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. 

By Clog and Shoe

 With all the excitement surrounding the imminent Royal Wedding, I thought it would be interesting to look at an older and less formal kind of marriage.

Black leather clogs

We are all familiar with clogs, the traditional northern wooden shoe, strengthened with iron or brass at the heels and edges. Perhaps less familiar is its use in an enigmatic entry in the Haworth parish register for 1733, which gives a list of ‘marriages at Bradford and by clog and shoe in Lancashire’.

This entry has been the subject of much conjecture over the intervening years. The 1867 Notes and Queries correspondent Llallawg asked about the meaning of the entry, noting that ‘in some parts of the West Riding it is customary to throw old shoes and old slippers after the newly married pair when starting on their wedding tour.’ They further mentioned an ancient custom of the forest of Skipton, which is near to Haworth, where in the reign of Edward II ‘every bride coming that way should either give her left shoe or 3s 4d to the forester of Crookryse, by way of custom of gaytcloys’ (here gate will be in the dialectal usage meaning ‘journey’).

I don’t know if they received any responses, but later The Derbyshire Times of 1894 carried a similar query, noting that at a time when legal marriage did not require a priest of religious ceremony (Hardwicke’s Marriage Act was still twenty years away) many people married clandestinely or by unusual methods (similar to 'jumping the broom' which was still referred to as a folk practice when I was growing up). Two solutions were then offered to the ‘clog and shoe’ conundrum. One suggestion was that a pub called the ‘Clog and Shoe’ in the Bradford area might have been operating as ‘marriage shop’. Apparently, taverns were often popular locations for clandestine marriages. This idea was supported by a (poorly cited, so I can’t track down the original) reference to ‘a book at Elwick, Durham’, which suggested that marriages were celebrated ‘by’ the clog and shoe, ‘with’ the clog and shoe and ‘at’ the Clog and Shoe, the constructions seeming to suggest a place such as a tavern.

Frontispiece and Title page from Richard Braithwaite, A Boulster Lecture, London 1640

An alternative was the custom of marrying by exchanging a man’s clog for a woman’s shoe in front of witnesses. A further illustration from Braithwaite’s A Boulster Lecture (1640) emphasizes the potential symbolism of some of these traditions:

When at any time a couple were married, the sole of the bridegroom’s shoe was to be laid upon the bride’s head, implying with what subjugation she should serve her husband.

Dr George Redmonds, the author of the Yorkshire Historic Dictionary, offers a less romantic explanation: it might simply have meant that the couple had walked over into Lancashire to get married. Haworth was, after all, right on the county boundary.

Allegations from CP.I.1110
Isaac Smith c. Benjamin Kennet, 1739

This more prosaic definition has some help from our archival records. In the 1730s, the minister to the Howarth curacy, Rev. Isaac Smith and the vicar of Bradford (its mother parish) Rev. Benjamin Kennet, engaged in a protracted dispute through the church courts around the issue of irregular marriages. Rev. Kennet was accused of conducting improper marriages, by marrying a couple without the publication of banns and out of ceremonial hours (after 12 noon on a Sunday), and by receiving additional payments for doing so. The couple in question, John Arthington and Ann Swaine, had been forbidden permission to marry by her father. When the case was brought several years later, Kennet attempted to clear his name by producing a witness, Lucy Brigg, who swore that she remembered the banns being read at Bradford church sometime in the June, July or August before the wedding but unfortunately it was shown that at the time she was confined to a room for lunacy. I don’t know what punishment, if any, was meted out to Kennet but he didn’t lose his position as he continued as vicar to Bradford until his death in 1752 (outliving Smith, I’m sure to his great satisfaction, by ten years).

The papers for the numerous back-and-forths in the church courts between Smith and Kennet (which include the memorable occasion when Smith hired the Bradford town crier to tell Kennet’s parishioners what he thought of him) are freely available online under the references CP.I.1739; CP.I.1099; CP.I.1100; CP.I.1101; CP.I.1102; CP.I.1103; CP.I.1104.

It’s interesting that we have a verifiable recorded case of improper marriage at exactly the same date as the ‘clog and shoe’ marriages. The situation in Haworth perfectly illustrates the motivation behind Hardwicke’s Act for the Better Prevention of Clandestine Marriage in 1754, to tighten up the legal definition of a marriage service once and for all.

Can you help us to tighten up our definition of clog? Do you know what marriage ‘by clog and shoe’ means? I’d love to hear from you!

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You can click on the 'dictionary' tag below to see other blog-posts from the project.

Edit 25/01/2019 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

Revealing the Registers: thoughts of an indexer

Our Marc Fitch Fund Project Archivist, Helen Watt, gives us some thoughts and reflections following the completion of initial work in indexing one of our Archbishops' Registers and attempts to answer and old indexers' question - can you ever really be sure when using a previous index? 

Having worked on the pilot for ‘York's Archbishops’ Registers Revealed’ in 2012, generously funded by the  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it is excellent to be able to put the theory devised during that pilot into practice. Thanks to funding from the Marc Fitch Fund, since October 2015, work has been underway on Registers 31 and 32 using the newly-developed indexing tool. This period covers 1576-1650 and includes the tenures of Archbishops Edwin Sandys (1577-1588), John Piers (1589-1594), Matthew Hutton (1595-1606) in Register 31; and the archiepiscopates of Archbishops Samuel Harsnett (1619-1631), Richard Neile (1632-1640) and John Williams (1641-1650) in Register 32. 

Since the examination of Register 31 was completed last month, it is now possible to reflect on the process of indexing a register of the Archbishops of York of this date and, crucially, the kind of material found within it. To put them into some context, none of the registers for this period have been subject to any previous indexing work - unlike their medieval predecessors where various published and indexed versions have been created since the 19th century. 

First of all, the quality of images of the registers produced during the Mellon project is excellent, especially for remote use, The images may also be greatly enlarged, so that even the smallest, faintest penstrokes may be read with ease.

Thanks to the quality of the images, we were able to discern this date as being the 'xvth day of febuarie' (Reg 31 f 76v)

The schema of subject headings compiled during the pilot has been integral to indexing subjects found in register entries, although some amendments have had to be made to cater for the post-reformation matters found in this register, as well as for matters to do with probate and archbishops’ visitations.

When indexing persons, there are two methods of dealing with personal names in the tool, either by inputting details of an individual straight into an entry, or by populating the Persons List with details before indexing. Using the second method, it was possible to draw on the work of several other projects, such as the Clergy of the Church of England Database, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae (via British History Online), the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, particularly for parish and higher clergy, to build up the required information and so streamline input of persons.

Similarly, to speed up the indexing of places, not only could the project draw on lists of places compiled during the Borthwick Institute’s previous work on the Cause Papers, but also automatically harvest place-names from the Digital Exposure of English Place-names (DEEP) and the online Ordnance Survey.

As regards the contents of the register, these have mainly comprised probate of wills and grants of administrations, confirmations of elections of bishops and archbishops’ visitations, and guides to the procedures involved in all of these topics will be made available shortly. Wills copied into the register are mostly those of clergymen and although there is an existing index in the Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series vol. 93 (1937), comparison between this index and the original wills has allowed small errors to be corrected, mostly concerning dates of wills and probate - understandable when you consider the quality of the images we are working with now!

Notification of the Vacancy after the death of Abp Sandys, 1588 

Even though these wills are well-known through that index, the new indexing tool has made it possible for them to be searched and explored online, making them so much more widely accessible and available and opening up their contents for research, so that many aspects of clerical life could now be studied. 

For instance, the pious preambles of wills, often not simply formulaic in nature, but long and involved, together with the titles of books left as bequests, may reflect the doctrinal inclinations and learning of these clergymen. We might also see the clergyman as farmer, and father of his family as well as shepherd of his flock. We can sometimes see far-reaching connections with the Universities, with court, members of London Livery Companies, and relationships with gentry and noble patrons. 

Long preamble in the will of  Ralph Kay, vicar of Topcliffe, 1613

With the commencement of work on Register 32, all these topics and more are bound to be further illuminated, so, as they say, watch this space!

‘Till death us do part’?: marriage, love and wills in the Archbishops' Registers

When David Cressy examined aspects of marriage in Tudor and Stuart times, he asked whether or not love played a part in courtship and marriage then (1). Unlike other historians, such as Laurence  Stone, he considered that love was fundamental to marriage in that era and in support of his argument cited one Stuart source which stated that ‘to the end that marriages may be perpetual, loving and delightful betwixt the parties, there must and ought to be knitting of hearts before striking of hands’(2).

So is it possible to discover the affection in which an Elizabethan testator held his wife from the wording of his will? Perhaps, judging from wills being examined in the ‘York’s Archbishops’ Registers Revealed’ project. A project generously supported by the Marc Fitch Fund is currently indexing the Archbishops' Registers for the period 1576-1650, and much of the content for this period consists of probate records, largely for beneficed clergy.

Take, for instance, the will of Charles Daintith (1557-1595), vicar of Kirk Ella, 1591-5, made shortly before his death (3). He mentioned his wife Isabel several times in strikingly loving terms, which do not seem to be merely formulaic, as ‘Isabell Jepson my beloved freind and my true and lawfull wief now by the lawes of this Realme established’ and ‘Isabell Jepson my welbeloved wief’.

'my beloved freind'

He left the residue of his estate to his ‘beloved wief’ and made her his executrix on one condition, which was ‘desiring as there was ever true love betwixt her and me ... that she will not forgett at hir ending if she keep hir so long unmaried my brother Gabriell and his children and my sisters children’.

Was this the same experience for all? Perhaps not, and the will of Barnabie Shepherd (d. 1588) may be a case in point (4) This was a nuncupative will, spoken before witnesses who recalled:

‘Memorandum that the Fyftenthe day of Februarie in the yeare of our Lorde God one thowsande, fyve hundrethe eightie seven, accordinge to the course and computacioun of the churche of Englande Barnabie Shepperde, bachelour of devynytye and parson of Bulmer, of the dyoces of Yorke being of perfecte mynde and memorye, and being asked and desyred to knowe to whome he woulde dispose or gyve his goodes, whether to his Wyfe, (meanynge Brygett Shepperde then his Wyfe) or not Annswered and sayd, yea to his wyfe, or the like wordes in effecte, in the presence of Fraunces Layton and Josias Fawether.’

So was he in pain or just bad-tempered or were relations between him and his wife less than loving?

'yea to his wyfe'

We will never know!

Are these just two examples at either end of the spectrum of marital affection or are there many others waiting to be discovered as work progresses? Watch this space!

Helen Watt
Marc Fitch Project Archivist

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(1) David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 260-3.

(2) Ibid., p. 262, citing from John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Houshold Government (1630).

(3) BIA, Register 31, fol. 132 v, entry 2, Will of Charles Daintith, vicar of Kirk Ella, made 24 June 1595, proved 3  October 1595; Alumni Oxonienses; Clergy of the Church of England database (CCEd), available at http://theclergydatabase.org.uk/.

(4) BIA, Register 31, fol. 105 v, entry 1, Will of Barnaby Shepherd, Rector of Bulmer, made 15 February 1588, proved 14 March 1588; Alumni Cantabrigienses; CCEd.