Blogs
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A religious island
The ruins of Godstow Abbey sit on an island to the north of Oxford where the Thames splits into multiple channels. The place-names surrounding Godstow — Hinksey, Osney, Cripley, Medley, Binsey and Pixey, ending in what was Old English ēg ‘island’ — speak of the historically marshy nature of this place. A location that was not easily…
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The King’s Book
I was recently lucky enough to visit The National Archives to have a close-up look at the Liber Regis – The King’s Book – the presentation copy of the Valor Ecclesiasticus (TNA E 344/22 and 23). These two volumes were produced to summarise the accounts presented by all the monastic institutions in England on the eve…
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Postcard from Cumbria
While visiting my family home over the May Bank Holiday – Bardsea, in Furness, Cumbria – I was able to visit the site of a former religious institution that will be illustrated from our Valor Ecclesiasticus research. And for those who know Furness, I do not mean the romantic ruins at Furness Abbey captured in poem…
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A Tudor Tileworks at Hollingbourne, Kent
Listed among the estate holdings of Christchurch Cathedral Priory at Canterbury, as recorded in the 1535 Valor Ecclesiasticus can be found a whole array of property that was typical for a great church during this period. This included manors, rectories, hunting grounds and agricultural land and meadows, alongside the many tenements held by those owing rent to…
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A Supreme Task
The Valor ecclesiasticus is best known – where it is known at all, that is, as it must have a claim for being the most obscure of all artefacts associated with the nation’s favourite historical figure, Henry VIII – simply for being immense and impenetrable. Line after line of abbreviated Latin lifted from the phrasebook…
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Portents of Doom
The landmark national surveys in Britain’s history were made at moments of profound fear for the future. It was remembered that when the conquering King William I sent his men to make a record of the kingdom he had won from the Saxons in 1086, his subjects compared their coming to the Day of Judgment.…
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Unequal values
Not everything in the Church was equally valued by the Tudor regime. The priority for the commissioners dispatched throughout the kingdom’s dioceses in the spring of 1535 was to determine the foundations of the Church’s wealth, what the instructions issued to them called the ‘certainty of the temporalities and spiritualties’, that is all forms of…