[75]with 1 water-mill.
[75]with 1 water-mill.
[76]with 2 water-mills.
[76]with 2 water-mills.
BURTON-ON-TRENT: INCOME (“SPIRITUALITIES”)
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1st Total £85 5s.2nd „ £99 5s.Given in _V.E._ as £lxxxxviii xi viii
Whether the official opinion in this case was just we need not enquire. We must, however, examine with some care the attempt which, as it appears, was made to mislead the Commissioners for First Fruits and Tenths in the reign of Henry VIII.
It will be noticed that by far the largest individual additions which are made in the second survey come from rents in Burton and its suburbs. In the first survey no mention at all is made of the special endowmentsof the Prior (£2), Almoner (£8), Cook (£8 6s. 8d.), Custodian of St. Mary’s Chapel (£4), and Martyrologist (£14). The kitchen at Burton had long been well endowed. Abbot Nicholas (ob.1197) was the first to put it on a business-like footing. Abbot Nicholas de Wallingford (1216–1222) and Abbot Richard de Insula (1222–1223) had added to its endowments. No mention is made of the Chantries of William Branstone (£4), or William Beyne (£8 13s. 4d.). The former had been Abbot in the fifteenth century and had died in 1474. The latter had been Abbot from 1502 to 1533 and had endowed the Grammar School. Considerable rents are omitted from “divers pastures near the Trent,” where fed the sheep which had once made the Abbey wool famous. In an old list of the English monasteries which supplied wool to the Florentine markets in 1315 the wool from Burton is described asin Torcea, probably the same as woolde marisco, which was usually classed by itself.Torceaappears to mean a dyke or embankment, and the Burton sheep probably pastured in these low fields near the Trent which were secured from inundation by means of embankments.[77]Rents from Abbots Bromley (£16 10s. 11d.), one of the oldest of the Abbey’s estates, and Derby are also omitted. Even in the items which are given in both lists, the second shows a considerable increase in nearly every instance. The rents from Allestree are raised by £7 2s. 6d.; the valuation of the Manor of Mickleover is increased by £8 14s. 8d.; the chief rents from Anslow actually leap from 13s. 4d. to£13 5s. 4d. The increase in the valuations of the other manors is also considerable.
“Seney Park,” the valuation of which is increased from £6 to £8, was to the west of the town, near Shobnall Grange. The Abbey had a house there, surrounded by a moat, and used as a place of retirement for many generations. The monks used to go there in the fourteenth century to recover from the periodical “blood-letting.” Its name is thus explained by a seventeenth century writer: “The Abbot of Burton-upon-Trent ... having a vast rough hillie ground about a mile distant from the Abbey, called it Sinai, for the likeness it had to that rough wilderness of Sinai where in a mount God appeared unto Moses; which ground to this day retaineth the Name and is now called Sinai Park.”[78]
The only important items which are left unchanged are the valuations of the demesnes at Shobnall Grange and at Burton (with the Court Fees), and the lands on lease (ad firma) at Bromley Hurst and this may suggest a possible explanation of the problem we are considering.
It is quite impossible to understand how it was that William Edie, the Abbot elected through Cromwell’s influence,[79]allowed the Commissioners to be misled. We might have expected that his sense of obligation to his patron would have led him to make a full disclosure, though we shall hardly blame him for not doing so. But for him to expect that he could successfully conceal the true state of things from suchan administration as that of Cromwell argues more simplicity than we should expect to find in one of Cromwell’s nominees. Through some means, however, the first set of officials was hoodwinked. But the success of the monks was short-lived. The Chancellor received information from some source unknown to us, which led him to order a second investigation. A tradition survived at the Office of First-Fruits and Tenths that theLiber Regis, into which were copied many of the Returns of the Commissioners, was transcribed by a monk of Westminster.[80]Dr. Boston was Abbot of Westminster at the time, and if the tradition represents the truth he may well have seen the survey of his old Abbey of Burton while it was being written out. He would at once recognise its incompleteness and we may be sure would lose no time in giving information to the authorities. Or Dan Richard Gorton, one of the monks of Burton for whom Cranmer wrote to Cromwell on August 15th, 1535, begging the Priory of Worcester, may have given a hint.[81]At any rate, Chancellor Audley ordered a second valuation to be made. The new officials he sent would, obviously, endeavour to raise all the figures they possibly could: that was the object of their mission. That they were not able to do so in the cases we have mentioned, while they succeeded indoing so in the great majority of cases, taken in conjunction with the fact that they added a considerable number of new items, seems to indicate that the monastic accounts were well kept and the estates well managed; and that probably the way the second commissioners obtained their higher figures was by discovering, by help given to them, that many more lands, tenements, etc., belonged to the Abbey than the first commissioners had been informed of. The impression is one not of falsified, but of incomplete, returns.
The difference between the two surveys is not so great as regards spiritualities, but again the chief increase arises in connection with Burton-on-Trent, the tithes of which are raised from £23 to £33. The tithes of Abbots Bromley are correctly given in the first survey, but the second commissioners discovered £2 6s. 8d. from Cauldon Chapel. They failed, however, to note that the 13s. 4d. from Grindon should be 14s.,[82]and the 16s. from Repton Priory[83]is overlooked altogether. The amount left for the Vicar of Abbots Bromley was £5 1s. 8d.[84]
On the demesne at Shobnall Grange the pasture is worth more than twice the arable land. There are two water-mills worth £12 each at Burton-on-Trent. The total value of the demesnes is £48 13s. 4d. in the first survey and £51 10s. in the second. A water-mill stood at Bromley Hurst and another in the town of Derby. A district of Burton called “Vico Nativorum”is mentioned, thoughNativiare seldom mentioned in the Burton Chartularies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The record that Abbot Thomas de Packington (1281–1305) gave to the Abbey of Polesworth “Henry our native” with all his belongings, is exceptional. The tenement in London, from which £2 rent was received, was probably the “Town House” of the Abbey. The tenvillaniof Cauldwell in the twelfth century had to provide between them a horse to London for their lord the Abbot. The Court perquisites amount to £3 6s. 8d.—over half the total amount for the county.
The outgoings may be seen from the table on the next page. They were computed at £33 8s. 8d. temporalities, and £55 13s. 4½d. spiritualities. When the total of £89 2s. 0½d. is contrasted with the Chancellor’s enhanced total income of £501 7s. 0½d. (or £513 19s. 4½d. as it appears it ought to have been) we see that he could well afford to spare himself the trouble of investigating it and to pass it with the contemptuous remark at the foot of his more profitable survey, “Mem. to deducte owte of thys boke ye allowaunces accordinge to ye olde boke.” That the outgoings apparently were not investigated, or the “corrected” survey substituted for the one found erroneous, but merely attached to it, taken in conjunction with the mistakes made in the reckoning of the totals (both the spiritualities and temporalities appear to be wrong), suggests that the new valuation was hurriedly made while the work of summarising and digesting was in progress by the Exchequer officials.
BURTON-ON-TRENT DISBURSEMENTS
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In the disbursements there are many interesting items. A corrody, worth £3 6s. 8d., one of the very small number recorded in Staffordshire, is held by a royal nominee, John Seggewik. £2 is paid annually to a poor scholar, John Belfeld, appointed also by the King: it was a permanent arrangement. £10 is paid to Gloucester College, Oxford. This was the great Benedictine college, and it was suppressed with the larger monasteries. Its modern representative, Worcester College, knows nothing of the £10 from Burton Abbey. On the other hand,Valor Ecclesiasticusrecorded that Worcester Monastery still received £4 from the King’s College at Oxfordratione suppressionis prioratus de Sandwall.[85]The annual payment to Gloucester College had been instituted by John Sudbury, one of the most famous of the Abbots of Burton. He held office from 1400 to 1423. His life had not been an ideal one, by any means, and he was a typical specimen of his time. When Convocation in 1404–5 voted the King a large grant he was appointed one of the collectors, and the grant, being exceptionally large and being levied with exceptional strictness, was bitterly resented. Sudbury, finding himself opposed even by his own tenants of Stapenhill, on the Derbyshire side of the Trent, instigated his Staffordshire men to retaliate on them, when they crossed the river and came into Burton to trade, by robbery and violence. The Burton monks were very disorderly at this time, for just previous to this there had been a charge against them of robbing a woman of 100 shillings. They waylaid John Newton, Canon and Chaplain of their hostile neighbour, Sir Thomas de Gresley, as well as the parson of Rollestonand others. They stole fish and cows. They assaulted one of the King’s Escheators. They set at naught not only the Statute of Labourers by paying Thomas Shepherd and many others 4d. a day, “to the sum of 100 shillings,” but also morality, for when Abbot Sudbury, in 1407, was driven to obtain a royal pardon for his manifold offences, we find among them that “of having, on Wednesday, Christmas, 6 Henry IV, in his chamber at Burton, ravished Marjory, the wife of Nicholas Taverner.”[86]So powerful was Abbot Sudbury that he was able to defy his Bishop’s summons to answer for the many irregularities with which he was charged.
During the rule of Sudbury’s predecessor, the Abbey being in difficulties, an attempt had been made to obtain the good offices of “Monsieur John Bagot,” the Sheriff of Staffordshire, by an annual payment of thirty shillings. It is a typical example of “maintenance.” Such a policy was double-edged, and the powerful “friend” was often encouraged to attempt to extort a higher price for his services. This happened in the present instance. A petition was sent by Sudbury, to the Bishop of Winchester, the Chancellor, setting forth that: “The said John, not being content with the xxxs., in order to force a larger sum from the Abbot, had destroyed his park at Bromley and had taken 20 bucks and 12 does, to the great damage of the said Abbot and to the prejudice and contempt of the King.” Moreover, although John Bagot held in chief of the Abbot the vill of Field by homage, fealty, and escuage, and by the service of twentyshillings annually, he had refused to perform his homage; his power in the district was so great that remedy was difficult.[87]Altogether, the situation was one which illustrates very well the general weakening of public security at the time through the growing power of great men and the increasing decline of authority. Just as John de Sudbury set at naught the Bishop and oppressed his weaker neighbours, so John Bagot, the Sheriff, abused his position and office to enforce an annual bribe from the Abbey to abstain from robbery and violence, which he, nevertheless, continued.
But Sudbury was none the less a man of business and not without his good qualities. When the Rectory of Allestree was appropriated during his tenure of office he arranged, asValor Ecclesiasticusrecords, for a distribution there of 3s. 4d. annually at Michaelmas, and for £1 to be paid to the deacon who took the place of the absentee rector. He also provided for the maintenance of a lamp there at an annual cost of 2s. Other former Abbots who had endowed Poor Doles were Nicholas Abingdon (1187–1197), John Stafford (1260–1280), Thomas Field (1474–1494), and William Beyne (1502–1533), the amount to be distributed in each case being £14 7s. John Stafford arranged also for the payment of £5 yearly to the Chantry Chapel at Sallow. There are further doles, said to have been endowed by the founder of the monastery, as follows: £1 18s. on the anniversary of his death (Oct. 22nd) for his soul and the souls ofKing Etheldred and his royal successors and of Anselm and Archbishop Alfrike, the founder’s brothers; £1 18s. at Corpus Christi; £4 in twenty-four cloaks on the anniversary of his death; and 8d. given to the poor each day in the year in bread, ale and meat (reckoned at £12). The total spent in doles is £23 4s. 3d.per annum.
The officials (with fees) are as follows: George, Earl of Huntingdon, chief steward, £6 13s. 4d.; Hugh Barley, steward of Abbots Bromley, £1, and auditor, £5; Thomas Boylston, general receiver, £4; bailiffs Richard Morley (Findern and Stapenhill, 13s. 4d.), Ralf Manwaryng, gent. (Mickleover, £1), Nicholas Teyte (Littleover and Caldwell, £1 6s. 8d.), John Lambert (Allestree and Appleby, 13s. 4d.), John Smith (Branstone, etc., £2), Edward Edensore (Bromley Hurst, £2), Henry Meynell, gent. (Willington and Pothlac, 6s. 8d.), Walter Charnels (“bailiff of the town of Burton, who now receives the whole sum of the perquisites of the Court there by the King’s commandment” £3 6s. 8d.).
The remark about Walter Charnels reminds us that the King had a considerable interest in the affairs of Burton Abbey. Besides the bailiff of the town, he nominated a corrodian and a poor scholar, and he took fees (“Sheriffs’ Aids”) to the extent of £2 2s. a year.
If we are correct in our surmise that the statement of outgoings was not very strictly scrutinised in the case of Burton, we have, perhaps, an explanation of the large proportion allotted to alms there in contrast to the very small amount allowed elsewhere in the wholeof the county. It may be that in other places the amount spent in alms was not allowed to be deducted, as it was at Burton.
No valuation subsequent to the Dissolution appears inMonasticon, so that we are deprived of the material which might have been afforded for checking the Chancellor’s (second) valuation. It may, however, be safely assumed to be fairly correct, and to give us a tolerably complete account of the revenues of the Abbey during the last years of its existence.