Austrey
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Austrey Villagers -The Clergy
The Austrey clergy - a
comfortable living Like their gentry counterparts,
the vicars of Austrey gained more prominence within the parish over the course
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they were not as well off as
the Appleby rectors. As a religious office holder entrusted with the cure of
souls, a recipient of church tithes, and a landholder the parson occupied a
unique position in the village social order.
His education and responsibilities of office would have naturally allied
him to the gentry, to whom he was frequently connected by marriage or kinship,
as revealed in the choice of witnesses in legal documents. However, Austrey
marriage licence applications and probate records in the century before the
Civil War show no such affinity. Gentry
and clergy rarely called upon each other to serve as witnesses, overseers or
appraisers. There were few kinship links to cement relationships between the two
and it seems that the parson and the squire kept separate company.
We know that social distinctions were made locally between clerks who
enjoyed gentry status and those who did not.
In a 1629 dispute over the tithes at Seal, for example, the archdeacon's
official inquired as to 'what,manner of parson was [the incumbent] Mr Woolley, was he a gentleman or not’? It seems that even a
rector was not automatically considered a gentleman. Status differentiation within clerical ranks was inevitable,
considering the range of office, education and social origin. Clerical aspirations and
attainments have been discussed at length by Rosemary O'Day, who has examined
Archdeacon Thomas Lever's attempts to right clerical abuses and to strengthen
professionalism in the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield. The Austrey vicars did
not have possession of the advowson or rectorial tithes so they were not able to
prosper from the land changes as much as the Appleby rectors.
After the Dissolution both the rectory and the advowson to the vicarage
came into the possession of the Crown (except for a brief interval before 1579
when the advowson was held by a London merchant).
For most of the period, the impropriated rectory was leased to a
succession of aristocratic landholders with largely pecuniary interest in the
parish. The Earl of Leicester, who
was lessee in 1575, received an annual rent of £100.3.8 for the rectory,
slightly more than be received from Shuttington manor with the attached priory
of Alvecote. In 1669 the Austrey tithes were farmed out to George Kendall who
claimed family occupance of the rectory for the past fifty or sixty years for a
fee farm rent of £120 a year. The Countess Dowager of Somerset was probably
disappointed to hear that ‘despite all efforts’ her steward, George Crowther,
could not let the tithes for more than £130 in 1673. Meanwhile the parson had
to make do with the small tithes. Price
inflation in the late Tudor period particularly threatened the clergy with
poorer livings. One of the many
problems, for vicars. was that the value of the small tithes was not rising as
much as that of the great tithes. We
do not much about the income of Austrey's sixteenth-century clerks, but judging
from the frugal possessions listed in the inventory of Randolf Orton's widow in
1609, the living was not well particularly well endowed.
However the parsons’ probate records after this date suggest that the
Austrey clergy were weathering the price rises in the parish.
Randolf's successors, Roger Mould 1619), John Prior (1619-65) and John
Shakespeare (1665-88), all left inventories.
Each inhabited in turn a spacious and comfortably furnished vicarage
house of three bays with thirteen bays attached, servant quarters and a dovecote
in the back yard. They also had a stake in both arable and livestock farming.
The glebe comprised over 200 arable strips and farming leys, complemented
by rough pasture and meadow 'proportionable to one and a quarter yardlands',
together with rents from seven cottages. Besides their endowments, some of the
later clergy had personal assets. Roger
Mould's inventory was appraised at £267.7.0 in 1619, including £80 worth of
corn in the town field, fat cattle and horses.
His successors were also comfortably off. John Prior, for example left assets worth £236.6.4 in 1665
and John Shakespeare was worth about £370 in 1688. The wills and inventories of
John Prior, and his wife Martha, who died and had their goods appraised within a
few weeks of each other, clearly show that the vicar had bought land within the
parish during his term. Despite their comparative affluence, the
Restoration clergy were not closely associated with the gentry, perhaps because
most of them were outside appointments who did not stay long in the parish. The
exception was John Prior, a friend to Robert Lilley, one of the new gentry, and
a kinsman of the Appleby rector, his father in-law. Both Abraham Mould, and William Lilley were called upon to
act as overseers in Martha Prior's will. The
link between the vicarage and the established gentry weakened after 1670 when
John Shakespeare was presented to the living. John's unremarkable background,
the son of a Coventry merchant, a plebeian of St John's at Oxford and a servitor
at St Mary's Hall, might have prevented him from assuming the status of gentleman. The early loss of the
advowson helps to explain why the Austrey vicars failed to assume the same role
as that played by the Appleby rectors. The
Austrey vicars did not have sufficient wealth, nor the long association with the
parish nor the family connections to keep up with the local gentry.
Sources and Notes Dr
V.B. Elliott has discovered a strong correlation between Kentish gentlemen and
clergy in the choice of bondsmen for marriage licences between 1619 and 1641
which suggest that clergy had stronger links with gentry than gentry had with
yeomanry: V.B. Elliott. ‘Marriage and mobility’ thesis, 117-21. Seal
parish L.R.O. 1D 4114/VII/107 (my emphasis); One Ralph Wolly is listed among the
jurors at Appleby Magna in 1594: DE 40/37/1. R.
O'Day, The English Clergy, 172.
HMC Report of the MSS Marquess of
Bath IV, 26, 275; WCR Quarter Sessions
Order Books II, 73-4.
L.J.R.O. inventories, Isabell Orton, 1609.
See, for example, inventory of Roger Mould (L.J.R.O. 1619) which refers
to a hall, buttery, kitchen, maid's chamber, upper chamber nether chamber and a
parlour above the hall; Austrey glebe terrier, 1635: L.J.R.O. B/V/6
L.J.R.O. will and inventory, Roger Mould, 1619; Mould gave portions of £10
and £20 to each of the four eldest children mentioned, but omitted his eldest
son, Robert, who may have received his portion and left the parish at some
earlier time, inventories, John Prior, 1665; John Shakespeare, 1688, wills, John
and Martha Prior, 1665.
John Shakespeare’s J. Foster (ed.) Alumni
Oxoniensis: the Members of the University of Oxford 1500-1714
(Oxford, 1968), 1338. Collier's
analysis of 8,803 livings in the Valor
Ecclesiasticus shows that 90% were worth less than £26, 75% less than £20,
(p.172); One of the richest local livings was Seckington which yielded £40.13.4
annually. Cf. Ashby-de-la-Zouch (£13
p.a.), Seal (£13 p.a.), Shackerstone (£7 p.a.): Nichols I, lxxix. Cf. Joseph
Harryson, vicar of Shustoke, had an allowance of 2s 6d a week for maintenance
and 15d weekly for his wife and child taken away as he was 'a man of very lewd
condition much subject to drunkeness'. WCR
Quarter Sessions Order Book I, 210. |
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