Pensford Feoffees and a 16th C. Scandal

Some years ago, the late Barbara Bowes, a Publow and Pensford resident and local historian, sent me a copy of a draft short piece on the subject of the historic 'Pensford Feoffees'.  She was intent on writing a book on the locality and this might have been intended as part of it, although sadly there is little that can be traced of the project.

The Oxford dictionary has this definition of the term 'Feoffees': 

"Plural noun: feoffees a trustee invested with a freehold estate to hold in possession for a purpose, typically a charitable one. Historically (in feudal law) a person to whom a grant of freehold property is made." 

Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feoffee has this somewhat more explanatory definition:

Feoffee

Under the feudal system in England, a feoffee (/fɛˈfiː, fiːˈfiː/) is a trustee who holds a fief (or "fee"), that is to say an estate in land, for the use of a beneficial owner. The term is more fully stated as a feoffee to uses of the beneficial owner. The use of such trustees developed towards the end of the era of feudalism in the Middle Ages and declined with the formal ending of that social and economic system in 1660. The development of feoffees to uses may have hastened the end of the feudal system, since their operation circumvented vital feudal fiscal mechanisms.

Development

The practice of enfeoffing feoffees with fees, that is to say of granting legal seizin in one's land-holdings ("holdings" as only the king himself "owned" land by his allodial title) to a group of trusted friends or relatives or other allies whilst retaining use of the lands, began to be widespread by about 1375.^[1] The purpose of such an action was two-fold:

• Akin to modern tax avoidance, it was a legal loop-hole to avoid the suffering of the customary feudal incidents, namely the payment of feudal relief on an inheritance, the temporary loss of control of a fiefdom through wardship where the landholder was under the age of majority of 21, and the forcible marriage of a young heiress. Nor could the land-holding escheat, that is to say revert permanently to the overlord, as was customary where the land-holder died without a legal heir. When the fiefdom was held by a group of feoffees, the death of the beneficial holder was legally irrelevant to its continued holding by them. They simply allow the lands to continue to be used by the deceased's heir. The feoffees are "an undying corporation which never suffered a minority and could not be given in marriage" (McFarlane, p. 146). The feudal overlord, the king himself if the land was held in-chief, was not entitled to exact feudal relief from the new beneficiary nor was he entitled to seize control of the lands and their revenues until such heir was of full-age, nor was he entitled to sell the heiress in marriage or to marry her to one of his own sons. This had a considerably deleterious effect on the royal finances, which state of affairs was rectified by the aggressive and imaginative new fiscal measures taken by King Henry VII after his accession in 1485.
• The land-holder was able effectively to bequeath his land to whomsoever he wished, and was no longer bound by the custom of primogeniture where the eldest son alone had the right, on payment of the appropriate feudal relief, to inherit, that is to demand to be re-enfeoffed with his father's land-holdings by his father's overlord.

The effect was that on a man's death he appeared to hold little or no land, whilst in reality he had full use of it and of the revenues derived from it. If he was thought by the county escheator to have been a tenant-in-chief, a jury for an Inquisition post mortem would be convened to enquire into what manors he held from the king and who was his legal heir. Frequently the verdict of such inquisitions even in the case of the decease of the most influential men of the county, was "he holds no lands of the king in this county". Such reports can be a major source of confusion to the modern historian or biographer who is unaware of the operation of feoffees to uses. As McFarlane summarised "it can make a great landowner (sic) appear to die a landless man".^[1]

Procedure for creation[edit]

To effect such an arrangement a sealed charter was usually drawn up which specified all relevant matters, such as who the feoffees were to be, to whose use the feoffees were to hold the lands, for what period, who were the desired heirs of the settlor, what provision should be made for his widow, etc. Such charter appears as a conveyance or alienation, and may be mistaken as such by the unwary modern researcher. Likewise, such a charter may be misinterpreted by the modern observer as signifying that those named as recipients of the conveyance are themselves beneficial owners in the form of a commercial partnership, and therefore may be mistaken for wealthy men.

Legal status[edit]

Feoffee is a historical term relating to the law of trusts and equity, referring to the owner of a legal title of a property when he is not the equitable owner. Feoffees essentially had their titles stripped by the Statute of Uses 1535, whereby the legal title to the property being held by the feoffee was transferred to their cestui que use. The modern equivalent of a feoffee to uses is the trustee, one who holds a legal and managerial ownership in trust for the enjoyment benefit and use of the beneficiary.

Modern usage[edit]

The term is still in use today to mean a trustee invested with a freehold estate held in possession for a purpose, typically a charitable one.^[2] Some examples include: the trustees of the Chetham's Hospital charity in Manchester,^[3] in the towns of Colyton, Devon and Bungay in Suffolk, and the trustees of the Sponne and Bickerstaffe charity in Towcester, Northamptonshire.^[4] The Feoffees of St Michael's Spurriergate are the trustees of a charity that helps with the restoration of churches in York.^[5] In Ipswich, Massachusetts, US the Feoffees of the Grammar School have been trustees of a piece of land donated for the use of the town since the 1600s.^[6] In the village of Ecclesfield, South Yorkshire, the feoffees contribute to looking after the fabric of the church, Church of St Mary, Ecclesfield and also make other donations for the benefit of the local population but in the past they used to have responsibility for law and order, punishment of the guilty and upkeep of the roads. The Spalding Rectory Feoffees were formed in 1620 to pay the stipend of the Vicar of Spalding, Lincolnshire, which they continue to do.

Other examples are the companies of the Selby Feoffee and Welfare Charity and the Chittlehampton Feoffees.

As of 2021, there are 135 active Feoffees registered at the Charity Commission in Britain & 4 Feoffees registered at Company's House.

Of which, presumably those of Pensford and Compton Dando, both situated on the River Chew in North Somerset (now 'BANES') are two examples. Although existent from the Medieval Period onwards, the increasingly perilous position of the Church Estate leading up to the Dissolution of the Monasteries (c.1538) may have prompted the creation of Feoffees in the early 16th Century, including the two referred to above.

Barbara Bowes as a member of the Parochial Church Council had access to extant surviving Feoffees documents which she states consisted of five "dated 1714 which continue through to 1870." As with all legal titles relating to land, it can and did, give rise to dispute, an example of which she describes in some detail. 

She points out that the Pensford Feoffees dates from 1527 when certain prosperous local residents vested land and property in a Feoffees instrument, for the benefit of the local St Thomas a Beckett Church - a 'Chapel of Ease' or subsidiary Church in the Parish of Stanton Drew. St Thomas dates from the late 13th C. and early 14th.  It reflected the development of the economic and commercial importance of effectively, a small early English town, divided between two parishes by a river boundary. 

The River Chew was an important source of power and water for manufacturing mainly high-worth broadcloths, for which it was famous. This supported and encouraged other commercial activities and trades centred around a weekly market and twice yearly fair, drawing farmers, buyers and sellers from an extended area. It also provided a crossing point over the river on trade routes both north/south (Bristol to Shepton Mallet and Wells) and east/west (a packhorse route to Keynsham, Bath and London).

The Pensford Feoffees largely divested itself of its assets in the late 19th Century to pay towards a brand new parish church, which still stands, now converted into a domestic dwelling, on its island home. It is still attached to the original 13th C. tower which has been relatively recently consecrated as an ecclesiatical structure. However one building with its own local history, remains the sole remnant of the Feofees bequest, namely the Church Room adjacent to the Mill Race and River Chew, used now for village events and meetings.

Barbara Bowes gives an account of some of the details of the Pensford Feofees and in particular an interesting 16th C. dispute relating to it. The following is a faithful copy of her rough draft of an article, which I will type in itallics for clarity of authorship. I have only made minor changes in layout and punctuation to aid reading.

THE PENSFORD FEOFFEES 

By Barbara Bowes

The story starts in 1527 when certain prosperous citizens of Pensford, amongst them a wealthy clothier named John Bisse, under the guidance of Sir John St Loe of Sutton Court, set up a Trust, known as the 'Church Lands Trust of the Church or Chapell of St. Thomas in Pensford', by which the rents from certain landsand propertieswere to be used - "especially to the maintenance and findings of a Minister ..... and to the needful repairing the Church and upon other charitable uses if the occasion did so require."

There are many similar Trusts throughout the country, some dating from as early as the 7th Century: the Church at Compton Dando has a similar Trust founded at the same time. The timing is interesting as 1527 is eleven years before the Dissolution of the Monasteries and opinion is dividedwhether the people who created these Trustscould have had some suspicionof what lay ahead and that these Churches, both of which were connected to Monasteries, could become impoverished.

Amongst the papers relating to the Trust isthe one about the missing documents, which is the account of an enquiry which would report to the Chancery of Queen Elizabeth (I) into the misappropriation of the Feoffees papers.

It is the custom that when the number of Feoffees, about eight, administering the Trust, falls to one or two, the survivors must "enfeoff" new members, drawn from men of standing living within a certain radius of the parish. John Bisse, who died in 1565, had failed to do this - he was apparently in bad health for some time. According to one witness, "he had said in her hearing several times that he would do so" but obviously had failed to take the necessary action.

His son, another John Bisse, a man who had several times been accused of dishonesty, had apparently handed them to Tristram Cotterell at the house of his father, who lived at Failand.  Some of the evidence centres upon whether, as Cotterell claimed, he or his father was paid money by the people of Pensford to advise them.

However the situation had dragged on until finally John Coorte and Edward Baylie, both tanners of Pensford, under the leadership of Henry Bynny, late Vicar of Stanton Drew and now Vicar of High Littleton, decided to beard Cotterell in his chambers in Chancery Lane (London) and retrieve the documents.

They met Cotterellat his chambers in Symons Inn, in Chancery Lane and there then followedthree days of farce in which Cotterell first denied having them, then said. "peradventure they were a hundred miles away and were the property of John Bisse."

They persevered and he then suggested they went to the Middle Temple, where he would deliver them, but in the middle of the case "he stole from them" and disappeared. Eventually after many delaying tactics on the part of Cotterell, they arrived at Symons Inn at about 11 o'clock in the evening and after some argument the papers were released.

Henry Bynny said that they must be examined, so they went to the shop next door to use the candle and discovered the Deed had been "razed, torn and defaced in the lower part of it and the old labels and seal taken off and a new seale put thereto through the date and the Notary's marks rubbed off."

Cotterell denied the accusation that he had changed the seal "with very lofty words. At this point the narrative ends but it can be presumed the Deeds were returned. Although there is a gap in the documents of enfeoffment, we have the first of five documents dated 1714, which continue through to 1870.

Until 1902, the Church was in the Parish of Stanton Drew and all the properties were sold to service a large mortgage taken out to repair the Church after a disastrous fire in 1868. The Tower which dates from the late 13th C. was not affected and still remains consecrated. When the main part of the Church was declared 'Redundant' in 1981, the Charity Commissioners ruled that the proceeds from what was now only a monetary Trust, should be used for the upkeep of the Church Room, which had been built as the first school in Pensford, on one of the plots belonging to the Trust.

Another interestingevent in the history of St. Thomas in Pensford, was that in 1473 the Church was put under interdict and the Clerk, Sir Nicholas Northron excommunicated for allowing unlicensed preachers to take services in the Church. 

This interdict only lasted a few months, as with Christmas approaching, Sir James Ormonde of Belluton, petitioned the Bishop to lift it. Sir Nicholas remained excommunicated and there were other occasions when unlicensed preachers were allowed to preach in Pensford and members who invited them were tried by the Bishop's courts. This was at the time when Lollardy was being widely disseminated around the Bristol area.

The grandfather and father of John Locke, the great 17th C. Philosopher, lived at Belluton and all worshipped at Pensford Church and all left money to it and to the poor of Pensford and Publow.

Now the Church of St Thomas, which holds so many strands of our national history, stands in the centre of our village falling into decay and this generation, unlike of the 16th C., seem unable to help it. END.

NOTE: In around 2010 the Church was purchased by an enterprising couple who after obtaining planning permission, converted it skillfully into an amazing home.  The above article predates this and so does not make reference to it.  The transformation was followed by 'Restoration Home' and can be viewed on YouTube here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKIdDgT96Nc  

Tower clock appeal:  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090854410204