The heavy snows of the first years of the seventeenth century provide us with images as vivid as those from the eighth century or the early fourteenth. In London the Thames froze over, and the bitter winters have left their trace in poetry of the time in images of ‘wind fanned snow’. On frozen and rutted roads travel proved especially difficult. The main road north to the Trent was notorious as ‘one of the worst kept roads in the kingdom’, impassable in winter, and when wet ‘loaded with mud to the footocks’, so that wagons must be ‘dragged on their bellies’. Travellers in the East Midlands remarked that it was so hard to get them properly repaired that an entirely new road system ‘as Romans did of old’ might be the answer: ‘so heavy the loads, and so numerous the carriages that a great number of horses are killed each year by the excess of labour.’ Daniel Defoe noted on his travels a little later that the road beyond Northampton through Harborough to Leicester, which ran through Kibworth, was ‘perfectly frightful to travellers … where there is no provision for repair, and in some seasons dangerous’. The winter of 1606–7 was the worst: the poet John Marston, who travelled this road through Leicester to write a masque for an aristocratic house party near the city, describes noble ladies on their struggling carriages, their hair shining with ‘glittering icicles all crystalline, … periwigged with snow, russet mantles fringed with ice, stiff on the back’.
Kibworth Harcourt in 1609, from a Merton Estate map: it was still surrounded by the open fields
Kibworth suffered heavy losses from plague in 1605–6, then shivered through the long winter. Almost every house now had chimneys burning coal in bad weather. Taxed in the seventeenth century on the number of hearths, it was still normal for villagers to have two or three; many had four, and some like the Rays had as many as eight. At this time the village population was on the rise. The revival of population in England after the calamities of the fourteenth century continued apace during the first half of the seventeenth – from an estimated 4.1 to 5.3 million between 1601 and 1656. In Kibworth Harcourt there was a slow but steady increase, but development had not gone beyond the bounds of the village reached in the fourteenth century. In a beautiful map from this time of the open fields of Harcourt, held at Merton, the houses still lie behind the old hedge as they had for centuries, the tenements and gardens running back from Main Street. The Rays are in the former bailiff’s house; the Coxons are in Priory Farm; John Polle (the last of the male line of Polles) is on Hogg Lane, and Rob Brian (son of Elizabeth Clarke’s trusted friend) and Oswin are at the end of Hogg Lane by the village hedge.
For the parish as a whole the population had risen in Elizabeth’s reign from eighty-two taxable households in 1563, perhaps 500 people, to 444 registered communicants at church at the end of the reign. These were people over fourteen, which suggests an increase in population to about 600. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were nearly 200 households evenly divided between the two Kibworths and Smeeton, perhaps 800 people. These increases took place despite severe mortality from disease over the century. Typhus, influenza and plague continued to leave their mark, and the danger of bad harvests and famine was ever present. There were three great periods of mortality between the later years of Elizabeth’s reign and the 1690s. In the plague in the 1590s sixty-two men, women and children died; and there were even more heavy losses in 1605–6 with seventy-nine deaths. That summer alone thirty-three men and thirty-four women were buried in the churchyard, though the villagers were successful in protecting their children, only two of whom were lost. A last major outbreak in Kibworth between winter 1657 and summer 1659 caused fifty-seven deaths, among them sixteen children. But the community managed to cope with all this and avoided starvation in the years of the extraordinarily bad harvests of 1612 and 1639. Only in the 1698 famine year did the village see high mortality.
Rural revolt
The conditions of rural life in England were still as precarious as they had been in the fourteenth century. A string of bad harvests after bad winters and heavy rains brought the rural poor in the Midlands to their knees in the first decade of the century. There had already been sporadic violence in Midland towns against recent enclosures as avaricious landlords ploughed up the hedges and the common field strips for sheep farming. The old communal society of the Midland ‘champain’ lands was beginning to dissolve. In the first week of June 1607, major rural riots flared up across Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, with several thousand peasants and agricultural workers demonstrating against the enclosers. In Leicestershire rural revolt flared to the south of Kibworth at Cotesbatch, where crowds of workers tore out fences and hedges. These rural rebels called themselves ‘Diggers’, and as they marched the Diggers of Warwickshire sang songs brimming with workers’ patriotism:
From Hampton-field in haste
we rest as poor delvers and day labourers
for the good of the Commonwealth till death …
The Diggers had produced a written manifesto to put their case to the local authorities – the JPs and freeholders – portraying themselves in an almost Shakespearean image as one limb of the English body politic, still loyal to their king:
Loving friends and subjects under one renowned prince, for whom we pray long to continue in his royal estate … his most true hearted Commonalty … We as members of the whole, do feel the smart of these encroaching tyrants, which would grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty …
At Hill Norton 3,000 rebels gathered to protest against ‘the incroaching tyrants who grind the faces of the poor’. In response local JPs and gentry assembled armed bands and erected a scaffold in the centre of Leicester. On 8 June over the shire border at the village of Newton in Northamptonshire a crowd of almost 3,000 peasants was attacked by a private army raised by the local authorities. The rebels were easily dispersed, leaving fifty or so dead. The leaders were hauled off to Northampton, where they were summarily condemned to death, and hanged, drawn and quartered on a scaffold in the centre of town.
Across the Midlands many were shocked by the brutality of the retribution. On 21 June in Northampton a sermon was preached by Robert Wilkinson, who used the Diggers’ metaphor of the body politic to preach against all violence, including that of the rulers ‘who reformed wickedness with a greater wickedness’. The smell of burning was in the air, with prophecies of greater conflagrations ahead. Kibworth itself had so far escaped big enclosure battles; the amount of land still farmed as common fields and pastures almost 200 years later shows that it remained till the end an open-field village. But around it many other such villages had already gone, and across England the voice of the workforce, suppressed in Elizabeth’s day, was now clamouring to be heard, more vocal, more self aware and increasingly literate. The changing nature of the proletariat then, coupled with the changing nature of what they called ‘the middling sort’ – people who wanted more say in local affairs than a franchise based only on gentlemen of the shire – were developments that set the scene for the Civil War. And in the background of the revolutions of the seventeenth century was education.
A literate society
The sixteenth century had been an era of turbulence and change in England – in politics, religion, economy and society. The Reformation had broken down many medieval institutions that had served the community. But the Tudor period had also seen huge advances in education. During the reign of Elizabeth, 160 grammar schools had been founded, making England the most literate society the world had yet seen. After Henry VIII and his son Edward had dissolved the monasteries, and abolished guilds and chantries, the traditional institutions of charity and social welfare had found themselves pillaged by a rising gentry and middle class profiting from a spectacular property boom. In Kibworth there had long been a grammar teacher, possibly even some kind of ‘school’, which village tradition said had been founded in the time of Warwick the Kingmaker, during the Wars of the Roses. In the early days the ‘grammar school’ in Kibworth (like most village schools) consisted of nothing more than a chantry priest teaching children in the corner of the church nave, or in a private house in winter, but this arrangement had been financed by the rents from ‘school lands’ originally gifted by local farmers for a chantry. During the Reformation, as we have seen, these had been saved by the intervention of the Lord of the Manor of Kibworth Beauchamp, John Dudley, who, according to the Kibworth gentleman Robert Ray, shrank from grabbing lands ‘employed to so good a use as the maintenance of a school’.
Kibworth school’s surviving feoffment charter from 1595 provides the names of eighteen men then appointed to act as trustees. It is a telling testimony to the range of social classes working together on the school’s management: two knights, four gentlemen, nine yeomen and three husbandmen – a real mix of the Elizabethan ‘community of the village’ and all, presumably, interested in the provision of education for their sons and happy for them to share a classroom. The knights and gentlemen were largely from outside the village (and the involvement of eminent men from across the county testifies to the importance of the school in its wider region). Of the four gentlemen, only Robert Ray (grandson of Thomas, whose will we saw above (pp. 290–95)), was himself a Kibworth resident. Seven of the yeomen trustees were local: Thomas Fox and Richard Polle of Harcourt, John Iliffe of Beauchamp, and Zachary Chapman, Arthur Cloudesley, Richard Bryan and James Wright of Smeeton Westerby – all of them respected and respectable ‘swearing men’ who farmed their own land. The labourers were William Frisby and William Smeeton of Beauchamp and William Goode of Smeeton Westerby. It may seem surprising to find sixteenth-century farm labourers serving on the board of a grammar school, but a mark of the ‘community of the village’ in that time was the respect afforded to ordinary freemen in local society. They may not have all been literate themselves – half a century later a few of the school trustees still signed their names with a single initial – but they appreciated the value of literacy, and aspired to it for their children.
In 1601, two years before Elizabeth died, measures were taken by the government to address problems and abuses in the administration of private charities which had arisen during half a century of upheaval. The Poor Relief Act of that year put the administration of poor relief in the hands of municipal authorities (one by-product of the Reformation had been the collapse of the great edifice of medieval charity provided by the religious houses and guilds). The Statute of Charitable Uses, meanwhile, called for an investigation into the state of existing charitable endowments, seeking to ensure that bequests continued to be utilized for their intended purpose, and putting ultimate supervision in the hands of the state. The legislation’s preamble spoke of the widespread abuse known to have occurred as monastic and chantry lands were bought up by well-placed individuals. It sought to redress ‘the Abuses, Breaches of Trustes, Negligences, Mysimploymentes, not imployinge concealing defrauding misconvertinge or misgovernmente of land and money heretofore given to godly and charitable uses’.
Among the many such charitable uses specified in the act were the maintenance of ‘Schooles of Learninge, Free Schooles and Schollers in Universities’. As a village with an established grammar school maintained by charitable bequest, Kibworth was on the itinerary of the commission of enquiry finally appointed for Leicestershire in 1614. The following year four commissioners visited Kibworth, and spent time looking into the origins and current maintenance of the school, hearing evidence from those locally with information – including, no doubt, the then schoolmaster, the Reverend Richard Kestyn, who retained the position for more than twenty years between 1611 and 1634. They established that ‘certain messuages, farms, closes, cottages and lands’ had been bequeathed for the maintenance of the school and its schoolmaster at a point ‘before the memory of any of the villagers then living’. The land documents in the ‘school box’ in fact, as we have seen, go back to 1353, probably originally rents provided for a local prayer guild or chantry chapel whose priest may have doubled up as a teacher of grammar for village children like Widow Palmer’s son in the 1440s (see p. 271).
Much is known about the running of the school in the middle of the seventeenth century, because in 1647 a book of rules or ‘constitution’ was drafted for the school, on the model of one that had been drawn up in 1630 for Market Bosworth Grammar School. The Kibworth governors carefully studied the Bosworth regulations before adapting them for use in Kibworth. The school, which had about thirty pupils, was free, and consideration was to be given to the status of many of the families concerned. The governors did not prescribe text-books, but stated that the schoolmaster should teach ‘none but authentical authors and because the School standeth much upon poor men’s children, whose parents are not able to buy many books, that they read unto them few books and them throughout, if conveniently they may’. Children accepted into the school had already to know their ‘letters’, in other words their grammar, and to ‘be somewhat well entered into the spelling of words’. (This primary education would be provided by small infants’ schools run by villagers – often women – in private houses over the next three centuries.)
The grammar school feoffees themselves undertook to examine the children to assess their progress: along with the rectors of Kibworth and Church Langton, they were ‘on the Thursday before Whit to examine the children, hear them dispute and observe their proficiency’. Those who failed to progress might be discouraged from continuing: ‘the schoolmaster shall certify the parents of such children as they shall find unapt for learning or indoceble, to the end that said parents may prevent their loss of time and expenses.’ Nor did the regulations exempt the schoolmaster himself from examination. He had in the first place to be well-educated, with an MA or BA, and free from infectious diseases; he was expected to devote himself full-time to the school and to set a virtuous example to his pupils. Vices from which he was to abstain are methodically set out: ‘gaming and night-walking’ among the excluded behaviour. And he was prohibited from excessive violence with his charges; he must not ‘strike any scholars about the head or face with his hands or fist or with a rod, book, or any such like thing’. (Vigorous corporal punishment had been the norm in English schools since the Anglo-Saxon period.) If anger got the better of him, he was to pay a fine into the Common Box. Older boys were given the responsibility to police the conduct of their younger schoolmates; these monitors would ‘observe the scholars in the upper school and present them that swear or use any unseemly talk’.
Standards must have been high. The school box suggests that literacy was widespread among the yeoman farmers of the parish in the seventeenth century, and under the schoolmaster James Wright, who was appointed in 1639, we learn of boys from Kibworth school gaining places to continue their studies at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. As an insight into how one English village tried to take care over the future of its children, the Kibworth school box is the pre-modern story of English education in microcosm.
The coming of civil war
The 1630s were an unhappy decade on both the local and the national scene. Poor harvests – with associated malnutrition and disease – came bunched together, accentuating a sense of gloom and foreboding aggravated by an increasingly overweening government. Charles I’s ‘personal rule’ after his dissolution of Parliament in 1629 was widely viewed as an ‘eleven-year tyranny’, and it rankled in Kibworth, as elsewhere in England. Fighting unpopular wars with France and Spain, and with enormous expenditure on the court, the government looked to increase revenue by the revival of archaic taxes such as Ship Money which was extended for the first time to inland territories in 1635. This was a particular grievance in a distinctly un-maritime county. Leicestershire was expected to fund a 450-ton ship, a tax that partly fell on the taxpayers of Kibworth who only recently, in 1628, had had a Lay Subsidy levied on them – the village incomes and goods had been noted, starting with the richest man in Harcourt, Robert Ray, then going down to the likes of ordinary freeholders such as the Colmans, Iliffes and Carters. Anger at the tax was heightened by the assiduity of Henry Skipworth, the staunchly loyal Sheriff of Leicester, who aspired ‘to be the first Sherriffe that should paye in his whole somme’. His efforts were effective but stirred furious resentment. Skipworth lamented the ‘soe manye complainers & opposers’ and accused Puritans in southern Leicestershire of stirring civil disobedience. At Noseley, a few miles east of Kibworth, the fiery Puritan Sir Arthur Hesilrige sent Skipworth’s men scuttling from the area as they tried to extract payment by confiscating property. Hesilrige’s election in 1640 as a senior knight of the shire was a sign that local support for the monarchy was ebbing away.
Religion
Mistrust of the king in the country also stemmed from his religious policies, his High Church leanings and his Catholic marriage. A very important aspect of the seventeenth-century revolutions was religious dissent, and the national conflicts over the next decades were mirrored in Kibworth. The village became a major centre of dissidence; it is not yet possible to say whether such opinions had remained as an undercurrent in village culture through the Tudor period, but in the seventeenth century religious independence suddenly emerged in a flood of debate. The immediate roots of these movements in England lay in the growth of Separatist and Independent groups in the 1590s, Protestant denominations which demanded a return to what they saw as a plainer, purer form of Christianity. In this the literate free peasantry of the East Midlands proved to be a particular hotbed of ideas: the Pilgrim Fathers came from the region and George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was a weaver from Fenny Drayton, to the south of Kibworth. Whether such groups had already made headway in the village before the Civil War has not yet been discovered; though the strength of Independents, Dissenters and Quakers in Kibworth in the early 1660s suggests they had a longer history in the village. Their insistence on independence from the national church, on ‘purer’ forms of worship and even, later, on anti-slavery and women’s suffrage represents a strand in village culture which would survive robustly into the twentieth century. These ideas came to a head nationally and locally in the Civil War period.
Layered on top of these grass-roots movements was the national situation. King Charles’s Church of England was itself in turmoil, and though the majority of Kibworth people were loyal to the national church, the measures taken by Archbishop Laud to enforce High Church ceremonies smacked to some of a covert return to Catholicism. They provoked further tension in a county already deeply divided in spiritual matters. In this south-east corner of Leicestershire there were strong Puritan communities, but also a conservative, Laudian element. The evidence for religious tendencies in Kibworth during the decades prior to the Civil War is fragmentary, but what there is suggests a village that was deeply divided, and this came out in thirty years of conflict over the post of vicar.
Early problems arose with the appointment in 1634 of the Reverend James Weston, who had been curate at Tur Langton, as schoolmaster of Kibworth Grammar School. His religious inclinations seem to have been Puritan. Archbishop Laud closely supervised matters of practice at a local level and an ecclesiastical visitation in 1634 resulted in Weston being presented for ‘defect in canonical habit’ – probably a refusal to wear the surplice. The following year he was appointed as curate in Kibworth, but in 1639 he had his licence to teach revoked by Laud for the propagation of unsuitable doctrine.
Some of the feoffees who managed the school, however, are known to have been staunchly Church of England in their outlook – and would adhere closely to the king’s party in the troubled years ahead. The Beridge family – whose son John went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1642 – were both lords of the manor of Beauchamp and occupants of the church living for several generations from the 1570s. During and after the Civil War they were loyal to the Stuart regime. On the death of the vicar William Beridge in January 1640, the gift of the living was passed to the king, who appointed an outsider, William Hunt, as rector. Hunt would not forget – and neither would his parishioners – that he was a king’s man. Thus began a sequence of events which saw the rivalries and controversies of the Civil War played out at a local level in the parsonage house and the streets of Kibworth.
Like many Kibworth rectors of the period, Hunt seems to have enjoyed several benefices and been often absent – employing a curate, Joseph Foster, to run the church week to week. Foster, no doubt, was a man after Hunt’s own ecclesiastical taste, and if later charges are to be believed, the two of them ‘observed ceremonies’ in Kibworth church, suggesting an obedience to the crypto-Catholic rituals that had riled the Puritan element. The ‘ceremonies’ of which Hunt was accused in Kibworth would have centred on the performance of sacraments: the hearing of confession, for instance, and the respectful kneeling to receive holy communion. The communion table in St Wilfrid’s would have been shunted from the middle of the church (where, for Puritans, it symbolized the democracy of worship) to the east end, where, railed off like a Catholic altar, it emphasized the God-given intermediary role of the priest. Hunt himself would have worn the traditional white surplice – retained under the Elizabethan compromise, and staunchly defended by Laud, but furiously denounced by Puritans for its evocation of Roman tradition. To the Calvinist or Independent, the Nonconformist or Dissenter, such practice in the parish church reeked of popery, and was intolerable.
Civil war
As tension mounted nationally between the king and his Parliament (which Charles was finally forced to recall in 1640), local issues and rivalries became overlaid with the broader passions of a divided nation. The long-running feud between the dominant Hastings family of Leicestershire and the rival Greys re-clothed itself in the colours of the impending Civil War – but such tussles were often about local power as much as the political future of the nation. One thing was for sure: Leicestershire was a divided place in which royalist and parliamentarian gentry families intermingled – a county which had ‘many Bickerings one with another’.
For the inhabitants of Kibworth during the three years after 1640 the dominant hope, as for ordinary men and women throughout England, was that the storm clouds massing in the political realm might pass over and leave them undisturbed. For the people of Leicestershire in particular there was a strong feeling of being, in the words of a petition sent to the king in 1642, ‘in the middest of your Kingdome of England, and in the middest of our great feares and apparent dangers’. Few felt an allegiance for either cause decisive enough to induce them to leave the county to fight in the armies. The common people, it was often remarked during these years of turmoil, loved ‘their pudding at home better than a musket and pike abroad, and if they could have peace, care not what side had the better’.
In Kibworth itself, the sense of living in a polarized county was keenly felt. Only four miles to the north-east, at Noseley Hall, lived Sir Arthur Hesilrige, the tempestuous radical MP whose attempted arrest by Charles I (along with four other members of the Lower House) had heightened the sense of an impending conflict. Meanwhile, a short downhill walk along a track to the west brought the villager to Wistow, the seat of Sir Richard Halford, one of Charles’s most loyal and influential supporters in the county (and a feoffee of Kibworth Grammar School).
In the early months of 1642 the stakes dramatically increased. The sense of crisis was brought home to the provinces of England as king and Parliament scrambled to secure the allegiance of the country’s feudal levies – the ‘trained bands’ of borough and shire – which still constituted its only standing army. Historically such bodies were at the command of the king. But mounting distrust of Charles’s intentions led to Parliament issuing, without royal assent, a Militia ‘Ordinance’ – an unprecedented move which further polarized opinion and enraged the king, for whom this trampling upon his customary rights seemed ‘the fittest subject for a King’s quarrel’.
In the Kibworth area Sir Arthur Hesilrige of Noseley was at the centre of these developments. On 4 June he was despatched by Parliament back to Leicestershire to assist with the mustering of the county militias. Under Henry Grey, the Earl of Stamford, appointed by Parliament as Lord Lieutenant of the county in place of his great rival, the royalist Henry Hastings, Hesilrige oversaw plans for one muster in the borough of Leicester and one, on successive days, in five of the hundreds of the shire: ‘in such convenient places as might be most for their ease, and least chargeable’. The muster for the Gartree Hundred was appointed to take place at Kibworth – more accessible from Leicester than Market Harborough (a key consideration given that Grey, Hesilrige and other parliamentarians were riding frantically back and forth from the county town to coordinate activities and counter the similar efforts of royalists).
King Charles, meanwhile, tried desperately to regain the upper hand. Having issued a proclamation from York forbidding the raising of troops without his express command, he sent Henry Hastings back to Leicestershire on 12 June with a ‘Commission of Array’, authorizing him, with Sir Richard Halford, Sir Henry Skipwith, Sir John Bale and other loyalists, to raise the local trained bands in the king’s name. In her memoirs Lucy Hutchinson would recall that time vividly in a period metaphor:
Before the flame of the war broke out in the top of the chimneys, the smoke ascended in every county; the king had sent forth commissions of array, and the parliament had given out commissions for their militia, and sent off their members into all counties to put them into execution. Between these, in many places, there were fierce contests and disputes, almost to blood, even at the first; for in the process every county had the civil war, more or less, within itself.
At Kibworth, a second muster was held by the king on 15 June. ‘A very good appearance’ was noted, ‘with above an hundred volunteers’ – ‘except’, an interesting caveat, ‘some of the Clergy’. The Reverend William Hunt may have exerted some influence in Kibworth in the king’s cause, perhaps denouncing the actions of Parliament from the pulpit, but he was wise enough to keep his head down while the muster was taking place. There is no indication that he was specifically singled out by Parliament in 1642, when across the shire those who made attempts to frustrate the parliamentary musters were reported by villagers and drew retribution from London. The parson of neighbouring Ibstock, for instance, was among those ‘forthwith sent for as delinquents for opposing and giving obstruction to the execution of the Ordinance of the Militia in the county of Leicester’. For now, Hunt would watch which way the wind would blow.
The war began when Charles raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642 (decorated with the motto ‘Give Caesar his due’). The two sides first came into conflict at Edgehill in October, and the next three years saw armies moving and recruiting through the Midlands, though the Kibworth area was spared the worst depredations. Like most regions, though, it was subject to the punitive costs of garrisoning major towns – a double taxation, as both sides sought to extract maintenance and supplies from the same population. The general sense of fear and upheaval which pervaded this most anarchic of English decades is conveyed in Kibworth’s parish register, which has several blank pages introduced by the following note:
Anno Domini 1641. Know all men, that the reason why little or nothing is registered from this year, 1641, until the year 1649, was the civil wars between King Charles and his parliament, which put all into a confusion till then; and neither minister nor people could quietly stay at home for one party or the other.
The first phase of the war came to a climax in the late spring of 1645. With the outcome of the conflict still in the balance, Leicester found itself suddenly surrounded by royalist forces and presented by Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert, with an abrupt summons to surrender. The townsmen sought desperately to buy time while they threw up earthworks to patch the decrepit medieval walls, but they were soon subject to an intense bombardment by the royalist artillery established on a ruined Roman aqueduct to the south. A breach was quickly opened and rampaging royalist troops poured through, unrestrained by their leaders in retribution for the town’s failure to surrender. Many hundreds died that day inside the town.
Meanwhile out in the countryside to the south a parliamentarian cavalry regiment under the mercenary John Dalbier was quartered at Kibworth. Dalbier’s soldiers, it was said, were ‘the most unruliest of all the Parliamentarian soldiers quartered in Leicestershire’ and their stay must have been an unpleasant experience for the villagers. (In the archaeological dig of 2009, Civil War stone cannonballs were found on Main Street by the old marketplace.) The troops would at the very least have taken water from the village wells, and demanded fodder and grain from their barns; but perhaps a lot more besides. Domestic robbery no doubt was commonplace. A hint of what things were like over that late spring of 1645 for the Colmans, Chapmans and Carters living in the middle of the village around the market cross at the junction of Hog Lane and Main Street is given by a remonstrance received by the parliamentary Committee of Both Kingdoms concerning the behaviour of Dalbier’s unit: ‘for the last two years they have been damnified by free quarter, taking of horses, and other charges not imposed by Parliament … Many of the troopers of Dalbier’s regiment are returned into the county to the intolerable burden of the inhabitants.’
There had been, the committee noted, ‘of late within three days 200 robberies committed in the county by soldiers, which has much disheartened the country in the Parliament’s service’. While billeted in Kibworth, Dalbier’s troops also learned of the vicar William Hunt’s royalist sympathies. At Whitsun (25 May that year), ‘they threatened Mr Hunt they would not leave him worth a groat.’ With Hunt’s reputation as a royalist and High Church to boot, and given the destructive record of parliamentarian forces elsewhere, especially if they were Puritans or religious radicals, it would be surprising if the interior of St Wilfrid’s survived this episode unscathed: what little had survived the Reformation iconoclasts no doubt went now.
But the decisive battle was now at hand. Having captured Leicester on 31 May the royalist army moved south through Kibworth towards Market Harborough, fanning across the countryside to scavenge supplies from the beleaguered villages. In the path of the army on the main Harborough road, Kibworth (as its vicar later noted) was now afflicted by raids and plundering from the other side, as the royalist troops replenished their stores and quartered themselves on the population. Prince Rupert’s cavalry had been based throughout the siege of Leicester at Great Glen, two miles from Kibworth. On 6 June 1645 the Earl of Manchester reported to the House of Lords, ‘that the King marcheth Southward, his Forlorn Hope at Harborough, the main Body following; their Foot Quarters about Kybworth, Noselye, Scevington, and Tilton’. On 4 June, King Charles stayed at Wistow Hall, seat of his ally Sir Richard Halford, and it was around this date that the main royalist foot moved through Kibworth. The king’s cavalry was reckoned at 3,600, his remaining infantry at around 4,000. If this was not, as Clarendon observed, ‘a body sufficient to fight a battle for a crown’, it was no doubt enough to strike fear into the long-suffering villagers, and to drive them indoors praying for deliverance from this ‘unwanted war’.
The main parliamentary army under Fairfax and Cromwell now moved north to intercept the king. On 14 June the decisive battle was fought to the south of Kibworth at Naseby and Charles was comprehensively defeated. This ‘very great victory’ was hailed by the Committee of Both Kingdoms as a mighty providence from God: ‘the King’s army in which he was in person is wholly broken and destroyed.’ As the royalist forces retreated in chaos north towards Leicester – Charles himself pausing at Wistow to change horses and saddles (the conspicuous crimson and gold one he left behind still remains in Wistow Hall) – they were pursued by Cromwell’s cavalry. ‘Our horse,’ the committee reported, ‘had the pursuit of them from four miles on this side Harborough to nine miles beyond, even to the sight of Leicester, whither the King fled. Our army quartered last night at Harborough, and this day are marching both horse and foot towards Leicester.’ It was said that the first eleven of the fourteen miles through Kibworth to Leicester were littered with hundreds of Cavalier dead, scythed down from behind as they fled, pursued by a body of ‘the enemyes horse and loose scowters to Great Glyn’. It had been, as one survivor noted, ‘a dismall Satterday’.
Among the overheated and bedraggled royalists fleeing desperately north on the road towards Leicester was the rector of Kibworth, William Hunt. Hauled later before the parliamentary committee for sequestration, on suspicion of having been in the royalist army, Hunt pleaded simple ill-fortune. He had, he said, unwittingly set out on horseback from Kibworth for Leicester at about two or three o’clock on the day of the battle and found himself caught up with the defeated royalists: ‘the king’s forces were then so scattered that they rode up and down the country about Kibworth, so that a man could ride no way, but he must needs ride in their company.’ It was, to say the very least, unfortunate timing.
Hunt’s hearing, however, opened up a major religious split in Kibworth. The charge sheet brought against Hunt was later catalogued by the royalist John Walker, in his compilation of the ‘Sufferings of the clergy of the Church of England who were sequester’d, harass’d, &c in the times of the Great Rebellion’. Having had his property sequestered initially on 17 August 1644 (though he evidently remained in Kibworth after that date), Hunt was fined the substantial sum of £150 in November 1645 for being in Leicester when it was a royal garrison. ‘While at Leicester’, it was alleged, he ‘got protections from Prince Rupert for some parishioners, but left others to be plundered’, implying a loyalist community in Kibworth whose interests he had sought to protect. Hunt was accused of having ridden in arms with Cavaliers and of having been ‘one of those who fled after Naseby’, suggesting – and it would not be surprising – that fearful royalist sympathizers in Kibworth followed in the tail of the fleeing Cavaliers. But he was also, as we have seen, charged with observing ‘ceremonies’; also of refusing to read parliamentary notices and of avoiding taking the Covenant – an oath in support of Parliament. He had, moreover, even ‘employed a scandalous curate’ in Joseph Foster, who had, the constable of Kibworth reported, been several times seen drunk. In the aftermath of a war, the story is a measure of how central religion was seen to be in the conflicts of the time.
The evidence was enough to condemn Hunt. In 1647 the parliamentary Committee for Plundered Ministers – set up to replace ministers loyal to Charles – ordered that Hunt be removed and nominated in his place a Cambridge Puritan vicar for Kibworth, John Yaxley. But Hunt would not go without a struggle. Finally, after an appeal, on 16 July 1647, the Committee for Sequestrations ordered that his eviction proceed. Interestingly they did so, ‘on parishioners’ petition’, suggesting that if there was a royalist contingent in Kibworth, there was also a body in the village hostile to Hunt and his ‘ceremonies’. Hunt remained obstinate and barricaded himself into the ‘fortified parsonage house’, the medieval rectory to the south of St Wilfrid’s. The parliamentarians responded robustly. A party of soldiers was despatched and they ‘broke down part of the house “not without bloodshed” and gave Yaxley possession’.
Hunt continued his fight at law but failed to wrest the living back from Yaxley, though the dispute rumbled on bitterly for several years. In 1654, Yaxley complained that Hunt was still trying to sue him even though, he indignantly protested, he had now been the village vicar ‘quietly’ for seven years. On 27 June that year the Committee for Compounding ordered that the county commissioners should ‘use all lawful means to quiet Yaxley in his possession of the rectory’. Finally, on 9 February 1655 an agreement was reached by which Yaxley kept the living on condition that he returned all of Hunt’s possessions and paid him £120 for the first year and subsequently £80 a year for life. The generosity of these terms – and the passion with which Hunt fought for them – shows how lucrative the Kibworth living was. And if this dispute dragged on longer than most, it is a pointer to the degree of religious turmoil at grass-roots level during these years that roughly two in five of Leicestershire’s parish incumbents in 1642 had been obliged to resign by Puritan committees.
If Hunt, his curate Foster and their ‘ceremonies’ had been a divisive presence in Kibworth, the same was also true of the new man, John Yaxley. A zealous – indeed militant – Puritan, Yaxley was (even his admirers conceded) not an easy man to live with. Even apologists for Nonconformist preachers after the Restoration hint at his uncompromising approach: ‘He was a sincere, plain-hearted, humble, pious man; a faithful friend, and very communicative. While he was in the church he was very zealous in promoting reformation, both in his own parish and in the whole country.’ Such men though could be ‘exceptionable characters and turbulent spirits’, one admitted, ‘and Justice obliges us to acknowledge that Mr Yaxley appears to have been of this description.’ Riding with the army as a captain in 1648 with his own troop, Yaxley was ‘a great disturber of the peace, by day and night, searching for cavaliers and making great havoc and spoil of people’s goods’. Back home in his Kibworth pulpit he ‘constantly preached and prayed against the Stuarts’. In Kibworth, needless to say, with its rich and often diverse religious life, such an inflexible approach to his parishioners could only stir up trouble.
Yaxley’s Puritan fundamentalism was felt in Kibworth from the start. The fourteenth-century font was cast out from the church as a ‘relic of superstition’ and wound up doing service as a horse trough in the yard of Robert Brown, a local man of presumably similar views who had served as an officer under Yaxley. (Later buried in a field, it was recovered in the 1860s and today is once again used for the village baptisms.) A similar attitude was taken towards other details of ornament or ritual which offended Yaxley’s sensitive nose for papistry. But such was the drift of the time. Elsewhere even the tomb of Walter of Merton was rudely assaulted, as a Latin inscription commemorating its subsequent repair makes clear:
In the year 1662, during the custody of the nobleman Thomas Clayton, the warden and scholars of Merton College in Oxford University, by virtue of their devotion and gratitude towards its founder, restored this tomb, which had been damaged and almost destroyed by the madness of the fanatics (which mad rabble, for a period lasting beyond the recent civil war, directed its rage against this tomb in just the same way as it was accustomed to do on a monstrous scale against the churches themselves, and against the relics of heroes and saints piously established therein).
Up and down the land in these bitter decades it was not only lives but history which was lost: in Kibworth too, where the once numerous memorials in St Wilfrid’s were mistreated.
Yaxley meanwhile eagerly assisted the wider work of the Puritan regime, which with a virtual ‘thought police’ sought to stamp out licentious behaviour or blasphemous opinions (the latter category of course including any perceived disaffection towards the government). In August 1654, Cromwell passed an ordinance, in his newly assumed capacity as Lord Protector, ‘for ejecting Scandalous, Ignorant and Insufficient Ministers and Schoolmasters’. A panel of commissioners was nominated for each county: on that for Leicestershire sat Sir Arthur Hesilrige as well as Cromwell’s fourth son, Henry. This was assisted by a subsidiary panel of eighteen ministers deemed impeccable in their Puritan rigour, one of whom was the Kibworth vicar John Yaxley.
Together they worked for the ‘setlement of a godly and painful Ministery’, sniffing out any such wrong thinking as contravened the 1650 Act against ‘Atheistical Blasphemous and excrable opinions, derogatory to the Honour of God, and destructive to humane Society’ – as well as licentious behaviour: not only adultery, fornication, drunkenness and fighting but also frequent playing at cards or dice, ‘Whitson-Ales, Wakes, Morris-Dances, May-poles, Stage-plays … or such like Licentious practices, by which men are encouraged in a loose and prophane Conversation’. Republican England, then, was not a place for jollity. Liberty did not on any account mean licence. And Kibworth, with Yaxley at the helm, was in the front line of the campaign for a brave and godly new world.
By the late 1650s, Cromwell was dead and his son Richard installed as Lord Protector, as was noted approvingly in the Kibworth parish register. But many in England, even those once enthusiastic, were wearying of the Republic. As support for the regime dwindled, Yaxley led a delegation of thirty-eight Leicestershire ministers to deliver a petition to Parliament. His was the first name affixed and he delivered the preamble, testifying to the desire of all ‘the true Godly of the Land, to strengthen your Hands in the Work of the Lord’, and rueing the late lapse of erstwhile allies: the ministers ‘could not but with shame, and bleeding of heart, bewail that Cloud of darkness, which had lately overspread divers of their old professed friends, who at first deeply engaged with them’. The House thanked Yaxley and his fellows for a petition in which they discerned ‘a Gospel-Spirit of Meekness, Sincerity, and Holiness’. But many of them sensed clearly enough that, for the English Republic, the game was up.
Restoration
From the moment that Charles II landed at Dover on 25 May 1660 and processed to London, there were those in Kibworth who sensed that the game was also finally up for their vexatious minister. Unfortunately for Yaxley, the return of the king gave his local enemies all the security they needed to avenge the violent eviction of William Hunt thirteen years earlier and much else suffered by villagers in the interim. One need scarcely doubt that, if there were Puritans in the village who shared Yaxley’s mindset, there were many others profoundly unhappy with the turn their community’s religious life had taken. (In 1658 even the schoolmaster of Kibworth Grammar School had resigned after only two years in the job, fed up with the minister’s busybodying.)
But Yaxley did not go quietly from Kibworth. As Charles arrived in London, Yaxley delivered an apocalyptic commentary from the village pulpit: ‘Hell is broke loose, the devil and his instruments are coming to persecute the godly.’ From the time of the Restoration, it was alleged, Yaxley preached that ‘the King was a Papist, and went to mass twice a day, and that Popery and Profaneness increased apace’. Finally, at dawn on 17 August 1660, William Beridge, whose family had been popular vicars from the 1570s, and his village friends took the law into their own hands.
For what happened next we have conflicting accounts delivered in petitions to Parliament: that of Yaxley’s sworn witness on the one hand (a man given simply as J.D. who was staying at the Rectory while Yaxley was away); and, on the other, the reply of the local Justice, Sir John Pretyman, who lived near to Kibworth and who was summoned to the scene after the initial drama had taken place. According to J.D., Beridge came to the parsonage at sunrise with two other men, Richard Clark and John Brian, both middling Kibworth farmers. They drew the latch and entered, Beridge armed with a drawn sword and a cocked pistol, Clark with a cocked pistol and a fork. Having turfed the maids out of bed they entered the room where J.D. had been sleeping and threatened to run him through with a sword if he did not rise and leave quietly. They then entered the chamber of Mrs Yaxley, breaking down her bolted door, hauled her from the room in her petticoat and thrust her down the stairs and out of the house.
J.D. testified that Mrs Yaxley then went to her sister’s house in the village to borrow a coat before returning and shouting through the parlour window to be allowed to collect some clothes. Yaxley later seems to have claimed that his wife had been frantic at being unable to collect her granddaughter, who was asleep in a cradle in the house – and that she had shouted through the window: ‘You villains, will you kill my child?’ Both agree, however, that she was then shot at through the window and badly wounded in the face by the gunpowder and broken glass, which left her sightless and – as J.D. delicately put it – ‘more like a monster than a woman’. It was a harsh punishment for her husband’s unpopularity.
Yaxley moved to Smithfield in London, where he continued preaching until he died in 1687. It is interesting to compare his case with that of William Sheffield, another Puritan preacher installed by Parliament. In contrast to Yaxley, Sheffield became so respected by his new parishioners that a successful petition to the court was organized after the Restoration – signed by over a thousand people – requesting that he be allowed to continue in his role. But in 1662 the Act of Uniformity imposed the ritual and liturgy of a new Book of Common Prayer – a measure which led to the resignation of some 2,000 clergymen, including Sheffield, who could not comply with its terms. On his resignation William Sheffield retired to Kibworth Harcourt, where he owned land and where he lived the rest of his life. For eleven years he ‘constantly went in the morning, with his family, to the parish church, and preached in his own home in the afternoon’, becoming a lynchpin of the burgeoning Nonconformist community in Kibworth. In 1672, Sheffield licensed his house behind the Old Crown on Main Street as a place for Presbyterian worship with himself as preacher. The Civil War had seen the uniformity of the Church of England that Henry VIII and Elizabeth had sought fragment into scores of sects. Ecclesiastical discipline had almost entirely broken down, and thanks to war and division a generation had grown up quite unused to regular attendance in the established church. ‘Nonconformity’, as a local phenomenon and as a national movement, was born.
Nonconformists
The explosion of radical and dissenting groups after the Civil War is one of the great features of English seventeenth-century history. What contemporary directories of heresy had listed with loathing was now in the open: Quakers, Ranters, Independents, Millenaries, Sabbatarians, Seventh-Day Men, Brownists, Children of the New Birth, Sweet Singers of Israel and so on. Their legacy in Kibworth can be seen in chapels dotted around the village, many now redundant, and in the beautiful slate tombstones in the grounds of the old Congregational Chapel on the A6.
It was after Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 that Kibworth suddenly emerged as a great centre of dissent. We know from the surveys ordered by Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1663, that Kibworth Harcourt in particular was already a centre of Protestant dissent. The episcopal returns of 1669 report a startlingly big community, a ‘conventicle’ of about 200 Presbyterians and Independents of the ‘middle sort of people’ meeting there together – an astonishingly large number, unsurpassed even by larger centres of dissent like Market Harborough. It was reported that these dissenters met in the houses of ordinary husbandmen, Isaac Davenport, Will Johnson and Will Jordan, and the returns list four preachers in particular who preached to this community: Matthew Clark, John Shuttlewood, an ‘ejected minister called Southam’ and ‘a husbandman called Farmer’, along with William Sheffield. In a trend that quickly came to define Nonconformist practice, however, most ministers were itinerant, and of these only Sheffield actually lived in Kibworth. Clark was particularly tireless, ‘preaching up and down in Leicestershire and the neighbouring Parts’. In 1669 he seems to have been preaching at no fewer than fourteen Leicestershire parishes.
The atmosphere was particularly hostile for Nonconformists during the first decade of Charles’s reign. In 1664 the Conventicle Act forbade religious assemblies of more than five people not under the aegis of the Established Church, driving some pastors and their congregations to hold services in the open air. Three times Clark was imprisoned in Leicester jail ‘for the Crime of Preaching’. He was evicted from his ‘very lonesome house in Leicester Forest’ by the terms of the 1665 Five Mile Act, which forbade clergymen from living within that radius of a parish from which they had been banned. He was later fined and excommunicated, and had his possessions seized. A community as large as that in Kibworth Harcourt must have been subject to routine observation, harassment and inquisition. Not for nothing has this period been referred to as the ‘heroic age of Dissent’.
Something of a let-up occurred in 1672 when Charles issued a Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended (though it did not repeal) the penal laws and permitted the construction of registered chapels run by pastors who were officially vetted and licensed. William Sheffield was granted such a licence that year, and his house in Kibworth was recognized as a meeting place.
There were certain groups, however, to which no such forbearance was shown. One, surprisingly, was the Quakers. This sect had been founded during the 1640s by a weaver’s son, George Fox, who came from Fenny Drayton near Kibworth. They called themselves ‘Saints’ (to mark their intended revival of the early Church), ‘Friends of the Truth’ or simply ‘Friends’. But after a judge mocked this group as ‘Quakers’ who ‘tremble at the word of the Lord’, this label was proudly adopted. In contrast to their later reputation, the early Quaker communities were seen as dangerous and subversive, particularly by the Restoration regime alarmed by their rejection of monarchy and the established social hierarchy; but even Puritan preachers who now led Nonconformist groups were furious at the disruption the Quakers caused (and at their rejection and ridicule of all priests and ministers). During the 1650s William Sheffield himself had twice written to the Protectorate to report ‘a great concourse of those people called Quakers’. They acted ‘under pretence of peacableness,’ he wrote, ‘… yet some of them were accidentally seene to have pistols at theire sides under theire cloakes and in their pocketts’; he himself had been threatened with the ‘lowse-house’ (slang for a cage). By toleration for such, he argued, ‘godly people [are] discontented, that the government should be soe much asleep as to suffer such in their insolency, which is falsely called a liberty, for as they manage it, it is not only disturbing but distructive to the civill and Christian libertyes of others.’
Measures were taken against the Quakers during the Interregnum, and more systematic suppression was carried out by the government of Charles II, which in 1662 introduced a Quaker Act, requiring people to swear an oath of allegiance to the king – all such oaths contravened Quaker principles. Such persecution led many Quakers to emigrate to America, among them William Penn, who founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with unprecedented religious freedoms. But a remarkable document in the Leicestershire County Archive preserves the suppression of one Quaker community unrecorded in the official Quaker histories and which based itself in Kibworth parish at Smeeton.
As ever, it is in the official attempts at suppression that traces of these groups survive. In this case the County Lieutenancy Book preserves an order sent out to a Lieutenant Bales, at the head of a militia troop overseen by Captain George Fawnt, on 3 December 1668. It notes information passed to leading men of the county to the effect that ‘there are great numbers of persons commonly called Quakers that assemble and meete together under the pretence of joyninge in a religious worship at Smeeton in the parrish of Kibworth and divers other places […] in the Hundred of Gartree.’ (As we have seen in the case of William Sheffield, informants were plentiful against a group whose conduct offended even the Nonconformist conscience.) Regardless, action was enjoined: muscle was to be provided, with as many troops as seemed necessary, to Mr Oliver, one of the Chief Constables of the hundred, ‘to bring all the said persons or the chief of them before his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace’. Unfortunately the local quarter sessions of the period are missing, so full details of the dissenters, the charges against them and their punishments are lost.
The Kibworth Academy
Kibworth, however, continued to grow as a centre of Nonconformity. In the wake of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ by which William of Orange deposed Charles’s Catholic brother, James II, the 1689 Toleration Act relieved dissenting communities of some of the punitive restraints imposed upon them (though exclusions from political office and the universities would long remain). During the course of the eighteenth century small communities of Independents, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists would establish themselves in Kibworth Beauchamp and Smeeton Westerby. Kibworth Harcourt, however, remained the hub of Nonconformity in the parish. Soon after the regime change, in 1690, a private chaplain called John Jennings, Welsh by birth, who had himself been evicted from a living in 1662 and subsequently gathered an independent congregation at nearby West Langton, relocated to Kibworth. When he died in 1701 he was succeeded by his son, another John Jennings, who established a small but highly influential dissenting academy. When Jennings moved to Hinckley in 1722, the house – in the yard of the Crown Inn – was bought by the congregation, and his pupil Philip Doddridge, then only twenty years old, took the helm. During this period a list of Dissenters in Kibworth, Glen and Langton gives an astonishing 321 ‘Hearers’ and forty-one ‘Voters’ in Doddridge’s congregation.
Three years later Doddridge was asked, by one Reverend Saunders, to provide an account of Jennings’s teaching at Kibworth, which he did in full, from memory and with reference to a letter he found in which Jennings himself had set down his methods. The syllabus he details seems astonishingly diverse and open-minded, not least in comparison with the resolutely unmodernized education provided by the old universities in the early eighteenth century. (The imperative to run academies in the first place was provided, of course, by the exclusion of Dissenters from Oxford and Cambridge – subscription to the Act of Uniformity and the Thirty-Nine Articles being a condition of university admission.)
‘Our course of education at Kibworth,’ Doddridge recalled, ‘was the employment of four years, and every half year we entered upon a new set of studies.’ He then detailed a curriculum, stage by stage, which was remarkably utilitarian and broad-minded in its embracing of the latest modern disciplines as well as theology (which itself was taught in a manner which encouraged freedom of opinion). Science was strongly represented, with lectures on mechanics, algebra, geometry, anatomy, physics and astronomy; modern history reading included not only works on Britain and Europe but the latest studies of Africa, Asia and the Americas; French was studied as well as Latin and Hebrew; logic was taught using a system Jennings had largely derived from John Locke. At all turns, Doddridge observed, Jennings ‘made the best writers his commentators’. When in later years, after the academy had relocated to Northampton, students were admitted for a general education as well as in preparation for the ministry, its popularity and success mounted. Jennings also strongly believed in women’s education, and it is no coincidence that his sister’s daughter, the poet, feminist and anti-slavery writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld, was born and raised in Kibworth. Also a pioneering writer of children’s books, Anna enraged Wordsworth and Coleridge by her anti-war stance, and, though she left the village when she was fifteen, she is one of the most interesting and symptomatic products of Jennings’s Nonconformist curriculum.
Doddridge himself thrived on Jennings’s example and relished his time in Kibworth for the leisure it gave him to study and reflect, in addition to his work teaching and ministering to his congregation (which included the composition of numerous hymns, some of which, like ‘Oh Happy Day’, remain popular among Nonconformist communities even now). When in 1720 a friend consoled him for the assumed tedium of being ‘buried alive’ at Kibworth, Doddridge memorably contradicted his correspondent:
Here I stick close to those delightful studies which a favoring Providence has made the business of my life. I can willingly give up the charms of London, the luxury, the company, the popularity of it, for the secret pleasures of rational employment and self-approbation; retired from applause and reproach, from envy and contempt, and the destructive baits of avarice and ambition. So that, instead of lamenting it as my misfortune, you should congratulate me upon it as my happiness, that I am confined in an obscure village, seeing it gives me so many valuable advantages to the most important purposes of devotion and philosophy, and, I hope I may add, usefulness, too.
Grievous crimes and carnal concupiscence
There was much of profound interest, then, and of a modern cast, in the religious and intellectual life of Kibworth during the early eighteenth century. One less appealing aspect though was the enforcement of morality. It had long been a tenet of the Church that behaviour contravening the Christian moral codes endangered the salvation not just of the individual sinner but even of the wider community. In the absence of criminal sanctions for such moral lapses as pre-marital sex or adultery, punishment took the form of ritual humiliation by the church congregation. Cases were referred to the Leicester archdeaconry – and in Leicester Cathedral to this day there remain the furnishings of the consistory court in which such ‘crimes’ were addressed.
In the county archives numerous cases survive from Kibworth, as from across the archdeaconry, which attest to the importance of such moral policing in early eighteenth-century English society. The majority of such ‘crimes’ were cases of defamation or pre-marital ‘fornication’ – with the guilty couple almost invariably subsequently marrying, either by choice or through family and community pressure. Less frequent but not unusual were instances of the more serious lapse of adultery. In 1702, for instance, Esther Sturges of Kibworth was charged with committing adultery with another villager, William Swinglar. Her penalty was to appear on successive Sundays in January and February 1703 in the parish church of Kibworth, and in the neighbouring churches of Burton Overy and Great Glen. There, at the beginning of morning prayer, she was to ‘stand upon a stool before the desk in the face of the congregation then assembled’, dressed (in the winter cold) in nothing but a white sheet, and holding in her hand a white wand – the sheet a symbol of a return to baptismal purity, the wand an acceptance of the rod of discipline. In this humiliating position she was to recite her humble confession:
Whereas I Easther Sturgis not having the fear of God before mine eyes but being led by the instigation of the devil and mine own carnall concupiscence have committed the grievous crime of adultery with the above-named Wm Swinglar to the great dishonour of Almighty God, the breach of his most sacred laws, the scandal and evill example of others and the danger of mine own soule without unfeigned repentance for the same I do humbly acknowledge and am heartily sorry for this my heinous offence. I ask God and the congregation pardon and forgiveness for the same in Jesus Christ and beseech him to give me his Grace not only to enable me to avoid all such like sin and wickedness but also to live soberly righteously and godly all the days of my life and to that end I desire all that are here present to joyne with me in saying the Lord’s prayer. Our Father which art in Heaven …
On the back of the charge sheet, which was passed to the village rector or curate, a note was made confirming that the confession had been made in the prescribed manner, before the sheet was returned to the archdeacon for filing. In the case of John and Sarah Monck, and John and Mary Reddington, whose penance was carried out on the same day in April 1719, a note was made by Will Vincent, the rector of Kibworth, that the confessions could not be recited sooner ‘upon the account of the women’s lying in’: both couples by then had married.
Such ceremonies seem to us now the stuff of repressive fundamentalist fantasies, but they were performed routinely in England during the eighteenth century, as similar rituals had been for hundreds of years previously (Esther’s penance, for example, unmistakably echoes that of Roger and Alice Dexter in 1389 (see p. 226)). After a more live-and-let-live attitude in the late medieval and early Tudor period, where pre-marital sex was widely accepted among ‘engaged’ couples, these rituals became more common after the Reformation as congregations sought to return to the ‘purer’ practices of the early Church. By enforcing them, it was believed that the Church could thus secure a forgiveness of sins for the penitent by the community. During the course of the eighteenth century, however, such moralizing zeal waned under the influence of new ideas and a more relaxed religious climate. Cases of penance continued in Kibworth church until late in the century, but they became less frequent, and had disappeared altogether by the early nineteenth. The religious fears and tumultuous passions which had driven the events of the Tudor and Stuart periods had begun, finally, to subside.