Cross Hill, St Bees, Cumbria

By John and Mary Todd

“the house wherein I was born, and the lands pertaining thereto, being a small matter, under twenty shillings rent, but well builded at the charges of my father and brother.” (1) So wrote Edmund Grindal, on the point of promotion from bishop of London to archbishop of York, to Sir William Cecil, Secretary of State to Elizabeth 1, in 1570. But where was this house? Antiquarians have been undecided, but it is now possible to say that the house wherein Archbishop Grindal was born still stands on Cross Hill in the village of St Bees, otherwise known as 19 and 20 Finkle Street. As will be shown, Grindal’s letter also enables us to give a date for its construction or rebuilding, namely between 1500 and 1520. The house preserves to this day much of its original structure and has recently been well restored by Mr and Mrs Noel Carr. For its period, it is a surprisingly substantial house for a tenant farmer paying “under twenty shillings rent”. Grindal’s modest words almost give a false impression, for in fact the rent was only 8s. 2d. (2)

Edmund Grindal’s early biographer, Strype, believed that the Archbishop’s birthplace was at Hensingham, which was formerly within the parish of St Bees. Local tradition puts it either at the former farm known as Chapel House, or at Overend Farm, where stones with the initials W. G. and W. R. G. were thought to refer to William Grindal, Edmund’s father. In the last century William Jackson doubted Strype’s opinion. Professor Patrick Collinson, Grindal’s modern biographer, shared those doubts. New evidence from the building on Cross Hill, and from the court book of the manor of St Bees, shows that the doubts were well-founded.(3) Grindal was born between 1517 and 1520.(4) At that time, the main landowner in the parish was the priory of St Bees, a cell of St Mary’s Abbey at York. The demesne lands of the Priory lay on the north-west side of the Pow Beck. On the south-east side of the valley, compactly arranged around the village which bears all the marks of being a planned settlement, were the lands of the Priory’s customary tenants. Other customary lands were to be found in the outlying hamlets of Sandwith and Hensingham. The tenants held by “tenant right”, which was marked by “reasonable” entry fines, moderate rents, light labour services, and the obligation on the tenant “upon his own proper cost and charges [to] attend upon his landlord or his officer in the service of her Majesty, her heirs and successors, on the next marches of England against Scotland”.(5) A rental drawn up for the Priory in 1500 (6) lists 33 tenants in St Bees village, with holdings ranging in size from a cottage with half a customary acre to a messuage of three oxgangs eight acres (equivalent to at least 61, possibly 76 modern acres) (7).The annual rents run from twelve pence to 6s. 6d. In addition to the cash rents, the tenants owed from one to twelve “boon days” of work on the lord’s demesne, and from one hen and ten eggs to five hens and fifty eggs per annum. No single tenant was clearly dominant: there were nine holdings of two or more oxgangs (20 or 26 customary acres, 32 or 42 modem acres). No tenant in 1500 bore the name of Grindal.(8)

In the first twenty years of the sixteenth century, therefore, William Grindal appeared in St Bees, acquired a holding as a tenant of the Priory, and started his house “well-builded” there. Of his two known sons, Edmund was sent to Cambridge and embarked on a clerical career which was to carry him to the highest office in the Church of England. His elder brother Robert stayed at home and ran the family farm.(9) Edmund never forgot “that little angle where 1 was born, called Cowpland, parcel of Cumberland: the ignorantest part in religion, and most oppressed of covetous landlords, of any one part of the realm, to my knowledge”(10) He never forgot the house where he was born. Ignorance in religion he parried by his death-bed resolution to found St Bees School. In three interventions, he also did what he could to protect his family’s security – and he may well have been responsible for saving the tenants of St Bees for all time from the oppression of covetous landlords. The archbishop’s concerns are reflected at each stage in the early history of Cross Hill House.

St Bees Priory was dissolved on 16 October 1539.(11) The lands held by the customary tenants went through the hands of Henry VIII’s agent Sir Thomas Leigh to the second husband of Leigh’s widow, the distinguished diplomat Sir Thomas Challoner.(12) It was an anxious time for the tenants. They had enjoyed fixed low rents and light burdens of custom under the monks. Although their tenure was in theory at the will of the lord, it was in practice hereditary. Now, in a time of rapid inflation, landlords everywhere were seeking to raise rents and reduce security of tenure.(13) The courtier Challoner was perhaps in need of ready cash, and may have been influenced by Edmund Grindal, with whom he seems to have been on good terms.(14) He struck a bargain with his tenants in 1560. In return for lump sums totalling £88, he granted them leases for fifty years at rents which (in the incomplete list which survives) were roughly one and three-quarters times as much as the rents of 1500. It was agreed that, at the end of the term, the old customary tenure would apply in default of other provision; and for better security the old customs were written down at a session of the manor court in 1587.(15) Edmund Grindal, then bishop of London, helped his brother Robert to buy his lease.(16) The counterpart (the landlord’s copy) survives at St Bees.(17) For a premium of twenty shillings, Challoner leased to Robert Grindal:

“…..all that one messuage and one oxgang and six acres and an haiff of londe or grounde arrable

altogether … which the said Robert Gryndall now holdeth, together with all suche medowe

grounde as to the same fermolde is incident or apperteyning … payeing therefore yearely … the

some of eight shillings ij d. lawfull Englishe money.”

Only fifteen of the 1560 leases survive, but even these show that Grindal was not the most substantial tenant in St Bees village. There were at least three larger holdings, ranging in size up to three oxgangs (48 or 63 statute acres), compared with Grindal’s one oxgang 6.5 acres (presumed to be equal to 27 or 31.5 statute acres). The rents ran from 2s. to 10s., with Grindal’s the second highest.(18)

Within ten years a double crisis overtook the Grindals of St Bees. Robert Grindal, his wife, and their only surviving son all died within three weeks of each other in 1568.(19) Robert left the farm to his second daughter, Anne. “Her father in his testament willed her in all things to be directed by me”, wrote Edmund Grindal, although the text of Robert’s will does not quite bear this out. (20) Contrary to her uncle’s wishes, Anne married William Dacre, son of Richard Dacre of Aikton near Carlisle, although she was only eighteen and her father not a year dead. Shortly afterwards, in 1569-70, William joined his cousin Leonard Dacre in the northern rising known as “Dacre’s Raid”, which started as a struggle with the Howards over the inheritance of Naworth Castle and the barony of Gilsland. The Dacres were defeated and fled, and their lands were forfeited to the Crown. Hence Edmund Grindal’s begging letter quoted at the head of this article, asking for permission to redeem the St Bees holding for his impulsive niece and her unfortunate husband. It cost him more than the lease of 1560: this time he had to pay £40 to recover the farm and another lease of the tithes of the parish.(21)

Leonard Dacre died three years later, and William was pardoned and settled down at St Bees. It is likely that at this time Anne and her husband had the inside northwest wall of their house decorated with griffins, supporters of the Dacre arms, and carried out other improvements, mentioned below.(22) The painting is possibly out of the same workshop as another in the house which Thomas Dacre converted out of the west range of Lanercost Priory.

William Dacre died in 1583, the same year as Edmund Grindal.(23) Had he lived, he would have been a governor of the grammar school which the Archbishop founded at St Bees. Anne married again, into another gentry family, that of Thomas Wybergh. Although she had issue by Thomas, the Grindal estates in St Bees did not – as Jackson believed – pass to the Wyberghs and thence to the Lowthers.(24) When new leases were granted to the St Bees tenants in 1609 (close to the expiry of the 1560 leases), Anne’s eldest child by William Dacre, Eleanor or Helena Dacre, was holding a messuage or fermhold called Grindall’s tenement containing three and a quarter oxgangs situate in the town of St Bees, late in the occupation of Thomas Wybergh and sometime of Robert Grindal deceased”. The holding had grown since 1560 to 53 or 69 statute acres, but so had others. The areas are shown for only six out of the forty leases, but two of them were larger than Eleanor Dacre’s. The rent was 11s. 7d., and there were two higher rents, in a range from 8d. to 14s. 6d.(25)

Archbishop Grindal had a posthumous hand in the granting of the new leases. It was generally believed that he intended the money which he left to endow St Bees School to be invested in the freehold of the St Bees tenants’ lands, so that they might regain the security which “covetous landlords” once threatened, “so to settle their estates that they might hold the same without eviction or hard dealing”. The freehold was in the hands of the Crown, having been surrendered by Challoner to settle a debt to Elizabeth I in 1561. In 1604, Grindal’s executors purchased it from James 1 on behalf of the governors of St Bees School. After much controversy, and a disputed arbitration by Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, the governors granted to the tenants leases at fixed rents, to run for a thousand years from 31 January 1609.(26)

In this manner, Edmund Grindal for a third time benefited the family farm (among others). Thanks to the records of the governors’ manor court, which show changes of leaseholders and sales from one to another, it is possible to piece together the subsequent history of “Grindal’s tenement”, or Cross Hill as it came to be known, up to the present day, so proving that this was indeed the house in which the future archbishop was born.

Eleanor Dacre died unmarried in 1624.(27) The governors’ first court book is missing, and it is not until 1692 that we pick up the name of the next known tenant ‘ Henry Aerey. Henry had died in December 1691, and in April of the following year his widow Jane claimed the succession to the holding in the manorial court.(28) Since the rent of the holding then claimed was the same as Eleanor’s rent in 1609, namely 1s. 7d., since there was no other tenement paying this rent, and since two Aereys have Dacre as their Christian name, the identity of Henry Aerey’s holding is not in doubt.(29)

Anthony Aerey succeeded his brother’s widow in 1701.(30) He left daughters, who divided the holding. Mary and her husband Edward Wilkinson received her portion during her father’s lifetime. They are found tenants of a moiety of the tenement in 1712, paying 5s. 91/2d. rent.(31) Her sister Isabel had to wait until her father’s death in 1723 for her part. In 1724 she is found tenant of a messuage called Cross Hill, the first mention of the name.(32) Isabel had married Richard Preston. Divided ownership resulted in the physical division of the house which persists to this day.

Mary Wilkinson’s half of the house – which later record shows to have been the south-eastern end – passed to her son Anthony (d. 1775). (33) Eventually Anthony’s daughters Mary Coulthard and Ann Bell were admitted in 1802 under the terms of his will.(34)Richard Johnson purchased the holding from the personal representatives of Mary and Ann on 24 March 1832. It was then described as a “messuage or dwellinghouse, barn, stable, cowhouse, piggeries, garden and ground”. Because more leasehold land had been added, the rent was now 10s. 8d.(35) The area, as shown in the 1838 tithe map, was 55 acres.(36) Richard Johnson died in 1834, and his widow had the property until her remarriage the next year, when it passed to trustees for their son.(37) In 1851, their son, the Revd John Richard Johnson, sold the house, with some of the land, paying an apportioned rent of 3s., to Richard Jackson, owner of the other half, so reuniting the ownership (but not the occupation) of the house.(38)

Turning to the history of the north-western part of the house, we find from the court book that Isabel Preston and her husband Richard gave their property during their lifetime to their son Richard.(39) Richard lived to 1802 but gave the property to his daughter Jane in 1798. Because of additions, the rent of this moiety was by now 13s. 7d., and the tithe map in 1838 shows that it comprised 41.5 acres.(40) Jane died in 1837, bequeathing her land to Richard Jackson.(41) Richard’s son Joseph Preston Jackson owned the reunited holding from his father’s death in 1888 until his own in 1928. His wife had it for three more years, and their son sold it almost immediately after his mother’s death to Henry Mawson. The latter died in 1948, and the estate was held by trustees for the benefit of his daughters, who in turn sold it to Noel and Jean Carr in 1983.(42) In 1993, the ownership of the two parts of the property was divided again, when the Carrs moved into 20 Finkle Street (the south-eastern part) and sold no.19.

Professor Collinson begins his account of Grindal’s life with a fine pen-picture of conditions in the Cumberland of his day, including the following:

The “great rebuilding” which transformed the condition of domestic life over much of England in the course of the sixteenth century hardly affected the north-western counties before the reign of Charles II. It was only then that a vernacular stone architecture began to replace the older constructions of clay and wood built on stone footings.(43)

In this, Collinson was but following the received view of northern domestic architecture. Ironically, it is Grindal’s own birthplace that puts a question mark against that view. Robert Grindal, a tenant farmer, “statesman” not gentry, and not even holding the largest farm in the village, paid a rent of 8s. 2d. for which his brother had almost to apologise. Robert and his father built, or rebuilt, early in the sixteenth century, a substantial house of stone, with a lofty hall, parlour and solar.

Either tenant farmers were not so badly housed as has been supposed, or William and Robert Grindal had some additional source of wealth.

It is to be hoped that the research of Mr John Reedy, of Brandon, Florida, will shortly show the early history of the Grindal family, and the other resources outside St Bees that sustained their expenditure. Edmund Grindal was on familiar terms with the Sandys of Rottington, who were gentry, and Robert’s daughter Anne twice married into ancient gentry families, the Dacres and the Wyberghs.(44) They also had the same surnme as the William Grindal who was tutor to the future Queen Elizabeth 1 before Roger Ascham.(45) There was the money to send Edmund Grindal to Cambridge and abroad. The “house well-builded” surely covered a family of substance and, perhaps, of higher status than has been admitted so far.