Herald - Issue 424

v THE HERALD - Your Community Magazine v 2nd June 2022 • The HERALD • Page 59 Yours Faithfully... 24” high from £550 30” high from £675 (Prices inclusiveVAT) Installation anywhere in England andWales Memorials refurbished and inscriptions added Colours and full range of memorials available You are invited to BETHANY CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Rollestone Road, Holbury Every Sunday, 6.20pm for 6.30pm C hristian W orship & T eaching 023 8089 2153 Everyone Welcome HENRY AUDLEY Within the building of All Saint’s Church, Fawley, is a brass plaque which depicts the passing of Henry Audley Esquire. e actual site of the grave probably disappeared when the Victorians renovated the building. Henry was born circa 1550 and died on the 9th November 1606. He probably has the oldest traceable memorial of All Saint’s Church Fawley, that still survives. It is located inside the church in a dark corner on a pillar located near the internal door to Saint Nicholas Chapel. e memorial reads ‘Here lyeth the body of Henry Avdlay of Holbvry, Esq. His Ma(jes)ties late Receiver Ge(n)erall of the Cov(n)ties of Sovth(amp)t(on), Wiltes(hi) r(e) & Glovces(tershire) who departed this mortall life the X1 of Nov(ember) 1606 and is here interred.’ * e industrious polishing of the brass plaque over the years has rendered some of the text unreadable. In 1572 Henry Audley married Cecily, the daughter of John More of Crabbet, Worthing in Sussex. Henry was a man with ‘his nger in many pies’. He was the Member of Parliament for Whitchurch in 1584, re-elected in 1586 and again in 1589. A man of some note in the areas that he lived. Henry’s ‘Tale’ takes place in an interesting period in the history of England. We are in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First and the commencement of the reign of King James the First. e two monarchs had one thing in common….they were both cash poor. Elizabeth the First realised that the Forests of England would render a healthy much needed income for e Crown. Consequently she changed some laws and devised other new ones in order to be able to receive revenue from the wood from the forests, especially from the Crown Estates. is was not popular with the local persons already controlling the sale of the various types of wood in these forests, as it heavily impacted their own lucrative personal income. Di erent types of ‘Warrants’, either from the Justice of the Forest or from the Exchequer were granted. e Justice of the Forest (South of Trent) was a sub national o ce and included all forest lands South of the Trent, therefore it was not a very ‘ local’ o ce. Some pertained to the actual felling of trees and others to the use of fallen trees and branches. It all became very confused and open to illegal sales. erefore, in 1567 the o ce for a Preservator was made in order to solve the problems i.e. to have an independent oversight. In Hampshire there were several New Forest ‘concealed lands’, one of which was a ‘concealed land’ at Rollestone. is was at the heart of a bitter battle for rights to the wood. Wood was felled to repair the house at Rollestone that belonged to Henry Audley. Originally the concealed lands had been lands held from the Crown by paying certain rents, most of which had been rented from the Exchequer in the medieval period, and were not to do with the rights to the wood. e role for the permission to fell trees had always been in the remit of the ‘Woodward’ which was the o ce that Henry had purchased from Arthur Swayne for the sum of £300 (approximately £41,363 in today’s value) in 1595. Henry then managed to acquire a grant of o ce for his friend William Christmas to become the Woodward on 11th November 1595. It was originally the role of the Woodward to say which trees could be felled for general use, such as building dwellings or structures and the branches and for heating etc. As the previous system had not been successful the Exchequer had not been receiving the correct amount of revenue. One of the complaints had been that the paperwork was too complicated and took too long to complete. (Not much di erent to modern times!) e new law gave the Exchequer complete control of the wood sales in the ‘Crown Estates’. Henry was now in a very strong position because he was both a member of the Exchequer and was in a controlling position to the Woodward, William Christmas, whom he had appointed. From 1585 he had served on committees regarding records of monies paid to the Exchequer. Tree felling was guided by Commission but William for the wood felled and sold. Research shows that there followed a long string of wood cutting o ences where the submitted paperwork to the Exchequer bore TALES FROM THE GRAVEYARD OF ALL SAINT’S CHURCH FAWLEY by Patricia Hedley- Goddard where false documents were submitted and the records show that it was Baron Sir John Fortescue who had given them the grant in February 1592 to fell the trees. In reality there was no such warrant given. Certainly by the time Henry Audley died in November 1606 he was in both a powerful position and nancially very well o . He owned a Tudor manor in Knighton (still in existence), a property in Whitchurch and lands in Dorset. He owned a Hampshire property plus an estate in Holbury/Fawley. His wife became sole executrix of his will. William Pytt of Westminster, William Christmas of Southampton and his brother-in -law Edward Moore of Odiham were made overseers to his will and 6 days a er making it, Henry died. e brass memorial plaque in the church, sadly, has a radiator beneath it and there is no sign of Henry’s original memorial in situ. However, in the vestry is a very ancient top half of a full length sarcophagus which could possibly be part of Henry’s original memorial. Unfortunately it is unmarked, so we will never know who the original owner was. e only bene ciary to the will other than his wife was a omas Harvey who received some of the land in Dorset. His only surviving daughter contested the will because she had been le nothing from this vast amount of wealth, but judgement was ruled against her. e widow was a very wealthy person, and in 1607, less than a year later she married William Christmas. One wonders just who was the one who had a greed for such wealth! *brackets enclose letters not on the actual memorial. My thanks to Richard Reeves for alerting me to this set of research, and correcting my misunderstandings within the original texts. ey were highly complex and sometimes di cult to understand. If I have made errors, please forgive me. My thanks also to my husband David, for further researching the family detail of Henry. no relationship to what had actually been felled. Ash trees were cut down and recorded as being sold for rewood when in reality they had been sold to omas Page, a wheel wright. Whole woods were felled and described as being sold for rewood when in reality they had been sold for vast pro ts as good timber. In July 1598 there was a Commission inquiry, consisting of 9 trusted o cers regarding the misuse and mismanagement of the forest by William Christmas. William was summoned before the o cers but did not appear, nor give any response to the inquiry. A writ was signed by Henry Audley but no punishment was given to William Christmas (his friend). One of the tricks of the Woodward’s was to lop and trim trees and stack these pieces round the remaining live tree to make it die. is was not just on the odd tree but on whole woods of mature trees. ey falsely felled nearly 700 small oak trees, o cially for the forti cations of the Isle of Wight, by using a legal warrant granted by the late Lord Treasurer, dated August 16th 1597. is amounted to 2000 tons of timber which Henry Audley, William Christmas and a deputy Woodward named Oseland, converted to their own use, thus defrauding the Crown. Taking into consideration that 10 trees at this time in history were worth about £30 (£4136 in today’s currency), they were into large scale fraud. A further 160 oak trees were felled at Setley, in the New Forest. ese were allegedly for repairs to the tenement buildings in Southampton. 28 oaks were felled which were recorded as being used to fortify the city of Portsmouth but in reality were sold for private gain by Henry, William and Oseland. ey was the person who account ed seemed to have repeatedly defrauded the Crown, but eluded punishment and were granted a pardon. eir friends were the jury members in the court hearing held in Romsey,