ISSUE 12 Autumn 2018 www.lincoln-record-society.org.uk NEWS REVIEW Lincoln Record Society THE COUNCIL AND OFFICERS Welcome you to the 12th issue of the News Review! It is fifty years since my Oxford supervisor sent me to suggestions. Another reader was Sir Francis Hill, who at Lincoln to investigate the huge and unexplored registers that time was gathering material for Victorian Lincoln, and of John Buckingham, bishop of Lincoln from 1363 to 1398 he had us in stitches as he recounted scandalous stories (LAO, Registers 10&11: institutions; 12: memoranda; of past city worthies which were, even then, too spicy to 12B: writs). ‘Make a list of the contents of the memoranda appear in print. register’, he said, ‘and bring your findings back to me’. This At week-ends, before I got a car, I explored parts of the I duly did, in several notebooks, and he identified ‘crown- county by buses which wove in and out of the villages, church relations’ as a suitable thesis subject. He also wrote and I fell in love with the landscape. A particular memory to two great ladies in Lincolnshire history to warn them I have is of going to Belton House before it belonged to of my coming: Mrs. Varley, the county archivist, and Miss the National Trust, and, ahead of the building’s opening Major, the supremo of Lincolnshire medieval history, who time, eating my picnic alone in the park, with just the deer had retired to Lincoln from the headship of an Oxford for company. Also, in the course of writing my thesis, I college. From both I received a warm welcome, generosity discovered much valuable material about Lincolnshire and kindness far beyond the call of duty. The archives were history which was housed outside the county, in what was then housed in the old prison, where documents were known then as the Public Record Office (now The National stored in the cells, and the reading room was in the former Archives). I was delighted to publish some of this as Lincoln debtors’ day room. Every morning and afternoon a signal Record Society volume 81 in 1992 (Clerical Poll-Taxes in → tapped on the internal phone system summoned ‘trusties’ to tea with the archivists in their mess-room. There, Joan TNA SC 8/335/15818A: A petition from the citizens of Lincoln and merchants of Lincolnshire, requesting that a writ should be sent to the sheriff of Lincolnshire, to Varley, Michael Lloyd, Mary Finch and Judith Cripps asked maintain Henry III’s order to all the religious of Lincolnshire not to buy wool or me about my work, gave encouragement and made helpful other merchandises for selling to foreign merchants (c. 1272). 01 the Diocese of Lincoln, 1377-1381). I believe strongly that am slowly transferring the material onto the laptop, and a valuable service which the LRS can provide is to publish starting to fill out the rough listings I made. It is my hope Lincolnshire material which is housed outside the county, one day to present this material to LRS members, and I so making it accessible to local readers. thank subscribers for their patience! When the chance came to move from the University This issue of the News Review celebrates some of the of Aberdeen in the late-1980s, the option which most Society’s most recent activities – notably our very appealed was the University of Nottingham. This was successful spring conference at Bishop Grosseteste because of its proximity to Lincoln, both Lincolnshire University – and the launch of the second volume in our Archives Office and the rural county. Later I was honoured Occasional series of publications. A former President of to be invited to join the Lincoln Record Society’s council, the Society, Professor Michael Jones, reports on the launch and to observe, at first hand, the remarkable work it does of the White Book of Southwell, which was produced in furthering the county’s scholarship, both directly, with the assistance of the LRS. Also our Honorary through its own publications, and by assisting others. General Editor, Dr Nicholas Bennett, whets our appetites Continuing the theme of editing documents which for the next volume in the popular Lincolnshire Parish are housed elsewhere, Gwilym Dodd (my successor at Clergy series. And Dr Duncan Wright, Senior Lecturer Nottingham) and I are completing a volume of ‘Petitions in Archaeology and Heritage at Bishop Grosseteste from Lincolnshire’, which are housed at The National University, shares some of the findings from an excavation Archives, and which we hope will be issued to members that took place in Lincoln over the summer. We hope you next year. We have found this an exceptionally interesting, enjoy it! varied and exciting project, and we hope that members will feel the same. As for those notebooks on Buckingham’s Alison McHardy register, filled in the late-1960s: I still have them, though LINCOLN RECORD SOCIETY RECORD LINCOLN PIPE ROLL SOCIETY BOOK LAUNCH The White Book of Southwell A two-volume edition of the principal collection of 2007-15), also drawing on the expertise of several other medieval deeds relating to Southwell Minster, ‘the greatest scholars, spent over ten years preparing the complex of all the medieval collegiate foundations of England’ (A. edition from the Minster’s main medieval cartulary, the Hamilton Thompson) was formally launched on 16 May Liber Albus, now curated by Nottinghamshire Archives. 2018 by the Rt. Rev. Paul Williams, bishop of Southwell The edition, published by the Pipe Roll Society, was and Nottingham. A team of four editors, led by Professor successfully completed in part thanks to a generous grant Michael Jones (president of the Lincoln Record Society from the Lincoln Record Society, for which the editors Members of the editorial team and the Minster community at the launch of the White Book of Southwell in the Chapter House, Southwell Minster, 16 May 2018 (left to right: Professor Michael Jones, Dr Teresa Webber, Dr Jean Cameron, Dr Trevor Foulds, Professor Julia Barrow, Dr David Crook, Bishop Paul Williams, Dr Paul Cavill and Rev. Canon Nigel Coates, who received a copy on behalf of the Dean and Chapter) © Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire. 02 are extremely grateful. Chiefly compiled between c. 1350 and the late fifteenth century, the earliest records copied into it date from shortly after 1100, and a few additions were made after 1550. Well-known to antiquaries and local historians since the days of Sir William Dugdale and Dr Robert Thoroton (d. 1677), they provide a record of the Minster’s privileges, granted by popes, kings and archbishops, together with a very wide range of other documents concerning the governing body, the largely autonomous Chapter of sixteen prebendaries, and their estates from around 1100 up until the Reformation. Most of the lands and benefices acquired by the Minster were located in Nottinghamshire. However, it also came to possess livings in South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, where the alien priory of West Ravendale was transferred to the Chapter by Henry VI in 1439, to enhance its Bishop Paul Williams launching the White Book of Southwell in the Chapter House, Southwell Minster, 16 May 2018. Seated in the prebendal stalls, left to right: Mark diminished endowments after disruption caused by the Dorrington (former Archivist, Nottinghamshire Archives), Dr Elizabeth Jones, Dr Black Death and its recurrences. Henry VIII briefly Trevor Foulds, Professor Michael Jones © Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire. abolished the Chapter in 1540, only to relent three years later. Suppressed again under the Commonwealth, the Chapter was restored by Charles II so that it was not and those that served it, but also incidentally furnishes until 1841 that the old Chapter was finally abolished. a rich fund of information relating to the pastoral care Some of Southwell’s resources were then used to endow and spiritual guidance the Chapter offered, as well as the new dioceses of Ripon and Manchester, while this illuminating wider social and economic matters affecting mother church of Nottinghamshire, which had been the townsfolk of Southwell and the agrarian routines of LINCOLN RECORD SOCIETY RECORD LINCOLN part of the archdiocese of York since at least the tenth the peasantry in the many neighbouring villages forming century, was transferred between 1837 and 1884 to the the remarkable ecclesiastical ‘Peculiar of Southwell’ in diocese of Lincoln. The White Book provides not only the later Middle Ages. the major source for the institutional history of the medieval Collegiate church of St Mary’s, Southwell, Michael Jones A PREVIEW OF Lincolnshire Parish Clergy c.1214-1968: A Biographical Register: Volume 3 The Archdeacon had seen it all before – or so he thought. – the church ‘redundant’. Redundant? – when the village Although in his eighty-eighth year, William Kaye was is teeming with life? Some blunder seems to have been remarkably fit for his age and his vigour of mind was committed here. And, going on, round this immediate unclouded. He had held office as Archdeacon of Lincoln neighbourhood, what do we find? Gayton-le-Marsh: for the past forty-seven years and had no thoughts of church demolished; Tothill: church demolished; Muckton: retirement. As he drove along the country lane on 7 June church demolished; Authorpe: church demolished; South 1910, on his way to induct the newly-appointed Rector of Reston: church demolished … Evidently, in this part of Tothill, it must have seemed a routine occasion, merely the Lincolnshire, the Christian Church is in full retreat.” So latest such ceremony of the many hundreds over which he begins, in characteristically forthright manner, Henry had presided since his appointment in 1863. But, as we Thorold’s book, Lincolnshire Churches Revisited.