IN SEARCH OF AN OLD GIRLFRIEND
In August 2006, Jane and the boys and I visited England for a three-week holiday. On arriving at Heathrow, we picked up a hire car and followed the winding itinerary that I had mapped out in my head.
It was designed to overcome the reservations that Jane had developed about England on her Kiwi OE (Overseas Experience) during which time she had worked, for example, in a bookshop in Cambridge - feeling impoverished, marginalized and, dare I say it, different and ‘colonial'.
So we struck off for Cheshire from Heathrow taking the scenic route via Salisbury, Bath and Ludlow. My ploy was to introduce lots of beautiful rolling English countryside, fine old market towns and plenty of ruins, monuments and stately relics.
This plan also had the merit that it largely avoided the motorways, which to me are a never-ending hell somewhere between riding dodgem cars at the fairground and driving go-kart circuits.
My stratagem did not entirely work. As a devotee of Midsomer Murders, she eyed picture book scenes and the numerous English characters, identities and eccentrics that we encountered with apprehension.
For the greater part of the holiday, we stayed in tourist accommodation that had been developed on a farm at Cholmondeley, Cheshire – which was OK except that Jane got lost driving the hire car in the back streets of the nearby market town of Whitchurch, and again in the high-hedged back lanes on the way home on her one solo venture.
As for me, having feasted myself on sagging doorways, low-hanging beams and pork scratchings, I too became a little bit allergic to the closeness of everything and the preoccupation in modern rural England with leaving no nook un-knick-knacked.
However, we took the same approach to travel when we left to return to Heathrow but this time it was via Oundle and Oakham, as I wanted to spend some time with my eldest son Matthew (known locally as Kiwi) who was working on a farm at Draughton in Northamptonshire.
And as our route took us close to the village of Glapthorn (just outside Oundle) I took the time to try to catch up with an old girlfriend.
I can still remember it as yesterday – a rainy day on 25th August 2006. Diplomatically, Jane and the boys stayed in the car while I pushed open the old oak door and surveyed the scene, before kneeling quietly and muttering a prayer for time past and loves lost.
Before you surmise too much dear reader about my insensitivity to my wife, I should explain that the object of my affection died in the 1590s.
But the tiny country church that I had entered – St Leonard’s, Glapthorn – was where this headstrong, whimsical but practical lady had regularly worshipped with her children Charity (b.1542), Rachel (b.1544), Faith (b.1548), Evangelist (b.1550) and Edward (bca 1552) – and more occasionally with her frequently absent husband John Johnson, merchant of the wool staple in Calais, England.
INTRODUCING SABINE JOHNSON
Sabine Saunders (born around 1520) was the daughter of Thomas Saunders of Sibbertoft, Leicestershire and Margaret Cave. In 1541, she married John Johnson (c.1514-1590), who had been apprenticed to her uncle, Anthony Cave. John Johnson was a draper and a stapler whose business was centred in Calais. He also traded in a wide range of other items apart from wool, including wine, herring, grain, cloth, and canvas.
Sabine’s letters from 1542-1552 have been preserved along with those of her husband – and it is from these that we catch sight of a lively and loving lady. John, Sabine’s husband, was bankrupted in 1553, and following the conclusion of the legal proceedings, his letters were stored in the Tower of London until they were transferred to the Public Record Office in London some 300 years later.
The story of the Johnsons is told engagingly if in a somewhat episodic manner in Barbara Winchester’s "Tudor Family Portrait" (1955). This provides excerpts from some of the most interesting letters.
For example, in 1551, John Johnson wrote that he wished: ‘it had pleased God so to have provided for me that I might with less embracing of business have passed my times in the world. But God having appointed me to be a merchant (and such one as cannot live only to myself or for myself) I am compelled to enter into much business, and to take money and much things in hand’.
In 1544, John had been asked by Sir Thomas Brudenell of Deene, one of the wealthiest local aristocratic landowners, whether he would like to take up the tenancy of the Old Manor House (known locally as Browns’ Manor) in the small village of Glapthorn, Northamptonshire. This he did and Sabine set up and ran an extensive household there while John pursued his business interests in Calais.
From the letters, we know that there was a good deal of banter between John and Sabine, with some of it being of a slightly salacious nature.
In December 1545, John wrote from Calais:
‘If but one man in the whole world should be kept from death, it might be I, if it pleased God. Then the women of this town would keep me perforce from you. By Saint Mary! I should have much ado to please so many women! God save me from being troubled by many women, for I have much ado to please you alone, as ye know!
To which Sabine replied from Glapthorn:
‘Husband do not write there be many fair widows in Calais that would be glad of you. The truth is that I had rather they had everyone of them two husbands than you should be troubled with them!
Your promise made to me I will not say but you kept, and so have I, and will do the uttermost, without any bond or allegation. And, when it please God to send you home, I put no doubts that we shall agree very well these cold nights.’
We also know that she had a particular yen for red wine when she was pregnant and that she loved riding ‘her little black mare’ (which was much more tractable than one of the horses that her husband had unwisely purchased for himself which was ‘a pretty horse but fair unrid in the head’).
THE MERCHANT, THE PRIEST AND THE VILLAGERS
When I dodged the rain to look around the tiny white-washed church of St Leonard’s at Glapthorn, I picked up a small pamphlet there that had been produced about its architecture and history – leaving a couple of pounds in return in the gift box (or what we in New Zealand would call the ‘koha’ box). Apparently, the church was originally a Chapel of Ease of nearby Cotterstock.
The pamphlet points out that one of the moulded archway capitals is dated to 1160 and that despite the small size of the church, building and refurbishment can be detected from the succeeding 200 years.
‘Also note the exterior east window is decorated with a stone sow and her piglets – a reminder of when Glapthorn was known as ‘pig village’ and everyone kept a pig in their yard’.
As for the history of the village, there is a terse note that in 1512, ‘Robert Brudenell acquired the Manor of Glapthorn, beginning a long family association with the village. In 1815, the fields were enclosed but field names like Casteepings, Hanging Baulk, Stemborough, Hens and Chickens and Milking Stool remind us of agricultural life from Saxon times to the present day’.
There is no mention of Glapthorn’s most famous residents the Johnsons, though there is mention that the tenor bell weighing five and a half hundredweights was cast by a London foundry in the 15th century – which opens the possibility that it was donated by John and Sabine.
It is interesting then to pick up Glapthorn and its church as it was some 450 years ago.
Browns’ Manor was a relatively small property of around 250 acres which consisted of a hundred acres of arable and pasture ‘lying scattered in all the fields of Glapthorn and Cotterstock’ (i.e. strips of land pre-enclosure), besides which were a number of large and valuable enclosures in Glapthorn itself – Willow Row Close, Bodger’s Close, the Great Close amounting to 30 arable acres and Caies Stybbing, the forty acre meadow where the horses were put out to graze.
Clearly, Caies Stybbing is what the villagers now call Casteepings.
Initially, John seems to have seen the estate as a rural, gentlemanly retreat. However, it wasn’t long before he started to use his growing local knowledge to further his interests as a wool trader. The vicissitudes of this business are illustrated by the inflation in wool prices that followed the succession of rainy springs and autumns in the 1540s which decimated lambings and led to ‘murrain’ and foot-rot.
In April 1545, John refused to pay 12s (shillings) per tod (28 lbs) for the wool of his neighbour Mr Belcher but by autumn he was thankful to have it for 13s. By 1546, wool was only to be bought for 14s per tod in Rutland and 16s per tod in Northampton. And so prices continued to rise, with Lady Brudenell getting 24s per tod for her wool in 1550.
Not surprisingly, as a wool merchant John soon went into wool production, clearing and enclosing as much of his land as he could. In 1550, he spent nearly forty pounds on buying in sheep from Essex and he soon owned 1,000 sheep. However, the local price of wool hit a high of 30s per tod in 1551 and fell thereafter, putting John’s venture at risk.
Not only that, his entry into local trading set him at odds with the regional wool staple (i.e. trading guild) based in Norwich which then also threatened his legitimate registration with the more powerful London Staple.
The Johnsons then, although an apparently happy and cheerful couple, were not exactly popular in Northamptonshire – what with encroaching on the arable land of the cottagers and offending local merchants and traders.
Moreover, they soon fell foul of the local clergy as John through his connections with Lord Cromwell and Sir Thomas Brudenell helped in 1548 to clean up the remaining chantry and church property that had been plundered after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
And the lease that Sir Thomas had given John had effectively privatized the tithes payable on lands associated with St Leonard’s. Parson Saxby of Glapthorn was unsurprisingly miffed about this and a long and costly law suit ensued.
This led Sabine to write to John in Calais ‘desiring him with all her heart to make speed to come home considering how I am troubled with a Sir Priest and have great need of help’. In one letter she confided to John that ‘our priest is a very K, as our last was’ (no one seems sure exactly what that meant, but in all probability it wasn’t polite).
Sabine also much resented Saxby’s lawyer Nicholas Walker, dubbing him ‘the crafty child Nicol Walk-a-Knave’.
The villagers sided with the clergy and in 1548 there was ‘a kind of seditious uproar’ at mass at St Leonard’s. This coincided with the introduction of the new Book of Prayer and the switch of rites from the Catholic to an evangelical form.
So a change of faith was accompanied by some profit realization by those who gained in power and influence, with it being noted that John Broughton, John Desborough and Richard Trusse had been the ringleaders of a ‘great disturbance and disorder in Glapthorn’ and the suggestion being made that ‘the offenders should be committed to prison for a season, until they be taught to study and apply to quietness and godliness’.
I’ll leave it there for the time being. I had intended to review the economic and political milieu of the Johnsons’ lives – and its parallels to some of the problems that we face today but it is quite a big draught to distill and one that must wait for another day.
But it has been a delight to write about Sabine – even though her husband may have had more than an eye for the main chance (and quite possibly the odd Calais widow).
POSTCRIPT
Incidentally, while I was searching in the period 2002-2008 for my own non-existent Johnson ancestors, I developed all kinds of lines of inquiry and interests in Johnson genealogies and family histories. The Tudor Johnsons of Calais and Glapthorn are by far the most interesting, at least as far as England is concerned
As I have already mentioned. The Johnsons’ business went into bankruptcy in 1553, and in 1555 John Johnson was committed to the Fleet Prison for debt. He was not released until 1557. Sabine was allowed to remain at Glapthorn with their children but after his release there was little money to support the family in the manner to which they had become accustomed.
With the help of William Cecil, Johnson obtained a post as a secretary to Lord Paget. This lasted until 1561 and during that time the family shared a house in Lombard Street with John’s widowed sister-in-law, Maria.
During this period, John became a consultant and lobbyist for the relocation of the English Wool Staple from the Continent, following the loss of Calais by Queen Mary I. He wrote a consulting report at this time with the catchy and for that era very short title of ‘Antwerp in England’.
In 1562, John and Sabine moved into the parsonage at West Wickham, Kent, renting it and the accompanying farm for £8 a year. Later they moved back to London. Sabine seems to have survived her husband who died around 1590.
It struck me on my visit that there might still be Johnsons in the Oundle area that were descended from John and Sabine and I asked about this, inter alia, at the town’s best butcher’s shop ‘Johnsons’ (it does fantastic Melton Mowbray type pork pies).
Nobody it seems had heard of the tenants of the Old Manor House and no one claimed descent.
But when I told Mr Johnson that I was from New Zealand and that I had an interest in family history, he jumped at the chance of employing even the most distant relative. Sadly, I had to admit that I had no skills whatsoever in boning and butchering and that for better or for worse I had to stick to my trade as an economist.
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