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G R I S E L E I A
IN
S N O T I N G H S C I R E
An Illustrated History from the Earliest Times and from
Reliable Sources
OF
THE PARISH AND PARISH CHURCH OF GREASLEY
AND PRIORY OF BEAUVALE,
WITH THE HAMLETS OF
HEMSHEL, NEWTHORPE, MOORGREEN AND BEAUVALE,
AND THE TWO TOWNSHIPS, NOW INDEPENDENT PARISHES OF
KIMBERLEY AND BRINSLEY,
TOGETHER WITH A GLOSSARY OF TERMS USED
RODOLPH BARON VON HUBE,
VICAR OF GREASLEY.
NOTTINGHAM:
MURRAY’S NOTTINGHAM BOOK COMPANY.
1901.
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Contents
- Title page
- Contents
- Greasley and the founding of Beauvale Priory
- Hemshell
- Kimberley
- Brinsley
- Watnall
- Newthorpe
- Moorgreen
- Beauvale
- The church of St. Mary, Greasley
- The churchyard
Greasley
GREASLEY also written Greyseley, Griseley, Grisley, Greselang, Gresley and Graslee, but in Domesday Griseleia seems to mean “grassland in an opening of the forest.” Mr. Flavell Edmunds in his “Traces of History in the Names of places,”p. 217, gives gres, from Graze grass, whence grese, that is deer in grasstime, i.e. fat deer, and Gres-lay as Gras-land; while both he and Taylor in his “Words and Places” p. 360, give the leys as open forest glades where cattle love to lie.
POSSIBLY some early temporary Church may have been at Greasley, before the one which the Domesday Survey mentions as having been here in the Confessor’s time. It may have been founded by some great Thaine, who may at an early time have been the sole possessor of the large estate, on which he placed the Church near his own dwelling and equi-distant from all parts thereof, before the estate may subsequently have been divided among the proprietors which are mentioned in Domesday. But be that so or not, it must be taken for certain that only one of those whom the Survey mentions can have been the founder, because there is no trace whatever that the others had a proprietary claim on it (as in the case of Medieties, or as at Wandesley, where one Fitz Hubert had half a Church, and as at Trowell where William Ostiarius was in like manner interested in the Church of that parish.
The photo-zincographed copy of the Notts part of Domesday gives one Ulfi as having been at Greasley in the Confessor’s reign, and that the Church and a priest were then here. It is not necessary to give in this place an account of that survey as contained in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which the reader will find there under A.D. MLXXXV. We believe, however, that the survey comprised of Greasley so much only as was then of present revenue to the King. Greasley, including all the hamlets thereof, are found in the Notts part of the survey on page vi., column 2, and on page XVi., 2, and xvii., i. These accounts, together with Thoroton, Throsby, Dugdale. and the national records, with those of the Borough of Nottingham, must be our guides.
Our County’s name in Domesday is Snotinghscire, the unsettled puzzle of the derivation of which we must leave where we find it, that is, unsolved; though we think that Thoroton’s conjecture is nearest the mark, i.e., that in the Heptarchy the capital town was by the Saxons called Snodengaham, from Snottenga: caves, and ham: home or dwelling. William the Conqueror, as Camden writes, built a castle there on the rock-site of the former ancient tower, in which the Danes so successfully held out against Alfred and Aetheired. Thoroton, on the other hand, opines that, since there is no mention of the Castle in Domesday, it is to be concluded that it was built by Peverel or by the Conqueror. Anyhow, Peverel (whatsoever his disputed descent may have been) had the Lordship of Nottingham, was Governor of the Castle, and had 48 merchants’ houses, and 13 houses of Knights at Nottingham, and 55Lordships in this County alone, one of which was Greasley, which he divided among his followers. As in other places, many of the landed proprietors of the Confessor’s time were dispossessed by the Conqueror. We need not relate how much Ulfi lost at Hodsok, where Turold, one of Roger de Busil’s men superseded him. It is enough for our history to know that he lost his two manors at Greasley, which came to the fee of Peveril who gave one to one of his men called Ailric. One of these manors was rated to be taxed at four bovats to the geld, where Peveril had one carucate, five villains, and two borderers having three ploughs; the other, which became Ailric’s fee, was also rated to the geld at four bovats and certified to be one carucate, but was then waste.
From that time forward we hear nothing more of the dispossessed Ulfi, except that in Strelley (also called Stradleg and Strally), he appears to have been permitted to hold together with one Godwin (a clerk), some of the expropriated Thane’s land (which had been Vichel’s), from the King in capite, which paid for three bovats to the tax, and where they had four villains and one bordar. It would appear that it was one of Ailric’s descendants who first assumed the name of Greasley from the place, which was very usual with those owners who superseded the expropriated proprietors of the Confessor’s reign. Thoroton mentions the first of the de Greasleys as William by name, in the fifth year of the disturbed reign of King Stephen. He takes this William de Greasley to be of the same family with one Hugh, son of Richard, who gave some land in Claindon to the Priory of Lenton. Thoroton arrives at this conclusion from the fact that the next owner of Greasley to be met with was Ralph de Greasley, who was certified to hold three Knights’ fees of the honor of Peveril in Notts, one of which was in our parish, and the two others in Claindon. It is in that way therefore, that William de Greasley of Stephen’s time, is brought into connection with Ralph de Greasley of the reign of King John.
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But it is a long stride from the Conqueror to Stephen’s reign, and if we have some, however scant, information of the descent of the Greasley property until then, we may well desire to know something of the condition of the country and people during that period. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can give the information. Let it speak. “When the Conqueror was hallowed at Westminster, Archbishop Ealdred pledged him on Christ’s book (the Gospel) and he swore, before he would set the crown on his head, that he would govern the nation as well as any King before him had best done, if they would be faithful to him; nevertheless (book 2, p. 175, &c.), he laid a very heavy contribution on the people, &c. Then, in the month of February, 1071, he caused all the monasteries that were in England to be plundered, &c. Next, in 1082 there was a great famine, notwithstanding which the King in 1083 caused a great and heavy tax of 22 pence (say 36 shillings of our money, or more), to be laid on every hide of land, &c. Again, after the birthtide of our Lord Jesus Christ, 1007 and eighty winters, in the one and twentieth year after William ruled and held despotic sway over England, &c., there was a very heavy and pestilent year in the land. Such a malady came on men, that almost every other man was in the worst evil, &c., &c. Afterwards there came, through the great tempests, a very great famine all over England, so that many hundred men perished. Alas! how miserable and how awful a time was then! when the wretched men lay driven almost to death; and afterwards came the sharp famine and quite destroyed them, &c. The King and the headsmen loved much, and overmuch, coveteousness in gold and silver, and recked not how sinfully it might be got, provided it came to them. The King gave his lands as dearly for rent as he possibly could, &c., &c., and he recked not how sinfully the reeves got it from poor men, nor how many illegalities they did, &c Next, what in the reign of Rufus? “He had Earls in bonds who had acted against him. Bishops he cast from their bishoprics, Abbots from their abbacies, and Thanes into prison, &c. He took from his subjects many marks of gold, and more hundred pounds of silver, which he took by weight, with great unright, from the people for little need. He granted to men their woods and liberty of the chase, which was but for a while, and his calls to arms and imposts were frequent. In his sickness in 1093 he promised much and did something good, but when he recovered he brake his promises. He lost his life in 1100 on the morning after Lammas Day (August 1st) by being shot with an arrow while hunting, &c., &c. He was very vigorous and stern over his land and his men, and toward all his neighbours, and very formidable, &c., &c., and through his own covetousness he was ever tormenting this nation with an army and with unjust exactions, because in his day every right fell, and every wrong in the sight of God and of the world rose up. God’s churches he depressed, and all the Bishoprics and abbacies, whose heads died in his days, he either sold for money, or held in his own hand and let for rent, because he would be the heir of every man, whether ordained or lay.” We follow the Chronicle to Henry I.’s reign. “It is not easy (1104) to recount the miseries of this land, which it was at this time suffering through various and manifold illegalities and imposts, which never ceased nor failed. There was also a severe murrain and mortality among the cattle and swine, disastrous seasons, severe epidemics, and several earthquakes, not to mention that his moneyers (mint-masters) debased his coin, so that a man who had at market a pound, could by no means buy therewith twelve penny worth, &c.” We pass over the rebellion of the Barons in Henry II.’s reign and their severe repression ; together with the necessity under which Richard I. was to subdue John’s stubborn resistance at the Nottingham Castle; and we return to Ralph de Greasley in the thirteenth year of King John. He made a to him fortunate match in marrying Isabella de Muschamp. She was the sole heiress of the lordships belonging to her family, which had descended to them from Robert de Muschamp, who had been senescal (steward) to Gilbert de Gaunt, and whose estates were held by military service. It was a great accession of wealth to Ralph de Greasley, and doubtlessly gave him increased importance in respect of his enhanced military obligations to the crown. There is, however, a discrepancy in respect of the name of Ralph de Greasley’s wife. While one authority states that it was Isabella, another, viz.: the “Register de Beauvale,” in the British Museum, maintains that it was Agnes, a sister of Isabella, but that must be an error, because a contemporary official document, dated from Windsor on the 25th of June of the seventeenth of John, enjoins the King’s Sheriff of Nottingham and Derby to give full possession, without delay, to Ralph de Greasley and Isabella his wife, of her inheritance from Robert de Muschamp. But there was a hitch yet. The succession duty of £100 (2,000 or more in our money) was not paid when King John died, and the Sheriff on that account did not deliver the possession to Ralph de Greasley and his wife until the reign of Henry III. They had a daughter named Agnes. about whom Ralph, her father, had entered into an arrangement, under which he would pay the King 500 marks for his permission to marry Agnes to one Robert Lupus, and if that marriage should fall through, then he would marry her as the King should will or advise it. Eventually Agnes de Greasley married one Hugh FitzRalph (doubtlessly the Hugh FitzRanulf of the Torr Manuscripts), who was the first recorded Patron of Greasley, which was then a Rectory, of which we read in Domesday: “There was a church and priest, and wood pasture, nine quarantins long by six quarantins broad.” As there was a doubt whether Agnes or Isabella had been Ralph de Greasley’s wife, so there is a doubt as to who the Hugh FitzRalph was, who married their daughter Agnes; but it is held that he was the son of Ralph Wandesley, Lord of Selston. He was a widower when he married Agnes, having lost his first wife Idonea, and is said to have been one of the Barons who had taken up arms against King John to wring Magna Charta from the unwilling monarch. He rendered homage to Henry III., from whom in 1251 he, among other privileges, obtained a grant of free warren, dated April 10th, 36th Henry III. Hugh FitzRalph and Agnes his wife had two sons, the elder of which was named Ralph, and he had a daughter named Eustachia, who became sole heiress of all the property of the de Greasleys, and the de Muschamps of old together.
On the death of Hugh Fitz Ralph the usual post-mortem inquisition took place at Greasley. The jury consisted of Gilbert de Brinsley, Daniel de Wandesley, Robert Torkard in Kirkeby, Adam de Aldisworde, Richard de Stapilford, William Torkard, Adam le Marchal, Stephen de Brokelstone and others, and they found that Hugh Fitz Ralph (as recorded in Ilkeston, p. ii) died possessed (by the service of one Knight’s fee to the King) of 3 carucates of land, with a capital messuage; that there were 60 oxgangs of land held by villains, besides free tenants which paid 43s. 9d. per annum, one pound pepper and one pound cummm; that there were besides 14 coterells and 1windmill and pigeon house, and that there was also wood pasture, and the advowson of the Church, which was £13 6s. 8d. to the Rector, or about £270 in our money.
Eustachia, who on the death of Hugh Fitz Ralph (or Ranuif) had become sole heiress, married Nicholas de Canteloupe, one of the younger sons of the De Canteloupe’s of Hertfordshire; but there is not much known of him. He died early, not living long after his marriage, and Eustachia had by him a son named William, who was born at Lenton Priory, where possibly she may have taken refuge in those turbulent times. It is claimed that the altar tomb in the chancel of the Parish Church of Ilkeston refers to this Nicholas de Canteloupe, though of course it may be that of a later Nicholas.
Eustachia was not a very deep mourner over her husband, and notwithstanding the early youth of her son, who was born at Lenton Priory, she consoled herself by taking William de Ross of Ingmanthorp (a relative) for her second husband. But true love does not run smooth. William de Ross was had up for this marriage, to learn that the King, in whose gift the hand of Eustachia, as a widow and heiress of land held from the King in capite was, had intended her for one Alan Plunkenet, wherefore William de Ross was cast in damages and had to make amends to Plunkenet to the tune of p133 (or about £2,660 in our money) which the latter accepted (we suppose as a consolation stake).
William de Ross, as second husband of Eustachia, had entrusted to him the care of the property of William, the at Lenton Priory born son of Eustachia, while the heir himself was in the guardianship of the King. When William de Canteloupe attained manhood it became necessary that he should prove his descent, his age, and his claim to property. Letters of inquiry were therefore issued by the King from his court at Carnarvon (Prob. Act., 11th Edward I.), and in 1284 a jury declaredat Nottingham, upon oath, that William son of Nicholas de Canteloupe was born in the Abbey of Lenton, and was baptized in the Church of the said Abbey, that is to say, on Palm Sunday twenty-one years ago, and that the same William, son of Nicholas, was of full age on the said Palm Sunday last. Additional information on the same subject is given by the distinguished Mr. Godfrey in his history of the Parish and Priory of Lenton, who refers to the Calendarium Genealogicum I., 139, which tells that Nicholas de Canteloupe, who married Eustachia, daughter and heiress of Ralph, son of Fitz Ralph, was the 4th son of William de Canteloupe, Baron Canteloupe by tenure, and Seneschal to King John, and was the father of William de Canteloupe, and that William was (as above stated) baptized in Lenton Priory on Palm Sunday, 1263.
William de Canteloupe in his riper years accompanied the King into Scotland after having been raised to the dignity of a Baron, as shown by the Calendar of Patent Rolls of Edward I. After that King’s death he was summoned to the Council of the Kingdom about the burial of the deceased King and the marriage and coronation of Edward II., and in 1308 he attended the King at Carlisle with all arms and horse equipments, which were due from tenure by military service of his estates. Some Greasleites will have accompanied their lord in that expedition, which was disastrous. The battle of Bannockbourne followed, and as William de Canteloupe was not heard of again it is to be inferred that he lost his life in the overthrow of the King’s army.
He left, it appears, two sons, the elder of whom was also named William, but who died without issue, and was succeeded by his younger brother Nicholas.
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William de Ross had, by the courtesy of England, been allowed to enjoy during his lifetime the estates of the De Canteloupes as Eustachia’s second husband, but when he died in about 1303 the properties reverted to the De Canteloupes in the direct line of succession, and so came to that Nicholas de Canteloupe, by whom the Nottinghamshire branch of that family attained their highest distinction. He was Knighted in 1326, which opened to him a career, which he could not otherwise have attained unto. Edward III. was only about 14 years old when he led an army against the Scots, who were doing great damage in Yorkshire. Our young Knight, Nicholas de Canteloupe was, as behoved him, in the King’s army, together with his retinue; but Edward III.’s army was too considerable for the Scots liking, who found that discretion is the better part of valour, and retired to their country with but little loss. A few years later Nicholas is met with on some business of the King’s in Flanders, perhaps in connection with his marriage with Philippa of Haynault, and it appears that he stood in good credit with the King, who placed much confidence in him. When Edward III. had, at last, a good opportunity to deal with Scotland, he set Balliol on that throne, and secured the cession of Berwick, the governorship of which he bestowed oii Nicholas de Canteloupe. But a few years later Nicholas is again in Flanders on the King’s business, and still later on, he is fighting in that terrible but victorious battle of Cressy, the most renowned which England until then had ever been engaged in.
It is interesting enough to have been able to follow Nicholas so far, but we have to see another side of his character. He came of a long distinguished family, some of whom had held high positions in the Church and State, and who were known for their pronounced religious tone of the type of their days, and to have been benefactors to religious houses of importance. Nicholas seems to have inherited, or to have been brought up to that tendency, somewhat spiced perhaps, with an undefined kind of religious awe and superstition, and it is no wonder that his mind run in the channel of his progenitors, and that he was thus led to imitate them in benefitting religious establishments; only he outstepped them in that direction so far, as to become not only a helper to, but the founder of a considerable Priory. He was a discreet and confidential servant of his King, and possibly a useful diplomatist, and he was a noble and brave warrior too, but he had withal his human side of a kind of speculative expectation from temporal outlays for spiritual advantages.
We read that when Jacob was fleeing from his brother Esau, and when awaking from his sleep, with a stony pillow under his head (he had had a dream), or vision of a ladder set up on earth, the top of which reached to heaven, on which the angels of God were ascending and descending, above which the Lord himself was standing, and Jacob said how dreadful is this place, this is no other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob vowed a vow and said: if God will be with me, and will keep me in the way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God, and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house, and of all that thou shall give me, I will surely give the tenth to thee. A feeling in some way akin to that has been and still is with many people in times of danger, or in the anticipation thereof. How many for instance like William Rufus make good and earnest resolutions in times of serious illness; only unlike warriors of Nicholas de Canteloupe’s type they afterwards forget their solemn promises. Not so the then Lord of Greasley. It was no uncommon thing for warriors on the eve of battle to vow what they would do for God’s cause, if spared from falling on the bloody field, and we must bear in mind that in Nicholas’s time, there was a generally accepted belief in works, and costly sacrifices as a means by which to secure the favour of heaven, and the prospering providence of God; besides which the assurance of papal indulgences and plenary absolutions were greatly influencing the mind of men. From what we shall find of what Nicholas did, it would seem that he must have long and frequently pondered in his ardent mind over the plans of the priory which he had resolved to found in his park of Greasley, and for which, when he had brought them to maturity, he had to apply for his King’s leave to execute his purpose. That was not always free from difficulties, because it might touch the royal exchequer, and it might besides entail loss of military service from lands which were held on that tenure, and from the King in capite. For these reasons, and to ascertain that the King would not be a loser, an inquisition was generally ordered; but Nicholas was in the good graces of the monarch, and when making his petition as a loyal Knight and noble, had his request granted him on Sept. 22nd of the 16th year of the reign of Edward III.; while two years earlier in the month of April of the 14th year of that King’s reign leave had been granted him to fortify his mansion house at Greasley, which from thenceforth became a castle. Nicholas de Canteloupe’s heart will have beaten high, when in distinction from other Barons around him he would be the Lord of a fortified castle; and being in possession of the King’s leave to proceed with the founding of his religious house, he accordingly set to work to do it in a manner worthy of his resolve. Messrs. Norman and Martin in their history of Ilkeston give the preamble together with an extract of Nicholas de Cantaloupe’s foundation Charter of the Priory of Beauvale, taken from the Register of W. Zouch, Archbishop of York, but Dugdale and Thoroton gave the Charter in extenso from the Register of Beauvale, which is to the following effect:
“Nicholas de Cantaloupe, Lord of Ilkeston in Derbyshire, &c., having obtained licence of King Edward the Third, dated 22nd September in the sixteenth year of his reign, founded a monastery in his Park of Greasley, for a Prior and twelve monks of the order of the Carthusians, to which he gave ten pounds per annum of land and rent in the towns of Greyseley and Selleston, together with the Park of Gryseley, and the advowson of the Churches of both the said towns, which he got appropriated: and this he devoutly did for the glory of Almighty God, and the increase of religion and the Divim Worship, and for the good or healthful state of the said King Edward III., and of William la Zouch, the Lord Archbishop of York, his most dear Lord and cousin, and of the Lord Henry de Lancastre, Earl of Derby, and of himself and Joane his wife, and William his son and heir, while they should live and for the souls of the said King, and of all the rest, when they should die, and for the soul of Tiphania his former wife, and for his father and mother and all his progenitors and heirs; wherefore he by special Deed, gave to God and the blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the Prior and Monks of the Carthusian order in the Monastery called Bellavallis which he had builded for them in the said park of Gryseley, and their successors there serving God according to the Customs, order and Rule of the Mother Church of the Carthusians, the said Monastery and Park of Gryseley adjoining, and three hundred acres of land, ten messuages, twelve bovats, with the appurtances of Gryseley, which Richard le Carter, John Pygot, Robert Newbell, John le Carter, Thomas Dey, Roger Pygot, Hugh son of Agnes, John le Maisterman, Henry le Cartre, Richard Sareson, Roger Dey, Thomas de Fulwode, and Hugh de Pynkeston, his natives and villains held of him in the said Town in Villanage, together with the said Villains, their Chattels, sequel and Sects, and also three shillings rent of John Witteberwe in the Town of Selleston, and four shillings and four pence of the like yearly rent of John Arnold in the same town, also thirteen messuages and seventeen bovats and a half with their appurtenances in the said town of Selleston, which Richard le Coke, John above the Kirk, Nicholas le Schipherd, William le Tayllour, William son of Richard le Wright, Theo. le Mongh, Nicola who had been the wife of Richard le Wright, John son of Richard le Wright, Robert son of William Coke, and Thomas Cabald his natives, held in the town in Vilianage, together with those natives and all that were born of them, and their suits and Services, and also likewise the said advowsons of the Churches of the said towns of Greyseley and Selleston, with all their rights and appurtances. He also granted that the said Prior and Monks and their successors, should have common of pasture for all manner of cattle whatsoever, wheresoever they couched, or from wheresoever they came through his whole Dominion or Lordship and Demesnes of Gresly and Selleston, in all places and times where his other Freeholders had, and that they should have stone for all the work of the Church and their houses, and marie to marle their lands in all the said places, except in his Park of Kirkstall. To this Deed were witnesses, his said Cousin the Archbishop of York, Richard, Bishop of Durham, Thomas of Lincoln, Roger de Coventre and Lichfield, Henry de Lancastre, Earl of Derby, William Earl of Northampton and William Earl of Hundyngton, John de Cressy, William Dencourt, William de Grey of Sandiacre, Knights, William his own son and heir, and Nicholas son of that William, Robert Barnack, William Facumbrige and others.”
This was dated at Greyseley the 9th December, 1343, the 17th of Edward III., as was also another of his, partly to this purpose, but something shorter which had other witnesses, viz: Sir Richard de Wyleby, Robert de Strewley, William de Gray, John de Annesley, Knights, Hugh Martell, John Attecarre, William Danvers and others.
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Thoroton adds here that, from the last foregoing, it appears probable, at least, that in those days they were not more precise in the date of their deeds, in reference either to time or place of sealing, than they are now (i.e., in Thoroton’s time). Four years later, in 1347, the 21st of Edward III., another Deed of gift was executed at Gryseley on the 20th of October, to which the names of the same former witnesses were appended, except that the Bishop of Durham then was not Thomas but Richard, who had succeeded him, and also John instead of Thomas of Lincoln, and the only other difference is that the signature of William Grey of Sandiacre is wanting. By this second Deed of gift it is written that :— Nicholas de Canteloupe, his son and heir, William, having by his instant application obtained licence of the King for twenty pound per annum of Land and Rents in the Towns of Gresly, Seleston, Watnowe, Kynmarly and Newthorpe, to be given to the said Prior and Convent and their successors, did for the same reasons, and as before is expressed, give five messuages, one mill, and forty acres of land, with the appurtenances in Gresley and Watnowe, and all his demesne of the said Town of Selleston, and a great company of villains, with the messuages and bovats of land, which they held in Watnowe, with all their cattles, suits and sequels, and sixteen shillings and sixpence yearly rent out of the land which Thomas Gratton held of him in Selleston, and as much out of the Lands and Tenements which Ioane, who has been the wife of William le Cressy, held in the same Town, and divers small rents in Greseley, and the Reversions of twenty-one acres which Thomas le Purchaceour held of him for life in Watnow, and a messuage and six acres of land on the north side of the Castle in Greseley, which William de Beaurepayr held for life, and another of five acres and one rood of land, which William de Worthington and Agnes his wife held for life, on the north side of the Castle also, &c., &c.
But besides the foregoing, the Priory of Beauvale had other gifts granted to it, as in King Richard II.’s time, who granted licence to Elizabeth, who had been the wife of Sir Brian Stapleton, the younger, Knight, and to William de Rither Chr. and Sibyll his wife, to give to the Prior and Convent of Beauvale, each of them forty shillings a-year, out of their respective moieties of the Manors of Kirkby Orblawers and Kereby, for two monks, more especially to celebrate in the Church of Beauvale for the souls of William de Aldburgh, his son and heir (brother of the said Elizabeth and Sibyll) and Margery his wife, and of Edward Balliol Chr., which they did accordingly, and William Rither and Sibyll his wife (Mich. 18th Richard II.) levied a fine; which rents after some time of intermission of payment, William de Rither, Knight, his son, and Robert de Rither, Knight, his son and heir, restored to Thomas Metheley, the Prior, and his successors, for forgiving them all the arrears, except forty shillings of silver, which they were to satisfy to the Noble and Revd. Guy Fairfax, which he had paid to the said Prior and Convent, for which the said William and Sibyll, and William and Robert, their wives and children in their lives, and after their deaths, were to have full participation in all the Masses, Prayers, Psalms, Watchings, Disciplines, Fastings, Alms, and other spiritual exercises of the said house of Beauvale.
Again, William de Aldburgh, Chr. for the soul of his lord, Edward de Balliol, King of Scotland, and Elizabeth his wife, and that himself might be as one of the founders, and the King of Scotland as a principal benefactor, in the participation of the spiritual benefits of that house, with some others also of his next kindred, did by his Deed, bearing date at Willey Haye the 10th February, 1362, in the 37th year of Edward III., give and confirmed the same Haye of Willey to the said Prior and Convent of Beauvale, which he had of Sir Thomas Metham, Knight, heir to his great grandfather Adam, son of Adam Harnelton, to whom King Edward the First granted it in the 9th year of his reign, reserving ten pounds per annum rent, to be paid yearly into the Exchequer, which said Fee Farm rent of £10 King Edward III., 11th January in the 32nd year of his reign, granted to his beloved servant John Attewode for term of his life, and the reversion of it, 26th May in the 37th year of his reign, to his beloved cousin Edward de Balliol, King of Scotland, and William de Aldburgh, Chr., with license likewise for them to give to the Priory, which they did the same year, having obtained of John Attewode the possession also, so that the said Edward Balliol, King of Scotland, might from thenceforward likewise enjoy all the benefits of the house, as one of the founders.
The next benefaction which came to the Priory was by John de Gaunt, who granted license to Sir William de Finchenden, Knight, Richard de Ravensor, Archdeacon of Lincoln, Mr. Nicholas de Chaddesden, Richard de Chesterfield, and Richard de Tissington, Clark, to give the Manor of Etwelle in Derbyshire to this Priory, to pray for him while he lived, and for his soul, and the soul of his wife Blanch when dead, which John de Ryboef also released to the Prior and Convent of Beauvale.
The Priory must also have had some benefits from Lord John Grey of Codnor, either directly, or that he may have been the overlord of some benefactors, because Madox in his Formul. Angl. gives an account of the Priors of Beauvale having done homage to that nobleman.
Lastly, John, Duke of Lancaster, granted the Priory a tun of Gascoign wine yearly while he lived, which from the strict frugality of the life of the Carthusians may have been bestowed on them to assist them in their possible hospitalities, or for use in their infirmary.
From observing the names occurring in Nicholas de Canteloupe’s foundation Charter of the Priory it appears to us that the writer of the Ilkeston history must be mistaken in his conjecture that the “Cressy” of Selston had his name bestowed on him by the villagers, owing to his having been with de Canteloupe in the Battle of Cressy. It seems, on the contrary, that three of the de Cressy’s were the three first Rectors of Greasley, tempus Henry III. and Edward I., and that they came from a family of position, whose pedigree is given in Tlirosby’s Thoroton, vol. iii. pp.416—419. Again, William de Cressy’s name (a knight) is met with as early as in the sixth year of Edward I., and William, son of Roger de Cressy, in the thirteenth of Edward II. So also William de Cressy, and Johan his wife (Patents), as appears from a fine in he 34th year of Edward I., held at Selston, with William de Gratton and Isabel his wife (Tenants), a moiety each of a considerable property, consisting together of two messuages, two carucates, 37 bovats of land, 20 acres meadow, 6 cottages, 2 watermills, 8 acres of wood, and 40 shillings rent, with the appurtenances. The Cressy’s of Selston, therefore, so far from deriving their name from the Battle of Cressy, held considerable property in that township, as well as in Wandesley, as early as in Edward I.’s reign, or some 40 years before the Battle of Cressy was fought. They were probably descendants from Roger de Cressy, Lord of Hodsac, and, as coming from a younger branch of that family had settled in Selston. But enough of this digression.
We cannot but judge that the founder of Beauvale Priory, while a trusted servant of his royal master, and a brave and distinguished soldier, was a man of generous disposition and of a strong religious bent of mind. It matters not that Protestant England cannot view with approval a Christian man’s expectation of salvation in return for so much material outlay ; we are all the same entitled to acknowledge that men of the de Canteloupe’s stamp were at least acting up to what they believed would advance the spiritual interests of others and of themselves, and advance the spread and progress of religion, such as they had been brought up in. Granted, that aside from their benefactions to religious houses, &c., the dependants of the Barons of de Canteloupe’s time were held as slaves in all but the name of it, and that the territorial lords passed them on with their estates from one to another, together with all they had, or could yet possess, with even what should be born of them like so much chattel, what then?
It was a cruel and bitter condition of life, but we are not entitled to judge that long bygone past by the measure of the light and freedom of our days. The same mode of life and being of the people was the same everywhere throughout the land. They had grown up with it and knew no other, and possibly they may have felt even happy in a way, which we cannot now understand, but can we understand either the great (?) happiness of the working classes and their well-being of, say only 60 to so years ago? There are still people of that generation (though very few in number) living, who tell us what it was, and what must it have been ere then? The Barons, moreover, will have found it in their interest to shew kindness to their people perhaps, but it will naturally have been of the type of kindness which was current in their coarse days, and which, from the very condition in which they themselves were placed, were the only ones which they knew how to bestow. The whole mode of life in the country, from the crude, uniform, and not unfrequently scanty fare of the menial and villain, to probably even of the Baron’s own household, to whom many or most of the comforts of the meanest labourer of our time were a thing undreamt of, were consistent with the kind of camp life which they lived. The feudal system of the Conquest had imposed it on the nation with a strictness and severity which, with the but crude system of agriculture and pastoral pursuits, together with the insanitary condition of the country, left the latter long undeveloped and the nation in abject subjection. But the root of the crying evil lay deeper than all that. The mode and system of education were utterly wrong. The Church had not done her duty. All Europe was suffering from the same evil. The key of knowledge was withheld. Ignorance and bondage, dependent on one another, stalked the world together, and were so held together from lust of dominion. The nobles themselves had been taught no better than they did. Had it been otherwise, their generous spirit might have responded to a higher and purer tuition, as they had done to what they knew. The very priesthood was indifferently instructed. Thought’s wings had no room given them to expand, and all expressions of them were stifled. We cannot blame, but we feel for the sufferers. How many in that unreflecting age rested themselves honestly on what had been impressed and imposed on them, and how many others honestly believed that they served God meritoriously in seeking refuge from the world in monastic institutions. With the Carthusians in special that certainly must have been the case, for so far from their rules and mode of life having been attractive and inviting, they were forbidding; and whosoever sought their houses for a deeper devotion, and as they believed for higher service to God, must have felt persuaded in their mind, that they gave themselves up to greater holiness here with a title to superior blessedness hereafter. The fault was not theirs, but lay at the door of the tuition which they had received. But enough of that. The Priory of Beauvale was founded. The Rectory of Greasley frommi that day became a Vicarage, and with that day too, the people of Greasley belonged nolens volens to new masters. We must for the present stop here. The continuation of Greasley and Beauvale belong to other chapters, and will be taken up when we deal with the Parish Church of Greasley, and with the hamlet of Beauvale.
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Hemshell
Hempshill Hall, overgrown with creeper and semi-derelict in 2004 (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
HEMSHELL also Hempshill, Hemdeshull, and even Hems Hall is in Domesday written Hamessel.
Mr. Edmunds has rather surprised us by his derivation of “Hem.” He wrote that it is a corruption from “Emma,” the mother of Edward the Confessor, and “shel” as coming from “sceol” a shallow place. We do not think that it is necessary to dwell on that. We. prefer “Taylor” who on page 124 of his book derives “hem” from “ham” “a home” and on page 485 “sell “(AngloSaxon) a “cottage.” It would thus mean a “cottage home” and such possibly it may have been before a good house was erected there. The Hamlet is not mentioned in Spelman’s Villare Anglicum. There was according to Domesday in Hemshel soc to Hockenale of six bovats to the geld. The land was one carucate, and there were besides two socmen, and two bordars with two carucates and four acres of small wood. This latter soc lay partly in Bulwell and partly in Watenot, and was William Peverall’s. Some of this belonged to the Parish of Greasley, which had an early Chapel in the place. It was owing to this Chapel that we felt that we must give to Hemshel priority over Kimberley in our history, the Church of the latter place being of a date over 50 years later. To give this difference clearly we gather from the Torre Manuscripts as follows: “ There was a Chapel in this town of Hindeshall, for on the 29th of January, 1240, Walter de Gray, Archbishop of York, confirmed the grant which Hugh Fitz Ralph, patron, and Hugh de Cressy, Rector of the Church of Greselang made to Sir Robert de Vavasour and his heirs, touching the having a chantry in this chappell.” The chantries began to suffer under the spoliation edict of Henry VIII., but if it was not then done away with, it will surely have been so under the Chanteries Act of Edward VI., in 1547, and with it probably the Chapel itself will have been suppressed. We know nnthing more of it after that date. The more considerable part of Hemshel belonged to the Strelleys. It came in the Division to the Sacheverells and was subsequently purchased by the Ascough family, descending from Sir Robert Ayscough in the absence of heirs male, to his daughter Jane, who married Gervas Rosell of Radcliff, Esq., as his second wife. Thoroton mentions another house in Hemshel, with grounds belonging thereto, which was the Willoughby’s of Wollaton, but was in Thoroton’s time the inheritance of the Shepheards.
The part of Hemshel which belonged to Greasley, and which comprises the dwelling house in which Mr. Houghton now lives, remained with the Mother Church of Greasley until the Ecclesiastical District Parish of Kimberley was formed. Another part which also belonged to Greasley was at Cinderhill, and comprised both the Colliery there and also the Cottages which are situate opposite to where the road for Broxtow branches off from the Nottingham road. Both of these, as well as that part of Hemshel which was of Greasley, became included in the new parish of Kimberley. We see from the foregoing that a considerable of Hemshel belonged to the Strelleys, who like many other landed proprietors had taken their name from their chief manor. The name originally was Stralley, also Stradleg Walter de Stradlegh married Isilia, widow of William de Moiz, about the time of Henry I., by whom he had a son named Sampson, who gave account for ten marks of his amercements in the forest.
Cottages to the rear of Hempshill Hall (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
We inter alia meet also with Simon de Stradley in Richard I’s. time as having had to suffer on account of having been a partisan of Earl John, afterwards King of England; and there is a curious note, which Thoroton has about a member of a branch of this family, i.e., that, Robert Strelly of Woodborow was in the 9th year of Henry VII. bound in forty shillings by one Simon Digby, Esq., that he should not chevish nor borrow any sum of goods or money of any person, nor bind himself, nor enter into mortgage. The Strelleys of Strelley seem to have lost their importanceif when two sons of a John and Sancia Strelley died young and the estates devolved upon the four remaining daughters, Isabel, wife of Clement Lowe; Margaret, wife of John Pawtrell of Hallam; Elizabeth, wife of William Ayscough, and Ann, wife of Sir Richard Stanhope of Rampton. Only Strelley itself and Bilborough then went to Sir Nicholas Strelley, the younger brother of John, and he died in 1560.
We are able to trace what property the Strelleys had of the Hemshel properties. There was a post mortem inquisition held (vide W. P. W. Phillimore), which took place at Trowell on the 12th of November, 1488, the fourth year of Henry VII., respecting the properties held by Robert Strelley, Knight, then deceased. The Escheator on the occasion was Thomas Hunt, and the jury consisted of the following: John Brunnesley of Trowell, gentleman, Henry Lamyng, of Bilburgh, gentleman, Robert Lamyng, of the same place, gentleman, Richard Skevyngton, of Cossall, gentleman, Nicholas Whiteley of Kymberley, Thomas Wryght, of Bilburgh, Thomas Brounsten, of Trowell, Thomas Burton, of Stapulford, and John Middleton. who on their oath say: “that Robert Strelley, Knight, was seized in his demesne as of fee, on the day he died, of the manor of Strelley and advowson of the Church, 2 oxgangs of land in the town of Strelley; 1 messuage, 3 oxgangs of land and meadow at Bramcote; and 10 oxgangs of land at Hemshel, which last named 10 oxgangs of land were held of the Prior of Beauvale, &c., &c., &c., and that John Strelley, Esq., is the son and heir of Robert Strelley, Esq., and is aged 40 years and upwards.”
The Sacheverels who held property at Hemschel were descendants of the family of that name who had monumental memorials in the Church of Kingston upon Soar, and more of them and in better preserved condition in the Church of St. George at Barton.
The Aescoughs of Hemshel appear to have been descendants of Sir William Ayscough, a judge, who had the moiety of a manor at Basford, which had been the Cockfields, from whom it came to the Taylboys and so descended to the Ayscoughs.
It remained in that family until Sir Roger Ayscough sold it among freeholders. In Throsby’s time Hempshill contained two or three houses and at that time belonged to Lord Wentworth. The Greasley part of Hemshell now belongs to John Holden, of Nuttall Temple, Esq., but ecclesiastically (so far as we as Vicar of the mother parish know) it still belongs to the new Parish of Kimberley and not to Nuttall.
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Kimberley
Nottingham Road and Main Street, Kimberley, c.1905.
KIMBERLEY also Kinmarlie, Kimmerley and Kimberlie, in the Villare Anglicum Kimberleigh, stands in Domesday as Chinemarelie. Taylor refers for the meaning of “lie” (as in the Domesday name of this township), to Kemble’s Codex Dipl., from which it appears to be the same with “leah,” “lea,” and “ley,” i.e., an open place in a forest; and Mr. Edmonds writes that Kimber (Cumber) and Kimmer were perhaps the name of some Theyn named “Cymba” or “Gumba.” May we suggest that it it may be of a same root with Cynedrith, the wife of Offa, the Mercian King?
We shall, in respect of this township, first avail ourselves of Domesday and of Throsby’s Thoroton, which are authentic and a safe guide. In the Confessor’s time Asor had in Chinemarly a manor of four bovats, and Grimchetel (also Grimshel and Grunshel) had also four bovats for his manor, the land being 1 carucate. Besides these, however, as we shall find in Newthorpe, Grimshel had also a “berew” in Kimberley, i.e., a fenced-in place or villa (according to Taylor), a fortress on a hillside. Kimberley became Peveril’s fee, who had there 2 socmen, 1 vill. and 2 bordars, having 3½ carucates with small wood to the extent of 4 quarentens in length and 2 quarentens wide. Peveril gave it to one of his men, whose name is not recorded; but his descendants appear to have assumed the name of the place. Throsby writes that this manor seems to have been held by a family, who had their name from their residence here. In the 9th of Edw. II., it went for the fourth part of a villa, and Robert de Kynmarley was certified to be Lord of it. The Domesday survey does not say that there was a Church here in the Confessor’s time. It was probably an off-spring from Greasley, and the first mention we meet with of one at Kimberley is in 1298,f when Robert de Kymmerley was the patron, and John de Kymmerley the first recorded Rector of that Parish. The next Rector’s name was John de Curtenale, appointed in 1304, and unless he was succeeded by an incumbent, whose name and appointment is not recorded, de Courtenale must have held the living for 42 years; for the next known appointment did not take place until 1346.
The estate of Kimberley passed in the 9th year of Edward II (1316) for the fourth part of a villa, and Robert de Kimmerley was certified to be Lord of it. He had a son named John, who was a Cleric and succeeded him, but who, in the 9th year of Edward III. (1336) passed both the manor and the advowson of the Church, together with all his land at Newthorpe, which he had of the gift and feofment of his father, and all his goods to Sir John de Monte, the at that time Rector of Greasley.
St James' Street, Kimberley (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
We must here digress to redress a wrong done to (or a mistake made by the author of the history of Ilkeston, respecting) John de Monte. We feel that we have a right to infer, from what we read in Ilkeston, that the Rector of Greasley so administered his Lord and Patron’s estate as to enable himself to become the purchaser of some estates for himself. It is easy to say that, for de Monte is long gone to his rest, and cannot now answer for himself, but he was one of our predecessors in the Incumbency of Greasley, and we are glad to be enabled to say so much about him, as we trust will clear the memory of his name from an unworthy stain. For that purpose we refer our readers to the Calendar of Patent Rolls of the 3rd year of Edward III. (1329), Part I., which any one may go to see at the Free Reference Library. That testimony is to the following effect: “ Nicholas de Canteloupe, going beyond the seas, had letters nominating William, Parson of the Church of Ilkeston, and John de Monte, his attorneys for three years.’ “ Protection with clause nolumus, for the same period for the said Nicholas.” De Monte, therefore, was only joint attorney in the management of the estates. Possibly the Rector of Ilkeston was manager of the Derbyshire estate, and de Monte for those in our county. If not so, then the Rector of Ilkeston must be equally culpable with de Monte, and if the latter’s attorney-ship was confined to the Greasley estates only, then we may fairly consider the utter unlikelihood of his being able (even if he would) to extract so much for himself, during the short term of three years only, out of an estate, which after all that de Canteloupe had given to his Priory, was sufficiently indifferent, not to have sufficed de Canteloupe for his positional needs, without the much larger estates in Derbyshire, &c. Besides, the Baron seems to have been a man who knew what belonged to him, and to have looked fairly well after and into it; for he was now and then rather short of money, of which we will give an instance. The Calendar of the Close-Rolls of the 8th year of Edward III., Jan. 3rd, tell the tale that: “Nicholas de Canteloupe acknowledges that he owes to William, Archbishop of York, £100, to be levied in default of payment of his lands and chattels in the County of Nottingham, which acknowledgment the Chancellor received.”
We beg from the foregoing to say that we have no desire to cause painful feelings to the author of Ilkeston, to whom we trust to have given a satisfactory answer touching our predecessor; and he will no doubt agree with us that peculations of the kind, together with secret commissions to the detriment and damage of proprietors, are rather the complements of our days, than of those of de Monte’s, which do not seem to us to have well lent themselves to the like.
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We must now return to the Rector of Greasley, whom we left in the possession of the Manor of Kimberley and the advowson of the Church there, together with all the land which John de Kynmarley had at Newthorpe, &c. That transfer was made to him in 1336. Nicholas, as we have seen, went over the seas 8 years before then for 3 years, and will therefore have returned some 5 years before de Monte secured Kimberley. Three years afterwards, in the 12th year of Edward III., we find the Rector of Greasley conveying all that he had secured from John de Kynmarlie to Nicholas de Canteloupe, which Deed was confirmed by Richard del Hall, of Little Hallam, who probably was a prospective heir of de Monte’s, else his confirmation of the conveyance would have been of little use, if of any. We have to pass over 17 years more, and then in the 29th year of Edward III. Nicholas de Canteloupe (as the Torre Manuscripts inform us) passed the same property, except the Church, to Robert Barhak (or Barnack) and William de Braydiston (a cleric), who the same year settled it on Hugh de Cressy of Selleston for life, and afterwards on the Prior and Convent of Bevall. The Borough Records of Nottingham throw a little side light on the type of the religion of the Barnack family: One Nicholas Barnack and Margery his wife being in 1397, called upon to answer for themselves in an action brought against them by Richard de Watenow (a clerk), who by his attorney John Breadsall, claimed to recover from them the sum of six shillings and eightpence, &c., for an indulgence obtained for them at Rome by Master Thomas de Kirkby six years before, in 1391. The action failed, but it shews nevertheless, what had taken place.
Manor Farm lies a short distance from the site of the demolished Kimberley Chapel (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
Hugh de Cressy (and Cecilia his wife), on whom Braydiston had settled the above part of the Kimberley property for life, did not wait more than four years, when in the 33rd year of Edward III., they released the possession and lands at Newthorpe to the Prior and Convent of Beauvale for £7 10s. per annum during Hugh de Cressy’s life, and £4 l0s. per annum during Cecilia’s life, if she overlived him, to begin after his death, for which, in case of non-payment they reserved to themselves the right to distrain in the Priory lands in Selleston, Watnow, Gryseley, and the Moorhouses. We must observe here that the de Kymberley’s interest in Newthorpe must, inter alia, have been in respect of Fulwood, as in the history of that hamlet will appear, and it is certain that the family had also landed interest in Watnow Chaworth, for of their manor there we shall find that Joan, the relict of Stephen de Kinmarlie, held two parts in dower, which, during her husband’s lifetime will have been held by him, by what was called the courtesy of England, i.e., in the right of his wife.
The Church of Kimberley, which as already shewn had been conveyed to Nicolas de Canteloupe was in 1339 settled by him on his Priory of Beauvale, and on the 24th September, 1448 was united to that of Greasley, and made subject to it as the Mother Church, so as all and singular the Parishioners of Kinmerley from thenceforth do repair to the Church of Griseley for sacraments, sacramontals and burials, &c., &c.
Throsby, Vol 2, p. 172, gives a drawing of some ruins which he believed to have been the remains of a chapel, which years ago some persons had told us, that from what they thought it might have been a chapel of ease belonging to Greasley; but we believe that the remains really were the ruins of the once small Parish Church of Kimberley which needed not to have been of larger proportions, since as Thoroton writes, there were as late as in the 7th year of Henry VI. but 10 householders in that Parish. Throsby speaking of Kimberley, and the said ruins writes: “The ancient Chapel of Kimberley has not much relation to the Forest. It stands without the boundaries, but was taken on an excursion to the Forest in 1792. It has but little about it toarrest attention, and it is not so much as mentioned in Thoroton’s history of the village, which by his account was but a small place about two centuries ago, now (that is in Throsby’s time) it is of considerable magnitude. It is in the Parish of Greasley. The village is one of the most romantic I have seen in these parts. Its site is extraordinarily diversified. Some of the dwellings perch upon the eminence, others sit snugly on the side, and some on the base; comparing little things with great, the travelling of an insect over a succession of anthills, is like that of a man over the lanes and passages through the village.” What would Throsby now say, when much of what seemed to him so romantic has made room for a populous and thriving township of tough practical every day work and business, with a Church and several other places of worship of considerable proportions in it, together with several Schools, and even a Branch Bank in the Township. The Chapel ruins, of which Throsby gave a drawing, betoken a much earlier construction than a chapel of a later date might be expected to exhibit. They have evident indications of a Norman character about them even though in paucity of design, and it can be easily noticed from the sketch which we here reproduce, that the entrance porch had at some time been altered, together with a window over it, an arch of which can still be seen though blocked or built up.
Another part of the Kimberley property which came to Nicolas de Canteloupe from De Monte, went away with Greasley from the Canteloupe family by succession to the La Zouches, descending (as an inquisition taken in Yorkshire on the 26th of February of the 14th year of Richard II. shews) to William, son of William La Zouche Chr., who, long before his death, settled the Castle of Greasley on William, Lord Ross, of Hamlock Chr., and others about the third year of Henry V. But the La Zouches continued to hold the property until it was forfeited by William Lord Zouche who suffered attainder, upon which on the 7th March in the first year of Henry VII. it was granted to Sir John Savage, junior. Respecting this grant we have a full explanation given us from an inquisition taken at Nottingham on the 9th of May, of the 19th year of Henry VIII., 1527. (See W. P. W. Phillimores, Exchequer copy: Excheator’s Inq. p. m. file 742, No. 3.) The Ecscheator was John Hercy, (after the death of Sir John Savage, Senior, Knight.), and the jury consisted of . . . . Blackenall, gentleman, Thomas Revell, gentleman, Richard Pyerpoints, gentleman, John Henryson, gentleman, Edward Farneworth, yeoman, William Gadde, yeoman, Robert Kylburn, yeoman, Richard Scott, yeoman, and William Sewall, yeoman, who say that:
“Sir John Savage, senior, Knight, did not die seized of any manors, lands or tenements in the County, in demesne or reversion because they (the Jurors) say that King Henry VII. was seized in his demesne as of fee, by reason of an act of forfeiture in his Parliament at Wesminster on 7th Nov. first Henry VII. (1485), of the Castle, manors, and Lordships of Greasley, Kymberley, Granby and Sutton, and so seized by his letters patent, dated 7th March, 1st Henry VII. (1485-6), granted the said Castle, manors and Lordships to John Savage, father of the said Sir John, by the name of John Savage, junior, which late were of Sir John Zouche, Knight. &c., &c., &c., &c.” The jury’s testimony in this case is a long one, which beyond the foregoing gives an account of the John Savages, senior and junior, having together been concerned in the murther of John Pouncefote for which they had to pay 1000 marks in charity for the latter’s soul, and 200 marks yearly to the King, &c., &c. &c. These conditions must have been complied with, otherwise the properties enumerated in this inquisition would not have remained at the disposal of the Savage family, who sold the same to Sir John Manners, the ancestors of the Dukes of Rutland.
A last remaining part of Kymberley, &c., which has been shown to have come to Beauvale Priory, through the de Cressy’s, who had it for life from Robert Barnack and William de Braydiston, to whom it had been passed by Nicolas de Canteloupe, was at the dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII. granted to Sir William Hussy, as will appear in Newthorpe and Greasley.
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Holy Trinity Church and Rectory, Kimberley.
The list of the ancient Clergy of Kimberley, taken from the Torre Manuscripts, is as follows:—
1298. Feb. 23. Joh. de Kynmerley. Patron, Robt. de Kynmerley.
1304. Decr. Joh. de Curtenale (died). Patron, Robert de Kynmerley.
1346. Augt. 17. Ths. West de Malton. (Resigned for the Vicarage of North Kelsey, Linc. Dioc.) Patron, Nicholas de Canteloupe.
1348. April 4th. Joh. de London (died). Patron, Nicholas de Canteloupe.
1351. Jany. 7th. Tho. de Shepeley ye! Shilpeley. (Resigned for the Vicarage of Selston). Patron, Nicholas de Canteloupe.
1364. Feb. 14. Joh. de Arnbale. (Resigned for the Church of Letheley). Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1368. Augt. 3d. Philip Helwe. Resigned. Uoh. de Kymerley died). Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1396. July 25. Will. de Broghton. Resigned. Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1398. Nov. 17. Richard Webster. John Gate-less, resigned for the Vicarage of Billesfeld, Linc. Dioc. Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1401. July 4th. Robt. Bassingham. (Will. Hawberks) resigned for the Church of Hareston, Linc. Dioc. Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1403. Jany. 28th. Robt. de Swepeston. (Joh. Ashe) resigned for the Church of Elmedon, Lond. Dioc. Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1413. Decr. 22d. Will. Twyford. Resigned. Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1414. July 17th. Hen. Brese. Resigned. Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1416. April 23d. John Smyth. Patron, Prior and Convent of Bella Valle.
1424. Feb. 23d. Fr. Tho. Gloucester, Canon of S. Trinity, London. Patron, Chapter of York, by lapse.
Only three of the ancient Clergy of Kimberley died there and ten others resigned, leaving only six of the Clergy to be accounted for, who probably were not incumbents but assisting chaplains. These circumstances speak for themselves. It may be that the sphere was a disheartening one, and it may be that the Patronage was in fault. We leave it there. The Parish of Kimberley was after that united to Greasley, as the Mother Church (from which it probably was an offshoot at its beginning). We have given the date of it before. Probably among the scanty householders of Kimberley the cottars will have been the largest number of them at that time at Kimberley. The Borough Records help us to incidentally recover a few of the early names. John Barley was sued for trespass by Richard Redswell, bellfounder, on Dec. 10th, 1433; William Archer was with others a witness (on June 28th, 1442), to a grant of John Wolaton, of Nottingham, to John Heron, Esq.; and Nicholas Whiteley was one of the Jury who sat at the post-mortem inquisition of Robert Strelley, Knight, as seen in Hemshell, &c., &c. We deplore the deep mist which, more or less, hangs over this and all other parts of the Parish of Greasley, and which in respect of probably most interesting details is impenetrable; but the same regret is felt by all writers of the histories of ancient Parishes. It is to be hoped that all incumbents will at least now take care to set up a kind of Parish Chronicle, in which may be recorded the chief events, if not more, of every year, which Chronicle may be left from Incumbent to Incumbent as Church property, and preserved in the Parish Chest.
If Kimberley had much increased up to the time when Throsby wrote, it had made much more progress up to 1866 when we first knew it, and though the traces of bygone rural charms were then still in evidence, and the advancing township bore still tinges of the fair and interesting village character, yet the spirit of enterprise was abroad, and energetic men who then strove honestly and hard, have by this time earned the deserved reward of industry and thrift; and not only arrived at competence and even wealth; but the respect of the public, and confidence and trust in their private and business dealings are willingly dealt out to them.
Perhaps we may be permitted here to have a glance at the industries of Kimberley long before the township acquired that prominence which now belongs to it. The earliest industry throughout the land was that of the plough. The Kings of England were strict in their requirements to maintain the cultivation of the soil, and that arable land should not be converted into pastures, otherwise villages would become depopulated from want of agricultural labour, and the monarchy would lose archers and others, to come with their Lords to the battles of their Kings. But Henry VIII.’s spoliation of the Monasteries had an unexpected effect. The men to whom the King granted the confiscated lands were not only vandals in respect of sacred buildings, but to save the cost of labour let much land go into pasture. Times had changed and were changing. It was too late for Queen Elizabeth to redress the evil by her ordinances. It was not much heeded. Then small bits of farmlands became merged into larger ones, and the larger ones into still larger, for farming in early days did not pay badly. One hears even now from living witnesses of times, when some farmer or other would have taken things comfortably, knowing such as one or two fields of his farm would pay his then small rent. But rents could naturally not remain the same when the purchasing power of money had acquired more than twenty-fold its former value. It was besides a great benefit to the country when rents were raised, because our mother-earth was then more generously treated than it had been to yield better returns; and more especially of late years, when the industry of agriculture had passed through a long and severe crisis, it was seen that the British farmer was still the man of energy, that could hold his own against adversity and competition, (though no doubt not a few of them had for various reasons to go to the wall). No doubt Kimberley had her experience both of the better and of the worse side in this matter, and yet in the, midst of her other industries and commerce she holds out in agriculture still, and what is more, shews some of the best treated farms in our neighbourhood. We do not say that there is not some grumbling here and there, but which is the time when grumbling was not. Is it not said to have become a birthright? After all, the old classic fable of a vineyard owner’s legacy to his sons of “dig, dig, dig,” has turned up a treasure. We do not all find the same amount of it, but most find it in proportion to their best endeavours, and what agriculture still means to the country is best understood when a year or two of bad seasons make a loss to the commerce and industries of the country of millions of pounds in each year. Unfortunately foreign competition has forced the farmer to embark more freely upon stock-raising, and for good or evil to avail himself of the use of labour-saving implements and machinery. Hence the farm labourer and his children are drifting into towns, and nature’s compensating balance works out, that the farmer and the village life are not the better for it; because the few of that toiling class which remain on the land feel themselves to be of so much greater importance than they have been, and may be, become proportionately more independent, besides having to be much better remunerated for their labour. The mining industry was another one, which for years of time obtained throughout the Kimberley district, and gave occupation to many who now must seek it in other Collieries, since those of Kimberley are worked out.
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Cloverlands, home of the Hansons.
That framework knitting was much in vogue throughout the Parish of Greasley is evident from the Marriage and Baptism Register of the Parish, but whether the Luddite movement of frame-breaking did mischief here we know not, but framework knitting continued here long after. There were frames worked at Newthorpe and Moorgreen as late as 1868 and some time after.
Of Shoemakers there was a large supply throughout the Parish, though not so much as now of dressmakers. Does not the latter show that the people are very much better off, and that they are able to renew their garments much oftener than 50 or even 25 years ago?
Mechanics too have increased throughout the Parish, though few of them are perhaps now as in olden times more or less versed in all branches of their trades.
Some of the latest industries of Kimberley are the lace works, which give occupation to many; and Mr. Ths. Bayley has established a leatherboard manufacture at the Giltbrook Tannery, which occupies from 150 to, we believe, 200 hands of the weaker sex. It is an industry in the process of which we were much interested when looking over the establishment, not the least agreeable impression made on us there was, the silent busy working of those engaged there, and the considerate and kindly treatment which they receive.
Lastly, though their establishment belongs to an earlier period we must mention the Kimberley Breweries. The oldest of them was that of Mr. Robert Goodall Hanson, a County Councillor, and for many years of uninterrupted succession Chairman of the Board of Guardians. His brewery had in process of time to be greatly enlarged, and the lucrative business is now the property of a limited liability company, of which Messrs. Hanson and Sons are the chief shareholders directing the business. Mr. Hanson has built a fine and commodious house for his family residence in Newdigate Lane, to which he has given the name “Cloverlands.”
Hardy & Hanson's brewery, Kimberley (Photo: A Nicholson, 2002).The other brewery was started by the late Messrs. Thomas and William Hardy, and was equally prosperous. Upon Mr. William Hardy’s retirement Mr. Thomas Hardy considerably enlarged the establishment, which is now also the property of a limited liability company, of which the family are chief shareholders and we believe directors. Mr. Thomas Hardy a few years before his demise purchased Bulwell Hall and the estate thereto belonging (together with the advowson of the parish church of Bulwell), which hall is now the family residence.
The parish of Greasley was, territorially speaking, the largest in the county, being about 20 miles in circumference, and having in one direction and another not less than 9 miles high road. The population of Kimberley in one direction, and that of Brinsley in another, had greatly increased, and the populations lay so widely scattered and so far asunder that the provision of a church, with a churchyard and parsonage, at Kimberley, had become a necessity. When that was accomplished Kimberley was, on the 11th October, 1848, by an Order of Her Majesty in Council in the Isle of Wight, constituted a district parish. It was provided however, that the ecclesiastical fees of the new parish should be retained by the then vicar of the mother church to the close of his incumbency. Under this arrangement the style of the incumbent of Kimberley was that of a perpetual curate. After the demise of the then vicar of Greasley the fees became due to the incumbent of Kimberley, who then became a vicar. Subsequently an Act was passed which gave the title of rector to any incumbent who should recover or secure some tithes for his benefice, and the first vicar of Kimberley having done that to the extent of some £20 per annum, Kimberley became once more a rectory, as in its earliest church times it had been.
The first incumbent of the new parish was the Revd. William St. George Sargent, after whose demise we, on the recommendation of a late dear friend, presented the Revd. Alexander Roberts, M.A., to the rectory, and on the latter’s resignation it was gratifying to us to present the Revd. Frederick Hart, B.A., the present incumbent, to the rectory. Since 1848, and especially 1870 odd, the parish of Kimberley has vastly progressed and increased. Not only has the town of Kimberley itself much increased, in commerce and population, but also in large and comely structures; and westward of it a new considerable township has sprung up, which may well be denominated “New Kimberley.” Still further west, on Gilthill, Hilltop, the Brook Hills, and Newthorpe Common, the population has also considerably increased and the localities are becoming increasingly thriving ones.
The boundaries of the new parish of Kimberley, as described in the above quoted Order in Council, are as follows :— “The Chapelry District of Kimberley is bounded on the north-west by the parish of Eastwood, on the west by the parish of Ilkeston, on the south-west by the township of Awsworth (which is a detached part of the parish of Nuthall) and by the parish of Cossall, on the south by the parish of Strelley, on the east by the said parish of Nuthall, on the north by the remaining part of the parish of Greasley, from which such Chapelry District of Kimberley is separated, by proceeding in a northwesterly direction up the middle of the road leading from Nuthall to Greasley, as far as Holly Lane, up the middle of which lane it proceeds westerly as far as the boundary line separating the hamlets of Kimberley and Watnall Canteloupe, along which boundary it proceeds north-westerly to the boundary of the hamlets of Moorgreen and Kimberley, along which boundary it then proceeds westerly as far as Giltbrook, and then turns southerly down that brook as far as the road from Kimberley and Nottingham to Eastwood, along the middle of which road it then proceeds northwesterly as far as the parish of Eastwood, and including in the said Chapelry District of Kimberley a certain detached portion of the said parish ‘of Greasley called Hempsill, which is bounded on the north and north-west by the said parish of Nuthall, on the east and north-east by the parish of Bulwell, on the south-east by the parish of Basford, and on the south by the parish of Bilborough.”
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Ere closing our account of Kimberley it may be interesting to our readers to know the division into small properties by sale of some of the Duke of Rutland’s property in this township in 1816:—
Lot 1. William Hanson
2. Hannah Slater
3. John Shaw and others
4. John Shaw and Thomas Shaw
5. Joseph Shaw
6. Samuel Sharp
7. John Higden
8. John Shaw, junior
9. William Widdowson
10. Martha Richards and others
11. Priscilla Walker
12. William Widdowson
13. Henry Golder
14. William Shaw
15. Joseph Smedley
16. Thomas Winfield and Robert Smith
17. Joseph Smedley
18. Edward Lindley
19. Viscount Melbourne
20. William Dennis
21. Thomas Smedley
22. John Birks
23. William Street
24. John Sisson and others
25. John Saxton
26. Thomas Birkin
27. John Godber
28. Viscount Melbourne
29. John Godber
30. John Godber
31. Edward Lindley
32. William Marlow
33. Henry Golder and others
34. William Oldershaw and others
35. John Saxton
36. John Birks
37. Anthill or Laurence Hale
38. William Mason
39. Thomas Birkin
40. John Moss
41. Thomas Birkin
42. Rt. Holden, Esqr.
43. Rt. Holden, Esqr.
44. Rt. Holden, Esqr.
45. Hannah Needham
46. Isaac Cocker
47. Priscilla Walker
48. John Greensmith
49. Elizabeth Hanson
50. Priscilla Walker
51. William Dennis
52. Elizabeth Hanson
53. Hannah Slater
54. William Dennis
55. John Moss
56. Joseph Smedley
57. John Fox
58. John Farnsworth
59. John Farnsworth
60. John Farnsworth
The chief landed property now is Earl Cowper’s.
Holy Trinity, the parish church of Kimberley, has a mission room at Hill Top, and the following denominations have also places of worship in the parish :—
The Roman Catholic Church of “Our Lady of good Counsel” at Hill Top.
St. Paul’s, of the Wesleyan New Connection.
The Primitive Methodist Chapel.
The General Baptists’ Chapels in Kimberley and Babington.
The Salvationists’ Barracks in High Street.
The Primitive Methodists’ Chapel at Jubilee,.and
The Methodist New Connection Chapel at Hill Top.
The Educational Establishments are:–
The Holy Trinity Parochial Schools.
The British School in Newdigate Lane.
The Board School in Kimberley Town, and
The Board School at Gilt Hill.
Both the Great Northern and Midland Railways have stations in the town.
The Nottingham Joint Stock Co., Limited, have a branch bank here.
There is a Post, Telegraph, and Money-Order Office in the town, and another at Giltbrook.
The area of the parish is 1,357 acres, and the population at the last Census was 6,387.
The Educational Establishments are :— The Holy Trinity Parochial Schools.
The British School in Newdigate Lane.
The Board School in Kimberley Town, and The Board School at Gilt Hill.
Both the Great Northern and Midland Railways have stations in the town.
The Nottingham Joint Stock Co., Limited, have a branch bank here.
There is a Post, Telegraph, and Money-Order Office in the town, and another at Giltbrook.
The area of the parish is 1,357 acres, and the population at the last Census was 6,387.
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Brinsley
Holy Trinity church, Brinsley.
Brinsley is also written Brunnesley, Brimslie, and Brynnesley, &c. In the Villare Anglicum, Brimsly, and in Domesday, Brunesleia. We know not how to derive the name. In Welsh Bryn is a brow or ridge of a hill. In the Anglo-Saxon a Burn, which germanised is Brunen, is applied to a stream or well, neither of which appear applicable; but Mr. Flavel Edmonds, in his traces of history in the names of places takes “Brins” as probably derived from “brea,” a prince. The “ley” as before pointed out, means an opening in the wood or forest. It is certain however that the Brun who lived at Brinsley in the Confessor’s reign is also called Brown. He is the only pre-conquest proprietor in Brinsley mentioned in Domsday, and stands there doubtlessly for so much as the Conqueror was pleased to leave him, which was a manor which paid for 4 bovats to the geld, the land being half a carucate. After the conquest Ailric held in this place from Peverel, whose fee it was, 1 carucate, and 1 villain having 1 carucate and 2 acres of meadow, and pasture wood of 6 quarantens in length and 3½ in width. This was later on held by a family (probably descending from Ailric) who assumed the name of the place.
The first of the de Brunesley’s whom Thoroton mentions was Roger, occurring in the Pipe Rolls of the I2thyear of Henry III. He left a son named Gilbert, who was at that time under age and in the custody or guardianship of Ranulf Brito of Annesley. When Gilbert became of age we meet him in the 26th year of Henry III., not only as holding the Manor of Brinsley, but also part of Trowell which was acquired in his father’s lifetime.
The principal manor of Trowell before the Norman invasion had been Verebrands and became the fee of William Ostiarius, but there were three manors besides, which were of the Taynes, each of which answered for half a carucate to the tax. One of these was Ulchel’s, another Aluric’s, and the third Uluric’s. All these became after the conquest escheated to the crown, and became the properties of the following:
Ulchel’s was given to the nuns of Sempringham.
Uluric’s came to the family of Strelley, and Aluric’s became the property of the Brunnesleys.
There was a fine levied as early as in the 20th of Henry III. between Robert the Brunnesley and William Stanley, concerning 2 bovats of land in Trowell with the appurtenances, the right of which was Robert de Brunnesley’s, and which he held at that time, paying yearly a pair of white gloves, and doing foreign service. It is this which descended to Gilbert, the son of Roger or Robert de Brunnesley, whose Brinsley inheritance from his father was of the serjeantry of Peverell, by which he had to find a horse of the value of five shillings, with sack and brock, and a halter of an half penny for forty days at his own cost in the army of Wales. Gilbert de Brunnesley died about the 7th year of Edward I., and left a son and heir named Roger, then 30 years old, who about the 3rd of Edward III left a son and heir called Galfrey, then about 50 years of age, who succeeded him at the same tenure as that at which his progenitors had been the holders. Galfrey had a son named Robert, who in the 21st year of Edward III made a fine (of succession) of fifty shillings for the estate, whose son, John de Brunnesley, did the same in the 16th of Richard II.
But we must hearken back to Brun or Brown of Brinsley. Whether or not his land had been diminished by the conqueror at Brinsley, it is certain that he was unfortunate enough to lose a manor which before the Norman invasion belonged to him at Strelley, which was rated for 3 bovats to the geld, and which was by Peverel given to one Ambrose. The Bruns or Browns had therefore to submit to the fate which had befallen so many others; but more favourable prospects were now at hand for them. A descendant of the Browns married Joan, the daughter and heiress of John de Brunnesley, above mentioned, a lineal descendant from Gilbert, son of Roger or Robert de Brunnesley, first mentioned in Brinsley, and it appears that (what was not unusual in those days), the Browns and their descendants from that time forward assumed the name of de Brunnesley from Joan, whose dower the estate was. Of this Robert Brown, husband of Joan, we find that in the 8th year of Henry VI. he levied a fine on the manor of Trowell, and on one mill and 30 acres of land in Brunnesley and Trowell, together with his moiety of the advowson of the Church of Trowel1, to John Cockfield, Esq., John Curson, Esq., Thomas Mackworth, Esq., John son of Bothe, Esq., and Robert Oelage of Brunnesley. The properties remained in the Brunnesley (Brown’s family) until it descended to Francis de Brunnesley, after whose death (as said in Trowell), from an office taken at Nottingham on the 15th March of the 39th of Elizabeth, it came to Gervas, the son of the last named Francis de Brunnesley, who sold the Trowell property to John Hacker, gentleman. But as regards the Brinsley estate we must hark back again to take up the lines from an earlier date. There was one Robert, son of Robert de Brunnesley (probably a younger son) who was outlawed the County in the 1st year of Henry IV., and so fell out from the Brinsley history; but about John, whose daughter Joan was married to Robert Brown, we have yet to learn some particulars, which we feel will not be very satisfactory to thoughtful readers. He died in about the third year of Henry V. and was succeeded by his son and heir William, and so far all is right. But then comes in a discrepancy between the Brinsley and Trowell accounts which we are unable to reconcile. We read, to our surprise, that John (father of the heiress Joan) or some other John (whose link of descent we cannot find) in about the 13th year of Edward IV., had a son also named John, then under 25 years of age, and heir of the manor. The only way in which we believe the discrepancy may be cleared up is, that possibly the Trowell account of the family is wanting a link, which the Brinsley account supplies; and then the family history stops abruptly, until we come to Francis de Brunnesley and Beatrix his wife, daughter of George N evil of Ragnel on Grove, whose son Gervas was in 1569 but some 2 years old.
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This last named member of the de Brunnesley family is the Gervas who sold the Trowell property to John Hacker, and the demesne and capital messuage of Brinsley he sold to Patrick Cocke and others; and the tenements to Gilbert Millington the plunderer of ministers in the civil wars, and one of the Committee who signed the death warrant of Charles I. As already said, Millington was of Felley, which (that is the reversion of the house and site of the Priory of Felley) was on the 7th of June of the 1st year of James I. granted to Anthony Millington and his heirs, and so had come to Gilbert, who from his acquisition of part of the Brinsley property, was treated as a Parishioner of Greasley. From this arose an erroneous subsequent idea that Felley was an extra parochial part of the Parish of Greasley, while it really belongs to that of Annesley. The Millingtons nevertheless have claimed burial rights at Greasley, and have not been hindered therein. Is the memory of men short? or is their loyalty an empty name? The Grant of Felley by James I was ill rewarded on the benefactor’s son; but then, Gilbert Millington had ere then earned for himself a character of doubtful worth and repute. His first wife, as we learn from Lady Hutchinson’s memoirs, was a gentlewoman ; but after her demise, and from the loose associations in which he moved, while by his politics rising to the position of a representative in Parliament, &c., he degenerated, and in the end failed so sadly as at last to exhibit a mean and abject spirit. One of his companions in debauchery was Charles White of Newthorpe. Though he was a man of fractious disposition and lack of character, his father Charles stands honorably in the Parish Registers as a gentleman. The son became a captain in the parliamentary army, and as a companion of Millington’s, was if anything, the worse of the two in fallen morals. Lady Hutchinson writes: How lamentable it was to behold how those wretched men fell away, not only from public spiritedness, but from sobriety and honour and moral conversation, not only conniving at and permitting wickedness in others, but themselves conversing in taverns and . . . (houses of ill repute), till at last Millington and White were so enamoured that they married a couple of ale house wenches, &c., &c.: a man of sixty, professing religion, and having but lately buried a religious matronly gentlewoman, &c., and then to go to an alehouse to take a flirtish girl of sixteen. Gilbert Millington was one of those who signed the death warrant of the King, and it may interest some of our readers to know what became of him after the accession of Charles II.
We take the following from the trial of the regicides, published in 1724, in our possession, i.e.:
“In the County of Middlesex, the proceedings at Hick’s Hall, Tuesday the 9th of October, 1660, in order to the trial of the pretended judges of his late sacred Majesty.
The Court being set, the Commission of Oyer and Terminer, under the Great Seal of England, was first read, and was directed to the Lords and others. (The long list of whose names, together with that of the Grand Jury sworn, we need not insert here).
After proclamation for silence was made, Sir Orlando Bridgman, Lord Chief Baron of his Majesty’s High Court of Exchequer, addressed the Jury, which being ended, Thomas Lee, of the Middle Temple, London, Gentleman, was called to give in the names of the witnesses, which were 42 in number, and the Grand Jury returned the indictment: Billa vera.
The Court then adjourned to the Old Bailey for the 10th October.
On the 10th of October, 1660.
Sir John Robinson, Knight, Lieutenant of his Majesty’s Tower of London, according to the warrant received, delivered to Mr. Sheriff the prisoners who were (in several coaches) with a strong guard of horse and foot conveyed to Newgate, and about 9 of the clock in the morning delivered to the keeper of the prison, and thence brought to the Session House in the Old Bailey, London, where the Commissioners of Oyer and Terminer were in Court assembled, and where their indictment was publicly read by Edward Shelton, Esq., Clerk of the Crown.
Sessions House in the Old Bailey, October 10th, 1660.
The Court being assembled and silence commanded, the Commissioner of Oyer and Terminer was again read, after which the prisoners were brought to the Bar and commanded to hold up their hands.
(We need not go through the whole of them, having for the purposes of this book to do with Millington only).
Clerk: Gilbert Millington, hold up your hand. How sayest thou? Art thou guilty of the Treason whereof thou standest indicted, and art now arraigned, or not guilty?
Gilbert Millington: My Lord, I am an ancient man and deaf; I humbly crave your Lordship’s pardon to hear me a few words; I will promise it shall be pertinent enough.
Mr. Solicitor-General: Impertinent enough he means.
Court: You must plead either guilty, and so confess it, or not guilty, and then you shall be heard anything for your justification.
Clerk: Are you guilty, or not guilty?
Gilbert Millington: I desire I may
Court: There is nothing you can say, but guilty or not guilty, all other discourses turn upon yourself.
Clerk: Are you guilty or not guilty?
Gilbert Millington: You might enlighten me in some scruples. Does my pause trouble you much? I shall not be long.
Court: Your particular case cannot differ from others.
Clerk: Are you guilty or not guilty?
Gilbert Millington: There are some things in the indictment that I can say not guilty to, there are others that I must deal ingeniously, and confess them.
Clerk: Art thou guilty in manner and form as you are indicted, or not guilty?
Gilbert Millington: Not guilty.
Clerk: How will you be tried?
Gilbert Millington: By God and the country.
Clerk: God send you good deliverance.
The final trial took place six days later.
October 16th, 1660.—Session House, Old Baily.
Proclamation of the Court.
Clerk of the Crown: Set Isaac Penington, Henry Marten, Gilbert Millington, Robert Tichburn, Owen Roe, Robert Leiburn, Henry Smith, &c. (in all 15) to the Bar (which being done)
Gilbert Millington: I desire you to hear me. I come not hither to dispute but to acknowledge; I will not trouble you with long discourses. My Lord, it is not fit for wise men to hear them; I am not able to express them. I will not justify myself; I will acknowledge myself guilty. My Lord, the reason why I said the last day, not guilty, was in respect of being upon the scaffold, and murthering the King and those things; but I will wave all things, if your Lordship will give me leave, and will go unto the lowest strain that possibly can be; I will confess myself guilty every way; I was awed by the powers then in being. This I leave with you, and lay myself at your feet, and have no more at all to say, but a few words in a petition, which I desire you will please to accept, and so I conclude.
Council: We do accept this honest and humble confession . . . and shall give no evidence against him to aggravate the matter.
Lord Chief Baron: Your petition is accepted and shall be read.
Thus abjectly did Gilbert Millington demean himself at his trial to be excepted out of the bill of pains and penalties. The Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 37, relates that sentence of death was pronounced on the day following the Millington trial, but that it was commuted into imprisonment for life, his name having been inserted in the clause of suspending execution in case of attainder (Common’s Journals, vol. viii., 61, 139). Gilbert Millington died at Jersey in September or October 1666, and was buried (Calendar of State Papers, Dom. 1666—67, p. 192), in common ground. Some of his letters are among the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library. His property was seized by the Crown.
We make no comments on Millington. History has spoken, let its voice be heard.
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It is after the recital of the sad end of a once honoured man refreshing to turn to a more pleasing topic in connection with Brinsley. Who would but a very few years ago have thought, that of all things, Numismatics would be of any help to trace and to recover any submerged part, even though but a small yet interesting one, of what belongs to the history of Brinsley, and yet it is so. As discovered Greek coins tell a tale of cities and of artists that once have been; and as the coins of the ancient Britons speak of early art and commerce; and the Roman coins of that nation’s conquests and arts; so a humble half-penny token comes forth to speak of Brinsley. It was in the collection of the late Mr. James Toplis, who was a native of Eastwood, and it is now in the Nottingham Castle Museum.
It must be borne in mind that there was in the 17th century a crying need of small change. It is not indeed that there was no small silver currency, but it was so small as to be highly inconvenient. As early as in the reign of the last Henrys the inconvenience was greatly felt, though silver halfpennies continued to be struck as late as in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and James I. It was on that account that traders had early begun to use private tokens of lead and copper for circulation, which in a manner continued, until after Charles I. they became general, so that every tradesman of any note would have his own tokens for change. The Brinsley half-penny token shows that there was a blacksmith there in 1669, who probably may also have had some little store of groceries and provisions, &c., both for the convenience of the good people of Brinsley and also for the increase of his own gains. Such is enterprise in humble village life, and such the evidence which 230 years later speaks in praise of it and of its merited remembrance. This half-penny token has in the centre of one side (called the obverse) the blacksmith’s arms of 3 hammers, with the inscription— “Robert Horesley. Black-” The reverse side of the token has, in continuation of the obverse inscription—“Smith-in-Brinsley, 1669. His half penny ½” The whole is in Roman capitals.
The same causes which necessitated the formation of a new parish at Kimberley operated also in Brinsley. The church was built in 1837, and the new district (to judge from the accounts of the churchwardens of Greasley who paid the early church expenses of Kimberley and of Brinsley) was, for some few years, worked from Greasley. On the 26th of June, 1861, an Order of Her Majesty in Council erected Brinsley into a separate District Chapelry. The church was dedicated to “the Holy Trinity” (though the present incumbent thinks it is “St. James the Great”). The first incumbent of Brinsley was the Revd. Edward Cayley in 1861, who was a perpetual curate until the demise of the, at that time; vicar of Greasley in 1866, after which Brinsley became a vicarage. The next vicar of Brinsley was the Revd. J. D. Gibson, who was instituted in 1868. He was, after his demise succeeded by the Revd. C. E. Roberts in 1874, on whose resignation for a London preferment the present vicar, the Revd. Percival Page was instituted in 1881.
The chief landed property of the township, together with the advowson of the new parish, was then with the Duke of Newcastle; but has, a few years ago, been purchased by Messrs. Barber, Walker & Co., of Eastwood, whose it now is. Another part of the new parish, containing about 400 acres, is the property of the Earl of Mexborough.
There are commodious church schools in Brinsley with an accommodation for fully 400 children. The church has a mission room (St. John’s) in a part called New Brinsley.
The Nonconformists have only one chapel in this parish.
The local industries are represented by two collieries belonging to Messrs. Barber, Walker and Co., and a third one which is the property of Messrs. Jas. Oakes & Co.
Messrs. Jas. Oakes & Co. represent also part of the agricultural interest of the parish, being the tenants of Lord Mexborough’s lands, together with Messrs. J. Betts and Fisher of the Ginn Farm and others.
The tenants of Messrs. Barber, Walker & Co. are Messrs. G. Meakin of the Manor Farm, Wm. Taylor of the Brinsley Farm, and several others, among whom are Wm. Riley, Hy. Meakin, and Smi. Malley. In addition to the above there is also a number of small freeholders in Brinsley, among whom are the Revd. R. Royston, Mr. Rt. G. Hanson and Messrs. Matth. Bindley, Wm. Chambers, Saml. Smeeton, F. Williamson, J. Granger, T. Radford, and C. Stokes and others.
The acreage of the parish is 1,340. The population at the last census was 1,423, and the rateable value in 1885 £5,517 12S. 0d.
The parish has a Postal Order Office.
THE ARMS OF THE DE BRUNESLEYS.
In the visitation of Robert Glover, Somerset Herald, who visited for Wm. Flower, Norry, in this county (says Throsby) in the year 1569, the Norry granted to the Brinsleys to bear for their Arms “party per pale Or, and sable, a Chevron between three Escallops counter-changed”; but the ancient Coat in Thoroton’s time, remaining in the church of Trowell, was Or and Sable quarterly, quartered with a Chevron itself, also quarterly between three Escallops counter-changed. Besides these notices there are others from the Trowell history, which give the following :—Quarterly per quartered Chevron, between three Escallops Or, and sable counterchanged. They were in the windows of Trowell Church, and in the east window of that chancel, under which was “Robertus Brinsley, partronus (sic) istitus Ecclesiae.”
In our usual way of endeavouring to verify or correct our notes, we have very lately been for register searches at Bilborough Rectory, where we met with courteous help; and thence went to Trowell Church; but our disappointment there was complete. Nothing of the old stained glass is remaining. The windows have throughout been reglazed with plain quarries, except the east window in the chancel, which is of new stained glass.
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Watnall
This timber-framed cottage at Watnall dates from the mid-15th century (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).WATNALL also Watenhow, Watnowe, and Watnow, is in the Domesday Survey written Watenot. Flavel Edmund derives the “Wat” from “Watel,” a wattled fortification or defence, formed with the trunks of trees interlaced with boughs and plastered over; and Mr. Potter Briscoe gives “all” as coming from “sal,” a seat. It seems to us very possible that that may have been so. Watnall then would have been the Key of the Greasley defences, and together with the “Berew” of Kimberley and the Crow Hill position would have commanded the heights, not only as posts of observation, but from whence at the shortest notice to send help into any other direction of the Parish, without which Greaseley would have been helplessly unprotected, except by the sheltering positions of High Park Wood and Fulwood, in which to keep from the observation of an enemy the post of reserves, such as in those early days they may have been.
Watnall after the Conquest was Peverel’s fee. In the Confessor’s time Grunchel (whom we have met at Kimberley, and shall meet again in Newthorpe) had a manor here, which paid to the Danegeld for one carucate. Another manor was Siewards, which paid for 2 bovats, and had soc in Watnall. Of this soc one “Grim” had one bovat for the geld, with soc in Bulwell and Ailmer had also of this soc, which paid for 2 bovats to the geld, the land being one carucate. There was also in demesne 1 carucate, 1 socman, 2 villes and 2 bordars having 1 carucate, and 5 quarantines’ length of pasturewood by 4 quarantines width. This demesne, when the survey was taken, was held by Grunchel and Gozelinus, the latter of which two, as seen in the history of Lenton, was one of Peverel’s men, and this is all which Grunchel was permitted to retain from all his properties in the parish of Greasley, which were his in the Confessor’s time. We have no further information of early date about this hamlet until the time of King John, in the 12th year of whose reign Robert, son of William de Alfreton, was certified to hold of the Escheat of Peverel (among other properties elsewhere) half a Knight’s fee at Watnall. This half Knight’s fee descended to the Chaworths, whose name is derived from Cadwecis, as shewn in page 5 of Patronymica Britannica, while another part of the hamlet went from the Lords of Greasley (descendants of another one of Peverel’s men) to the de Canteloupes, and hence the distinction, which to this day remains, of Watnall Chaworth and Watnall Canteloupe. Thoroton in the next place infers from the Test. de Nevil, that Hugh de Redinges (who we judge was of a junior branch of the family of de Alfreton) was also called Hugh de Watenhow or Watnow, and had an estate in this township, which was held from him by one Tolly, and afterwards by Galfrey Stoyle. Of this estate, Hugh de Watenow (as we shall now call him) gave 1 bovat of land to Lenton Priory, with the reservation, however, that during his lifetime he would hold it himself, paying the monastery 16 pence yearly, but that after his death the Priory might dispose of it as their own land, and he granted common to their tenant, as the rest of the men of Watnall had in all places. In return for this grant the monks of Lenton were pledged to make an anniversary for his father, and he left a bitter curse for his heirs, if any of them should attempt to go against or hinder this gift. The monks demised that land to Robert, son of Roger de Watenhow, for his life, and after him in the time of Henry III. to Sir Robert Lathom for his life, for a noble yearly, which same amount of rent was still later on paid in the 5th year of Edward I. by Robert, son of Robert de Watenhow. This last-named Robert was probably thus provided for while in expectation of better things to come, for one Hugo de Watenhow had left half a Knight’s fee in Watnall, in the early part of Henry III’s reign, which eventually came to Robert de Watenhow; but in the 9th year of Edward II. it had come to Robert de Kimmerley, whom we have mentioned in the township of that name), and who was then certified to be Lord of it.
We must next turn to the Borough Records, where in the same above mentioned 9th year of Edward II. i.e., on August 24th, 1316, a grant is registered from a certain George Wase of Watnall to William de Amyas, a Burgess of Nottingham, of a tenement in Watnove, to which the following were witnesses: Stephen de Watnowe, John de Colson, Thomas de Cressy, Ranulf de Colston, and John Attegreene. Dated at Watnove.
We find next from Thoroton, that in the third year of Edward III. Stephen de Kimmerley was a descendant from Robert de Kimmerley, and that a fine was then levied at Nottingham on the Monday next before the feast of St. Martin, between William de Mekesburgh of Nottingham and John de Hacunthorpe and Agnes his wife, who acknowledged the manor of Watnall Chaworth as the inheritance of the said Agnes, and that 2 parts of that manor, which were then held in dower by Joan, who had been the wife of Stephen de Kimmerey, were of the right of the said William (de Makesburgh).
We turn from thence again to the Borough Records, and under date of the i6th June, 1348, the following is registered, i.e
A grant from Bartholomew de Cotgrave to William de Amyas of Nottingham and Margery his wife, of the manor of Watnall Chaworth with all appurtenances, a windmill and bondmen, &c., &c., and also of his manor of Reddinges, near Alfreton, with appurtenances, a watermill and bondmen, &c., &c., to be held for their lives.
With remainder to Hugh de Spicere of Nottingham and Joan his wife, daughter of the said William de Amyas.
With remainder to their son William and his heirs, male.
With remainder, in default of heirs, to Agnes, daughter of the said William de Amyas.
And remainder, after the death of the said Agnes, to William, son of Robert de Wolaton of Nottingham, and his heirs, male
With remainder, in default of heirs, to John, son of Ralph de Wollaton of Nottingham, and his heirs, male.
With remainder, in default of heirs, to Thomas, son of Ralph de Wollaton of Nottingham, and his heirs, male.
With remainder over to the right heirs of the said William de Amyas.
The witnesses to which grant were: John de Annesley, Knight, William de Seiston, Robert de Sutton, William de Worthington, Stephen Smyth of Watnall, and John de Stanleye, Cordwaner.
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In the 26th year of Edward III. when the aid of 40 shillings for every Knight’s fee was required, to make the King’s eldest son a Knight, Wm. de Amyas was found to hold the fourth part of a Knight’s fee in Watnowe, which Richard de Kimmerley had held in former times.
The Borough Records of Sept. 25th, 1397 throw a sidelight on one of the religious ways of that time, i.e.:
Richard de Watnowe, Chaplain, by his attorney John Breadsall, complainant, appeared against Nicholas Barnack and against Margery his wife in a plea of debt, that the said Nicholas owes him six shillings and eightpence for an indulgence obtained for them by Master Thomas de Kirkby, in the year of grace of our Lord, 1391, at Rome, &c. The Watnall Chaplain lost his suit, but it shews nevertheless that papal indulgences were a familiar matter in those days.
In the 20th year of Henry VI., John Wollaton of Nottingham, cousin and heir of William Arnyas, remised to John Viscount Beaumont and others, all his right in the manor of Watnall Chaworth, which was late William Wollaton’s, his brothers; and the Close Rolls of the same year shew that William de Wollaton had pardoned the Prior and convent of Bevall for acquiring from the Vicar of Greasley (who must have been Robert Felowe, who was instituted in 1501, and died at Greasley), without his consent, 1 messuage and 1bovat in Watnall Chaworth, which had been Hugh de Cressy’s; 8 acres of land which was Richard Selston’s in the same town, and 5 tofts and 13 acres of land in Brokebresting, which was sometimes John de Pynkestone’s and others, and which was held of him and John Skeffelin of Broxtow, &c.
Row of distinctive cottages at Watnall (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
The next name of importance (to us in special) is that of Richard Bingham mentioned in Thoroton. He and Ann his wife, in the 7th year of Henry VIII., suffered a recovery of a moiety of the manor of Riddinges. This Richard Bingham is the last link between the past and the present. This Richard Bingham was of Watnall Chaworth, and Thoroton writes that he married Ann, one of the 4 sisters and heirs of Nicholas Strelly of Lindsby (Throsby V. 2, 243). There is a mistake or a discrepancy in that. Either Richard, who married Ann Strelley, had lost a first wife, or he must have been the son of another Richard Bingham who married a Colston of Car Colston. One reason for this observation is, that there is a recovered brass shield of arms, unfortunately obliterated, hut with it a brass label, in Greasley Church, recording the resting place of Helena, wife of Richard Bingham. Either this Helena was the wife of Richard whose son married Ann Strelly, or Thoroton was misled in giving Ann, instead of Helena, as one of Nicholas de Strelly’s heirs, which from public documents cannot be.
The Binghams were a family of distinction whose origin we may briefly trace. The township of Bingham was by the Conqueror given to the famous land-absorbing Roger de Boullie, and passed from him to William Pagenel and others in succession, until it was by Henry III. given to Ralph Bugge, of whom the Binghams, who took their name from the place, are descended. We have met with them for the first time in about 1284. After only 4 or 5 generations in their descent, their property came into the hands of Sir Thomas Rempton; but among the branches of the family which survived, one settled at Car Colston. from whom Richard Bingham of Watnall Chaworth descended. He left two daughters, of whom Ann married Rafe Purefey of Drayton; and Margaret became the wife of Ralph Rolleston, from whom the present owner of the Watnall Hall estate is a lineal descendant. The family is a long-known one of honoured repute. The first Rolleston we read of was of Rolleston in the County of Stafford, who bestowed much succour to the unfortunate around him, and built some almshouses at Rolleston, which he also endowed.
In the reign of Henry II. Thomas de Rolleston is met with as a witness to a Deed by Richard de Houten to Walter de Mores. In 1410 Robert de Rolleston was one of the Prebends of the Collegiate Church of Southwell, the now Cathedral of our Diocese. Again, a John de Rolleston was at one time Chief Lord of the fee of Stoke.
Henry Rolleston was one of the witnesses to an agreement between the Abbot and Convent of Welbeclc and Robert de Sommerville of Oxton, Hugo de Capella, and Walter de Straitley.
In about 1645 a Rolleston married Ger. Franc., daughter of Robert de Pierpoint and Gertrude his wife, daughter of Henry Talbot.
And in the reign of James I. Lancelot Rolleston, with Gervas Wyld, Christopher Strelley and John Wood, who was one of the Verderers of Sherwood Forest, petitioned the King to have their right of a Fee Tree and a Fee Deer (which had been withheld) restored to them.
But all the above are fragmentary and discoursive notes which we made from widely scattered readings in one work and another, until we come to Malgern de Rolleston, who was a benefactor to the Monastery of Rufford, on which he bestowed 40 acres of land. Thomas, son of Malger, held two knight’s fees of Walter d’Aincourt. Henry, son of Thomas de Rolleston confirmed to the Monastery of Rufford all that his grandfather Malger had given to it. Thomas, son of Henry, and Benedict, son of Thomas de Rolleston, in like manner confirmed to Rufford Malger de Rolleston’s gift. Benedict de Rolleston was a Knight, who gave and confirmed to the Church of St. Peter at Thurgarton, &c., several lands (at that time in the tenure of several persons) so absolutely that neither he nor any of his heirs might subsequently be able to challenge any aid of the said tenants, natives or villains, whether to make his eldest son a Knight, or to marry his eldest daughter; and the Lady Dimysia, wife of Benedict de Rolleston, released her dower in the same lands.
There is also a branch of the Rolleston family in Derbyshire, and one in Ireland, beside those of Staffordshire, from whom the present Squire of Watnall is descended; and it is with regard to a member of the Derbyshire family that we propose to give the results of an interesting investigation.
In Queen Elizabeth’s reign the unfortunate Mary, Queen of Scotland, during her imprisonment, reckoned a Rolleston among her attached and faithful well-wishers, whom she also honoured with entrusting him (as some writers say) with her cypher. We believe, however, that the so-called cypher was (as we have somewhere read) a jewel in the shape of a royal seal, bearing M.R. for Maria Regina on the sides of the crowned shield of arms, of which we have an impression—on wax. The seal was in the possession of a late lady of the Rolleston family, and may still be among their private treasures.
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This Rolleston of the Queen of Scots confidence repute, is by some writers said to have conceived the plan for the Queen of Scots deliverance, and was also said to have been betrayed to Elizabeth’s Government by his own son, and that he was thrown into the Tower and beheaded. Even Camden in his “Elizabeth” was carried away to write, that he was betrayed by his son and suffered imprisonment, though he does not go beyond that, and “The Old Halls, Manors, and Families of Derbyshire,” vol. II, 125, from which we quote, refer to the same subject. That he suffered imprisonment is true, but that he was the contriver of the plot is not correct; that he was betrayed by his son is doubtful, and that he was executed is now fairly exploded. The facts are as follows :—A younger branch of the Rollestons were located in Derbyshire around Ashover, where they lived early in the reign of Richard II. and for two centuries after. Dr. Cox in his Derbyshire Churches, vol. i, 24, gives a detailed account of the monumental and memorial inscriptions of the Rollestons in Ashover Church.
Of these it was John Rolleston who purchased Lea, and he was brother to Thomas, husband of Regna Stafford. Thomas can be said to be the founder of the Irish branch of his house, for James I. in 1610 granted to his descendants, Richard, John, and Arthur, certain lands in the County of Armagh, on condition that Richard and his brothers should not let any of the said lands to anyone who did not take the oath of supremacy before the Chancellor. Two of the sons of Richard lost their lives in the Irish rebellion, being murdered in 1641. The Derbyshire family are descendants of John the purchaser of Lea, and it is in connection with one member of this family that the supposed pathetic incident is connected, and so much mystified, and it was so much more difficult to clear the whole matter up, since there is no account thereof to be met with in the State Trials, nor in any other authentic documents and sources, where it might be looked for.
James Rolleston in the reign of Henry VII. married Ann Babington and had a grandson named Francis, who married Mary Vernon of Harleston. It was this Francis Rolleston who felt so affected with the captivity of Mary of Scotland, because he deemed it unjust.
His grandfather, James, had, by Ann his wife, nine daughters and four sons, of whom Thomas married Elizabeth the daughter and heiress of John Turville of New Hall. This Thomas Rolleston had five sons, named Francis, James, John, George, and Christopher, and four daughters, i.e., Ann, the wife of Thomas Dethick; Dorothy, the wife of Richard Colley; Ursula, the wife of Adam Beresford of Bentley; and Mabel, the wife of Richard Pershel of Horsley.
The two manors of the family at Lea, at Old Hall in Ashover, passed to the Perchalls of Horsley in Staffordshire, and the Rollestons are after ‘that met with at Matthefield.
The Queen of Scots had escaped from her kingdom and taken refuge in England in the early part of the summer of the year 1568, but was by the Queen of England’s orders detained at Carlisle and subsequently brought as a prisoner first to Bolton Castle, and then to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire, where she was placed under the care of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Tutbury Castle was within some miles of Lea and of Mathefield, but in the following spring the captive Queen was brought much nearer to Lea, by being taken to Wingfield Manor House.
It was from this latter confinement of the Queen that Leonard d’Acres designed to liberate her and to take her back to the borders of Scotland, but meanwhile the unguarded and impulsive Duke of Norfolk had made his proposals of marriage to the Queen, and had influenced the Earl of Northumberland to dissuade D’Arcies from his purpose. The unhappy Norfolk had hoped to get Queen Elizabeth’s consent to the marriage, but instead thereof he was, by the Queen’s orders, arrested and committed to the Tower. Then came the unhappy rebellion in the north under the leadership of the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, who designed to liberate the Scotch Queen, and another conspiracy of Leonard d’Acres, all which unfortunate undertakings told heavily against the interests and safety of Mary of Scotland. She was in the beginning of the winter 1569 taken to Coventry, and from thence not long after back to Tutbury.
Early in 1572 the Duke of Norfolk was tried for high treason, and in the following summer beheaded; and among others who had been implicated or compromised in the designs of the time (when Norfolk had taken occasion to propose marriage to the Scotch Queen) were both Francis Rolleston and his son, who were arrested for conspiring to liberate the Queen of Scots from her captivity.
When the Duke of Northumberland was examined as to what intelligence he had with old Roleston, &c., he replied: That he knoweth not olde Rolleston, nor none of that name (which would indicate that Francis Rolleston was then a man advanced in years). He had a son named George, with whom (as the State Papers, Domestic, Elizth., Vol. 99, No. 5, show) he entered into the following agreement, viz. :— Articles of Agreement made by Sr. Xpofer Wraye. Knight, Lorde Chefe Justice of England; Sr. William Cordal Knight Mr. of the Rolles, Gilberte Gerrarde, Esquyer, Attorneye Gen’all to the Quene’s Matte and Thomas Bromleye, Esquyer, Solicitor to her Matie for the Appeasinge of certaine controversies Betwene ffrauncis Rollston Esquyer and George Rollston his sonne made the xvij daye of November, in the xvij yere of the Raigne of our Souaringe Ladye Elizabethe by The grace of gode, of Englande fraunce, and Ireland Quene deffender of the faithe, &c.
“In primis, yt was Agreed that suche conveyance as was allreadye made sealled and deliv’ed heretofore agreed uppon Betwene the saide ifrauncis Rollston and the saide George his sonne Devysed by there Counsell learned in the Lawe uppon Boathe pties be pffcted and executed accordinglye.
“Itm., yt was allso Agreed that the reu’ione [reversion] of the feesimple of all the lande conteyned in the saide conveyance yf the saide George Roliston dyed without yssue of his bodye shoulde bee assured to suche p’sones as bee heires to the same at the commen Lawe payinge a Thousande m’ke vnto the saide George the sonne or else to the saide ffrauncis Rollstonne the ffather yf hee woulde paye vnto his saide sonne the said some of one Thousand m’ke.
“Itm., yt was allso Agreed the thinge before men’coned beinge accomplished the saide ffrauncis Rollstonn shoulde enioye in the saide conveyance accordinge to the meaninge thereof and not before.”
[Endorsed] 17 of November a° Eliz. xvij. ‘The award of the L. chief Justice, &c. between Mr. Roulston the father and the son.
Finally, Francis Rolleston made his will on the 20th July, 1586, describing himself as Ffranncis Rolleston of the Ley in Hirste, in the County of Derby, Esquire, directing his body to be buried where yt shall please allmightye God, as becometh a Christian man, the order whereof I refer to my wife and my executors, willing yf yt do please allmightye God, to lye in our ladies’ quire in Ashower Church, yf I depte this life wth in 14 myles thereof, &c., &c. He died on the 3rd of August, 1587, and was buried in Ashower Church, and the Probate of his will was made at Lichfield on the 6th Dec., 1587.
Every inquirer after correct and authentic items of history must feel with us how much we are indebted for the foregoing to the disinterested and persevering efforts of Mr. Rollaston, who, notwithstanding great difficulties, has not rested until the long mistaken and mis-stated circumstances connected with Francis Rolleston had been cleared up by him, and published in Notes and Queries.
The Watnall Chaworth estate came to the Rolleston family, as before shewn, through the marriage of Margaret Bingham to Ralph Rolleston of the Staffordshire branch of the family.
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Watnall Hall.
Watnall Hall is a large mansion of the Elizabethan style of architecture. To the red brick and stone of which it is built time has given a pleasing tone. It was well described in 1881 by Mr. Leonard Jacks, whose articles on the “Great Houses in Nottinghamshire, &c.,” appeared first in the Nottingham Journal, and were subsequently brought out in a collected form in one volume. The prospect from the leads of the mansion, to which years ago we ourselves were taken by the present owner, is absorbing in diversified and charming scenery, and an artist might long sit there without getting wearied of his work. The grounds of the hall have been the most made of in the laying out of the shrubberies and garden in tasteful arrangements, and there are some remarkably fine trees both in the grounds and behind the mansion in the park. Some interesting remains of long bygone days are the once cockpit in a part of the grounds, and a wide flight of stone steps which in earlier times led to the then entrance to the Hall. Mr. Leonard Jacks, in a vein of romantic playfulness, while giving a graphic description of the house and premises, together with a telling allusion to the great Balls for which Watnall Hall had been reputed, introduces a charming nymph in the person of the now historic Mary Chaworth (of Byron’s disappointment, which made him the poet he became), who, it appears, now and then escaped the vigilance of her guardians to surreptitiously trip it here to the strains of the ballroom. Mr. Jacks is an altogether facile artist in the way of pen and ink sketchings, and we cannot but say that his sketches are interestingly suggestive, only we have not the poetic vein to fill up the pretty picture, as he may have had it in his mind’s eye.
Gates to Watnall Hall.
The fine gate which gives entrance to the Hall grounds, and which in earlier times stood not where it now is, is a work of art worthy of the examination of any student of antiquarian taste. It is generally admitted to be the work of the deservingly reputed Huntingdon Shaw of Nottingham, of art-ironwork fame. His chief works seem to date from about 1695, not the least of which is the magnificent gate which was removed to the Kensington Museum from the Hampton Court Palace Gardens, to which it is now hoped that they will be returned to again adorn those historic grounds.
The Rollestons of Watnall were the sole pioneers of elementary education in the parish of Greasley. They built and endowed the Bogend School in about 1756, which was not closed until the Board Schools of Beauvale had been established; and it was also owing to the auspices of this family that a dame school was kept at Watnall, and another small school at Kimberley, which we believe has been absorbed by one or other of the now existing schools of that township. During the years of the present Mr. Rolleston’s minority, (and subsequently from subsidences owing to coal mining), the Bogend School had become much dilapidated. Moreover, the Charity Commissioners have remodelled the endowment of it, and the old schoolhouses and premises were then bought in by Mr. Rolleston, who since then had them transformed into a neat and comfortable cottage-dwelling, which is now occupied by Mr. William Harland Attenborough, the grandson of the late Mr. John Attenborough, who for many years was master of the Bogend School, and also Clerk of the Parish Church.
The present owner of Watnall is the eldest son of Lancelot Rolleston of Watnall Hall, Esq., son of Christopher Rolleston and Ann his wife, daughter of Capt. Nicholas, R.N., and Eleanor Charlotte his wife, daughter of Robert Fraser, Esq., of Torbeck, Inverness, and the Lady Ann his wife, daughter of James the 8th Earl of Lauderdale.
Mr Lancelot Rolleston.
Mr. Lancelot Rolleston, like his ancestor of Charles II.’s time, has been High Sheriff for this County, and is a Justice of the Peace. As an ardent sportsman he has been Master of the South Notts hunt, and subsequently of that of Rufford. As a soldier he has attained to the Colonelcy of the South Notts Hussar Regiment; and as a patriot he left his sports and comforts, and volunteered for service in the South African War, where unfortunately he was severely wounded in an engagement at Lindley, where his South Notts Hussars of the Imperial Yeomanry would probably have earned for themselves great repute if their daring charge could have been supported. He married, on February 25th, 1882, the Hon. Charlotte Emma Maud, sister of the present Earl Carnworth, daughter of Robert Alexander George, fourth son of Robert Alexander Dalzeel, LieutGeneral in the Army, and his second wife Andalusia, daughter of Lieut.-Colonel Arthur Brown. The Lady Maud Rolleston followed the Colonel (her husband) to South Africa, where after various other endeavours, she set up a convalescent hospital at the ere then besieged Kimberley, and did not surrender that work until necessitated to do so by the critical state of the Colonel from his severe wound.
Some little history may possibly be connected with Watnall as betokened by the field names of the township, since there is always some reason or another why a certain name is given to a place. We have the names, but we have not been able to trace their origin. In Watnall Chaworth, which is the larger of the two Watnalls, they are: the Spinney, the Black Nook Close, the Trusty, the Nabbs, the Sledder, the Coney Gree, and the Muttering Yard, which call for explanation ; while it is easily seen why the names of Crow Hill, Ox Close, Calf Close, Long Lane Field, Gospel Close, and Church Field, or even Nook Close have been bestowed.
In Watnall Canteloupe it is in most cases easier to explain the field names to one’s own satisfaction. We have: the Stubbings, the Roe or Row Oak, the Crosslands, the Water Close, the Star-Mare Croft, the Crooked Stile Close, the Goose Pen, the Burnt Oak, the Five Lands, the Woody Closes, the Flat, the Cliff Hill, and the Thistle Close, while two names only are out of the ordinary, and possibly point to some little history, i.e., the Pingle, and the Holywell. But we have in Watnall an instance of the gradual perversion of original place names. There is a farm near the Watnall-Hucknal road, of which tradition says that its ancient name was Shiloh, and since there is both a Gospel and a Church Close in the township, the tradition may rest on a good foundation. But Shiloh became Illo, Sub, Sello, Ello, and at last Hell Hole; while a small wood adjoining it bears on an early ordnance map the name Hell Wood. We have now given the farm, or we endeavour to give to it, and to maintain for it, the name Eel Hole Farm, from a pond that is there. We shall meet with another perversion of a place name when we come to deal with the other hamlets of the Parish.
Watnall Canteloupe is the property of Earl Cowper, where one or two quite new farmsteads have been erected, as well as several fine labourers’ cottages, while other farm buildings have been much improved.
The Wesleyans had a small chapel in this township, which was opened on the same day as that on which we read ourselves in at Greasley. It is now a reading room, which is called the Victoria Institute. The township has a Post Office at the house of Mr. John Webb.
Bogend School.
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Newthorpe
Main Street, Newthorpe (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
In Domesday, "Neutorp." The meaning of this name obviously is "The New Village." We are therefrom entitled to believe that this settlement was formed later than either Greasley, Watnall, Kimberley, Brinsley, or Hemshel. The village was probably begun in a clearing made for it in the wood ,and as the name indicates, it will have been of Danish origin. It will thus have existed before the Confessor’s reign, and was probably founded in Fulwood, which as a place name is now altogether lost, so far at least as our parish and neighbourhood are concerned. The name of the earliest known chief landowner of this hamlet is also of Danish origin, who had also property in Watnall and an estate at Kimberley, with a "Berew" there. From the in early times connected properties of Newthorpe and Kimberley, one is inclined to conclude that the New Village of Neuthorpe was a Danish enterprise from Kimberley. Before the conquest Grunchel (also Grimshel) had, as the Domesday book informs us, some manors here, one of which was rated to the geld for 5½ bovats, the land being half a carucate only, which explains that the rest of this estate was waste in the Confessor’s time. All this was after the conquest given to Peverel as of his fee. The other manor of Grunshel’s was also 5 bovats to the geld, and had the “Berew” already mentioned in Kimberley. At Kimberley, as in that township shewn, was a family descended from probably one of Peverel’s men, who had adopted the name of the place, and they had an estate at Newthorpe, which later on, through Sir John de Monte, the at that time Rector of Greasley, finally passed to the Priory of Beauvale; and it is not likely that it was one of the members of the de Kimmerley family who had assumed the name of Newthorpe. The de Newthorpe’s however do not seem to have been a family of much importance, and we meet with little about them except in connection with Fuiwood. May it not therefore, have been this branch of the de Kimmerley family which were the possessors of Fulwood in which the new settlement had been made before the conquest.
All the land which had been Grunchel’s (or Grinshel’s, as it stands in Domesday), and which had become Peverel’s fee, was by the latter given to his new founded Monastery of Lenton, as recorded there, to which other benefactions from Newthorpe were added as follows:
Beatrix de Whatton (see Thoroton), widow of Robert de Whatten (Lord of Whatten in the Vale) who had come over with the Conqueror (and was a descendant from Gaultier de Tirel, seigneur de Poix in Picardy, as shewn in Lenton), gave to that Priory 2 bovats in Newthorpe, from which she reserved 2 shillings per annum for herself. She had a daughter named Adeline, who was married to William de Heriz, who as interested parties in Beatrix’s gift to Lenton confirmed the same; but the time when this confirmation was made by them is not recorded in Lenton, nor in Thoroton or Throsby.
About 1234, in which Walter Grey, Archbishop of York issued (as the Borough Registers shew) a set of orders for the hospital of St. John the Baptist in Nottingham, Robert, son of Robert de Kimmerly and Roger Prior of Lenton agreed that a division should be made between the woods of the Prior and the woods of Robert de Newthorpe. Robert de Vavaseur of Chyppely (mentioned by us from the Torre Manuscripts in Hemshel), was to fence the Prior’s wood, which lay next to a “holm” in Newthorpe, which the Prior had given him and his heirs as a compensation for damages in connection with the Prior’s mill, or else the Prior would fence it close.
In the same 22nd year of Edward I., circa 1234, John, the son of Thomas Leech, medicus of Newthorpe, who during his minority had been a ward of the Prior of Lenton, released to William, the then Prior, all actions and demands in respect of the time of his wardship.
In 1316, the Prior of Lenton, pursuant to writs tested at Clifton on March the 5th, was (among other properties) certified to be Joint Lord of Newthorpe.
According to the Register of Felley Priory, as stated in Lenton, it appears that part of an open (i.e. unenclosed) hay, or wood, called Fulwood, was bestowed on the Monks of Lenton at an early period by Robert, son of John de Newthorpe.
Henry Grey, the youngest son of Sir Henry de Grey, Lord of Codnor, and dame Isoldaf his wife (for some certain reason), released to the Prior and Convent of Lenton all claims and right of common pasture in Fuiwood, either belonging to the Castle of Codnor, or to the town of Eastwood, or to any of his villains.
Again, in 1286, Ranulf Paskayle, of Eastwood, for himself and his heirs, freeholders and villains, released to the same Prior all claims and right of common pasture in the same wood; and about the same time William Paskayle, of Eastwood, likewise released his right of commons in Fulwood to the same Monastery; as did also William, the son of Godfrey de Eastwait, Thomas, son of William de la Rode, and others, upon which the Prior of Lenton enclosed Fulwood, and appropriated it to the exclusive use of his monastery.
We have purposely been particular to throw all the light we could gather on the now completely lost Fulwood, to shew that it bordered on Shipley and Eastwood, and probably reached close to Kimberley; and we shall now see that the wood was in Newthorpe.
When the Prior of Lenton had enclosed the wood, the Rector of Eastwood, whose name was Adam de Markham, considered that his right and interest had been damaged.
He instituted in 1290 a suit against the Prior and Monks of Lenton, alleging that they had unjustly deprived him of his right of common in about 150 acres of pasture in Fulwood, but the Prior pleaded that Fulwood was an extra parochial place, and was neither Burgh, Town, nor Hamlet, and the Rector of Eastwood lost his case. Adam de Markham, however, was not satisfied with the decision, and the case was tried a second time (abbrevatio placitorum, p. 224), when the Prior pleaded that Fulwood was in Newthorpe, and this having been proved to the satisfaction of the jury, the Rector of Eastwood was again defeated.
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Are we wrong, then, in our more than conjecture that Fulwood was the remains of an early wood or forest, in the clearings of which Newthorp was founded, and in either the natural or artificial openings of which the “leys” of Kimberley and Greasley were situate, especially since (as we shall later find in another part of this book) Joan the Canteloupe in a recovery which she made of the Castle of Greasley, &c., regained also not less than 1,000 acres of wood in the parish?
But we have so far only dealt with one part of the landed property in Newthorpe and with Fulwood. We must proceed to another.
In the Confessor’s reign one Aeluyns, or Aluins, had 2 bovats here, one of which was taxed to the Geld. After the Conquest this became the Earl of Moriton’s fee.
Thoroton states that it had early come to the honor of Leicester, and was held by the St. Andrews’, Lords of Gotham. We find on further research that the Lordship had come to the St. Andrews’ family by Sir Seer de St. Andrew, who had married Matilda4 the eldest of the three daughters of William de Diva, who was Lord of that Barony in the reign of Henry II.
In the 28th year of Edward III. Sir John St. Andrew gave eight shillings out of a messuage and a virgate of land at Newthorpe to the Conventual Church of Lenton on the understanding or condition, that the Convent should find for it a light in that Church as he should order it. Of other property of the St. Andrews’ at Newthorpe, Robert de Teversalt, the then Rector or Vicar of Greasley, secured for the Priory of Beauvale, to whom he conveyed it, 1 messuage, 7 tofts, 2 bovats, 60 acres of land, and twelve shillings and seven pence yearly with the appurtenances. It was obtained by Teversalt from Julian, who was the relict of Sir John de St. Andrew, of whom one John Samon was a holder for the service of two shillings per annum; but the greater part was held from her by William Ferrour of Newthorpe, who together with his son John Ferrours confirmed Julian’s gift to Teversalt, it being all the land which the Ferrours held at Newthorpe except one messuage, which was retained to dwell in, and which was not passed away at that time. Some differences subsequently arose about some little property here which led to arbitration. It was that William de Hickling, Rector of Thornore claimed a rent of six shillings and sixpence issuing out of a certain messuage with 2bovats of land and a cottage, which were held by William Ward of Kimberley, who had married Maud, the sister of the Rector of Thornore. The latter claimed it as his inheritance, and the difference was referred to Sir Nicholas Strelley, William Babington, Thomas Hunte, and William Wollaton, who ‘determined that the rent which William de Hickling claimed was due to the Priory of Beauvale, seeing that it was held of Robert de Kimerley, as of his manor, which had come to be of the right of the Priory.
A last item which we have met with to be noted here is that as early as in the 17th year of Edward II., Ralph de Annesley the elder and Agnes his wife recovered a seisin which was theirs in Newthorpe of one messuage, twenty acres of land, and two parts of a mill, against Peter de Cressy and others, but it is not shown in what way it had come to them, nor how it afterwards descended, only so much is recorded that they, i.e., the Cressys and others were in obligation of twenty marks damage, for which execution had been sought and granted.
After the dissolution of the Monasteries all that which the Priory of Beauvale had in Newthorpe was on the 8th of July, in the 33rd year of Henry VIII. granted to William Hussey, who died on the 10th of January of the 2nd year of the reign of Philip and Mary, and the property then descended to Richard Disney and Neile his wife, and Francis Columbel and Ann his wife, daughters and heirs of the said Sir William Hussey, who had held in Newthorpe and Underwood seven messuages, 20 cottages, one watermill, 200 acres of land, 30 of meadow, 150 of pasture, 13 of wood, and fourteen shillings and sixpence rent, besides divers other properties.
The Manor also and divers lands in Newthorpe which had been the property of the Prior and Convent of Lenton, was on the 13th of July in the 37th year of Henry VIII. granted to John Mylle and George Mule, who in the same year sold it to William Bolles.
Most of these properties have in process of time come to the house of Rutland and the Barons of Melbourne and others, while other minor parts have changed hands repeatedly, and have become so much broken up into small parcels, that to trace them correctly would be next to impossible, or would entail so much research and expense to find out, and to gather up the many links of the long chain of descent, that we are not able to pursue it, nor would it be of much interest, while probably it would involve indelicacies.
Charles White, much mentioned in Nottingham during the civil wars was of this township. He was in Brinsley described as an intimate companion of Gilbert Millington, who was one of those who signed the death warrant of King Charles I. Lady Hutchinson wrote of White that “he associated with the underling Gentlemen of the County.” He became captain of a parliamentary troop at Nottingham, where he was also a member of the public committee of Counsel. Eventually he turned Royalist.
The chief part of the properties of this township are now Earl Cowper’s, whose tenants are the representatives of the late F. Farnsworth, John Ball, senior; Samuel Chrich; Samuel Clifton; the representatives of the late Richard Jackson; Albert Whistler; Thomas Chambers; the representatives of the late John Woolley; Edward Alcock; Matthew Eyre Wild; the representatives of the late Robert Chrich; and the representatives of the late Richard Wilcockson Paxton, and others.
The Trustees of the West Hallam School have also an estate here of which Mr. Zachariah Shaw is a tenant and Messrs. Chr. Smith and Sons, leaseholders. The property in Newthorpe of the representatives of the late Mr. John Godber is the Newthorpe Manor Farm in the occupation of Mr. William Shaw, and some other held by Mr. Harry Farnsworth and Zachaeus Radford.
Mrs. Matthew Eyre Wild has house property in this township, and the remainder of Newthorpe is broken up into a number of small parcels, owned by the representatives of the late Robert Chrich, Messrs. Charles Smith and Sons, and Edward Alcock and others, who probably have the larger shares of it.
The Colliery called New London in Newthorpe belongs to Messrs. Thomas Bayley and Thomas Potter.
The Church of Greasley has a small school-building here, which since the establishment of the board-schools is used for mothers’ meetings and other parochial purposes.
The chief place names of Newthorpe are Wapping, Dovecot Lane, Pinfold Lane, Baker Lane, and Stamford Street, the last two of which are quite modern and in parts built upon.
The General Baptists have a chapel in the township, and the Primitives a small one in Baker Lane.
The newest part in Newthorpe are the houses in Stamford Street and Baker Lane.
The Newthorpe letter and money-order office is at Messrs. Chs. Smith and Sons.
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Moorgreen
Manor Farm, Moorgreen (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
MOORGREEN was part and parcel of the Greasley Castle Estate, and probably the home Farm of it, with maybe some villain tenements and a few necessary labourers’ huts, and it has therefore no separate place in Domesday. Even now the chief farm there preserves the name “Manor Farm.” It was probably indifferently called the Moor and the Green before the two designations were united into Moorgreen. We have seen in Kimberley that as late as in the 33rd year of Edward III. Hugh de Cressy and Cecilia his wife, when surrendering certain properties to the Priory of Beauvale, reserved to themselves out of such properties a rent for their lifetimes, with the stipulation that in default of payment they should he entitled to distrain in the Priory lands (among other places) at the Moorhouses, which seems to have at that time been the name.
The first instance in which we meet with Moorgreen is in the reign of Henry IV., i.e., on May 31st, 1411, in the Borough Records. It seems probable from that entry that the Lords of the Manor of Greasley had set up a gate at Moorgreen, for it is certain that a man whose description is given as “William of the Gate of Moorgreen” was sued at Nottingham for a breach of some contract with the people of Cossall.
The Moorhouses therefore of the de Canteloupes’ days were in the early years of Henry IV. called Moorgreen, and there will by that time have been a few cottars or bordars here, who were at liberty to engage in employments away from home, which from their social condition of earlier times would not then have been admissible.
As a village or township it is necessarily not much antecedent to the Commonwealth time, and was not sufficiently populous when the Villare Anglicum was written to find a place in it. It is now next to Beauvale a very pleasing locality in our parish, and perhaps the most esteemed by visitors from Nottingham and by travellers which pass through to other places for a short rest here. We may miss some of the thatch-roofed cottages of 30 years ago, but instead thereof the township has very greatly gained in comfortable and comely new dwellings of a picturesque architecture, which owing to Earl Cowper’s general beneficence to the parish have been erected here. It may indeed be said that the locality, together with Earl Cowper’s improvements in the other hamlets and farms of the parish have put on a holyday attire, which from the substantial way in which the buildings have been erected is likely to weather the tests of time and of climatic influences for some generations to come.
Eighteenth-century Congregational chapel at Moorgreen (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
The Congregationalists have a chapel here, which until other places of worship of their denomination were established in the neighbourhood, (chiefly at Eastwood), was for years an important centre of attraction to their co-religionists. It was frequently asserted that the Moorgreen Chapel was first called into being by one of the Vicars of Greasley. We need not say that this seemed to us to call for explanation, and we are glad to be able to give to our readers a satisfactory result of our investigations.
The oldest reference in our own locality to the Chapel of Moorgreen (so far as we know) consists of some documentary evidence to the effect that in 1662 the Nonconformists held Divine worship at Moorgreen in an old barn, on the site of which a chapel was later on built, and that finally the much larger one of the present dimensions was erected on the same site; and it was said that a Vicar of Greasley, named Robert Smalley, was the originator of it in the said year of our Lord 1662.
We had necessarily to search our Parish Registers in that behalf, and what did we find? The last incumbent before the Civil Wars who signed himself as Vicar of Greasley was Samuel Tuke, in 1636. After him Robert Smalley did indeed minister in the Parish Church, but he did not sign himself in the Registers as Vicar of Greasley but simply as minister. To account for this we must turn to the political occurrences of the troublous times of the Commonwealth, of which Buchanan’s Woodborough gives a telling description.
Horse and Groom pub at Moorgreen (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
The Parliament of the time was bent on the destruction of the Church of England, and to enforce conformity with Presbyterianism. In 1640 it came to this that the Clergy had either to sign the Covenant, or to be ejected from their benefices. Seven thousand of them were thus dispossessed and Nonconformist ministers put into their places. In 1645 the use of the Common Prayerbook was prohibited, both for Churches and for use in private families, where some of the expelled Clergy had found a refuge as domestic chaplains. In 1656 the Clergy were even forbidden to teach children and to keep private schools, nor were they allowed to baptise or marry persons, or to administer the Holy Communion. The jails were overfilled, so that there was no more room to contain those who disobeyed the edicts, and not a few of them had to go to the hulks to die there, while others fled and left the country. There were it appears, only about one thousand of them left at the Restoration, and hence when the Act of Uniformity was passed in 1662 it was so framed as to admit of the Nonconformist ministers who then held the benefices of the Church to retain them on the condition of submitting to Episcopal ordination. About 6,000 of them, it is said, accepted the condition, and about 2,000 (whether from religious scruples or from fear of examinations which might have to be passed we know not) resigned their position. Mr. Potter Briscoe, in his Old Nottinghamshire, 2nd series, p. 19, gives a compilation (from Palmer’s edition of Calamy’s Nonconformist Memorial, published in 1775) of the names of ministers in this county who were ejected, and amongst them is the name of Robert Smalley, of Greasley, above mentioned, who then founded the Nonconformist services at Moorgreen.
Some of the ministers, however, who had first objected to the conditions necessary to retain their benefices subsequently conformed, among whom in our immediate neighbourhood were Charles Jackson of Selston, and a Mr. Horn of Nuttall. Is it then correct to say that Moorgreen Chapel was founded by a Vicar of Greasley? We leave the answer to our readers.
The landed property of all that is now called Moorgreen belongs to Earl Cowper, with the sole exception of the Greasley Castle Farm and the Reckoning House Farm which were purchased by the Grammer family from the House of Rutland. The Reckoning House Farm then became the property of Lavinia (widow of Thomas Marshall), and of her sisters, Georgina and Jemima Grammer, spinsters, whose tenant was Antony Fletcher. This farm was subsequently alienated, and after some change came into the possession of the late Mr. John Godber, whose tenant was Mr. John Shaw (now of the Ruffs at Hucknal Torquard) and Mr. John Godber sold it to Lancellot Rolleston, the present Squire of Watnall Chaworth.
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Outbuildings of Greasley Castle Farm containing ancient stonework.
Mr. Isaac Grammer of Nottingham is the present owner of the Greasley Castle Farm, whose tenant Mr. Joseph Renshaw, has considerably improved the condition of the land since he came to it, and carefully preserved every part and object connected with the ancient Castle and its defences.
The basement of the Castle Farm house appears to have been built with materials from the ruins of the Castle, and still contains some fragments of ornamental stone carvings on the front of it.
The outbuildings fronting the Nottingham road are resting on an ancient wall which formed part of the defences of the Castle, and contains the remains of a small ancient sally-port. That wall is now the outer part of stables, &c., on the inside of which (fastened against the wall) are the remains of an ancient arch, and the upper parts of some traceried remains of ancient windows, of which Mr. William George of Moorgreen has been good enough to make us a tracing.
The remains of the entrenchments of the Castle fortifications are in remarkably good condition, and are so carefully preserved that even an unitiated visitor cannot fail to recognise them, together with an apparent porthole for a culliver or other piece of small calibre in the rear of the building.
Tradition says: that the Castle was taken and overthrown during the Civil wars, and considering that Lord Capel, an ardent Royalist, was at that time the owner of the Lordship of Greasley, and that two such men as Gilbert Millington of Felley and Brinsley, and Charles White of Newthorpe, were parishioners of Greasley, and foremost in the interests of the parliamentary party, the tradition may be well founded.
Portions of old windows in the ruins of Greasley Castle.
Lord Capel, like many other royalist noblemen, had elected to loyally take the side of the crown in the unfortunate Monarch’s struggles against the Parliament. After various encounters and marches, he met at last with a serious reverse in the south, and with the remnant of his troops, and accessions which came to him in his march, he threw himself into Colchester, which was strongly fortified to hold out for the King. The parliamentary armies besieged him there, and after a manly and protracted, though hopeless, defence, and under the mistaken impression that the lives of those who surrendered would be spared, he surrendered Colchester to the Parliamentarians. The issue was a sad one. Rapin writes that, notwithstanding Lord Capel’s surrender, he was together with the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Holland judged and condemned by a parliamentary Commission, and executed in front of Westminster Hall on the 9th of March, 1649.
The Greasley property afterwards descended to the Earls of Essex, and from them eventually came to the Sutton family, from whom they passed by sale to the House of Melbourne.
Leaving the Castle estates, we propose for a moment to refer to a small piece of land of only a very few perches in dimension, which had traditional interest about it. It was situate at the end of the occupation lane which leads from Mr. John Renshaw’s of Moorgreen to join a public footpath, which leads to Messrs. Barber and Walker’s Co.’s Beauvale Engine yard, and from thence over Cony Grey Farm to Brinsley. The fences of the small piece of ground (through which the footpath leads) have of only very recent years been removed. The piece was called “ Dead man’s land,” while others called it “ No man’s land.” This matter is now nearly, and with many quite forgotten. So far as we could ascertain it, the name had to that piece of land been given from bearers of coffins, and funeral parties from Brinsley on their way to Greasley Churchyard, having usually rested their burden and themselves in that small square.
Lambclose House.
Lambclose is in this township. When Sir Matthew Lamb purchased the Greasley estate from the Sutton family in 1753, Lambclose was a farmhouse, which after some alterations and improvements was fitted up and used as a shooting box. The former farmhouse, or parts of it, are now in the rear of the present Lambclose House, which the Barber family have built and made what it now is. They have occupied it for several generations and repeatedly made improvements in it. The last late Mr. Thomas Barber has much enlarged the house, and tastefully laid out the grounds and shrubberies, &c. The lodge and the fine stables are also owing to him, and the whole forms now a commodious and charming country residence.
Moorgreen reservoir (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
The Great Northern Railway Company have a large reservoir here, which when full, is a measured mile in length, and which in severe winters attracts hundreds of people and visitors from far and near to the splendid sheet of ice. The late Mr. Thomas Barber has placed a steam houseboat and smaller craft on the reservoir, and liberally stocked it with trout at a considerable outlay. The large Bazaar for the restoration of the Parish Church in 1882 was held in these charming grounds and surroundings.
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His eldest son is Mr. Thomas Philip Barber, a County Councillor. He volunteered on the outbreak of the Boer rebellion for service in South Africa in the South Notts Hussar of the Imperial Yeomanry, and was gazetted on the 27th of November, 1900, as having since the 27th of September been promoted to a lieutenancy in the 3rd Battalion of the Imperial Yeomanry, with the temporary rank of lieutenant in the army.
His mother, the widow of the late Mr. Thomas Barber is a descendant from Admiral Sir Edward Spragge, of whom Pepys in a footnote on page 142 of his Diary says: He was a distinguished naval commander who perished in a boat which was sunk in an action with Van Tromp in 1673, while he was preparing to hoist his flag on board a third ship, having previously lost two in the engagement. There is a monument to his memory in the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist in Westminster Abbey, as recorded in Stow’s Survey of London and Westminster, book 6, p. 21, which bears the inscription: Sir Edward Spragge, Kt., a brave and valiant Sea Captain, who lost his life in a sea fight against the Hollanders, 1673.
Other members of the same family had, as the same work of Stow in his perambulations describes, memorials in the old Parish Church of Chelsea.
Throsby incidentally mentions the Barber family in his history of Bilborough and the coal mines there. We have lately visited that Church and also made a register search there; but the only entry which we met with was that Francis Barber, gentleman, was buried there on the 18th of June, 1782. That was sufficient to prove that he was a member of the Greasley family of that name. A tomb in Greasley churchyard, in which (from the four brass-plates on it) several members of the family have been buried, bears the date 1710. The family are on Lady Hutchinson’s side related to the Hutchinsons of Overthorpe repute, the once residence of the Governor of Nottingham Castle in the civil wars.
The great autumn attraction of Moorgreen is the Annual Show of the Agricultural and Horticultural Societies, which attract people from many miles round, as well as from Nottingham and other places. They pass the turnstile in thousands, and every available place in the neighbourhood of the show is utilised to accommodate (if possible), the many conveyances of various descriptions which with their passengers turn Moorgreen into a miniature Derby. The show has for some years past continued rising in the estimation of our localities and neighbourhood, owing in a great measure to the liberal pecuniary contributions of Earl Cowper and some other minor gifts and subscriptions, from which liberal prizes are given to successful exhibitors.
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Beauvale
Remains of the church wall at Beauvale Priory.
This name was not known in Greasley until Nicholas de Canteloupe gave it (not to the hamlet but) to the Priory which he established there. Until then it was part of the Park of Greasley. The adjoining wood still bears the name High Park. The hamlet has subsequently acquired the name from the Priory, but the appellation has been sadly corrupted. The original name which de Canteloupe gave to the Priory was Bella Vallis. The Carthusians, coming probably from their mother house near Grenoble, frenchified the name into Beau Vale. Subsequently the last letter, e, which is not pronounced in French, was given expression to in English. From thence, as an earlier ordnance map shows, it was called Bevale, and in another Beaver, and at last the beautiful vale came down to Beggarlee. We would plead with all whom it concerns to restore to that charming and still romantic part of our parish the name which properly belongs to it, which surely in our days of boasted educational progress and advancement is not too much to ask, as a slight lesson in refinement.
We have already in an earlier part of this book given an account of the foundation of the Priory, which Dugdale, in one instance, calls not only Bella but Pulchra Vallis. It was the youngest establishment of the Carthusian Order in England, and the last founded Monastery in our County before the Reformation. The monks came from their mother house in France, and it is not unlikely that Nicholas de Canteloupe met with them there, or at least with the repute of their sanctity, which would have been sufficient to him to select that Order rather than another for his Monastery. He had no doubt knowledge of other Orders in England, both from his own observation and from his family relationship with high ecclesiastical dignitaries, and it may be that he was by them influenced, as well as from his own inclination, to give the Carthusians a preference over other monastic brotherhoods in his selection.
De Canteloupe will first have made some temporary provision for his prospective monks before he invited them to come here. We have seen what he did for them to establish them at Bella Vallis, and we presume that he was not disappointed in them, even though later on they did not disdain to secure some additional property by the backstair of using for it the Rector, or rather Vicar of Greasley, which as we have seen in Watnall, was forgiven them. According to the rule of their Order the monks were twelve in number, with the addition of some lay brethren, and probably some menials. Their number however was later on slightly increased, owing probably to conditions arising from some of the benefactions which were bestowed on their establishment. To the inhabitants of Greasley and the neighbourhood they were probably, so far as teaching is concerned, of no great benefit, because they did not profess to do that; but the reputed sanctity of their lives spoke volumes for them, and their sacred seclusion will have told on the common people with a religious awe. Besides, the Lords of Greasley might now and then be away on important business of the King, but the Charterhouse was always here and their direct or indirect influence was ever felt. And so the Monastery of Beauvale continued for nigh two centuries, and except for the sound of the holy chaunts, which ever and again broke from the sacred confines within to the world without, there was perpetual silence within those walls. The monks had each their separate cell of small chambers, which they never left, except for their religious exercises in their church and vigils, and possibly too (though that was properly the occupation of the lay brethren) for some work pertaining to the cultivation of their lands. It is generally admitted, that the monastic orders were great agriculturists, and that they made their surroundings to smile in Nature’s beauty. So far as Beauvale is concerned it was without the aid of man a lovely and romantic spot, much of the picturesque beauty of which still remains, and meets the eye of a thoughtful visitor with surroundings of soothing influence. But the hallowed structures of the past have nearly all disappeared. The ruthless hand of grasping vandalism has left nothing remaining that could be turned into cash, and there are now but some poor ruins of the long dismantled and once noble sacred pile. Must we add, alas! that the common people learned to copy their betters and to follow their deeds, until the irony of fate would have it, that parts of the broken pillars and capitals of the arcades of the Church should now be met with in cottage yards to serve the people as tub stands. We need not dwell on how the Priory was dismantled to become a ruin.
A visitor to our locality, who, in the month of June, 1891, wrote some brief and interesting articles about Greasley under the nom de plume “A Pilgrim,” could not help quoting the appropriate passage from Dr. Neale’s poem:—
Ill hands are on the Abbey Church,
They batter down the nave,
They strip the lead, they spoil the dead,
They violate the grave.
They overthrow the altar tomb
With effigy and lore;
For Jesus’ tender love, in peace
Repose they evermore.
We sometimes now stand on that erst consecrated spot, and we cannot shake off the feeling which comes over us, that notwithstanding all that we cannot agree with of the past, we are still standing on holy ground, at whose voiceless whispers it is, as though we heard: “ Take off thy shoes.” The Almighty, who is everywhere, is here. The place is not God forsaken. Stop and pray!
Yes, and if we may not join in the chants of the past, we can surely send a devout thought and sigh up to Him who directs all things, and reflect that, however mistaken, yet holy men lived and prayed here, some of whom may in their solitude, like Luther, have found their Saviour and His full and free salvation.
The church wall and farm buildings at Beauvale Priory.
The Carthusians do not seem to have been much in favour in England, which was probably owing to the severity of their rules. Among other their garments were coarse, their bed was hard, their fare was a frugal vegetarian Lenten one for ever, and their whole monastic life a complete selfabnegation and self-sacrifice from all the world without, with perpetual silence in the world within their walls. But the time had come when their chaunts of the versicles from David’s holy psalms should no longer send their echoes from pillar to pillar, and from the archades to the vaulted roof. It was not that men had become so callous as not to suffer them elsewhere, but the material value of the monastic establishments had whetted men’s cupidity. The monasteries must fall. The pretence for their spoliation was awowedly the Reformation, the origin of which in the bluff monarch’s time was none of the purest, but besides that, the lives of some monkish communities had given their enemies a strong handle. To the honour of the Carthusians it must be said, that their memory was never thus asperged. They never like some other communities, departed from their severe rules of life, even though their establishments emerged from comparative poverty to apparent opulence: but Henry VIII. could not get the Pope’s decree of dissolution of his marriage with Katherine of Aragon. He therefore broke with and repudiated him, and the Parliament in 1533 decreed the acknowledgment of the monarch as head of the English Church, and required the transference of allegiance from the Pope to the King, while the King himself had sent forth an edict for the spoliation of the monastic orders. The edict was naturally resisted by the religious orders, and possibly more loudly so by the Carthusians. The Prior of the London Charterhouse at that time was Houghton, to whom Augustine Webster, the at the same time Prior of Beauvale joined himself in what we probably now would call a constitutional agitation; but that was their mistake, and they did not sufficiently know the temper of the monarch with whom they had to reckon. It appears, moreover, that they had gone a step further, and that they had firmly declined to change their allegiance, and that was enough for their times. They were charged with High Treason, and together with three other Carthusians, with superadded barbarities executed at Tyburn on the 4th of May, 1534. Mr. Cornelius Brown, mentioning this subject writes that Sir Thomas Moore, whose daughter (Mrs. Roper) was present with him, saw the Priors from his prison windows being led to their sufferings and said to her, “Lo, dost thou see Megg, that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage?”
This is said to have been the first blood which Henry VIII. shed in connection with the spoliation of the monasteries; but it is probable that he hoped thereby to bring others to submission. He may, besides, have had some early intelligence (however partial) of a strong hostile movement which was preparing against him. It was as yet immature and secret, but it in reality became in its issue a severe test of the stability of Henry VIII’s crown. The movement was called “The Pilgrimage of Grace,” of which Mr. Stevenson, in his Bygone Nottinghamshire, gives a telling account. The revolt broke first out in Lincolnshire, but soon spread throughout Yorkshire and the north. Both nobles and ecclesiastics rose against what they conceived to be threatening their enslavement; and the partisans of the movement took the “Five Wounds” for their badge. The whole northern country had soon risen, and mustered not less than 30,000 well horsed men, so that about half the kingdom was nearly lost to the King. Henry VIII’s Privy Seal was at that time one Thomas Cromwell, who from an humble extraction had risen to the high position (which Cardinal Wolsey had held) of Privy Seal and Vicar-General of England. Sycophant as he was, and a man of subtlety and craft like some others, he had so gained on his royal master that he was permitted to rule the kingdom with a rod of iron. Though the danger from the general northern revolt was great, yet this wily man did not lose heart over it. He bided his time with cunning patience, and even made it appear that he yielded, by allowing Norfolk, who had only 6,ooo men, to treat with the leaders of the rising. Alas! for the peace which was then arrived at. The Insurgents were offered and accepted the assurance of a free pardon, and the promise of a Parliament at York, and with that they disbanded and returned to their ordinary peaceful avocations; but they lived in turbulent times, when some petty disturbance or another might easily occur which actually took place. That was Cromwell’s time for his vendetta. He took advantage of the occasion. He recalled the settlement which had been arrived at. He threw off the mask, and shewed himself the vindictive creature which in reality he was. The country was soon filled with gibbets on which the leaders of the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace, together with their adherents expiated their too easy trust in Cromwell’s assurances. The whole nobility of the north were implicated in the rising which had taken place, and alas in the betrayal too, from the too easily accepted promise of a free pardon and of a parliament at York. Cromwell’s vengeance was terrible. Lord Dacre of Yorkshire and Lord Hussey of the Lincolnshire aristocracy, the Abbots of Barlings and of Woburn and Sawley suffered in Yorkshire; while the Abbots of Fountain and Jervaux were hanged together with the Percy’s at Tyburn. Lady Blumer was burned at the stake, Sir Robert Constable was hanged in chains at the gate of Hull, and some of the last to suffer were the Prior of Lenton with some of his monks, who died on Gallow Hill. But there were yet three more sufferers, who Mr. Stephenson says were the last, i.e., Henry Leatherhead Vicar of Newark, who was arraigned at York as late as in the year 1538, and executed along with Thomas Mimer, Lancaster Herald, and Morley a monk of Fountains. Such was the bitter ending of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which possibly, or even probably, the Priors of the London and of the Beauvale Charterhouses were the early and unfortunate forerunners.
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The startling removal of Augustine Webster told heavily on Beauvale Priory, which never recovered from the severe blow. The next Prior was Robert Lauran, who however governed the house but for a short time, during which the number of the monks rather decreased; and the last Prior of Beauvale was Thomas Woodstock, who surrendered the house to the King’s Commissioners on the 25th, or as some have written it, on the 18th of July 1540, i.e., in the 31st year of the reign of Henry VIII.
One of the earlier Priors was named Nicholas Wartre, who about 1446 wrote a “Registrum Prioralis de Greaseley, sive Bella Valle,” otherwise described as “Pulchra Vallis in Parco de Gresseley.” This manuscript came somehow into the possession of one of the late Vicars of Mansfield. It was in fine preservation, and answered Dugdale’s references precisely. The Vicar of Mansfield’s name was Leeson Carstain. He presented the manuscript to the British Museum’ in 1814.
John Swift is also mentioned as one of the Priors of Beauvale in 1478, and Thomas Wydder in 1482. The monks who surrendered with Thomas Woodstock were: Joseph Langforde, William Veil, Alexander Louthe, Edward Garnett, Robert Gowton, Nicholas Dookener, Thomas Lyghton, Thomas Walishe, Richard Wakefield, and Richard Byrde.
There is in the Augmentation Office an impression on red wax of the common seal of the Priory, which is appended to the deed of surrender dated July 18th, the 31st Henry VIII. It represents a seated male figure with a glory round his head, his right hand elevated, and in his left an orb, while underneath him in a niche is the figure of a praying monk. The legend, that is the inscription on the seal is: S. Commune, Domu. Bella Vall, Ord. Car. Lastly, Madox in his Formul. Angl. gives an account of the Priors of this house (as before mentioned elsewhere) doing homage to John, Lord Grey of Codnor, but we regret not to have been able to meet with that book.
Thus had the curtain fallen over the greatest of Nicholas de Canteloupe’s work, nor did his own house long survive the distinction to which he had raised it. His own widow, Joan, was ere long obliged to bring an action against a William de Canteloupe (some relative) and Ralph Faucenberg and others to recover 50 messuages, 20 tofts, a mill and 10 acres of land at Ilkeston; and the Castle of Greasley with 13 messuages, 3 carucates of land, 20 acres meadow, 200 of pasture and 1,000 of wood, together with ho rent. It was pleaded against her that she, under the name of Joan Kym (which was her former name) had given a deed of release of these properties, but she denied it to be her deed, and at the assizes of the 30th year of Edward III. at Derby and Nottingham she regained her property, and Wm. Canteloupe and Ralf Faucenburgh, with others, were amerced. The properties after her went out of the direct line of succession, i.e., so much of them as had not been given to monastic establishments.
Stone capital from Beauvale Priory.
The Beauvale Abbey Farm premises, the farmhouse of which is built on to part of the Priory ruins (and is occupied by Mr. C. C. Chambers, a member of a long and well-known family here and in our neighbourhood) occupies the site of the ancient monastic establishment. We saw there some 15 years ago, traceried pieces of stone, about sufficient for a window, but they have probably long been broken up. We have however been able to secure some fragments of floor tilings, which resemble those from Lenton Priory, and which have probably been manufactured at Nottingham, where remains of tile ovens, with fragments of tiles of a similar character, have long been discovered. The Beauvale Abbey Farm nestles just on the border of High Park Wood, and at a little distance from the farmstead is Robin Hood’s Well. Whether this really had any connection with the possibly mythical outlaw of Sherwood Forest we leave to the fancy of the reader; but Annesley Wood adjoins High Park Wood, and Annesley too has preserved the outlaw’s name in Robin Hood’s Hill there. There is another farmhouse on a hill opposite the Beauvale Abbey Farm, which is called the Beauvale Manor Farm, and is in the occupation of Messrs. Wakefield (brothers). The house is said to have been built with materials from the ruins of the Priory, and in the kitchen window of it is inserted a circular piece of stained glass which is said (and probably truly so) to be a fragment of glass from Beauvale Priory. Robin Hood’s Well has an attraction to visitors from the neighbourhood, &c., and is a romantic spot in High Park Wood, where one likes to sit down and rest on a hot summer’s afternoon, and where not a few picnics have been held. Lord Cowper has in this wood a handsome house which he had erected there for his convenience when occasionally visiting Greasley. The view from the tower of the house is most charming and takes in much of the scenery around, and one might linger there with interest and scarce notice the flight of hours.
Earl Cowper's Beauvale Park House.
It need scarcely be said that Beauvale had no place in the Villare Anglicum, because there was no village of that name in Sir Henry Spelman’s time. There is a large and important colliery adjoining the wood, with some office buildings, &c., and a row of cottages for mining officials and work-people. Engine Lane in Beauvale is a private road, and derives its name from the engine yard of Messrs. Barber, Walker & Co., who have a sawmill, wood shops, and engineering works there in an extensive piece of ground, besides stabling for the company’s work-teams and farms.
Llyncroft (probably so-called from a pool which was there) properly belongs to this hamlet. The land had for years been used for grazing purposes, when the late Mr. John Godber acquired it by purchase. He established a small colliery there which adjoined Dovecot Lane, and when that was worked out sold the Croft to Messrs. Elias Paxton and the late Wm. Weston who after some time, cut the Croft up into building lots, for which they found ready purchasers. Llyncroft and Walkerstreat (the latter adjoining Eastwood) form quite a new village in Greasley parish, and, especially the former, has a pleasing aspect, and the houses in it are larger and seem better planned and built than the latter.
Dovecot Lane doubtlessly derived its name from the Pigeon House which is named among the properties of the early Lords of Greasley.
There is a new industry in Llyncroft, for which the parish is indebted to Messrs. F. Mellor, Jepson and Mellor, who originated it in 1880. The pottery is for the manufacture of bottles, &c., and from hard labour and energetic management proved a lucrative concern. It was in 1891 sold to the present owners, Messrs. Joseph Bourne & Sons, who, after a fire which took place there, enlarged the works and, by the introduction of machinery, greatly enhanced the value and prosperity of the business.
The building lots in Llyncroft, especially in the now Walker Street, have been purchased chiefly by Mr. Edward Lionel Walker Munro. The late Mr. Ths. Barber, of Lambclose, has also secured lots, and the rest of the parcels have been acquired in smaller single lots by a number of smaller purchasers. The more considerable among the latter are Mr. Edward Alcock of Hilltop, Messrs. Joseph Bourne & Son, the late Mr. Fred. Chambers, Messrs. Bircumshaw, John Limb, and other small proprietors.
The fine and extensive Board Schools for Greasley, together with a master’s house, are in this hamlet; and of places of Worship are the following: a Chapel of the Primitive Methodists, a Chapel of the New Testament Disciples, and a Chapel of the General Baptists; while the Old Wesleyans have a temporary wooden structure. Llyncroft and Walker Street are besides in proximity to various places of worship in the adjoining Eastwood.
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The church of St. Mary, Greasley
South east view of St MAry's church, Greasley.
The Rev. J. Charles Cox, the learned author of Notes on the Derbyshire Churches, gives the warning, that the dedication of a church should never be taken for granted from County Gazetteers or Directories. Dedications to All Saints and to St. Mary should be viewed with some suspicion until fairly established, for in the time of Henry VIII. the dedication festivals or wakes were often transferred to All Saints’ Day and Lady Day, in order to avoid a multiplicity of holidays, &c., &c. The Village Feast of Greasley not being among those which have been so transferred, the dedication of our church to St. Mary may reasonably be taken as being the correct one. We know not when or by whom our church was founded. It may have been by some early Bishop of the then Diocese; and it may be owing to the munificence of some great Saxon Thane of the Mercian Kingdom, in which this county then was; or to some converted Danish noble, who placed the church centrally in his large domains to be as nearly as could be equidistant for his dependents from every part of it. It appears to us that it was not only the founding of a church hut of a parish, and that probably the large property was subsequently alienated or divided into parts, and was ‘then acquired by those owners whom we find mentioned in Domesday, otherwise Hemshel and the townships of Watnall, Kimberley, and Brinsley might not have been in the parish. We conjecture that the parish was founded at latest in the time of King Canute if not before then, and possibly the first church here may have been a temporary structure, on the site of which our parish church was erected. Nevertheless, since we have the place names of Church Close and of Gospel Close in the parish, it may be that a temporary church may have been in one of those two Closes, and not on the site where our parish church stands. Another reason for our conjecture that the parish will have been founded when the whole territory belonged to one owner is, that no one of those mentioned in Domesday is known to have been entitled to a claim of part of our church, as for instance in Wandesley and in Trowell, in which parishes there were claimants for half a church. What we know for certain from Domesday is, that when the Survey was taken Ulfi was found to have been at Greasley from the Confessor’s time, and that the church and a priest were then here. It might be said that possibly Ulfi had founded the church, but then he could not have been the founder of the parish, since he had no authority over the proprietary of the other townships of the parish, which belonged to other owners, and that brings us back to the earlier presumption.
There is nothing to shew what the original type of the architecture of the church may have been, but it seems certain that the ground plan has never been altered. Probably it consisted of a chancel, nave, and a small tower, and the masonry was of a very primitive kind. The remains can even now be seen outside the chancel, especially the east end of it. It was nothing but a good thickness of undressed stones put together, with fine earth abundantly washed in between them, and the very irregular joints afterwards pointed with mortar. It is the oldest part of the church, and bears marks of alteration in the windows. Both the north side of the chancel and the east end of the north isle of the church were in 1882 found to have no mortar in the foundations, when the walls had to be underpinned for the excavations required for the new heating chamber. The chancel walls especially were even in 1896 found of the worst construction for about eight or nine feet upward from the foundations, and required great quantities of liquified mortar and cement to be poured into solidify them. The walls of the nave were of much later construction, but although better, yet also defective. The outside stones are of properly dressed and durable material, but the inner sides of the walls are not so, and evidently required being plastered over like the chancel. It appears from G. S. Tyack that the appellation “nave” was given to that part of a church from comparing the church with a ship, though his reference for it to the apostolic constitutions may not be the most acceptable one, and it is by himself admitted to be of a debated age. The floors were either unpaved, or where they were not so, were paved with either stones or tiles, and consequently very cold to the feet, and possibly they were not floored at all. Both in churches and in private houses the floors were strewn with rushes, arid Tyack refers for it to Thomas Newton’s “Herbal to the Bible,” published in 1587, in which Newton speaks of “sedges and rushes, with the which many in the country do use in summer time to strawe their parlours and churches, for pleasant smell, &c” Tradition says that rushes were in use in Greasley Church, and that they were grown in a very low laying piece of land in the second field south from the church, now forming part of Mr. Foster’s farm of Moorgreen.
The church must necessarily from time to time have undergone serious repairs and alterations or restorations of the earlier ones of which we have no knowledge, except from an evidence on the South side of the chancel, where there are proofs of earlier windows. Probably the church was in the best early condition in Nicholas de Canteloupe’s time. It is not likely, we conjecture, that the founder of Beauvale Priory would have left his own church, adjoining his castle, in a condition at variance with the greatest event of his life, when on the 9th December he had that distinguished assembly of high ecclesiastics and of noblemen here, who witnessed his Priory foundation charter. Moreover, during the last restoration of St. Mary, fragments of earlier windows were recovered, which were undoubtedly of 13th century work, and were semi-trefoil headed. To retain some of these fragments of the early work we have had a vestry window constructed from them, which exhibits them just as they were found. At that early time too, the windows must have been filled with stained or painted glass, fragments of which adhered in the grooves of the stonework which was recovered. These fragments of ancient glass however, when closely examined, did not only shew the kind of glass which had been used, but that they must have been subjected to great heat. That fact led us to conclude that the church must at some early time have suffered from an unrecorded fire, and this supposition became a certainty when the upper part of the east end of the chancel had in part to be taken down to make room for the new east window, when some six or eight feet downward from the roof a large lump of strangely shaped lead was found in the masonry. It had taken the shape of the bed which it found among the poorly put together stones and rubble, and must have run down in a molten state from the roof.
Thirty-nine years after the foundation of Beauvale Priory we meet with the information that there was an altar (probably a side altar) of St. James in our church. We gain this information from the Borough Records, which give the copy of a will concerning a testamentary burial. It is the burial of a Wolaton of the Wolatons mentioned in Watnall, and is as follows
“In Dei nomine, Amen. Ego Johannes de Wolaton condo Testamentum meum in huno modum. Imprimis lego animam meam Deo et Beatae Mariae, et omnibus sanctis Dei, et corpus meum ad supeliendum in Ecciesia de Greseley coram altari Sancti Jacobi. Item, lego, nomine principalis mei, meliorum equum meum. Item, lego in cera circa corpus meum comburendum, decem libras cerae. Item, do et lego Marjoriae uxori meae omnia bona et catella mea. Item, Priori de Bellavalle XX’s. Item, Fratribus Minoribus de Nottingham xld. Item, Fratribus Ordinis Carmelitarum ejusdem vilke xld. Item, Vicario Ecclesiae de Griseley XId. Item, Domino Thomas presbitero ejusdem villae XIId. Item, duobis clericis, utrique VId. Item, fabricae ecciesiae XId. Item, pauperibus istius parochiae. dimidiam marcam. Et ad istud testamentum fideliter faciendum et exequendum, ordino et constituo principalem executricam meam Majoriam uxorem meum, ac etiarn Willelmum fihium meum et heredam, necnon et Willelmam, flulium Georgii Charneles, coad jutorem corum. Datum apud Watnow, quinto nonas Maii, anno Domini Millesimo CCC LXXXI.”
Which is:—
“In the name of. God, Amen. I, John de Wolaton, make my testament in this manner. First, I leave my soul to God and St. Mary and to all the saints of God, and my body to be buried in the Church of Greasley before the altar of St. James. Also, I leave, in the name of my principal my best horse. Also, I leave in wax to be burned about my body, ten pounds of wax. Also, I give and bequeath to Margery, my wife, all my goods and chattels. Also, to the Prior of Beauvale, 20s. Also, to the Friars Minor of Nottingham, 40d. Also, to the Friars of the Carmelite Order of the same town, 40d. Also, to the Vicar of the Church of Greasley, 40d. Also, to Sir Thomas, priest of the same yule, 12d. Also, to two Clerks, 6d. each. Also, to the fabric of the Church, 40d. Also, to the poor of that parish, half a mark. And for faithfully making and executing this testament, I ordain and constitute my principal executrix my wife Margery, and also William my son and heir, as well as William, the son of George Charneles, their coadjutor. Dated at Watnow the fifth of the nones of May, in the year of the Lord One thousand three hundred and eighty-one.”
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Another testamentary burial in Greasley Church is mentioned in the Torre Manuscripts. We have noticed in Watnall the name of a Chamberlain as one of the witnesses to a document, and we conclude that one of that family entered the Church and rose to some ecclesiastical dignity, otherwise we should not know how to account for the “Torre” Notice. It is as follows :— “12th June, 1446. Joh. Chamberlayn, Archdeacon of Notts, to be buried in the Chancel of the Church of Greasley.”
We have, among others, through the kind aid of Mr. W. P. W. Phillimore, seen the original document at the Public Record Office, of the inventory of the goods of Greasley Church in the reign of Edward VI. It is on an irregular scrap of parchment fastened on a page of a folio Volume (Acy. Misc. Book, 507), and is as follows:— “This inventore made ye V. Daye of September, VI. yeyre of Edwarde ye VI. be ye grase of good of yngland Frannce and yrland diffendor of ye Fayth and of ye Chyrche of yngland and allso of yrland ye suppreme had.”
1st. Imprymis a challys wth. ye patten of sylver gylt.
Item. ii. bellys in ye Steppyll.
Item. ii. coppys on branchyd wth. blew ye hother. wth. grene.
Item. iii. vestementes on of thame ys blake chamlet wth. ye crosse of ye bake of greyne vellvet.
It. Ye second of Tham ye of grene wth. ye crosse of ye bake of Chamlet.
It. Thred of thame ys of goyld wth. a crosse of ye bak wth. blewe and rede.
be me Richard Hallam, Vicar ibidem. John gallale, Richard Folwood, Jhon [Blake?],
Wyllam Shyppard [Churchwardens].
Md. John Galleley and his followers are bound by ... to answer for a bell wch. they have sold for X. li
The reading of the document is as follows :—
It. Imprimis a chalice with the paten of silver gilt.
Item. 2 bells in the steeple.
Item. 2 copes, one branched (i.e., broidered) in blue, the other green.
Item. 3 vestments, one of them is of black chamlet, with the cross of the back in green velvet.
It. The second of them is of green, with the cross of the back in chamlet.
It. Third of them is of gold, with a cross of the back in blue and red.
The words which in the copy from the original are placed in brackets were not clearly legible.
Chamlet was the name probably given to a material much used at that time for ecclesiastical vestments.
The Churchwardens had evidently done away with one of the bells, by sale, since the Commissioners, according to the memorandum appended to the inventory, made a note of it, and bound them over to answer for it.
The Tower of Greasley Church comes next in age after the Chancel, and from its west window appears to point to the perpendicular type, which is reputed to have lasted from about 1377 to 1509. Possibly the tower was built on the site of a former crumbling one of Saxon date by Nicholas de Canteloupe, or perhaps by the La Zouches who succeeded the De Canteloupes, but not later. The gurgoyles of the tower waterspouts are hideous in their representation of deformed and leprosy stricken countenances of human heads. Tyack writes that in olden times of superstition they were supposed to keep evil spirits out of the sacred edifice. The tower has eight crocketed well-proportioned pinnacles and is embattled. The same kind of embattlement is also on the walls of the nave, and the material of all the battlements, together with that of the tower and of the buttresses (except those of the chancel, which are modern) is of very good and durable stone.
There were in 1866 four bells in the tower. We have read of two of them in the inventory of church goods which was taken in Edward VI.’s time. The churchwardens of that time, who were by the Commissioners made answerable for the third bell, probably replaced one for that which they had sold, and a fourth one was added in 1773. This fourth bell may have been cast in our churchyard or in some place close by, because on the occasion of a difference of much later years about the west fence of the old vicarage grounds, an aged man came forward as a witness, who stated that in earlier years of his life he had been engaged to renew that fence ditch, in which he discovered a quantity of bell metal refuse. We found two of these four bells cracked in 1866, and the other two needed re-clappering and re-hanging. The work was entrusted to Messrs. J. Taylor & Co., Bell-founders, of Loughborough, together with the addition of a fifth bell, and they restored the whole peal in a most satisfactory manner. The bells were carefully described in the Reliquary, vol. 19, p. 170. The first, fourth, and fifth were as stated cast by Messrs. J. Taylor & Co. in 1869. The second in the peal is the one supposed to have been cast in our churchyard, and bears the inscription :—
* O O |__| G. HEDDERN OF NOTTINGHAM MADE ME 1793.
There is a star before this legend, followed by two coin impressions and a guilloche or piece of pattern border.
The last of the five bells is the third in the peal and is a rare pre-Reformation bell in black letters, of the finest and purest tone. The inscription is in Old English letters with Lombardic capitals, which are much smaller than the others, and the circular medallion-like divisions between the words represent the founder’s marks, i.e., Dulcis O Sisto O Malis O Vocor O Campana O Gabrielis O William O Founder.
Translate that puzzle who can. So far the best rendering has been by a clergyman, whose name has escaped our memory. “I am a bell of sweet sound. I am called Gabriel.”
We know nothing of Greasley Church repairs or restorations until the year 1727, when William Warburton was Vicar. We know neither what the works of that restoration embraced, except that the roof of the Church was lowered and roofed with lead. A piece of the lead was cut out of it in 1897 which bore the inscription (in raised letters): Sir Robert Sutton, Improprietor, 1727. It is now preserved as a relic of the past in the Tower porch.
Another restoration of which until very lately we knew nothing must have been an important one, the estimated cost of which was £1,530. That was in the year 1753, and the funds for it were raised “Upon Briefe.”
The authorities of the Parish Church of Chatham have a carefully preserved list of the Briefs, in compliance with which collections were made in that Church from 1663 to May 5th, 1791, and the collection for Greasley Church was made there on the 15th of April, 1753. The Revd. G. S. Tyack gives the following explanation :—When a public appeal had to be made for funds, the usual method in past ages was by means of briefs. The word was applied originally to a form of pontifical letter issued by the Pope, somewhat less solemn and weighty in character than a bull. It came latterly in England to be used of letters patent issued by the Sovereign, authorizing and recommending the collection of alms on behalf of a specified cause, &c. Briefs, both in the legal and the popular sense, were often issued for the building and the repair of churches.
Dr. J. C. Cox gives the further information that: the repair or rebuilding of churches in past reformation days, until nearly the beginning of the Catholic revival, was almost invariably effected by briefs. About the middle of last century, owing to the growing frequency of briefs, it was ordered that they should only be granted on the formal application of Quarter Sessions, &c. The briefs themselves were issued from the Court of Chancery until 1828, when they were abolished. The brief for Greasley was owing to the need of church repairs (not fire) which were estimated to cost, as above stated, £1,530; an experience which the Church of Eastwood had likewise to make some six years later to raise (in 1760) the sum of £1,200. Whatsoever the repairs of our church may have effected in 1753 (of which we have no particulars) there were again repairs of the church in 1832. That restoration was the most unfortunate of all, except that it gave a new lead roof to the chancel.
The church remained practically in the condition then given to it until 1882. A piece of lead cut from the roof in 1897 has in raised letters the words:— “Lord Viscount Melbourne. Improprietor. 1832.” This plate is also preserved in the church porch.
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The state of the church in 1866 was as follows. On the outside, the chancel walls were skirted with thick stone slabs to about three or four feet from the ground. The rest of the masonry was cemented over and buttresses had been erected to support the walls. The skirtings and buttresses are still there, and it is now clear that the skirtings had been built on, to strengthen and to protect the worst and most defective part of the masonry. Inside the church, a brick wall to the height of about ten or twelve feet was erected to separate the tower from the church, and in that brick wall were skeleton folding doors, covered with green baize, to give access to the nave. A large heating chamber, with a furnace, was made under the tower, with large hot air flues, in two directions, under, the church floor, wide enough to allow a sweep to pass right through them. A large gallery was running from east to west of the nave, and another from north to south, both galleries resting on cast iron square fluted pillars. To keep the cold out the tower arch was completely boarded up, so that the west window was effectually shut off from the church. The ceilings of the chancel were of gypsum, as in any ordinary living room, and there was an ordinary parlour fireplace with a dog-grate to give some warmth to the chancel.
The chancel arch was a thick medallioned plaster covering over the ancient stonework. The chancel windows were throughout glazed in exactly the same way as early greenhouses used to be, the fairly sized panes of glass only just overlapping each other a little, and the whistling of the air through them when the wind was in the wrong quarter was not exactly what an aeolian harp would perform. The pews were all provided with doors, and they were pretty straight backed, so that people inclined to dose could not have done so comfortably.
There were three pews however in the church, two of which were in the chancel, of which in one, one could stand upright without shewing much more than the head, and if tall something of the shoulders. The pulpit was a fair two-decker, and the large ancient octagonal font had part of the pedestal cut away to get it into a buttress corner of the tower near the entrance to the nave.
Restored interior of St. Mary, Greasley.
The restoration which was undertaken in 1882 was partial, but cleared the ground for future works so far that much which was then done and provided could afterwards be satisfactorily retained. The partition which separated the tower from the church and the galleries was removed. The tower was provided with a new roof in timbers, boardings and leading. A new Belfry floor was made, including new floor beams in a higher stage of the tower. The old heating chamber, &c., &c., were filled up, and a new heating chamber with all requisites provided. Defective stonework in the windows of the nave was replaced with new pieces. All the windows of the nave, as well as the west window in the tower, were reglazed with tinted cathedral quarries. The nave was refloored and reseated. The font was removed to the baptistry at the west end of the south aisle. A stone pulpit replaced the former one. A new reading desk and lectern were provided. For the first time the church was provided with gas fittings, and the roofs of the chancel and nave were well repaired. The foundations of the church were drained throughout, and minor defects on the outer walls made good by repointing. In the chancel the windows had already been reglazed with plain cathedral quarries, and the choir stalls erected some five years earlier. For the first time a small vestry was improvised by walling up the door of the old priest’s porch and inserting a window there. The chancel sedeliae were also provided at this restoration, together with a platform for the church instrument. Finally a glass screen was erected under the tower, and a new oak door given to the porch. The interior of the church after these works were completed did not look very church like, but was warm, clean and comfortable, and a respectable place of worship. We would have desired to carry that restoration much further, but funds were lacking, and the structure was in a safe condition; but it was fortunate that no more money was spent at that time, for much of it would have been thrown away from what followed after. We were for a few brief years comfortable, but then partial subsidences began to show themselves, followed by cracks in the walls. It was owing to coal mining operations. The coal was not taken from underneath the church, but the coal bed had an eastward fall, and gradually drew the surface after it. It is supposed that if the coal had been taken right away from underneath the church the structure would not have suffered so much. We still hoped that repairs might suffice, but as time went on the ‘church suffered more and more. The north and south aisles gave away from the tower; the north and south walls of the nave cracked in the middle from the foundations upwards, so much so that in some parts one could well see the light through them. The chancel broke away eastward from the nave. The glass in the windows was in several parts drawn out of the lead sockets. The lead of the roof became drawn from the cracks in the walls, and began first to leak, and afterwards in the north east corner of the nave to admit the rain water freely. Was the Church then in danger? If even so, it was in vain to undertake anything to correct the evil until the ground had fairly and safely settled, by which time the worst of the defects would be known. Measurements of the cracks were taken, and carefully watched and recorded, until at last in 1896 it was plain that the movements of the soil had fully passed away, and that no further damage might be expected, unless the structure should be neglected by further delay. The necessary funds for the restoration which was then undertaken were generously provided by Earl Cowper, the Duke of Rutland, and Messrs., Barber, Walker & Co., the coal masters in the parish. It is the only restoration we know of of our Church which is worthy of that name, though the chancel railing, sedelia, choir stalls, pulpit, reading desk, lectern, font, tower screen, window glazings, and the seatings provided in 1882 were all retained. The new part of the heating apparatus was not either provided from the restoration funds, and very little of the drainage, nor the final painting of the walls, which was done much later from other funds.
The restoration was an important one. The roofs from both the church and chancel were taken off. The cracks in the wall were built up with bonded stones from the floors upward. Lofty stone arcades forming south and north aisles were erected together with a new noble chancel arch. The new roofs were much raised and made of strong timbers, boarded, felted and tiled, and strongly bonded together with each other, and with the arcades and walls with irons. The aisles were roofed with lead. Part of the east end of the chancel was taken down to erect a handsome east window, and from fragments of 13th Century work discovered in the chancel wall a window was put together for the small vestry, to retain them as a memorial of bygone times. The interior of the chancel roof is interesting. The main timbers and rafters are curved, and the roof presents the look of the bottom of a vessel turned upward, and is very comely. The church and chancel have been throughout re-floored with tiles, except in the seats, where the floors are made of wood blocks set herring-bone fashion in pitch over concrete and cement. The north and south aisles have for the first time east windows to give additional light to the church; and the church has new gas fittings, which in part have been provided from help other than the restoration fund to replace the former gas standards with pendant chandeliers. Finally a special fund was raised by us from subscriptions to provide for the ornaments of the church and chancel, and for a fine church instrument of Mason & Hamlyn’s manufacture.
To mention what we may call our Church lore, we were many years ago told of a custom which at one time prevailed here down even to living memory, which we at first gave little heed to, and held to be merely legendary or possibly a myth. As it is, we find from reading Tyack’s lore and legend of the Church that the same custom really obtained in some Churches, and having lately had the opportunity of seeing an aged daughter of our before last predecessor, who ministered here for 50 or 51 years, we were able to ascertain from her that the custom really existed here, and that she well remembered it. It is to the effect that when some young person died in the odour of virginity, white gloves and wreaths or garlands were hung up in the church in memory of her. In process of time the memorials were made less costly. Wreaths and patterns of gloves cut out from paper took the place of the former memorials, and possibly the Church Clerk may have received some little douceur for them, and for hanging them up in the church.
Our Parish Registers begin with the year 1660, but are in a very poor condition, and for some few years they are altogether missing, while a couple or three years more are merely on loose leaves, partly tattered and much filled out around the edges. Some parts of the early parchment register books are scarcely, if at all, decipherable. There is a two-paged list of names at the beginning of the books, which may probably be the roll of the householders of the parish at that time. A few of them could sign well, some others indifferently, and most of them had crosses and strange (to us unknown) hieroglyphics at the end of their names. We hope that some day these registers may be published, but the publishers are now engaged with the Nottingham Registers, which so far at least as marriages are concerned, have already appeared for St. Mary’s, Nottingham, and for the parish of Bingham. There may be besides these some others for our county, but we have only those just mentioned on our shelves.
There was, of course, instrumental music in the church before the introduction of a really good harmonium of Alexander’s manufacture, which is now superseded by one of Mason & Hamlyn’s American organs of much power.
The list of the Clergy of Greasley from the time of the dissolution of the Monasteries is incomplete; but that of the early Rectors, as given in the Torre Manuscripts, seems to be sufficiently satisfactory. But Greasley is not much of an exception in that respect. It is an acknowledged and regrettable matter for many parishes that, from a variety of causes, even Diocesan Registers are lacking in completeness and in details which we are missing, both from the time of the suppression of the monastic orders and from the time of the Commonwealth to the Georgian era.
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THE RECTORS WERE THE FOLLOWING:
Hugo de Cressy. Patron, Hugo Fitz Ranulf.
May 20, 1254, Rad. de Cressy. Idem.
Feb. 15, 1294, Hugo de Cressy. Patrons, Will. de Ross and Eustachia his wife.
Oct. 12, 1317, Sim. de Preston. Patron, Will. de Cantiloupe.
May 12, 1324, Will. de Walkingham (died). Patron, Nic. de Cantiloupe, mil.
March 10, 1334, John de Monte (died). Idem.
Sept. 15, 1339, Will. de Laxton. Patron, The Assigns of Nic. de Cantiloupe.
LIST OF THE VICARS:
July 20, 1344, Ric. fil. Will. le Clerke de Newthorpe (resigned). Patron, Prior and Convent of Bellavalle.
Aug. 2, 1349, Will. Bilburgh (resigned). Idem.
Oct. 3, 1349, Will. Cressy (resigned). Idem.
Dec. 21, 1371, Robt. de Tyversholt (died). Idem.
Sep. 2, 1397, Ric. Kendale. Idem.
Tho. Bollesore (died). Idem.
Feb. 6, 1408, Joh. Ottewey (died). Idem.
March 5, 1441, Hugo Tapton, M.A. (resigned). Idem.
July 3, 1445, Joh. Leicester (resigned). Idem.
March 15, 1451, Tho. Dekyn. Idem.
Oct. 16, 1460, Tho. Deakyn (resigned). Idem.
Decr. 10, 1466, Joh. Blande (died). Idem.
Jan. 1501, Robt. Felowe (died). Idem. There is nothing to shew at what time Robert Felowe died, and we have no further record until Dec. 6, 1544, when Ric. Halam was appointed under the patronage of the Crown.
April 22, 1570, Elyas Okeden, alias Ellys Okden (died). Patron, Elizth. Regina
May 9, 1588, Geor. Wolley. Patron, Carolus Morrison, mil.
From that time forward to 1636 all information is again missing, but in that year we meet in the Parchment Register of our parish with the name Samuel Tuke, Vicar. He was probably the Vicar of Greasley who was expelled by the Parliamentarians in the Caroline Wars.
The next signature is that of Robert Smalley, in 1653, who was the Nonconformist minister who held this incumbency until 1662, when at the Restoration he declined to submit to Episcopal Ordination, and set up as an independent minister at Moorgreen in our parish.
From that time forward we have again no information until 1723. Possibly the incumbency may have been held by a Pluralist, as at least once again it was at a later time. The Parish Registers give no information, the Clergy not having signed their names in them during that period, and from 1722 to 1727, both years inclusive, the registers are either altogether missing or are mere tattered fragments on paper.
The next Vicar was William Warburton, in 1723, at that time a young clergyman of whom Dean Hook’s Ecclesiastical Biography gives the following account :—William Warburton was born at Newark on the 14th Decr., 1698, and was there educated. He first studied for the Law, but having served his articles he read for the Ministry. He did not go to any University, but was ordained Deacon in 1723 in the Cathedral of York, by Archbishop Dawes, and remained a Deacon until 1726, when he was ordained Priest in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, by Bishop Gibson. In 1723 he published some miscellaneous translations in prose and verse from Roman authors, with a Latin preface to Sir Robert Sutton. These were styled by Bishop Hurd “Juvenile Essays of his Pen, Hasty and Innocent”; but they so far pleased Sir Robert Sutton that in 1826 he gave Warburton the Vicarage of Greasley, in his native county. In 1728, on the occasion of the King’s visit to Cambridge, through Sir Robert Sutton’s influence his name was placed upon the King’s list, and he received the degree of M.A. In the same year, 1728, Sir Robert Sutton gave him the Rectory of Brand-Broughton, in the Diocese of Lincoln, where he remained till 1746. In 1733 he had been made Chaplain to the Prince of Wales, and in 1753 he was appointed to a Prebendal stall in Gloucester Cathedral. He was also in 1754 made King’s Chaplain, and in 1757 Dean of Bristol; while at the close of 1759 he was made Bishop of Gloucester. He received the Lambeth D.D. degree from Archbishop Herring about 1754.
The foregoing account is supplemented in Gorton’s Biographical Dictionary, with the information that Warburton began in 1727 to distinguish himself as an original writer by his “Critical and Philosophical Inquiry into the Causes and Prodigees of Miracles as related by Historians,” which he also dedicated to Sir Robert Sutton, upon which the Rectory of Brand-Broughton was bestowed on him. This remarkable man was therefore only for two years Vicar of this parish, but during that time he had (among others) occasion to give a short written character to a poor boy of Greasley, on whose remarkable career we shall dwell in another part of this book.
There is again nothing to shew who the clergy were that succeeded Warburton at Greasley until 1747, when the burial took place of John Cooper, who died as Vicar of Greasley and Rector of Thorp. It is possible that another pluralist may have succeeded John Cooper, of whom we know nothing, because there are six years after Cooper’s death for which we are not able to account. But in the year 1753 the estate changed hands. It had come from Charles Morrison to Lord Capel by marriage, and from thence through the house of Essex to the Suttons. Sir Robert Sutton sold it to Sir Matthew Lamb in 1753, and in the same year the Rev. William Wright was presented to Greasley, and was for 22 years Vicar of the Parish, his death taking place in 1775. With this last named Incumbent the Vicar’s signatures in the registers began, and were ever afterwards regularly continued. He had for a short time a curate in 1760, named J. Nixon, who became Rector of Nuttall; and another curate, named George Allan, in Jan. 1775, who remained here until July, 1776. We gather from an old parish terrier of this incumbency that the Vicar was entitled to have 4d. a year from every chimney in use in the parish. We should certainly not like to have the benefit of collecting that now.
The next Vicar of Greasley was John Mansell, appointed in 1776, who had for a very short time an assistant named George Sanders in 1797, and then from Nov. 1797 to Sept. 1798, the Rev. John Thompson for his curate. This Vicar left a benefaction for the poor of Greasley, the details of which are specially mentioned by him, together with the hamlets of the parish in which those to be benefitted should live, and what the circumstances should be which should entitle them to doles from his endowment. The Charity Commissioners have departed from the founder’s appointments, and have thrown this charity together with the Rolleston School endowment into one united scheme for administration.
The Rev. John Mansell was in 1798 succeeded in the Incumbency of Greasley by the Rev. Peniston La Tour, who had again the Rev. John Thompson for his assistant from Oct. 1800 to 1805, when the same clergyman became his regular curate, and remained such until the month of April, 1814.
The Rev. John Thompson after that was curate of Eastwood. He was the father of the late Dr. Thompson of Leicester, who married Miss Annie Gelstharp of Moorgreen on April 28th, 1870.
The Rev. John Thompson was succeeded in the curacy of Greasley by the Rev. John Hides in June, 1814, who, five years later, became Vicar of Greasley in 1819, and died, after fully 51 years of ministrations at Greasley, in the year 1866, having during that half century borne here the no slight heat and burden of the day. We can well remember that venerable Vicar, who was well respected here.
The Rev. Charles Steward Upperton, M.A., who succeeded in 1866, resigned the Incumbency in the same year; when in October of the same year, 1866, the present Vicar, the Rev. Rodolph Baron von Hube, was instituted to the Incumbency.
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We have mentioned the sale of the estate with the advowson of the parish by Sir Robert Sutton to Sir Matthew Lamb in 1753. From the latter descended the Lords Melbourne, of whom there were three. Peniston the First, Viscount Melbourne, was born June 29th, 1748, and died on the 22nd of July, 1828. His eldest son, Peniston, died unmarried on the 24th of June, 1805; and he was therefore succeeded by his second son, William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, who became Prime Minister of England, and died in 1848. The third son of the first Viscount was Frederick James Lord Melbourne, who was born on the 17th of April, 1782, and died in 1853. The two last named have memorials in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. The eldest daughter of the first Viscount Melbourne was the Hon. Emily Mary, born on the 21st of April, 1787, and died on Sept. 11th, 1869. This lady married first Peter-Leopold-Louis-Francis Cowper, 5th Earl of that title, and after that Earl’s demise, the Lord Viscount Palmerston, Prime Minister of England. After the Viscountess Palmerston’s demise the estates came to the present Earl Cowper, who has done so much for the churches and parishes of Greasley and Selston.
There are, to the best of our knowledge and belief, no vaults now existing in Greasley Church except that of the Rev. John Mansell and his wife, in nearly the centre of the chancel, and the large vault, now sealed up, of the Rolleston family at the east end of the south aisle.
The monumental remains in the church are: On the north side of the chancel a brass shield with an obliterated coat of arms and a brass label, in memory of Helena the wife of Richard Bingham-mil; and one of a Gilbert Millington, who died very young, a descendent of the Millingtons of Felley.
On the south wall of the chancel are:
1st.—A tablet inscribed
To the Memory of
Ann,
The wife of the Rev. Wm. Wright,
Vicar of this Parish,
Who died April 19th, 1762,
AE 41.
Also of five infants, their children.
A little family in heaven we hope they make,
In bliss and happiness for Jesus sake.
Here also lies the body of John, son
of the Rev. W. Wright, and Ann his
wife, who died Feb. 4th, 1767, aged 23 years.
And also the body
of the above
Rev. William Wright,
who died
May the 3rd, 1776,
in the 60th year of his age.
2.—A marble tablet inscribed:
Sacred to the Memory of
The Rev. John Mansell, A.M., Vicar of
Greasley, who died,
August 27th, 1797, aged LXXII years.
Also to Mary his wife,
who died May 12th, 1797, aged LXV years.
3.—A small brass plate, which cannot be the original one, since in Throsby’s time the plate of which he wrote was heart-shaped while the present one is a square, with the engraving:
John Cooper, Rector of Thorp,
and Vicar of Greasley, departed
this life March 10th, MDCCXLVI.
The late Revd. John Hides, vicar of Greasley
4.—A brass plate inscribed:
Sacred to the Memory of the
Rev. John Hides, Vicar of Greasley,
and 51 years Minister of this Parish,
who departed this life August 2 1St, 1865,
Aged 77 years.
Also to Mary his wife, who died
Feb. 27th, 1859,
In her 75th year.
Psalm XXXIX, 8: And now, Lord, what
is my hope, truly my hope is in Thee.
In the south aisle of the church are the Rolleston series:
1.—A marble monument, with a large niche containing a bust. The monument is surmounted with a crest and coat of arms. The Inscription is:
In Memory of Lancelot Rolleston,
of Watnall in ye County of Nottingham, Esq., who was one of ye
Branches of ye Family of the Rollestons of Staffordshire. He
married one of the daughters of Geo. Poole of Hege, in the
County of Derby, Esq., with whom Hee liv’d very haypily many
year until his death. And for his Knowne and Steddy loyalty to
his Prince, he was made
High Sheriff of this County in the year 1682.
A Gentleman Generally belov’d in this Country, but especially by
his particular acquaintance.
He was a great lover of the Person y once Contracted
friendship with,
And not given to change,
His carriage was Affable and his Conversation Ingenious and
Pleasant, very courteous and Friendly to his Neighbours, and
Charitable to all he knew in want.
He died in the year 1685, in the 35th year of his age,
Making his loving Cousin, Edw. Rolleston of Toynton, in the
County of Lincoln, Esq., His Executor, who erected this monument.
The small head of an angel with outspread wings is under the Monument, as though supporting it.
2.
Near this Place Remains
The body of Christopher Rolleston
Of Watnall, Esq., and Hannah his wife,
Daughter of Samuel Holden of Aston,
in the County of Derby, Esq.
She departed this life on the 29th of Ap…
In the 49th year of her . . .
He died on the 21st March of . .
in the 67th year of his age.
They had issue, Lancelot, Mary . . .
Christopher, Frances, Edward, Robert,
Elizabeth and Thomas.
This monument was erected in 1749.
Here Lie also the bodies of
Lancelot Rolleston of Watnall, Esq.
3.
Sacred to the Memory
of Revd. John Rolleston, M.A.,
LI. years the worthy and consciencious minister of Aston,
in the County of Derby.
The fourth and last surviving son of
Christopher Rolleston, Esq., of Watnall,
in the County of Nottingham,
and of Hannah his wife,
The daughter of Samuel Holden, Esqr., of Aston.
He married
Dorothy, the youngest Daughter
of Robert Burdett, Esqr., of Foremarke,
in the County of Derby,
and had issue by her
Six sons and one daughter.
He died June 13th, 1770,
aged 65 years.
This small tribute to his Memory and worth
Is paid by his truly affectionate
and sorrowful widow.
Also to the Memory of Dorothy Rolleston, Widow of
the Revd. John Rolleston, M.A.,
who died the 20th Octr., 1794,
in the . . . . year
of her age.
4.
Sacred to the Memory of
Christopher Rolleston,
of Watnall, Esqr.,
second son of
the Revd. John Rolleston
and Dorothy his wife.
He died April 3rd, 1807,
Aged 67.
Also to the Memory of
Ann Rolleston,
Relict of Christopher Rolleston, Esq.
She died Feb. 4th, 1809,
aged 60.
5.
Also to the Memory of
Ann Rolleston,
Daughter of Christopher and Ann Rolleston,
who died Feb. 16th, 1813,
aged 30 years.
Sacred to the Memory
of Lancelot Rolleston, Esqr.,
of Watnall,
in the County of Nottingham,
eldest son of
The Revd. John Rolleston, A.M.,
and Dorothy his wife.
He departed this life the 25th April, 1802,
Aged 65
6.
Sacred
To the Memory of
Caroline,
Wife of Lancelot Rolleston, of Watnall, Esqr.,
and Daughter of
Sir Christopher Chatwynd, Bart., of Granden Hall,
in the County of Warwick.
She died March 10th, 1844,
aged 57 years.
Also in Memory of
Lancelot,
Son of Lancelot and Caroline Rolleston.
He died March 20th, 1826,
aged 14 years.
6. Under the east window of the south aisle:—
Sacred to the Memory of
Lancelot Rolleston, of Watnall, Esqr., son of Christopher
Rolleston and Ann his wife,
Daughter of Captain Nicholas, R.N., Colonel of the Nottingham
shire (Sherwood Foresters) Militia, Chairman of Quarter Sessions.
and from 1837 to 1849 member in three successive parliaments
for the Southern Division of this County.
He died 18th May, 1862, aged 76.
Also to the Memory of his Wife Eleanor Charlotte, Daughter of
Robert Fraser, Esqr., of Torbrek, Invernesse, and the Lady Ann
his Wife, Daughter of James the 8th Earl of Lauderdale,
who died 2nd June, 1894.
At the west end of the south aisle in the Baptistry over the venerable old Font are the Tables of the Law, together with the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, presented to the church by Francis Barber in 1764. These incidentally show that the indifferent east window of the chancel, which was taken out in 1897, must have been erected during the restoration of 1832, because the tables, from their height, had then room there without obscuring the light, and were therefore buried behind the Lord’s table, where we found them in 1866. and have at the last restoration in 1896-7 transferred them to the Baptistry.
At the west end of the north aisle, with an obliterated coat of arms, is a monument inscribed :—
Near this Place are deposited the Remains of
Gilbert Millington, of Felley Abbey, Esqr., and Sarah
his wife. He died the 2nd April, 1703, and
she departed this life the 22nd August, 1741.
She had issue Gilbert, who died the 14th of
May, 1694, aged 14. Elizabeth married
Thomas Holden, M.A., Rector of Aston in the County of
Derby, and Alathea, their only surviving daughter,
Relict of Charles Savile of Methley, in the
County of York, Esq., by whom this monument
was erected to their memory out of Filial
regard and Gratitude in the year 1744.
On the north wall of this aisle is a marble monument :—
In Memory of Anne,
The wife of
George Robinson, Esq.,
and eldest daughter of
Thomas Barber, Esqr.,
Who died March 5th. 1824,
Aged 21.
Under the east window of the same aisle is a brass plate inscribed
Sacred to the memory of
Thomas Francis Philip
Hutchinson Barber, of Lambclose House.
He died at Wurtenberg in Germany
3rd April, 1857, aged 79 years.
Near the pulpit in the same aisle is an alabaster tablet commemorating the last Church restoration, bearing the inscription :—
To the Glory of God.
Earl Cowper, the Duke of Rutland, and
Messrs. Barber, Walker & Co. defrayed
the costs of the restoration of this Church
A.D. 1896.
The Rev. Rodolph Baron von Hube, Vicar.
M.E. Wild, Wm. George Churchwardens.,
Finally, on the south wall under the tower are two tablets the upper one of which reads
The
Reverend
John Mansell
and Mary his
wife Bequeath’d
the charities
as specified on
the Tablet below,
and which was erected
by L. Rolleston, Esqr.
The Revd. C. Nixon
and A. Jackson Gent.
Trustees.
Underneath this is the tablet containing the founder’s directions how his bequests should be applied:—
A Schoolmaster or Mistress for teaching Eight poor Children, Boys or Girls, whose Parents belong to the Parish of Greasley the Yearly Salary of | 5 | 0 | 0 |
Also Two Shillings and Six-pence on Christmas Day to each of the said poor Children, provided that they shall have regularly attended Church on Sundays and Christmas Day, unless prevented by sickness or lameness | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Ten Shillings each to Eight poor Women, parishioners of and resident in Greasley aforesaid, at the time of their Lying In | 4 | 0 | 0 |
One Shilling per week to Five poor Women, parishioners of and resident in one of the hamlets of Watnall, Moorgreen, Beggarlee, and Newthorpe | 13 | 0 | 0 |
Two Shillings and Six-pence to each of the said poor Women on Christmas Day, provided they shall have been regular attendants at Greasley Church, unless prevented by sickness or other reasonable excuse | 0 | 12 | 6 |
Fifty Shillings to be distributed in Wheaten Bread, on Candlemas Day, to the poor of Greasley aforesaid | 2 | 10 | 0 |
| £26 | 2 | 6 |
Lastly, underneath the tablet containing the Mansell bequests is a brass plate, which years ago we recovered from some rubbish, and which refers to one who is said to have been buried under the tower, but whose remains were probably removed when the earlier large heating chamber, which is now filled up, was constructed. It is: “In Memory of Samuel Potter, son of Samuel Potter and Elizabeth his wife, who departed this life the gist day of May 1712, in the 22nd year of his age.”
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The Churchyard.
Tyack’s Lore and Legends of the Church contain some interesting anecdotes connected with churchyard watchings and their object. Whether the same was the object here we know not, nor do we know whether it was a regular custom here, or for what reason; but of one churchyard watching at Greasley we have information. It took place many years ago, and the parties engaged in it shall be nameless. One of them, whom we knew well died years ago; but the other, a very intelligent and much respected old man, is still with us. We will name the parties A and B. In his younger days A was given to innocent practical jokes; but B had a strain of fears of the supernatural in his composition, and unlike as the two were in their temperament and disposition, they were coupled together to watch the Greasley churchyard in a certain night. Said B to A when they had proceeded some little distance toward the churchyard, “Hark thee, A, I don’t owe nob’dy nothink, and I has done nob’dy no harm, but if anythink happen to we to-night, God have mercy on me soul.” “Nonsense, B,” chuckled A, “come on, it’s time we should be there.” On they trudged, B hanging a little behind until he felt he must tell A again that he owes nob’dy nothink, &c., but being both good-humouredly scolded by A as well as ‘encouraged, the two went on until they came to the Moorgreen stile of the footway leading through the fields to the churchyard. There B halted once more, and more solemnly than before reasserted his character of owing nob’dy nothink, nor having done nob’dy no wrong, and that God may have mercy on his soul if anythink happened to them that night. A stepped over the stile, and being used to B’s lagging a little behind, walked on, but after having walked some little distance looked round for his companion, when, lo! B had fairly bolted. We do not know whether he had seen anything, but we have seen him often and felt that we could credit what had been related to us, especially the first part of B’s protestations.
It does not appear that there was at Greasley, as in some churchyards of olden times, an objection to burials on the north side of the church. To the contrary, both on the north and south side of thç church, and the west as well, the churchyard was well filled with graves.
Perhaps one remarkable circumstance may deserve to be noted here about some burials near the north side of the chancel. When the new heating chamber was being excavated for there (at the before last church restoration) the workmen came upon a number of human remains, which were carefully uncovered, and each of them proved the remains of a man of uncommon stature—a number of giant brothers one might say, which were all buried in that special corner. We had the remains carefully collected in a large coffin, which we got made for that purpose, and the remains were reverently re-interred as near the place where they had been found as conveniently could be.
The Churchyard of Greasley was originally a very small one, and one might wonder how it sufficed for centuries. But the explanation is not far to seek. The Kimberley dead were not buried here until 1443, but were interred in the ancient Kimberley Churchyard, in which locality human remains have frequently been brought to the surface by the agriculturist. But even then Greasley had but a small God’s acre for the large parish. We must, however, consider that the population was small. If the list of names which we find at the beginning of the Parish Register for 1600 is that of the householders of the whole parish then the marvel is not by far so great; but independently of that, as long as burials (as was the rule) continued to be in woollen, and not in coffins, the ground was not filling up so fast, and the decay was far more rapid, so that the ground was much earlier ready again for interments than otherwise could have been. The original limits of the Greasley Churchyard were southward as far as where the large elm tree stands; eastward no further than our Churchwalk; westward to the present boundary wall; and northward as far as the boundary of the old Vicarage grounds. There was a thick holly fence separating the Vicarage kitchen garden from the Churchwalk, which was then called Black Lane, and it is said (whether true or not we know not) that suicides used to be buried under that lane. The first Churchyard extension was southward, the second from the Churchwalk eastward, and the last, in our own time, northward to the Nottingham Road. It will take about ten years more before the new ground will be filled up. Meanwhile much care is being taken to have all graves in the new ground made so deep that the families to whom they belong may for some time be able to continue burying there, even after the Churchyard should become officially closed for other burials.
As in many other old churchyards, ours could not be expected to be without some carvings of death’s heads and cross bones and an hourglass. We meet with that here both on a headstone and also on one of the four brass plates of a tomb.
There are several large tombs in our Churchyard, the panel of one of which has an inscription which illustrates in a measure how rhymes were at times forced. It reads :—“ Sacred to the Memory of Charles Maltby, who died Jan. 3rd, 1821, aged 90 years
“With successful industry he passed through life,
Attached to his children, his friends and his wife,
And reached the advanced age of 90 you see,
Having lived an example of economy.”
There is an interesting tomb eastward from the chancel which we cannot omit mentioning. The large stone slab which covers the tomb has a line lengthwise drawn on it, on the respective sides of which are the words
Benjamin Drawater's tomb in Greasley Churchyard (Photo: A Nicholson, 2004).
“Underneath lies interred the mortal remains of Benj. Drawater, Gentleman, of Mansfield, late of Eastwood, who suddenly departed this life on the 2nd of June, 1818, in the 68th year of his age. In his professional duty he had accompanied the great circumnavigator, Cook, in the years 1772— 1775. His virtues were commendable and exemplary, and were highly esteemed by friends and relations and his surviving family. He was a pious and good Christian. He lived respected and died lamented”
On the other side of the line the Doctor’s wife is commemorated, i.e. :—
“Underneath lies interred the remains of Dorothy
Drawater, relict of the late Benj. Drawater, who
departed this life at Nottingham on the 20th of
May, 1818, aged 61 years.’
Another tomb betokens the resting place of the late Rev. John Hides and his wife, whose memorial tablet is in the chancel as we described it there.
The Barber family have several tombs here, under the oldest of which a vault must exist because of the several burials which (to judge from the brasses) will have taken place there. The tomb has four brasses.
1. Here lieth the body of Sarah, the wife of John Barber, who departed this life the 3rd day of March, 1710, in the 39th year of her age.
2. Here lyeth the Bodies of Mary and Elizabeth Barber, daughters of Francis and Elizabeth Barber. Mary departed this life ye 14th day of Jany., 1739, aged 5 months, and Elizabeth died Jan. ye 7th, 1744, aged 11 years.
Below these is engraved the cross bones, a death’s head and an hourglass.
3. Here lieth the Body of Sarah Raynor, Widdow, Daughter of Francis and Elizabeth Barber, who departed this life Apl. 11th, 1769, aged 36 years.
4. Underneath this stone lies the remains of Hannah, the wife of Thomas F. P. H. Barber of Lambclose House. She died the 2nd March, 1844, aged 59 years.
Also of Eliza, daughter of Thomas F. P. H. Barber, and wife of Francis Read Grammer. She died at Langton Hall, 26th of January, 1845, aged 35 years.
Also of Lucy, daughter of Francis Read and Eliza Grammer. She died at Watnall, 8th February, 1853, aged 13 years.
A red granite ledger tomb has on one side:–
“In loving Memory of Thomas Barber of Lamb-
close House, Greasley, Notts., who died Jan. 10th,
1874, aged 68.
Redeemed with the precious blood of Christ.”
The other side has :—
“Also in loving Memory of Elizabeth, the beloved
wife of Thomas Barber, who died June 24th, 1885.
Saved by grace through faith.”
On a marble tomb over a brick vault, on one side :—
“In loving Memory of Lavinia Bertha, the beloved
wife of Thomas Barber, Jun., who died at Hemp
shill, near Nottingham, February 2nd, 1870, aged
25 years.”
On the other side :—
“In loving Memory of Thomas Barber of Lamb
close House (late of Hempshill), born December
28th, 1843, died December 8th, 1893”
Next to this marble tomb is a grey granite cross, at the head of another brick vault, where lie buried two dear young children, who both lost their lives by accidents, i.e.
“Here rests in God, Kenneth Forbes, second son
of Thomas Barber of Lambclose House, April
23rd, 1890, aged 12½ years.
Also his little sister, Cecily, August 12th, 1892,
aged 6 years and 4 months.
What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt
know hereafter.”
There are several large tombs of the Flint family, and a red granite one of the late R. Harrison of the Grange. The Farnworths and the Rogers family have also memorials here, as well as the family of Mr. Gge. Harrison, the Yeomans, the Gelsthorps, and many others too numerous to mentiorn The Rolleston family, since their vault in the Church has been sealed up, have a new family vault in the churchyard sufficient for eight burials.
THE END
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Notes and Sources
About the book and its author...
Full title: Griseleia in Snotinghscire: an illustrated history from the earliest times and from reliable sources of the Parish and Parish Church of Greasley and Priory of Beauvale, with the hamlets of Hemshel, Newthorpe, Moorgreen and Beauvale and the two townships, now independent parishes of Kimberley and Brinsley, together with a glossary of terms used.
Published: 1901 by Murray's Nottingham Book Company.
Pages: 209
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| Mr. Straw's copy of von Hube's book |
INSCRIBED
WITH MY ESTEEM TO
LANCELOT ROLLESTON
OF WATNALL HALL, ESQR.,
AND
COLONEL SOUTH NOTTS HUSSARS,
AND
TO MY PARISHIONERS
WITH SINCERE WISHES FOR
THEIR BEST FUTURE AND HIGHEST WELFARE
BY THEIR FAITHFUL FRIEND AND PASTOR,
RODOLPH BARON VON HUBE
 |
| c.1901 - von Hube and his wife. The picture was found inside a copy of his book on the his parish history of Greasley called "Griseleia in Snotingscire" Courtesy of K.Kenneth. |
Notts Archives copy http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/books/vonhube1910/contents.htm
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