last years, therefore, Atkinson will have lived in somewhat reduced circumstances, and Lord Craven was by then in no position to supplement his basic parochial income. He was however described as Craven’s ‘chaplaine’ in his burial entry in the register, so it seems likely that he had received, during his earlier years at Stanton Lacy, some annual fee or enhancement to his parochial earnings. With his patron in exile abroad and stripped of his estates during the Commonwealth, this almost certainly ceased altogether, as did his income from Wistanstow. Atkinson had the lease of a farm and its farmhouse, which he let out to a tenant, although he and his family occupied much of the house himself. Otherwise, as vicar his income was principally derived from the small or privy tithes; glebe; fees paid at baptisms, marriages, and burials; and also churchings – that is the readmission of women after childbirth. Tithes, in theory a tenth of the annual produce of the parishioners, in Stanton Lacy had long since been commuted to fixed sums of money that, due to inflation, now bore little relation to the actual value of what was produced. Long before the time of Foulkes’ incumbency this had included the tithe of hay, normally allocated to the rector or, as here at Stanton Lacy, the ‘impropriator’.11 In fact Atkinson also took the rectoral tithe of corn and grain, but only because he held the right to do so by lease from Lord Craven.12 We shall see that Foulkes himself was later to be involved in several tithe disputes, although the motive behind bringing these actions is sometimes questionable. Glebe lands were those allocated to a benefice that could either be rented out to tenants, or farmed by the incumbent himself. Lastly, we know from the register that the ‘accustomed’ fee paid to Foulkes at each marriage was five shillings; and both Atkinson and Foulkes also occasionally recorded ‘mortuaries’ of ten shillings, a maximum fee paid in lieu of the heriot or tax of the second best chattel taken by the vicar after a death.
Atkinson died on the 8th April 1657, at the age of 53, before happier times returned. He was apparently exhausted, for a correspondent to John Walker, author of Sufferings of the Clergy, recorded that he was ‘severely or worse handled, which hard usage was believed to have shortened his days’13. His will gloomily speaks of every soul ‘groaneing under the burden of the earthlie Tabernacle’, which latterly may have summed up his opinion of life in general.14 John Walker also mentioned that a puritan, Major Sanders, succeeded him at Stanton Lacy, but then ‘went off at the King’s return’, although Walker’s correspondent, probably mistakenly, gave his name as Major Slaughter.15 Atkinson left a widow, Elizabeth, who was his third wife, and there were also three children by his second marriage.
His first wife Anne had given him two sons. Both were baptized Thomas and died in infancy and, together with their mother, lay buried at Stanton Lacy by 1643.16 Then in about 1645 he married an Anne Whitmore of Claverley near Bridgnorth, youngest daughter of John Whitmore of Ludstone Hall, in so doing also marrying into his patron’s extended family; and in January 1646 his son John, later a physician, was born and baptized at Ludlow.17 Next came Francis, born in Stanton Lacy in about 1648, who was to become a parson like his father; and finally there was the daughter Ann, the youngest, born in about 1650. Their mother may have died before Atkinson was reinstated in his parish, possibly immediately after Ann’s birth, but there is no record of her burial locally, the registers being suspended until October 1651. She was certainly dead by 1654 because his third wife, Elizabeth, according to her own testimony, first came to Stanton Lacy in about that year. At the age then of about 46 she may have been a widow, although there is never mention of any previous marriage or children. Either way, she acquired a step-daughter Ann, then about four years old, and two step-sons aged eight and six. By 1661 the two boys were up at Christ Church, Oxford, while their sister remained at home.
The already-motherless Ann was but seven years old when her father died, and she was therefore for the most part brought up by her stepmother, Elizabeth. It is however evident, judging from the wording of Thomas Atkinson’s will, that the young Ann seems to have been doted upon by her father, and that there may have been a particularly close bond between them. After Elizabeth’s death, his will specifically left the lease of the rectoral tithe to Ann. It also expressly desired Elizabeth ‘to be carefull of my daughter Ann in A speciall manner, And to add what she pleases towards her porcion’. In addition, Ann was also the beneficiary of the will of her maternal uncle and godfather, William Whitmore, who left her twenty pounds in 1668.18
