East of Bristol in the Sixteenth Century: Documents from the Manors of Barton Regis and Ridgeway

BRISTOL RECORD SOCIETY’S PUBLICATIONS General Editors: MADGE DRESSER ROGER LEECH JONATHAN BARRY VOL. 68 EAST OF BRISTOL IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: DOCUMENTS FROM THE MANORS OF BARTON REGIS AND RIDGEWAY EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 1 27/07/2016 09:48 To the memory of my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, Barton Regis residents EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 2 27/07/2016 09:48 EAST OF BRISTOL IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: DOCUMENTS FROM THE MANORS OF BARTON REGIS AND RIDGEWAY EDITED BY KATHLEEN HAPGOOD Published by BRISTOL RECORD SOCIETY 2016 EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 3 27/07/2016 09:48 ISBN 978–0-901538–37-6 © Kathleen Thompson 2016 No part of this volume may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without permission. BRISTOL RECORD SOCIETY President: The Lord Mayor of Bristol General Editors: Madge Dresser, BA, MSc, DPhil, FRHistS Roger Leech, MA, PhD, FSA, MIFA Jonathan Barry, MA, DPhil, FRHistS Secretary: Kathleen Thompson PhD, FSA, FRHistS, Treasurer: Jonathan Harlow PhD The Society exists to encourage the preservation, study and publication of documents relating to the history of Bristol, and since its foundation in 1929 has published sixty-seven major volumes of historic documents concerning the city. All the volumes are edited and introduced by scholars who are experts in their fields. Recent volumes have included: Bristol Probate Inventories (Vols 54, 57 and 60); Robert Sturmy’s Commercial Expedition to the Mediterranean 1457–8 (Vol. 58); Records of Bristol Cathedral (Vol. 59); Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent, 1503–1601 (Vol. 61); Westbury-on-Trym: Monastery, Minster and College (Vol. 62); The Ledger of Thomas Speed, 1681–1690 (Vol. 63); The Diary of William Dyer: Bristol in 1762 (Vol. 64); Clifton College: Foundation to Evacuation (Vol. 65); and Manning the Royal Navy in Bristol: Liberty, Impressment & the State, 1739–1815 (Vol. 66); The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar (Vol. 67). The subscription for private members is £15 per annum. In return, members of the Society receive the volumes as they are published. Institutional members are invoiced for each volume. The Society acknowledges with thanks the continued support of the Bristol Record Office, the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England. Correspondence to the Secretary, [email protected]. Subscriptions to the Treasurer, Hardings Cottage, Swan Lane, Winterbourne, S. Glos. BS36 1RJ. Orders for past volumes to the Bristol Record Office, ‘B’ Bond Warehouse, Smeaton Road, Bristol BS1 6XN. Website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/bristolrecordsociety Produced for the Society by 4word Ltd Unit 15 Bakers Park Cater Road Bristol BS13 7TT EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 4 27/07/2016 09:48 CONTENTS Abbreviations vii Acknowledgements ix East of Bristol: the parishes of St Philip & St Jacob, Stapleton and Mangotsfield, outline map x Introduction xi I Customs of the manor of Barton Regis 1553 1 II Survey of the manor of Barton Regis 1553–63 11 III Rent Roll of the manor of Barton Regis 1563 61 IV Surveys of the manor of Ridgeway 1523–69 73 V Depositions taken before John Birch, Baron of the Exchequer, concerning Barton Regis woods 1569 93 Biographical index 115 Place name index 139 Glossary 149 EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 5 27/07/2016 09:48 EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 6 27/07/2016 09:48 ABBREVIATIONS BGAS Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society BRO Bristol Record Office BRS Bristol Record Society CBAB Calendar of the Bristol Apprentice Book 1532–1565 (3 vols), part I 1532–1542, ed. D. Hollis (BRS XIV, 1949); part II 1542–1552 (BRS XXXIII, 1980); part III 1552–1565 (BRS XLIII, 1992) CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls EPNS A.H. Smith, The Place-Names of Gloucestershire, part 3: the Lower Severn Valley, the Forest of Dean (English Place-name Society, 40) (Cambridge UP, 1964) GRO Gloucestershire Record Office L&P Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer et al. (21 vols in 37 and Addenda, London: HMSO, 1862–1932) Latimer, “St James” John Latimer, “A Deed Relating to the Partition of the Property of St James’s Priory, Bristol (Ancient Bristol documents, no. XV)”, Proceedings of the Clifton Antiquarian Club, 4 (1897/99), 109–38 MS Manuscript ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition OED Oxford English Dictionary Sharp Accounts of the Constables of Bristol Castle in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Margaret Sharp (BRS XXXIV, 1982) TBGAS Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society TNA The National Archives Tudor Wills Tudor Wills Proved in Bristol 1546–1603, ed. Sheila Lang and Margaret McGregor (BRS XLIV, 1993) VCH Victoria History of the Counties of England Wadley Notes or Abstracts of the Wills Contained in the Volume Entitled the Great Orphan Book and Book of Wills in the Council House of Bristol, ed. T. P. Wadley (Bristol: Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 1886) Way, “Heath House” L. J. U. Way, “An Account of the Heath House Estate, Stapleton, Gloucestershire”, TBGAS, 35 (1912), 18– 68 EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 7 27/07/2016 09:48 EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 8 27/07/2016 09:48 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Any volume of edited texts implies debts to the custodians and owners of the documents that are reproduced and I have acknowledged those debts at appropriate points in the volume. I am particularly grateful to Ian Chard for giving me access to documents in his possession, which helped me with dating the 1553 survey of Barton Regis, and for sharing with me the early findings of his work on the early modern topography of Stapleton and Mangotsfield. I would also like to thank the staff of the various organisations, the archivists, librarians, receptionists and administrative staff, who have helped me in my researches. They include the staff of the Bristol Record Office, the Bristol Central Reference Library, the Gloucestershire Record Office, the Kent Local History Centre and the National Archives. Dr Kate Harris welcomed me to Longleat and David Smith provided help on the Berkeley muniments. I am grateful to them all. I owe particular debts to Professor Roger Leech, who started me on this work by introducing me to the 1553 survey of Barton Regis, and to Professor Jonathan Barry, who has provided much needed advice on the early modern period for an editor who has strayed beyond her historical comfort zone. Dr Joe Bettey has given me the benefit of his great knowledge of the history of the locality and Dr Madge Dresser and Dr Jonathan Harlow have encouraged and supported me throughout. I have benefitted from conversations with Professor Edmund King and Dr C. P. Lewis, both authors of distinguished local studies on other areas, and Professor Richard Coates has been generous with his expertise on place names. Professor David Crouch has shared with me some thoughts on the earls of Gloucester and advised on reading sixteenth-century hands. I would like to thank them warmly, but most of all I should thank my ever patient husband, Ray Thompson, who has accompanied me on long walks around the obscurer parts of east Bristol, has photographed my manuscripts and listened to my findings. EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 9 27/07/2016 09:48 x East of Bristol in the Sixteenth Century EastBristol_3rd proof.indb 10 27/07/2016 09:48 INTRODUCTION The history of east Bristol has not been as intensively studied as other areas of the city, yet the importance of the area in the city’s development is beyond doubt. It was both the location of the king’s manor of Barton, on which the city was founded, and the area where a diversity of industries emerged that enabled the city to withstand the decline of its mercantile and commercial interests in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 The documents printed in this volume relate to that area as it was in the middle of the sixteenth century at a period of great social and economic change, when the royal connection with the manor was severed and a new pattern of ownership emerged. They focus on the district to the east of the medieval city, when it was still a rural area, continuing to practise medieval approaches to farming in common fields, and they enable us to reconstruct long disappeared topography and landscape use at the point when the foundations of the modern suburbs began to be laid. The setting The area that lay to the east of the medieval city and county of Bristol was the location of the king’s manor of the barton. It stretched from the eastern limits of the city to the king’s wood northwards to the parish boundary with Horfield and Stoke Gifford and its southernmost point was the king’s marsh that lay in a great loop of the River Avon. The primary meaning of the word “barton” in Old English is a threshing floor, but by the central middle ages it had come to mean an area where the land was for the lord’s use, often adjacent to his dwelling. The word still survives in the Bristol street name St James Barton, which refers to the barton belonging to the priory of St James, or Thurstan’s Barton, off Whitehall Road, and it is also used in one of the documents presented in this volume to describe Thomas Tovey’s holding at Mangotsfield, where there was a “dwelling housse barne oxehousse garden orchard and barton”. Since the lord who kept this area for his own use was the king, the manor came to be called Barton Regis, although it was also known as Barton nexte or nighe Brystowe.

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