The Muster Roll of 1535

The national Muster Roll of 23 May 1535 was ordered by Henry VIII to take stock of England’s military capability, in terms of the country’s able-bodied adult males and the weaponry they possessed (there being no standing army of any kind) – this in anticipation of possible invasion from abroad, with a coalition of France and Scotland seen as being the likely source of aggression. It was carried out county by county, by Commissioners appointed by the Crown, with each shire’s hundreds and half-hundreds being assessed by their own duly appointed constables and those of the individual parishes themselves. The resulting record for Lowestoft follows.

The letters appended to each man named represents his level of fighting capacity and expertise – which was probably meant to show his physical capability and the particular armaments he had in his possession. Letters aa and a stand for “principal archer” and “able archer”, with the occasional aaa seen perhaps referring to someone of outstanding ability and equipment. The bb and b identify “principal billman” and “able billman” – again with bbb seeming to indicate excellence of some kind. The bill was a billhook (as used in hedging and forestry), but with a sharp spike protruding from its top and a curved hook forming part of the back of the cutting blade. It could be (and was, in capable hands) a formidable, close-quarters battlefield weapon. And all men who held such weaponry were expected to keep in some sort of regular practice with their equipment. 

Suffolk 

Lovynglond

Half Hundred[s] of Mutford and Lovyngland

Inspection and supervision of the head-count musters in the Lowestoft area, in the aforesaid county on behalf of the aforesaid hundred, on Monday 24 May in the twenty-seventh year of King Henry the Eighth [1535] – by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith and Lord of Ireland, and Supreme Head of the Church of England – [carried out] in the presence of Sir John Jernegan and John Harvey, gentleman, two commissioners of our said Lord King assigned to this division within the said county (among other commissioners holding effective responsibilities elsewhere) and directed thence.

[This introduction is translated from the original Latin.]

Christian name abbreviations given as follows by the document’s transcriber.

Lowestofte

The document above was transcribed by E. Powell, using Exchequer Accounts K.R. 59/4(as they were catalogued then, at the former Public Record Office) and published in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, vol XVI, pp. 38-40 (1918).

Weaponry referred to in the hands of those listed as archers or billlmen

• Bill (69) – hand-held pole weapon, five to six feet in length, with curved steel cutting head having a claw to the rear and a sharp spike protruding from the top. Basically, a hedge-bill converted to close encounter military use.

• Bow (41) – the English longbow, made of yew wood and some six feet in length, with drawing power of about 100 pounds or more.

• Harness (39) – primarily, body armour of some kind, consisting of breast-plate and back-plate. Helmets may have been included in the term. Perhaps the most famous use of the word occurs in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, lines 51-2, as the central figure prepares to meet his nemesis, Macduff: “Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! Come wrack! / At least we’ll die with harness on our back.”

Numerical analysis of those named

• 130 people recorded (127 men and 3 women – all three of the latter being widows).

• 8 of the 41 archers had body armour and 6 of the 69 billmen. And one man in each category also owned a horse.

• 17 men are not classified as either archers or billmen, with fourteen of them having body armour – and three of these also owning horses.

• Horse ownership is recorded in 6 cases (including 1 widow), with Robert Bache, Thomas Annot, Robert Hodds Snr. and John Jettor all identifiable as merchants and with Anne Goddard being the widow of one.

• 1 individual is described as a horseman, without ownership being stated, and 1 other (last mentioned in the listing) has no kind of description at all. Horse management and the ability to ride are possibly being indicated in the former case.

• The single plusin dorso comment (Thomas Davy) is difficult to interpret. If is a Latin phrase plus in dorso, it has the literal translation of “more in/on the back” – but without any firm indication of what this might have meant.

Explanatory notes

• The Half-hundred of Lothingland is dealt with first, with Lowestoft ninth in order – following Belton, Southtown, Oulton, Burgh Castle, Somerleyton, Gorleston, Bluindeston and Lound. Gunton is not referred to and may have had its small number of able-bodied men included in the Lowestoft list.

• Its 130 named individuals is by far the largest in number recorded in both half-hundreds.

• Use has been made of square backets, mainly to give more common versions of surnames (where these are known from other documentary sources).

• The punctuation, as used throughout, is the format employed in the Muster list.

• Use of the final -e on the ends of surnames (e.g. Belle and Rooke) was very much standard practice of the time.

• So was the use of y as a vowel, instead of i. 

• A number of the surnames recorded here do not appear in the 1524-5 Lay Subsidy list, which may well reflect the transitory element of the male population, which was largely younger men on the move from place to place on short-term employment of one kind or another.

• The two occupations given (draper and barber) are to distinguish between the two men named as R. Aleyn.

• The two commissioners referred to in the introduction, Sir John Jernegan and Thomas Harvey, were (respectively) lord of the manor of Somerleyton and a member of the gentry residing in the parish of Oulton. Their families remained Roman Catholic in belief and practice after the Protestant Reformation in England had run its course and were identified and named as being potentially sympathetic to Spain (along with other Lothingland men) in an assessment made in 1584 of the Island being a likely point of invasion from the Spanish-occupied Netherlands. See Lothingland Invasion Scare (1584) elsewhere in these pages.

• John Jettor (merchant), recorded as having seven sets of body armour, was Lowestoft’s wealthiest citizen, whose father and grandfather were the leading donors of money spent on building and embellishing St. Margaret’s Church during the late 15th and early 16th century. His son Robert (or grandson of the same name) became the most heavily fined of all of Suffolk’s Roman Catholic recusants, when a sum of £1,500 was imposed on him in October 1586 – a penalty which bankrupted him. The family had already moved out of Lowestoft, to take up residence in the small nearby parish of Flixton.

• There are three examples in the list (relating to James Trappet, John Rotherham and 

William Mewse) where the old genitive case of a noun is used. Adoption of the aspostrophe s in England, to denote ownership, was already well under way by 1535 – but the earlier practice is found continuing here. Jas. Trappet his servant does not refer to the preceding person J. Bubbyng, but to the unnamed servant of James Trappet himself. Today, we would write Jas. Trappet’s servant. And do the same, also, for other two examples. Interestingly, the three servants’ masters themselves are not included in the Muster list – for reasons unknown. Old age, long-term illness or general frailty might have been the cause, but there is no use of either senex or egrotat (as in the 1584 Muster) to indicate this.

• The John Grantam referred to as having a servant named W. Knyff (seventh in the list) is not listed in his own right, either.

• It is interesting to note the use of Roman numerals for the presence of body armour – the particular numbers in question being 1, 2 & 7. Perhaps there was some kind of connection with the Muster’s introduction being written in Latin – this language being very much that of legal documentation.

• The population of Lowestoft in 1535 (using the 1524-5 Lay Subsidy as the means of calculation) was in the region of 1,000-1,100. By the time of the 1584 Muster List – using parish register data – it had risen to c. 1,500.

CREDIT: David Butcher