Catalogue description Lease fr. chw. (DR429/112) with consent of (DR429/105) and Ric. Smythe and other, the...

Lease fr. chw. (DR429/112) with consent of (DR429/105) and Ric. Smythe and other, the governors, etc., to Joh. Swete, of a tenement in Bishop Street called "Tho Crane", containing 8 bays of building and 2 sheares and bounding on town wall, and a croft in Dog Lane, for 21 years, at 40s. a year.

Seal and mark of Joh. Swete. Witn. (dorso) T. Banester.

Most of the names mentioned in these deeds are by now familiar: Fenton (DR429/118) is a Shakesperean surname; there was a Fenton in "Merry Wives", Anne Page's lover; "he smells April and May" is the pretty description of him. The calling of Will. Howlt, "musitian" (DR429/119), reminds us that in those days England led the musical world. Corviser (DR429/120) shoemaker; Whittaver (DR429/118) leather dresser. We all remember how disturbed Mrs. Poyser was at the appearance of the "whittaws" on churning day to repair the saddlery. Windmill-hill-field (DR429/121), a "lammes" pasture, i.e., open at Lammas, August 1st, for grazing rights after hay harvest, lies to the north-west of the city, and so, perhaps, it was Thomas Barr who gave his name to Barr's Hill. "Several" (DR429/121) applied to property, indicated private ownership, "Thack't" (DR429/124) is still the local variant for "thatched." A "bay" (DR429/121) is an architectural division of a building, marked in a church by the disposition of the main pillars. Houses and barns were sold by the "bay", which measured 16 feet or thereabouts: enough space for two pairs of oxen. (Addy, "Evolution of the English House.")

No. 122 is an assignment by four men - the patentees, I suppose, named in James I's charter of 1607, which is not now in the vestry - to fresh feoffes of the whole, or a very considerable portion, of the property belonging to the church. The church property is still vested in feoffees, and it is on its regular transmission from one body of feoffees to another that the church's title depends. A new feoffment is made, I believe, about once in thirty years, when the number of the feoffees named in the previous document will have been considerably reduced by death.