Those Was Good Lads ‘THOSE WAS GOOD LADS’ A HISTORY OF TUDOR ROTHERHAM by Stephen Cooper 1 Those Was Good Lads For my grandchildren 2 Those Was Good Lads CONTENTS Acknowledgments and a Note on John Guest Introduction I The Setting: Rotherham in the Tudor period II Religion 1. Thomas Rotherham and Rotherham College 2. Henry Carnebull and Purgatory 3. William Senes and heresy 4. The career of William Draper 5. Robert Swift and the destruction of Rotherham College 6. Thomas Snell and the survival of the grammar school 7. Simon Clerkson, the first married vicar 8. The Churchwardens and religious change 9. Offenders in the Church Courts III Government 1. The Monks of Rufford Abbey 2. The Earls of Shrewsbury 3. Thomas Corker, the 'vile wicked varlet' 4. The Manor Court 5. The Origin of the Feoffees 6. The Feoffees at Work 7. The Trained Band 8. Law and Order 9. William West the 'administrative power' 3 Those Was Good Lads IV Economics and Society 1. Agnes Foxe and the Friar of Tickhill 2. The 'Visited Folks' - plague in Tudor Rotherham 3. Musicians 4. People at Work 5. Rotherham Mill V Private Lives 1. William Drabble, Margaret More, and a hanging 2. Robert Wilson wins a bride 3. Isabella Dowke and conjugal rights 4. Elizabeth Lockwood and forbidden fruit 5. Adam Goodyear and perjury Appendix I Conclusions about Rotherham in the Tudor period Appendix II The historians of Rotherham College Appendix III Chancery Proceedings relating to Rotherham College, 1515 Appendix IV Note concerning the records of the Feoffees Appendix V Rotherham’s Early Parish Registers Sources and Abbreviations 4 Those Was Good Lads LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Samuel Buck’s drawing of Rotherham, 1723 The Chapel on the Bridge [2012] Rotherham Parish Church Exterior [2012] Robert Swift's tomb Fresco Archbishop Thomas Rotherham Rotherham College Old Gateway from the College, 1869 Old Gateway from the College in Boston Park, 2012 Thomas Rotherham, Laxton Church [Joan Jones, 1991] Robert Pursglove, the last provost of the College, in Tideswell Church The Remains of Rufford Abbey, 2012 George Talbot, 4th Earl of Shrewsbury (1468-1538) George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury (1528-90) Sir James Croft Rotherham Market Place (early eighteenth century) 5 Those Was Good Lads ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most of the work for this book was done in the early 1990s. At that time, I received a great deal of help from the staff in the Local Studies Section of Rotherham Central Library and I would like to thank in particular Fred Crowder and Tony Mumford. Tony helped me translate the Cause Papers which form the basis of many of the chapters; Freda Crowder, was especially helpful when I was looking into the history of Laxton in Nottinghamshire; and Stephen Whittle helped me with the evidence contained in the Visitation Court Books at York. A NOTE ON JOHN GUEST No-one who reads his friend Thomas Beggs's Sketch of the Life and Labours of Mr Alderman John Guest F.S.A. (1881) can avoid feeling respect and even affection for Guest. He set out in 1865, when he was already sixty-six years of age, to 'construct a more noteworthy memorial' of his home town, he spent the next fourteen years 'prosecuting' enquiries and 'ransacking' national and local records, and when his 'compilatory labours' were concluded and the 700-page tome was finally published, he confessed that he felt 'somewhat forlorn', as Edward Gibbon did when he parted company with Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. Guest's book is indispensable, though he was not a historian by profession. He was apprenticed to a grocer at fourteen, before becoming a magistrates' clerk, and eventually a partner in Guest and Chrimes Brass Works. As a historian, he must have been largely self-taught, though he was eventually elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He clearly did not understand the nature of everything he wrote about and quoted (and no wonder!); but his work is a vast storehouse of documents, some of which would not be easy to gain access to, or transcribe, even now, after a century and more of improvements in information technology. This is not only because Guest was efficient at 'prosecuting' his enquiries, and evidently had the time and the money to 'track the historic quest through briar and brake'1, but also because he was himself one of the Feoffees of the Common Lands of Rotherham, and therefore had access to the archives of that organisation, not all of which are reproduced in Historic Notices. 1 Beggs, 205. 6 Those Was Good Lads Guest's local knowledge was unparallelled. He was born in Bridgegate in 1799, and died in Moorgate in 1880. In between those dates he spent virtually the whole of his rich and varied life in Rotherham. For about half a century, from the time when he took the pledge (having been by his own admission "one of the greatest drunkards that there was...",2 he was 'Mr Rotherham'. His was involved with the Board of Health, Board of Guardians, Burial Board, Dispensary Committee, Library Committee, and British School Committee; and he was President of the Temperance Society, of the Town Mission, Chairman of the Institute Committee, Vice- Chairman of the Hospital Committee, Feoffee, Churchwarden, Vice-President of the Literary and Scientific Society and 'Chairman of three-fourths of the public meetings of all kinds and creeds'.3 This experience must have given him insights into all aspects of the town's affairs and history, which it would be very difficult to match today. It is indeed arguable that John Guest's intense civic pride and local patriotism influenced his work as an historian. For many years, he strove to bring about improvements for the people of Rotherham. Although he was a Conservative, he argued successfully that the waterworks, the gas works, and the markets in the town should be taken into public ownership. He was instrumental in setting up the Board of Health, the Hospital, a building society, a mechanics institute, and a public park. He worked to enlarge the grammar school of his day, He rescued an Italianate doorway belonging to the old College of Jesus when this was discovered on a building site, and presented it to the Park,4 where it remains. It is hardly surprising that someone with this degree of involvement in municipal affairs should regard anything which tended to increase the facilities available in Rotherham as good, and anything which diminished them as bad. Specifically, Alderman Guest was outraged that the College of Jesus, created by his 'patron saint', Thomas Rotherham,5 should have been destroyed by virtue of the Chantries Act, its buildings ruined, its endowments seized, its Provost and Fellows expelled, its links with the Universities broken, its choirboys silenced, its schools decimated, and the local importance of Rotherham as a centre of learning obliterated. Guest knew that Thomas Rotherham had intended his foundation to last for centuries, and he assumed that the College functioned satisfactorily down to the date of its dissolution. He also thought - which can never be proved - that if the College had 2 Beggs, 224. 3 Beggs, 208. 4 Boston Park. The plaque in the park states (1991) that the doorway displays something of the magnificence of the College of Jesus in its heyday; but the style of the doorway suggests that it did not form part of the original College buildings, but rather dates from the sixteenth century when the buildings were turned to secular uses: Munford. 5 Beggs, 204. 7 Those Was Good Lads survived, it might have gone on to become another Winchester. Its destruction was inexcusable and thoroughly bad; and Guest took this view despite the fact that he was a Protestant and the College had been dissolved at least in part as a result of the Protestant rejection of Purgatory, and of masses for the dead. The full title of Guest's book is significant: Historic Notices of Rotherham, Ecclesiastical, Collegiate, and Civil. This reflected his strong attachment to Thomas Rotherham, his interest in the architecture of the parish church (largely built in the late medieval period), and his conviction that the College of Jesus had played a vital role in the history of the town. It meant that he concentrated on the early Tudor period, and did not have as much to say about Elizabeth's reign. Copyright © Stephen Cooper 1991, 2012 The right of Stephen Cooper to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, designs and Patents Act 1988 8 Those Was Good Lads INTRODUCTION The men and women who walked the streets of Rotherham four hundred years ago, who crossed its bridge, gossiped in its market, drank in its inns, worshipped in its church and studied in its College, were as alive as you or I, though their material circumstances were very different. Some of them were our ancestors, others simply lived in the places that we now frequent. They deserve to be remembered, from time to time. Rotherham did not play an important part in national affairs in the Tudor period, though Cardinal Wolsey must have passed through the town, and Mary Queen of Scots stayed there.6 There were no battles or sieges or risings or plots in which the town was directly involved, although the Pilgrimage of Grace must have caused some alarm there. No martyrs were burned there. No magnate had his seat there. With the exception of Archbishop Rotherham, no famous person is associated with the place; but this does not mean that nothing happened.