Thrale history

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After the fall of the monastery, by charter dated the 12th May 1541, the Crown conveyed the manor of Sandridge to Ralph Rowlatt, who was a London goldsmith and banker. With the manor went the right to appoint the vicar, and this privilege has remained with the descendants of Rowlatt ever since. Well into the twentieth century they were the principal landowners in Sandridge. Rowlatt’s son, lost two wives; the bodies of both were buried in London, but he directed in his will that they be reinterred in Sandridge church,¹ and he himself was buried in St Albans. Many years later his descendant Richard Jennings was reputed, to have had an income of £4,000 a year,² but some have it that his father had impoverished the estate by raising troops to fight for Charles I.³ At this time the Jennings family was living at St Albans, in Holywell House, and from there Richard set out in June of 1660 to welcome Charles II back to London. The same month his ninth and most famous child was born, Sarah Jennings. By the time she was seven years old her parents had moved to Waterend House, Sandridge. At the age of ten or eleven Sarah was sent to court, and there, when nineteen, she met Colonel John Churchill, the son of Sir Winston Churchill, who was ten years older than herself. It is needless to recount their careers; in 1685 her husband was created Baron Churchill of Sandridge by James II. Sarah’s brothers had died and she had inherited some of the Sandridge estates; her husband bought the shares of her two sisters and so by the time that he became the Duke of Marlborough in 1702 he and his wife owned the entire manor of Sandridge. When he died in 1722 he left his Sandridge estates to his widow Sarah. She founded, in 1736, the Duchess of Marlborough’s almshouses in Hatfield Road, St Albans, and made the vicar or Sandridge one of the trustees, a duty which has passed down to the present vicar.

To follow the careers of all the Sandridge vicars would be tedious. In 1581 Richard Woodward came to Sandridge as vicar. He was appointed by the Queen⁴ because the proper patron, Thomas Jennings, was under age. It is still the custom for the churchwardens to report each year to the Archdeacon on the state of the parish and the conduct of the vicar. In April 1582 Robert Sandar and John Thrale reported that Mr. Woodward was loyal to the Book of Common Prayer of 1559. He wore a surplice in church and did not preach against the State. He used the sign of the cross at baptisms, and all baptisms were at the proper font, which was not moved. Everyone came to the church where the catechism was taught, and they bowed their heads at the name of Jesus. The ring was used in holy matrimony, women were churched after childbirth and the dead were buried.⁵ This is significant, as it shows the kind of thing that was then regarded as controversial. It was the Puritans who objected to the surplice, the ring, and the sign of the cross. Apparently all went well for nearly two more years, and in 1584 the churchwardens gave another good report of their vicar. About that time he went away for a short period, leaving a priest with no experience, William Peagrym, to take duty in his absence. Mr. Peagrym had a school in the church and he was unwilling to leave it when the vicar returned. This led to a sharp quarrel between the two priests, and they were both summoned to the Archdeacon’s court for "chiding, brawling and quarrelling, one in the church of Sandridge, and the other in the churchyard, to the discredit of them whom they did so quarrel withal, and to the evil example of others." Mr. Peagrym acknowledged his fault, apologised, and left the parish. During the latter years of his stay in Sandridge Woodward was often absent and does not appear to have been a great success. So long as he was resident all went well enough, but during the frequent absences of his last two years he seems to have supplied inexperienced, quarrelsome and unlearned curates. Soon after, the new vicar arrived.

Stephen Gosson, vicar from 1586-1592, is noticed in the Dictionary of National Biography because of his fame as a writer. He is also the subject of a modern book by an American historian, William Ringler. After a university education he tried his hand at writing poetry and plays when Shakespeare was a boy of twelve. He also acted occasionally but this work did not keep the wolf from the door. Further, he had been educated in principles of strict morality, and the actors of Elizabethan days were not particularly moral people, so after two years he revolted against the whole theatrical and entertainment profession, which “corrupted morals and wasted time and money.” Thus he attacked the profession by writing in 1579 a pamphlet called The Schoole of Abuse containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters and such like Catepillars of a Commonwealth This was a huge success and brought the author fame and money. He did not attack the art of acting itself, but the abuse of that art. He said nothing about Sunday performances, and had no objection to honest recreation on that or any other day. Ordained priest in 1584, two years later he came to Sandridge from the rich commercial parish of Stepney, having been appointed by Thomas Jennings. He was loyal to the Church and had no use for the Puritans who wanted to reduce her to a protestant sect. Of them he wrote: "By favour and support these vermin that were long since, by the labours of learned bishops hewn in pieces. have crept out of their holes, and by continual rolling recovered their tails. Their torn papers and maimed pamphlets have been stitched together again with a skein of sister’s thread, and wrought round with a white selvedge of reformation to grace them, whereby the ears of the Church have been filled with a nerve hissing, to the very mockery of religion and the impudent slander of

Footnotes

1. Herts. Genealogies, Vol.2, pp.185-6.↩︎
2. Bonamy Dobrée, Sarah Churchill, p.11.↩︎
3. Mrs. Arthur Colville, Duchess Sarah, pp.2 and 3. ↩︎
4. R.Cutterbuck, History and Antiquities of Herts., p.219.
5. Records Of The Old Archdeaconry 1575-1637. Compiled by H.R. Wilton-Hall, published by The St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society. 1908, No.17.↩︎