1 came across an article in this month’s London Review of Books (Vol 46 no 16) by Tom Johnson. It is about visitations, whereby church authorities attempt to discern the state of religious life in the parishes. Here are some sections which mention the Forest of Dean:
On 13 May 1397, the visitors came to Ruardean in Gloucestershire. They learned that Nicholas Cuthler was causing a scandal among his neighbours. He had not come to terms with his father’s death and was making strange claims: he went about in public saying that his father’s spirit still walked the village at night. One evening he even kept vigil beside the tomb from dusk till dawn, waiting for the ghost to come. Nothing else is known about Cuthler, who was born six and a half centuries ago. His case happened to be written down by a scribe – and meanwhile he went on with his days, or so we must suppose. As is usually the case with medieval legal records, lives flash before our eyes and then vanish. The flashes are what make the archives so tantalising. You can wait a long time before you get one.
Cuthler’s scandalous grief was recorded in a booklet of about fifty pages, among more than a thousand other parish reports from the diocese of Hereford in 1397. These were the results of an inquiry called a visitation, whereby church authorities attempted to discern the state of religious life in the parishes. Local worthies sent reports to the bishop, John Trefnant, who processed through the diocese with a cadre of officials to investigate, judge and correct any troublesome behaviour.
In 1397 the visitors would have approached Cuthler’s parish of Ruardean with some trepidation, ghosts or not. It lay in the Forest of Dean, a district marginal even by the standards of the Welsh borders. Shallow seams of iron ore were excavated by shovel and pick in open-face mines; industrial quantities of charcoal were produced for the countless forges of a forest that must have seemed as though it was perpetually aflame. Living within the royal forest and its distinct legal regime, the men of Dean claimed special privileges that they were willing to defend by force. In the 1430s, after a dispute over tolls, they launched a series of attacks on grain barges heading down the Severn for Bristol. An indictment described them as ‘a wild people close and adjacent to Wales’, alleging that ‘the whole community of the Forest …cares nothing for the law, its officers or its procedures.’
At Ruardean the omens were not good. The chaplain failed to appear, the church’s chancel was found in a ruinous state and its revenues – supposed to be used for maintaining a priest – had been sold off without permission. But the parishioners, or at least the clutch of prominent men who supplied the visitors with information, were more accommodating. For some, visitation was an opportunity to speak truth to power; to tell a sombre ecclesiastical official in his expensive robes what needed fixing. The vast majority of reports concerned sex out of wedlock, which disrupted the household, the basic unit of patriarchal authority. The offence was often called ‘incontinence’ in the records: a failure of restraint. Its victims were usually the women and children left out in the cold. In Ruardean, apart from Cuthler and his father’s ghost, all anyone had been talking about was Margaret Hobys, a married woman who had been having an affair with a single man called Nicholas Boweton. Summoned before the judges, the shamed couple could not bring themselves to deny it. They swore an oath of atonement. They were assigned penance: they would be beaten around the parish church six times, and another six times through the market-place. At Staunton, the parishioners complained to the visitors that Thomas Smyth had ejected his wife from their house, ‘denying her food and clothing and other conjugal rights’.
If visitation seemed to some a chance to complain, for others it represented an intrusion. Who wanted to be told their church vestments needed replacing, or to traipse off to the nearest town to be solemnly scolded? At Mitcheldean, another forest village, the report gave a simple omnia bene, but a later note claimed that the official sent there ‘dare not cite the parishioners’.