Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London

Communities and Reforms

Gary G Gibbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429640438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London presents linked microhistorical studies of five London parishes, using their own parish records to reconstruct their individual operations, religious practices, and societies.

The parish was a foundational institution in Tudor London. Every layperson inhabited one and they interacted with their neighbors in a variety of parochial activities and events. Each chapter in this book explores a different parish in a different part of the city, revealing their unique cultures, societies, and economies against the backdrop of presiding themes and developments of the age. Through detailed microhistorical analysis, patterns of collective behavior, parishioner relationships, and parish leadership are highlighted, providing a new perspective on the period. The reader is drawn into the local neighborhoods and able to trace how people living in the Tudor era experienced the tumultuous changes of their time.

This book is ideal for scholars and students of early modern history, microhistory, parish studies, the history of the English reformation, and those with an interest in administrative history of the late medieval and early modern periods.

1 Allhallows London Wall, 1455–1536

Fundraising and collaboration

The records and the parish

Studies based on churchwardens’ accounts must deal with a basic fact: the records are inconsistent. A parish might acknowledge paying for a certain expenditure for several years and then not do so for one or two, or it might organize an annual festivity for years, and then that action disappears without explanation. Such patterns are not difficult to find and are often explained as the result of sloppy bookkeeping.¹ But what is one to make of people or groups who appear and disappear from churchwardens’ accounts? In the pre-Reformation records from Allhallows London Wall certain individuals or groups are recognized as contributing to fundraising in some years and not in others, and there seems to be more to that pattern than simply amateurish accounting practices. Included among those occasionally recognized are the parish’s resident anchorite, the parson, a parish fraternity, the wives of the parish (referred to as such), and, here and there, the names of individual men and women. These individuals and groups occasionally receive mention, usually when the churchwardens require assistance, but “the wives” and the anchorite appear, especially, when there is a need for extra income because of a construction project. From the perspective of the churchwardens, the coming and going of these sources of income most certainly represented evidence of collaboration in parish fundraising and governance, documented to an unusual degree. From our perspective, the records allow for a greater understanding of these apparently tangential agents in fundraising and a greater sense of the social dimension of the parish.

This irregular pattern represents a system at odds with modern expectations of consistent accounting methods and economic behavior.² The fluidity of the language and, indeed, the fluid form of the record-keeping become apparent at the beginning. The initial run of churchwardens’ accounts from Allhallows London Wall, also known as Allhallows on the Wall, reveals an approach to fundraising that required the generosity of many parishioners, but also shows that people played various roles, participated in different ways, and received recognition “inconsistently” because such notice depended on the churchwardens’ need to make ends meet. Some men’s names appear frequently, others once or twice, and some men are not specifically named at all but are referred to by various occupational markers.³ Women are identified as either someone’s wife, or widow, or aggregately as “the wives,” suggesting collective behavior by the more prominent women of the parish.⁴ The actions of these parishioners uniquely expressed their aspirations and combined with the area’s poor and marginal status to shape parish culture and society. Strategies for fundraising included group donations, and the incorporation of lists of donors occur throughout the accounts. Documentation of these meetings provides clues of complex social negotiations that, in the end, expressed a more collaborative approach to parish governance than appears in most London churchwardens’ accounts from the Tudor period.

This chapter, therefore, does two things at once. First, it explores the culture and society of a poor, marginal parish on the edge of London in the last decades before the changes of the Reformation. Rather than be constrained by limited circumstances, parishioners created several unique approaches to fundraising that not only raised revenues to pay for parish operations but helped to promote social coherence and connected their part of London to distant places. Thus (and second), it also explores parish strategies to raise funds and accomplish tasks while contextualizing them especially in the local culture—in essence, to detail the elastic accounting method in which people appear and disappear. This analytical approach will require an examination of the parish and its setting, the unique attributes of its community, the fundraising process, and, finally, an examination of particular attributes of parish culture, such as the anchorite, the core group of men who explicitly appear to offer stability in parish operation, the collection of Hock money,⁵ “the wives” of the parish who implicitly seem to offer stability in parish operations, the parish’s one religious fraternity documented in the churchwardens’ accounts, and the local saintly devotions. The social dimension of the late medieval religious practices and teaching transformed Allhallows London Wall into an impressive and active community, which receives its best documentation in the extant churchwardens’ accounts.

Parish fundraising usually had one predictable element: lines of income related to the dead. At Allhallows London Wall, churchwardens recorded a steady, but small source of income in burial fees, for interments both within the church and in the churchyard. The records further reveal three additional fundraising patterns that were not unique to the parish but found local expression in unique ways. The first of these was the appearance of occasional parish gatherings (collections) and donations; the second was income related to the presence of an anchorite in the pre-Reformation era; and the third was the collection of Hock Day money. The fundraising at Allhallows London Wall differed from that of the other city parishes, especially that of the much studied churchwardens’ accounts from Saint Mary at Hill, which featured as a main source of revenue the rent collections connected to properties that endowed the parish’s seven chantries.⁶ Allhallows London Wall documents one perpetual chantry and, without more consistent, institutionalized sources of revenue, such as income from parish properties, its approach to fundraising focused on parishioners: parish officials often had to react to problems; parish meetings negotiated approaches to numerous financial problems; the anchorite brought in money from outside the parish and exercised a moral authority in the community; and the wider population played a complicated but generous part as well.⁷

Location, neighborhood, and history

The church was close to Bishopsgate, which was just beyond the parish boundary; in fact, the oddly shaped parish was situated well to the west of the gate and the church was at the end of a slim stretch of territory that ran along the wall. Elizabethan author John Stow stated the parish and its church, located in Broadstreet Ward, “stands Eastward from the Little Postern leading into Moor-Fields.”⁸ Holy Trinity Cartulary provides evidence of the church’s existence to ca. 1127–34, while the current edifice dates to the eighteenth century, with extensive repairs conducted in the post-World War II era.⁹ The first mention of a churchyard dates to 1348.¹⁰ In the Tudor era, it was among the city’s less populated parishes, with an estimated 217 communicants in 1548, which would suggest an estimated parish population at ca. 289.¹¹ Its average fundraising revenue in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as represented in the churchwardens’ accounts, was among the lowest in the city: £7 5 s. 10 d. annually. Among the parish’s most unusual attributes was the grant of a papal indulgence, an arrangement that has left little documentation. About 1486, Pope Innocent VIII offered parish visitors and benefactors a pardon that bestowed “seven years and seven Lents of pardon at All Saints, All Souls, the first Sunday after the Translation of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the feast of St. Cuthbert, and the parochial dedication day.” In 1486–87, the churchwardens paid a scrivener 20 d. for a “copy of owre bulle of ye pardone,” but only a small amount of indulgence money ever appears in the churchwardens’ accounts in the last years of the fifteenth century.¹² The few entries, according to Robert Swanson, are “intermittent” and “scrappy,” leaving the impression that the pardon money was usually dealt with in some other fashion, or else the indulgence failed to appeal to Londoners.¹³

The parish benefice was controlled by the prior of Holy Trinity Aldgate before the dissolution and afterwards by the Crown.¹⁴ The Carpenters’ Hall was one of the significant buildings in the parish, and the Carpenters’ Company is mentioned in the records occasionally, for example, they donated money for the beam light in 1492¹⁵ (Figure 1.1). While they undoubtedly influenced parish operations to some degree, it is difficult to gauge how much direct leadership either the company or individual carpenters may ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Subject, method, and process
• 1. Allhallows London Wall, 1455–1536: Fundraising and collaboration
• 2. Saint Michael Cornhill: Foundational transformations, ca. 1450–1610
• 3. Saint Stephen Coleman Street: Living on the margins
• 4. Saint Botolph Aldgate: Accounting for reform, 1547–1554
• 5. Saint Peter Westcheap: Crossing the divide
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index