Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 88

Bradgate Park is a large open area of historic parkland four miles north-west of Leicester, managed by the Bradgate Park Trustees for the benefit of the local and wider public. Most of the park has open access during daylight hours and there are miles of informal paths. In recent years a large percentage of this area has been blanketed by bracken, growing to a height of well over 1m and getting on for 2m in places, completely hiding the ground surface. In the spring of 2012 the park authorities extended their clearance of bracken, allowing the surface of the ground, including any undulations and earthworks, to be seen clearly for the first time. This was noted by Anthony Squires, who had been studying the history of the park for many years. He shared his research with Robert Hartley, formerly a curator and archaeologist with the Leicestershire County Council Museums Service, who previously had also observed historic features in the park, mainly from air survey in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In April 2013, metal detectorist Chris Heap discovered a decorated socketed axe in a field near Hathern, in north-west Leicestershire. He reported the find to Wendy Scott, his local county Finds Liaison Officer, who contacted Dot Boughton, Finds Liaison Officer for Cumbria and Lancashire, who specialises in socketed axes from the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (c.1000–600 BC). The socketed axe is now recorded on the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database (www.finds.org.uk/database) under the find identification LEIC-1ED197. It is described as an Early Iron Age socketed axe of Sompting type, dating from c.800–600 BC. A grid reference of 10 figures for the findspot of the axe was provided by the finder.

In the Leicestershire parish church of St Mary’s, Lutterworth, where the controversial Oxford philosopher and theologian John Wyclif served as rector from 1375 until his death in 1384, and where he resided full-time beginning in 1381, the walls are adorned by at least two paintings that date from the later middle ages. Both decorations were discovered by the noted Victorian architect Sir Gilbert Scott, who supervised the restoration of the church in the middle of the nineteenth century; they were further restored in the late twentieth century, as the parish prepared to celebrate the sixth centenary of Wyclif’s death.

Most references place the medieval Kirby Priory in the field called Brummels, immediately north of the parish church. This article challenges that view and locates the priory about half a mile away from Brummels in the Kirby Park area. It was probably on the site of the seventeenth-century mansion of Erasmus de la Fontaine II and close to the former moated manor house of Roger Beler I.

Robert Johnson, rector of North Luffenham, and from 1591 archdeacon of Leicester, accumulated an extraordinary estate, through marriages and investments. In the months before his death in July 1625 he was occupied in – even preoccupied by – making arrangements for the distribution of this wealth. Confronted by competing demands of family and augmenting his educational establishments, as well as making customary provision for the local poor, between April and July he not only composed his will but instructed three codicils. The contexts of those decisions are worked through here.

English clerical incumbents who lived and functioned in the immediate post-1945 period were much more fortunate than those who worked in the inter-war period. Their expectations were different from those who had waited in vain for the return of young men from the trenches after 1918. It was a period of relative stability. Throughout England as a whole the number of Easter Day communicants in parish churches rose from 1,728,940 in 1947 to 1,899,469 in 1956. Between 1956 and 1962 there was an increase to more than two million. Electoral rolls varied very little, from 2,989,704 in 1947 to 2,682,181 in 1966. At the same time the number of benefices fell from 12,838 in 1951 to 11,314 in 1966, while the total number of incumbents was reduced from 11,300 in 1951 to 10,198 in 1966. The total assistant curates, however, increased from 2,200 in 1951 to 3,262 in 1966, indicating that there were plenty of men prepared to put themselves forward for ordination.