Introduction
From the secular perspective of the 21st century, it is difficult to appreciate how much the church dominated the lives of our ancestors. Family historians will have come across the records of church courts before, as these were the authorities that issued marriage licences and probated wills before 1858.
But there are many more records in the diocesan archives that are fascinating. Thankfully it is getting easier to locate ancestors in the church courts as many are being indexed and catalogued onto the Access to Archives website.
So if the parish register suggests a child is illegitimate, or the vicar makes a comment about your ancestor in the margins, see if a dispute occurred in the church courts.
Church court records are largely of use to the family historian researching the 16th to 18th centuries, although some of their major functions continued into the middle of the 19th century until they were assumed by the civil courts.
The church courts throw valuable light onto the family lives of our ancestors, who often got up to all sorts of unmentionable activities. These courts often dealt with moral matters and cases of sexual impropriety and are so rich in wicked stories that they earned the nickname 'bawdy courts'.
It has been suggested that an appearance in the church courts of the 18th century would be akin to points on your driving licence today. Appearances before a court were so common that some dioceses pre-printed schedules of penance for fornication, leaving spaces for the names of the parties to be entered in.
The witnesses who gave evidence about their neighbours before the courts also gave important information about themselves, including their names, ages and all the places they have lived in.
In this period could be found a whole network of some three or four hundred ecclesiastical courts whose activities affected many aspects of our ancestors' lives. Just as we have a hierarchy of courts from the local Magistrates' Court to the County Court, the Central Criminal Court to the Courts of Appeal, there was a similar hierarchy of the church.
Published: 2006-08-23
© MMIX