Again, Berneston Chapel, Notts, had been accustomed to have only three services a week. The people had the archbishop's licence to give an endowment to provide for having full services in their chapel _pro habendo plenario servitio_ by a chaplain and clerk residing there.[112]
There are many other examples in the Archbishop's Register of similar extensions of the usefulness of the existing ecclesiastical machinery, but these are enough to show the way in which it was done. There can be no doubt that the work was done in the same way where it was needed in the other dioceses of the kingdom.
There is a curious instance at Stokesay, in Shropshire. Before the Conquest, the parish church of that estate had been at Aldon, which is mentioned in Domesday. After the Conquest, the status of parish church had been given to a new church at Stokesay, on the same estate, and Aldon Church had been left in the status of a chapel. In 1367, the chief parishioners of Aldon took proceedings against the vicar, Walter of Greneburg, for neglecting them, and he was required by the bishop to find a chaplain to celebrate three days a week--Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday--except on great festivals.[113]
The following seems to be an instance of the transition of dependent chapels into independent parish churches, and an illustration of the way in which sometimes it came about. At Newnham, Gloucestershire, in 1260, an inquisition _post mortem_ found that the Rector of Westbury held the chapels of Newnham and Munstreworth as pertaining to the Church of Westbury. In 1309, in the Pleas before the King, the jurors declared on oath that the churches of Newnham and Munstreworth were mother churches with cure of souls before the time of King Henry III., and in the presentation of the king.
Here is an example at Whalley of the way in which great landed proprietors brought new tracts of their forest and waste under cultivation, and created new manors.
In a suit in the reign of Edward III., the jurors found that in the time of King John there was not in the aforesaid place of Brandwode any manor or manses, but it was waste, neither built upon nor cultivated, and was parcel of the aforesaid forest of Penhul [Pendle], and it is said that in the time of Henry, the ancestor [proavus] of the present king, the then abbot [of Whalley] built houses on the aforesaid waste of Brandwode, and caused a great part of the waste to be enclosed, which is now called the Manor of Brandwode.[114]