252 An Account of Lesbury Parish, by Geo. Tate, F.G.S. 



letten all the rest by lease and receives the yearly rent thereof, so that if it 

 be not by some means forseen after the death of the Vicar that is now, who 

 has also one pension of the Prince, there will no priest of any understanding 

 or knowledge take upon him the said cure and all for lack of living. Even 

 so the church shall decay and the inhabitants there brought to nothing, and 

 in the end the town wast, which plague God avoid." 



Queen Elizabeth, in 1575, let by lease, the Alnmouth tithes to 

 James Grarston, and two tenements in Alnmouth, which belonged 

 to her, to Robert Dormer ; but subsequently the tithes of lamb 

 and wool were sold to Sir H. Lindley. 



Roger Spence, a canon of Alnwick Abbey, was curate of Aln- 

 mouth Chapel at the time of the Reformation ; and out of the 

 wreck of the Abbey property there was assigned to him a yearly 

 pension of £5 ; and as curate he had also, according to the 

 Ministers' account, " 60s 8d, the rent of tithe of grain with all 

 other tithes of the Chapel." He was present at the Archdeacon's 

 Visitation in 1578, when Edward Spence was there as parish 

 clerk ; and he appears again in 1584, when Thomas Wilkinson 

 and Quintinus Soulbye were churchwardens. In 1610, there 

 were neither bible, homilies, surplice, nor pulpit ; and the body 

 of the chapel was in decay. I have not seen the name of any 

 other curate; but at the Visitation of 1661, John Bayard and 

 John Gardner are the old churchwardens, and John Bayard and 

 Thomas Leang, the new churchwardens. It may be inferred 

 from the following document that there was a curate in 1663, 

 though his name is not mentioned : — 



"Alnmouth Terrier. — Alnmouth, Dec. 12, circa 1663. To certify we have 

 no Terrier, nor we have no glebe land except one but of land which payeth 

 twelve pence by year. There is not a house belonging to the Curate, only 

 the Easter reckonings, tithe lamb and wool, geese and pigs, and tithe hay in 

 some places, which will not amount above five pounds by year. 

 THOMAS BURLETSON, \ Old 



WILLIAM WALKER, / Churchwardens." 



With the exception of a little of the foundation, the ancient 

 chapel of Alnmouth, which stood southward of the town, on a 

 hill of gravel and sand whose base is washed by the river, has 

 disappeared ; but we can now form an opinion of it from slight 

 notices written in last century, and from a drawing of it in 

 Grose's Antiquities, made in the year 1783. Mark, in his Survey, 

 1734, says — "the church is now quite ruined and the covering 

 entirely gone, there having been no service except burying the 

 dead for many years." The drawing in 1783, shews the place to 



