Bettany
London now, to meet a brother and sister. Derrick Phillips and Mary Sanders have been using church records to follow up a family story that they are descended from aristocrats, the Staffords. It’s a spicy tale of denied birth rights, bawdy and incest.

So it sounds like it’s a very good story behind these records.

Mary
Well my aunt came back from India in 1941 with many trunks. In one of which was this paper story.

Bettany
But was there any popular mythology in the family that you had aristocratic . . .

Derrick
My family always used to say, and we took no real notice about it, oh your mother was well born and her descent was good, and we had no idea what he was talking about until we found this.

Bettany
The story hinges on their ancestor, Charlotte McCarthy. In the early 1800s, she staked a claim in the house of Lords to be Baroness Stafford. She lost the case but Derrick and Mary want to find out more about her, and if her claim was unfairly dismissed.

Derrick
There’s a Charlotte Gertrude who was the claimant in 1825 according to this. She is married to someone who is not named here, there is a blank box and that looks strange.

Bettany
Very strange.

Derrick
She in fact married her uncle, who was the youngest brother of her father.

Bettany
So you can’t admit to that through the family tree.

Derrick
Well they couldn’t admit to that because they were rather foolish in those days.

Bettany
But she’s clearly an interesting character to follow, she sounds very feisty. She was marrying her uncle and then tried to claim a title, going back hundreds and hundreds of years.

Bettany
Derrick and Mary are going to the London Metropolitan archives, to check out Charlotte’s marriage to her uncle. We’ll join them there later.

What interests me about the church courts is that the punishments don’t seem to have been too harsh. In the Middle Ages you might have got a whipping, otherwise you were likely to have to confess your sins in church. But there was also excommunication - exclusion from the church and possibly damnation. Surely that was very serious?

Dr Martin Ingram
The way the church thought about excommunication was actually less harsh and less severe than that. It was always thought of as being medicinal, something which was designed to encourage people to repent, encourage people to confess their sins. And so people were excommunicated with a view to bringing them back in.

Bettany
To Lambeth Palace library. There were of course radical clergymen and dissenters who didn’t want to be brought back into the fold because they thought the church was wrong and the church has never responded well to people it’s labelled as heretics.

While England was still Catholic, probably the most persistent heretics were the Lollards. They rejected the major beliefs of the Catholic church and called for a Bible written in English. At that time, there is only one punishment for those who did not repent of their heresy.

Bettany
So, how was heresy defined in England, before the Reformation?

Rob Lutton
It was anything that was seen as a threat to the doctrines of the orthodox church. Which ultimately were defined by the Papacy. There were ideas in circulation which did challenge that but they tended to be academic circles normally, because when those ideas were popularised, and were picked up by lay people, they were seen as dangerous and then defined as heresy. And Lollardy in England is a very good example of that sort of movement.

This is the trial of Agnes Grabble on 29th April in 1511. And we see here "Agnes Grabble, uxor Johannes Grabble snr, atatis sexginta annori adulterer". So, appearing personally, Agnes Grabble, wife of John Grabble Senior, of Tenterton, aged 60 or more, so she was quite an old woman when she was tried. And here are a list of the charges against her which included denying the miracle of the Mass, of the actual physical presence of Chris in the Eucharist.

And Agnes’s husband and two sons are tried on the same day and they are brought in as witnesses against her. There is mention of something that they did together here, "examined how the said Agnes believed of Holy Bread and Holy Water" - it’s said that she believed that they were no better than other water and other bread. How they knew that, he says, is that "they brought home Holy Bread at diverse times to his house and eat it and had none other regard unto it, but as to other bread". So she brought it home and ate it for her supper.

The next day on the 30th April, the Sunday, she was brought back in to the trial and the depositions were presented to her and read to her and she again denies all the charges that were made against her, denies the evidence that her family has given against her, and there is a final phrase saying that these witnesses including her husband and two sons, have "perfidiously betrayed her and their own souls" and that it grieved her to have ever borne those sons of hers.

Bettany
And so what happened when she didn’t recant?

Rob
Well the Archbishop gave her another two days until the Tuesday of that week to decide whether she would confess her errors or not.

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