Snoreham: a sad loss to the map of Essex
The near-total disappearance of the charmingly named Snoreham from the map of Essex may seem regrettable. In fact, as a fully-fledged parish, it barely clung to an independent existence for two hundred years. Despite the initiative of two eighteenth-century cartographers, there was never any village of that name, and Snoreham's half share in the scattered settlement that eventually became Latchingdon was never fully recognised.
Location Snoreham is situated thirteen miles east of Chelmsford and six miles south-south-east of Maldon. Since 1867, it has formed part of the united parish that, until 1954, was called Latchingdon with Snoreham, and the slight thread of its history is interwoven with the existence of its larger neighbour. Indeed, even during its relatively brief (two-hundred-year) phase as a notionally distinct local jurisdiction, Snoreham's roughly rectangular 400 acres were entirely surrounded by Latchingdon's 3,600 acres: on the map, the smaller unit resembled a postage stamp stuck on the lower left side of an A4 document.[1] In the centre of the oblong stood Snoreham Hall, not a stately home but a large farm, and it was here that a church was built. There is no evidence that anyone ever lived in the surrounding fields.
Aerial view of Snoreham Hall looking north, taken Thursday, 29 July, 2010, reproduced under Creative Commons licence: cc-by-sa/2.0 - © terry joyce - geograph.org.uk/p/2165398. St Peter's church stood in the small meadow in the south-east (lower right) corner of the farm complex. In the background is The Street, now known as Latchingdon village. My thanks to Terry Joyce for this photograph.
However, an east-west highway ran along the northern edge of Snoreham's territory, which today is still called The Street. Leading north at its western end was a direct road to Maldon; from its eastern extremity, a more winding route led south and east to Burnham-on-Crouch and Southminster. The intervening stretch, about 750 yards (700 metres) in length, became a kind of distended staggered junction where, on both sides of the road, disparate clusters of cottages took root. Far from constituting a traditional village, most of them were over a mile (perhaps as far as two kilometres) from the ancient parish church, which was bizarrely tucked in at the south-east corner of Snoreham. However, there is a widespread belief, a kind of topographical superstition, that every parish – and especially one as large in area as Latchingdon – should have its own named 'capital': by 1848, White's Directory of Essex could call identify The Street as Latchingdon and call it "a pleasant straggling village". Since then, there has been an infill of housing, plus the development of what in North America would be sub-divisions, melding the ingredients into an attractive community that modern mapmakers identify as Latchingdon.
However, in earlier centuries, the settlement was neither a village in the traditional sense, nor did it all legitimately belong to Latchingdon. The hovels on the north side of The Street belonged to the larger parish, but those opposite – including the local hostelry, the Red Lion – were in Snoreham.[2] In 1837, a local landlord sued a defaulting tenant for alleged arrears of unpaid rent. The defendant had handed back the keys, but his persecutor insisted that this did not invalidate a continuing tenancy agreement. The sympathies of the court were evidently with the tenant, and there was triumph when somebody spotted a flaw in the indictment. The address of the disputed premises was stated to be Latchingdon, "when in fact they were in the parish of Snoreham", a blunder that made it possible to dismiss the case on a technicality.[3] Snoreham's part-share in this mini-metropolis explains how the 1851 census managed to attribute to it a population of 151. In reality, the parish was an almost empty countryside: that same year, Latchingdon, with nine times the area, was home to barely double the number, 411 people.[4] When a dispute erupted between Latchingdon and Snoreham in 1657-8, as described below, it was essentially a row between two sides of the same street.[5]
Snoreham was part of Dengie Hundred, the peninsula between two rivers, the Blackwater and the Crouch. This coastal fringe of the county is often referred to as the "Essex marshes", but this term did not apply to Snoreham. True, at its northern end, by the headwaters of a stream that fed into the Blackwater, The Street was barely twenty feet (6 metres) above sea level. But Snoreham stretched a mile to the south on rising ground: the Hall and church were 65 feet (20 metres) above sea level, while at the south-eastern corner there was – by Essex standards – a steep slope to a height of over 130 feet (40 metres). The topography is important in tackling the mystery of the place-name.
The key to this diagrammatic map of the parish is Snoreham is given below:
A: Snoreham Hall and the site of St Peter's church; B: Latchingdon old church; C: Latchingdon and Snoreham new church (1856); xxx: houses on the Latchingdon side of The Street; yyy: houses on the Snoreham side of The Street. The 400-acre parish of Snoreham was entirely surrounded by Latchingdon. The distance from The Street to the old parish church is about one mile.
Snoreham – a mysterious place-name The four earliest recorded examples of the name fall between 1238 and 1254. All take the form "Snorham", which tells us that the pronunciation has been unchanged over eight centuries.[6] However, the name itself almost certainly originated much earlier and, here, it is unfortunate that the oldest known versions belong to the relatively late period of the thirteenth century. The explanation for this apparently ungrateful comment lies in the evolution of our language. In Anglo-Saxon times, Old English was an inflected language, with case endings to words, as in Latin. In particular, there were various ways of indicating the possessive: thus Paeccel's farm became Paglesham, while Daecca's farm evolved into Dagenham (and this name can be traced back to a charter from the seventh century).[7] But by the thirteenth century, the language was losing its case endings, and English was on the way to the rolling, yodelling sounds of Chaucer. Hence having the first examples of Snoreham from as late as 1238 makes it difficult to guess whether the first syllable preserved an owner's name, or was some word used adjectivally to describe the property. By contrast, Great and Little Snoring in Norfolk were recorded in Domesday Book, and that 1086 form tells scholars that the Snorings were named after the people of a chieftain called Snear, who is not only forgotten but disguised through a vowel shift.[8]
The first attempt to explain the name was made by the pioneer Essex historian, Philip Morant, in 1768. "Snore, in Saxon, is the son's wife", he pointed out, although he felt obliged to add "but why this place was so named we cannot discover".[9] His suggestion has been brusquely ignored by subsequent scholars, which seems unfair, since Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) did indeed have a feminine noun, snoru, which meant daughter-in-law.[10] However, as Morant himself signalled, it is hard to understand how such a word could form a place-name. An absent-minded landowner might forget his daughter-in-law's name when talking about the farm that had been assigned to her, but it is hard to imagine a ploughman telling his neighbours that he was working on Son's Wife's Farm. Where the owner of a property was female, it was associated with her by name: nearby Asheldham, for instance, probably originated as the farm of a woman called Aeschild.[11]
To a remarkable extent, our knowledge of Essex place-names depends upon the research of two scholars who worked a century ago. Eilert Ekwall was a professor at the University of Lund in Sweden; P.H. Reaney earned one of the earliest doctorates granted by the University of Sheffield and worked as Senior Classics Master at Sir George Monoux School in Walthamstow. The two shared information and ideas, a process could become complicated when one of them took hold of an idea that the other had come to doubt.
Something like this happened with Snoreham. In 1936, Ekwall noted that there was a Snore Hall in Norfolk which had been recorded in Domesday Book, as "Snora". Coupled with the Essex example, this persuaded him that there must have been an Old English word "snōr" (with a long -O- sound), but "no definite etymology can be suggested". This was a somewhat formal way of admitting that he did not know what it meant. The previous year, Reaney had tentatively linked Snoreham with a similar place-name, Snower Hill, near Reigate in Surrey. However, back in 1923, Ekwall had taken a look at the Norfolk Snorings, and concluded that their Domesday form, Snaringes, reminded him of a Norwegian word, ""snaar", which meant "brushwood".[12] Acting on this speculation, Reaney in 1935 thought that the first syllable of Snoreham denoted "perhaps some form of brushwood", assuming, of course, that there had been a similar word in Old English, which was not mentioned in any text. Evidently, he did not know that Ekwall was about to row back on his brushwood theory, attributing the Snorings to the people of Snear, and discerning a different mystery word, "snōr" and not "snarr" (or some Anglo-Saxon approximation) as the key to decoding Snoreham.
All of this is more than a little complicated. Thinking of the topography of Snoreham, we might be inclined to embrace Reaney's brushwood theory: sloping ground comfortably above sea level might well have been covered with scrub which early Saxon settlers did not forget that they had been obliged to clear. But the embarrassing fact is that Reaney in 1935 had given a "perhaps" explanation based on a theory advanced by Ekwall in 1923 which Ekwall was about to dump in 1936. Thus, in reality, Snoreham remains a mystery name: the most active modern student of Essex place-names, James Kemble, quotes the brushwood explanation, but with a question mark.[13]
Two speculative reflections may contribute to the discussion. First, there is an Icelandic name, Snorri, which can be traced back to the tenth century. While there are obvious reasons for doubting that it is the root element in Snoreham – Essex had notably few contacts with Iceland – it may be just worth keeping the Snorri option on the table. The Norse settlers in Iceland perhaps brought the name with them from Scandinavia, and there was some slight Danish-Norwegian influence in the county. Notably, one of the Domesday landowners in Latchingdon was Ulveva, widow of Phin the Dane, a shadowy figure but a survivor from the time of Edward the Confessor who managed to retain his property after 1066.[14] Could Phin have installed as his tenant a fellow Dane with the previously unrecorded (in Denmark) name of Snorri? Of course, we have to face the inconvenient fact that Professor Ekwall, a distinguished Swedish scholar, did not mention the possibility. The second outside guess would also push credibility to its outer limit, but for the undoubted existence of an unusual place-name nearby. Ulehams Farm stands about one mile (1.6 kms) south-west of Snoreham Hall. The final -s- is a later addition: the place appears twice in Domesday Book as "Uleham". Unlikely though it may seem, Dr Reaney concluded that the first syllable is our modern word "owl", and that the farm was given its name because it was haunted by this enigmatic nocturnal bird.[15] Could Snoreham have a similar inspiration? When calling for food, barn owl chicks make a noise that sounds like human snoring. Perhaps 'snore' was a local term for a barn owl? In the winter months, Saxon peasants started and finished the working day in the dark, and it would have been useful for them to identify local farms by associated sounds to ensure that they were tramping in the right direction. It must be admitted that the theory is unlikely to be true, not least because there is no evidence for any such dialect term. Barn owls were better known, year-round, for screeching: only in the breeding season would their colonies produce insistent chicks. This discussion concludes by making two points. The first is the reminder that Professor Ekwall argued that there was an Old English word "snōr" but, unfortunately, nobody knows what it meant. The second is the one conclusion about which we can be reasonably certain: Snoreham was not an Anglo-Saxon term for "Sleepy Hollow".
The church and the parish There can be little doubt that Snoreham church was built by a landowner to function as a private chapel for the occupants of Snoreham Hall. Whereas a parish church 'belonged' to the parishioners (that is, they had to pay for its upkeep), the church of St Peter at Snoreham was private property. Its territory – for we must set aside for the moment the question of whether Snoreham was an ecclesiastically independent entity – was small and obviously taken out of the surrounding parish of Latchingdon.[16] "Of what age this Parish is, nothing shews above the year 1326, when Sir Henry de Grey of Wilton presented to the Rectory", wrote Morant, who was sure that the church "was undoubtedly built by some of the noble Family of Grey of Wilton, the patrons".[17] He was almost certainly right in his general theory, but he may not have identified the correct founders: there was a priest at Snoreham as early as 1238 (his name was John) and this may have been before the Greys arrived on the scene.[18]
The parish of Latchingdon, which was probably formed about 1200, was a fusion of the Domesday vills of Latchingdon, Lawling and Uleham. Measurements in the Essex volume of Domesday Book were often impressively precise: the ten entries that cover the three vills total 4,230 acres (1,712 hectares), which compares very closely with the area of modern-day Latchingdon-cum-Snoreham, 4,071 acres (1.647.5 hectares).[19] Although Snoreham is not named in Domesday Book, it may have been represented by the holding of Hugh de Montfort, which was stated to be three and a half hides plus 20 acres in area. This would total 440 acres (178 hectares), forty acres larger than the later territory of Snoreham. As noted, the parish of Snoreham was basically rectangular, but in the south-east corner a small segment was snipped out and retained by Latchingdon. This was understandable, since it contained Latchingdon's original parish church and was entered in the tithe award of 1838 as glebe – the property of the rector. The half-dozen fields which seem to have been detached from the Snoreham oblong amount to just about forty acres (16.2 hectares), which would total Hugh de Montfort's holding. The fact that it was also reported to include enough woodland to support one hundred swine also points to Snoreham Hall, which was one of the few local properties to retain a vestige of tree-cover into modern times.
One of William the Conqueror's closest allies and most aggressive supporters, Hugh de Montfort benefited from the Conquest on a large scale, gaining so much property that it is highly unlikely that he ever visited Snoreham. Here, and elsewhere, he succeeded a Saxon landowner called Gudmund (or Guthmund), who had owned a cluster of estates at Kelvedon, Purleigh, Rayne and Sandon, which he probably farmed as a kind of collective agribusiness, moving stock and supplies around his various properties to take advantage of different seasons of the year. Gudmund was the brother of the Abbot of Ely, in the fenland city which was the centre of Saxon resistance to William the Conqueror, led by Hereward, which lasted for several years after the Battle of Hastings. As a result, the fenland monks were not popular with the Normans, and Gudmund would have had no chance of retaining his estates.
In 1086, the recorded population of this holding, here assumed to be Snoreham, (heads of households only) consisted of two villeins, four bordars and four serfs. Villeins were farmers, bordars were cottagers or smallholders, while the serfs were probably in charge of Hugh's plough teams. The first two categories probably lived at The Street where the Snoreham tithe award of 1841 shows a small farm of about twenty acres (eight hectares) that was operated in association with the main property. These six families shared the use of half a plough, an artificial term which means that they owned four oxen among them, making half a plough team. This indicates that they farmed perhaps fifty to sixty acres of land. The serfs were more likely to have lived in hovels at Snoreham Hall, where two ploughs were operated on land directly farmed by Hugh de Montfort, two serfs to a plough being a common Essex ratio.
In addition to sufficient woodland for one hundred swine – a formula that did not necessarily mean that there were any pigs kept at all – the estate had pasture for two hundred sheep, a remarkably high number. Evidence from his other Essex manors suggests that Hugh de Montfort operated as an entrepreneurial grazier, perhaps aiming to produce and export wool to the textile manufactories across the North Sea. His two working ploughs would have cultivated perhaps between 200 and 240 acres (81 to 97 hectares) each year almost certainly on a rotating basis. The other half of Snoreham would have been intensively grazed, with the sheep turned loose on the ploughed land to manure it in winter. It is slightly surprising that the value of the property was reported to have fallen in the twenty years since 1066, from £7 a year to one hundred shillings (£5), but this may have been a mistake by a clerk: inscribing figures in Roman numerals on parchment rolls was a process that was wide open to error.
If Hugh de Montfort's Latchingdon property is correctly identified, we have a tantalising glimpse of Domesday Snoreham.[20] However, it does not tell us why a church was built alongside the Hall, especially when Latchingdon church was only a short stroll across the fields. Since they both controlled extensive property portfolios, we can be reasonably sure that neither Gudmund or Hugh actually resided locally. One possible explanation is that one of its medieval owners installed a farm manager who chose not to worship with the local population. The mysterious fall in the value of this obviously prosperous estate might be explained by the installation (and expense) of a Norman man-at-arms, a soldier whose task was to keep the peasants in order. An alien hated by the local Saxon population, such a military man would have regarded a chapel built of stone as a place of refuge if there was an uprising. Another possible reason for its construction might be that the landlord wished to divert the tithes – ten percent of all produce handed over to the Church – to a priest of his own choosing. Thus Morant was almost certainly correct in concluding that Snoreham church was erected by a landowner, although it may have been built before the Grey of Wilton family acquired the property.
Equally intriguing is the question of the ecclesiastical status of Snoreham: was it a stand-alone parish and, if so, when and how did it acquire its independence? Private chapels were not uncommon in the Middle Ages. Some did develop into parish churches – this is the story of most of the Essex parishes that are called Little Somewhere-or-Other – but many simply faded away. For instance, in the other corner of Latchingdon, there was a chapel at Lawling [or Lalling] Hall. "Near Lalling-hall anciently stood a Chapel, built for the Ease and Conveniency of the Inhabitants of that part of the Parish, which were distant two miles from the mother Church," Morant observed in 1768. "Part of the foundations are still visible in the orchard belonging to Lalling-hall. The Rector of Lalling was obliged to officiate in that Chapel."[21] But Lawling did not become a distinct parish (although, even in Victorian times, it was sometimes used as the name for the whole parish, as Morant's confusion demonstrates).
Was Snoreham fully independent? In the sixteenth century, the place was occasionally given the alias "Lyttel Lachyndon", which suggests some form of subordination to its larger neighbour.[22] Yet Morant pointed to a strange anomaly, one about which he could be regarded as an authority since he was both an antiquarian and a clergyman. Until 1836, Essex formed part of the diocese of London, and its parishes were subject to the supervision of its bishop. But a handful of parishes in the county, places where the monks of Canterbury had owned property, were exempt from episcopal control and directly answerable to the Archbishop. These excepted districts formed a group called a "peculiar", and were locally overseen by a dignitary called the Dean of Bocking. Latchingdon was one of the components of the peculiar, but – so Morant pointed – Snoreham, embedded within the Archbishop of Canterbury's jurisdiction – was subject to inspection by the Bishop of London, which suggests that it was recognised as a fully independent entity.[23] It is all very strange, and perhaps the biggest mystery is: what on earth did the Bishop of London find to investigate at Snoreham?
The first formal description of Snoreham church that I have traced was made in 1650. Having won the Civil War and beheaded Charles I, the Puritans undertook a national survey of the provision of religious services, with the returns arranged alphabetically within each Hundred. However, "Snorham Hamblet" (the information was recorded in the Essex dialect) was listed out of order, under Latchingdon. Nowadays we think of a hamlet as a rural collection of houses that is too small to be regarded as a village, but in the seventeenth century it has a precise meaning as a subordinate community within a wider parish, usually with its own chapel: Brentwood, for instance, was a town in the modern sense, but legally counted as merely a hamlet within South Weald. Snoreham was described as "[a] Donative without any cure of souls". This meant that it was a piece of private property whose owner could appoint whomever he chose, and that there were no parishioners. The estate belonged to Richard Argall, who had appointed "Richard Argall, Clerke", who seems to have been his nephew. Although Richard Argall was a product of Emmanuel College, Cambridge – a radical institution in religion – he made his peace with Charles II after the Restoration and added two more clerical appointments, as Rector of Rivenhall and of Aythorpe Roding. Snoreham had evidently given him good practice at falling down on the job. The 1650 report noted that he pocketed the "proffitts thereof being Nyneteen pounds per An[unm]". There was a "Chappell there, but no publicke service of God there". Snoreham was a sinecure which generated a useful sum in pocket money for its lucky recipient.[24]
Seven years later, the legal status of Snoreham became a matter for legal determination. By the seventeenth century, parishes existed in a dual capacity. Primarily, they were ecclesiastical units, whose inhabitants had an obligation not only to attend worship in the local church but also to contribute to the cost of its maintenance. However, parishes had acquired additional local government functions: parishioners were required to pay rates to support their own poor and to work together to mend the roads within their boundaries. The system was advantageous to Snoreham's tiny population. Since their church was the property of the landlord, it was his responsibility, not theirs, to keep it in good repair. If he failed to do so and it became derelict, they could perform their religious duties in the nearby church of Latchingdon, where they could hardly be refused access. With luck, Snoreham residents might also evade the secular burdens associated with parochial status: they were too few to have any paupers to support, and their only highways skirted their northern and eastern boundaries and could be left to the attentions of Latchingdon. In 1657, the inhabitants of the larger parish lost patience with their tiny enclave, and asked the Essex Quarter Sessions – which doubled as both a court of law and an embryo county council – to make Snoreham pull its weight. Their petition asked that "the Inhabitants of Snoreham neere thereunto adjoyneing may bee compelled to contribute towards the repaire of the parrish Church & Church yard of Latchingdon aforesaid, which they refused to doe". The Latchingdon grievance that Snoreham people were attending their church without helping to meet its running costs was probably a long-running sore, but the issue came to a head through the problem of Elizabeth Westwood and her children. Since she was a widow, somebody had to pay for their upkeep, and Latchingdon felt that she belonged to Snoreham. Thus the case of the Latchingdon people contained an internal contradiction: on the one hand, they implied that Snoreham was not a proper parish and claimed that its inhabitants should help pay to maintain the next-door church but, on the other, they insisted that the smaller unit was fully independent and should look after its own poor. The Essex justices, themselves mostly landowners, examined representatives of both sides and concluded that "the said place called Snoreham is a distinct parrish & not parte or member of the said parrish called Latchingdon". On the basic point, then, the victory went to Snoreham: "This Court doth find noe cause to charge them to the said Rates", i.e. those levied by Latchingdon on its own people. However, there was an unwelcome proviso: "the said place called Snoreham ought & shall provide for their owne poore, & particulerly for the Widdow Westwood and her children".[25] Independence, then, came with its own burdens.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth Westwood continued to cause friction between the two communities. In March 1658, the Quarter Sessions summonsed William Winsor, a butcher in the nearby community of Althorne, "touching a bastard child charged upon him to have been begotten on Elizabeth Westwood of Latchingdon". The surety for his appearance in court, John Francis of Snoreham, was a cooper, who almost certainly carried on his trade in The Street, perhaps next door to the Lion inn.[26] The outcome of the case was not recorded, but it is possible that Winsor managed to clear his name, for Snoreham soon resorted to drastic action to escape the burden of supporting the Westwood family. Their solution brought the wrath of the Quarter Sessions upon themselves. In January 1659, almost two years to the day since the justices had heard the original petition, the court issued a fiery warning to the tiny community. Recalling that "it was formerly Ordered by this Court that the Inhabitants of Snorum should provide for their poore distinct from the parrish of Latchingdon, and perticulerly for the widdow Westwood & her Children", it denounced as unacceptable that "the said Inhabitants have refused soe to doe and sent the said widdow and Children to Latchingdon aforesaid in contempt of the said Order". The absurdity of this strategy is underlined when we appreciate that Snoreham had almost certainly driven the hapless pauper family from one side of The Street to the other, no doubt contributing to local disharmony by wishing Latchingdon joy of them. Not prepared to tolerate this brazen defiance of their authority, the county justices issued a thunderous instruction that "the said Inhabitants of Snorum Doe forthwith receive and provide for the said widdow and Children according to the said Order as they will answeare the contrary att their perrill". Should there be any further refusal to co-operate, "the cheifest Inhabitants of Snorum aforesaid" would be made to answer for the collective disobedience.[27]
It is likely that, soon afterwards, Snoreham people decided that, since they were forced to pay for their own poor, they might as well pool their resources with Latchingdon, for there seems to be no further record of the issue arising. In 1686, the Quarter Sessions investigated another ex-nuptial birth, the mother this time being Elizabeth Bones of "Snoram", who had become pregnant while employed at Snoreham Hall alongside a fellow servant, John Jewry, whom she named as the father. Jewry admitted a sexual relationship, but the case was complicated by the fact that Elizabeth Bones was now living with a man at Purleigh. Presumably somebody in this love tangle paid for the child, and it may be that the ratepayers of the two parishes were spared the cost, since the outcome is not recorded.[28] In 1717, the fields of Snoreham were surveyed, probably in connection with the sale of the property. The resulting map described the place as "a Sinecure lying in the Parish of Latchingdon".[29] Thus, in the longer perspective, it appears that the controversy with Latchingdon of 1657-9 had not resolved Snoreham's 'San Marino' status, and that it remained a notionally distinct enclave that was in practice subsumed within the larger surrounding jurisdiction.
Snoreham and the Strutt family In 1743, the Snoreham estate was purchased by John Strutt, a wealthy Maldon miller and energetic investor in local farm property.[30] By this time, the manor of Snoreham Hall had considerably diverged beyond the boundaries the parish, being described in deeds of 1735 as lying "in the several parishes of Snoreham, Latchingdon, Lawling and Althorne". (Lawling was not a separate parish, but it is some distance away, at the opposite end of Latchingdon.) In 1781, John Strutt's nephew, another John Strutt (the family lacked imagination when naming their sons) owned a Snoreham estate of 677 acres, which was let to a tenant. The additional area is probably explained by the Latchingdon tithe map of 1838, which shows the Strutt family occupying around two hundred acres of marshland alongside the River Crouch beside Bridgemarsh Island. John Strutt the nephew was a progressive farmer whose activities won the approval of the pioneer agricultural expert Arthur Young. With the co-operation of his Snoreham tenant, a Quaker called Jacob Dines, he experimented in sheep breeding to increase the production of mutton. Seven centuries after Hugh de Montfort, Snoreham was once again sheep country.[31]
The Strutt family were much more than simply another name on the roster of forgotten landlords. During the eighteenth century, they steadily rose from merely comfortable prosperity to amass wealth of sizzling proportions. In 1772, John Strutt the nephew began the construction of Terling Place, still one of the stately homes of Essex. From 1774 to 1790, he was MP for Maldon, being succeeded by his son, Joseph Holden Strutt, who held the seat for a further 36 years. Maldon was a freeman borough, which sounds reassuringly democratic but, in practice, meant that a great many voters had to be compensated for the inconvenience of casting their votes or – in plain English – bribed. Only very rich candidates dared aspire to represent the constituency: the Strutt family controlled the town for half a century.
In turbulent times, John Strutt was an arch-reactionary. In 1792, as the radical ideas of the French Revolution threatened to cause instability in Britain, he declared his "firm and determined adherence and attachment to the constitution, both in Church and state".[32] Joseph Holden Strutt shared his father's political opinions, and liked to call himself Colonel Strutt on the basis of his services to law and order as an officer in the local militia. Even the family historian acknowledged that he had "a good deal of the tyrant in him", and quoted the local joke that the letters "IHS" (derived from the Greek symbol for Jesus) carved into the wall of the Terling parish church referred to Joseph Holden Strutt.[33] In the nineteenth century, the family would be promoted to join the aristocracy, under the title of Lord Rayleigh.
It is only fair to say that Snoreham church was almost certainly falling down well before the first John Strutt arrived on the scene. However, his family were shrewd investors and they obviously saw no point in patching up a chapel in which nobody worshipped. Given the family's wealth and their influence, they were not likely to come under pressure to restore it. Hence St Peter's church steadily disintegrated. "It is quite ruinous, there being only some small remains of it near the Hall-yard," Morant reported in 1768. "The inhabitants resort to Lachingdon-Church, as being the nearest, and are there baptized and buried, and contribute to all parochial duties…. There are not above six or seven houses in this parish." However, he emphasised that, despite its moribund state, Snoreham was "still a Rectory presentative": the advowson (the right to appoint the incumbent) went with the property, and the Strutts and the Rayleighs used the patronage to reward favoured clergy.[34]
In 1812, a new element was injected into the Snoreham story by John Nichols, who was a printer and prolific editor and writer. In 1812, he began the publication of his Literary Anecdotes, snapshots of eighteenth-century authors that proved very popular with the reading public. One of his subjects was the Reverend Paul Wright, a theological writer, who had been vicar of the Essex village of "Ukeley" (Ugley, which Wright preferred to call Oakley). Wright was also also – for thirty-three years and of course, purely nominally – Rector of Snoreham. Nichols explained that there was a "remarkable peculiarity" about Snoreham: "it contains only a single farm-house; and there is no church belonging to the parish; but, once a year, service is performed under a tree".[35]
Eighteenth-century England was generally relaxed about the corruption inherent in both its system of government and its official religion: there were so many winning tickets in the lottery that a coalition of eager beneficiaries kept the ramshackle system afloat. However, attitudes began to change in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Demands for change in the political system were frequently angry, but critics of the abuses in the Anglican Church preferred to rely upon scornful contempt. The picture of a clergyman reading an annual service under a tree was absurd, but it could be improved upon. If there was a service, then surely it must include a homily directed at the non-existent congregation. In 1835, Thomas Wright's History of Essex baldly stated that "a sermon is, or used to be, preached annually under a tree". Wright's Directory of Essex in 1848 repeated the joke. Snoreham "has neither church nor parsonage; the former … went to decay some centuries ago, though some remains of it may yet be traced near the Hall, where a sermon used to be preached annually, under a tree." D.W. Coller, the Chelmsford journalist and historian, filled out the legend in a little more detail in his 1861 reference to Snoreham: "for a long time the only sign of its ecclesiastical independence was a sermon preached once a year under a tree near the spot where the pulpit and altar once stood".[36] In fact, we may be reasonably sure that no reverend gentleman ever mounted an imaginary pulpit to harangue the sheep. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer makes no provision for sermons in its morning and evening services: a clergyman could go through the motions of religious observance without needing to preach.[37] In any case, these nineteenth-century references all imply that any such practice had long since died out. Nonetheless, the tradition was not entirely unfounded. William Myall, the curate at Latchingdon (the incumbent was a particularly scandalous absentee) kept a parish diary, in which he noted in 1849 the induction of John Faithful Grover Fortescue as Rector of Snoreham, in the churchyard on the site of the vanished church.[38] The ceremony, which was supposed to be a public event, was evidently carried out in total secrecy, for no newspaper reported the event – and we may be sure that journalists would have enjoyed highlighting the farcical story. Even the Church of England was becoming embarrassed by the anomaly of Snoreham. The Reverend John Faithful Grover Fortescue would be the last Rector.
Snoreham's invisible clergy[39] Snoreham was not one of the big prizes in the Anglican lottery. When the tithes were commuted into cash payments in 1841, the total income was reckoned to be £117 a year.[40] Rectors of Snoreham were spared most of the deductions incurred by clergy in other parishes. Incumbents were required to maintain the fabric of the chancel, a burden that ceased to apply when St Peter's church fell down. Absentees had to employ a curate to take services and look after parishioners, another challenge that did not arise. Nor was there any call to contribute to the costs of a village school. Taxes were light, collection costs probably incidental: Snoreham was worth a clear hundred pounds a year. Yet Owen Chadwick, historian of the Victorian Church, reckoned that any 'living' (as ecclesiastical appointments were termed) worth less than £200 annually was regarded as inadequate. Anglican clergy usually married and tended to produce large families. With sons to educate and daughters to marry off, they had an eye to the loaves and the fishes. The scramble for parishes that paid well was unedifying but understandable. Curates, on the other hand, were expected to survive on starvation wages.[41]
It is possible to compile a tolerably complete list of Rectors from the late sixteenth century, although in most cases they are little more than names. A handful stand out as achievers in some sphere, even if only that of personal advancement. We have a glimpse of one of them as far back as the fifteenth century. In 1428, John Druell, who also appears as Drewell, Drewett and Drowell, was elected to a Fellowship at King's Hall, Cambridge, a foundation that Henry VIII absorbed into Trinity College. Soon after he became Rector of Snoreham, the first step in a clerical career in which he leapt from benefice to benefice, retaining some, exchanging others. He eventually rose to become Treasurer of St Paul's Cathedral in 1458, although it is not clear whether he had kept Snoreham as he climbed. If he has a claim to be remembered, it is as the founder of two Fellowships at Queens' College Cambridge, which represented some atonement for unearned income.
The most noteworthy of Snoreham's absentee clergy has only recently been identified. Born at Thaxted in 1577, Samuel Purchas was ordained after graduating from Cambridge. He began his career as a curate at nearby Purleigh, where he married, and perhaps it was then that he first cast a covetous eye on Snoreham. In 1604, he was appointed Vicar of Eastwood, now part of Southend-on-Sea. It was probably there that Purchas fell under the spell of the mariners of Leigh, who told fascinating yarns about voyages to strange lands inhabited by even stranger people. In 1613, he published Purchas His Pilgrimage, whose scope was explained in its subtitle: Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered from the Creation unto this Present. This was followed by Purchas His Pilgrim (he was certainly determined to ensure that his readers did not forget the author's name), which was a History of Man, with due emphasis upon Wonders, Vanities and the need for regeneration. Many regard his major work as the publication based on the manuscripts of a pioneer geographer, Richard Hakluyt, editor-stamped as Purchas His Pilgrimes, in the form of a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land-Trauells [travels] by Englishmen and Others. Although it seems unlikely that he ever left England himself, Purchas became a member of the Virginia Company, the London-based organisation that controlled the first successful English colony in America. Established in 1607, Virginia had depended for its existence on a fragile relationship with the local indigenous population. In 1622, the local Powhatan peoples attempted to destroy the increasingly large and ominously permanent settler population. Purchas wrote a defence of the colonists' right to settle across the Atlantic, a viewpoint that would not now be regarded as politically correct. The original Dictionary of National Biography, in 1896, was severely critical of Purchas as a scholar: "he was very far indeed from a faithful editor or a judicious compiler, and … took little pains to arrive at an accurate knowledge of facts". Nonetheless, he may be regarded as the pioneer of English travel writing and honoured – if we take a relaxed attitude to accuracy and credulity – as one of the founders of the academic study of Geography. His tomes were among the bulkiest that had yet been printed in England, and the cost of their production fell largely on the compiler himself. His appointment as Rector of Snoreham in 1616 was probably intended to provide him with the extra cash needed for publication but, since he is believed to have died in a debtors' prison ten years later, it was presumably insufficient.[42] There was still a church standing at Snoreham in the early seventeenth century. Did Purchas mount a horse once a year and ride from Eastwood to Fambridge ferry in order to discharge the minimum responsibilities in his notional appointment? If so, he has a claim to be the first person associated with Snoreham to whom we can put a face.
Samuel Purchas (probably pronounced 'Purkiss') was Rector of Snoreham from 1616 to 1626. A pioneer travel writer and distant godfather of Geography as an academic study, he was the Vicar of Eastwood (now part of the City of Southend-on-Sea). It is likely that he conducted an annual service at St Peter's church (which was still standing in his time), which would make him the first person associated with Snoreham to whom we can put a face.
It is likely that Snoreham was also used as a form of literary support grant for another writer, Paul Wright, whose entry in the Literary Anecdotes of John Nichols sparked the sermon-under-a-tree canard. Wright specialised in rewriting and expounding sacred texts for a popular but devout audience. His biography of Jesus, which contained "an authentic and full account of all the wonderful transactions, sufferings and death of our glorious redeemer", received the unwelcome compliment of being pirated several times in America, where publishers ignored British copyright. An even more ambitious project was Wright's New and Complete British Family Bible, which came with "most valuable notes and annotations, theological, critical, moral, divine, historical, geographical, systematical, biographical, practical, admonitory, chronological, and explanatory". Obscure passages were illuminated, seeming contradictions reconciled, errors in translations corrected and objections from infidels confuted. Even the weights and measures used in the Bible were explained, and the text was liberally illustrated by the religious art of Raphael , Rubens and van Dyk. Wright's version of the Word of God aimed "to enlighten the understanding, purify the heart, and promote the cause of virtue and piety", thereby guaranteeing the happiness of Christian families in this world and their salvation in the next. In a 'beware of inferior imitations' warning, he described his work as "the result of more than forty years study and experience (and not a hasty production, undertaken to serve pecuniary purposes)" which he had "executed in a manner far superior to other publications of the sort". Although he lived at Ugley, in north-west Essex, Paul Wright enjoyed an additional income from Snoreham for seventeen years. In terms of sheer hard grind, there were many less deserving beneficiaries.
One Rector may even have lived at Snoreham: John Brockden, a Lancashire man appointed in 1722, is recorded as having died there twenty years later. Some others at least double- jobbed in the same area: Hugh Glover in the fifteen-seventies was Rector of St Laurence while Christopher Kynge around 1600 also served at Creeksea and Robert Paley on the eve of the Civil War was Vicar of next-door Althorne. No doubt these appointments belonged to the days when the incumbent was still expected to provide an annual service. However, by the eighteenth century, the connection between Snoreham and its Rectors was becoming steadily more tenuous. Richard Rous, who succeeded Wright in 1785 and enjoyed the income for twenty-five years, was a clergyman in Devon, and there is no clue to suggest why he merited the patronage of the Strutt family. However, there is no mystery about the choice of Thomas Foote Gower, who was appointed in 1810 and held the post for thirty-nine years. He was the nephew of John Strutt, the builder of Terling Place. Gower lived at Great Totham, where he was curate to an absentee vicar who was eventually declared to be insane, opening the way for Gower's belated promotion in 1835. He stitched together a basic income by also acting as curate at Langford and Little Braxted, small and undemanding parishes, which – with that handy hundred pounds a year from Snoreham – gave him an annual income of £240, sufficient to support a comfortable bachelor life.[43]
The last incumbent, John Faithful Grover Fortescue, inducted in the abandoned churchyard in 1849, led something of a directionless life, seemingly making it hard to explain why John James Strutt, the first Lord Rayleigh, thought he deserved the appointment. An aristocratic surname and a profusion of forenames suggest privilege and private means, with at least enough financial independence to make Fortescue indifferent to a formal career in the Church. In 1812, soon after graduating from Cambridge, he became the rector of a town church in Colchester, a post that he resigned six years later. For a time in the late eighteen-twenties, he acted as curate at Brentwood but, by 1841, he was living a gentleman's life at Writtle. More country gentleman than clergyman, he acted as a steward in the county's Grand Conservative Festival that year, and was appointed a Justice of the Peace – although he seems only rarely to have sat on the Bench. In 1860, he was living in Upper Belgrave Place, a smart address In London's West End, but he travelled to Chelmsford two years later to attend a County Meeting of worthy citizens who adopted an address of condolence to Queen Victoria on the death of her husband, Prince Albert.[44]
Why, then, did Lord Rayleigh bestow the Rectory of Snoreham upon the Reverend Mr Fortescue? The son of the tyrannical Joseph Holden Strutt, John James Strutt had endured a predictably stormy relationship with his father. Indeed, he would be nearly fifty before the old man's death finally gave him personal and financial independence. Not surprisingly, until his mid-twenties, John James led a wild and aimless life. Then, in 1822, he experienced a seismic personal crisis which left him "convinced that Christianity was the most important thing in the world". Indeed, the change in his behaviour was so extreme that he became obsessed with organisations such as Bible societies, and his descendants believed that "he came very near to what is commonly called religious mania". It was also remembered that "[a] certain Mrs Fortescue, wife of a neighbouring clergyman, brought about his conversion", exercising the decisive influence that made him turn his back on the pleasures such as fox-hunting and card-playing that had been the staple of his pre-awakening days.[45] This spiritual crisis occurred during J.F.G. Fortescue's decade-long sabbatical between his Colchester and Brentwood appointments, but it is very likely that he was helping out when more established clergy needed someone to step in and take a service, acting as a kind of ecclesiastical equivalent of a supply teacher. When Snoreham fell vacant in 1849, Lord Rayleigh, at long last master of his own destiny, was able to thank the woman who had turned his life around by rewarding her husband with a profitable sinecure. It can at least be said in Fortescue's defence that he took the trouble to attend the dedication of Latchingdon's new church in 1856, thereby symbolically passing the Snoreham baton on to a reformed dispensation.[46]
The last years of Snoreham, 1849-67 In the middle of the nineteenth century, Church affairs in Latchingdon were in a dismal condition. The tower of the parish church had fallen down more than forty years earlier, and the bricks were removed to build a wall at a local farm. The stump "was covered with an ugly bandage of weather boarding". Latchingdon and Snoreham, joked the local historian D.W. Coller, "had only half a church between them".[47] The inhabitants of the two parishes also suffered "considerable inconvenience" as a result of "the complete decay of the Old Snoreham Church, and the consequent over-filling of the church at Latchingdon", which was too small to accommodate a combined population of over five hundred people – although this was hardly a new problem. The clusters of houses along The Street had coalesced into something resembling a village, but the church was inconveniently distant "from the bulk of the population".[48] In fact, there were clear signs that the Anglican Church was not only failing the people of Latchingdon and Snoreham, but losing them too. The desperate lives of farm-workers made Essex fertile ground for religious revivals, and it was noteworthy that Latchingdon had a small independent chapel – built, in fact, on the Snoreham side of The Street. Poor as they were, local people sought to secure salvation by their own efforts.
The solution should have been obvious. An energetic Rector would take in hand the restoration of the church, providing additional seating if required for all of his flock. But here we come face to face with one of the grossest scandals in the mid-Victorian Anglican Church, which had its roots in the very different world of half a century earlier. In 1783, John Moore had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, on the recommendation of his fellow prelates who saw him as a reliable choice.[49] Detractors sneered that Moore was the son of a butcher from Gloucester and that his rise in the Church was hardly disinterested. Indeed, it soon became apparent that this safe pair of hands was determined to line the pockets of his relatives. As the Dictionary of National Biography mildly remarked in 1894: "He appears to have dispensed his patronage with somewhat more than due regard to the interests of his own family."
The Primate's son, Robert, graduated from Oxford in 1802 and immediately embarked on a career in the Church. "He had an immense advantage at starting, in the fact that his father was Archbishop of Canterbury," a London newspaper remarked at the younger Moore's death in 1865, adding, with cold sarcasm that his parent was "evidently deeply sensible of his duty to provide for those of his own household." Within an astonishingly short period, this favoured young man had received no fewer than four valuable ecclesiastical appointments, which gave him a combined income of over £3,000 a year: one of them was Latchingdon, where Canterbury Cathedral had owned land as far back as the time of Domesday Book. Until 1858, the Church of England was in charge of the administration of Wills, through a body called the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. Its Registrarship was a particularly attractive post, since all the work was done by a deputy. Anxious that "no other clergyman in the diocese might be tempted to abandon his clerical duties by the mental dissipation attached to an office where there is a high salary and no duties", the Archbishop appointed his own son. When the responsibility for the administration of estates was transferred to a secular agency, Robert Moore demanded compensation for the abolition of his snug berth, and secured a government pension of almost £8,000 a year. He also became a prebendary of Canterbury Cathedral, drawing another generous salary with a house in the Close thrown in. Although he had no work to do in the Prerogative Court, Robert Moore decided to settle in the Kentish parish that formed part of his quiverful of patronage, to enjoy a comfortable rural life just thirty miles from the cathedral. At his death in 1865, a hostile journalist calculated that he had netted three-quarters of a million pounds from his clerical appointments. He left an estate of £250,000, of which £800 went to charities.[50]
It was hardly surprising that Robert Moore did not wish to live in Latchingdon. While the parish of Snoreham was positively Alpine by the standards of Dengie Hundred, Latchingdon contained a swathe of marshland – fertile ground that helps to explains the lavish tithe income – which was notorious breeding ground for the ague, a form of malaria that made the effete clergy of Georgian England avoid coastal Essex. The unreformed Church of England operated a two-tier career system. Those who possessed privilege and influence cornered the most attractive appointments and pocketed the income from them. To discharge their duties, they hired curates at rock-bottom wages, drawing upon an endless supply of serious young men who had struggled their way through Cambridge (the source of most Essex clergy) or Oxford with little money and few comforts. Where ague was concerned, curates were expendable. Although Robert Moore did eventually resign Latchingdon in 1859, it is likely that it never occurred to him that he owed very much to the parishioners whose labours helped maintain his astronomically plutocratic existence. By 1848, he was contributing £20 a year to the salary of a village schoolmistress, which he probably regarded as a generous gesture. God (or his father) had picked him out for the good things of this world, and his only responsibility was to enjoy them. it is unlikely that the notion of rebuilding Latchingdon church ever crossed his mind.
However, entrusting the Anglican cause at parish level in the hands of poverty-stricken curates did nothing to provide the energy and the leadership needed to turn around moribund structures. Curates tended to be mobile, moving on after a few years either to seek better-paid employment or because they had clashed with their parishioners. Some absentee incumbents probably sought to ring the changes in case the underpaid deputy built up sympathy and support among the flock. In every respect, curates were poorly qualified to launch major projects. Indeed, most of them lacked the incentive, the confidence or the social position to undertake the fund-raising or the mobilisation of support that would be involved in the erection of a new church. Hence Latchingdon was unusually fortunate in the eighteen-fifties to acquire an energetic young clergyman who was determined to make his mark.
Richard Merewether had started his academic career at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1835. However, two years later, he switched to the rival university, almost certainly drawn by the Oxford Movement, the High Church religious revival that had erupted in 1833. High Church clergy were committed to working in unfashionable parishes where they often introduced ritual into the services, bringing colour into the harsh lives of working people. Indeed, their unfamiliar practices and their notorious independence of thinking made them unattractive candidates for more traditional and comfortable appointments, for landed gentry feared them as a disruptive influence in their village churches. When Richard Merewether came to Latchingdon in 1851, he had held four curacies in the nine years.
A former pupil of Eton who came from a clerical family, Merewether had a background that usually swung open the doors of priestly privilege, all the more so because his uncle held the prestigious office of Dean of Hereford Cathedral, where he had arranged for young Merewether to be ordained in 1842. Unfortunately, Dean John Merewether had become a controversial figure , leaving Richard burdened with a surname that cautious power-brokers within the Church would have regarded as synonymous with Trouble. In 1847, the Dean had attempted to block the appointment of an Oxford don, Dr Hampden, who had been nominated by the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, to be the new Bishop of Hereford. Hampden held advanced theological opinions which had caused controversy within the University, and Merewether regarded him as heretic. With skilful public relations, the Dean might have dramatised a sensitive issue by portraying himself as a courageous champion of the truth, prepared to risk martyrdom by defying the government's instructions. His concerns about Dr Hampden were certainly widely shared within the Church, even at the highest levels. Unfortunately, Merewether was already an embittered man, and his wordy protests succeeded in conveying the impression that he felt aggrieved that he had not been appointed himself. In December 1847, he addressed a long and argumentative letter of defiance to the Prime Minister, in which he refused to accept the new bishop. Russell responded with a memorably withering put-down, a single sentence reply that curtly instructed the Dean to take part in the farcical formal election in which the cathedral clergy were required to elect their diocesan but allowed only one candidate. Although some of the canons absented themselves from the ceremony, only one of them joined Merewether in his lonely opposition. In a last-ditch gesture, the Dean refused to affix his official seal to the announcement of election, claiming that this invalidated the document. Bishop Hampden was enthroned anyway.[51]
By making the tactical mistake of entangling his personal grievances in his principled protests, the Dean of Hereford had made himself a national laughing stock. When his nephew came to Latchingdon four years later, he needed to prove that his Merewether genes did not prevent him from working with people to achieve a positive end.[52] It was unusual for so humble a being as a curate to undertake the building of a new church, but Latchingdon was an unusual case and the young clergyman had a particular motive to prove himself. Tact was called for in handling the absentee Rector, especially to avoid anyone asking what the Reverend Robert Moore had done with his Latchingdon cash throughout the past fifty years. Fortunately, Moore backed the project: he donated new communion plate and a bell to summon the parishioners to worship, and even paid the fees that Anglican bureaucracy charged anyone who was public-spirited enough to erect a new church. Since a key part of the project was that the two parishes of Latchingdon and Snoreham were "for ecclesiastical purposes, to be merged into one district", it was fortunate that Lord Rayleigh, the patron of Snoreham, was a religious enthusiast. Lord Rayleigh not only recognised that the anomaly must come to an end but agreed to co-sign the contract for the new joint church. By the summer of 1855, the "exertions" of the Reverend Mr Merewether had collected almost £1,500 for the building project, "but the sum of £200 being still required, it was determined to have recourse to a bazaar for making up the deficiency". Lady Rayleigh mobilised " the ladies of the neighbourhood", a schoolroom at Maldon was lavishly decorated for the event and the band of the West Essex Militia turned out to serenade the customers. The stalls groaned under "a large and beautiful collection of articles" for sale. "The company was numerous and influential, and many purchased very freely". Special transport to Maldon was provided for the parishioners to pressurise them into spending their pennies on trinkets.
A site that was conveniently central for the two parishes was selected, beside the road junction at the east end of The Street. The architect, J.P. St Aubyn, who mostly worked in Devon and Cornwall, sportingly agreed to reduce his fees if the fund-raising campaign fell short of its target. "Standard St Aubyn small church model" is the verdict on his Latchingdon project of Dr Newberry, the authority on his work. "The style of architecture is of the late 13th century," was the more enthusiastic comment of an admiring local journalist. The project was completed by November 1856, when the Bishop of Rochester dedicated the "new church at Latchingdon, intended also to accommodate the inhabitants of the adjoining parish of Snoreham". Snoreham was in the process of being removed from the map.[53] Three years later, Merewether secured his reward when he became Vicar of Tenterden in Kent. There he continued his energetic ministrations, for instance helping to establish a refuge for fallen women.
As a matter of courtesy, the formal abolition of the parish of Snoreham had to await the passing of its last nominal Rector, the Reverend Mr Fortescue. This delay enabled it to make one last appearance in British history as an independent entity. In 1862, a national collection raised cash for a memorial to Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert. Latchingdon contributed £2, ten shillings and sixpence (£2.52p), but fourteen inhabitants of Snoreham insisted on organising their own whip-round, which raised fourteen shillings and threepence. Thus Snoreham's last communal act was to collect 71 pence towards the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens.[54]
Fortescue died in November 1865. A year later, a local newspaper reported that "proceedings are in progress to unite the livings of Latchingdon and Snoreham" with arrangements being made by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Rayleigh, the respective patrons of the two parishes.[55] But why was so simple and obvious a solution moving forward so slowly? The problem was that Lord Rayleigh was having second thoughts about the use of the income from the parish of Snoreham, and its final extinguishment became the subject of a squalid squabble over cash. In 1859, the absentee Rector of Latchingdon, the Reverend Mr Moore, had finally been persuaded that fifty-five years of drawing an income for doing nothing was long enough. The Reverend Richard Formby, a clergyman from Lancashire, was appointed as his successor, and actually settled in the parish as a working Rector. Rather meanly, the opportunity was taken of his appointment to reduce its income by £200 a year. Since the eighteen-thirties, more flexible spirits within the Church of England had sought to fend off root-and-branch restructuring of its tottering organisation through a series of sticking-plaster reforms. The income of the Vicar of Kings Langley in Hertfordshire was "very inadequate", so £200 a year was diverted from Latchingdon to ease his finances: Queen Victoria briefly interrupted her summer holiday at Balmoral to approve this exercise of robbing Peter to pay Paul.[56] Nonetheless, the new Rector was able to enjoy (no doubt in every sense of the word) £700 a year in exchange for taking care of the souls of 550 parishioners.[57] Lord Rayleigh no doubt wished Formby well, but he did not see why so comfortable a billet should receive a £100 pay rise by absorbing Snoreham and its tithe revenue. The Rector of Latchingdon was already ministering to the people on the Snoreham side of The Street, so the formal merger would not add to his workload. Lord Rayleigh was troubled by the comparison with his own village, Terling, where the vicar was paid less than £300 annually to serve in a parish of nine hundred people. It is tempting to suggest that, if Terling was "at present ill-endowed, and that it is desirable that some additional provision should be made for the cure of souls within the said parish", the obvious answer was that Lord Rayleigh should find the money. Indeed, the argument might go further. The vicar was poorly paid because Terling was one of many villages where, in the sixteenth century, a slice of the tithes had been diverted away from their original religious purpose and handed over to a local landowner, who was styled the lay impropriator. it will come as no surprise to learn that the lay impropriator in Terling was – Lord Rayleigh.[58]
Shortly before the death of the Reverend Mr Fortescue, Snoreham's last Rector, Lord Rayleigh had addressed a very serious letter to his eldest son, giving him advice on how to manage the family estate when the time came for him to inherit. "There are two pieces of Church preferment, Terling and Little Baddow," and these must be treated as a great responsibility. It was clear that he did not intend to make any further appointment to Snoreham, and there were also indications that the Bishop of Rochester would block any attempt to install a new sinecurist. However, Lord Rayleigh cast covetous eyes on Snoreham's revenue, and the delay in quietly terminating the anomaly after Fortescue's death suggests that there was a dispute over the spoils. Eventually, on 26 February 1867, the Privy Council processed a thousand-word document, peppered with legal terms such as "whereas", which transferred all of the Snoreham loaves and some of its fishes to Terling. Ex officio, Rectors of Snoreham had enjoyed the use of twenty acres of glebe, farmland that they could either cultivate themselves or – more practically – rent to a local farmer.[59] This miniature land-bank was now handed over to the Vicars of Terling. In addition, out of the £111 of annual tithe income, £44 was diverted as well. Why £44? We can only assume that Most Reverend Archbishop and the Noble Lord had bargained like two hucksters in a market place before finally settling on this arbitrary sum.
The proposal came before Queen Victoria at a meeting of the Privy Council at Windsor Castle. Ministers would attend such meetings if they were "Right Honourable" and had some business to transact, a duty that most politicians resented as an unwelcome intrusion in their busy schedules. (it did not occur to Her Majesty to make their lives easier by coming to London to hold Councils.) Throughout that winter, Britain was in the grip of a prolonged political crisis over parliamentary reform, with Disraeli and Gladstone fencing in the House of Commons over who was to be given the right to vote. Worse still, Disraeli's own party was divided over the issue and, on 26 February, there would be a tense meeting of the Cabinet, with three ministers on the verge of resigning. It is unlikely that anyone was interested in the division of the spoils of Snoreham and, in any case, Queen Victoria insisted on holding meetings of the Privy Council standing up, since this discouraged discussion. A clerk read out the list of measures on the agenda, Her Majesty said "Approved" in her clear, bell-like voice, the meeting terminated and – if they were lucky – the visiting politicians were given lunch before they caught a train back to the political cauldron of Westminster.[60] The dispute over resources was a squalid end to the centuries-long Snoreham saga. However, it was an appropriate finale too, since for over a century, Snoreham had meant little more than easy money.
It should be noted that the union of Latchingdon and Snoreham was a purely ecclesiastical merger. Alterations to parishes as local government units were made by a formal notice published in the government's official newspaper, the London Gazette.[61] No such announcement appeared for the union of Latchingdon and Snoreham. As White's Directory of Essex had put it in 1848, "they are united for the support of the poor and the roads", and officialdom evidently decided that it was best to leave matters as they were rather than risk raising questions about the curious inter-relationship of these two tiny communities. The Reverend Mr Formby duly entered the union of the two parishes in the Latchingdon parish diary as the memorable event of 1867.[62] Two hundred and ten years after the Essex magistrates had sought to clarify its ambiguous status, Snoreham finally ceased to be an independent parish.
Snoreham remembered and forgotten Despite its formal extinction, Snoreham still occasionally surfaced. In 1878, a company was formed to build a railway from Maldon to Southend. Such schemes were common, and Victorian Essex was criss-crossed with imaginary lines. In seeking legal powers to lay track through intervening parishes, the directors included Snoreham in their list, in case it retained some notional existence. Presumably it was soon realised that few people in Maldon would travel to Southend, and hardly anybody at all would wish to make the journey in the other direction. The line was never built, and it would hardly have jolted Snoreham from its rustic seclusion if it had been.[63] In 1923, the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments noted that the site of St Peter's church was "marked by a rectangular area in a meadow" beside Snoreham Hall.[64] Ten years later, a number of Australian newspapers carried a paragraph about the absurd place-names of Essex, a story that had originated in the London Daily Mail. The item relied upon the usual staples of this tired joke – Messing, Mucking and Ugley – but the jest also called upon the wholly invented "Snoreham-in-Ruins". Reminding New Zealanders of their own embarrassment, Poverty Bay, a Wellington newspaper pointed out that "the delightful old-world village of Maggots End in England has continued to hold its own for centuries despite the unfortunate suggestion that its name arouses". Maggots End was wholly fictitious, but the Kiwi journalist was warming to the theme. "Snoreham-in-Ruins is, if anything, even more destructive as a name. Yet Snoreham still looks the world in the face. One day perhaps a Prime Minister of England may make the place famous by holding a conference there."[65] Of course, Snoreham had long since ceased to look anybody in the face, and its story had degenerated far beyond ruins. Three years later, the story surfaced again, this time in the New York Times, which fell notably short of its fabled commitment to accurate reporting. The new version was a tale of American tourists exploring Essex by automobile. They drove from Maggots End to Snoreham, whence "another road branched off to the still more somnolent Snoreham-in-Ruins, from which even the ruins have vanished. Here, as a girl, Anne Boleyn used to ride. There was a church once, but nothing remains except the foundations, which are hidden by grass."[66] The reference to Anne Boleyn was borrowed from the folklore of Rochford, some miles to the south. Snoreham was in danger of entering the realms of fantasy.
The combined parish – by 1931, home to just 419 people – was burdened with an unusually complicated official name, longer indeed than that of Britain's most cumbrously named city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1954, it annexed a marshland neighbour that had an even smaller population. Something had to give on the nomenclature front, and Latchingdon with Snoreham became "the united parish of Latchingdon with Mundon". This was another step in the disappearance of Snoreham from the map, although it lingered faintly in the collective memory.[67] The twenty-first century has opted for simplicity, but in 2025 the parish council website helpfully explains: "The parish was once called Latchingdon-cum-Snoreham, and Snoreham Hall still exists to the south of Latchingdon."[68]
When the mapmakers John Chapman and Peter André published the first detailed atlas of Essex in 1777, it was necessary to confront the problem of two place-names jostling within the same locality. They decided that "Lachingdon" (as they spelt it) must be the district to the south, around the old parish church. This allowed them to use Snoreham as the name for the developing village along The Street.[69] Had the village name Snoreham stuck, there might today be a minor tourist trade, with visitors stopping off to be photographed beside a village sign, but it did not take root. In the stagecoach era, The Street's most widely known feature was the village inn, and perhaps alliteration made that hostelry the Latchingdon Lion. Maybe the inhabitants did not care to be the victims of the mapmakers' designation: from what we know about Essex peasant humour, subtlety was not a major element. As Snoreham fades into distant memory, the historian cannot claim that it was ever the scene of great events, nor was it the birthplace of famous people. Yet it was associated with interesting and sometimes even eccentric personalities, and there is something intriguing about its long if fragile survival.
NOTE Snoreham Hall is a working farm. There is no public right of access to the site of St Peter's church.
ENDNOTES For a full list of material relating to Essex on this website, see: https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/411-essex-history-on-www-gedmartin-net
[1] Reported areas tend to vary, not least because Latchingdon included a stretch of marshland alongside the river Crouch. Victoria County History of Essex, ii, 346-7 reported Latchingdon at 3,672 acres (1,486 hectares) and Snoreham at 399 acres (161.5 hectares). The later parish of Latchingdon(-cum-Snoreham) incorporated the Domesday vills of Latchingdon, Lawling and Uleham. Remarkably, the combined area of 9 entries reported in 1086 was 4,110 acres. This is a reminder that Domesday Book measurements were often more accurate than has been recognised.
[Additional Note, March 2025: Was there ever a Snoreham village? In 1968, the historian and archaeologist M.W. Beresford included Snoreham in his exhaustive list of the lost villages of England. His work is discussed on a University of Hull website, which notes that there are "no visible earthworks in the area of Snoreham Hall Farm", as would be expected from an abandoned village. The website concludes that since there is "no clear evidence of a substantial settlement here", the site at Snoreham Hall should be provisionally "classed as a deserted hamlet". In 2021, an evaluation was carried out at a site in Burnham Road, Latchingdon (but within the former parish of Snoreham) under the auspices of the Colchester Archaeological Trust, by a team led by Dr Elliott Hicks (CAT Report 1633). Trial excavations discovered 1.785 kg of pottery sherds, mostly dateable to the 11th to 14th centuries, and possibly buried in rubbish pits. The report suggested that this activity was connected to "a deserted medieval village" at Snoreham Hall, 500 metres to the south-west. The link with the farm seems plausible, but the reference to a village is problematic. Much depends on the definition of the term. Until c. 1800, it was common for farm labourers and servants to live in or close to the farmhouse: we have the names of two employees resident at Snoreham Hall in 1686. However, in the absence of any archaeological evidence, we have to conclude that there was never a village at Snoreham Hall, certainly not in the romantic sense of a maypole on the green by a duckpond. Nobody before Professor Beresford in 1968 had classified Snoreham as a deserted village: several earlier sources mention the church but none refer to any accompanying population. It was not unusual in Essex for a church to be built where there was no settlement, and this is especially true of smaller parishes. The Snoreham entry on the University of Hull's 'Beresford's Lost Villages' website is at: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/2554fbb754214f02af57209244ce1545/. The CAT report is at:
http://pixel.essex.ac.uk/cat/reports/CAT-report-1633.pdf.]
[2] "The inn commonly called 'Latchingdon Lion', is in Snoreham", said White's Directory of Essex (Sheffield 1848), 528. Although Latchingdon and Snoreham hardly offered a sizeable customer base, the Lion was strategically located on a stagecoach route between Chelmsford and Burnham-on-Crouch. James Redgwell, born locally in 1836, recalled horses being changed at the inn shortly before his death at the age of 101. Warwick (Queensland) Daily News, 25 May 1937, via National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive, Trove.
[3] Essex Standard, 23 June 1837.
[4] Victoria County History of Essex, ii, 346-7. Snoreham's population was reported separately between 1831 and 1871, but on the first two occasions part of Latchingdon parish was wrongly included.
[5] Wills preserved at Chelmsford (Essex Archives Online) show that that, in the eighteenth century, there was a smithy in Snoreham, probably on the south side of The Street near the inn where it might service passing traffic: blacksmiths are mentioned in 1705 and 1784, a wheelwright in 1749. (The blacksmith and wheelwright were also noted on an estate map of 1717.) Passing trade probably also explains a shopkeeper in 1781. White's Directory of Essex (529) reported more economic activity in 1848. John Taylor's occupation as coach builder seems implausible in such a small place, but he was probably married to Elizabeth Taylor, who ran the Red Lion. There were two shopkeepers, two butchers and, in addition to the inn, Snoreham parish could also boast two beerhouses. These businesses must have depended upon custom from a wider area.
[6] P.H. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex (Cambridge, 1935), 217.
[7] Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 189-90, 91."The absence of any clear of an inflexional syllable is noteworthy", Reaney ponderously remarked of nearby Mundon, as he was forced to abandon the plausible derivation "Munda's hill" in favour of the nonsensical "mound hill" (220).
[8] E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (4th ed., Oxford, 1960, cf. 1st ed., 1936), 429. It should be pointed out that earlier examples do not necessarily remove doubts about place-name explanations. The Essex village of Boreham, about 13 miles (21 kms) from Snoreham, was recorded in 1086, but early forms are confusing. It may mean "boar enclosure" but it could also be "the form of someone called Boar": the Anglo-Saxons had a rough attitude to nicknames. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 238.
[9] P. Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex … (2 vols, London, 1768), i, 356n.
[10] I owe the illusion of erudition here to Bosworth Toller's online Anglo-Saxon dictionary, https://bosworthtoller.com/28249, and I gratefully acknowledge my debt.
[11] Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 208-9.
[12] Ekwall's earlier theory was outlined by J.E.B. Gover, et al., The Place-Names of Surrey (Cambridge, 1934), 284. For the Reaney and Ekwall references, see above.
[13] J. Kemble, Essex Place-Names … (London, 2007), 81. Snoreham was one of the few places in Dengie Hundred with woodland in 1086. Place-name evidence suggests that about 29 acres survived in 1717, while the tithe map recorded 9 acres in 1841. This may support the 'brushwood' theory: J. Kemble, ed., The Place-Names of Snoreham (2010, accessed via www.essex.ac.uk/history/esah/essexplacenames).
[14] Victoria County History of Essex, i, 348-9, 565.
[15] Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 217.
[16] I advance a more general theory in relations to Essex churches dedicated to St Peter, but exempt Snoreham from it: https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/424-essex-st-peter-glacial-hypothesis.
[17] Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 357. The Reverend Philip Morant was born in Jersey. English was his second language, and his phraseology was sometimes awkward.
[18] Essex Review, liii (1944), 64.
[19] The largest estate, later Lawling Hall, the property of the monks of Canterbury Cathedral, was returned at 14 hides (1,680 acres or 680 hectares), which may have been a rounded figure for purposes of taxation. Seven of the ten estates contained fractions of a hide and / or specific measurements in acres in their returns, which is suggestive of precision.
[20] Morant did not record any owner of Snoreham until 1323, when it belonged to the Grey of Wilton family. Hugh does not seem to have been related to Simon de Montfort, regarded as the founder of Parliament, and I can trace no connection with the Grey of Wilton family.
[21] Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 356. White's Directory in 1848 also stated that the foundations of the Lawling chapel were "yet visible", but this may have been a crib from Morant.
[22] This was an example from 1548: Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 217.
[23] Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 356-7. One point in Morant's favour was the fact the incumbent at Snoreham was styled 'Rector' (ruler), not 'Vicar' (deputy) or 'Curate' (caretaker). Bishops of London also ratified the appointment of successive Rectors of Snoreham.
[24] H. Smith, The Ecclesiastical History of Essex Under the Long Parliament and Commonwealth (Colchester, n.d.), 264. Biographical information about Cambridge graduates is from https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/Documents/acad/2018/search-2018.html.
[25] Essex Archives Online; D.H. Allen (ed.), Essex Quarter Sessions Order Book 1652-1661 (Chelmsford, 1974), 95 (13 January 1657).
[26] Essex Archives Online.
[27] Essex Archives Online; Allen (ed.), Essex Quarter Sessions Order Book 1652-1661, 130 (13 January 1659).
[28] Essex Archives Online.
[29] Essex Archives Online.
[30] Strutt purchased Snoreham from a colourful and controversial vendor. The 1717 field plan of Snoreham (in the Essex Record Office) had described its owner as "Nathaniel Green of London Esquire". Green died in 1725, leaving his daughter Lucy an heiress worth £25,000. She married Raphael (alias Ralph) Courteville, a member of a musical family who were probably of French origin. Courteville succeeded his father as organist at the fashionable church of St James, Piccadilly, where he was punctilious in collecting his salary but less diligent in discharging his responsibilities. His real enthusiasm was for political journalism, and he became a virulent defender of Britain's first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Westminster's two-party system originally took the form of Court versus Country: the Court party were the immoveable government, the Country party were the permanent opposition. The United States, which drew up its Constitution in 1787, perpetuated this division, making Congress the check upon the President. However, in 19thcentury Britain, the parliamentary system evolved to allow the two main parties to take turns in holding office. Courteville has been described as "the principal hack journalist of the Daily Courant", the first London (and UK) newspaper. Opponents responded to his denunciations by calling him 'Court-evil'. Walpole ensured a steady flow of taxpayer cash to his journalistic supporters, but he was forced out of office in 1742. The loss of these corrupt subsidies may explain the timing of Courteville's sale of Snoreham to John Strutt the following year. I. Spink, "Courteville, Raphael (fl. c. 1673–c. 1735)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; J.H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: the King's Minister (London, 1960), 315n.
[31] Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 357; Essex Archives Online; C.R. Strutt, The Strutt Family of Terling … (privately printed, 1939), 25-7.
[32] Strutt, The Strutt Family of Terling, 64.
[33] Strutt, The Strutt Family of Terling, 58.
[34] Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 357.
[35] J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century ... (London 1812), iii, 179.
[36] T Wright, The History and Topography of the County of Essex... (2 vols, London, 1835), ii, 676; White's Directory of Essex, 1848, 528-9; D. W. Coller, The People's History of Essex ... (Chelmsford, 1861), 449.
[37] A sermon was required to accompany Holy Communion, but there is no evidence that Snoreham church ever held Communion plate.
[38] 'The Book of the Parish of Latchingdon cum Lawling & Snoreham began AD MDCCCXLIX' is calendared on Essex Archives Online. It is interesting to note that Myall's very formal title already laid claim to Snoreham as part of the parish of Latchingdon in 1849.
[39] For Rectors of Snoreham, I have used the location search commands in https://theclergydatabase.org.uk/jsp/locations/index.jsp. and https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/Documents/acad/2018/search-2018.html.
[40] The figure given in White's Directory of Essex, 529, which quotes an 1831 figure of £108. Kemble, ed., The Place-Names of Snoreham, 5 gives the 1842 figure as £111, which included £5, 8 shillings rental on 21 acres (8.5 hectares) of glebe.
[41] O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, part I (3rd ed., London, 1971, cf. 1st ed., 1966), 127, 522. Chadwick examined 22 advertisements for curates in 1858. Only 2 offered £100 a year, and most paid wages that a "respectable butler or coachman" would not have considered. Another historian regarded £150 a year as the early-19th century "poverty line" for clergy. E.J. Evans, The Contentious Tithe... (London, 1976), 3.
[42] D. Armitage, "Purchas, Samuel (bap. 1577, d. 1626)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The name was probably pronounced "Purkiss". His appointment as Rector of Snoreham has been misread as "Punhas", which accounts for the fact that his connection has only recently come to light. The metaphysical poet, John Donne, was also mobilised to wield his quill pen in support of Stuart imperialism in Virginia.
[43] https://totham1821.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/the-revd-thomas-foote-gower-1763-1849/.
[44] Chelmsford Chronicle, 24 September 1841, 6 January 1860, 17 January 1862.
[45] Strutt, The Strutt Family of Terling, 75-6.
[46] Chelmsford Chronicle, 28 November 1856.
[47] Coller, The People's History of Essex, 449.
[48] Chelmsford Chronicle, 28 November 1856.
[49] N. Aston, " "Moore, John (bap. 1730, d. 1805)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[50] Robert Moore's career was unfavourably reviewed by Belfast Morning News, 15 September 1865, quoting the London Morning Star, probably 12 September. The Victorian Morning Star was not the same newspaper as the former Daily Worker. Moore did not always draw his full tithe income. In 1830, a bad year for farmers, he allowed a 20% discount. The following year was worse, and he reduced his demands by 30%. Of course, this still netted him over £600 annually in hard times. J. Oxley Parker (with H.E. Priestley), The Oxley Parker Papers... (Colchester, 1964), 78. His Will was reported in The Times, 28 October 1865.
[51] Anglican bishops were (and are) appointed by the Crown which, in practice, meant that they were chosen by the Prime Minister. However, formally, each new bishop was elected by the Dean and Chapter of his cathedral. The link in this mildly farcical procedure was a document called (in archaic Law French) a congé d'élire, which directed the cathedral clergy to elect a new bishop but gave them only one candidate. When the bishopric of Hereford fell vacant in 1847, the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, decided that the diocese needed a learned theologian, and named an Oxford professor of divinity, Dr Hampden. A decade earlier, there had been a violent controversy within the University over the orthodoxy of Hampden's opinions: he had suggested that some of the stories in the Bible were so far-fetched that Christians need not believe them. When Dean Merewether heard that this dangerous cleric was heading for Hereford, he announced that he would ignore the congé d'élire and refuse to vote for the Prime Minister's choice. Unfortunately, the Dean not only believed that he deserved a bishopric himself, but claimed that he had been promised promotion to the episcopal bench by William IV shortly before that monarch's death. A steady succession of right reverend prelates had since passed to their eternal reward (there was no retiring age in those days), but no mitre materialised for Merewether. He had reminded Sir Robert Peel, Russell's predecessor, of the old king's promise, but Peel stiffly refused to be bound by any such engagement and managed, in his notoriously cold manner, to imply that he did not think much of the Dean's qualifications. Russell's reply to Merewether's December 1847 diatribe read: "Sir, I had the honour to receive your letter of the 22nd inst. in which you intimate to me your intention of violating the law." It became one of the best-known public put-downs of Victorian times. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, part I, 226, 241-5.
[52] It seems that Richard Merewether was a different kind of curate from the run-of-the-mill downtrodden locum. He occupied a new Rectory which had been built in 1850 and presumably enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. It is likely that he had private means.
[53] Essex Standard, 29 June 1855; 21 November 1856; Chelmsford Chronicle, 28 November 1856. Merewether had raised £1,481 by June 1855. St Aubyn's work is discussed in the University of Buckingham 2022 PhD thesis by Dr P. Newberry (esp. 494). In 1846, Essex had been transferred from the over-large diocese of London to the tiny diocese of Rochester, a scheme that failed to take account of the obstacle called the River Thames. The Bishop of Rochester was given an official residence at Danbury, eight miles from Latchingdon, and no doubt encouraged the project. Peculiars were phased out in the 1840s: the Archbishop of Canterbury continued to appoint the Rector of Latchingdon, but ecclesiastical jurisdiction was transferred from the Dean of Bocking to the Bishop of Rochester. Merewether had buried an infant son in the summer of 1855, a too-frequent occurrence in Victorian times. His Rectory was burgled in 1857: Chelmsford Chronicle, 1 September 1855, 10 June 1857.
[54] Essex Standard, 30 May 1862. Since the Albert Memorial cost £120,000, Snoreham's contribution was hardly critical.
[55] Chelmsford Chronicle, 24 November 1865.
[56] London Gazette, 30 September 1859, 3572.
[57] The Reverend Richard Formby was unusual among Essex clergy in being a graduate of Oxford. He was quickly appointed a Justice of the Peace. and sometimes presided alone at Latchingdon Petty Sessions, the local police court. Identifying himself so closely with Authority was probably a mistake by late-Victorian times. He died in 1894.
[58] Although there was no difference in status or function between Rectors and Vicars, the former were usually better paid. Vicars operated in parishes where medieval religious houses had owned property, and had usually controlled the local church. The abbey or priory creamed off part of the tithe income, treating the Vicar as its deputy (hence our word, "vicarious"). In the sixteenth century, monastic property passed into private hands – along with the 'rectorial' share of the tithes. In the 1890s, the Maryon Wilson family, lay impropriators at Great Canfield, actually handed back their share of tithes, converting the local Vicar into a Rector. This solution presumably did not occur to Lord Rayleigh.
[59] Strictly speaking, Rectors of Snoreham controlled 21 acres of land, but this included about an acre of former churchyard.
[60] Strutt, The Strutt Family of Terling, 93; London Gazette, 1 March 1867, 1446-7.
[61] When Latchingdon with Snoreham annexed the parish of Mundon in 1954, the Privy Council assembled at Balmoral to lay another lengthy document before another Queen. At the conclusion of the proceedings, "Her Majesty, by and with the advice of Her said Council, is pleased hereby to affirm the said Scheme and to order that it shall be and become effectual in law immediately upon the publication of this Order in the London Gazette." London Gazette, 31 August 1954, 5019.
[62] 'The Book of the Parish of Latchingdon cum Lawling & Snoreham', calendared in Essex Archives Online.
[63] Essex Standard, 5 October 1878.
[64] Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, Essex, iv, 82.
[65] Hobart World, 6 August 1933, one of many examples from the National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive, Trove; Wellington Dominion, 20 October 1933, from the National Library of New Zealand's online newspaper archive, PapersPast. There were farms called Maggots at High Easter and Takeley, but no village of that name. The allusion to a conference called by a British Prime Minister is puzzling. Perhaps it was an echo of the Empire trade negotiations, convened by the British but held at Ottawa, Canada's backwoods capital, the previous year.
[66] Wellington Evening Post, 24 October 1936, quoting New York Times, n.d., from the National Library of New Zealand's online newspaper archive, PapersPast.
[67] London Gazette, 31 August 1954, 5019.
[68] https://www.latchingdon-pc.gov.uk/the-council/what-we-do/.