More Plague, Pestilence and Parish Registers

In Michael Leach’s interesting article in the March 2020 issue of the HCHG journal, he examined evidence for the plague and other epidemics in Essex, including from the registers of Chipping Ongar. This article, also written during the coronavirus pandemic, continues his theme and looks at evidence for the much smaller parish of Theydon Mount.

In 1428 Theydon Mount appears to have had a lower population than it had at Domesday. It was specially exempted from a house tax introduced that year because there were fewer than 10 households in the parish. Perhaps the population numbers had never fully recovered after the pandemic of the Black Death, which arrived in England in June 1348 and is estimated to have killed 40-60% of the population.

After the 14th century, the plague retreated but never went away, recurring regularly over the next 300 years, including in our area. London was understandably one of the epicentres, and it spread easily to the surrounding countryside because of the frequent movements of people (and their fleas) between the two. There was a known “great plague year” in London in 1563, for example, and the following year four unrelated children in Theydon Mount were buried on the same day at the end of June, with another child in August and an adult in September. (Plague tended to strike in the summer and autumn, then usually retreated after a few frosts.)

A possible visit to Hill Hall by Queen Elizabeth in 1570 may have inspired her Secretary of State, Sir Thomas Smith, to completely rebuild two wings as a suite of Royal apartments and decorate them lavishly with classical and Biblical wall-paintings. But plans for the visit were abandoned when in July Smith reported “the sudden death of certain persons very near his house”. The intended progress into Essex (Hill Hall, Leez Priory and St Osyth Priory) never happened. The registers of Theydon Mount only record two deaths in 1570 (about average for the time), so the cases must have been further afield. There were two farmhouses just over the parish boundary with Theydon Garnon only a few hundred yards from Hill Hall. Anyone dying there would have been recorded in Theydon Garnon registers.

There was a definite spike in Theydon Mount deaths a few years later in 1579, when nine people died between July and September, with one more – a 6-week-old baby – in early November. Four of the deaths were from the same family – a child John Love was buried on 12th July, his mother on 1st August, his father on 5th August and his sister on 7th September. On 31st July a maidservant from Hill Hall was buried and then a manservant the next day. A wife and then her husband were buried on 5th and 19th August. Two more unrelated children died, buried on 31st August and 1st November. As Michael Leach pointed out, several of these deaths may have been from any dangerous infectious disease, not necessarily the plague. But there had been plague in London and Norwich in 1578 which continued into 1579, when it also struck Yarmouth, Ipswich, Colchester and even Plymouth. And the spread of the disease across five separate households in the parish makes the plague seem the most likely cause.

The 17th century was a particularly bad time for sickness, when severe outbreaks of diseases afflicted the south of England again and again. The 1640s were plague years in London and beyond, often spread by troop movements, but typhus and influenza were rife too. Nine burials were recorded in Theydon Mount between March and December 1642, six of them in summer and four of them young children.

The political and religious turbulence of the Civil War meant that parish registers for this period are often patchy or altogether missing. Theydon Mount fared better than most. There is nothing for the three years after the incumbent rector was ejected in 1644, but then in 1647 a minister called Walter Welles took over. This may have been the same Dr Walter Welles whose preaching at a lecture in Godmanchester is credited with converting Oliver Cromwell to the Puritan view. Welles was a good record-keeper: he tried to reconstruct entries for the missing years and copied out the glebe terrier and churchyard fence liability from the old register book. In 1648 he reports that on June 10th, John North (his house is still known as North Farm) was “slain in the service of the Parliament at Epping”. The following year he wrote that “Edmond Nokes, Octob. 13 & his wife & one son all in a weeks’ space of a dysenterie. Jone Glascock her sister, of the same disease about 3 weeks after.” In early 1660 he tells us that Thomas Ward, an old servant at Hill Hall, was “esteemed at above 100 years old”. This was one of Welles’s last entries, because with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the ejected rector returned.

In 1663 Samuel Hall, another careful record-keeper who wrote in Latin, took over as rector. It was his unhappy lot to record the worst plague year of all in 1665, when the disease reached a crescendo and then seemed to burn itself out – literally, in the case of London. In Theydon Mount, the first two deaths were in June and July, but they were both older people, so perhaps unexceptional. Then four members of the same family were buried in September and October – first John Pitts, then his wife a fortnight later. A week later their adult son died, and his sister a fortnight later. In the margin of the register against each of these four names Hall wrote “peste” – Latin for “of the plague”.

Printed transcript of Theydon Mount burial register. Until 1752, the calendar year began on March 25th, so the two Hall entries were in what would now be reckoned as 1666.

Curiously, on the same day that Widow Pitts was buried, presumably in the churchyard, there was another burial. Hall wrote, “Gratia filia Johannis Lloyd Baronettae sepulta fuit Septbris25°”, ie ‘Grace, daughter of Sir John Lloyd, Baronet, was buried September 25th’. Grace was the step-daughter of Sir Thomas Smith, great-nephew of the Sir Thomas who rebuilt Hill Hall. The entry continues in English, “Shee lyes buried in the entrance of the chancel on the right hand, under the seat where the menservants of Hill Hall use to sit”. In the margin there is no reference to the plague, but Hall has drawn a hand with the index finger pointing to the entry, seemingly drawing attention to it. It would surely be unlikely, though, that she would be buried inside the church if she too had died of the plague. Although the transmission of diseases was not understood, noxious fumes (miasmas) were often blamed, which no doubt would emanate as the body decayed in its shallow grave beneath the seats – perhaps a rather queasy thought for those who usually sit there now.

Interments within the church itself are technically known as intra-mural burials. Fees were much higher than for burials in the churchyard, so they were only for the wealthy elite or the clergy. They were common in the Middle Ages and beyond, but fell out of favour before the 19th century, and were banned on public health grounds in 1850. Uneven or sinking floor tiles or slabs are often an indicator of collapsed coffins below.

Grace Lloyd’s burial within the body of the church was not the only one Samuel Hall recorded. In March 1666, he reports that his own little daughter Elizabeth, not yet two, “lyes buried in the ally [aisle] the feet of her Coffin agt the end of the seat belonging to Mr ffield and where the tenant of Munt Hall sits”. It seems that each property in the parish was allocated all or part of a pew, for which they would have paid a pew-rent. (Mr Field lived at Colemans Farm, and Mount Hall used to be just by the church.) This was the same system as described by Richard Gough in 1701, in which he goes through his parish church of Myddle in Shropshire, pew by pew, gossiping about current and former occupants of properties and pews.

Exactly a week after little Elizabeth was buried, tragedy struck the Hall family again. Her mother Margaret also died. “Shee lyes buried by her Child towards the women’s seat, the foot of her coffin even with the foot of the above mentioned.” Eight months later in November 1666, a citizen of London called Sarah Houghton was “buried in the alley below the before mentioned Margaret Hall along by the women’s seats”. It appears that the Hill Hall menservants and the women (presumably women servants) had their own seating, as well as the tenants of the various farms. Has anyone else come across similar records of burials under the church floor?

The year 1668 saw the deaths of the two highest-ranking parishioners – in March it was Lady Beatrice, second wife of Sir Thomas and mother of Grace Lloyd, and then in May Sir Thomas Smith himself. They are both described as being buried in the chancel, the most prestigious and expensive location. Today there is a crypt beneath the chancel containing coffins from the 18th and early 19th centuries, suggesting the crypt was not dug out until then. Lady Beatrice in 1668 was “in the chancell, part under the seat where the men servants of Hill-Hall sit, and part in the entrance into the chancel”. Sir Thomas was placed “in the upper end of the chancel close by the monument of Sir Wm Smith the Elder”.

From this time on, burial entries become fairly formulaic and routine, although Samuel Hall’s successor helpfully records the occupations of all the men. In 1697 he made a note that an unknown man was found hanging in the woods and after three days he was buried in the woods by the locals as a suicide. Because suicide was a crime, he would not have been allowed a Christian burial. Almost a century later, however, in 1783, local man Thomas Laundy died “in the King’s Bench”. This was a prison in Southwark, but mainly for debtors, not criminals, so perhaps that allowed him to be buried in the churchyard.

In the 1780s the registers start to identify paupers, who were exempt from the 3d Stamp Duty imposed in 1783 but discontinued in 1794, and a few entries have the word “Parish” added – buried at parish expense. In November 1787 a child died of smallpox, and two months later so did a 28-year-old woman. These were the last entries in the old register book to record a cause of death. In 1812 printed books for standardised register entries were introduced, leaving little scope for the individual clergyman or clerk’s additions.

It seems fitting to end with an epitaph. Mr Philip Gloyns, a farmer, died in 1806 at the age of 63. His gravestone in the churchyard carries a verse which, along with other monumental inscriptions and the old parish registers, was transcribed by J J Howard and H Farnham Burke (of Burke’s Peerage fame) and printed in a limited edition. The Rector at the time, the Revd Lewis Newcomen Prance, assisted with the commission and added some marginal comments in his own personal copy. Next to Philip Gloyns’s verse is the note “killed by a kick in his stable”, by way of explanation for the advice in the verse.

Stop, courteous reader, and contemplate here,
In pity drop one pious friendly tear
On one whom Death no warning chose to give,
Nor may not you – be careful how you live.