The Theatrical and Other Misdeeds of William Appowell, Priest

IN November 1584, the Diocese of Bath and Wells accused the vicar of Marston Magna of misdeeds the most serious of which had to do with a puppet show. Marston Magna is a village in Somerset, and the vicar there since 1572 was William Appowell, who was often called simply William Powell. "Powell" is a Welsh name and "Ap" the Welsh equivalent of "Mc" in Scottish and Irish names. The diocese supposed that (to reverse the order of the famous clauses in the Prayer Book) he had done those things which he ought not to have done, and he had left undone those things which he ought to have done. The diocese brought a case against Appowell in its Consistory Court, which met in the Cathedral at Wells, and the documents of the case provide everything known about Appowell's alleged misconduct. Nearly all these documents are depositions in which deponents answered "articles" drawn up by the diocese. The articles do not survive, but the answers to them suggest much of what they asked. Early in the proceedings of 20 November 1584, the diocese summoned Appowell to appear. Presumably somebody rode pell mell for Marston Magna, some twenty miles away, and Appowell rode pell mell back, for as the last item of business on that day he was in the cathedral to answer a group of six articles that the Diocese put to him (hereafter group I).1 In answer to the first article, Appowell began by saying that "he was in Come wells." Then he had the clerk line out "Come wells" and write "Glaston" (that is, Glastonbury) instead. He was there, he went on, "at the signe of the Harte in January aboute ij yeares since & confesseth that there was poppett playenge," but (in Latin) he believed the article otherwise to be untrue. His answer to the second prompted the clerk to write "vt supra"-as above, and add that otherwise Appowell believed the assertions in this article also to be untrue. Appowell thought those in the third article untrue as well but did not hint at what they were. Evidently the first two and maybe the third asked whether he had done improper things at a puppet show in an unspecified place and asked when and where the show had taken place. "Come, wells" must mean Combe Wells, a name now unknown by which Appowell probably meant Walcombe, then and now a hamlet less than a mile north of the Cathedral. People named Marchaunt were prominent tenants there in 1477 and still in 1645, two of whom in 1580 were William Marchaunt senior and junior:2 soon in 1584 a William Marchaunt would tell the Consistory Court that he knew Appowell well. The sign of the Hart in Glastonbury was an inn on the south side of the High Street, opposite the Glastonbury Tribunal, that in the 165Os became a coaching inn called the White Hart (or so the plaque on one of the present buildings there and another on the Crown farther down the street suggest). In answering the fourth and fifth articles, Appowell recounted a business meeting one evening six or seven years before at Ilchester, a small town about five miles west of Marston Magna. He had heard while in the town that the wife of one Mocksedge was suing him about a horse he had bought from her husband and for which he had not paid. He and three or four of his neighbors, "honest Comepany" who included George Taswell, Nicholas Cutler, and Silvester Mewe, went to her house to talk to her "thereaboute." While they were talking, the constable of the town arrived at the house and apparently for no reason took Appowell and "the woman" to prison and in the morning set him in the town stocks. Appowell then dismissed the sixth article as untrue without hinting at the question. If Appowell thought these answers sufficient, he was wrong. The case was by now in the hands of William Watkins, diocesan procurator, who at a sitting of the court on 4 December 1584, announced new articles. The court summoned Appowell to appear again on 12 December, then decided that he could do so on 9 December. There would be twenty new articles divided into two groups (hereafter groups 2 and 3). …