Steyning Museum Archives: The Vicar who never was.
Just inside the body of our church is a board on which, many years ago, the names of all our known vicars were inscribed – and, since then, the names of subsequent vicars have been added. It has now been decided that a replacement board is needed so a challenge has been issued to find out more about the men – all men, I’m afraid – who have cared for the souls of the people of Steyning over the centuries.
In doing this there have been some unexpected discoveries: some of the listed vicars were not vicars at all but we have found other men we have been able to add to the list – and we know much more about them all than we ever did before.
The story traced by the existing vicars’ board starts with the confident assertion that David Chaplin was our vicar in 1307. But this turns out to be wrong. He was not called David Chaplin, he was not our vicar and the date of 1307 is only partly correct. He was actually called David Cubbel and, in six different documents stretching from 1293 to 1329, he is referred to as David of Steyning, chaplain or David Cubbel, chaplain.
Old documents are fairly careful over their use of terminology and in none of these was he described as the vicar. Whereas two other men – Roger de Wole (in the 1290’s) and Ralph (in 1325) have been shown to have been vicars of Steyning during David’s chaplaincy.
Although David Cubbel was not a vicar, he did have some significance in Steyning’s story. We believe that he was possibly the first chaplain of Steyning’s Chantry of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He it was who, kneeling at the chantry altar in the church, would have said and sung masses and prayed for the souls of Steyning’s dead to speed their passage through purgatory. In 1293, to support him in this role, Hamo Bovet, lord of the manor of Wappingthorne, granted him the revenue from two of his outlying manors of Woghewode and Totyngton. Tottington’s name is unchanged but, after seven hundred years, Woghewode has been more difficult to track down. It could have been what is now known as Hoe Wood, still described as an ‘ancient woodland’, south of Woods Mill.
A further grant was made to David in 1298; this time being of two unnamed parts of the manor of Wickham. This grant was made by Margaret, wife of Richard Fylol, but it was only for the duration of David’s life – for which he, rather charmingly, had to 'render a rose each year on the nativity of John the Baptist' (24th June).
Whether these two unnamed portions of Wickham were also Woghewode and Totyngton, under a different guise we cannot be sure.
They may have been because Wickham itself was part of Wappingthorne and in the 16th century Wowood re-appears as part of the Wappingthorne estate. In 1307, when Richard died, Margaret re-married, this time to a gentleman called William Grandyn, and, to keep it legal, the whole agreement had to be restated – including the rendering of the rose.
However, some years later, the rapacious baron, Hugh Despenser, one of Edward II’s favourites and a very nasty bit of work, somehow managed to seize these lands.
Consequently, when Despenser was convicted of treason and was rather unpleasantly hung, drawn and quartered, the two Wickham properties fell into the hands of the king. It needed a court case in 1329, after David’s death in 1328, to reclaim them for Margaret and her successors.
It is through these small seven hundred year old nuggets of information that we learn about David who, because he was never a vicar in Steyning, is now being removed from the vicars’ board.
For those vicars whose names will still appear on the new board and for the new ones we have uncovered during our researches, more will be revealed by a number of short presentations given on 13th October – at 17:30 that evening in the parish church.
Article by: Chris Tod - Steyning Museum.