Heaven only knows

Our ancestors may have been God-fearing, but they weren't above misbehaving in church. Carla Passino delves into records of parish life and discovers a host of miscreants, from naked Quakers to veil-less women and squealing clerks

- Carla Passino

SKIPPING church to go hunting must have seemed an innocent enough escapade to Thomas Harwell of Islip, in Oxfordshire. Little did he know that he would be caught red handed and his name would go down in shame for eternity. He was duly reprimanded in 1584—and a churchwarden’s report preserved the memory of his misdeed for more than four centuries.

Kept meticulously up and down the country, parish registers, churchwardens’ accounts, vestry minutes, wills and presentments (reports of misdemeanours to higher church authorities) ‘build up a detailed picture of what happened in and around old churches in their heyday,’ notes Justin Lovill, who collated material from more than 900 communities across the country for his latest book, Old parish life: A guide for the curious. His findings shine the light on life in medieval and modern England, whether it’s countryside economics—in 1582, the ‘killinge of ratte’ in Preston, Lancashire, was rewarded with 4d, the same amount as a Cambridge woman received three years later ‘for caryage of a lode of dunge’—or how major historical events played out in everyday life. As an example, Mr Lovill quotes a 1548 entry from Long Melford, in Suffolk: ‘Sold to John Dowty a planke and halfe, the crosse... 8d. There is the Reformation in a handful of words: the cross, and all it represented, reduced to two bits of timber and valued accordingly.’