Trans. Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 132 (2014), 201–215 Bishop Monk and the Horfield Question By WILLIAM EVANS In July 1848 a House of Commons select committee (and in July 1851 the full House) heard allegations that James Henry Monk, bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, had acted improperly in relation to the Horfield manor estate, which was part of his bishopric’s ecclesiastical property.1 Among other things Monk was accused of acting so as to improve the financial position of himself and his family, and to the detriment of the parish and of a local landowner who was also the perpetual curate of Horfield. The purpose of this paper is to identify the allegations against Monk; to sketch the local background to the dispute and its national context; to assess whether the allegations, and Monk’s counter-allegations, were justified; and to note how the matter was resolved and what its local consequences were, not just for Monk and his successors and for his church, but also for the wider Bristol community. The Horfield Manor Estate Of ancient origin, the manor of Horfield was part of the endowment of St Augustine’s abbey,2 and then of the Bristol diocese.3 It extended over 1,200 acres north of the city of Bristol, from Westbury-on-Trym (which then included Redland) in the west and south to Stapleton and Stoke Gifford in the east, covering not only much of modern Horfield, but reaching north into Filton.4 By the early 19th century parts had been sold off, but the rest of it produced income for the bishopric, not from the rents its manorial tenants paid, but that from the lessee of the manor to 1. Principal printed sources are: (1) J.H. Monk, Horfield Manor: a letter to each of the rural deans in the diocese of Gloucester and Bristol, by the bishop, 30 November 1848 [hereafter Monk’s Letter], the appendix to which reproduces minutes of the select committee [hereafter Select Com. Mins.]; (2) a letter by Revd Henry Richards to Monk dated 30 Jan. 1849 [hereafter Richards’s Letter]; (3) a selection, prefaced by an introduction by Monk dated 12 July 1851, by Monk of documents relating to Horfield [hereafter Monk’s Documents] (which is not identical with the HC Return listed as (5) below); (4) a response dated 1852 by Monk to a speech by Edward Horsman MP on 17 July 1751 [hereafter Monk’s Response]; (5) Bishopric of Gloucester and Bristol, Horfield: Return to an Address of the House of Commons dated 31 July 1851, ordered to be printed by the House of Commons 24 May 1852 [hereafter HC Return]; and (6) a letter dated 9 March 1852 by Monk to Sir William Page Wood MP [hereafter Monk to Page Wood]. Octavo copies of documents (1) to (4) and (6) are bound together in Bristol Reference Library [BRL] as B23206– B23210, but with B23209 inserted between the introduction to B23208 and the latter’s appendices. Several of the documents are themselves appendices to other documents, so there is much duplication. Some variations between earlier (foolscap) and the bound versions suggest some editing. The bound volume was drawn on by D. Wright and J. Hyde, Bishopston – The Early Years (Bishopston, Horfield and Ashley Down Local Hist. Soc. 5, 2010), 14–24. 2. D. Walker (ed.), The Cartulary of St Augustine’s Abbey, Bristol (Glos. Rec. Series 10, 1988), Docs. 7, 17, 73, 81, 119, 158, 396–401, and Add. Doc. 15. 3. J.H. Bettey (ed.), Records of Bristol Cathedral (Bristol Rec. Soc. 59, 2007), 13–15 and sources there cited. 4. The extent of the estate is shown in an undated plan: Bristol Record Office [BRO], 31965 [STG]/9. 202 WILLIAM EVANS whom it had been farmed out. The rent thus payable to the bishop was low, but the lease was for the longest of three lives, and from time to time the tenant would pay a fine or premium in consideration of the bishop agreeing to add a new or replacement life so as to extend the potential term of the lease. In 1817 Bishop Mansel leased the estate to a George Lempriere for the lives of three people: Dr John Shadwell, who practised medicine in Southampton, then aged 54; his son John Augustus Shadwell, then a captain in the 26th regiment of native infantry of the East India Company, aged 22; and Dr Shadwell’s brother Richard Shadwell, of Bristol, aged 46.5 Though Monk claimed6 to have been the first to realise that the Horfield manor estate had what a later age would call ‘development potential’, in fact it was Lempriere who first floated the idea. In 1822 he drafted an ‘outline of an Act of Parliament for improving Horfield’. This would have empowered the lessee of the Horfield manor estate and the bishop to grant building leases of 80 years, the bishop to take a third of the rents and Lempriere two thirds, until the combined rents should exceed a certain sum, beyond which the bishop should receive an additional rent of so much per acre for land, and a percentage of the rent for every new house. The houses, it was implied, would be up-market, because they were not to be within 50 feet of each other, their grounds were not to exceed one acre, and at least half an acre was to be allotted to each house as a pleasure ground or gardens. No manufacturing or noxious business was to be allowed. Once an initial 80-year lease had expired, the bishop would have power to grant a further lease of 40 years.7 It can be inferred from Lempriere’s proposal that he and, no doubt, others recognized that the Horfield manor estate had potential development value; that anyone contemplating erecting a house would not be willing to take a lease limited to lives, the duration of which would be uncertain in case the lease might terminate before the builders had recouped their outlay; that any purchaser, builder or funder would therefore require either the freehold or a long fixed term of years; that that would not be possible unless the bishop, the lessee and the copyholders were to co-operate; that not all concerned would necessarily co-operate; that an Act of Parliament would therefore be necessary to impose a solution; and that the potential for residential development was lucrative enough to justify the expense of private legislation and buying out copyholders. Nothing came of Lempriere’s proposal, but it will have alerted Bishop Mansel (if he was not already aware) to how valuable the Horfield manor estate was, and that awareness will have passed to successor bishops. As Monk put it later in 1848, ‘the double uncertainty of a dependence on leasehold lives and copyhold lives proved an obstacle to the erection of villas and other residences, for which the parish, being situate on rising ground contiguous to the city of Bristol, seemed well adapted’.8 Henry Richards By 1847, when the dispute about Horfield manor estate reached Parliament, several relevant events had occurred. In the 1820s Dr Shadwell, the first life under the lease of the manor estate, also acquired the right of presentation to the living of Holy Trinity Horfield, the parish church. One Henry Richards, who also held some 136 acres of the Horfield manor estate as copyholder,9 acquired the right of presentation from Dr Shadwell and in 1828, when the antiquarian and historian of Bristol Samuel Seyer10 resigned the living, Richards presented himself to it as 5. HC Return, 105–6. 6. Monk’s Documents, vi. 7. BRO, EP/E/11/5. 8. Monk’s Letter, 3. 9. Valuers’ certificate, inHC Return, 203. 10. For Seyer, see I. Gray, Antiquaries of Gloucestershire and Bristol (BGAS Rec. Section 12, 1981), 74; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB]. BISHOP MONK AND THE HORFIELD QUESTION 203 perpetual curate.11 Richards also had a living at Llansoy near Usk, but it was of low value.12 He had been presented to it in 1836 by the duke of Beaufort and held the living until 1849. The church at Llansoy was heavily restored by the subsequent incumbent in 1858; there is no record or other trace of Richards having spent money on improving or otherwise altering that church or its parsonage house, or the local school.13 Of the lives that set the duration of the lease of Horfield manor that Bishop Mansel had granted to George Lempriere, two had died about the time of the 1831 Bristol riots, leaving only Dr Shadwell, who had himself become the tenant under the lease, perhaps by assignment from Lempriere.14 Both Bishop Gray and his successor Bishop Allen had offered to grant a fresh lease for the term of the surviving life and two new ones, but neither had been able to reach satisfactory terms with the tenant.15 Shadwell’s health fluctuated – he had dropsy – but every time he seemed near death, he recovered. For reasons explained below, in June 1847 an Order in Council directed that when the Bristol see should next become vacant, the bishop’s interest in the Horfield manor estate should vest in the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.16 So by July 1848 the legal position was that Monk was freeholder of the estate in right of his bishopric; when Monk ceased to be bishop that freehold would be transferred to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for non-Bristol purposes; Horfield manor estate was leased by the bishop to Dr Shadwell for three lives of which only one, Shadwell himself, then in his eighties and poorly, was surviving; Henry Richards, the perpetual curate of Horfield, was a copyhold tenant of a large part of the manor; and when Richards ceased to be incumbent, the right of presentation to that living would transfer to the bishop.