Mathew Crypps's Sonning timber certificate: royal fuel, bridges, mills and park pales, 1605-1606
The document is a quantified administrative return
Royal Berkshire Archives D/EN/O12/43, dated at Hurst on 26 November 1606, is not a general letter about woods. Mathew Crypps calls it a true certificat of trees felled throughout the manor of Sonning during the preceding two years under warrants. He divides the return between the Berkshire and Oxfordshire portions of the manor, separates firewood from timber, identifies several public or customary uses, names warranting authorities, and admits where his figures are estimates or incomplete.
The exact RBA catalogue describes the sender as Mathew Crypps and the recipient as “probably” Sir Henry Neville. That qualification must remain: the recto addresses only Right worshipfull, the reverse retains no address, and neither image names Neville. The document's position in Neville's papers and the recipient's authority over Sonning make Neville probable, not textually certain.
What Crypps counted
The directly checked marginal figures and corresponding body clauses produce the following reconstruction:
| Division | Purpose | Trees stated | Further quantity information |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berkshire | billet and tallwood for the king's house | 1,550 firewood trees | intended to make 2,000 loads |
| Berkshire | rebuilding Sonning Bridge | 150 timber trees | from Bearwood copyhold and lease grounds |
| Berkshire | repair of a tenement | 38 | by warrant from Sonning Court |
| Berkshire | Easthampstead park pale | 68 | rails, pales and posts; Lord Admiral's warrant |
| Berkshire | Richmond park pale | 47 known, plus unknown | 30 in William Martyn's ground; 17 in Richard Miller's; more in Hurst and Sonning ditches |
| Oxfordshire | billet and tallwood for the king | about 2,000 firewood trees | estimated to make 1,720 loads |
| Oxfordshire | Sonning mill and customary tenements | 200 timber trees and small saplings | customary repairs |
| Oxfordshire | felling under a lease | about 600 | actor and exact syntax unresolved |
The explicit figures total 4,653 trees, plus an unknown number cut in the ditches of Hurst and Sonning. The two royal-fuel operations total 3,720 loads of billet and tallwood. Those totals should not be presented as modern survey precision. Crypps himself writes that he took no certayne number of part of the felling, calls the Oxfordshire 2,000 an estimate, and cannot state the ditch quantity.
The Lord Admiral's clause records the Easthampstead pale:
A warrante from the Lord Admirall for the reparacons of the pale of
Easthampsted ... Syxty Eight trees for Rayles
pales & postes.
The next clause concerns the pale of Richmond. Richard Miller's quantity is xvij; with William Martyn's thirty trees, that produces the manuscript's own marginal subtotal of 47.
The 1605 State Papers entry identifies the warrant and surveyor
The central new finding is an independent printed-calendar match. On 6 May 1605 the State Papers calendar records:
“Warrant to fell 216 trees within the manor of Sunning, cos. Berks
and Oxford, for finishing the park pale at Richmond.”
The immediately following entry is:
“Warrant to pay 56l. 13s. 8d. to John Taverner, Surveyor of
the Woods, for timber for the park at Richmond.”
This controls the difficult manuscript wording as a warrant from the Lord Treasurer directed to m[r] Taverner his Surveyor. It also makes the Richmond clause historically specific: Crypps is reporting the local execution of the May 1605 Sonning warrant within the two-year window covered by his November 1606 certificate.
The Lord Treasurer was Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset. The Morgan Library's biographical record places him in that office from 1599 to 1608, while the calendar page itself uses Lord Treasurer Dorset in the next dated entry.
The calendar authorizes 216 trees. Crypps can account for 47 by named copyholder parcels and says that an unknown additional number was felled in the ditches of Hurst and Sonning. If the full authorization was executed, the missing component would be 169 trees. That is a research calculation, not a recovered manuscript figure: a warrant to fell 216 does not prove that all 216 were actually felled. The original warrant, Taverner's account, or a park-works voucher could decide the question.
Richmond was an active royal construction project
The same State Papers volume supplies a longer project sequence. On 22 July 1604, a payment of £661 18s. 4d., based on John Taverner's estimate, was ordered for a new lodge at Richmond: £231 18s. 4d. to Hampshire woodward William Christmas for felling and carrying trees and £430 to Sir Thomas Gorges, keeper of Richmond Park, for oversight.
The sequence is therefore:
- July 1604: a new Richmond lodge, with timber felled and carried from
- May 1605: 216 Sonning trees authorized to finish the Richmond park pale,
- November 1606: Crypps certifies the Sonning felling over the preceding two
- a writ dated 20 November 1606 supports payment to Sir Thomas Gorges for an
Hampshire;
with John Taverner paid for the timber;
years, naming Taverner and the Richmond pale;
enlargement of Richmond Park by 25 acres and for paling, ditching, and other work already done.
The last item appears in the published Pell records:
“the sum of 11l. 18s. for so much money by him disbursed for
paling, ditching, and other work done about the said park”
Crypps's certificate thus sits inside a multi-year royal project, not merely a single local timber sale. Sonning supplied a quantified part of a network that also drew construction material from Hampshire and involved the Lord Treasurer, the Surveyor of the Woods and the Richmond park keeper.
Easthampstead was another royal park pale, not a bridge
The Berkshire Historic Environment Record describes Easthampstead as a royal hunting preserve in Windsor Forest, with a lodge and a paling recorded from the medieval period. It notes that Norden's 1607 map shows the park and that Norden described its 265 acres as well timbered and stocked with 200–300 fallow deer. This makes Crypps's rayles / pales & postes exactly appropriate to a deer-park boundary.
The Lord Admiral in 1606 was Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham. Royal Museums Greenwich records that Howard remained Lord Admiral from 1585 to 1618.
The warrant itself has not yet been recovered, so Howard's administrative route into Easthampstead Park remains an open question. The next search should use the exact anchors 68 trees, Easthampstead, rails, pales, posts, Charles Howard and the two-year window 1605–06.
Why Crypps divides Berkshire from Oxfordshire
The county division is not a scribal curiosity. VCH describes the parish as including Sonning Town, Woodley and Sandford in Berkshire and Eye and Dunsden in Oxfordshire. It also places Sonning Mill just inside Oxfordshire. Crypps's organization follows that geography precisely: his Oxfordshire section names Eye, Dunsden, Wargrave Wood and the customary repair of Sonning mill.
“The parish of Sonning comprises ... the liberty of Eye and Dunsden
in the hundred of Binfield and Longtree in Oxfordshire.”
VCH also records that Sonning remained Crown property from 1574 until 1610. Crypps was therefore not simply accounting for a private woodland. The return coordinates Crown-manor resources, royal warrants, copyhold and lease grounds, customary repair obligations, public infrastructure and royal parks.
“Billet and tallwood” means fuelwood, not building timber
Crypps distinguishes fire wood trees from timber trees in his margin. His phrase billett & tallwood belongs to contemporary firewood vocabulary. A 1570 edition of Thomas Tusser places tallwood beside a billet stack, and Ferdinando Pulton's 1609 legal treatise groups coales, billet or Tallwood in a forest-felling clause. The exact EarlyPrint lemma search [lemma="tallwood"] returned twelve hits in nine documents; the strict phrase [lemma="billet"][lemma="and"][lemma="tallwood"] returned none because the surviving texts use other order and punctuation.
- Thomas Tusser, *A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry* (1570), TCP A14063
- Ferdinando Pulton, *De Pace Regis et Regni* (1609), TCP A10218
The large 1,550- and 2,000-tree operations should therefore be described as royal fuel supply. By contrast, Sonning Bridge, the tenement, park pales, mill and customary tenements required timber trees, small saplings, rails, posts and square timber. The certificate records both energy supply and construction material, and its categories should not be collapsed into a single generic “timber” total.
Neville's administrative position
Royal Berkshire History identifies Henry Neville as steward at Sonning after the Crown acquired the manor. That position explains why a manor-wide return addressed to Right worshipfull could enter his papers, although the missing address prevents certain recipient attribution.
The paper shows the kind of information placed before the recipient: warrant authority, tenure category, locality, intended use, approximate yield, named copyholders, customary obligation and acknowledged gaps. It also reveals a chain of reporting. Crypps says Gerard Lytton certified the Oxfordshire figures to him by letter. The certificate is therefore a compilation assembled from at least two administrative levels, not necessarily Crypps's eyewitness count of every felling.
Person deepening: John Taverner was a Crown surveyor and experimental author
The m[r] Taverner his Surveyor clause now has a dedicated biographical context. British Library catalogues show John Taverner reporting that the Queen's timber was becoming scarce, urging legal action against spoilers of royal woods, listing the Queen's parks and forests south of Trent, surveying the forests of Chute, and complaining about timber wasted on park mounds.
Bibliographical tradition strongly identifies the same John Taverner, who died in 1606, as the author of Certaine experiments concerning fish and fruite (1600). In that book he says that he is setting down experiments he had personally observed and practised in order to benefit England.
This adds an intellectual dimension to the Sonning certificate. The Crown surveyor named in the warrant belonged to a culture of field observation, measurement, resource scarcity, husbandry and improvement. It does not prove that Neville read Taverner's book or knew him socially.
See the dedicated AI Topic, John Taverner: Crown woods surveyor, experimental author, and the Sonning–Richmond timber operation. The cross-reference is also preserved in this packet's related_topics metadata.
Person search result: Mathew Crypps remains unresolved
Broad searches for Crypps, Cripps, Crippes and similar spellings in Sonning, Hurst, Berkshire and Crown-woods contexts did not produce a public biographical record that can safely be joined to the certificate. Genealogical name matches without an office, property, date or family connection have been rejected.
The controlled facts remain those of the item: Mathew Crypps signs at Hurst on 26 November 1606 and compiles a warrant-based certificate for the manor of Sonning. Court rolls, rentals, parish registers and the underlying warrants are still the correct route to his identity.
The partly unresolved closing passage appears to mention Shinfield, Mr Wollascott, London and Mr Martin. It may connect this certificate to William Wollascott, the Crown surveyor already represented in Neville's 1606–07 correspondence, but the syntax is not yet controlled closely enough to assert the transmission route. The names are retained as search leads, not converted into a narrative.
Research paths opened by the certificate
Reconcile authorization with execution
The 216-tree warrant and Crypps's 47-plus-unknown return invite a precise accounting search. The high-value target is the original docquet, Taverner's £56 13s. 8d. account, or Richmond park works papers. Any of these might name the missing Hurst/Sonning ditch quantity and confirm whether 169 trees were actually taken there.
Map the timber catchment
The document can support a GIS layer joining Bearwood, Sonning Bridge, Wokingham, Hurst, Sonning, Eye, Dunsden, Wargrave Wood, Easthampstead and Richmond. This would show one Crown manor feeding two royal park pales and a large royal fuel stream across county boundaries.
Identify the royal fuel destination
Crypps says the loads were for the king's house or majesty but does not name a palace. Windsor is geographically tempting and must not be assumed. Royal household, Works and fuel accounts for 1605–06 should be searched for deliveries of 2,000 and 1,720 loads and for Sonning, Eye, Dunsden or Wargrave Wood.
Recover the Easthampstead warrant
Norden mapped Easthampstead in 1607, immediately after Crypps's 1605–06 reporting window. Comparing the map's pale with the Lord Admiral's 68-tree repair could tie a quantified felling operation to a surviving early survey.
Identify local actors
Mathew Crypps, Gerard Lytton, William Martyn and Richard Miller should be sought in Sonning court rolls, rentals, copyhold admissions and parish records. Their roles may explain how figures moved from individual grounds into the compiled certificate.