WLHS
Thirteenth Warwick Symposium on Parish Research
Warwickshire Parishes: History and Legacies
Saturday 16 May 2015, University of Warwick, c. 11am-6pm
ABSTRACTS
(alphabetically by surname)
Medieval Churches of Norwich Research Project:
City, Community and Architecture
Kristi Bain, University of East Anglia Norwich
57 parish churches are known to have stood within the walls of medieval Norwich. Despite
depredations, notably in the sixteenth century and World War II, 31 of them remain standing—the
greatest concentration of medieval urban churches north of the Alps. Not only are these medieval
churches significant for their architectural quality and the incredible medieval furnishings and
objects held within, but also for their inextricable relationship with the physical, social, and cultural
character of the city. The city’s ruined and lost churches play an important role in this project as
well, offering further insights into Norwich’s architectural development. Norwich’s churches are
nationally renowned, but no overarching study has been attempted since Francis Blomefield’s
seminal work published in the 1740s. The only other attempt at a detailed survey of Norwich
Churches came from Alan Carter in the 1970s, but the work was left unfinished. This project picks
up where others have left off, filling in the gaps whilst offering innovative architectural, art
historical, and archaeological perspectives. Ultimately, this project will reveal the symbiotic
relationship between city, community, and architecture, by which people and places have shaped
each other since the early Middle Ages. By focusing on Norwich’s medieval church buildings, their
furnishings and imagery, we can better understand the city’s architectural and spiritual landscape.
More broadly, this project provides a paradigm for exploring and analysing the artistic, cultural, and
social importance of medieval parish churches in England and beyond.
‘Church Memorial Tablets: Reflections of Secular Power? Memorials to
Catholics in Warwickshire Parish Churches’
Ruth Barbour, Warwick / WLHS
Leaders of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival portrayed eighteenth-century English Catholics as
a small and insignificant remnant. Newman, in his Second Spring Sermon, referred to ‘a few
adherents of the Old Religion, moving silently and sorrowfully about’ at the end of the eighteenth
century. How true a representation is this for Warwickshire? Here we have a number of Catholic
churches located in small rural communities – not just post-emancipation churches within the large
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cities in which the Irish fleeing the famine settled. Peter Marshall highlighted the continued use of
the graveyards attached to Anglican churches by Catholics even after the Reformation. Further
evidence of apparently good Anglican / Catholic relationships derives from surviving material
culture within parish churches in the form of memorials to Catholics, some of which incorporate
traditional Catholic wording and iconography. In this paper, I will examine these issues with
reference to, amongst other parishes, Baddesley Clinton, Brailes, Budbrooke and Coughton.
Chester Consistory Court Records Project
Patricia Cox, Chester
The importance of church court records as a source for the study of the lives and concerns of
ordinary men and women is now widely recognised. Recent incentives to make these records more
generally available online include the digitisation of cause papers held at York and transcriptions of
medieval depositions from the London court. However, the early records of the courts can be
challenging to use both because of problems with palaeography and because many of the papers are
written in abbreviated Latin.
My presentation is about a project which I have been working on to develop a website comprising
digital images of the earliest surviving cause papers of the Chester consistory court dating from the
sixteenth century, together with a transcription of each document and a translation of those in Latin.
This would not only make the early Chester cause papers freely available, but will open up this rich
and complex source to a wider audience and, it is hoped, make the records more user-friendly.
Solihull Town Centre Photographs
Trevor England,
Solihull Local History Circle
This project presentation will focus on a collection of early photographs of Solihull town centre
(around 1900) before the redevelopments of the 1960s.
The Churchwardens’ Accounts Database Project
Andrew Foster, Kent
A report on progress being made to create a database of extant churchwardens' accounts held in England
and Wales between the fourteenth century and around 1850. The aim is to provide an on-line database
that will give a complete listing of surviving accounts, where they are located, the extent of runs of
material, and summary guide to income and expenditure totals. Current estimates suggest that we are
dealing with a total of just over 3,000 sets of accounts, rather more than previously estimated, and
improving over time as one might expect. A framework is being constructed courtesy of the Warwick
Parish Studies Network on its My-Parish.org platform and help is eagerly sought from all those interested
in this field to assist us in populating the database fully.
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Some 17th century headstones from Kineton and Warmington
David Freke, Kineton and District Local History Group
In 2010 members of the Kineton and District Local History Group, led by Gill Ashley-Smith, carried out a
survey of St Peter’s churchyard memorials, and at the same time Peter Ashley-Smith transcribed much of the
Kineton parish Burial Register. In nearby Warmington 35 years ago another churchyard survey, coupled with
rigorous local history research, was undertaken on behalf of the Warmington WI by Liz Newman and many
villagers. The two records provide material for comparisons and research, particularly of the 17th century
memorials. This short paper will examine some of the surviving funerary monuments produced by 17th
century country masons in these cemeteries, and proposes some sources for what was essentially a new art
form. Their adoption of appropriate classical models is particularly striking and suggests a sophisticated
awareness of their social, religious and artistic contexts.
‘‘The malice and envy of my parishioners’:
Conflicting Religious Cultures in the Warwickshire Parishes of Wixford, Haseley
and Burton Dassett, 1655-1720’
Maureen Harris, Leicester / WLHS
Eric Carlson described seventeenth-century churchwardens as trustees of parish society in their
localities, and guardians not only of their community’s church ornaments ‘but also of its values and
aspirations.’ This paper considers these social values and aspirations in the context of religious
belief, as viewed, very differently, by the minister on one hand and by his churchwardens, ‘chief
inhabitants’ and other parishioners on the other. It examines conflicts of religious culture in three
widely spaced post-Restoration Warwickshire parishes. At Wixford, in south-west Warwickshire, the
rector was accused of being a captain in Cromwell’s army, but ministered to a parish with one of the
highest proportions of Catholics in the county. In Haseley, on the border of the Lichfield and
Worcester dioceses, successive clergymen were harassed by a Presbyterian churchwarden, while
‘high-Church’ ministers in Burton Dassett and adjacent parishes struggled to maintain their authority
in a remote area with a long tradition of ‘godliness’ and anticlericalism.
The resulting clerical complaints of parishioners’ malicious accusations suggest we should
challenge ideas of a harmonious society operating through negotiated consensus in the postRestoration parish. We should also re-examine assumptions about a weak laity, powerless against the
Anglican hierarchy. Finally, we need to re-position the clerical/lay relationship as central to late
seventeenth-century parish society, and to discover in its conflicts a continuing clash of religious
cultures stretching from the Reformation to the present day.
The ‘Spirit of Berkswell’ Project
Brenda Murray & Jill Tompkins Bailey, Berkswell
Over the years there have been a number of historical studies made in the Berkswell Parish most of
which get lost in the archives. A new website www.Berkswell.org has been set up and includes a section
which gives access to a synopsis of these studies and informs people where the full study can be found.
Recently scholars from Warwick and Birmingham have visited the parish enabling us to re-evaluate
established accounts. This is a work in progress, a progress that probably has no end…….
Brenda Murray has researched Berkswell Hall’s past and will give a brief example today of the
material we are including on the website.
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Competitive Philanthropy: Parish Charity in Early Modern Warwickshire
Angela Nicholls, Warwick / WLHS
Many places in Warwickshire have historic charities providing for the poor and needy of the parish,
some of which survive today. The motivation behind any philanthropic gesture is open to a number
of interpretations. Altruism and self-interest cannot always be easily disentangled, as the public
nature of much philanthropy leant itself to ostentatious displays of virtue or personal
memorialisation. Donors were often conservative, using the same forms of charity as their friends
and neighbours or their predecessors, resulting in groupings of similar charities in particular
locations, not always related to objective levels of social need. There was obviously a degree of
emulation in many charitable acts, and for some benefactors it seems that charity even became a
means through which donors competed for status and influence. This paper will explore the
sometimes complex motivations behind some Warwickshire charities and the extent to which they
benefitted the local parish.
Schooling and the Parish
David Paterson, Nuneaton
After studying the history of Nuneaton Grammar School and finding strong links with Nuneaton
parish boundaries, my researches have moved on to the history of schooling in the adjacent North
Warwickshire parishes of Chilvers Coton and Astley. Here, in contrasting areas linked by the landed
patronage of the Newdegates, similar though not identical links were found between school and
parish; for example the privilege of a free education only for children of parishioners, and institutions
whose administrators were only from the parish. In both Coton and Astley, schooling had begun
informally in houses, in the 17th and 18th centuries respectively and only later had buildings been
constructed. The long association of both parishes with the Newdegate family helped to emphasise
parochial links until the late 19th Century. Then the history of this link diverges, with Astley village
school retaining its close parochial connections until its closure in 1972. In more urban areas such as
the adjacent Nuneaton and Chilvers Coton, school-parish links, unsurprisingly, diminished in the 20th
Century.
Little Local Difficulties:
Parochial Problems in Pre-Reformation Warwickshire
Robert Swanson, Birmingham
Reconstructing medieval parishes requires attention to a vast array of sources. Historians tend to go
for the easy ones, but much remains to be excavated from unexpected places, as well as the expected
ones, to help to recreate missing elements and rebuild the individual microhistories. This paper draws
on a selection of episodes which allow the (often imperfect) construction of narratives dealing with a
range of 'little local difficulties' in parishes of pre-Reformation Warwickshire, suggesting the
potential of the seams which have yet to be properly mined, both for the county, and for the country.
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Worcester and Warwick:
The Consistory Court and the People
Andrew Thomson, Winchester
This ‘mini-paper’ is all about church discipline. It attempts to survey the numbers summoned from
Warwick to the consistory court at Worcester in the seventeenth century, attendance rates, charges,
and verdicts.
Although hardly more than ‘a glimpse’, it reveals, within the time constraints, something of the
extent – and limits – of church control over its flock, and highlights, in particular, the decline of the
court over the century, and some of the reasons for this development.