Tracing Your Church of England Ancestors: A Guide for Family & Local Historians

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My major debt in writing this book is to the authors whose works I have cited. I would also like to thank Marjorie for occasionally dragging me away from the computer. I am grateful to the librarians of Trowbridge, Sarum College and the Bodleian Library for their assistance. Simon Fowler, and one of my former Pharos students, have both made useful comments and saved me from errors. Any that remain are my responsibility, and I would be grateful if they could be brought to my attention.

Stuart A. Raymond

INTRODUCTION

Until the late seventeenth century, every English man and woman was a member of the Church of England. Legally, that continued to be the case for several centuries, although in practice Nonconformists and Roman Catholics denied their membership. Anglican priests, even today, recognize that they have an obligation to serve everyone in their parishes. It follows that everyone with English ancestors, at least in the nineteenth century and earlier, can claim Anglican ancestors.

This book explains how to trace Anglican ancestors. It is hoped that local historians will also find it useful. The documentary needs of the latter are very similar to those of the family historian, but are sometimes somewhat wider. Here, we are primarily concerned with records created within dioceses and parishes, although other records are mentioned where appropriate. Readers are assumed to have a basic knowledge of major sources, such as the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths, and the census returns. Two other basic sources – parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, and probate records – are actually records created by the Church of England, so are discussed here. The Church of England, incidentally, was the established church of England and Wales, and also of Ireland, but not of Scotland. The records of both Scotland and Ireland are not within the scope of this book.

We begin by placing the records that we need to consult in the context of the institution which created them. Chapter 1 provides a very brief outline of the history of Anglicanism. Chapter 2 describes the structure of the church, how clergy and laity operate within it, and why the records that we use were created. Some preliminaries to research are discussed in Chapter 3. The following chapters describe the various different sources that we need to consult in order to trace family and local history. Chapter 10 is solely devoted to the task of tracing clergymen, whose careers can frequently be traced in much more detail than is possible for most of the laity.

There are many terms used in this book which are peculiar to the Church of England. This jargon is generally explained when it is first mentioned. However, for a brief overview, see:

•Church Jargon

www.churchsociety.org/issues_new/churchlocal/iss_churchlocal_jargon.asp

The aim of this book is to suggest which sources might tell you something about your parish or your ancestors. As you read it, make a note of the various sources which might reveal some information about specific ancestors and follow them up either online or in a record office. Happy hunting!

Chapter 1

THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

After the crucifixion of Jesus, the message of the Gospel spread throughout the world. Discounting the myth that Joseph of Arimathea visited Glastonbury, it took perhaps two or three hundred years before it reached the island of Britain. The Church of England traces its ancestry back to two sources. The Celtic church flourished for several centuries before the Anglo-Saxon invasion. When Augustine was sent from Rome to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons in 697, he found that Celtic Christians were still active in the North and West, and were conducting their own missions in places like Lindisfarne and Iona.

Roman Catholic and Celtic traditions were different. It took half a century to meld them together. By the latter half of the eighth century, however, they had formed a unified body. The Church of England was not to be divided by doctrinal controversy again until the ideas of John Wycliffe prompted the Lollard ‘heresy’ to break out at the end of the fourteenth century.

Lollardy was uncharacteristic, and was quickly repressed, although it is possible that remnants survived to see some Wycliffite teachings adopted by early sixteenth-century Continental reformers, such as Martin Luther and John Calvin. Generally, however, early Tudor Englishmen were firmly attached to the Church of Rome. That attachment was strengthened by the imminence of death, which, in an age without modern medicine, was a constant threat. So was Hell. The great paintings of doom which could be seen over the chancel arch in many parish churches, one of which is still viewable at St. Thomas’s church in Salisbury, illustrated what was thought to happen after death. God was depicted sitting in judgement. Demons stood ready to seize the damned, and cast them down into Hell, which was graphically portrayed as the gaping mouth of a monster. On the other hand, angels stood ready to escort those saved by the blood of Christ into Heaven. Salvation depended on the sacrifice of Christ, mediated through the church, the body of Christ. The church offered consolation in death, a means to shorten the time to be spent in Purgatory, and a gateway to eternal life.

St Michael slaying the dragon at Ranworth in Norfolk.

Englishmen exercised a vibrant faith in the goodness of God, and in the power of the Resurrection. Their faith was expressed through the church, and through its services. The evidence of that faith is still all around us in the English landscape. It can be seen by anyone who cares to walk more than a mile or two in the English countryside: the landscape is full of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century church towers, which are rarely more than three or four miles apart. A lot of time, money, and effort went into their construction.

Protestants, however, thought that the Roman Church was full of abuses, notably the sale of indulgences, and the growth of the chantry system, both of which were claimed to reduce the time to be spent in Purgatory. They insisted that the reverence paid to images was idolatrous, and argued that the Bible alone was the guide to faith.

The twelfth-century chancel at St Levan in Cornwall, still used for worship today.

The fifteenth-century tower of Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire. Its steeple was destroyed by lightning.

Much of the church at Magor in Monmouthshire was rebuilt in the fifteenth century. Its churchyard is still in use.

The medieval rood screen at Ashton in Devon. It escaped destruction by sixteenth-century iconoclasts.

It is unlikely that Protestantism would have made much headway in England had it not been for Henry VIII’s determination to obtain a divorce from Katherine of Aragon at all costs. He convinced himself that the authority of the Pope over divorce proceedings was unjustified, withdrew the country from Papal obedience, and in 1534 had himself named supreme head of the Church of England by Act of Parliament. The royal arms began to appear in English churches, signifying the royal headship – or, in the view of one critic, the ‘abomination of desolation’ spoken of by the prophet Daniel.¹ Henry, nevertheless, remained a convinced conservative in other religious matters, and refused to allow the changes in doctrine which Protestants advocated. But when it came to money, he was all for seizing as much of it from the church as he could. That allowed Protestantism to creep in. Some redundant monasteries had recently been closed down by Cardinal Wolsey, whose servant Thomas Cromwell had overseen much of the administration of closure. When Wolsey failed to obtain a divorce for his master, he was dismissed – but his role as Henry’s chief minister was taken by his servant. Cromwell also became ‘vicegerent’, giving him more power over the church than any other layman before or since, and vitiating Henry’s religious conservatism. He used his administrative experience to carry out a wholesale dissolution of the monasteries, which he justified to Henry on the grounds that the Crown benefited immensely from the seizure of their lands. He would have been reluctant to mention to Henry that the dissolution also destroyed a major prop of conservative doctrine – although in 1536 the Northern rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace were keen to point it out to him.

It was not the Pilgrims who destroyed Cromwell. Rather, it was simply that Henry did not like the Queen that Cromwell found for him in Flanders, and that courtiers who did not like Cromwell persuaded the King to oust him. The vicegerent suffered decapitation in consequence, but not before he had ordered the placement of an English bible in every parish church, and created the conditions in which Thomas Cranmer, who had been made Archbishop of Canterbury at Henry’s instigation, could orchestrate a full-scale introduction of Protestantism into England.

The death of Henry VIII, and the accession of his son, Edward VI, changed everything. Edward had been brought up under Protestant tuition, and had absorbed the faith of his tutors. Although he was only a child, he encouraged the Protestant reformation to take root in his kingdom. Prayers for the dead were out, so the numerous chantries which had been established to conduct them were dissolved. Prayers to saints were also out, so the iconoclasts had a field day destroying their images, and, in the process, destroying most of the artwork of medieval England. Wall paintings in churches were whitewashed, or replaced with Biblical texts. Rood lofts were destroyed, and the stairs to them blocked up.

Blocked-off stairs to the rood loft at St Buryan in Cornwall, evidence of the zeal of sixteenth-century reformers in this remote parish.

The doctrine of transubstantiation, which argued that the bread and wine offered in the Eucharist became, in reality, the body and blood of Christ, was also discarded. Consequently, altars for sacrifice were no longer needed, and were replaced with a table in the nave. Processions ceased. The sermon became the focus of church services – if preachers could be found. And, in 1549, the Book of Common Prayer was introduced. That caused another rebellion, this time in Devon and Cornwall. Again, the rebellion was quashed. But the rebels’ aims were achieved a couple of years later, when Edward VI died, and Mary I succeeded to the throne.

The Book of Common Prayer is still in print after almost 500 years of use. This is a 1760 edition.

Mary claimed to be a devout Catholic. She reversed all that Cranmer had done, had him burnt, and appointed Cardinal Pole to succeed him as Archbishop of Canterbury. Protestants who did not want to suffer Cranmer’s fate fled to the Continent, many to Calvin’s Geneva. Mary experienced little opposition to the reintroduction of the old religion. It had been vibrant before Henry’s divorce proceedings; most Englishmen wanted to see its vibrancy continue, and to bring back traditional forms of worship. The Queen, however, had insufficient time to place the old church back onto a firm foundation. Only a handful of monasteries were re-established. She could not persuade gentlemen who had purchased monastic lands to disgorge them. It was a difficulty that Mary was unable to solve before she died in 1558. Her failure to re-instate Roman Catholicism was due to the brevity of her reign, and to the fact that she was succeeded by her half-sister, the Protestant Elizabeth.

Elizabeth’s primary task was to establish her authority in church and state. Her Protestantism was of a very conservative character; for example, she regarded married clergy with great suspicion.² She clashed with the radical Calvinist exiles flocking back to England from Geneva.³ Few of them shared her views, yet they were the only people available to staff the upper echelons of her Church. Marian bishops refused to cooperate with her, and were ousted, leaving the Queen with the difficult task of reconciling radical Calvinist bishops with her predominantly Catholic subjects. She sought a via media between the two positions, and won the respect of both, even though she had to suspend one Archbishop in the process.⁴

The Elizabethan settlement is still the basis of the Church of England. Archbishop Cranmer created a liturgy which depends on congregations listening and responding. The cadences of his prayers have continued to ring out at matins and evensong. Since Elizabeth’s reign, almost every generation of Englishmen and women have responded to the words ‘Oh Lord, open thou our lips’ with the reply ‘And our mouths shall shew forth thy praise’. And again, the words ‘O God, make speed to save us’, have brought forth the response ‘O Lord, make haste to help us’. The recitation of the liturgy has continued to be the prime feature of Anglican worship, although the pattern of services has been modified over the centuries – for example, by the introduction of hymns. It is, however, only in the generation of the present writer that the use of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer has gradually diminished.

Bishop Jewell, the sixteenth-century Calvinist reformer, is reputed to have preached from this pulpit at Monkton Farleigh in Wiltshire.

The success of the 1559 settlement was partially due to Elizabeth’s good sense in knowing what her subjects would accept, and to her refusal to ‘open windows into men’s souls’. But it was perhaps primarily due to her longevity. By the time she died, in 1603, most of her subjects had no memory of anything other than the Prayer Book service. They did, however, know full well the extent of Roman Catholic hostility to their country, as exemplified by the 1570 Papal excommunication of Elizabeth I, and the 1588 Spanish Armada. They also knew, or, at least, thought they knew, the horrors that ‘Bloody Mary’ had inflicted on their Protestant ancestors, graphically if somewhat tendentiously described by Foxe’s popular Book of Martyrs (also known as the Acts and Monuments).⁵ The introduction of a new translation of the Bible, the Authorised Version, in 1611 marked the point at which England had become, irreversibly, a Protestant country.

Elizabethan uniformity was to be challenged. Charles I did not possess Elizabeth’s good sense, and did not understand why many Puritans were prepared to take up arms to defend their beliefs. Although the issue when civil war broke out in 1642 was control of the militia, the religious issues quickly surfaced in Parliamentary deliberations. The emphasis Archbishop Laud placed on sacramental worship, downgrading the importance of sermons, bringing back altars and railing them in, was seen as Romanizing. Whilst Laud claimed to be campaigning for the ‘beauty of holiness’ in Church of England services, his opponents saw the ceremonial that he sought to introduce as the thin end of the Roman wedge.

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer.

Laudian extremism in one direction led to Puritan extremism in the other direction. The Pilgrim Fathers crossed the Atlantic Ocean to escape persecution, and to worship in a pure church. When Parliament had the power to do so, it abolished bishops, and sought to bring English ecclesiastical polity more into conformance with the Geneva model. Parliament, however, was sharply divided. Those who sought the establishment of a strict Presbyterian system of church governance were not sufficiently strong to overcome the resistance of the Independents, who argued for the autonomy of individual congregations. Whilst they argued, many other sects arose, amongst them Fifth Monarchy men, Muggletonians, Ranters, Quakers and Baptists. And the term ‘Anglican’ had to be invented⁶ for those who claimed to follow traditional Church of England practices.

Their claim was dubious. Before the Civil War, Puritans had as good a claim to be Anglicans as the