Guild Stewards' Book of the Borough of Calne, 1561–1688

WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY Returns ifiramb VOLUME Vll FOR THE YEAR 1951 Impression of 300 copies GUILD STEWARDS’ BOOK OF THE BOROUGH OF CALNE 1561-1688 EDITED BY A. W. MABBS DEVlZE§ 1953 CONTENTS Page PREFACE . vn INTRODUCTION . Ix CALNE GUILD STEWARDS’ B0014 Acc0unts....... 1 Minutes, Orders and Miscellaneous Entries . 96 GLOSSARY . 115 INDEX. 116 PREFACE The Branch is much indebted to the Mayor and Corporation of the Borough of Calne for allowing the present abstract to be made and to the Town Clerk for extending many courtesies to the editor during the course of his work. Thanks are also due to the Vicar and Churchwardens of Calne for enabling the editor to examine the churchwardens’ accounts for the period 1527 to 1670 which are bound up with the first volume of the parish registers. R. B. PUGH Hampstead, October 1952 INTRODUCTION The Guild Stewards’ Book, sometimes described as the Burgus Book, is a large volume in the custody of the Town Clerk of Calne. The volume consists of 505 numbered folios of laid paper measuring 13.} by 1o inches, and is bound in what appears to be its original cover of limp vellum. It is made up of 32 sections each of 8 double pages which are sewn to 3 leather bands. The vellum cover, now much cracked and insecurely stitched, was originally attached by 3 similar bands tacketted to the outside; one of the bands is now missing. The cover has a wrap-over flap which was originally tied with a leather thong to secure the book when closed. This thong has been replaced by a piece of ordinary white tape. Several folios have been removed both before and after numeration, and a large number of folios throughout the volume are blank. On the back cover is wlitten ‘Burgus do Calne’. In front of the first folio have been inserted two original letters together with printed copies of them 1 relating to a fruitless search made in 1810 in the records of the Duchy of Cornwall for references to a borough charter. A printed version of the burgesses’ oath 2 is similarly inserted after the last folio. The book contains accounts, orders, resolutions, minutes, and other miscellaneous memoranda relating to the borough for the period 1561 to 1814. The first entry was made in 1584 when Philip Rich, vicar and town clerk, entered the guild stewards’ accounts from 1561 to 1584.. From 1585 until 1814, with only a few omissions, successive town clerks entered the annual accounts shortly after each pair of stewards had ended their year of oflice and had rendered their accounts. At first only the accounts appear, but by the end of the 16th century the book was being used to an increasing extent for the recording of other information. After about 1600 admissions of burgesses, disburgessings, and appoint- ments of guild stewards, together with minutes and memoranda con- cerning a diversity of municipal affairs are entered. Elections of burgesses to represent the borough in parliament are recorded occasionally from 1605, and regularly from 1660. For some years between 164.4. and 1677 the separate accounts of some of the constables and tithingmen are entered to supplement the stewards’ accounts to which they are charged. In the back of the volume will be found such entries as the oath of the burgesses, the ‘orders and constitutions’ of the borough, lists of armour, and notes of the distribution of poor relief. 1 Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, XXIV, 207. 2 Ibz'd., 208, 209. IX GUILD STEWARDS’ BOOK The book is the only surviving record of the borough earlier in date than I835, and for the period that it covers is the main source for the administrative history of Calne. Its interest is essentially domestic, for its chief purpose is to record the receipts from letting the two borough commons and the payments made out of those receipts to meet the administrative expenses of the borough. Only rarely are we privileged to look beyond the borough boundaries. The Manors and Borough of Calne Many aspects of the manorial and municipal history of Calne have been discussed in A. E. W. Marsh’s A History of the Borough and Town of Calne, (Calne [1go3]), in which many extracts from the guild stewards’ accounts and minutes are printed. It is not proposed in this necessarily brief Introduction to attempt a comprehensive history of Calne, or to supplement in any but a few essential details the information available in that book. Before the Norman Conquest it is most probable that Calne, as a villa regia, one of the local administrative centres of the Old English kingdom, was a place of no small importance. From Domesday Book it is evident not only that in 1086 Calne was held by the king, but also that it had been held earlier by Edward the Confessor, and that it was therefore one of those widely scattered estates of the pre-Conquest kings which by later legal doctrine were to become known as ancient demesne of the Crown. The church of Calne is stated in Domesday to be held of the king by Niel, who claimed also a parcel of the church lands then held by Alfred of Spain. From this division of the land in Calne between what was held directly by the king and what belonged to the church developed two distinct manors which may be described as the lay and the prebendal manors. The borough of Calne, with which this account is chiefly concerned, developed from the urban settlement which lay within the boundaries of both these later manors; and for this reason it is proposed briefly to recount the details of their descent. Early in the reign of John, probably in 1201, the lay manor was alienated from the crown by a grant to Fulk de Canteloupe 1. In 1274. following the death without issue of his successor George de Canteloupe a partition of Fulk’s lands was made, the manor of Calne being among those which passed to George’s sister Millicent and her husband Eudo la Zouche. An inquisition post mortem 2 taken in that year identifies the Canteloupe holding in Calne with a third part of the borough together with the foreign hundred and other profits. From that time until the middle of the 16th century, except for occasional reversions to the Crown, the manor remained in the hands of the Zouche family. In inquisitions and 1 Pzloe Roll Society, New Series, XVIII, 248. ' Calendar of Inquisition: Post Mortem, II, p. 17. X INTRODUCTION other documents later than about 14.00 the property is usually described as ‘the hundred of Calne with a water-mill in Calne’, and it is frequently associated with the manors of Calstone and ‘Bowers’ or ‘Bowars’. Unfor- tunately no extents or surveys are known to exist, and the relationship of Calne to this later manor cannot be stated. In 1554 the Calne properties passed to Thomas Long, but by 1579 they had been acquired by Sir Lionel Duckett, whose successors continued to hold Calne until its purchase by the Earl of Shelburne, later to become the first Marquess of Lansdowne. From the lands belonging to the church of Calne in 1086 evolved the prebendal manor which for over six centuries was held by successive treasurers of Salisbury Cathedral. Two-thirds of the borough was included in this manor. A grant of the church, its lands, tithes, and other appurte- nances appears to have been made to the bishop of Salisbury shortly before the death of William the Conqueror, for in 1091 the church is named in the large number of churches and temporalities with which Bishop Osmund endowed his foundation of the cathedral 1. Moreover, a charter of about 1158 confirming an earlier grant of the church of Calne in prebendam describes it as one of the prebends which had been given by William 2. In about 1226 the prebend was granted to the treasurer of Salisbury 3; and it remained in the hands of his successors until the latter part of the 19th century when the manor passed for a brief period to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners before its purchase by the Marquess of Lansdowne. The borough of Calne, which lay one-third within the lay manor and two-thirds within the prebendal lands, possibly derived its early borough status from its pre-Conquest local importance as a villa regia. In Domesday Book it is described as a burgus, and is one of the eight places in Wiltshire in which tenants in burgage (burgenses) are then found; from 1295 burgesses were summoned to represent the borough in parliament; in the Nomina Villarum compiled in 1316 it is called a burgus; it is usually styled a borough in the accounts of tallage entered in the 12th century Pipe Rolls. All these are some of the common attributes of those urban communities to which the description ‘borough’ is loosely applied, although a precise definition of burghal status is im- possible until a much later date 4. Little is known of the early history of the borough of Calne, and even in the 16th and 17th centuries it is diflicult to assess how much municipal autonomy the burgesses had achieved. No charters of incorporation earlier than the late 17th century 1 Register of St. Osmond, (Rolls Series), I, 199. Q Ilrid., I, 205. 3 Ibid., II, 25. ‘ For a general account of the characteristics of early boroughs see R. B. Pugh’s Introduction to List of Wiltshire Borough Records . ., W.A.S., Records Branch, Vol.

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