The nobility’s penchant for killing each other made way for the rise of a class who were not quite middle class but for want of a better word, we call The Gentry.
It was sometime around the Wars of the Roses period that Great Baddow was given a charter allowing them to hold a market, which further helped develop the place as a village. It was already well served with chantry schools, with that extra one from the Duke of Gloucester’s and Henry V’s butler, Thomas Killie, coming on line in 1440. The education consisted of nothing we could call science and technology. It was still two hundred years before Jasper Jeffrey a well-off local cooper set up a school in Great Baddow specifically for teaching arithmetic and other useful skills for the trades, but Medieval England was still far more literate than the rest of Europe.

Jasper Jeffrey's school
As the lower classes attained a bit more of a share in the wealth, they also became more demanding of better places to live. Prior to this era people slept with their animals, slept in the halls of their masters, and lived in what were little better than wooden sheds. But now we begin to find brick buildings with lots of chimneys, meaning instead of one big hall with heating, a number of rooms could be heated and one could have a bit of privacy. This era has been labelled The Great Rebuilding, and the privacy to read and study should not be underestimated as a vehicle for revolution.


A literate population meant that Kings had to be a little bit savvier and appeal to more than just a bunch of barons. In fact, a savvy king could appeal to the lower orders and use their support to bolster their claim to power and challenge obstreperous nobility. There were two ways of doing this: an appeal to their intellects, and far more effective, an appeal to their pocket.
Henry the Eighth became rather enamoured with the Humanist Ideology, which more or less said a King’s job was to make sure everyone could make a decent living. This idea interestingly had emerged in China circa 500 BC during their warring states period hence Huang Di, the first emperor’s obsession with standardising weights and measures and indulging in large infrastructure projects. Serious study of Chinese thought by Europeans did not begin until the Portuguese set up their colony in Macao in 1557. I mention this here just to point out that as yet England was not the centre of the world and in global terms was by no means an advanced nation.
For Henry, probably having a meal off China plates was his only real awareness of this. His humanist ideas came from the rediscovery of Greek and Roman philosophers who probably knew more about China than the average English monarch until James the second met Sheng Fu Tsung. In 1680 this Chinese Christian travelled to Europe and got a job cataloguing Chinese books at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. By then Isaac Newton was already working on his “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” which catapulted us all into a different era and, not to exaggerate, made the rather unstable backwater of England, the most important country in the world… along with Scotland of course.

Sheng Fu Tsung
Henry’s big humanist idea, not too different from Huang Di’s, was to make everyone richer by deregulating LAND! That is, in 1534 he dissolved the monasteries and sent commissioners like Lord Petre and Thomas Mildmay to oversee the project in Essex. Perhaps it was motivated a little by his lust for Ann Boleyn and a need to rid himself of the influence of foreign Popes, but he was nudged into this solution by Thomas Cromwell, the son of a Putney blacksmith, who I am certain had some idea that this was a means of “levelling up.” A mere six years later he was executed as a lot of people saw it as undermining the nobility, let alone the church!
Naturally the Petres and Mildmays of the project gave themselves chunks of land as well as arranging the King’s share. And so a Great Baddow family with marriage connections to the Mildmays emerged as the first Lords of the Manor of Great Baddow! Enter the Paschalls, a family with land holdings in Basildon, Nevendon, Vange, and Pitsea, to name but a few. In fact, they owned Manors all over Essex. Reading their family wills with make one cross eyed, especially given how many of them were called John, but it rapidly becomes obvious that they were a lot on the land grabby side and rather keen on marrying women from families that at least had a Coat of Arms, something they did not have. They tended to utilize their wife’s heraldry and call their relatives “Sir” whether they had a knighthood or not. And always referred to Great Baddow as Much Baddow, which must have sounded posher to them. Talk about social climbers!
In 1544 John Paschall, husband of Thomas Mildmay’s daughter Anne, purchased a lease from the Court of Augmentations for a parcel of land in Great Baddow that was originally part of the Repton Priory’s holdings here. And in 1547 the Paschalls secured the rectory along with the advowson of the vicarage.
The Paschalls were big in Baddow even before this. John Paschall’s will says he wished to be buried in St Mary’s “Nere to my father and mother if there be convenient rommb.” So the graveyard was already full to the brim with them. Which was probably why they leapt at the chance of owning it all.
The Seabright farms, as they are called today, came into the Sebright (or Sabright as the spelling sometimes was) family’s possession in the time of Henry II because a William Sebright married the daughter of Henry de Ashe who must have owned the land before. So the farm became called Sebrights and that family lasted until 1543 when their land came into the hands of… John Paschall, who was on a big buying spree. He was a wealthy man but where he got the cash from for all this expansion is a mystery. The Mildmays and Petres and no doubt other catholic families seemed to be grabbing as much land as possible and certifying pensions for displaced monks and nuns! Maybe there was overseas funding to be tapped? Certainly, there is evidence of the Petre family making promises to the Pope that they would look after the displaced nuns and clergy. We often forget that despite the brutalities of the time, and the cynicism of our time, that compassionate considerations were just as often motivating factors as greed.
The Paschalls now had Baddow Hall, Foxholes, Rothmans, Barnards (which was a chunk of the Vineyards site, beside what the Petre family acquired.) Prior to them this area was part of an estate called the “Manor of Baddow Hall,” which was owned by the wealthy Fitzwalter family who must have passed the title of Lord of the Manor over to them. In short, it does seem that they owned everything here.

Baddow Hall

Rothmans


Another owner of some importance entered the property market of Great Baddow. The old building that is presently a Carpet Shop and the White Horse Inn became owned by Catherine of Aragon, then wife of Henry the Eighth, and eventually to be his divorced wife. I don’t think she was interested in flogging carpets or in opening a pub for that matter. What she got was an old nunnery which no doubt sweetened the bitter pill of a widowhood rapidly followed by marriage to her dead husband’s younger brother, Henry VIII… sweetened or soured it.


The Alhambra Palace, Spain
She, who had been brought up in the Alhambra Palace in sunny Andalucía, no doubt relished a good gallop among the soggy fields of Essex, right next door to the Boleyn estates of Little Baddow, resplendent with young daughters. The Great Sir Hugh’s estates were still obliged to look after the king’s riding horses for him, and so it was all very convenient for a quick gallop to visit the Boleyns. Catherine must have appreciated the convenience. She could probably get her housework done with Henry out of the way, or perhaps give Spanish lessons to the Paschalls.
The Paschalls had the unfortunate habit of calling their eldest sons John to confuse historians, though they made up for this lack of imagination by randomly changing the spellings of Paschal to sometimes Pascal, sometimes Paschall, and a few variations in between. But roughly speaking their history is as follows:
They appear to have been of Flemish stock. A number of Flemish Knights came over with William the Conqueror so they might have had deep roots in Norman Essex though, being from the Flemish side, they perhaps were not quite aristocratic enough to play aristocratic politics, which could be a good thing. It is perhaps more likely though that they came over as wool merchants or something equally dull at a later date but they probably wanted to believe they arrived with the Conqueror which in those days was considered cooler.
Their rise to prominence was part of the growth of what can best be described as Gentry. For this class of Englishman, good trade and a good marriage were preferable to wielding a battle axe. The Paschalls fortunately became known for having rather pretty daughters and handsome sons, which created connections for them all around, particularly with the Mildmays, the big wigs in Chelmsford. The image here of Jane Paschall now to be found above a radiator in St Mary’s Church shows a certain look that one might not think of as giving rise to particularly attractive children. You would be right because she died without issue and her husband was too busy with his new wife to bother having the engraver finish off the brass with the date of her death. Whatever manner in which they snuck into the fabric of Great Baddow, they were the very first and it seems to have been the last Lord of the Manor who actually lived in Baddow, in Baddow Hall to be precise, where today’s Baddow Hall Recreation Park is.

The Great Baddow of the Paschalls looked, or would soon look, recognisable to us today. However, at the start of their reign there was not much in the way of a Vicarage, more a bunch of rooms within the Church precincts that were fit only for the monastic life. Which was all rather unfortunate for one of the first things that John Paschal did when he acquired the advowson of the Parish, i.e. the right to choose the local vicar, was to invite Henry VIII’s old propaganda writer, Alexander Barclay, to take up the part. Alexander was not impressed, but he had been living in exile, suffering meals of gruel and bad meat in the company of snotty nosed monks found in the refectories of continental monasteries. French haute cuisine had not been invented yet and the rustic charms of monasteries dedicated to mortifying the flesh were lost on a man who had enjoyed life in the service of the royal court. He thus considered himself born for better things.
Alexander Barclay was an ex-Franciscan Monk who, before falling out of favour by calling Cardinal Wolsey a Butcher's Dog, referring to his low parentage, had written propaganda for Henry VIII's diplomatic overtures to France. In 1520 he wrote all the slogans that peppered the rather awkwardly named, “Field of The Cloth of Gold” exhibition that Henry had hoped would turn Francis 1st of France into an ally. He wrote stunners like: Amicitiam regum durare oportet! – Meaning: The friendship of kings should endure. Virtus et honor regum firmamenta sunt" - Meaning "Virtue and honour are the foundations of kings. And, that old favourite of Henry’s: Vive le Roi Henri!

There were a whole bunch of other poetic signage extolling various humanist principles emphasising that the duty of the king was to enable the individual to develop their capacity for self-realisation through reason and creativity. In short, an Englishman was challenged to surprise and Henry wanted to encourage this attitude in the French hoping to shift their belligerence towards friendly rivalry. Vivre le difference and all that!

There may well have been quite a bit of philosophical debate among the courtiers, though. it was probably the wrestling match between Henry and Frances that caught their attention. Henry unfortunately lost and seems to have rethought his position. He decided he needed bigger boats with more guns. Which did not go well either, as his biggest one, the Mary Rose, sunk in 1545 after adding extra guns and firing them thus tipping everything over and giving us a tasty piece of Tudor archaeology.
Probably nobody in Great Baddow gave a damn one way or the other, but Alexander was now a bit of a celebrity and so, something of a coup for the Paschalls. His career had rekindled when he found fame as the writer of an English adaptation of the German satire, Ship of Fools. This was a cry for competent government and who could argue with that? Certainly, Henry VIII did not and so he endorsed this book whole heartedly, which helped Alexander return to English shores. Either that, or Henry was known to be on his last legs. He died in 1547 and Edward VI, a hardcore protestant, took over until he died in 1553.
In 1546 when John Paschall appointed Alexander the new Vicar of Great Baddow, they knew he was famous but perhaps they had not read his works as I am sure they would have been horrified if they had. A petty provincial magistrate such as John Paschall was just the sort of man Alexander was taking pot shots at.

He most certainly would not have been targeting the Royals as Henry, very intelligent man that he was, was inclined to be a bit on the head choppy side regarding personal criticism and Alexander had already been on the run after his last snide comments. Alexander’s poetic muse led him to pronounce:
“The great thieves are laden with great chains of gold.
The small thief with iron chained to stop all escape.
The thief is judged... and oft time the great thief is the judge!”
Further, the Paschall’s interest might have been influenced by the rather sketchy distinction between the Church of England and Catholicism at this time. Many of the big local landowners like themselves never really gave up their catholic tendencies. The big houses around here had plenty of Priest Holes where catholic priests could hide, and Alexander, otherwise known as The Black Monk, was a man not entirely enthusiastic about Henry’s attack on the Church, and had even less enthusiasm for Edward VI’s protestant revolution. So, despite his low opinion of money-grubbing social climbers, he would accommodate the spiritually ambidextrous especially as he could no longer count on the Monasteries to house and feed him, even if inadequately.
Despite his precarious predicament, he complained probably thinking that a vicar of the Church of England should live better than a Catholic priest. He should have decent accommodation, which he considered lacking at St Mary’s, otherwise he would walk. To persuade Barclay to stay on, John Paschall loaned him money to upgrade the Vicarage but Barclay seems to have called in the Essex Builders who, curiously, didn’t finish the job, and then ran off to work at another parish which offered a better deal. He never did pay John Paschall back, which is why you find in the local court’s records that the Paschalls were suing him for all he was worth. Whether they got their money back is unknown, but Alexander did manage to find a suitable position as far away from them as possible and continued his literary career.
John’s son, or perhaps Grandson, John – did I mention that 8 percent of the male population were called John? And a dozen or so Pascalls! - Anyway, despite being married to Mary Petre of Ingatestone Hall, he went off to a Catholic seminary in Douai, France.
During Bloody Mary’s reign there was a shortage of Catholic Priests in England, so the aim of that college was to produce educated English priests to send back to England to reconvert everyone to Catholicism. He also made a trip to Rome, and became known as John of Rome. Though it doesn’t seem he became a priest, probably because he was married to Mary Petre, or possibly because Queen Mary’s reign ended in 1558 and Protestant Elizabeth took over making it once again rather a dangerous occupation.
Mind, divorce-ish might have been a possibility, as he signed a contract having his rents paid to his wife while he was “beyond the seas” and thus obviously celibate. Which I am sure he argued when visiting the Vatican. So perhaps that was seen as fitting compensation for her having married a wanna-be priest? She probably had a son by then, also called John, so the family line was safe.
In 1580 John, who was probably feeling his age and disappointment by now, managed to get himself arrested on returning to the UK and sent to The Tower for questioning. He was however allowed to go home after attending a Protestant service. He is recorded as feeling much shame, but seems to have been happy to keep his head and money and his wife. After that he appears to have not bothered even to appoint Vicars, leaving that to the Bishop of London. He did try bring in a guy called Christopher Ampleforth, but there seems to have been a bit of stink about him. It could be he was a closet catholic. Or a closet something else. Rumours of him having a child with his sister seem to have circulated.
The Paschalls were rather prone to local conflicts. One of the many John Paschalls was fined 6d once for leading twelve of his men onto Stock Common to beat up the Earl of Essex's men. Probably they were using land that the Paschalls considered to be theirs. We also find Paschalls involved in violent altercations while trying to evict unwanted tenants. We find them chasing Rabbit Poachers off their lands while not being averse to poaching the odd deer themselves. And despite being in charge of appointing the local vicars, members of the family were being fined for not attending church! And there was old John Paschal forced to pay two shillings and sixpence a month until one of his bastards is ten years of age. Worse still, as far as the puritans were concerned, the Paschalls had allowed a “superfluity of Alehouses!” No doubt Edward VI’s Book of Common Prayer was driving everyone to drink.
They had punch ups with aristocrats, punch ups with the new landless poor, and a rather dodgy relationship with the local Church that they were supposedly in charge of. This was not uncommon during the Tudor times. The middling classes found themselves squeezed between the lower orders who read their Bible, and paid all too much attention to radical religious influencers and their conspiracy theories, and an aristocracy who still thought in feudal terms and now and again liked to burn protestants at the stake, then Catholics, then Protestants… It was hard to keep up with who was hot and who was just burning. Tudor England was thus ideal ground for a very a different sort of war to the previous centuries of dynastic disputes. A war where the ordinary man felt he had a stake in the spoils. Hurrah!
