Appleby History > Alan Roberts > Early Modern Villagers > The Clergy
Appleby Families: Villagers in Early Modern Times
Part 2: The Appleby Clergy
A Comfortable Living
by Alan Roberts
Like their gentry counterparts, the rectors became more prominent within the parish between 1550 and 1700, particularly with the arrival of the Moulds. 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 be was frequently connected by marriage or kinship, as revealed in the choice of witnesses in legal documents. However, Appleby 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. As far as we know the parson and the squire kept separate company. There were few kinship links to cement relationships between the two until the late 1600s though 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? 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. A strong family succession, scholarly interests and gentry links undoubtedly helped to improve the status of the Appleby incumbents. They also enjoyed the benefit of rectorial tithes and from 1612, possession of the advowson. The Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, the most authoritative source for clerical income in the Tudor period, values the tithes and emoluments at around £20 a year, around the middle rank of income-earning parishes in England. By 1603, the expansion of the cultivable area, helped perhaps by the influx of new settlers, had boosted the tithes to £80 a year – a comfortable income though still barely ahead of inflation. However, the earliest glebe terrier from 1606, reveals that the rector had additional income from church lands including rent from two cottages and the support of 25 acres of arable field strips and several small parcels of pasture, orchard and meadow. This, together with their occupation of a substantial timber-framed rectory of five bays with five additional bays of kitchens and outbuildings, provided support equivalent to that of a fairly prosperoushusbandman or yeoman.
The rectors' personal wealth. as distinct from the tithes and endowments that belonged to the church, varied. Not much is known of Geoffrey Page, the Appleby rector whose will was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury in 1553, except that he had property in Brimley [?] and brewed his own beer. Roger Banister (incumbent 1560-72), the first rector to leave a will or inventory, appears to have lived modestly. He makes no mention of landholdings in his will. Indeed, his most generous bequest is a cash settlement of £20 and six lambs to his illegitimate son, George, leaving his wife and two daughter with only a few sticks of furniture and two sheep apiece. Roger's successor, Hugh Blith (1572-1610), 'a peaceable, quiet and credulous man altogether unskilled in bargaining' (according to supporters in a tithe dispute) was a man of more substantial means with money invested on security. His widow, who died in 1621, was worth £89, a third of which was in ready money and gold and another third in bonds and leases.
The Mould family who took over the rectory in the early Stuart period, were much better placed. This was made possible by a change in the right of presentment to the living during Hugh Blith's incumbency. William Mould, prebend of Lichfield and Coventry and chaplain to the earl of Huntingdon, purchased the Appleby advowson and sole patronage of the church around 1600, instituting his son Thomas into the rectory in 1610 when the living became vacant. The Moulds subsequently consolidated their hold on the rectory through several generations as Thomas, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob each became rector in turn, interrupted only by an intruder minister during Abraham's incumbency (1642-84). This long, hereditary association undoubtedly contributed towards an increase in family fortune, and a noticeable improvement in the rector's social standing.
In 1642 when Thomas Mould drew up his will after thirty-two years as rector, he left sufficient to provide generous portions to each of his seven children, including his eldest son, Thomas 'if be will behave himself and not at any time lay claim to the rectory, advowson or patronage'. His second eldest son, Abraham, enjoyed an even longer period in office. When the time came for him to write his will in 1684 he promised each of his two youngest daughters £500 giving his eldest son Thomas several closes and parcels of ground. The size of his investments are revealed in his widow's inventory, appraised in 1686, which lists some £678 or about three quarters of her worldly goods and chattels, as 'money out on securitie'. When Thomas Mould's daughter Rebecca married Charles Moore, the lord of Little Appleby, in 1643 it confirmed their elevation to gentry status. An alliance was forged between the rectory and the manor house which set the seal on the Moulds' secular fortune. This marriage coincided with gentry moves to purchase more land in the parish, and probably helped to heal the rift brought about by Thomas Mould's Star Chamber litigation. Further evidence of the rector's closer identification with and links to 'the better sort', can be found in subsequent marriages and settlements as for example in 1688 when Abraham Mould's youngest daughter, Ann, married John Wilde of Longwhatton, the younger son of a Leicestershire gentry family. Abraham Mould's second son, who like his father was both rector and patron of Appleby, married Susanna Leving of Twycross, a gentry widow.
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.
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.
'Survey of Churches and Incumbents in the County of Leicester'. Nichols I, xcvii, wrongly dated 1650; Cf. W.G. Hoskins, 'The Leicestershire Country Parson in the Sixteenth Century'. Essays in Leicestershire History (Liverpool, 1950), 16; 'The poorer livings would have had to increase by far more than five or eight times to do more than maintain their initial level of poverty', O'Day, English Clergy, 176; 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.
P.R.O. PCC 10 Taske (1553). PROB 11/54/29.
L.R.O. 1D 41/4/VII/108 (1629); Inventories.Alice Blith, 1621: PR 1/29/37;
P.R.O. PROB 11/116/206 (Roger Bannister)
William Mould, prebend and chaplain, Nichols IV, 435.
L.R.O. wills.Thomas Mould, 1666/9, inventory Elizabeth Mould, 1686, PR 1/88/109.
P.R.O. PROB 11/376/60.
©Alan Roberts
Next Section: The Yeomanry