Samuel Rudder was a cheese-mango

I have made a monumental historical discovery.

It’s not often I uncover something so enormously colossal, particularly in the academical world such as this. In fact, my last important discovery was the time I (almost) proved that time travel is possible thanks to archives and cucumbers. You can read about that significant breakthrough here and decide for yourselves how important my contribution to science really is.

Another discovery I’ve made recently was when I realised that the word “algorithm” was not actually spelled or pronounced “alogarithm” [a-logga-rhythm] as I had spent the last forever doing. I’m pretty sure this erroneous pronunciation has made me look fairly silly at various points in my life, so at least that has now been resloved.

As for now though, I really should take a few breaths before I divulge my current discovery, so here’s some background detail before the glorious main event.

Goodbyes and legacies

Colleagues and I at Gloucestershire Archives have been delighted to witness the tremendous success of the BAFTA, Oscar and IFTA winning short film, An Irish Goodbye.   Why? Because it is a brilliant film, but also because Tom Berkeley, one of the two writer-directors of this film is the son of our colleague Kate, and former colleague Nick, and lives just round the corner from the Archives. So massive congratulations to Tom and his Belfast co-writer and director, Ross White. The film features two Irish brothers working through a bucket-list following their mother’s death and is both amusing and profound. If you haven’t seen the film, I strongly recommend looking for it on I-player.   

Vermin!

Churchwardens are lay officials who oversaw the routine running of parishes. They were elected to their positions by other members of the laity (a body of people not in orders as opposed to the clergy) and usually served a single term. Their primary job was to procure and disburse funds from parishioners for the maintenance of the parish church and other parish buildings. To keep track of all this, churchwardens created account books which recorded their income and expenditure. All manner of things are represented including incomes and expenses of parish officials, church repairs (to doors, gates, pews and graveyard walls), plus sundry items such as washing surpluses, brooms, bell ropes and communion bread and wine.  

However, another, more tragic aspect of these records is that they usually list bounties paid for catching ‘vermin’. By the mid-1500s, the population of Britain had recovered from the Black Death and was starting to rise rapidly. However, agriculture didn’t keep pace and frequently harvests were poor – the harvests of 1527, 1528 and 1529 were particularly dreadful. In just over three years, most food prices doubled in England. A further abysmal harvest in 1532 was the final straw and concerned least this cause major civil unrest, Henry VIII passed ‘An Act made and ordained to destroy Choughs Crows and Rooks, 1532’. This Act was specially aimed at reducing the number of rooks, crows, and choughs [jackdaws], in the hope of protecting grain harvests and it stated that: