‘Where there’s a will’: Charles Dickens and York’s Church Court Records

By John-Francis Goodacre, Archives Trainee

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On the 12th of October 1850, an exposé reprinted in the York Herald sparked a small controversy in the city. Criticising the way that York’s ecclesiastical records were kept, the article generated a flurry of accusations and denials in the city’s newspaper over the subsequent weeks. However, no attempts were made to draw the author into this dispute, perhaps as the piece had appeared without direct attribution. We now know that the article, which was the second in a series of four under the title ‘The Doom of English Wills’, was written by the 38-year-old Charles Dickens and had first appeared in his weekly journal Household Words. But what made Dickens, one of Victorian England’s best-loved authors, so interested in the storage of historical records - the same records that are now housed at the Borthwick?

As the Borthwick’s current Graduate Trainee, a large part of my time has been spent providing access to the centuries of wills and probate records in the York Diocesan Archive. I was fascinated to learn that Dickens wrote about the very pieces of paper and parchment that I have been handling day to day. The tightly rolled documents, often covered with a layer of smoky residue that obstinately coats the fingers, sometimes feel like they belong to a Dickensian world of candlelit intrigue.

Rolled probate bundles from the York Diocesan Archive

Katharine Longley has already written a fantastic account of all four ‘Doom of English Wills’ articles and their place in record-keeping history in the Journal of the Society of Archivists. However, this left me curious about how they fitted into Dickens’ career as a writer. I am fascinated by the way Dickens brought his skills as a novelist to the investigation of York’s historical records, while exploring issues that would play a central role in his novels of the early 1850s.

The Doom of English Wills

The article that appeared in the Herald (subtitled 'Cathedral Number Two’) was the second in a series of journalistic investigations into the keeping of England’s historic records. A young lawyer and antiquary named William Downing Bruce had made expeditions to four of England’s great ecclesiastical registries (the church archives of the time), and Dickens, together with his assistant editor William Henry Wills, turned Bruce’s experiences into articles for his newly-established magazine Household Words.

Charles Dickens in 1850 (Wikimedia Commons)

Dickens gives Bruce the pseudonym ‘Mr William Wallace’, and narrates his experience in York. Wallace goes in search of the registry, where he wishes to look at some documents for the purposes of historical research. When he finally finds the registry, a shed sticking to the outside of the Minster ‘like a dirty little pimple’, his research is thwarted by its obstructive management. The Deputy Registrar questions Wallace’s motives, refuses to let him see any wills from after the year 1500, and repeatedly claims that the records he wants to see have been lost or stolen. After a week of apparently fruitless struggle, Wallace is forced to ‘beat a dignified retreat’.

Corruption and reform

Until 1858, the Church of England had jurisdiction over matters of probate in England and Wales. This meant that a small number of civil law courts had the (often lucrative) job of approving wills and giving grants of administration if a testator had died intestate - that is, without leaving a will.

Dickens was already familiar with the technicalities of these legal processes. After leaving school, he had worked for a year as a junior clerk in a law office, and spent a subsequent four years as a freelance legal reporter at Doctors’ Commons, the London Inn of Court for civil lawyers which played host to the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. Doctors’ Commons and its record office even appeared in one of Dickens’s first forays into legal satire, an episode of his Sketches by Boz which appeared in the Morning Chronicle in October 1836.

The registries that housed the wills and other records created by the courts had an important function. The documents could be vital evidence in settling inheritance disputes, not to mention being rich historical sources. Public access was thus a serious matter. Yet despite parliamentary debates and inquiries throughout the 1830s and 40s, and the passing of the Public Record Office Act in 1838, the conditions of storage and ease of access to such documents was haphazard. Additionally, it was suspected that some registries were charging extortionate fees for their own gain.

In his novels of the 1850s, Dickens turned his attention to antiquated institutions that in his view were keeping England stuck in a morass of corruption and bureaucracy. David Copperfield, which was reaching the end of its monthly serialisation when ‘The Doom of English Wills’ appeared, gave him an initial chance to satirise the apparent corruption of the registries. David, who is apprenticed to a proctor (the civil law version of a solicitor), gets to observe the registry where the wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury are stored. He remarks that the office is 'rather a queerly managed institution', where registrars with 'magnificent sinecures' store the public’s wills haphazardly, ‘having no object but to get rid of them cheaply'. 

Wallace’s misadventures in York take us deeper into these charges of corruption. With characteristic irony, Dickens claims that the registry generates ‘about ten thousand a year for the Registrar who does nothing, and the like amount for his Deputy who helps him.’ Dickens also intersperses the narrative with anecdotal accounts of York’s records being sold as waste paper or being used as a private source of income by the registry’s clerks. 

While ‘The Doom of English Wills’ portrays the immediate consequences of inadequate storage for records, Dickens would depict the wider repercussions in his next novel. Bleak House, published serially between 1852 and 1853, presents a dysfunctional society whose problems can be traced back to legal corruption and poor record-keeping. The novel’s central characters are all ensnared in the web of a legal case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that has been going on for years and has become ‘so complicated that no man alive knows what it means’. The impasse stems from the multiple conflicting wills left by a testator. 

Dickens leads us to believe that the crucial will, which will allow the case to be resolved, is in a rag and bottle shop in the shadow of Lincoln’s Inn, filled with 'heaps of old crackled parchment scroll, and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers'. The shop is presided over by a grotesque and illiterate alcoholic named Krook who obsessively hoards documents that he has no means of understanding. To drive the point home, Krook is known by his neighbours as the 'Lord Chancellor' and shop as 'Court of Chancery'. This is Dickens’s nightmarish vision of a dysfunctional record office taken to its extreme - a place of filth and disorder where nothing can be found and documents lose their meaning.

Smoke and fire

When he first steps into the registry, Wallace finds himself in a ‘confined den’ with a ‘pestilent little chimney in it, filling it with smoke like a Lapland hut'. This first impression, its outlandish imagery contrasting starkly with the descriptions of York’s opulent mansions, primes us for the article’s other serious criticism of the registry - that the documents were at risk of smoke and fire. Despite the specific complaints made by an 1832 Ecclesiastical Commission, Wallace finds that the registry has done nothing to fire-proof itself. Reflecting on the prospect of spending a week there, he remarks that he ‘did not enjoy the notion of being smoke-dried; and of returning to the Middle Temple a sort of animated ham.'

Dickens was well aware of the danger that fire posed to historical records. He had been working as a journalist in London in 1834 when Parliament was consumed by fire, destroying centuries of procedural records for the House of Commons. It is quite possible he saw the blaze with his own eyes. Major fires at York Minster in 1829 and 1840, in which York’s records were rescued by local bystanders, are unlikely to have escaped his notice.

The Palace of Westminster on Fire, 1834, unknown artist (Art in Parliament)

Speaking about the burning of Parliament in an address to the Administrative Reform Society in 1855, Dickens dwelt on the irony that the fire was itself a product of poor record-keeping practice. The blaze had started when two cartloads of tally sticks - small notched pieces of wood used as tax receipts since the twelfth century - were used as fuel in a heating furnace designed to burn coal. Dickens mocked both what he saw as the ‘obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom’ well into the nineteenth century, and the perverse decision to incinerate them rather than distribute them to locals in need of fuel.

Yet for Dickens, the cause of Parliament’s incineration had a metaphorical significance that surpassed mere fire safety. The moral he drew was that ‘all obstinate adherence to rubbish which the time has long outlived [...] will some day set fire to something or other’. In other words, the failure to reform England’s stagnant institutions and outdated systems would lead to disaster. 

This image of a corrupt system consuming itself in flames is one that Dickens used to great effect in Bleak House. Krook, the ‘Lord Chancellor’ of the rag and bottle shop who parodically embodies the ills of Chancery, apparently dies of spontaneous combustion ‘engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself’. Smoke too, together with the thick London fog, is one of the abiding images of the novel, evoking the confusion and opacity that shrouds the lives of its characters. 

Krook’s smouldering remains, illustrated by Hablot Knight (Flickr Commons)

Humour and humanity

Finally, it is worth acknowledging quite how funny ‘The Doom of English Wills’ is. Dickens takes what could be a dry subject - the appropriate storage of historical documents - and makes it engaging, satirising corruption and using narrative intrigue and memorable characters to humanise the issue.

There is of course a real person behind the mask of ‘Mr William Wallace’, but Dickens takes advantage of the pseudonym to craft a likeable novelistic protagonist in the vein of David Copperfield. Rather than depicting Wallace as a hard-headed investigative journalist out to expose corruption, Dickens endows him with a naive optimism about the state of York’s ecclesiastical records. After listing the historical distinctions that make York the second city of England, Wallace exclaims 'this is surely the place for an unimpeachable Registry!'. 

We know from the start that Wallace isn’t going to find the flawless institution he is dreaming of, so his search among all of York’s grand buildings takes on a comic futility, and all of his efforts lead up to one big punchline. Unable to find his way to the registry, Wallace reflects that 'there must surely be a flaw in the old adage, and that where there was a will (and a great many wills) there was no way at all'. Having finally located the registry and started the arduous task of finding the information he needs, Wallace takes on the quixotic role of a ‘kind of knight-errant in the matter of rescuing ancient documents from their tombs of filth’.

The other ‘characters’ in the article seem to have stepped out from the pages of a novel: from the ‘farmer-looking man’ with the comedy Yorkshire accent who finally points Wallace to the registry, to the officious Deputy Registrar who laughs incredulously at the idea that Wallace might actually want to see the documents himself. (Dickens describes this reaction in a way that recalls the disbelief of Mr Bumble when Oliver Twist asks for more gruel.)

While Dickens is writing reportage here, describing people and events that have a basis in reality, his persuasive techniques are quite comparable to the ones he uses in his fiction. He could have advocated for reform using argumentative and factual prose (as William Downing Bruce would go on to do). Instead he uses characterisation and narrative to highlight the injustices of the situation. In the words of social historian David Vincent, 'Dickens’s fundamental claim [is] that contemporary abuses are best understood and communicated by means of an intense imaginative engagement with individual lives'. 

Dickens’s articles, along with the sustained campaigning of Bruce and certain sympathetic politicians, did help bring about reform. Efforts were made to improve the storage conditions in York’s registry, and in 1858 the entire probate system was reformed, transferring jurisdiction from the church courts to a new centralised Court of Probate with specific registries for the new records. 170 years on since the publication of ‘The Doom of English Wills’ (and 150 years to the day since Dickens’ death), the records are now kept safely in the Borthwick strongroom - but the persistent layer of smoky residue on some of the wills reminds us of this chapter in their long history.

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 2003).

Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield (London: Penguin, 1996).

Dickens, Charles, Sketches by Boz (London: Penguin, 2006).

Dickens, Charles, Speeches Literary and Social (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880).

Dickens, Charles, and William Henry Wills, ‘The Doom of English Wills: Cathedral Number Two’, Household Words, vol 2, pp. 25-28.

Longley, Katharine M, ‘Charles Dickens and the “Doom” of English Wills’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 14.1 (1993), 25-38.

Vincent, David, ‘Social Reform’, in John Jordan, Robert L. Patten, and Catherine Waters, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 420–435.

Using the York Cause Papers for Family History

As a family historian I’m always on the look-out for record collections that add some colour to the past lives I’m researching. Sources such as parish registers, general registration and census records are indispensable sources, but on their own they can only give a small number of clues to the life a person led. Sometimes that may be all you’re looking for, but I generally find that once you have an outline view, you become hungry to find more about the person. How did they live? What was their personality like? What did they do in their life? What were their beliefs? Who were their friends? How did they interact with others? What did they own? The list goes on…

Dioceses of the Church of England between the
Reformation and the mid-19th century

I recently had my eyes opened to the documents from the church courts of the Archbishop of York. Known as the York Cause Papers, these documents hold information on people mainly living in the Diocese of York, and the Northern Province and run from 1300 to 1858. The papers are well known and well used by academics researching church, legal and medieval history, but less so by family historians researching the lives of specific individuals or families. Certainly, I’d always felt a little intimidated at the prospect of delving into them and feared that I could spend a lot of time finding very little!

I was looking for a project subject for my studies at the University of Strathclyde, and Alexandra Medcalf from the Borthwick Institute showed me the papers for the cause of Hannah Willmott from Ellerburn. Hannah died in 1820 without leaving a will and had no immediate next of kin. Administrators carried out the initial distribution of her estate, but the scale of wealth she had inherited meant that lots of people started to come out of the woodwork, disputing the actions of her administrators and staking a claim to a share of the estate. The detail of Hannah’s cause deserves a blog post of its own, but what really challenged my preconceptions about Cause Papers were the records I found in this case: 5 detailed family trees, more than 60 “certified” copies of parish register entries and 30 witness testimonies giving vivid descriptions of individuals and events.

Examples of copies of parish register entries and an excerpt from a genealogical chart, TEST.CP.1820/3

With more than 15,000 causes and appeals in the overall collection, I suspected that there could be great potential locked into the records, so I had to find out more. The courts heard causes relating to probate, marriage, immorality, defamation and tithes, and I felt that the probate records could hold details of particular interest to a family historian. And so my project was launched!

I spent time building a high-level view of the entire Cause Paper catalogue, then looked in detail at a selection of testamentary (probate & administration) causes dated between 1733-1858. Here are some of the things I found in the causes I looked at:

A relatively large number of people can be found in the collection. Across the 100 causes I looked at in the catalogue, I found 720 named individuals. Causes most often involved only 2 participants, but some (admittedly exceptional) causes had more than 30 people involved. The average number of participants was 7 people per cause. Looking more broadly, and with 15,000 causes in the full collection, it means that there is the potential to find details for more than 30,000+ individuals (possibly up to 100,000). Although this is not a large number when compared to collections such as parish registers or census records, when considering the relatively humble background of those listed, and the periods covered, this is a significant collection.

The individuals came from a wide range of backgrounds. The occupations of people involved in causes were not just limited to legal or church officials. They also included producers (e.g. agricultural workers), manufacturers (e.g. clothing, food, construction), sellers and dealers, professionals and transport workers. This is great news for family historians, as biographical information about individuals from such a broad range of backgrounds is extremely scarce prior to the 1841 Census.

Occupations found for 50% of the 720 people named in testamentary catalogue sample

Most of the individuals came from Yorkshire. This was not really surprising, but given the complexity of church court jurisdictions (there were 372 active in England & Wales in 1832), it’s useful to know that I found 84% of participants came from Yorkshire (all Ridings). 13% came from elsewhere in the Northern Province (mostly Lancashire, Durham and Nottinghamshire), and 3% came from the Southern Province.

Heat map showing locations of testamentary cause participants

The depositions (witness testimonies) and case exhibits are generally the most useful documents. I looked at 20 causes in great detail and found more than 400 documents, across 1000 images. These documents contain a wide variety of facts and clues, some of which may not be available elsewhere, and this is where I found I could glean most information about a person’s character. Other records such as parish records, family trees, guardianship, debtor/creditor accounts, etc. may open up new lines of enquiry helping break through a brick wall.

Examples of documents in causes: an account of funeral costs from 1779 (TEST.CP.1779/2 p. 2)
and a sample of questions put to witnesses 1820 (TEST.CP.1820/3 p. 106)

The catalogue has a wide range of search terms. Many family historians will be searching for a person by name. Whilst the search allows for a search by name or variant, I’d love to see an enhancement to allow for a phonetic search. During the period of the records, names would have been spoken much more often than written, and given the rich variety of dialects across Yorkshire, a phonetic search would help to track individuals down. The search is not just limited by name. The cataloguing team have indexed a wide variety of terms, all of which can be searched in the advanced search. Places, occupations, dates, roles, sex, status are all indexed (where they appear on the source record), and while I did find a small number of inconsistencies, errors and omissions, this doesn’t in any way diminish the fantastic job the team did in compiling the catalogue.

The quality of online images is excellent. People familiar with attempting to read parish registers from digital versions of grainy, feint microfilm images, will be delighted with the quality of the images in the cause paper collection. I only found a couple of less than perfect images in the 1000 I looked at.

The records are (relatively) easy to read and understand. Armed with a basic understanding of court procedures, and a good reference book, the records were surprisingly easy to follow. The handwriting was generally clear, most records types were easy to identify, and the standard records were consistent in their structure. After 1733, English was the mandatory language, and I also found it used in many pre-1733 records. Those pre-1733 records written in Latin were harder to decode, but they were generally formulaic so once the record type had been identified, I found it possible to pull out keywords.

Having found all of these benefits, I also need to sound a word of caution which will be of no surprise to family history researcher. Always keep in mind the context of the records, don’t just take them at face value. These records were created in adversarial court cases, so there is a risk of bias and this needs to be taken into account before accepting what is written. This is made difficult on some occasions, where a cause did not have a full set of papers, making it harder to reconstruct the case and determine a record’s context. However, understanding the verdict and cross-referencing facts to other sources (e.g. newspaper accounts of proceedings) will help in this area. 

So is it worth the effort? Absolutely it is! The project team which created the online catalogue have created a fabulous, easy to access, free to use resource. Anyone researching a Yorkshire tyke living between 1300 and 1858 should have this on their list to check and may well tap into a rich seam of information that will bring real colour to their research.

The catalogue of York Cause Papers can be found at here, with images (where they are not linked directly through the catalogue) here. 

To get a deeper understanding of the records, the following are invaluable sources of information:

• The Cause Papers Research Guide.
• Tarver, Anne. (1995) Church Court Records: An introduction for family and local historians. Chichester, England: Phillimore.
• Withers, Colin Blanshard. (2006) Yorkshire probate. 1st edition. Bainton, England: Yorkshire Wolds Publication.

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This blog was written by Paul Wainwright, a volunteer at the Borthwick Institute working on the Retreat Letters Project . Paul is a student on the University of Strathclyde's MSc in Genealogical, Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies and a student member of the Register of Qualified Genealogists. 

Magical Yorkshire

The magic of Yorkshire's history can sometimes be literal as well as figurative! 

We are all familiar with the idea of wisemen and wisewomen as people involved in occult activity. In Yorkshire, such people seem to have been helpful rather than malicious, although that didn't mean the Church approved. 

V.1567-8/CB1 f. 25v, Borthwick Institute for Archive

In 1567, Robert Garmann was the subject of testimony to the archbishop of York during a visitation, where he was accused of being a wiseman who 'had healed beastes beinge forespoken' (bewitched or charmed). The magic spell he used to break the enchantment was 

God and sancta charytie blysse the beast. 

The belief in forespeaking carried on in Yorkshire into the ninteenth century. Around 1840, a farmer from South Crosland near Huddersfield who was noted as a cow-doctor wrote down instructions for curing a forespoken cow: 

When Cattle is forspoken Catch her waters then get a new Pipkin never been used put the waters therein then Get some Glass shave both horns a little of then Cut some hair from between her horns and Tail end then get 9 Clogg nails 9 pins never used put all together into the pipkin then as near the full Moon as Possable at twelve O Clock at Night make the doors then set the Pipkin with the above in it on a good red fire and sit with it till all be boiled away and no Smook from it then take it off and when Cold scrape all the black in the pot and nails etc on to some paper then put all in as small a parcil as you can turning each end Contrary way and if any body come to the door don’t open nor speak when doing this then in the morning take the parcel and a Gimblet big enough and go to a live Oaktree and bore a hole and put the parcel in and make a peg for it and put it in and drive it up with a hammer and then Get a egg and break the small end and put tarr in when emptied and give it to the Cow next morning keep warm and give Aird water to drink a time or two till well 

Clearly, un-forespeaking an animal was a complicated process!

Other wisewomen are on record as folk healers. During the 1598 vistation, one Widdow Carre of Darfield was reputed to be a wisewoman with skill at curing sickness. And in 1693, at the Quarter Sessions in Silkstone, appeared one William Beever who was supposed to be able to 'finde things that are lost' by the use of 'a booke whiche he calls an alminacke'. 

A wiggen, or rowan tree, Barbondale

Although these people professed benign powers, there was still obviously a fear of magic and bewitchment. The wiggen (the rowan, or mountain ash) was supposed to protect people from evil. In 1674, a witch's plot was foiled because 'they tye soe much whighen about him, I cannot come to my purpose'. It was even a cure against sickness: in 1782, an Ecclesfield man's diary records an attack of ague from which he recovered after six days 'Under Bark of Wiggin'. 

We can even track the suspicion of the occult into people's names. The surname Pricker was evidently occupational but its meaning is uncertain. In some contexts a pricker was a huntsman and in others a witch-finder. One by-name which may derive from witch-finder is Helya Prickescin, who lived around Fountains Abbey 1168-1194.


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Edit 25/01/18 The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary is now available online at yorkshiredictionary.york.ac.uk 

Strike in the Chapter House: Archbishop Neville and the Canons of Beverley

The Registers of the Archbishops of York contain a great many interesting stories - but few more dramatic than the story of what has been described as the ‘most notorious clerical strike in medieval English history’ - Archbishop Neville’s feud with the Chapter of Beverley Minster in 1381 from Register 13, f 77r -92v. 

Here, Gary Brannan, our Access Archivist, takes us through this fascinating period - a dispute that eventually resulted in deep divisions between clergy, church and state.

For stories from this (and other) Archbishops’ Registers, see http://archbishopsregisters.york.ac.uk

It is the 2nd March, 1381.

A messenger arrives at the heavy doors of the Chapter House of Beverley Minster. He has come the short distance from the Archbishop's Manor in Beverley to bring the news that the Archbishop of York - Alexander Neville (c.1332-1392) - intended to visit the Chapter House of Beverley to undertake a Visitation of the Chapter, sometime around Lady Day (25th March). The Canons - and other clergy - were ordered to appear in person. The Archbishop had been busy in this regard, and had already appointed Roger de Pickering as his judicial assessor, and John Stane of Beverley - now at the door with the order - as his official runner and messenger.

The Chapter House, Beverley Minster

To say that this, relatively normal, procedure caused outrage amongst the Chapter understates things greatly. By the 20th of March, an official appeal had been sent to his Holiness Pope Urban VI appealing this jurisdiction. In the appeal, the Chapter set out their many rights and privileges that they said existed over the Archbishop. For 60 years or more, they argued, they had run and governed themselves, and had managed their own issues of discipline and correction and that, anyway, they were all good natured and peaceful men, undertaking their duties lawfully, and that the Archbishop knew this, too. They feared, they said, the Archbishop's’ use of his power, and that the Archbishop's’ argument that he had a seat in the Chapter may be true, but that he had no official power such as a vote there. 

The Chapter threw themselves on the mercy of the Papal Court, desperate not to be subject to the Archbishop. The Archbishop was, as one could expect, having precisely none of this, and the footnotes and annotations by the Archbishop give a very rare insight into the fury of a prelate scorned. In a section describing the past use of rights in the church, the Archbishop writes ‘Careful! This story is false!’. 

'Careful, this story is false!'

Just on the opposite side of the page, next to a section explaining that the Archbishop had usually been absent from Beverley and never laid claim to a Canonry there, the Archbishop furiously responds “And wrongly - consequently, this Archbishop will purge the negligence of his predecessors’.

'And wrongly, consequently, this Archbishop will purge the negligence of his predecessors'

In an appeal from Richard Ravenser, Archdeacon of Lincoln and Canon of Beverley, he notes a sarcastic ‘Show your authority’. Later, when explaining how the Archbishop was a mortal enemy of his, the Archbishop writes ‘ Yet your messenger came to the Archbishop with this writing and the archbishop asked him to dinner as he would have invited you if you had come’. Others complained of the many occasions the Archbishop had exceeded his authority - going to the place behind the altar, once citing the executors of Richard Kylling to appear; the same with the executors of Robert of Beverley; and wickedly made Margery, wife of Adam Cook of Beverley purge herself for her wicked crimes.

'Yet your messenger came to the Archbishop with this writing and
the Archbishop asked him to dinner as he would have invited you if you had come'

The notices of visitation were affixed to the seat of the Chapter House on the 26th March (the day after Lady Day). The names of 47 priests were cited to be present- but only 3 appeared. When asked where the rest were, he was told they were outsude, but were scared to appear because of the Canons of the Minster, and so they left. The Archbishop angrily demanded their return. The day after, only another four appeared. Now furious, the Archbishop demanded to know why they should not all be excommunicated. 

By now, it was the 5th April, and only another four vicars had appeared, the rest having left. They were summarily excommunicated. But now, who could undertake services? The Archbishop went to Matins - the evening service - on the 8th April, and was so saddened at the fact that the lack of priests meant there could basically be no adequate service, he called for priests trained in serving and chanting to be urgently sent from York to take services in place of the excommunicated priests.

Register 13, showing the Beverley visitation

And at this point - it got serious.

On the 21st April, letters were received from the King, Richard II. In these, he delicately explained that, actually, Beverley’s independence came from the time of his ancestor, King Athelstan. Under pressure to appeal to Rome but worried that this would ‘take more money out of the Kingdom’, the Archbishop was commanded to appear before the King before St George's day to settle the matter. The matter was settled on the 11th May - with a slight whimper as it was found the Archbishops’ Counsel did not have the full authority to represent him, the visitation was therefore ordered to be formally suspended.

The Archbishop was outraged - he notes in the margin that 'It is not the business of the temporal to interfere with the spiritual court' and that 'the request is not just and is therefore not granted'.

'the request is not just and is therefore not granted'

In this, the Canons of Beverley had won a significant battle with York over their independence. Beverley was not visited again as a result, though the Archbishop kept a Manor close by, just in case, and was able to visit the other churches in Beverley - all while the Canons no doubt kept a close eye on his comings and goings.

For Neville, the feud with Beverley was a marker of his obsession with local clerical issues, and also a sign of how his strategic decision making with marr his future. Neville became closely involved with the inner retinue of Richard II. Caught in the maelstrom of Richard's downfall, Neville found himself charged with treason in 1388 after being caught off Tynemouth while attempting a clandestine crossing of the North Sea. Spared execution, he finished his days in Leuven in the Netherlands as a lowly parish priest in 1392.

BIA, YDA/Abp Reg 13, available via <http://archbishopsregisters.york.ac.uk>, accessed 29/03/17

‘Memorials of Beverley Minster: The Chapter Act Book of the Collegiate Church of St. John of Beverley’, A F Leach, Surtees Society Vol 108 (1903)

‘Alexander Neville’, Dictionary of National Biography <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19922>, accessed 29/03/17

Image: ‘Beverley Minster’ Steve Cadman, CC-BY-NC-SA, <https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecadman/7171749305>, accessed 29/03/17

Present and Future Consent: proving marriage in fourteenth-century Yorkshire

If, like me, you’ve been enjoying BBC4’s Medieval Lives, you will have been fascinated by the recent episode on Marriage. The idea that a marriage in the Middle Ages could be contracted and considered valid on the strength of a few words of consent, often spoken in private and/or under pressure from one’s family or friends, is one that’s alien and disconcerting to modern western sensibilities. Much of the evidence for these practices comes, as Helen Castor showed, from the records of the church courts which, amongst many other things, dealt with proving and enforcing marriage contracts, annulling invalid marriages and punishing adultery. Here at the Borthwick we hold the papers relating to around 15,000 cases pleaded before the diocesan courts of York between 1300 and 1858, the largest such archive in the country. Just over 1500 of those are matrimonial and of those around 200 come from the period 1300-1500 – there are well over 600 medieval causes in total. All of these papers have recently been digitised and indexed in a project run by the Universities of York and Sheffield and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Anyone can now search the database of about a million instances of personal names, over 5000 places mainly in Yorkshire but spread as far afield as Sweden, America and Russia, and an almost endless variety of subjects. Scans of the papers are also available on the University of York 'Discover' digital library.  The Church Courts from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century had jurisdiction over a wide variety of business including matrimony, defamation, tithe, probate, breach of faith and church rights.

Rather than being a day-to-day record of court proceedings, the Cause Papers are full, formal documents submitted to or issued by the courts. They were used by litigants to introduce their arguments and by the court to transmit its findings. They are a wonderful source and capture rich detail about human existence and interactions. I came to the Borthwick to work as an archivist two years ago. Up till then I had specialised in the records of English medieval royal government. Since arriving I have taken a crash course in ecclesiastical records, and the Cause Papers have regularly grabbed my imagination. I was fortunate to help behind the scenes on filming and sit in on the discussion between Helen Castor and Dr Bronach Kane. Inspired by the show (and, I should add, by recent discussions with Sara Powell, a York MA student who has just completed a dissertation on matrimonial causes in medieval York), I’ve done a bit of digging. The case I’m going to focus on is not untypical of the kind of disputes the church courts tackled. Indeed, those which attempted to enforce contracts and make one partner to stick to their vows with the other, make up the greatest number of marriage dispute cases.

CP.E.181.1 & 181.2

In the late winter of 1389/90 Emmota, a servant of Henry Rayner of Beal in the West Riding brought a suit before the Curia Ebor', York's central church court. She complained that though she and Robert son of John Williamson of nearby Kellington had contracted to marry, he had not yet solemnized their vows and would not now marry her. What was worse, in a parallel suit brought by Emmota she complained that Thomas, Robert's brother, also of Kellington, had publicly defamed her good character by alleging he had slept with her (or, as the record more prosaically states, 'knew her carnally') in an attempt, she claimed, to prevent the marriage taking place.

Those are the bare bones of the story, which are laid out in a variety of documents now available to view for free through the York Digital Library Cause Papers portal, although, be warned, you will need to know some Latin to make sense of them. In essence, Emmota's case hinged on proving the words she claimed she and Robert had spoken openly before witnesses in the private house in which she worked at Christmas a year previously (which, by my calculaton, would be December 1388) had actually been spoken, and that she had not slept with Thomas. In the formal articles her attorney William de Killerwyk presented to the court, Emmota argued that Robert had publicy and willingly confessed that he and she had both lawfully contracted marriage

'p(er) v(er)ba mutuu(m) co(n)sensum exp(ri)me(n)cia de p(re)senti ac spo(n)salia p(er) v(er)ba de fut(ur)o carnali copula postmod(um) int(er) eosd(e)m subsecut(a) ... /

by expressing words of mutual consent in the present and their spousal by words of future [intent], carnal intercourse between them having followed afterwards...

In the formal articles her attorney William de Killerwyk presented to the court, Emmota argued that Robert had publicly and willingly confessed that he and she had both lawfully contracted marriage ‘p(er) v(er)ba mutuu(m) co(n)sensum exp(ri)me(n)cia de p(re)senti ac spo(n)salia p(er) v(er)ba de fut(ur)o carnali copula postmod(um) int(er) eosd(e)m subsecut(a) … / by expressing words of mutual consent in the present and their spousal by words of future [intent], carnal intercourse between them having followed afterwards …’ If she could prove this, she wanted the court to declare the marriage valid and to compel Robert to recognise her as his lawful wife and solemnize their marriage.

Section of CP.E.181.1 p.7

The court documents, written in heavily abbreviated, legalistic Latin, unfortunately give us no idea of what words they actually said to each other. I think we can imagine them taking each other’s hand and Robert saying something like ‘Emmota, here I take you as my wife, for better or worse, to have and to hold until the end of my life; and of this I give you my faith’.[1] Legally though, it is the emphasis on ‘present’ and ‘future’ consent that mattered. By claiming both, Emmota hoped to prove her marriage was doubly valid and indissoluble. The theory that words of present consent created a perfect, complete marriage and a permanent bond had held sway in Canon Law since the mid-twelfth century.[2] But it often cut little ice with ordinary people! Many tended to see these words as merely making a contract not the marriage. The theory meant that Emmota and Robert were married; the only things remaining for them to do at that point were to solemnize their union in church and to consummate it afterwards. It is clear that Robert wanted, initially, to have no more to do with the marriage, and he challenged the truth of Emmota’s case in court. But, as will become apparent, he had indulged in sexual intercourse with her at some point after saying these words, which, by his words of future consent, theoretically made the marriage valid, complete and unbreakable.

That is unless Emmota could not disprove the allegations that had apparently been made around this time by Thomas son of John Williamson, brother of her supposed husband. In her articles submitted in this second case Emmota claimed she was a woman of ‘good fame and honest conversation’ who had never previously been accused of adultery or incest. Thomas, she said, had declaimed before a multitude of local people that he knew her carnally in order to impede the marriage contracted with his brother. For this, she wished Thomas to be excommunicated. We can suspect, I think, since there is no real hint in the records of a fraternal row over Emmota, that the brothers colluded in concocting the story of Thomas’s fornication with her. Local men John May, John Warde and Alan son of Robert appeared before the court to testify for Thomas, and they appear to suggest that Emmota had refused to say to which of the two brothers she had promised herself for fear of them. Their evidence, presented in March 1390, of a sexual relationship with Thomas, though, appears to have been trumped after much toing and froing by a surprise confession from Robert.

On the back of the document bearing their witness statements is a memorandum that on 3 November 1390 Robert and Emmota came before the court. Having sworn on the Gospels, Robert admitted he had made the contract of marriage a week before Christmas last one year hence. He had then first slept with Emmota (‘p(ri)mo carnalit(er) cognovit’) on the feast of St Stephen (26 December) following. Both parties confessed to the truth and the judge moved to deliver his verdict, that,

‘Because we have heard both by the confession of the said parties made in the judgement before us and by other sufficient and lawful evidences in this business, the abovesaid Emmota, plaintiff, has sufficiently proved her action brought before us in this case, therefore in this writing we have adjudged as our sentence and definitively the same Robert, defendant, to be the lawful husband of the same Emmota and the same Emmota to be the lawful wife of the same Robert.’

In short, Emmota had won. Robert had confessed and the truth of her side of the story had been lawfully upheld. Sadly, the sentence handed out by the court does not survive. Robert may well have joined his wife in solemnizing their marriage and may have had to do penance. I’ll leave you to speculate.

Emmota was a woman of humble origins who fought tooth and claw against men of, perhaps, greater means to persuade a church court to recognise her version of events. It appears from the Poll Tax records of 1379 that she worked for a tailor. She herself is not listed as a taxpayer (although there are a couple of Emmas in the Beal list which might be her), while her ‘husband’ Robert may be the same man as the ‘Robert Williamson’ noted as being taxed at fourpence, the lowest rate, in Kellington.[3] We are dealing here then not with the wealthy in society or with the urban or rural gentry but with ordinary people. We have a brief window into their everyday concerns and lives. Emmota and Robert had promised themselves to each other away from many prying eyes. For over a year she had been forced to wait. She must have been getting worried about not being able to publish banns of marriage and to have her union blessed by a priest, both of which were considered sins. Ultimately, she took her man to court and won the day. Their case is one among many at the Borthwick which give us intimate detail about the lives of our ancestors from all ranks of society. I hope this will have persuaded you that the Cause Papers have a great deal of interest. Do please take a look on the database and see what you can find.

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This post was written by Dr Paul Dryburgh, one of our archivists who specialises in our medieval records.

[1] Emmota probably returned the words. These were the words a witness reported that John Beck, a saddler, and Margery daughter of Simon Taylor had exchanged, in a cause paper from 1372: C.P. E.121: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/causepapers/causepaper.jsp?id=91754.

[2] For what follows and for an excellent overview of the Cause Paper evidence in English matrimonial cases, see R.H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 26-36.

[3] Henry Rayner of Beal and his wife, Agnes, were taxed at sixpence in 1379: Carolyn C. Fenwick, The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381: Part 3, Wiltshire-Yorkshire (Records of Social and Economic History, New Series 37, 2005), pp. 361-2. For leading me to these references, and for help in nailing down the place names in this cause, I am very grateful to Dr Jonathan Mackman.