Uncle Jasper is simply absorbed in the history of the little place, and one day he showed me the deeds and some of the old Churchwarden accounts. I will copy out the one I like best, although he says it is not sufficiently ’early’ to be really interesting.
£ s. d. Received from ye ffor: Churchwarden 00 10 02 Reed ffrom ye psh on Two Rates .. 01 17 03 −−−−−−−−−− Totall Received 02 07 05 −−−−−−−−−− to ye house of Correction .. .. 00 12 04 Ffor Bread and wine & at ye Comm 00 07 06 ffor necessarie Repaire of ye Church 00 15 07 ffor Releiving poor passengers .. 00 02 06 −−−−−−−−−− Payd out 01 17 11 Rests due to ye psh .. .. 00 09 06 These Accompts were examin'd and Allowe'd by us FRED SLOCOMBE ROB COCKRAN WILLIAM COPP ALLIN VELLACOTT
I’m sure they had an awful bother to make the accounts balance, they must have got so muddled with all those noughts, especially Rob Cockran. I suppose Tommy Vellacott is a descendant of Allin’s, and I’ve just remembered that there is an old woman who lives at the last house in the village and her name is Slocombe. She is thrice widowed and exceedingly rotund. She says she has only the Almighty to look after her now, and that all her troubles went innards and turned to fat. She has varicose veins. These things do link one up with the centuries.
(Father has just looked over my shoulder and says that really, ’after all the money that has been spent on my education!’ But I don’t know what he means. I’m certain varicose is spelled correctly, for I looked it up in the dictionary.)
It seems that some land and some money were given to the church by William the First ’for the health of his soul.’ (Perhaps he’d been beastly to Matilda of Flanders and gave it as a kind of penance.) Father says, ’Oh, no. Probably it was a thank-offering when she died.’
’But,’ I said, ’_did_ she die first?’ Father remarked that he thought she shuffled off this mortal coil in 1084, but that he couldn’t bother to remember an unimportant little detail like that about a woman!
Apparently it was quite a nice bit of land, sufficiently large and fertile to supply pasture for ’80 romping, roaming, and rollicking swine.’
Some of the things the tenants had to do were very quaint. How would the village people like daddy to come down on them now to ’dam the water to overflow the meadows once a year,’ and if they didn’t do it make them pay a halfpenny? Or supposing they got a message that they had ’to fill two dung carts every two days or pay twopence,’ or ’thresh and winnow white wheat,’ and for every two bushels that they didn’t do have to pay ’somewhere about three farthings.’