July 2004 - Nuneaton & North Warwickshire Family History Society

Nuneaton & North Warwickshire Family History Society - Journal Page 13
HART – Atherstone Civic Society’s Local Heritage Initiative
By Judy Vero, Honorary Secretary of Atherstone Civic Society
Within the next two years the History
of Atherstone Research Team hopes to
be able to offer family historians a new
resource.
Over the last year HART has been transcribing
the Manor Court Rolls for
Atherstone, held at the Warwick Record
Office. These extend from 1589 to
1608 and from 1640 until the 1893.
They record all transactions involving
copyhold property. Until this property
was enfranchised, in the 1920s, each
time an owner died, or sold, mortgaged,
or leased his building, he or she
had to attend the manor court, where
the property was surrendered ‘by the
rod’ into the hands of the lord’s steward.
The new owner was then admitted
on payment of a fine which ranged
from 2 shillings and 6 pence for a quarter
burgage to 10 shillings for a whole
burgage.
Roughly two-thirds of Atherstone’s
property was copyhold, as opposed to
freehold, and the town is fortunate in
having probably the best run of manor
court rolls in Warwickshire. Until now,
they have hardly seen the light of day.
A grant of £25,000 from the Heritage
Lottery Fund and £5000 from Nationwide,
through the Countryside Agency,
has enabled HART volunteers to undertake
the massive task of transcribing
the whole archive. With the help of Dr
Nat Alcock, the house historian, they
have already completed the majority of
the work and hope to put it on CD so
that it will be available in libraries, record
offices and possibly also for sale.
At the same time volunteers are preparing
a massive database of all the names
and properties mentioned in Atherstone’s
rich archive, mostly held at the
Warwick and Lichfield Record Offices.
Many stories have emerged about Atherstone
in times gone by, and all stir
the imagination. In 1659 Charles
Wells, a young longbow-string maker,
living in London, borrowed £30 from
John Simons his neighbour in Butcher
Row, Atherstone, on the security of
three ‘messuages or tenements’ he had
inherited from his grandmother, Hester
Wells. Charles went to the manor court
and surrendered the property to the lord
of the manor’s steward. Then John
Simons came into the court and was
admitted tenant, paying the necessary
fine and swearing his fealty to the lord.
Simons was to hold the property until
the loan was repaid, at the ‘Sign of the
Black Bull in Cheapside.’ Did Charles
ever repay the loan? We do not know,
for by the next entry in 1722 the house
has passed to William Eyre.
All transactions give the abuttals of the
property concerned, and this has enabled
HART volunteers to piece together
the ownership of every property
in Atherstone. It is now possible to see
who lived in each building and what
trade was carried on there over a period
of almost 300 years.
Another strand of the project is the
buildings survey, which is being carried
out under the supervision of historic
buildings surveyor, Bob Meeson. The
information gleaned from the manor
court rolls helps the survey team to understand
each building and how it has
been adapted for new owners and new
functions. Some of the town’s buildings
have been discovered to date back to
the 1400s.
Many of the wills and inventories were
transcribed by Marion Alexander and
the Local History Research Group
some 20 years ago. The most exciting
part of the project is going to be fitting
these into the house histories with other
records, such as the Hearth Tax. We
can now say definitively that the
‘Chamber next the Lane’ recorded in
Henry Rowditch’s inventory of 1676,
refers to a building which stands today
on the site of Dillon’s newsagents in
Long Street.
Over the 18 months that it has been
running, HART has attracted some 60
volunteers and will continue until October
2005, when a book will be published.
This is undoubtedly one of the
most important research projects ever
to have been undertaken on Atherstone.
It is particularly liberating
not to have to worry
about money. The generous
funding has allowed
HART to have the very
best expert advice, all the
photocopies and plans
they need, help with
translation of Latin and
palaeography, travelling
expenses, and computer
courses to help those
working on the database.
Any community group
that wants to follow Atherstone’s
example and
set up their own Local
Heritage Initiative
should contact their regional
branch of the
Countryside Agency.
Fidler’s Laws
These may be new to you. The editor
of the FHS of Cheshire Journal,
Graham Fidler, regularly writes up a
new law based on a “painfully learned”
experience in computing. His latest
bears repetition on a day when my virus
software has picked up a number of
unwanted, virus-laden emails. I do
hope Graham will not mind it being
shared with members in NNWFHS.
Law 11: Never open a file you were not
expecting – it’s bound to contain a
virus!
Let’s look at this in more detail. There
are 5 sub-rules:
1. NEVER open an attachment!
2. NEVER NEVER open an attachment!
3. If you have not updated your virus
checker’s database on virus
signatures within the last week, then
it will probably be useless. New
viruses come out daily.
4. If you must open an attachment,
make sure that you know who it
came from and even more
importantly, do not open it unless
you were expecting that sender to
enclose an attachment
5. To be safe, don’t open the
attachment. Email the sender to ask
if they did send an attachment, and if
so, what it contains.
Graham went on to explain about file
association and how, to be doubly safe,
you should not use Word but change
your folder options to open attachments
that are *.doc with Wordpad.
However, the basic advice is NEVER
open any attachment - even if from
somebody you think you know - until
you are sure they really have sent you a
file that you want and that will not give
you something you definitely do NOT
want!
CENSUS TIP
Is anyone researching Mercer in Atherstone? During
research for a family in the States on a Bindley family
(one of the ones who put the 'Chapel' into Chapel
End) I found that a Bindley daughter had married a
Mercer and lived in Atherstone.
The earlier censuses stated that she was 'born in the
county' but on the 1881 census she was a widow living
on her own and her place of birth was listed Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, USA. Obviously, previously
her husband had answered the enumerator’s questions
but this time she had answered the questions
herself.
So, remember, if a birthplace looks dodgy, or doesn't
fit family myth, ask yourself the question - did this
person answer the enumerator’s questions or did
someone else answer for them?
Val Pickard.