| Some Chambers Family
History
"The Chambers family, though we do
not find them quite so far back as the Warings, were
established at Tanworth at least a century before the
commencement of the Registers. They were seated at
Woodend, but later became an influential family at
Studley and Gorcott where they dated from the reign of
Edward VI, producing an Admiral in the reign of
Elizabeth, and being patrons of the living of Spernall.
The first Chambers of Tanworth to show
himself is one Henry, a member of the Guild of Knowle in
1461. It is also a Henry who winds up the connection with
Tanworth as far as the Registers show, and this later
Henry of about a century ago was a pauper!
William Chambers appears among the
tenants of the IvIanor in Sir Robert Throckmorton's
Survey of 1571 The name is plentiful in the Registers
from the earliest days to the end of the eighteenth
century, when it fades away to three entries in the first
half of the nineteenth century, and none at all in the
second half. One of the first pair of churchwardens to
sign the Registers is Richard Chambers, ' who signed page
after page when the transcript from paper to parchment
was made towards the end of the sixteenth century.
The family seem to have been very
important during the commonwealth, when William Chambers,
son of John Chambers of Woodend was appointed "Register"
in 1653. He was styled "the younger," his Uncle
William presumably being "the elder." The
number of entries made by him could, with advantage, have
been larger, there being many omissions, and his
handwriting being so good; but he compensated us for this
by making some pious reflections under cover of the
Registers, and evidently gave satisfaction, being elected
for a second period of three years. He died in 1660, four
years after his uncle, William the elder, and ten years
before his father, John Chambers, of Woodend.
John Chambers had married Anne Bayleys,
of Haselor, who pre-deceased him in 1650, at the age of
thirty-four, when one of the Chambers brasses was placed
in Tanworth Church to her memory. She left three sons,
William, Edmund, and John, the first-named being the
Register, while Edmund was described as "of Studley,"
at his death in 1709. He married Margaret Anderton, who
died young in 1666, when he placed in Tanworth Church the
second of the Chambers brasses, to her memory; the third
brass being in memory of Edmund's father, the above
mentioned John, who died in 1670. John was a man of so
religious a turn of mind "that he almost dwelt in
the church wherever he happened to be."
Edmund Chambers left a son, William,
who died in 1721; a series of Williams, Edmunds, and
Thomas's following to the end of the century, when the
name virtually becomes extinct so far as the Parish
Registers are concerned."
Extract from "The Story Of
Tanworth In Arden", by John Burman. Published in
1930
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