Top Full text of the 1655 court case
A year after transcribing the abstract above I took another look at the document and ordered a copy, which duly arrived, allowing a full transcription, yet presenting a strange anomaly at the end.
This is the finall agreement made in the Court at Lancaster on Saturday the four and twentieth day of March in the year of our Lord one thousand hundred fifty four Before Richard Newdygate one of the Justices of the Upper Bench And Robert Hatton sergeant at Law Justices at Lancaster And others then come there and sent Betweene Edward May gent and Alexander Standish gent plaintifes And Richard Standish esquire and Elizabeth his wife deforciants of the mannors of Duxbury Heapey Whittle-le-Woods Heath Charnock and Anglezarke with the apppurtenances and one hundred and twenty messuages four water corne mills one hundred and twenty gardens fifty orchards one thousand acres of land two hundred acres of meadow four hundred acres of pasture fifty acres of wood six hundred acres of moss two hundred acres of marsh four hundred acres of furze and heath fifty shillings rent and comon of pasture with the appurtenances in Duxbury Heapey Whittle in the Woods Heath Charnock Anlezarkh Standish Langtree and Chorley Whereupon a plea of covenant was sinnoned [signed?] betweene them in the same court, that is to say that the said Richard and Elizabeth have acknowledged the said manors tenements rent and comon of pasture with the appurtenances to be the right of the said Edward As those with the said Edward and Alexander have of the gifte of the said Richard and Elizabeth And those they have remised and quite claymed from them and their heires unto the said Edward & Alexander and the heires of the said Edward foriver And moreover the said Richard and Elizabeth have granted for themselves and the heires of the said Richard that they will warrant the aforesaid mannors tenements rent and comon of pasture with the appurtenances unto the said Edward and Alexander and the heires of the said Edward against them the said Richard and Elizabeth and their heires for ever And for this acknowledgment remission quite clayme warranty fyne and agreement the said Edward and Alexander have given to the said Richard and Elizabeth six hundred pounds sterling (L.R.O) DP397/21/17)
Edward and Alexander gave six hundred pounds to Richard and Elizabeth? How could this be? If Alexander was entitled to the estates by right of inheritance, why should he pay for them? This would be adding insult to injury. In any case the rest of the text makes it very clear that the case went against Richard and Elizabeth and it could only have been because of their paying up that Gilbert would have followed suit.
One potential clue is the very date on which this settlement was copied, i.e. 24 March, the very last day of the year 1654-55 (the new year started on 25 March, Lady Day, until the calendar reform of 1753). This date appears so often in documents that one suspects it was the day when copies of many documents concerning court cases during the preceding Assizes were drawn up from notes made during the hearings. In this case, it would indeed have been a copy 'after the event', with all the potential for inaccuracies that copying involves. Another clue is that there are no signatures on the document, which seems to confirm that it was a copy made by the clerk of the court some time after the case itself. It will presumably always remain a mystery why, if the award was presented the wrong way round and all concerned knew this, Colonel Richard made no effort to have it corrected. Or perhaps he did? This document needs to be compared with the one discovered by Farrer in the Feet of Fines. Although I have the greatest of faith in the integrity, intentions and skills of clerks of the time (unlike others, who have called them 'nincompoops' and similar when confronted with apparent inaccuracies in copying) mistakes did happen. It seems that the only logical interim explanation here is that this particular clerk misread his own (or someone else’s? shorthand?) notes and produced the 17th century equivalent of a typo by awarding the fine the wrong way round. The fact that it is a “Final Concord” and that a previous “covenant” was involved implies that the case lasted a considerable time.
Among other additional and interesting pieces of information emerging from the complete text is that obviously several people were called as witnesses or to provide further information in writing: “others then come there and sent”. We can only guess (although this is the only plausible conjecture) that these were local friends of the family whose memories stretched back to include a knowledge of Myles's ancestry and his departure on the Mayflower. Edward May seems to have fulfilled his commission from 'Alexander Standish gent' admirably by conducting his legal and genealogical investigations thoroughly, not only by locating relevant witnesses, whose testimony was obviously convincing enough to the two judges concerned, which resulted in his winning the case, but also by accepting future responsibility via himself and his heirs to guarantee the final satisfactory conclusion of the agreement. Perhaps this is a clue that Edward May and his heirs were still living in Old England?
It is also interesting that Richard was accompanied six times in this document by his wife Elizabeth, at a time when wives’ interests and property were totally subordinate to their husbands’. This document is unique (in my experience of 16th and 17th century settlements) in placing the wife on an equal footing with the husband. Elizabeth must have played some rather important role in this story, which we will probably never be able to unravel, but at least we know exactly who she was: a younger daughter of Peter Legh of Adlington in Cheshire, son of Sir Piers Legh of Lyme. (Ormerod gives complete pedigrees of branches of this family in The History of Cheshire, including where Colonel Richard fits in, and Elizabeth’s sisters and husbands also appear in Colonel Richard’s will of 1657. Her ancestry is also displayed in her coat of arms, quartered into husband Richard's in a stained glass window in St Laurence's, Chorley. A full description appears in his biography.)