Bettany Hughes
This is the parish church of All Hallows Barking near the Tower of London, and here in the vaults there are a remarkable collection of original documents. There are records of all sorts here, detailing people’s lives and deaths over the last 400 years.

This is the parish register for 1665, the year of the Great Plague, and if you look at each page it’s absolutely crammed with entries. This is the survey of all the privies, that’s loos to you and me, and chimneys in the parish in 1579. So that’s the church acting as a local sanitary inspector in Elizabeth I’s reign. It’s just fascinating. If you want to get to grips with the country’s social history then the church records are an excellent place to start.

I’m off to the Cathedral city of Chester. Church records are not just about births, marriages and deaths. They give us a picture of all aspects of people’s lives. The church in the past dealt with many things which today we’d say were the council’s job. It also had a major role in law and order. From the 11th century it had its own network of courts. And I’ve heard there is still a good example here at Chester Cathedral. This is the only complete church court still remaining in England. The furniture here dates from the early 1600s. And Michael, I know that you’ve spent years studying the Court. If we imagine it’s 1635, who would have been working here? And you must explain to me why you’re sitting in that ridiculous kid’s high chair.

Dr Michael Snape
The reason why I’m sitting on this chair is, because this chair would have belonged to the court’s Appariter and the task of the Appariter was to take messages from the court, to any concerned parties in the diocese and also to keep order in the body of the court whilst the court was in session. The chair which you’ve just come from would have been occupied by the Diocesan Chancellor who was the Judge in this court and was an appointee of the Bishop. He would have been helped by a Scribe and by the Diocesan Registrar. What you would have found round the table would have been ecclesiastical warriors known as Proctors, who acted as attorneys, who represented the parties involved in any particular case.

Bettany
What kind of cases are being brought to a court like this?

Michael
A whole range of cases, but the most common form of private prosecution was defamation.

Bettany
Is defamation slander?

Michael
It is slander. If you were called a thief, you would sue in a secular court. If you were called a fornicator or charged with any kind of moral offence, you would sue in the spiritual court.

Bettany
York Minster, the traditional Christian capital of the north. Apparently it’s the only cathedral in the country to have its own police force. There’s been an important church court here since Medieval times. The more I hear about these cases the more it strikes me they are pretty much all to do with sex.

I am here to meet legal historian Dick Helmholst, and I have got to ask him if he agreed that the church’s real concern was morality.

Dick
Well they certainly said so and they brought a lot of people before them in attempting to mould the morality of the county. Whether they improved the morality of the country is a little harder to say.

Bettany
I’ve heard then referred to as bawdy courts, why would that be?

Dick
Well that wasn’t a name that the court itself would have been willing to accept. But they were called bawdy courts because so many of the offences that came before them were sexual offences. This is the strong room where the records are kept.

Bettany
Why the need for all this security?

Dick
Well I think it’s fire more than anything else.

Bettany
Dick then took me to the Borthwick Institute to look at the records of the Bishop’s Court of York.

Its an extraordinary mass of material. How does it compare to similar archives elsewhere?

Dick
Well they probably have more here than almost anywhere else in England. More for example than in London, because the Great Fire in London destroyed so many of the church’s records. This is a penance form, from the 18th century. Here is one example from 1757 - a penance enjoyed on William Hudson. You can see in that year he was required to be present at the time of divine service.

Bettany
Let’s see. "In the presence of the whole congregation then assembled, being bare head, bare foot and bare legged, having a white sheet wrapped about him, from the shoulders to the feet and white wand in his hand."

Dick
Must have been quite humiliating don’t you think?

Bettany
Extremely.

Dick
See what he’d done.

Bettany
Oh he’s committed the "detestable sin of fornication with Hannah Hudson".

Dick
There is another interesting matter I thought you might like to see. Some of the actual cases, the instance cases which were heard by the ecclesiastical court here. This was a case, rather an unusual case, brought by a woman named Alice Russell, to dissolve a marriage on the grounds of the sexual impotence of her husband, John Scathlaw I think is his name is.

Bettany
What year are we in?

Dick
This is 1433. In this case they tried to establish whether or not he was impotent by employing what they called "seven honest women" and the honest women went into a room at the top of a house in York, and there was a magnum ignum - a big fire in the room. It was burning and they took off most of their clothes and then they hugged John and often kissed him and, in so far as they could, stirred him up on "ostendum virilitactem, potensium suum", which means to show his virility and his potency.

Bettany
And?

Dick
Well, unfortunately for this poor man, he failed and it must have been quite a humiliating experience for him because the women cursed him, and walked out.

Bettany
And what conclusion did the court come to?

Dick
Well I have the sentence here. We don’t always have sentences, but luckily we do here. Alice here was successful. She was divorced from her husband so the honest women cursed him, and he lost his wife.

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Content last updated: 03/04/2006

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