On Sunday, April 3, 2022 at 10:15:09 AM UTC-7, Girl57 wrote:
Found the below record in the Derbyshire Record Office and have ordered a copy but don't have yet. Christopher "the parson" FitzRandolph, nephew/cousin of Christopher FitzRandolph m. to Jane Langton in early 16th-century Notts and Derby, was installed
as rector at Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Notts in 1490 (advowson held by Sir John Conyers, presumably his uncle?) This suit was brought in 1503 and names Christopher parson as "Clerk of the Peace."
https://calmview.derbyshire.gov.uk/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=D6270%2f19&pos=2
Questions:
1) Was it common for a man to serve as both a rector and as Clerk of the Peace? Wouldn't this have been quite a bit of work? On other hand, I've read that some rectors hired assistants and left a lot of the parish management to them, freeing up time...
Also that some clerks of the peace had legal training. Is it likely/possible that Christopher had had both divinity and legal training?
Hard to tell how much work it would have been. Given the number of rectors who dabbled in history, genealogy and natural history, or as schoolmasters, it seems many of them had a good bit of spare time on their hands. In some case, this was a good thing
because not all parishes were sufficently self-supporting, leaving the rectors scrambling to supplement their income. (And at the risk of sounding cynical, human nature being what it is I imagine some of them treated their parishes as little more than
sinecures rather than solumn responsibilities.)
As to training for both law and religion, I would say it is not entirely impossible but I would expect it to be unusual. Formal legal training usually involved a long apprenticeship, or the equivalent with one of the Inns of Court, and so it is not the
kind of thing one would just do on a lark, or likewise having spent the time to acquire the training, would likely abandon for a position as a coutnry rector. I suspect the amount of legal training among people in such a role varied, and that one might
start out as little more than a scribe under an experience JP, and as they say in modern times, 'fake it 'til you make it'.
2) The details here seem to say that Christopher's land/farm was in Pinxton, Derbyshire...A few miles from Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Notts. Was it common for a rector not to live on the church premises? And is it correct that some rectors hired people to
manage their farms?
Many of your questions don't have one-size-fits-all answers. I would say that rectors lived in whatever situation most suited them and the tasks they had to perform. If they had a family home available to them within easy 'commuting' range, and it was
nicer than the rectory, then the choice seems pretty straightforward - rent out the rectory and live in the nicer house.
I would imagine that some rectors indeed hired people to manage their farms, and that likewise, some hired curates or clerks to deal with the day-to-day drudgery of managing their parish (some may even have done both).
3) Later on, Christopher's 1516 will says he bequeathed his "ferme" at Langton Hall -- the home of his (presumed) nephew/cousin of the same name -- to someone. Is it possible that the parson lived with his nephew while he was still rector, i.e., didn't
live on church premises, as above? And would the legatee's new ownership of that "ferme" have been recorded as a deed for his use as proof of his ownership/would there be a paper trail? (I also need to find out how ownership worked if the piece of land
in question was part of a larger estate/manor, etc.)
Is it possible he lived with a nephew? yes, or that the nephew lived with him. We are talking about pre-reformation here, so I could easily see an unmarried older uncle living with family, or inviting family to live with him.
As to paper trail, it sort of depends on the nature of the holding, but if the land wasn't held in chief and there were no minors involved and there was no entail, the will WAS the paper trail. We have a number of old wills, otherwise lost, that have
been preserved in court records because they were being presented in cases as proof of ownership. Note that 'deeds' didn't really exist in the 16th century. There were a number of ways land could pass from one person to another, each recorded in distinct
types of records held in different types of repositories (or some not recorded at all): wills, court cases (some of them fake), infeudations, simple male-preference primogeniture inheritance, royal confiscation and regrant, etc. In the English diaspora,
a unified registry of all land transfers is a fairly recent development of the modern bureaucratic state.
As to how things functioned if it was part of a larger estate, in some sense every piece of land in England was part of a larger entity, held through subinfeudation, or do you mean a larger estate held by the testator that he was carving this farm off of
to leave to a nephew? Anyhow, again, you seem to be envisioning cookie-cutter rules that can be applied like a mathematical equation, when things tended to be more nuanced in practice.
taf
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