Ralph Penniston Taylor's "History of Stapleford"
In 1984 Ralph Penniston Taylor said that he had written 250,000 words on the history of Stapleford that would never be published as the cost would be phenomenal. Ralph died in 2001 in Wymondham in Leicestershire, where he then lived, and at the wake afterwards in The Berkeley Arms (first drink on Ralph) the possibility was raised with his executors that the Nottinghamshire Archives might be interested in some of his papers. Contact was maintained over the succeeding years but it wasn’t until February 2012 that we had a phone call from Bernard Bettinson, Ralph’s executor, asking if I would like to pick up Ralph’s papers and saying that I would need a van!
Bernard had by this time moved down to the West Country and it wasn’t until April that we were able to pick up Ralph’s papers from a village in the middle of Exmoor. Fortunately, after sorting through them we managed to fit the Stapleford papers in the boot and the back seat and brought them back for a closer scrutiny. There were many notebooks containing Ralph’s notes and many old copies of documents in the Public Record Office, but the most important were the histories of Stapleford that Ralph had written.
The first was written between 1951 and 1956. Its 154 pages were typewritten and bound in hardcovers and contained a number of illustrations which later appeared in Ralph’s book “A collection of views of Old Stapleford.” Ralph was unhappy with the first version and started a second account, which is the one found here. It was completed in 1975 and consists of 369 hand-written pages in nine spiral-bound notebooks.
This transcription follows Ralph’s text exactly. However, I have made three changes in the presentation. Each chapter was written without subheadings. In order to improve readability for those of us who do not have Ralph’s powers of concentration, I have prefixed each paragraph by a few words describing its content. Ralph probably would not have approved of this ‘dumbing down’ but I hope that it is a useful aid in understanding the flow of the narrative. Secondly, Ralph inserted the references to his sources in black ink in the body of the chapter. This was to distinguish them from the main narrative which was written in red. I have reformatted these as footnotes using Ralph’s text, although sometimes I have not been able to identify the source. Thirdly, on those occasions when Ralph quotes directly from his sources I have used a different font to distinguish the quotation from the main narrative.
.Ralph was a remarkable man and no one knew more about life in medieval Stapleford than he did. His assiduous attention to detail helped him to uncover information about life in Stapleford that had been forgotten for seven centuries or more. He was equally at home exploring the Latin charters of the Priory of Newstead, some of which he was the first to translate, Inquisitiones Post Mortems or the wills of the yeoman who farmed the Open Fields of the village. We owe him a great debt and it is a privilege to publish this history in a way that he could never have envisaged.