Thrale history

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of the first gallows on a notorious robber called William Wawe. The other gallows he had removed because they were on his land. The abbot of Westminster said that they were on his land, and complained that the Sandridge men had forced an innocent Wheathampstead man called John Plomer to assist them in their dirty work by threats of mutilation and death. Arbitration having failed, the abbot of Westminster sued the abbot of St Albans for £50 damages, though he admitted that the actual materials of each gallows only cost two shillings. A preliminary enquiry was held at St Albans in the Crown Court of Pleas, during which Matthew Bepsette felt it necessary to explain that his name was neither Bibsette nor Pipsed; so the Court decided to call him Matthew and leave it at that. The case was finally disposed of by the Court of Marshalsey at Westminster in July 1440. The jurymen, after taking the usual oaths, declared that Robert Belamy, Matthew and their accomplices were in no way to blame, in that they cut down, broke up, and carted away the said gallows.⁶

The countryside then did not have the appearance of a patchwork quilt as it has today. The land was not fenced off by hedges and ditches. There was regular rotation of crops arranged by the bailiff, and each Villein would have a narrow strip In the wheat area, and the right of grazing in a third area, which for that year was left fallow. The corn and the hay were protected from the animals by moveable hurdles. All the corn had to be ground either at the Abbey mill, St Albans on the river Ver, or at the abbot’s mill at Sandridge, which must have been on the Lea. And thus life continued for one century more.

It was in April 1538 that Richard Boreman, a native of Stevenage, took up his duties as the forty-first and last abbot of the great Benedictine monastery of St Albans, which had dominated the religious, economic and social life of the neighbourhood for over seven hundred years. The year after his appointment the abbot granted a lease of Sandridge vicarage to John Bigges and Joan his wife for fifty years,⁷ which means that in return for a capital sum paid to the abbot, Mr. and Mrs. Bigges would receive the £8 a year which was the vicar’s income and allow him just enough to live on. The abbot was overburdened with the king’s taxes, and at last when the crippling taxation could no longer be paid, he was obliged to surrender the monastery with all its revenues, including the manor of Sandridge, into the hands of the king. The king kept the manor for some months, but in 1541 he conveyed it to Ralph Rowlatt, a London goldsmith and banker. Thus the era of secular rule had begun.

During the middle of the sixteenth century, the vicissitudes suffered by the church were severe. The services were all in Latin as they had been for five hundred years. There were no less than nine sets of vestments of various colours and three copes, green, red and while. There was a cross made of copper, and two candlesticks, a silver chalice weighing ten and a half ounces, an abundance of linen for the altar, a censer and an incense boat, which shows that incense was used at Mass. There was a handbell which weighed three pounds and three bells hanging in the old Norman tower by which the faithful were summoned to church. Upon the death of Henry VIII in 1547, he was succeeded by his eight year old son, Edward VI. The government, not only of the state but also of the church, fell into the hands of the King’s Council and changes came rapidly. A set of sermons was published; outdoor processions were forbidden and the Litany had to be said or sung in church just before High Mass. One important change did have ecclesiastical authority, namely the giving of Communion to the people in both kinds, which came into general use in 1548. The same year the vicar, Mr. Harding, was told, not by his bishop Edmund Bonner, but by the secular rulers, that he must no longer use candles on Candlemas Day, or ashes on Ash Wednesday, or palms on Palm Sunday. During the year following the first English Prayer Book was issued, Mass being said in Sandridge church, as everywhere else, entirely in English. Before The end of the year many of the ancient Latin service books were destroyed by order of parliament.

The ornaments and furniture of St Leonard’s Church also suffered. All mural pictures, or scenes depicted in stained glass of pretended miracles were destroyed, and all candles except two on

Footnotes

6. Registrum, i) pp.6,14,15,24,35 ii) pp.127-143,213-220;↩︎
7. The Victoria County History Of Hertfordshire. Volume 2. 437.↩︎