THE FIRST NANTWICH PARISH REGISTERS

Connie Bullock

Further to the item in the September Journal, "Morality in the 19^th century", there could be added a similar theme of morality in the 16^th century, for the "way of a lad and his lass" regarding cohabiting, or the girl having a baby before marriage or having to get married, was no unusual occurrence to our ancestors.

The first volume of the Nantwich Registers, 1539 to 1545, commences with the baptisms of four illegitimate children. James Hall, in his History of Nantwich, says that throughout the pages of the registers, the names of both the father and the mother, whether legal or reputed, are recorded. He goes on to say, that in 1540 base-born children reached nearly 20% of recorded births. (62 legitimate births and 15 illegitimate.) For the next five years the records show that 16% of all recorded baptisms were those of illegitimate children. With one exception, concludes Hall, they appear to belong to the lower orders who, judging by the above facts, seldom entered into the bonds of matrimony and lived in poverty and degradatation.

The first recorded baptism in the Nantwich Registers states :-

1539 November 17^th Joane ffounderdam daughter of Nicholas ffounderdam and Esabell Davyson ylligittimat

The fact that daughter Joane took her father's surname could mean that her parents cohabited. They probably lived together in a small wattle and daub timber cottage. Unmarried because they could not afford the marriage fee, were near starvation level and with the re-occurring threat of plague due to the unclean way people lived at the time and the open dirty sewers situated down the middle of the streets.

In 1538 Henry VIII ordered that all Christenings, Marriages and Burials should be recorded in every church and chapel in England and that the priest in charge was to make the entries each Sunday in the presence of the churchwardens. Before that time, the only records of such events were those found in monasteries relating to a few of the upper classes.

This injunction of the King caused great resentment because of the charges, which would probably be incurred at a time of general poverty amongst the people. Some churches did not comply with the order until many years afterwards. Nantwich, which began its registers in 1539, was one of the first to do so. On the title page of the first volume of the registers is written: "the pairyshe of Wychemalbank" (named after the Norman baron William Malbank). Thomas Bulleyne, the parish clerk, wrote the entries with a quill pen in a calf-bound book of paper. The christenings or baptisms, as they were later called began in 1558. But things did not go too well for this first book and as the years went by entries were not made and the book lay neglected. Pages were torn out and the blank ones at the end were used later from 1615 to 1626 for trading transactions by one of the Trenche family.

All that survives of Thomas Bulleyne's first book of registers is nine pages of baptisms from 1539 to 1545. How lucky for me that the name of my direct ancester, Edward Church, is to be found in these surviving pages! He was baptised on 5^th May 1543, the son of William and Anne Churche. The surprising thing is that these paper pages ever survived at all.

The second book of registers did not fare much better than the first. In 1573 William Warde, curate of Nantwich at the time, decided to compile a register in view of the fact that none was being kept. He, too, wrote the entries on paper and bound with them the nine pages of baptisms from the first book.

Alas for his efforts! In 1603 a Canon of the church ordered that all registers written on paper were to be rewritten on parchment. William Warde's registers were to be declared obsolete and his entries rewritten on parchment by Hugh Price of Nantwich and bound with the Baptisms of 1539 to 1545 from book one.

After 1603 to the end of the Second Book of Registers, the entries were recorded by the senior Churchwarden, during his year of office, which takes the register to the year 1653.

In the first book of registers I came across an item of my family history - Edward Church's baptism. In this Second Book my interest is with his to grandsons. Both were Churchwardens, Edward, the eldest, in 1630 and Saboth Church, my several times great-grandfather, in 1633. Both would keep the Nantwich Registers in their year of office. Their youngest brother, Thomas, died on 6^th May 1604 having lived only seven days. He died one month before the town was visited by that terrible epidemic, the plague. The clerk was unable to enter all the deaths that occurred during the next six months. No marriage register were kept in that year and Baptisms are wanting from August 12^th to March the following year. No market was held and those who could, fled the town. Of those who stayed the death toll was 500 according to the Wilbraham M.S. Journal. Saboth, who was only five when the plague struck, would be very frightened at the horror of it all. Five of his cousins, children of Hugh Mainwaring of the Crown Inn, died within two days of each other.
The facts and figures in this article are taken from James Hall's History of Nanwich and Eric Garton's "Saxon to Puritan".