The life & death of Henry Cornish
Henry Cornish died in 1650 but is still remembered in
the town today as the founder of the beautiful almshouses in Church Street
as well as having a street named after him. His ten-page will has recently
been unearthed in the Public Record Office in London and transcribed into
readable form from the 17th century script and quaint spelling of the
original.
Named in Chipping Norton’s royal charter of 1607 as one
of the first members of the new Corporation which was to govern the town,
he was clearly a man of property and considerable social standing in the
community. His will describes him as a gentleman and shows that he owned
many houses in the town including the White Hart Inn and others in High
Street, Middle Row and Tite End (now Spring Street) as well as several
pieces of land in the open fields. Near the White Hart he had a
‘coneygree’ or rabbit warren, which is probably the origin of the name
Coneygree Terrace today. In spite of this wealth his private life had many
sadnesses. In about 1600 he married Sarah Browne, daughter of Thomas
Browne who built Fletchers House in Woodstock (the present county museum),
but although they had twelve children no fewer than ten died in childhood
and the remaining two only lived into their thirties. There is a pitiful
brass plate at the back of St Mary’s church commemorating the death of a
son, named Henry after his father, who died aged nine.
The lack of surviving children was one reason why he
left such generous bequests to the town, and to the poor of Woodstock,
Stow on the Wold and Churchill who were all to receive cash payments on
the day of his funeral. The other motive was his strongly held puritan
belief in charity to the poor. The almshouses were provided at his own
expense for eight aged widows who had to be ‘of honest and godly life and
conversation’. In addition he left money to provide coats and gowns for
two poor men and two poor women and fourpence each to 40 other widows. He
bequeathed 12 other cottages around the town to be let to honest people
who could afford to rent them, but stipulated that the rents should never
be increased. At the other end of the social scale he also gave his fellow
members of the corporation, the ‘Bailiffs and Burgesses of Chipping
Norton’, money for an annual dinner at the White Hart (then the leading
inn in the town) which became known as The Bailiffs Feast and was held for
nearly two hundred years after his death.
After the death of his wife Sarah, Henry married again
but less happily it seems. He explains in his will that he is writing it
secretly with the help of friends to cancel any previous wills he had been
forced to make under pressure from his second wife and her relations when
he was old and ill. He left her money and a home during her life, but
after that everything reverted to his own Cornish relations and to the
Diston family to whom he was also related. His final request was that he
should be buried in the middle aisle of the parish church, close to his
son and daughter, and hopefully he rests there in peace to this day. His
memory lives on in the community to which he gave so much.
Transcribing this will is part of the work of the recently formed
Chipping Norton Research Group, a
dedicated and skilled group who have embarked on the huge task of
transcribing hundreds of Chipping Norton and Over Norton wills and
inventories from the 17th century.
David Eddershaw
