Morebath is a remote Devonshire community on the rain-swept southern edge of Exmoor, ten miles north of Tiverton, twenty-five miles north of Exeter. Now as in the sixteenth century there is not much that can convincingly be described as a village, just a huddle of houses round a small gaunt church, gutted and rebuilt by the Victorians, and a wider scatter of farms across the foothills and valleys that run down to the river Exe from the moor. The parish forms a compact rectangle, three and a half miles by two and a half, on the southern skirts of Exmoor. To the west it is flanked by the valley of the Exe, from which it rises steeply between six hundred and a thousand feet above sea level, and runs east along the county boundary with Somerset, which forms its northern edge. To the south it stops just short of the market town of Bampton, from which it is separated by the river Bathern, while on the north-west its nearest neighbours are the Somerset village of Brushford and the market town of Dulverton, in the valley of the river Barle.
Nowadays a visitor is likely to approach Morebath via the A396, the scenic road which runs from Tiverton along the Exe to Bampton, and from Bampton on to Exebridge, on the south-western side of the parish. But the road from Bampton to Tiverton in the sixteenth century was more tortuous: it ran southwards along the ridge tops well to the east of the Exe, avoiding the valley bottom to follow the higher ground. The geography of the parish was changed decisively in November 1873, when the Devon and Somerset Railway opened a line to Barnstaple via Dulverton,1 and Morebath became the main station for Bampton and the surrounding villages. New carriage routes from Bampton and Shillingford were cut across the valleys to Morebath station, easing access to what had once been, even by Devon standards, one of the county's remotest communities.
The roads of Tudor Morebath were narrow, deeply banked and hedged in the Devon manner, poorly surfaced with soft slate, river gravel, and stones gathered from the fields, broken by fords and often awash with mud and water during the incessant winter rains drawn down by the moor, impassable in hard weather.2 Even in modern times, during the winter of 1963 every road in Morebath filled to the height of the hedges with layer upon layer of frozen snow. For weeks the only way in or out of the village was across the higher fields, where driving wind had kept the snow from settling. In Tudor England's savage ‘little Ice Age’ the parish must often have been totally isolated. Even the hardy long-woolled sheep which were the mainstay of Tudor Morebath's economy were vulnerable to the inhospitable moorland winters of the sixteenth century. The annual sheep counts of the church flocks are punctuated by reports of animals ‘lost and gone', ‘drowned', ‘dede and gone wolle and all', or ‘lost at crystmas'.3
North Devon was sheep country, above all here on the skirts of the moor, for, as an early Stuart survey of the county observed, ‘moors and hills are untractable to tillage'. In much of the parish the land was ‘lean and barren … churlish and unthankful to the husbandman's labour'.4 Some corn was grown – at best wheat and barley, but mostly rye and oats, the staples which until the nineteenth century provided the whole region with its black bread and small beer.5 A narrow ridge of good red loam reached westward into Morebath from the direction of Shillingford, and the farms to the east of the church – Loyton, Keens, the two farms or ‘bargains’ at Wood – all benefited from this fertile soil. But the valley floor was solid clay, cold and sodden in winter, and the thin sour soils of the hill farms in the northern half of the parish were good only for grazing. The northern half of the parish was still comparatively heavily wooded in Tudor times, with beech and especially oak available in abundance for even the most extensive building work: the woodland was coppiced for fuel and fencing.6
There are many small and isolated places in this border country on the fringe of the moor, but Tudor Morebath was one of the smallest communities in the Hundred of Bampton and the region generally. A set of regulations preserved in the parish records for the collection of the ecclesiastical tax known as ‘Peter's Pence', dating from 1531, reveals that there were just thirty-three households in the parish, five of them cottagers, the rest tenant-farmers or ‘placeholders'.7 Most were tenants of the Manor of Morebath, whose lord was the local priory of Barlinch, ‘one of the poorest, remotest monasteries of medieval Somerset', by the 1530s a somewhat run-down house of six Augustinian canons and a prior, with an income of under £100 a year, much of it derived from Morebath. After the dissolution in 1536 the manor was acquired by Sir John Wallop, gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and in due course passed to his son Henry. A couple of the cottagers at Exebridge were tenants of the Sydenhams of the neighbouring Somerset parish of Dulverton. The Sydenhams also grazed sheep on sixty acres of moorland in the north of the parish at Hawkridge Down.8
The sixteenth-century parish consisted of a series of farms, distributed more or less evenly over the surrounding hills. Some of the smaller holdings are now difficult to place, but most remain. To the east was Combe, a cluster of households belonging to the Timewell clan, one of the dominant families in the parish. Slightly to the west, on the next hillside, was Court, the base for another of the richest households in Morebath, the Norman family. Directly west of Court was Rill (now Morebath Manor), also farmed by a branch of the Normans. North and slightly west of Court was the small hill farm of Brockhole, eventually held by the Borrage family whose main base was at Warmore, but evidently a difficult let. Even today it is hard to find, the farmhouse tucked two fields away from the nearest road, an ‘outlandish place’ as one Morebath resident described it to me. In the mid-Tudor period it was often without a tenant. Moving west and south again, closer to the parish centre, was Timewell, like Combe divided into an ‘ester’ and ‘wester Tymewyll', and housing several branches of the ubiquitous Timewell clan. In the valley at the western side of the same hill was Hayne, until the beginning of Elizabeth's reign also held by Timewells, then passing to the Lambert family. To the west of Hayne was Warmore, farmed by the Borrage family. On a steep rise above the river, but facing north towards Warmore, was Burston, where there were more Timewells; west of that towards Brushford was Perry, and at the western foot of the rise, in the valley, was Poole, held by yet more Normans.
At the southernmost point of the western border of the parish was Exebridge, where there was a huddle of cottages but no major farmstead though Grants, on the Bampton side of the parish boundary, was farmed by more Timewells and features regularly in Morebath parish affairs. Immediately south of the village centre was Moore. In a farm slightly west of the village centre, and therefore called ‘Town', lived the richest family of all, the Morsses. Just under a mile to the east of the church was Loyton, with one household occupied by another branch of the Norman family, though there were Morsses here too. To the east of Loyton were the ‘ester’ and ‘wester’ Woods, farmed by yet more Timewells and Normans. At the southern end of the eastern boundary was Hukeley, and the Hukeley bridge over the river Bathern which flows south to join the Exe below Bampton.9 On the fringes to the east was Quartley, technically part of Bampton parish but closer to Morebath church and once again farmed by the Timewells and so, like Grants, its western counterpart, often drawn into Morebath affairs. The location of the mill is uncertain: it may have been near the cluster of cottages at Exebridge, but by the eighteenth century there were two mills on the Ben Brook, which runs through the Easter and Wester Timewells, past Rill, Loyton and Keens to join the Bathern at Hukeley, one to the south of Loyton (Keens Mill), the other marked now only by an old mill leet near Rill cottages: either of these is a likely enough site for the Tudor mill.10 There were also a number of smaller holdings, farmed by established families along with ‘the home place’ – ‘priers hay’ and ‘Galberdis yatte', which I have not been able to locate, and ‘Bollyn', a stretch of land with a house, long since disappeared, between Loyton and Keens. Field sizes on these farms were small, ranging from one to fifteen acres, most at the lower end of the scale.11
Surnames in Morebath were often simply the farm name – Alsyn at Perry, John at Moore, William at Timewell, Robert at Wood – and the priest often identifies householders by a single-word reference to their farm – Burston, Court, Wood – as even minor Scottish lairds are still addressed. However, occupational and family surnames were also freely used: George the Smith is interchangeable with George Smith; John Hukeley is called John Smith in 1537,12 presumably because of his occupation; Lucy Scely, widow of the miller William, is Luce at Mill, and Thomas Borrage, who seems to have taken over the mill in the late 1540s, calls himself Borrage but is referred to by the Commissioners appointed by the crown to handle the confiscation of Devon bells in 1549 as Thomas Mill. Occasionally, patronyms are used as surnames – Lewis Trychay's daughter Joan occurs as ‘Jone Lewys', as indeed does his wife.13 It is all very confusing.
As it happens, despite the loss of the manorial records, the pre-1558 parish registers and almost all the wills of the region, we are specially well placed to calculate the population of Tudor Morebath. A combination of the parish priest's obsessive penchant for list-making and the fiscal and military efficiency of the Tudor state has provided us with lists of the Morebath tax-payers in 1524 and 1545 (55 and 48 names respectively),14 the tenants of the manor of Morebath in 1532 (33 names), again in 1546 (31 names or farms), 1557 (24 names), and again in 1558 (31 names),15 the names of all the unmarried men and maidens in April 1534 (105 names, 68 of them men, but including an uncertain number of men and women with connections to the parish while living outside it, like the two chaplains from Bampton named there),16 a list of the wives in 1554 (27 names),17 a list of householders in 1554 (32 names),18 and a muster roll of 1569 listing 41 able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 60.19 Despite the large number of ‘young men and maidens', inflated by the inclusion of outsiders, these sources combine to suggest a population of not many more than 150 men women and children through the mid-Tudor period.20
In so small a community, everyone was known and communal life intense, even perhaps at times claustrophobic. The parish church was by no means its only focus. Since almost everyone was a tenant of Morebath Manor, the Manor Court and the obligations and relationships which flowed from it feature large in Morebath's records,21 even though the court records themselves have long since disappeared. The court and its officials were used to settle parish disputes and regulate common obligations – to the Crown, to the church, to one another – which strictly speaking had nothing to do with the Manor and its farms, and the priest recorded it all in the church book.22 At Morebath, no rigid distinction was drawn between the community at prayer, and the community as it went about its business.23
The restoration of Morebath church by Butterfield in the late 1870s scraped away most of its history along with its seventeenth-century plaster and eighteenth-century woodwork. It now has an unglamorous railway-age gothic interior which retains few traces of its late medieval and Tudor evolution. It is not clear how much the curious saddle-backed top to the tower owes to this restoration, though Butterfield clearly did not altogether invent it: Richard Polwhele, the eighteenth-century historian of Devon, noted that the tower was in shape ‘a rectangular parallelopepidon', that is, a box topped by a prism. But the windows were certainly altered and made smaller: a burglar could not now enter the church this way, as one did in 1534, and the modern tower roof cannot in fact be reached from within, so that all major repairs require elaborate scaffolding.24 In the sixteenth century the tower was forty-two feet high, almost twice the height of the church itself, its bells in constant need of minor outlay on ropes and stays and greasing. Even with the north aisle, the church interior was never large – sixty-five feet long by twenty-nine at its widest, a tight fit even for 150 people, which was no doubt why the aisle, with its handsome barrel vault, was added sometime in the fifteenth century, the one interior feature of the present building we can be sure its Tudor parishioners would recognise.25 This aisle, or ‘almatory’ as their priest preferred to call it,26 was a favourite place for burials, especially after the cult of St Sidwell took hold at the side altar which was located there. The wealthier men and women of Morebath regularly left the sum of 6/8d for a grave in the church, and the priest notes when someone was buried there, ‘for he/she lyeth in the almatory', which happened often enough for him to keep a nervous tally of the numbers of ‘corps beryd … yn the church actenus [so far]'.27 The tower and nave of the church were roofed with lead laid over timber, the aisle with tiles, and the roof, like the bells, was a constant demand on parish resources, its gutters in perpetual need of attention, its lead lifting clean away, ‘ryppyd with the wynd’ in 1545, so that a plumber spent the best part of a week lodging in the parish to fix it down again. In the 1520s and 1530s the parish had an annual maintenance contract with a travelling plumber ‘when he cummyth thys ways … to mendd all fawtis a pon our churche and gutters and towre', ‘to keppe us dry'. On one occasion the plumber was given old pewter plates from the church house in part payment for this work.28 From the 1520s to the early 1540s, in any case, a stream of devotional investment by parishioners and priest must have made the interior seem a constant building site, stacked with boards and building materials as new high and side altars were installed, along with new screens, new standings or tabernacles for the images, a new High Cross, a new floor and a complete re-pewing.29 Morebath church had only two altars but many images, most of them standing in niched tabernacles, curtained and gilded, and with candles or lamps in bowls or basins or branched candlesticks of timber or latten (a type of brass) burning before them during service time. Parish business was conducted there, bargains concluded, contracts signed and debts paid, ‘here before the quyre dore',30 and parishioners were prone to linger there long after service was done, so that the exasperated clerk who kept the keys was forced to knock loudly on the door to hurry them home.31
After the church, the most important building in the parish was the church house, also called the church ale-house.32 Located on the south-east side of the churchyard, in the cluster of ten or eleven dwellings that made up the village centre or ‘Morebath town', it was the parish's place of public entertainment, a two-storey building furnished with a fireplace and spit, with cups and platters and trenchers of treen [turned wood] and tin and pewter: its tressle tables and tablecloths were sometimes loaned to parishioners for events like weddings.33 Visiting merchants could hire a ‘sete’ or stall there to sell their wares, like William the merchant who had a ‘standing’ in the house in 1535, or the Tiverton ciderman John Walshman, who sold cider there for four weeks in 1538.34 The ‘pleers’ [players] who paid 12d to the wardens to perform in Morebath at Easter 1533 may well have been hiring the church house.35 Above all, the fund-raising banquets known as church ales, organised by the churchwardens and by the Young Men of the parish (the ‘grooming ale'), and which between them provided the bulk of the parish's income, were held here. Beer brewed or bought by the wardens and food cooked in the church house itself were sold and served at these ales: in 1527 the menu at the high wardens' ale included a roast lamb from the church flock, which had accidentally bled to death after being castrated.36 By Elizabeth's reign, and perhaps before, minstrels and a local man, John Timewell the harper, were being paid to entertain the drinkers.37 Parishioners were expected to attend and spend their money, and official representatives came and supported from surrounding parishes, a favour which had to be returned when the parishes concerned held their own ales.38
This was not merry England, however. Friction was as notable a feature of this intensely communal life as harmony. On St George's day 1537 the whole parish attended a party at Timewells for the betrothal of Margaret Timewell and William Taylor. But we catch a glimpse of the event only because it was a disaster, with tempers flaring and two of the guests ‘a most by the eris', so that the whole parish ‘resonyd shamfully’ all that day: poor Margaret Timewell. The language in which the priest reports the incident is value laden, a rhetoric designed to shame ‘froward fellows’ and to persuade the ‘parish universall' to cease ‘trobyll or vexacion: and ‘be contendyd to be ordred', so as to have ‘unite and pece a mongg us'. The quest for unity and peace, at Morebath as everywhere else in Tudor England, was an ideal eagerly pursued because often lacking.39
Small and remote as it was, we would be quite mistaken in dismissing Morebath as one of what seventeenth-century puritans liked to call the ‘dark corners of the land'. A serviceable road ran from Exeter to Bampton, and Bampton itself was a bustling place, claiming 600 houselling folk (communicant adults) in the 1540s, and supporting a community of gentry, merchants, tradesmen, artisans, lawyers and parish and chantry clergy, representatives of all of whom feature in the Morebath accounts.40 Morebath parishioners and their priest attended ales, employed workmen and transacted business in the surrounding towns and villages like Dulverton, Brushford and Bampton itself, attended the court at Bradninch as part of the sheriff's twice-yearly progress through the county (the ‘sherows towrne'), and regularly travelled on ecclesiastical or civil business to Exeter or, nearer at hand, to Oakford, Uffculme, Sampford Peverell and Tiverton. Morebath was one of the churches ‘next ionyng [joining] unto Tyverton' which in the 1530s attracted the minor benefaction of a corporas case41 from Joan Greneway, widow of the richest man in Tiverton, who had so magnificently extended his parish church of St Peter there with a chantry aisle and its splendid south porch.42 When they needed a lawyer in 1532 they employed one of the most distinguished in the country, who had a house at Wellington in Somerset, and the unbeneficed priest who made and repaired their church's vestments lived at Dunster, near the Somerset coast and the Bristol Channel.43 At least one parishioner travelled sufficiently regularly to London on business to be given errands to perform for the parish. Books and church furnishings beyond the resources of Bampton, Tiverton or Exeter thereby found their way to Morebath, and along with them, no doubt, budgets of news of the outside world.44
Nor was the parish without educational resources. The chance survival of some pages from a notebook used in the binding of one of the Luttrell Manuscripts now in the Somerset Record Office establishes the existence of a school at Barlinch in the early years of Henry VIII's reign, offering the standard grammar-school curriculum and taught by ‘Master David Juyne'. A visitation of the priory in 1510 had required the canons to make good the lack of such an educational provision, stipulated in their rule,45 and Juyne's appointment was almost certainly the result. The first objective of such teaching would have been the preparation of novices for ordination and the education of any choir and serving boys attached to the house, but Barlinch was too small and poor to have had many such pupils, and the presence of a competent schoolmaster there must certainly have attracted a wider clientele. The syllabus Juyne followed was identical to that available in the established schools in larger centres of population. The scrappy notes which survive from some early sixteenth-century Barlinch schoolboy's copy-book include quotations from standard grammar-school texts like Alain de Lille's Liber Parabolorum and Robert Grosseteste's Stans Puer ad Mensam; a Latin sentence declaring that ‘we are all off to the swimming-pool' suggests that the proximity of the Exe was appreciated by the boys, and an English sentence prescribed for translation declaring that ‘I ha[v]e ete my belyfull of coloppes and egges today' [bacon and eggs] suggests a down-to-earth approach by the schoolmaster in his choice of illustrative material. We have no way of knowing whether the sons of the farmers of Morebath made the two-mile walk across the moor or up the valley of the Exe to Barlinch, but the opportunity was certainly there, and there is evidence in the accounts of literacy in the parish, even among the cottagers and wage-earners.46
There were no very rich men in Morebath, and the gap between the well-to-do and the poor was narrower than in many more prosperous communities. The lay subsidy for 1524 lists fifty-five tax-payers, assessed at sums ranging from £1 in wages – the normal valuation for farm labourers – to £14 in goods, held by William Morsse, with John Norman senior a close second at £13/6s/8d; other indications in the accounts suggest that Norman was under-assessed in 1524, and may in fact have been the wealthiest man in the parish. Only five parishioners in all – two Normans, two Morsses and a Timewell – were rated at more than £10, and these families, together with the Raws and the Borrages, consistently show up in subsidy and muster rolls and in manorial and parish setts [local taxes] and rates as the wealthiest in the parish. As these modest figures suggest, Morebath was a parish without resident gentry, though the nearest gentry household, that of the Sydenhams of Dulverton, was not far away, just over the parish boundary in Somerset. Members of the Sydenham family were called in on several occasions to help sort out parish rows, and Morebath's priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, was clearly on excellent terms with them. Edward Sydenham, the family patriarch, had married into the Combe family of Dulverton at the beginning of Henry VIII's reign. He came originally from Culmstock in Devon, the priest's home village, and he must have known Sir Christopher's parents since he occurs along with Thomas Trychay senior, almost certainly the priest's father, in a list of jurors in a Culmstock manorial court roll in 1509.47 Though he was not a beneficiary of Sydenham's will, Sir Christopher paid the parish the large sum of 3/= in 1543 for a knell ‘for Mr Edward Sydenham ys sowle', too much for ringing simply on the burial day and month's mind. It probably represents payment for the elaborate tolling of the great bell every night for a month, a practice which continued to mark the obsequies of the more prosperous inhabitants of the Morebath even in Elizabeth's reign.48 It is too costly a gesture for casual acquaintance, and suggests a relationship of real friendship or perhaps of patronage and clientage.
Seventeen Morebath parishioners were assessed at £1 in wages or goods in 1524, the standard figure for farm labourers or poor cottagers. They formed a third of the parish, therefore just about the county average. These poor men included Lewis Trychay, the priest's brother. Thirteen parishioners were assessed at £2, while the remaining nineteen were assessed between £3 and £8, the majority in the £3–£4 range.49 It was a mixed farming area, with a range of livestock, from beef and dairy cattle to geese and chickens. But Devon's largest industry was the production of the ribbed woollen cloth known as kersey or ‘Devon Dozen', by the beginning of Henry VIII's reign already transforming the fortunes of north and mid-Devon wool-towns like Tiverton.50 John Greneway's alms houses and his chantry chapel, blazoned with his merchant's mark and carved with a fleet of his wool ships, proclaimed this new prosperity.51 The Exeter chronicler John Hooker wrote that in the region ‘there is no market nor village nor scarse any privat mannes house where in theise clothes be not made, or that there is not spynninge and cardinge for the same … wheresoever any man doth travell you shall fynde at the … foredore of the house … the wyffe their children and their servantes at the turne spynninge or at their cardes cardenge and by which comoditie the comon people do lyve'.52 Morebath certainly shared in this activity: there was a weekly sheep and wool market at Bampton, and in Morebath sheep-grazing dominated the high ground in the parish, as wool dominated the parish economy; every householder in Morebath had one or more (mostly small) flocks of sheep. Many parishioners, including the vicar, also kept pigs. The parish had a smithy, a mill, and a pound to keep sheep which had strayed or were awaiting sale. Everyone with land grew corn, at best wheat and barley, but on the higher, rougher ground, oats and rye. The heather and gorse of the moor itself provided pollen for hives of bees, though bee-keeping seems to have been a specialism of the Morsse family, who regularly made up the wax for the lights in the church and who were paid to look after the butts of bees left by members of the vicar's family and by parishioners to maintain a light before the statue of St Sidwell. Their proximity to the parish church also meant that the Morsses were regularly paid to lodge artisans working on the church and that equipment and building materials used in the repair of the church, from the loan of a ladder to the carrying of water for mixing cement and thatching reed for the church house, were fetched – and paid for – from the Morsse homestead.53
A few of the better houses in the parish may have been of stone – there are remnants of what may be Tudor stone building in the farms at Wood and elsewhere.54 But the majority were of thatch and cob, that extraordinary mixture of clay, straw and gravel which, kept properly roofed and limewashed, sets hard as brass and endures for centuries, but which melts away to mud if the weather is let in. The layout of the houses of Tudor Morebath is less certain: most were probably the two- or three-roomed type divided by a cross-passage which is the commonest medieval house form in Devon. But if appearances are anything to judge by, Brockhole, the remote hill farmhouse in the north of the parish, preserves under its pebbledash and flimsy modern porch the powerful lineaments of a Devon longhouse, in which the family living quarters were on the higher ground to one side of the cross passage, the shippon for the animals sloping away (for the sake of drainage) on the other, but all under one roof. In this arrangement, the bodies of the oxen provided an additional source of heating for their human companions in winter. Longhouses are essentially a Dartmoor phenomenon but they were also found on Exmoor, and Brockhole may suggest that the upland farms in Tudor Morebath followed this ancient pattern.55
We get a snapshot of the contents of a typical Morebath farmhouse and yard from the 1531 inventory of the goods of the widow Katherine Robbyns, whose husband William had been assessed at £3 in goods in 1524. She had been well clothed, with two kirtles to wear over her linen petticoat, black for everyday wear, crimson with matching mantle for best. To protect her against the bleak moorland winters she had a woollen ‘knytter' or jumper, and at her girdle she wore a splendid and expensive rosary of coral, ‘dubbyll gawdyd with amber' and with Pater Noster beads of silver, hung from ‘a ryng lyke a hope'.56 Even her best clothes, however, were probably old-fashioned. Morebath women, like country women everywhere in early Tudor England, passed their garments of state on from generation to generation. Such gowns were sometimes left to the church, but they were usually redeemed for cash by the family and passed to the women-folk in the next generation. Katherine Robbyns in her finery would probably have elicited a curled lip or a condescending smile from the wives of the citizens of Exeter, though they might well have coveted her rosary, as the wife of John Tutlake her executor evidently did, since she eventually bought the beads from the church.57
Katherine's bed had three blankets, a ‘hyllyng' or coverlet and a bolster, her table was covered with a linen board-cloth; she had eight pewter dishes and a salt-cellar; she had two silver spoons, one of which however was at pledge with a neighbour who had loaned her 10d, almost certainly because of Morebath's recurrent shortage of ready coin rather than through poverty. She had three wooden coffers, one of them ‘great', and her kitchen was equipped with a range, pans, pots, basins and ‘greater and lesser' bowls of brass and of earthenware, a mortar, a gridiron, the hanging for a crock, and a goose pan. She had two gallons of butter, ten and a half bushels of rye, seven pecks of malt, and a bowl with a ‘lytell wotmelle [oatmeal] in store'; still standing on her land was the ‘rye and the whett of this ere'. Three flitches of bacon hung from the rafters. She had the inevitable ‘torne' or distaff, two carding combs, three pounds of yarn and and eleven pounds of wool, ‘the blake and the blew'. She had casks and crocks and sieves for brewing beer, and ‘a pype and 3 lytell caskes' to put it in. In the dairy she had milking buckets, pans and cheese vats. A plough, a harrow, a sown saddle, a ‘teng' [a harness for a pack-saddle or pannier] and a bag stood or hung in the outhouses. Her livestock comprised the plough ox, a bullock, three cows, two calves, a mare and a colt, thirteen sheep, a sow, a goose and its gander, two hens and their cock, and there was a dray-full-and-a-half of hay to feed or bed them all. She died, as she had lived, in modest comfort, nursed with spice and ale and candles. At her burial and month's mind there were doles of bread and ale, and funeral baked meats of beef and mutton garnished with raisins and mustard.58
Between the living standards of middling farmers like William and Katherine Robbyns and the cottagers and smallholders assessed at just £1 in goods or wages there may not in fact have been all that much difference in practice. Lewis Trychay, the priest's brother, started life in Morebath town as a cottager assessed at £1, and regularly features in parish lists and levies as one of the poorest men. By the 1540s, however, while still among the poorer parishioners, he had progressed to tenancy of one of the farms of Morebath manor, and was very active in parish business, helped on no doubt by the fact that his brother was the priest. Harry Hurley was also a cottager assessed at £1, but Harry was one of a handful of men who gave an oak to the making of the church's new benches in 1534, he was able to donate a pair of candlesticks worth 20d to St Sidwell's altar in the same year, and his bequest of 6/8d at his death in 1543 suggests burial in church, the mark of a man of substance in Morebath. His son William was also nominally among the poorer men of the parish, but he too was one of the leaders of parish affairs in the 1540s and 1550s, and he certainly had sources of income other than his smallholding, perhaps trading in wool, for his business took him frequently to London.59
Men assessed at only £1 therefore played a full part in parish life, serving alongside the well-to-do as wardens of the stores and as churchwardens, appearing with other leading parishioners to support the wardens at visitations, riding to the hundred and manor courts to answer for the parish.60 But the community made allowance for their sometimes straitened circumstances, since some of those elected to serve as wardens lived very near the poverty line. John Isak was assessed at £2 in 1524. His son Robyn shows up in parish and manorial setts as one of the poorest men in the parish, yet he was High Warden in 1555 and again in 1562. By 1568 he had fallen ill, and both the Young Men's store and the High Wardens were making payments to a ‘leche' [a ‘leech' or doctor] on his behalf; by 1572 he was a pauper, receiving parish hand-outs.61 When another poor parishioner, John Wood, mislaid 18d of parish money entrusted to him by one of the wardens, the parish eventually wrote it off as a bad debt because ‘hyt ys more cherite to geve hyt hem then to take hyt frome hem' – though not before they had nagged away about it for fourteen years!62 It was recognised that service as churchwarden might be time-consuming, a serious matter for a wage-earner paid by the day, and also that outlay for parish expenses might involve the warden in personal expense or at any rate short-term cash-flow problems. When poor men were elected, therefore, they were sometimes allowed to decline the office, paying only a nominal fine for refusal of service, or being let off with no fine at all. When the cottager Richard Don was elected High Warden in 1544 he paid only £2 of wax ‘for hys dyscharge', and when the even poorer Exebridge cottager Marke was due to serve, ‘the parysse forgave hyt hem'.63
Until the reign of Edward VI, however, the poorest of all are concealed from us in the Morebath sources. Poor there certainly were, though we have virtually no hard information about beggars and the destitute in Morebath and its region for most of the Tudor period, and even servants and labourers like ‘Harry Tanner's wife' often surface first and last only when someone buys a funeral knell for them, or pays for their burial.64 The poor do occasionally appear in the accounts in their own right, like John Huintte or Alice Oblye the servant of Thomas Zaer, paying 1d or 2d for the ‘occupying of the alms light', a contribution to the maintenance of the communal light burned in memory of the parish dead and the nearest the poor could approximate to the ceremonies with pall and candles and ringing of knells which marked the obsequies of the well-to-do.65 With the Edwardine regime's emphasis on the substitution of alms to the poor for all other forms of ‘good works', and in particular the order that ecclesiastical linen rendered redundant by religious reform be given to the poor, the paupers or at any rate the marginal men of Morebath become visible – Marke at Exebridge, William Bicner, from a family whose members appear elsewhere in the accounts delving stone at Lodvin quarry, Thomas Sexton (the grave-digger), Richard Cruce, John Wood, all recipients of old surplices or altar cloths on St George's eve 1549, some openly in the face of the parish and some secretly, perhaps to spare their feelings.66 Periodic donations to paupers like ‘[W]hyte the begger' or the occasional demobbed sailor feature in the Elizabethan accounts,67 and with the commencement of the register of baptisms, weddings and burials in 1558, the homeless poor who increasingly haunted the Elizabethan social imagination if not always their conscience, stalk or stagger into Morebath – ‘Alice a poore walking woman which died at Robert Isac's' in March 1560, or Joan, another poor walking woman who died in the parish in October 1563, or the succession of ‘poor walking women' brought to bed of base-born children in Morebath barns and outhouses – in November 1562, August 1563, October 1572.68
The register also gives us a firmer grip on the experience of birth and death in Tudor Morebath. From 1558 we can trace the arrival of every new child in the village, including those who may not have been entirely welcome, like the bastard sons born to the unmarried daughters of some of Morebath's most prominent families – John, born to Margaret Morsse in March 1566, James to Mary Timewell of Burston in November 1568. But it is death rather than birth which the registers bring into sobering focus. Morebath seems to have avoided major outbreaks of epidemic disease, like the sweating sickness that ravaged other parts of north and north-west Devon in the 1550s, but it had constant acquaintance with untimely death.69 Even before the burial registers begin this is visible in the mortuary benefactions that commemorate the young – Walter More ‘a yong man' and John Tayler alias Iosse ‘a yong man' in 1529, Joan Hukeley and the priest's niece Joan Trychay in 1531, William Robbyns ‘a yong man' the same year, Alsyn the daughter of Thomas Timewell at Combe in 1532, John Don of Exebridge ‘a yonge man' and Christopher Morsse ‘filius William Morse' in 1534, John Webber and Christina Goodman in 1537, Thomas Zaer ‘a yong man' in 1538. The litany is relentless, the brief entries in the accounts of gifts for knells or candles the trace of the most terrible of afflictions, a parent's mourning for their child. Most will have succumbed to disease, some to mischance, like the unnamed ‘ladd that was killed with the knyffe', a stranger from Stoodleigh who leapt to his horse at Exebridge in 1558 and impaled himself on his own dagger, leaving the parish with elaborate and expensive arrangements to make for the inquest.70
With the commencement of the register the pathos of this everyday experience of mortality in Tudor Devon comes into sharper focus. James Goodman's son Christopher was baptised in church by Sir Christopher Trychay on 13 October 1564: he had been born with a twin brother, baptised in the birthing room at home, but certain not to survive and so not given a human name – the midwife bizarrely christened the little scrap of mortality ‘Creature'. Perhaps the doomed baby had been christened after only its head had appeared and its sex was not yet known. This was evidently the custom of the parish – the register for 31 May 1560 records the burial of Alice the wife of William Morsse, along with ‘her child Creature', presumably another hopeless birth baptised to ensure the salvation of the child's soul and its material equivalent, the dignity of Christian burial. Christopher Goodman's mother did not long survive the death of her ‘Creature': she lingered a week, but she herself was buried on 22 October. Goodman already had a three-year-old son, and with two young children to care for he could not afford the luxury of long mourning. Within six months he had remarried: the first child by his new wife, Joan Morsse, was another October birth, baptised Mary on 4 October 1567; it was to be another October death also, for this child too was buried a fortnight later, though this time the mother would survive to bear two more sons.71 The Goodman family's experience could be replicated several times over from the Tudor registers of Morebath, as of most other English parishes. This brutally high level of mortality among their children may explain the custom, maddening to the historian trying to pick his way through meagre documentation, of naming several children of the same generation of the same family with the same name. In 1534 the branch of the Timewell family farming at Wood in Morebath had three unmarried sons, all called John, identified by the priest in a note of that year as John maior, John minor and John minimus.72 Lawrence Stone has famously suggested that the men and women of early modern England were hardened to the loss of their children in infancy, held themselves back from bonding until the dangerous early years were passed, and did not grieve as we would grieve.73 Believe it who can: Tudor hearts were as breakable as ours, and one can only speculate about the impact of such relentless misfortune on the sensibilities of the men and women of early modern Morebath.
Most of our knowledge of Tudor Morebath derives from a single source, the parish accounts kept by one man, vicar through all the changes of Reformation and Counter-Reformation from 1520 to 1574. Sir Christopher Trychay arrived in Morebath on 30 August 1520.74 Despite the title, he was not of course a knight. Non-graduate priests were conventionally given the honorific ‘Sir' or, in Latin, ‘Dominus', though this was a form of respect which by the sixteenth century could sometimes carry undertones of irony, as a street-vendor nowadays might call his customers ‘squire': ‘Sir John Lacklatin', the ignorant country priest, was a conventional figure of fun. Morebath's priest was a countryman, but by no means a lack-latin. He was not exactly a local man, having been born twelve miles away at Culmstock, where his father Thomas still lived. There are two Thomas Trychay's listed in the 1524 subsidy rolls for Culmstock, assessed at £2 and at £5. His father was probably Thomas Trychay senior, a man of substance and reeve of the Manor of Culmstock in 1510–11, but most of the eight Trychays listed in the subsidy returns for Culmstock were assessed at £1 in wages, so the vicar's origins were humble. They were evidently comfortable enough to ensure him a decent education, however: he could express himself fluently if often rather wildly in Latin as well as English, at his death he left a collection of books to a favourite nephew, and his hand-writing, at least to begin with, is handsome and disciplined.75
Sir Christopher must have been born in the early 1490s: he was ordained acolyte in September 1514, subdeacon and deacon in March 1515, and priest on 2 June 1515, ‘ad titulum prioratus de Frithelstock' [to the title of the priory of Frithelstock].76 In order to avoid huge numbers of unemployed clerical scroungers, the medieval Church required every ordinand to have a ‘title', nominally a guarantee of employment, but if this had ever worked, by the end of the Middle Ages it was essentially a legal fiction. The granting of titles to candidates for ordination to the secular clergy was standard procedure for the religious houses of Devon, as indeed everywhere else in early Tudor England. In most cases this must have been no more than a formality, a convenience for which candidates may have paid a fee.77 The monasteries could not possibly have provided employment for all the clergy to whom they gave titles, even though a good many chaplaincies, chantries and curacies were in the hands of religious houses, and some of these did find their way to the men granted such titles.78
It is often assumed that men seeking a title for ordination went to their nearest religious house, so there is a puzzle about Trychay's use of a title from Frithelstock, an Augustinian priory near Torrington, miles away on the other side of the county. Many religious houses had schools or choirs attached, and it is just possible that Trychay may have been a pupil at Frithelstock, though the strong devotion to the Exeter saint Sidwell which he brought to Morebath and set about fostering there suggests an education in Exeter itself. At any rate, in his case the Augustinian connection was possibly more than a titular formality, for the vicarage of Morebath was in the gift of another Augustinian house, at Barlinch, and it was the prior of Barlinch, ‘my patrone', who presented Trychay to Morebath in 1520. But it may be that family connections rather than any special affiliation with the Augustinian order explain Trychay's preferment. It seems likely that his claims were pressed on the prior of Barlinch by Edward Sydenham, a friend of Trychay's family and, as one of the largest landowners in Dulverton, a close and influential neighbour of the priory. If Sydenham did use his influence to help Trychay to the security of Morebath vicarage, this would account for the priest's gift of 3/= for a knell for the repose of Sydenham's soul in 1543.79
We do not know what Sir Christopher was doing between his ordination and his arrival in the parish where he was to spend the next fifty-four years. The likelihood is that he eked out a precarious living as a chantry or stipendiary priest of some sort, without security or prospects, as most newly ordained clergy were obliged to do. The vicarage of Morebath, indeed, was itself only a modest security. Recorded in Henry VIII's Valor Ecclesiasticus as worth a mere £8, it was not the poorest living in the region, and was certainly enough for a single man to live on, but it was by no means a plum. Two miles away, the living of Bampton was worth £20, and Trychay's own home parish of Culmstock was worth £16.80 Nevertheless, Trychay's £8 put him at least on a par with most of his parishioners. The vicarage ‘mansion' was, by Tudor standards, a handsome lodging for a single man and his servant, with a buttery and larder-house divided by a passageway from parlour and hall on the ground floor, three bedchambers above, and a kitchen, barn, stable and stall, all under one roof round a courtyard. Outside, three patches of walled garden to back and front, an acre of meadow, and two acres of arable land, made up the glebe. By contrast with what may well have been lean years before, he clearly viewed his arrival in Morebath as a homecoming to permanence and security. Twenty years on, recalling his arrival on 30 August 1520, he wrote, in a jubilant quotation from psalm 117, ‘et in eo anno dextera domini exaltavit me' [and in that year the right hand of the Lord raised me up].81 But in retrospect, it is clear that the arrival of Sir Christopher in Morebath was to be at least as momentous for the parish as for the priest.
Sir Christopher heads a list of parish benefactors with a jubilant note recording his own arrival in Morebath on 30 August 1520 [Binney 19–20 / Ms 340]