Hampshire Record Office has recently released scans of all of the pages of Romsey Abbey Register to a Genealogy website “ancestry.com”. 

This enables subscribers to the site to inspect the register page by page on their computers without having to resort to microfiche readers. 

Of course, this data has been made available before but in many cases the data has been misinterpreted because of the hard to read handwriting, indeed the index accompanying the Ancestry scans has many transcription errors.

Romsey History Society has recently undertaken an exercise to transcribe the first 60 years of the
Register from 1570. This has revealed a new view of the social history of Romsey in the late Tudor and early Stuart years.

A careful reading of the scans has revealed differences from the accepted history of vicars in Romsey Abbey eg the register records Sir Hew Langley as vicar from 1575 not Hugh Kingley and Roger Richardson as vicar until 1586 and not Hugh Richardson. Also, the scans reveal two names of Mayors of Romsey not on the lists held in the Town Hall although mentioned by Latham in his History notes, namely William Raynold in 1576 and Edward Vynables in 1580.  Another Mayor identified in the burial register is that of John Hayward in November 1619. Although not described as such in the Register, we know from Charles Spence’s 1851 essay on Romsey Abbey that a memorial plaque was placed in the Abbey recording him as “sometime Mayor of this Towne”.

Hampshire Chronicle: Extract from the Romsey Abbey Register 1603

The demographic data is interesting in itself. The average number of christenings per year in Romsey Parish was 65, with marriages at 18 and burials at 58. The year in which most christenings took place was 1610 with 96 and the most burials took place in 1597 at 109. Possibly the latter was the result of an epidemic or harvest failures which were widespread in the years 1594 to 1597.

The burial entries reveal some sad stories. Romsey was a town containing many exposed waterways and five drownings are recorded in the Register, including two children one of whom does not even have a first name recorded:- “Child DAVYS taken out of the water drowned.

National events were also recorded in the Registers, including the accession of James VI of Scotland to the throne on March 14 1603 and subsequently the coronation in July 1603 and also the proclamation of the establishment of Great Britain in November 1604.

One of the entries for a baptism was Johan Drewell daughter of a Sir Humphrey Drewell recorded June 29 1603. In the burials for the very next day were consecutive entries for Francis Drewell wife of Sir Humphrey, followed by Sir Humphrey himself and then daughter Johan. Humphrey
Drewell was barber to Henry Wriothesly 3rd Earl of Southampton of Titchfield and the Earl was believed to be a patron of Shakespeare. Drewell was involved in supporting the Earl help the Danvers brothers escape to France after the murder of Henry Long, a result of a longstanding feud between the Danvers and Long families. It is believed by some that the murder case was inspiration for the Romeo and Juliet play. 

The Drewells were not known to Romsey parishioners – how did they come to be here and how did they die?