The Manor Changes Hands (Again and Again and Again) (1539–1572)

The Court of Augmentations and the Great Sell-Off

When the monastic lands fell to the Crown, someone had to actually manage all this newly acquired property. In 1536, Thomas Cromwell created the impressive-sounding ‘Court of Augmentations of the Revenues of the King’s Crown’¹Walter C. Richardson, History of the Court of Augmentations, 1536–1554 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961). – a bunch of bureaucrats whose job it was to fatten the King’s purse.

The Court’s central establishment at Westminster included the Chancellor and Treasurer and a principal Clerk among its senior officers, backed by auditors and receivers scattered across the realm. The original plan was simple and sensible: keep the ex-monastic estates, collect steady rents forever and watch the royal coffers fill. But inevitably, Henry’s need for cash right now trumped his need for cash every year for eternity, and the Court switched to selling off properties as fast as it could draw up the paperwork.

The First Sale: A Classic Tudor Shell Game (1546)

On 19 March 1546, Henry VIII granted²‘Henry VIII: March 1546, 26–31’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 21 Part 1, January–August 1546, eds. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (London: HMSO, 1908). Weston (along with several other manors) to Edward Twynyhoo of Wychehampton, Dorset, his wife Edith and John Watson of More Crychell, Dorset. The price? £834 and 3½ pence – or in the accounting of the day, £834 3d ob., the ‘ob.’ being short for obolus, a halfpenny. Someone was watching those half-pennies very carefully indeed.

The grant’s supporting documents (the ‘Particulars for Grant’³The National Archives (TNA), E 318/21/1150: Commissioners for the Sale of Crown Lands, Particulars for Grants, entry for Weston manor in Dorset.) showed that nothing much had changed since the Valor eleven years earlier: annual rents of £17 4d (and 22 hens, because somebody in accounts really liked poultry), court proceeds averaging 13s 4d per year and a clear (net) annual value of £17 5s and hens after the bailiff’s costs.

At the standard rate of twenty times the clear annual value minus tax,⁴H. J. Habakkuk, ‘The Market for Monastic Property, 1539–1603’, The Economic History Review 10, no. 3 (1958): 362–80. Weston cost the buyers about £338 for absolute ownership (‘fee simple’).

Twynyhoo and Watson were respectable West Country gentry. Edward came from a family that had managed Shaftesbury Abbey’s affairs a generation earlier, making him just the sort of man who knew which ex-monastic properties were worth buying. Watson appears to have been his local associate, the sort of friend you bring along when there’s money to spend and a profit to make.

Exactly one day after acquiring the manor, Twynyhoo and Watson received a royal licence to transfer it to Richard Duke.

Who was Richard Duke? The Clerk of the Court of Augmentations. One of the men whose signatures appeared on the grant transferring the manor from the King in the first place.

The System Working Exactly As Designed

From a modern perspective, we might furrow our brows at this arrangement and mutter things like ‘conflict of interest’ and ‘insider trading’. But this wasn’t corruption by Tudor standards; it was just how things worked. Office holders were expected to profit from their positions. Richard Duke was simply following the example set by his boss, Sir Richard Rich (the Court’s Chancellor), who’d parlayed his position into a priory and around a hundred Essex manors.

When you’re signing off on property sales all day, it would be almost rude not to help yourself to a few choice parcels.

Richard Duke: A Well-Connected, Well-Compensated Man

Richard Duke⁵History of Parliament: House of Commons 1509–1558, ‘DUKE, Richard (by 1515–72), of London and Otterton, Devon’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/duke-richard-1515-72. was born around 1515 to Exeter merchant stock. He entered the Inner Temple in February 1533 to train as a lawyer, and three years later, wet behind the ears, he was appointed Clerk for Life⁶‘Henry VIII: Grants in July’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 13 Part 1, January–July 1538, ed. James Gairdner (London: HMSO, 1892), pp. 572–73 (entry 1520, §i: Augm. Book 232, f. 2b). of the brand-new Court of Augmentations. For life. By letters patent under the great seal. At a salary of £10 and ‘profits’. We don’t know how he got the job – patronage is better at getting results than it is at leaving records – but it was an unusual grant of security for someone so young, and it put him at the documentary heart of the greatest land grab since the Conquest.

Every survey, valuation, sale, lease and grant passed through the Clerk’s office. Duke didn’t decide which properties were sold or at what price (that was for the Chancellor and the auditors) but he knew what every property was worth, who was buying and when the paperwork would be ready. In a property market, information is everything. Richard Duke had all of it.

He started using it almost immediately. His first move was a lease on Pilton Priory in north Devon, taken just months after the Court opened for business in 1536. Then came the big one. In February 1540, Duke and his wife Elizabeth bought the manors of Otterton and East Budleigh (roughly 5,400 acres of former Syon Abbey land on the Devon coast) for £1,727 14s 2d.⁷‘Henry VIII: February 1540, 21–29’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 15, 1540, eds. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (London: HMSO, 1896).

The grant included forty messuages, a hundred cottages, three watermills, two fulling mills, the entire watercourse of the River Otter with fishery rights, free warren, view of frankpledge and wreck of the sea. A reserved rent of just £9 12s was payable to the Crown. A very nice country estate.

After that, the acquisitions came thick and fast. Templecombe in Somerset (the old Knights Templar preceptory) in 1542. Brownsea Island in Dorset in 1544. Then in 1546, he picked up Collaton Abbot in Devon (in the same transaction as Weston), and Upper Budleigh with additional manors. In 1548, he partnered with Thomas Bell, the wealthy Gloucester cap manufacturer, to buy a former chantry. His last major purchase came in 1550: the lordships of Bishops Teignton, Radway and West Teignmouth, bought from Sir Andrew Dudley. The History of Parliament notes drily that he was ‘well placed to take advantage of the distribution of monastic and chantry land’. Which is putting it mildly.

Meanwhile, he sat in Parliament for Weymouth (1545) and Dartmouth (1547), both seats arranged through the augmentations network. His superior Sir Thomas Arundell managed south-western elections and got seats for colleagues. When Arundell was arrested in 1550 and executed for treason in 1552,⁸History of Parliament: House of Commons 1509–1558, ‘ARUNDELL, Sir Thomas (c.1502–52), of Shaftesbury, Dorset and Wardour Castle, Wilts’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/arundell-sir-thomas-1502-52. Duke quietly stopped standing for Parliament and carried on collecting rent. He survived the Catholic restoration under Mary without any apparent difficulty and went on to serve Elizabeth I as Sheriff of Devon in 1563–64.

When the Court of Augmentations was abolished under Mary in 1554, Duke received an annuity of £133 6s 8d in compensation for losing his clerkship, which tells you something about how lucrative those ‘profits’ of his position had been. And of course, he still had the income flowing from properties scattered across four counties.

What Kind of Landlord Was He?

For Weston, Duke was yet another lord the tenants would probably rarely meet. He had estates scattered across the West Country, sat in Parliament and signed off on property transfers all day long. A small Dorset manor was not going to command his personal attention, but he wasn’t too busy to make money from it.

A rental drawn up in 1611⁹Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/456: Rental of Stalbridge Weston Manor, with court proceedings, c.1558–1612. shows him granting

One capital messuage [Manor House] of the manor of Weston and all houses, buildings, ground, meadow, pasture, rights of passage and whatever is lying/annexed and belonging to the said capital messuage

to William Wattes in 1556, for an entry fee of £15 and an annual rent of 34s 1d. (A later entry in the same rental shows this to have been about 178 acres – a very large property). William Wattes may have been the bailiff named in the 1535 Valor Ecclesiasticus, or a descendant; it’s easy to see how a bailiff or his family could position themselves to acquire their own choice parcel. And Duke made other grants (88 acres for £31 in 1562 to Christiana Snowke, 30 acres for £13 6s 8d to Robert Kember, 3 acres for £10 to Thomas Carter) and those are just the grants that hadn’t been superseded by 1611. It does seem that William Wattes got a bargain.

Duke’s only real lever was the entry fine; the annual rents and heriots were customary and fixed, probably at levels set long before his time. So, he charged a fine up front and left people alone to farm. For the tenants, this was probably about as good as arm’s-length ownership got. The fines were steep but predictable, and nobody was turning up with a team of lawyers looking for other ways to squeeze them. That would come later, under different owners entirely.

Religious Whiplash: The Mid-Tudor Crisis (1547–1558)

While ownership remained stable under Duke, religious life was anything but. When the boy-king Edward VI came to the throne in 1547, his Protestant advisers set about reshaping the church. The Latin mass was abolished. The Book of Common Prayer (introduced in 1549 and revised again in 1552) brought English services into churches that had known nothing but Latin for a thousand years. Altars gave way to communion tables, images were whitewashed and priests were permitted to marry. For a population that had known only Catholic worship, it was very disorienting.

Edward died in 1553, and Mary I reversed everything. The Latin mass returned, married clergy were required to abandon their wives and Protestant bishops were burned at the stake.

Mary died in 1558, and Elizabeth I took the throne. Her Religious Settlement attempted a middle way: Protestant theology dressed in enough Catholic ceremony to be bearable, the Book of Common Prayer again, but bishops in vestments. Nobody was entirely satisfied, but that was rather the point.

Through four monarchs and four religious settlements, Richard Duke kept his head (down) and his properties intact. There’s a lesson in that, probably. He married twice. In 1562 he settled a trust on himself, his second wife, and after their deaths on any son they might have – a son was duly born, but died in infancy. When Duke died in September 1572, his daughter Christina inherited the greater part of the property, including Templecombe and Weston. The 1562 trust passed to his nephew – also named Richard Duke, the family apparently having exhausted its imagination in that department.¹⁰History of Parliament: House of Commons 1509–1558, ‘DUKE, Richard (by 1515–72), of London and Otterton, Devon’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/duke-richard-1515-72. Christina was around thirty-seven, wealthy and already into her second marriage.

And that is when things began to get complicated.