| Content Description | Call Books were prepared by the Registrar in advance of the Archdeacon's annual or half-yearly visitations. Other records generated by the visitation process, such as Citations and Presentment Bills, are to be found elsewhere in the collection. Call Books may be known in other Archdeaconry collections as 'libri cleri', consignation books, or 'libri ordinum cleri' and contain lists of clergy and churchwardens summoned to the visitation. The books are often annotated with details of whether the clergy appeared and whether the churchwardens presented bills, and also give the names of new churchwardens sworn in at the Easter visitations.
The Call Books for the deaneries of Nottingham, Bingham and Retford are fairly complete, apart from gaps from 1643 to 1662. The Call Books for Newark deanery, however, apart from two minor exceptions, survive only from 1663 onwards. In 1841 the parishes of the former Peculiars were incorporated into the Archdeaconry of Nottingham. The following year, the four original deaneries were slightly re-organised and a new deanery of Southwell was created.
The Call Books for the Nottingham Archdeaconry are grouped according to the individual rural deaneries of Nottingham, Bingham, Retford, Newark and (from 1842) Southwell, until the 1860s when all the deaneries are grouped together in single bundles or volumes. Each deanery volume is arranged internally in a vaguely geographical order, until Michaelmas 1697 when the Registrar began to write the Call Books in alphabetical order of parish and chapelry names.
The Call Books listed here have been re-arranged slightly from an earlier cataloguing arrangement and some items have been moved from other sections. It is hoped that the present list will be more straightforward for researchers using the Archdeaconry papers.
Various tables are available on-line to help researchers identify which deanery or Peculiar any particular parish or chapelry was in:
http://tinyurl.com/jgjs2fz
Table of all Nottinghamshire parishes and places up to 1842, providing information about which parishes each hamlet or townships was in, and which deaneries or peculiar jurisdictions they came under.
http://tinyurl.com/jqv4sy8
Table of rural deaneries in the Archdeaconry of Nottingham, up to 1842.
http://tinyurl.com/hsgmbbc
Table of rural deaneries in the Archdeaconry of Nottingham, 1842-1913. |