| Description | Listed by Mary Dormer Harris:
The documents in Trinity Vestry extend for a period of 550 years, and belong to every king's reign from Henry III down to George III with the exception of the short reigns of Edward V. and Richard III., and are full of information concerning the names, trades and habits of the people of Coventry. Mainly these documents consist of transfers of the land which ultimately came into the possession of Trinity Church, or leases to tenants of such lands and dwellings as the Church already held. There are also a series of deeds of feoffment, whereby one set of surviving trustees or feoffees, when their numbers were growing thin, conveyed their interest in the Church property to another set of feoffees of the younger generation. These documents are from a legal point of view of the greatest value, and the most modern of these, which constitute one of the Church's principal titles to its possessions are in the keeping of the Clerk of the Vestry. Mortgages are also to be found, wills, containing most interesting pictures of the life of the time, and extracts from court-rolls concerned with those fictitious suits whereby men sought to evade the laws which raised difficulties about the transfer of land.
The early documents in the Vestry are charters, and of these many take the form of indentures, or chirographs, so called because the original deed was written in duplicate, with a blank space between, on which the word "chirographum" (from the Greek, meaning handwriting) was written, and the duplicates were cut apart so as to give each a jagged, teeth-like edge. Each of the parties concerned had a copy of the document, and it was possible to test the genuineness of a deed by bringing the two copies together and seeing whether there was a mutual fitting between their respective indentations.
The series begins with five undated deeds - these are, therefore, earlier than 1320 - in Latin, three concerned with Dead Lane, one with Much - or, as it is called "Lower" (inferior) - Park Street, and a fifth of extraordinary interest with strips in the fields of Stoke, showing the ancient system of the common cultivation of land, which persisted until the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, whereby every individual cultivator held scattered strips in one large arable field, divided only by balks of unploughed turf. Another peculiarity is the occurrence of a suggested forfeiture of a sum of money to the Crusades in case of breach of covenant, an item I had never heard of before I saw these deeds, but Mr. Geo. Buchannan, of Whitby has pointed out to me a covenant executed in 1304 between Robert Bruce, afterwards King of Scotland, and the Bishop of St. Andrews, entailing a forfeiture of £10,000 to be devoted to the Holy Land, so the Coventry instances do not stand alone
To some of these documents are appended seals, and all are attested by well-known men of the time, usually beginning with the bailiff, at whose court they were probably executed.
Documents not Listed by Miss Dormer Harris:
Leases from the Feoffees of Holy Trinity usually granted for terms of 14 or 21 years. The lessees come from Coventry unless it is otherwise stated. |