The Campden Wonder
"Time, the great Discoverer of Truth, shall bring to Light this dark and mysterious Business"

Chipping Campden Parish Registers

The earliest surviving parish register for Chipping Campden dates from 1617 and is now stored at Gloucestershire County Record Office (GRO), catalogued under reference P81 IN 1/1. Sadly, an earlier register appears to have been lost some time since the 17th century.

Although normally only available for inspection on microfilm, the archivists at GRO were kind enough to let me inspect the original because in places the ink on the ancient parchment is so faint as to be completely illegible. Unfortunately, there are two or three pages relating to  the 1650s which are completely unreadable. If anyone has access to any equipment or technology that might be able to take an image from these documents and enhance it to allow us to see what is there, probably for the first time in centuries, I would be delighted to hear!

The register lists baptisms, marriages and burials conducted in the parish church at Chipping Campden. I have extracted the Harrison and Perry entries for the period from 1617 to 1692 and these are listed below.

One interesting, and rather frustrating fact about the registers at this time is that the name of the mother of children being baptized is never given. Quite apart from being extremely unfair on the poor woman who has just suffered the agony of childbirth, this also makes it even more difficult to distinguish between children being born to husbands of the same name, and, as we shall see, there appear to have been several separate individuals by the names of William Harrison, John  Harrison and Lewis Harrison at times during the 17th century in Chipping Campden. Moreover, some women appear not even to merit the mention of their Christian name at their burial, being listed simply as "Widow Harrison" or "Widow Perry" (usually spelled "wido").

Bizarrely, while the mother's name is omitted, the names of godparents are given. This can actually be quite useful in identifying relationships between families and individuals and goes some way towards rectifying the omission of mother's names.

Another easily overlooked but significant item that can be found in the registers is the use of the words "Mr" and "Mrs". This seems to be reserved for the higher-status members of Campden society. For example, the parish priest is always "Mr William Bartholemew", the widow of the former incumbent is "Mrs Honor Lillie", while none of the Perrys are ever granted this mark of respect. This can be of use in helping us to distinguish "Mr William Harrison" (very likely the protagonist of our story and feoffee of Campden Grammar School ) from plain old "William Harrison" (more likely the "old William Harrison" mentioned in the list of charitable donations given by Campden Grammar School).

Notes

The following inscription recorded from a headstone in Chipping Campden churchyard should be noted:

Mary, wife of Lewis Harrison, died 5 Oct., 1684. aged 61.

What can we learn from the information tabulated above?

Perrys

Constructing the family tree of Joan, Richard and John Perry is fairly straightforward.

Joan Perry was born Joan Edwards. She married Richard Perry at Chipping Campden on 14th July 1622. We do not know where or when she was born, but she must presumably have been at least 16 when she was married, so presumably by 1660 she was at least in her early fifties, more probably around 60.

PERRY FAMILY TREE

                            Richard Perry  = Joan Edwards

                            m 1622           d 1662 

                           i 1657         

 __________________________________________|______________________________________________

|          |         |      |       |        |         |       |     |      |       |     |

John   Elizabeth Margaret Anne      |  Elizabeth Margaret George Zara   John   Robert Zara

c 1622 c 1624    c 1625   c 1627    |  c 1631    c 1634   c 1634 c 1634 c 1635 c 1637 c 1640  

i 1622 i 1626    d < 1634           |                            d<1640        i 1638

                            Richard = Anne Harris

                                c 1628

                              m 1654

                              d 1662

Key:    

c = Baptized (christened)

i = Buried (interred)

d = Died

m = Married

< = Before

From this it is clear that Joan Perry was widowed some three years prior to Harrison's disappearance. As a widow, she would have been subject to the usual 17th century prejudices and suspicions of witchcraft.

We can also see that Richard Perry was already some 32 years old and had been married for 5-6 years by 1660: no young tearaway. The fact that he was married is confirmed by the mention in Overbury's account of his "Wife's hair-lace". Overbury's account also suggests that he had at least two children, probably more, but there is no baptism record for these children in the registers.

After the death of his father, as eldest surviving male child he would presumably have assumed the role of head of the family and taken some responsibility at least for providing for his mother, brothers and sisters, as well as his own wife and children. This would have given him some degree of influence over his younger brother John.

In 1660, however, John Perry was not the mere boy he is sometimes made out to be. He was probably around 25 years old at the time he confessed to the supposed murder of William Harrison.

Harrisons

Careful study of the Parish Registers of Chipping Campden further reinforces a suspicion already aroused by the records of Chipping Campden Grammar School and other sources: that there were several families called Harrison living in and around Chipping Campden in 1660, and that indeed there were probably 3 or even 4 William Harrisons alive in the area in 1660. Disentangling the lives of these different people is quite a challenge.

The very first Harrison entry in the register is that of the baptism of a John son of John Harrison "weaver" on 30th July 1617.  This is the same occupation as that followed by the William Harrison mentioned in "Men and Armour" in 1608. It seems likely that this William was either John's father or his brother. But it also seems unlikely that either of these men was related in any way to the William Harrison who is the focus of this study. For the steward to one of the most prominent families in the country to have come from a humble family of weavers must have been extremely improbable in 17th-century England.

This distinction between the low-status weaver Harrisons and the high-status family of the steward is consistently reflected in the registers by the use of the titles "Mr" and "Mrs" when referring to the latter.

We can also tell the high-status Harrisons by the company they keep. When William son of William Harrison is baptized in 1637, one of his godfathers is John Gooding, who also acted as a rent collector for the Noel family, and his godmother is Honor Lilly, widow of the former parish priest. Gooding is also godfather to Harrison's daughter Penelope in 1639, while in 1644 one of the godfathers of Harrison's son Rafe is William Bartholemew, the parish priest.

This little group of Noel employees and appointees appears to have formed a fairly close-knit community, for the Harrisons, Goodings and Bartholemews consistently chose one another to be godparents to each other's children. Although the William Harrison who is godfather to Robert Davenport's son William in 1636 could be the older William Harrison (since a William Davenport is godfather to the William son of William Harrison baptized 1621), it could just as well be the William Harrison of Campden Wonder fame. A "Mrs Dorothy Harrison" is a godmother to Hopestil daughter of John Gooding (1636), Mary son of to William Cale (1636), Anne daughter of John Gould (1636),  Penelope daughter of Thomas Sanford (1640), Mary daughter of Rev William Bartholemew  (1641) and to Martha daughter of John Gooding (1641). Is this William Harrison's wife, the infamous "snotty, covetous Presbyterian"? It seems highly likely that if Gooding and Bartholemew should be chosen as godparents to William Harrison's children, then the Dorothy Harrison who acts as godmother to Gooding and Bartholemew's own children should be Harrison own wife. However, if this is right then it casts doubt on the way Mrs Harrison has been depicted over the years. Would William Bartholemew, the "hammer of sectarianism" really have chosen a Presbyterian as godmother to his children?